Jumping To Conclusions

I learned to swim at the town pool when I was about 5. I remember paddling around with the kickboards and also getting water in my ears, but my most vivid memory of the lessons is being forced to jump off the diving board into the deep end of the pool. The instructors stood at the side of a pool ready to extend a long pole I could grab on to if I panicked and started to drown. My fear of the deep end was largely psychological; I couldn't touch bottom in the shallow end, either. But fear is fear, and it was usually the pole for me.

When I got a little older, even after that traumatic formative experience, I grew to appreciate the deep end. So now, when I read a line such as this:

The old-style "drowning pools" won't be missed, said aquatics expert Tom Griffiths.

I immediately look for a cup of coffee so I can take a sip and spew it all over my monitor in shocked surprise. "Drowning pools"? "Won't be missed"? "Aquatics expert?" Halle Berry full of grace, what in the heck is wrong with people today?

In case you haven't yet read the article I am mocking, here's a summary: People were getting hurt jumping off diving boards in municipal pools, so the boards were removed. So fewer people used the deep end of the pools. So now the deep ends are being filled in:

Philadelphia has been filling in its deep ends over the past several years, said Terri Kerwawich, the city's aquatics coordinator. After filling in two more this spring, the city has only 10 deep ends left at its 86 pools. All but one or two will eventually be filled in.

The article quotes various aquatics experts and coordinators (who the heck knew such people existed?), along with a soccer, I mean swimming, mom who all praise the new shallow designs. They're "safer" and more "family-friendly" and yes, even "interactive" (you know, as opposed to the old pool designs that allowed no interaction whatsoever).

Well, screw friendly interactive family safety if it's come to this. Let aquatics busybodies build themselves a safe little padded cell on a safe little island away from the people in the world who want to live. Give me my childhood of deep ends and merry-go-rounds and Big Macs and pointy chess pieces and un-car-seated car trips to Florida.

(But I'll take today's adolescence. That sounds fun.)

Here's an article that explains the triumph of the PG and PG-13 ratings without blaming John Ashcroft:

Of the top 20 biggest box office hits of last year, all but one were rated PG or PG-13. The Santa Clause 2 was the sole G-rated film to make the list, while 8 Mile, the R-rated Eminem (news - web sites) movie, just missed at No. 21.

The PG rating appeals to movie-savvy teens who find a G rating too juvenile. PG-13 is even better, implying the movie goes about as far as it can without kids having to be taken by parents if they want to see it.

Even so, more movies are still given R ratings than any other rating:

R-rated movies have hardly died. This summer, The Matrix Reloaded became the highest-grossing R movie ever, with $268.9 million and counting. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines opens today, and Bad Boys II on July 18. R is the most common rating, but only because so many are low-budget foreign-language films that aren't widely released, or steamy made-for-video movies.

I never fail to be awed by Victor Davis Hanson. I am not worthy to share the same internet.

Happy Independence Day.

For July 4th, Samizdata.net reverently quotes the first paragraph of the Declaration of Independence:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

A great paragraph, no doubt. On this day, it is appropriate to also remember the great paragraph of the first draft of the Declaration of Independence which Jefferson submitted to the Congress and but was deleted. Only if it would have remained:

he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, & murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.

People whose unemployment doesn't bother me:

• Charles Manson
  
• Members of Congress
  
• Jayson Blair
  
• Saddam Hussein
  
• Telemarketers
  

But from the article:

Outbound telemarketing brings in $211 billion in annual sales in the United States, according to the Direct Marketing Association.

The New York Times cites "Congressional investigators" in criticizing the Bush administration for its handling of Medicaid:

The Bush administration has allowed states to make vast changes in Medicaid but has not held them accountable for the quality of care they provide to poor elderly and disabled people, Congressional investigators said today.

The administration often boasts that it has approved record numbers of Medicaid waivers, which exempt states from some federal regulations and give them broad discretion to decide who gets what services.

But the investigators, from the General Accounting Office, said the secretary of health and human services, Tommy G. Thompson, had "not fully complied with the statutory and regulatory requirements" to monitor the quality of care under such waivers.

More than a dozen state waiver programs covering tens of thousands of people have gone more than a decade without any federal review of the quality of care, the accounting office said. These programs were in Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Louisiana, Missouri, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas.

The accounting office examined 15 of the largest waivers, covering services to 266,700 elderly people in 15 states and found problems with the quality of care in 11 of the programs.

But none of these nuances of time or details matter, when you're the New York Times and you're out to criticize the Bush administration.

The International Herald Tribune reports that high school seniors in Italy are being taught that communism is bad. Actually, it reports that people are complaining that high school seniors in Italy are being taught that communism is bad.

The evils of communism appear front and center in one of the themes that hundreds of thousands of Italian high school seniors could choose to write about in graduation exams given this month. That topic invited students to ponder "terror and the political repression in the totalitarian systems" of the 20th century and gives brief descriptions of fascism in Italy, Nazism in Germany and communism in the former Soviet Union and other countries.

Communism is blamed for the executions of about 100 million people, five times greater than the killings attributed in the exam to Nazism.

In the wording of the topic, it takes one sentence to denigrate fascism. It takes four to vilify communism.

Some historians and teachers have complained that the balance of the question is out of whack. "I teach my students that of course communism must be seen in a negative light, but the goal of Nazism was to kill people, and the goal of communism was to unite them," said Giuseppe Costantino, 61, who teaches history in a high school in Naples.

Yes, what's a hundred or so million dead anyway? Their hearts were in the right place. Still, a history teacher should know that Nazism also shared the goal of uniting people. You know, "Ein Volk" and such. So where, I ask you, are the calls for a balanced discussion on Nazism?

Coincidentally, Saddam Hussein is another chap who means well:

"Unify your ranks and act as one hand," the voice said on the Al Hayat-LBC broadcast. "Boycott the occupying soldiers ... Act and do not let the occupying forces settle down in your land."

"He who favors division over unity, and acts to divide ranks instead of unifying them, is not only a servant of the foreign occupier but he is also the enemy of God and the people," the voice said on the Al-Jazeera broadcast.

Jeebus, with uniters like these, give me good ol' fashioned divisiveness any day.

An ex-radio talk show host from South Carolina is suing her former employer for firing her.

The suit alleges that co-hosts Herriott Clarkson Mungo III, also known as Bill Love, and Hayden Hudson, also known as Howard Hudson, encouraged Cordonier to join their pro-war discussions regarding the invasion of Iraq.

The conversations became contentious on several occasions and management's tolerance for opinions decreased as war drew closer, the suit alleges. The suit also alleges that Love and Hudson belittled her both on and off the air because of her political beliefs.

"I went through hell," Cordonier told The Greenville News Monday. "I was forced out because I would not comply with their orders to be silent."

The suit cites a state law that declares a person cannot be fired because of political opinions.

Thought number 2: What kind of idiotic law is that? It sounds superficially reasonable -- but as written, it would apparently protect not only this radio host, but also a Michael Savage from being fired in South Carolina. In this instance, the story isn't entirely clear, so I can't be certain whether this host was fired for expressing her anti-war views on the air, or merely for holding those views. If the former -- as in the Michael Savage case -- it seems to me that there would be clear first amendment problems with applying such a law. To force a station to employ someone whose on-air views are contrary to the station's is tantamount to forcing a particular set of views on the station.

If the latter, there likely isn't a constitutional problem with the law -- but that doesn't make it less questionable. Why should an employer be forced to retain an employee who holds unpalatable political views? Should a black employer be prohibited from firing a member of the Klan? A Jewish employer be forced to keep on an avowed supporter of Hamas? (Are these extreme examples? Certainly. But, then, these sorts of laws are only needed for extreme situations. Nobody is going to fire an employee for being in favor of fireworks on the 4th of July. It's people who hold extreme views that will attract the ire of employers.)

Go to www.google.com, type in "Weapons of Mass Destruction" and click the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button.

Identify the bigot who criticized a civil rights activist thusly:

"It is possible for a lot of people to find his colorblind message to be superficially appealing..."

Opposition to his efforts has already begun to take shape. A Detroit News editorial on Tuesday called a potential battle over affirmative action dangerous, and called on Mr. Connerly to go home.

"The divide in understanding between whites and blacks remains wide," it said. "Toss in a ballot campaign that pits the two races against each other and all hope for finally closing that divide will be lost."

The leaders of both of the state's political parties also opposed the effort.

One of the Articles of Impeachment introduced against President Clinton concerned a set of 81 questions submitted by the House Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry Hyde to President Clinton on the Monica Lewinsky affair. The fourth Article of Impeachment read, in part: "Clinton, refused and failed to respond to certain written requests for admission and willfully made perjurious, false and misleading sworn statements in response to certain written requests for admission propounded to him as part of the impeachment inquiry authorized by the House of Representatives of the Congress of the United States."

For those of you who have forgotten (and I pray that you have), question #41 was:

41. As to each, do you admit or deny that you gave the following gifts to Monica Lewinsky at any time in the past?

a. A lithograph
b. A hatpin
c. A large "Black Dog" canvas bag
d. A large "Rockettes" blanket
e. A pin of the New York skyline
f. A box of cherry chocolates
g. A pair of novelty sunglasses
h. A stuffed animal from the "Black Dog"
i. A marble bear's head
j. A London pin
k. A shamrock pin
l. An Annie Lennox compact disc
m. Davidoff cigars

Five years ago, a President was impeached. The House of Representatives was debating -- and, as you can see, I'm not making this up -- shamrock pins and novelty sunglasses. Moving to the present, we are talking about whether a President took the country to war on, in part, misleading and factually incorrect evidence.

Who thinks the current CIA/White House scandal will get one one-hundredth of the press Monicagate received? It's a shame, too.

Over in National Review Online, there's an article by Clifford May providing a strong rebuttal to the sudden, weird claim that Bush's State of the Union address was a lie. While everyone has concluded that the Niger documents were phony, Bush did not mention those documents in the speech, and merely cited the British government for the proposition that Iraq was attempting to procure uranium from Africa.

May questions whether any member of Congress can honestly argue that this single minor claim was that significant to his decision making -- but May actually misses the mark on this point, because he fails to note that Congress voted to authorize war in October, three months before the State of the Union was given. So it would be pretty damn difficult for members of Congress to claim that Bush's true (if inaccurate) claim in the SOTU address is the smoking gun proving that Bush lied to get the US into war.

But what about the bigger picture? Maybe Bush's January statement didn't convince Congress to vote for war in October, but it surely convinced the American public to support the war, right? Wrong. What war opponents fail to mention is that all the administration's statements, over all the months since Bush began the full court press to "sell" the war, were ultimately irrelevant:

ABC News/Washington Post Poll. Latest: March 27, 2003. N=508 adults nationwide. MoE ± 4.5. Fieldwork by TNS Intersearch.

"Do you approve or disapprove of the way Bush is handling the situation with Iraq and Saddam Hussein?"

               Approve        Disapprove     No Opinion

               %              %              %

3/27/03        69             26             5

3/23/03        71             26             3

3/20/03        65             29             5

3/17/03        64             29             7

3/5-9/03       55             38             8

2/19-23/03     55             39             6

2/6-9/03       61             37             2

2/5/03         61             32             7

1/30 - 2/1/03  61             35             3

1/28/03        58             38             4

1/27/03        57             40             3

1/16-20/03     50             46             4

12/02          58             37             5

10/02          57             38             5

9/12-14/02     65             31             4

8/29/02        52             36             12

That's right; support for (and opposition to) the war was essentially unchanged from the beginning of the process until the day the war began. Minor week-to-week fluctuations, within the margin of error. Regardless of whether you think Bush lied, this simply isn't a Gulf of Tonkin situation. Bush's factual claims didn't mislead or trick Americans into supporting the war; Americans supported the war because they agreed with the various reasons advanced for it from the beginning.

It strains credulity to suggest that these handful of words in a speech that most Americans didn't watch, that weren't seen as overly significant at the time (see, for instance, Jake Tapper's review of the speech in Salon, where he barely mentioned the uranium claim in passing) somehow constitute the proof that Bush falsely tricked us into war. In the zillions of speeches Bush and other administration officials gave over the more than six months of intensive campaigning for war, it would be shocking if everything that was said turned out to be perfectly accurate. But if these 16 words are the best that Bush's critics can come up with, then it would be difficult to conclude that Bush did anything wrong.

In the 2000 election, Ralph Nader declared repeatedly (to some applause and much more derision) that there was no difference between Bush and Gore, or indeed between the Republican and Democratic parties in general. Of course, by that Nader meant that Gore and the Democratic party were conservative, just like the Republicans. They both favored NAFTA and globalization, after all, and both accepted "soft money" campaign contributions, and neither one spoke about corporations the way the Pope speaks about abortion. There's some truth there. Then again, there's some truth to the argument that there's not much difference between Bush and Gore because the Bush administration is liberal, just like the Democrats. For instance, just to pick one example at random, this headline from the New York Times: Bush Administration Says Title IX Should Stay as It Is.

The reference, of course, is to the law which bans sex discrimination in federally funded programs, and specifically to the portion of it which bans sex discrimination in college sports. When Bush announced a commission to review Title IX, there had been hope in some corners that the law might be amended, and on the left, the liberal advocacy machine had already geared up to blast Bush for wanting to eliminate women's sports and make all women barefoot and pregnant. But Bush, the supposed conservative right-wing extremist who wants to destroy everything good and decent in America, ultimately did nothing.

By the way, you've got to love the New York Times' idea of balance in reporting:

The National Women's Law Center says Title IX has led to increases of women's participation in sports of more than 400 percent in colleges and of more than 800 percent in high schools. But Title IX supporters point out statistical equality has not been achieved; 56 percent of college students are women and 42 percent of the athletes are women.

Title IX is one of those government programs that sounds perfectly fine on its face, if one doesn't follow the news enough to know how the program has been implemented. In theory, the law (and Department of Education bureaucracy in charge of enforcing it) allows three ways for colleges to comply with the anti-discrimination provisions. One is proportionality -- having the percentage of female athletes match the percentage of females in the student body. Another is to be continually increasing the size of women's sports programs until proportionality is reached. The third is to meet all the demand of female students.

In reality, colleges have found that cutting men's sports programs (and budgets) and giving the resulting money to women's sports is the only practical way to comply with the law. Obviously, they could increase women's sports budgets without cutting men's... if they could find a source of free money sitting around waiting to be claimed. Since we don't live in the land of tooth fairies and Easter bunnies, that isn't a realistic option.

Of course, schools could address the actual wishes of students -- except that they can't. The problem is that in the most significant court case on Title IX, Cohen v. Brown University, the First Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Brown's attempt to show that they were meeting all needs:

We view Brown's argument that women are less interested than men in participating in intercollegiate athletics, as well as its conclusion that institutions should be required to accommodate the interests and abilities of its female students only to the extent that it accommodates the interests and abilities of its male students, with great suspicion. To assert that Title IX permits institutions to provide fewer athletics participation opportunities for women than for men, based upon the premise that women are less interested in sports than are men, is (among other things) to ignore the fact that Title IX was enacted in order to remedy discrimination that results from stereotyped notions of women's interests and abilities.

We conclude that, even if it can be empirically demonstrated that, at a particular time, women have less interest in sports than do men, such evidence, standing alone, cannot justify providing fewer athletics opportunities for women than for men.

Call me crazy, but if the President said it, doesn't that mean it's made it to the "Presidential level"?

Unless, of course, we're not supposed to believe what the President says is presidential. That's what one is forced to believe Ari Fleischer was saying this morning.

There have been those who argued that blogs are inferior to traditional media because blogs aren't subject to the same standards that newspapers or magazines are. Blogs, the theory goes, don't have editors, so sloppy and misleading stories get published without the appropriate level of fact checking that editors provide. Anybody who believes that should read this appalling article-length correction in today's New York Times. The original story was so wrong that one has to wonder whether it was something left lying around Jayson Blair's desk before he quit.

From the correction:

A loan dispute between Prudential Securities and TVT Records, one of the nation's largest independent record companies, has had no impact on the control or management of TVT Records by its founder and president, Steven Gottlieb.

In a profile of Mr. Gottlieb last Monday, The New York Times reported incorrectly that Mr. Gottlieb had defaulted on a $23.5 million loan and that as a result, in February he had lost control of his company, officially called TeeVee Toons Inc., to Prudential.

In fact Mr. Gottlieb was never personally responsible for the defaulted loan and remains in full control of his company. Even if Prudential were to prevail in the dispute, which is still pending in court, its remedies would be limited to seizing certain music royalty rights that TeeVee Toons transferred in 1999 to an affiliated company called TVT Catalog Enterprises. Prudential has no claim to TVT Records itself and therefore would not be in a position to sell the company, as the article reported.

And it goes on. The Times described him as litigious; they had to take it back. The Times quoted his opponents in litigation without realizing that those people might have an agenda. The Times describes him as having sued people he hadn't sued. The Times described him as releasing albums he hadn't released. The Times described a suit as frivolous with no basis for that description, but citing yet another of its infamous anonymous sources ("People close to the case."). The Times reports that a contract was signed months before it actually was signed. The Times describes the songs as old when they weren't.

I guess the Times does get points for admitting the errors -- unusually, for them -- but that's like giving the surgeon who amputated the wrong leg credit for reattaching it. Let's wait and see what happens to Lynette Holloway, who wrote the original story. If her byline continues to appear regularly, we'll know that the recent spate of accountability at the Times is just for show.

Glenn Reynolds claims that the stories about the false claims from the State of the Union address have been an attempt by "some Democrats and their media allies to distract people."

If you have, indeed, been distracted, I'd like to call the following to your attention: the federal deficit this year is going to be $445 billion.

Some of us are old enough to remember a budget surplus.

"I want to take one-half of the surplus and dedicate it to Social Security, one-quarter of the surplus for important projects, and I want to send one-quarter of the surplus back to the people who pay the bills. I want everybody who pays taxes to have their tax rates cut."
-- Governor George Bush, 1st Presidential Debate

"We owe it to our children and grandchildren to act now, and I hope you will join me to pay down $2 trillion in debt during the next 10 years. At the end of those 10 years, we will have paid down all the debt that is available to retire."
-- President George W. Bush, Address to Joint Session of Congress, February 27, 2001

I saw this on CNN this morning:

HEMMER: You're soon to be the wife of a member of the U.S. military. It comes with the territory in many ways. What have you thought about how difficult this might be going forward in the future with him, knowing that the U.S. military's engaged in so many different hotspots around the world?

HAMILTON: I watch the news only to get news from Baghdad. It's good at times, when you think they're actually coming home. But it's horrible every morning when you wake up and there's another soldier killed and you don't know if it's yours.

Does anybody out there still believe that a Democratic candidate has no chance of defeating President Bush in 2004?

Glenn Reynolds offers advice to the Democrats.

Among his subjects are: Intelligence Failures (he thinks this is a no-go), the Saudi Connection ("lots of room" to criticize the Bush administration), Homeland Security (Reynolds focuses on the armed pilots program), Communications (which means media concentration), and lowering the drinking age. I don't know if Reynolds is attempting to be ironic in this last one, but, basically, he thinks the Democrats should be coming up with positions of their own and not just criticisms of the Republicans.

I have an idea for the Democrats. Things that, apparently, Reynolds hasn't thought of. How about running on the economy? Running on the idea of putting people back to work? How about running on health care? If everybody in America has the right to a lawyer when they're accused of a crime, shouldn't they have the right to a right to a doctor when they're sick? (Don't go running to a copy of the Consititution saying "Look, Partha, there is no *right* to a doctor written here!" -- I'm asking, shouldn't there be?). How about running on the concept of an open government that works for all its citizens and doesn't keep secrets from them? How about running on the slogan "Put People First" and insuring the United States is the United States for all its citizens.

This is a winning platform.

From Governor Dean's blog: Working at his desk in the Oval Office, President Bush reviews the State of the Union address line-by-line and word-by-word.

I have long thought that government workers should not be allowed to form labor unions. This article does nothing to change my mind:

Budget cuts meant there was no money to plant flowers this summer in Saskatchewan's Duck Mountain Provincial Park, so a group of cottagers raised $50 and spent an afternoon planting marigolds.

Less than a day later, a dozen park workers arrived to uproot the plants, saying the volunteer action had threatened their jobs.

These are precisely the jerks whose jobs *should* be threatened. Fire them all.

According to an article in Newdsay:

Since the end of the war, dozens of mass graves [in Iraq] have been discovered -- many of them containing hundreds of bodies. The United Nations is investigating the killing or disappearance of at least 300,000 Iraqis believed murdered by Saddam's regime.

Does anybody out there still believe that we shouldn't have overthrown Saddam?

From today's Washington Post:

"Mary Kewatt, the aunt of a soldier killed in Iraq, saying: 'President Bush made a comment a week ago, and he said 'bring it on.' Well, they brought it on, and now my nephew is dead.'"

Does anybody out there still believe that a Democratic candidate has no chance of defeating President Bush in 2004?

If Vice-President Cheney did, as Eugene Volokh claims, just "misspoke" when he claimed that Iraq had nuclear weapons, shouldn't his staff have issued a correction later that same day? Or issued a correction the next day? Or at some point?

Let's be clear; we're not talking about the New York Times misstating something. Professor Volokh is talking about the Vice-President of the United States saying that the leader of another, quite bad, country having atomic weapons in prelude to a possible war. This is very serious stuff. Every word must be measured, and if it can't be (like "in the middle of a long unscripted exchange") then it should be corrected as soon as possible.

Unless, of course, you intend your misstatement to be absorbed and believed.

"...we need somebody to simplify the code, to be fair, to continue prosperity by sharing some of the surplus with the people who pay the bills, particularly those at the bottom end of the economic ladder.... I can't let the man -- I can't let the man continue with fuzzy math. It's $1.3 trillion, Mr. Vice President. It's going to go to everybody who pays taxes. I'm not going to be one of these kinds of presidents that says, 'You get tax relief and you don't.' I'm not going to be a pick-and-chooser. "

-- Governor George W. Bush, October 3, 2002

Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Reynolds, and NRO are going overboard on a recent story by Mark Steyn. Basically, Sullivan, Reynolds and NRO are really happy because Steyn says that President Bush is going to be reelected.

Let's all remember the perils of predicting a Republican future. From ABC This Week, January 25, 1998:

COKIE ROBERTS: Well, what do you think? I mean, how -- what are the steps Bill Clinton could take to survive?

BILL KRISTOL: I don't think he can survive, because he's not -- well, he really isn't telling the truth. And I don't think anyone...

COKIE ROBERTS: OK. So he is out. So then what happens next?

BILL KRISTOL: What happens is senior Democratic leaders go to the president -- and I agree with Sam; it could be in days, not in weeks -- and tell him this is insupportable, you cannot put the country through this.

James Buckley, the Republican senator from New York, in April of 1974 was the first Republican to say publicly that President Nixon had to resign. It would be ironic if the man who defeated him in 1976, Pat Moynihan, the Democratic senator from New York, stepped up and said that. But I think someone like Moynihan or Sam Nunn or Bill Bradley or a respected Democratic elder...

COKIE ROBERTS: Do you see that happening?

BILL KRISTOL:... in the next few days is going to say, Mr. President, you cannot put us through this.

[...]

GEORGE WILL: What -- what that -- what -- sooner or later Democrats are going to have their minds rolled back 24 years to 1964 when the Republican Party was annihilated because it was seemed to have been tardy in disciplining one of its own.

SAM DONALDSON: Well, I renew my question. What will President Al Gore do then?

BILL KRISTOL: He'll select -- he'll select a very respected figure as vice president, and he will have a big honeymoon. And it will -- he will actually advance legislation pretty effectively.

From Andrew Sullivan today:

This is what the carpers and nay-sayers still don't understand. The West is at war with a real and uniquely dangerous enemy.

I do understand this. The United States and the rest of the West is, indeed, at war with a real and uniquely dangerous enemy.

When the consequences of negligence become catastrophic, the equation of intervention changes.

I agree with this, too.

The burden of proof must be on those who counsel inaction rather than on those who urge an offensive, proactive battle.

Here is where I start to lose Sullivan. The burden of proof is on us all, not just those who, in his words "counsel inaction."

In this battle, we are the good guys. More to the point, we should always be confident that we are the good guys.

And, who counseled *inaction*? To take Iraq as an example, there were those who supported a continuation of sanctions and, if they didn't work, only then take military action. That's not "proactive," but it's not inaction.

Does it matter one iota, for example, if we find merely an apparatus and extensive program for building WMDs in Iraq rather than actual weapons?

Yeah, it does matter. If we're told that there were a bizzillon gallons of chemical weapons and then there aren't, then it does matter. In this war, as in any war, we need to be able to trust our leaders.

Or rather: given the uncertain nature of even the best intelligence, should we castigate our leaders for over-reacting to a threat or minimizing it?

I think the question of the day lies (pun intended?) within this sentence. Was it our best intelligence?

Follow-up questions are:

If it was, why was it so bad?

If it was not, why not?

Another questions are: if there are serious consequences because our leaders over-reacted, should we castigate them then? Or should we remain silent?

[Aside: Andrew Sullivan loved castigating President Clinton because the President had an affair with a member of his staff. Sullivan loves castigating Howell Raines and the New York Times because of problems at the paper. He has a thing for castigating. This situation is much more serious. Why is, on this topic, he adverse to castigation? Even if it's by people who disagree with him?]

Since 9/11, my answer is pretty categorical. Blair and Bush passed the test. They still do.

The war is still being fought. The test is still being administered.

Lloyd Grove reports (via Josh Marshall) that the White House has been spreading rumors about Jeffrey Kofman. Kofman was the ABC News reporter who filed a story from Iraq that the morale of U.S. soldiers has been dropping.

The White House alterted Matt Drudge that Kofman was gay and Canadian. I liked Canadian Bacon, too, but I agree with the "network insider" quoted by Grove: "Playing hardball is one thing. But appealing to homophobia and jingoism is simply ugly."

I just have to ask: if this is what carpers and nay-sayers can expect, does Andrew Sullivan still believe that "Blair and Bush passed the test?"

Read it for yourself.

Or read what Tom Tomorrow has to say: "...if this is on the level, the implications are extraordinary. I always had it in the back of my mind that Cheney was stonewalling on the energy task force to hide the corruption, the ties to Enron and so on. But what if the sons of bitches were sitting around deciding how to divvy up Iraq? What if that most reductionist of slogans is a simple statement of fact: it's all about the oil?"

Quick question: do you think the New York Times would have printed a boy-isn't-that-cute profile of a kid who read Mein Kampf when he was little, thought the Nazis ideas sounded really cool, and went on to lead a branch of the Aryan Nations? Somehow, I doubt it. So what's up with this New York Times puffery about Charlotte Kates, one of the organizers of the pro-terrorism conference at Rutgers?

My favorite part is right at the beginning:

WHEN Charlotte L. Kates was in elementary school, she devoured a series of books on foreign countries. One nation, however, captured her imagination. She was in the family car on her way to a children's arts festival in Philadelphia, when, she said, the utopian vision of a communist society in the Soviet Union leapt off the pages and inspired her to be a revolutionary.

And she "agitated to loosen the dress code at her [middle] school and reduce the lunch fees." Boy, isn't that cute?

And, oh yeah, she supports Palestinian terrorism. And the total elimination of Israel. Boy, isn't that cute?

John J. Miller over at the Corner notes that: "The White House has just released a list of this year's Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients.... What an outstanding group--the White House deserves an A+ for this."

I agree. It's a great group.

However, follow the link to the White House press release.

It's Roberto Walker Clemente. Not Roberto Clemente Walker.

Anyway, it's good to see that he won.

Arriba!

UPDATE: Look up one post to David's. My mistake. In my defense, a born-and-raised Pittsburgher am I, yet I'd never heard "Roberto Clemente Walker" before.

Actually, Partha, the White House is correct. The correct rendition of Roberto Clemente's name is Roberto Clemente Walker, and the Baseball Hall of Fame changed his plaque a few years ago to reflect that.

(Oh, and he didn't actually "win" anything; he was given an honor.)