When I was at RedState, there were only three bloggers who I felt should never have been given posting privileges of any sort, for different reasons. Each was a Josh Trevino addition -- but let me be absolutely clear about something here: So was I. (Er, that doesn't make anything better.) Let me try it this way: Josh scores so many hits, you'd expect a few misses along with them. Moreover, given that his intent in his part of the creation of the site was to create a broad coalition of center-right writers, you have to give him credit for actually following through, even though the results were uneven.

One, Sebastian Holsclaw, left after the changeover from the Scoop platform to the Drupal model RedState is getting ready to abandon. Sebastian's problem, as far as I was concerned, was that he was so out of touch with the community as a whole that his posts were like dropping a snare drum solo into a performance of Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring. Bright fella, nice guy (from what I could see), decent-but-not-great writer, but just really out of step with the other writers and commenters.

The second, Charles Bird, still writes there. Frankly, I'm leery of sharing too many of my thoughts about him given his reaction to my departure, but that reaction is illustrative of two parts of the problem: Charles is and was a plodding, dim, extraordinarily conventional thinker, and his writing reflects it; but aside from comforting me that I wasn't the least capable talent on the front page of RedState, there's not much wrong with that. Bird's issues are two-fold, but inextricably intertwined: (1) Charles's blogging belongs first and foremost to that left-wing moron factory, Obsidian Wings, and it shows not only in his I-don't-expect-intelligent-reply style (and that he can't be bothered to change the hyperlinks in his work to redirect to his work on RedState), but also in the essential thrust of the work, which tends to be explicative to, for, and from the perspective of center-lefters. (2) Charles is more naturally comfortable with the Left, partially out of reflexive ideological sympathy, and partially out of the absence of two functioning prefrontal lobes; this in turn is why Charles has spent more than his share of time on his home site (the moron factory) taking shots at RedState. (I wasn't the one to whom he gave his cherry, if you catch my drift.) That post-semicolon part was the biggest reason I wanted him gone; sadly, as with my efforts to ban the (other) below-I.Q. 100 commenters at RedState, I was as much a miserable failure as Charles's teachers from kindergarten on.

(Yes, that's "not sharing too many of my thoughts.")

But I'm not here to address Sebastian or Bird. Instead, this is about John Cole.

A good friend of mine forwarded this a while back with the notation, "Pot, Meet Kettle." There's no point in excerpting it or commenting on it -- by now, anyone familiar with how John has degenerated will be able to sing along with it by knowing that he's upset with The Dread Rises for obsessiveness -- except to say that it's what prompted me to write this.

Flash back a loooong way. H.D. Miller -- remember him, anyone? Traveling Shoes? (H.D. has taken that blog private.) -- turned me on to him back in 2002 or 2003. Professor Miller would doubtless qualify as a wingnut in Cole's current lexicography, but back then, during an email exchange, he told me I should check out Cole's work.

I got a kick out of it. It was a fun read, he clearly didn't like my political priorities, but he clearly didn't like a lot of others', and he used to turn the odd good phrase. I was tickled when I found out I'd get to write with him at RedState, about two years later.

Now, this may surprise those of you whose experience with Cole is from mid-2006 on, but at one time, John was a fairly critical thinker. He pretty much always considered me a theocrat in waiting -- which isn't fair, I'm a monarchist if I'm anything -- but he was pretty up-front that (1) if I didn't bother him about it, he wouldn't bother me about it, and (2) that notwithstanding, common ground could make common fronts possible.

So: I recognize that abortion is murder, as is dehydrating one's wife to death; he thinks people should be free to commit these kinds of murder. Fair enough. At one time -- back before he voted for, and endorsed, Alan Mollohan and Bob Byrd -- we could agree that the growth of the Federal government is, ceteris paribus, a bad thing, and that efforts should be made to stop this. Of course, at one time, he wasn't actively opposed to winning in Iraq, either.

The critical issue, though, wasn't whether he and I agreed, so much as that you could tell he'd thought things through before he wrote, at least a large percentage of the time. Here in blog-land, that's a fairly rare event.

(Dark, funny secret: One of my posts that most set off the orangutans who inhabit the American Left was actually a composite work of the then-RedState crew, including, probably most heavily but for yours truly, John as the foremost contributor. Hint: Think late-summer 2005, and "yard ape.")

What's particularly hard about all this is that John is now just one more lefty. I can read the few bright lefties out there and think, Hm, maybe I don't agree, but that is a good insight, or even, Ya know, I think I agree with that. It says something that there is now nothing interesting about Cole except his on-again, off-again fascination with RedState. Basically, he's turned his site into a group-blog, slightly-wider-ranging version of B. Fred State.

John left around the same time Sebastian did -- sadly, Charles chose to stay after the switchover, and curiously, continued to post to the front through all of the 2006 and 2007, even though he now claims his work was purely in the diaries -- which more or less dovetailed with when I was agitating for him to leave. (There was no connection between my attempts and his voluntary parting.) The common theme for the three was that all spent a fair amount of their time shooting at RedState from their home blogs, only to turn up at RedState and pretend nothing had happened. At the founding of RedState, the operating principle was that only what's done on the site matters as to fronting privileges; however, I took that to mean that political positions taken elsewhere were not taken into account. Maybe it had changed two years later, and maybe it hadn't; maybe I was right, and maybe I was wrong. Regardless, it says something about a man if he'll tell one public audience something awful about you, then pretend in front of another public audience that there's nothing amiss.

Why did John go nuts? I dunno. I sometimes think it's ObiWi disease; sometimes, I think John's meds have failed; yet other times, I suspect he's simply grown senile.

For whatever reason, there's really no intellectual or substantive difference between anything he writes and the sort of pedestrian work you can find any time Markos Moulitsas writes for his page, or what the intellectual pin-cushions at Obsidian Wings spew at theirs. He's become an indistinguishable howl in the crowd, and I don't think his broken principles, such as they were, sting him any more.

Damned shame, really.

Interesting new entry: The Boileryard. Stop in and check it out.

(Interesting arcanum: His blog is self-confessedly a reference to Boileryard Clarke, a lifer during the deadball era. Deeply cool.)

This brief hiatus from my brief hiatus of blogging is brought to you by this public service message:

Pray for Stuart Buck, guys. Three times the man I'll ever be, seven times the lawyer. Life sucks some days. He's got a wife and two kids. If you don't pray, send happy-energy thoughts, or whatever it is y'all do.

Blogging will resume.

And Tacitus actually reads this trash.

I don't know whether to pity him or admire him.

No sooner than I get all gushy over the Old Oligarch than he posts something with which I must mildly take issue:

Natural Woman -- so typical of many people we've known who have adopted NFP, through twists and turns and sometimes despite their pastors and DRE.

Now, I say the rest of this with the following qualifiers:

(1) Believe it or not, I really try to be a faithful Catholic. Oh, Lord knows I mess up sometimes. I've never said otherwise (except to irritate my wife, but that's different).

(2) My wife and I practice natural family planning, because, first, I understand the theology associated with it, it makes sense, and even if it didn't, my name does not start with "Pope"; and, second, my wife and I are not cavalier about the side effects of the pill, especially in light of her family's history of breast cancer.

(3) I'm not really going after anyone here, at least in my usual bared-teeth way.

That said:

I'm calling bullshit.

My wife and I have used NFP since we got married. We were -- no pun -- religious about it. We understood the whole thing -- temperature, mucus, cervical position, even (a fourth dimension on the graph!) certain bodily sensations associated with ovulation. My wife is an engineer. I am the son of an engineer and a microbiologist. We both love to chart things. My wife is an obsessive compulsive. I'm a paranoid freak. We never miss a day of charting.

We wanted to wait, after we got married, for one year before having a family. We wanted to make sure we were settled in where we were gonna stay for a while, and we wanted to make sure we had enough money to properly care for the little one. (I've never bought, not cared much for, the "We had to get to know each other" crap as a reason to wait: If you didn't know each other before you got married, why did you say, "I do"?) Accordingly, my wife charted everything for months before we got married. We continued once the chain was fastened vows were spoken. Remember: One year.

We were married in June. We apparently conceived in late July. You know, less than two months later.

Don't get me wrong; I count as God's greatest blessing to me, my son. I love him much more than my own life. I would not have his existence any other way.

But let's be honest about this: If you buy the Church's, um, teaching, that NFP is 99% or so effective, you'll buy anything.

Yeah, but it's just one time, you say. Freak incident. The exception that proves the rule.

Au contraire, copains. My wife is now in sixteen weeks along with our second child. Same religious attention to detail. Had the doctor help this time to make sure. We had been planning to wait until about, oh, now, to do this; the starting gun went off early, apparently.

Again: Don't misunderstand. My life in trade for my children without hesitation. The tortures of Hell for their safety, in a heartbeat. I am fully aware of what those tortures are -- to some extent, I've lived them for periods of time -- and I say that even so.

But.

If you have a very regular, set-your-watch-by-it cycle, NFP will work for you. Guaranteed. But for those women who do not -- who, like my wife, drop multiple eggs just at random, or who have variable cycles, or whatever -- you're playing with loaded dice. As my wife's extremely Catholic OB told her (the lady won't discuss any sort of "contraception" except NFP), when we told her that we think the wife is just scatter-shooting eggs, "Looks like you were made to be a Mommy."

Which brings me back to my point: People who use NFP -- or at least, a larger percentage than the folks at pre-Cana let on -- really are called "parents."

Just sayin'.

How do I admire the Old Oligarch? Let me count the ways:

Here's a starter.

There is nothing, nothing stupider than putting less than our best and brightest out in the way of combat just so we can all feel warmer and fuzzier. Eliminate the massive physical and psychological differences between men and women, and we can talk. Otherwise, spare me the cockamamie crap about making girls feel good and accepting the needless loss of men and women as an acceptable consequence.

I'm addicted to the format. Sue me.

Right. As opposed to the humorless, whiney conservatism of the libertine right.

That said, this well-traveled piece is worth a read and a chuckle.

For those of you not reading Little Tiny Lies, go there now.

On the woman whose husband is trying to kill her: For the record: The reason he is her guardian is not because, as her husband, he is ipso facto her guardian, it is because he asked a court to be so, and he was so made. Hence, his decisions concerning her welfare are subject to judicial scrutiny. And the judiciary in Florida is no greater than any other branch of that State's government. A judicial order may be put aside by legislative action. it is, precisely, that simple.

(Mr. Sullivan: Yes, it's because life trumps marriage, and we're treating his marital "rights" -- although the word is not applicable here -- cavalierly because he is so doing, and is therefore waiving them. Put differently: Some people have a little more perspective than you.)

Paul Cella produces one of the most impressive essays I've read in a while.

Mr. Kennedy: It is a profoundly bad idea to get sloshed just before a significant vote, especially when you're trying to make sure that an additional thousands of children go to the abbatoir every year.

Just for kicks: Mary Jo Kepechne.

Why I'm not a libertoid, Volume XII: Liberty for me, and not for thee. I'll probably get to this later, but the short of it is this: We say Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in that order, because each successive one is predicated on the latter. One cannot have liberty without life. Therefore, any "libertarian" who whines about government restrictions on killing children in utero is merely a selfish nitwit -- his liberty trumps another's life (and therefore her liberty). Following that, even assuming secondhand smoke isn't deadly, it still stinks, and it's, you know, smoke, so forcing me to inhale it is hurting me so you can benefit. (I'll spare you talk of negative externalities for a little while.)