This dates to August 15, 2005.

I normally eschew this sort of thing for reasons that will become clearer below. But I want to say something about this Cindy Sheehan nonsense that I think hasn't gone said anywhere else.

There is nothing special about losing a child. Or, more accurately, there is nothing special about losing a child, given that many people lose children. I did.

Many folks would say I did not, as my wife was only a few months along when we lost the child. Some might even think it funny. I did not. I'll spare you the personal details, except to say this: I would have given my life for that child. I begged God to take me instead. With pain, if need be. He did not.

My wife made the same offer, same result.

I understand the pain of losing a child. I understand what it can do to your head. I understand wanting to die as a result. I understand being angry. I also understand that you're emotionally vulnerable on that count.

So here's my point, and it's two-fold: Cindy Sheehan has no more right to argue against the Iraq War than I have to argue against legalized abortion. I do not bring up my loss when discussing abortion or embryonic stem cell research because, simply, it seems ghoulish beyond compare to drag one's lost little ones into your personal war. Does it animate my arguments? Take a guess. Frankly, what motivates me isn't anyone else's concern. But I'll be damned before I drag a child over whom I still cry sometimes into a political mudfight. And having lost a child that way, or indeed, any other, I understand wanting to rage at everything in sight.

And now let me get to the real target of all this: The ghoulish, deranged Left. Shame on you. Each and every one. Sheehan's anger is understandable. Your behavior is not. You've taken her as a Judas goat, torn her family apart, and paraded her in front of the cameras so you can have one more small cut inflicted on Chimpy McHitlerburton. Or BushCo. Or whatever it is you call the man you hate so much.

Oh, I'm sure she's gone along willingly at every turn. I'm sure the Left takes comfort in this. You have no freaking idea what it's like to have every parent's worst nightmare come true. I would have stormed Heaven's ramparts for my child when the moment came that we all knew was coming.

Ms. Sheehan should have our humble thanks for the sacrifice of her son, and then we should turn our eyes away from her grief. Maybe she needs to protest to get this out of her system. There's still no excuse for our enabling this, or for our voyeurism.

Let it go.

This dates to February 7, 2007.

"If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime -- Pol Pot or others -- that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners."

"I have absolutely no regret about my vote against this war. The same questions remain. The cost in human lives, the cost to our budget, probably 100 billion. We could have probably brought down that statue for a lot less."

"Only by adopting the techniques of the big lie can the vice president make his case that those opposed to the Iraqi war fail to understand the importance of a firm response to terrorists. In fact, given the deleterious effect it has had on our effort in Afghanistan, and the enormous boost it has given to anti-American forces around the world, the big truth is that the Iraq war has damaged our ability to fight terrorism."

In 1974, every American who voted for a Democrat took the blood of millions of Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians on his hands. The Democrats responded by feeding the Reaper, as they'd been elected to do. To this day, they congratulate themselves for their noble sacrifice of millions of Asian lives.

In 2006, every American who voted for a Democrat took the blood of millions of Iraqis on his hands. The Democrats have responded by offering non-binding resolutions.

For thirty years, the Republican Party sliced off core Democratic voting groups who had become convinced that the Democrats were and are weaklings, cowards, and faithless allies willing -- joyful -- at the prospect of sending millions to the abattoir. The Democrats are now responding to the same kind of mandate by adopting a new pose of cowardice.

Dhimmicrats. DemocRATS. Surrendercrats. The names come as easily to some lips as Rethuglicans come to others. For every yahoo who elides an argument about foreign policy into a slur, however, there have been hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of voters convinced that Democrats are, to put this charitably, unwilling to engage in war. From the homebuilding tyrant enabler to the youthful pugilist to Mickey Mouse in a tank, the Democrats had to live down their response to Vietnam (again, even while they praised themselves for it). Even the serial adulterer had to waste time that could have been spent on White House Hotties proving he was willing to high-altitude bomb someone into submission. Tough and Strong went out of their way to repudiate Tough's own traditional stand on foreign policy, so that voters would be fooled into thinking that Democrats would be willing to go to war without a direct attack on the country first.

Obviously, that didn't work so well.

But oh, the worm has turned! Behold! They ran in 2006 on, well, very little; but the Democrats' consistent message, for anyone who was listening, was that the little party we call the Iraq War is over. And the voters gave them their marching orders. Now, for the first time in a generation, the voters want to try letting people get massacred en masse, and that's precisely what the Democrats were running on. Thus should begin a symphony of synchronicity.

So where are you, you cowards? You've made clear from the Spring of 2003 that you believe this is an illegal, unjustified, awful, soul-destroying war; that a Congress that wasn't a mere rubber stamp for the President would have pulled the cord a long time ago; and that, by a God you don't believe in, if you came to power, there would be no more Iraq War. You've salivated for the chance to truly make this another Vietnam. Your most prominent loons ran on little else. Now's your chance to exercise the only power Congress has in the exercise of war -- the ultimate power, in every sense of the word -- and end the whole thing. Come on, you fevered, yellow-bellied tucktails. Let's all climb to the top of a building and watch the last helicopter leave. Let's have another commission named after that brave milquetoast Frank Church. Let's remind the international community that Americans will fall in line when they demand it. Let's give your neo-McGovernites -- and the voters who agreed with them -- the blood they want.

Come on, you wastes of political skin. Defund the war. Do it. Cut all allocation for the war from the budget. Allow no supplementals. Consummate your promises. Prove those of us who think you spineless cowards that you have the right kind of spine to roll over and pee yourself when the world demands it.

Do it.

Cowards.

This dates to August 21, 2007.

Full disclosure: I have no dog in the 2008 Presidential brouhaha, am unlikely to develop a dog in the immediate future, and frankly, share a sentiment with a commenter/diarist whose handle rhymes with MeveFellBay, to-wit: None of the above. Part of this is because I have a hard time getting enthusiastic about political campaigns (yes, a great guy indeed to have a Director of RedState); part of it is because, with or without Fred! I'm underwhelmed by the current candidate pool, which ranges from a liberal New Yorker to a nativist to a crazy libertarian to some guy named Cox, with not a lot of improvement or fall in between; and part because, as I've said so many damned times, we are taking our eye off the ball of Congress, the State elections, and 2007, and royally hurting ourselves in the process.

Believe it or not, however, all of that was a digression. The point of this post was to say, for pretty much the only time in over a year, Mitt Romney blew my socks off (go to 9:30):

Now, the mandatory carping: I disagree with the old Mittster on a few things, not least of which being that if you're going to put faith in the public square -- an enterprise of which I'm an enthusiastic supporter -- you need to be prepared to discuss and defend it there. I'm fully aware of why Romney isn't interested in that conversation, but Catholics have had to do it for decades; I see no reason why this should be different. There's more, but it's just nit-picking.

With that said, Wow. If you could get him to drop the Ken-doll approach that he insists on adopting when the mike is on, I'd have been on this guy's team for a year now. That you can't concerns me in many of the same ways Al Gore concerned me, and the parallels are disturbing; but if this was how Mitt Romney was 24/7, I'd be a Romneybot too.

This dates to October 21, 2007.

Four years ago, Ben Domenech was excited about Bobby Jindal. So was I. He thought Jindal had a good chance at the governor's mansion. I did not.

I was right.

I won't go through the reasons I turned out to be right. I was. A woman who, I believe, is my sister's godfather's (my father's best friend from high school's) first cousin won by suddenly reminding everyone in Cajun country what her maiden name was, and reminded all of Louisiana that Bobby Jindal was not melanin-free (that this was successful in a State with such a strong history of interbreeding (not intermarriage, though) is an irony lost on most) -- and most importantly, manufactured votes in the time-honored way her Party always did, by getting 238% turnout in Orleans and a few other Parishes.

Four years later, I was wrong.

So: Ben (and Orrin): I apologize. You were right, just four years early. You called correctly, if early, something I never really thought would happen.

Erick is 100% right (though the Carter analogy is 100%, the better analogy to the Mary one is Catholics not fearing being burned at the stake after Charles II came to the throne after that psycho Cromwell breathed his last).

For the first time I can remember, I can say my family hails from Louisiana without feeling a little bit of rue and shame as I say it.

And Bobby? God bless, and congratulations.

This post dates to November 5, 2007.

It's another Giuliani/Huckabee diary. If just those five words are enough to turn your stomach, you should probably read something else.

Anyway: We're in the middle of something a lot of folks haven't really seen since 1980, and perhaps haven't seen in their lifetimes: A well-and-truly contested Republican Presidential Primary. Now, because we're unused to it, it's my theory that we don't remember how to react; and because the Party was a very different animal then, the coalition of groups who compose it have little to no institutional memory of how to resolve formational problems before they get out of hand.

Put differently: Depending on which candidate is ascendant at any given time, a lot of otherwise good-faith Republicans are threatening to take their ball and run away, because they don't know precisely what else to do.

I'm not going to sit here and argue that anyone must vote for this guy, or must not vote for that one; I'm not going to get into the middle of the what-happens-when-the-general-comes argument. I have enough headaches without engaging that.

What I'd like to do is offer every camp an insight into why we are where we are, and point to some possible resolutions of the problem. I would suggest that we need to get this done now, rather than, say, September 2008. So, if you have some time, read on.

I used to be a pretty fair hand at game theory, but as with so much else in my intellectual life, what sense I had for it at anything but the intuitive level has largely atrophied from disuse. I hope you'll pardon any obvious gaffes on my part as I try to work through this; but I really think it's the best analytical framework for this election, and I'm going to offer it that way.

I'm going to make two simplifications that I hope don't destroy the model, for explanatory purposes, and that will save a lot of "but ifs" sprinkled through the discussion. First, I'm going to assume that each group described below has more or less homogeneous beliefs, and internally consistent priorities, thereby allowing me to treat groups as an equivalent number of individuals. Second, while essentially, every participant in coalition politics has a slightly-to-highly uneven hand in the nomination process, let's simply assume that each has the same vote. Like I said, these assumptions glaze over a lot, but I'm looking for a basic model more than anything else.

Given that, here's where I think we are:

The "social conservatives" -- shorthand for conservatives whose first (though not only) priority is social issues -- want a nominee who will (1) win and (2) advance policy on abortion, gay marriage, stem cell research, and probably some other things we don't need to rehash here. The "fiscal conservatives" -- shorthand for conservatives whose first (though not only) priority is money and market, i.e., spending, taxes, and government regulation of the market -- want a nominee who will (1) win and (2) advance policy on taxes, government expenditures (and size), and government regulation of life in general but the markets in particular. There are of course other factions -- the "immigration conservatives," the "gun conservatives," the "liberty conservatives," etc. -- but I won't deal with those because (1) they complicate what's already a too-long blog post, (2) I think hyphenated conservatism is so much media hooplah, and (3) each of those groups, if they exist, can find something to adamantly dislike in either or both Mike Huckabee and/or Rudy Giuliani.

The problem we're experiencing is that Rudy Giuliani is currently the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, and Mike Huckabee is making a poorly funded darkhorse surge. Both men, on paper, have great credentials; however, each has the potential, based on current pronouncements and past acts, to split off large, vitally-needed chunks of the party come election time, should he make it to the general election. For Rudy, it's the social conservatives; for Mike, it's the fiscal ones. Social conservatives, now warming up the signs for the thirty-fifty anniversary of Roe, are wondering why they give their time, effort, and boots on the ground to a Party that not only can't get Roe reversed, but that actually got it affirmed the last time it made it to the High Court, with Justices appointed by post-Roe Republican Presidents providing the critical votes to uphold that monstrosity. Fiscal conservatives, listening to Reagan's rhetoric about government being the problem and but rarely the solution, wonder why every Republican President since Nixon has presided over vastly increased spending, increased taxes, or both; why the Code of Federal Regulations never shrinks; and why a Republican Congress showed admirable fiscal restraint for about five months in 1995, then went a-porking.

In Rudolph Giuliani, the social conservatives see an avatar of all the things they believe wrong with the Republican Party: A greater emphasis on electability and belligerence than on protecting the unborn, a liberal (sorry, guys, it's true) on social issues that don't directly affect crime rates whose personal life suggests that we don't want to spend too much time poking at the Clintons this time around. In Michael Huckabee, the fiscal conservatives see all the morass that is "compassionate conservatism" without even the little motes of sunlight offered with, say, No Child Left Behind and Medicare D -- a bigspending Southern Populist who'll say, "I'm with the people, not with the powerful," and mean it, forgetting that in the Republican Party, we believe that the "powerful" are not merely composed of the "people," but that they, through extraordinary selfishness run amok, actually help the people.

Now, what makes this problematic is that all of this has been simmering for decades now, and the various members of the Republican coalition are rather wondering why they bother with all the effort if nothing comes of it. This is further exacerbated by having a President of whom both sides can say bad and good things (again), and of having on the other side of the upcoming v a woman whom both sides detest enough to actually cause blood-vomiting; in other words, the stakes are highest just when everyone's patience is worn thinnest.

And that leads to the game-playing. There's a complex series of calculations at work here, for each faction, relative to each candidate. Each decision made in this particular game could yield disaster for the moving faction; for the non-moving faction; and for the Party as a whole.

Let's take the example that's received the most ink (and pixels): The social conservatives who have threatened to vote third-party rather than vote for Giuliani. Say they don't follow through, and vote for Giuliani:

(1) The Party/Giuliani might decide it doesn't need to even pay lip service to social conservatives if they'll simply shut up and vote when called to do so, regardless of the candidate's record (ample historical precedent exists for this in the Democrat Party);

(2) The Party/Giuliani may view social conservatives as the deciding vote in a close election;

(3) The Party/Giuliani may view social conservatives as irrelevant in a landslide election, and elect to stay with a socially moderate message to keep the landslide voters on-board;

(4) The Party/Giuliani may view social conservatives, to whom it/he believes there was a need to pander, as the reason for a loss in a close election/landslide, and so decides to dump those social conservatives, as they were never well-loved to start.

Implicit in this, of course, is how the other player -- let's say "the Party as a whole" -- reacts both to the action by the social conservatives, and how the election turns out -- and that all of this is taking place behind a double-blind. But let's continue, on the "sit out" option, to show what the social conservatives have in store:

(1) After a narrow win, the Party/Giuliani decides that they can't take any part of the coalition for granted again, and sets about wooing the disaffected.

(2) After a landslide win, the Party/Giuliani decides that they don't need the social conservatives any more, and the social conservatives spend the next twenty years in the political wilderness.

(3) After a loss of any kind, the Party/Giuliani decides that they can't take any part of the coalition for granted again, and sets about wooing the disaffected.

(4) After a loss of any kind, the Party/Giuliani decides that the Party's coalition structure needs to be totally revamped, and tosses the social conservatives out the door, forty years in the wilderness, etc.

The moving party -- the social conservatives -- not only doesn't know how their participation or non-participation will affect the election, nor how the rest of the Party will react, but the rest of the Party is clueless too.

The same thing might come to pass with the fiscal conservatives and Huckabee; just plug and chug and you can see the same kind of analysis. As an added bonus, both sets of players are playing for the highest set of stakes possible in a coalition: Perceived electoral significance. Take the Huckabee example: I'd submit that a true populist ticket could make a serious run at the Presidency. If successful, why would the fiscal conservatives matter? (As a son of Louisiana, let me go on the record and say if a true populist wins the Presidency, I'm moving to Poland.) On the other hand, maybe those fiscal conservatives, even if overrepresented on the internet, are a vital component of the coalition, and their absence means doom for the Party. The only way to know if you're gonna win at Russian roulette is to put the revolver to your forehead and pull the trigger.

All of this was to make a simple point: The fellow you're accusing of bad faith is not acting in bad faith; instead, he's playing a game maybe more complex than even he realizes, for stakes he considers worth it. More importantly, you are too. As we're going to need these people in downticket races, I'd respectfully submit we keep the "Hit the road" rhetoric to a bare minimum. We have a Wicked Witch to melt in a year, after all.

To the men and women who would do this, I maintain that you are nothing but a group of tucktails. If the Iraq War is so bad, so immoral, do everything in your power to stop it. Allocate no funds. Bush vetoes? Keep allocating no funds. Force Bush to choose between literal force protection and a staredown.

Stupid, immoral, cowardly excuses for human beings, the lot of you. If this war is merely a waste of lives and treasure, you are honor-bound to stop it at all costs. So do it. Relive the 1970s. Show us that you accept the inevitable slaughter of millions as irrelevant so that we can all watch the evening news without being bothered. Prove that refugees dying on boats and in camps are merely pictures, and not men, women, and children possessed of human dignity, being tortured because the United States won't live up to its promises. Remind the world again that we are a paper tiger, and then grieve when another embassy is held hostage.

Heck, why wait? Why don't we go slaughter a million Iraqis in bombing runs, so this time the blood will be directly on our hands, and we can avoid the irritating images of boat people and other refugees fleeing genocide?

That our Party once knew the value of honor, and words kept, and standing for the weak when they could not; and now accepts in its midst those who would spit on all those things, is a shame to the Republican Party. That the Democrat Party -- a Party that once championed the dignity of all Men -- not only slaughters them in the womb, but would abandon them to slaughter ex utero for political advantage; and that few Americans call them the mass-murdering tyrant enablers they've become -- should shame us all as Americans.

Fall on your face in shame, my fellow Americans, because we are giving away our honor, a piece at a time.

In honor of Steve Gilliard:



Rest whatever way God feels appropriate.

I'm loathe to engage in intra-dextrosphere blogwars, but I just wanted to add my bit about Dean Barnett's shots at pro-lifers (which, amazingly, seem to come as shots at John McCain, and appear to be a moral defense of the Dresden firebombing). I cannot hope to surpass Ross's, Mark Shea's (a hero of mine from years gone), or our own Alexham's (here and here). But I did want to add this:

One of the biggest dangers of respectable blogging is walking the line between being good partisans (or boosters for candidates) and good -- for lack of a more precise term -- ideologues. Put differently, if all you're getting is Wales, it doesn't always make sense to sell your soul. I therefore take issue with this:

Murder requires what those in the law refer to as a specific mens rea. That little Latin phrase in this context means you need a precise and knowing intent to kill someone in order to qualify as a murderer. The typical mother who has an abortion and the doctor who provides it have no such intent. They don’t feel they’re taking a life. I feel they’re wrong, and most of the readers of this site probably feel they’re wrong. But because they lack that specific and knowing intent, they’re not murderers.

What drives me crazy about the abortion debate, specifically on our side, is our stridency. There’s little attempt to understand the other side, and little effort to comprehend why a mother-to-be might desperately want an abortion. One of the reasons we toss around terms like “murder” is because they’ll end conversations, not begin them.

Let's just get this out of the way: If I kill a black woman, with the intent to kill her, but honestly believe that because she's black, she's not a human being, have I committed murder? And might -- just bear with me -- pro-lifers call such a thing "murder" not as a means to end debate, but rather as an expression of their honest beliefs?

The post in question is basically a long-winded way of taking a shot at one of Mitt Romney's opponents John McCain, and is apparently a long-winded way of getting there. In the process of traveling that road, it was apparently necessary to take some shots along the way.

I liked you guys so much better when you were just ballplayers.

Just because.

Running into the 1988 Presidential election, Bloom County -- for those of you who were even more children than I at the time, a left-leaning comic strip penned by, what else, an Austinite -- took to calling the two major party nominees the Wimp and the Shrimp. The joke -- with respect to one of only three one-term Presidents of the twentieth century -- took aim at the elder Bush's penchant for genteel, Rockefeller Republicanism; love of bipartisanship; and general image of softness, compared to the giant who came before him.

Little did we know that the truth of that image would come back to haunt us throughout the man's presidency, culminating (but hardly ending) in that great bipartisan moment in which President Bush (1) decided that everyone who'd read his lips scant years before had been suffering from mass dyslexia.

One of the great worries many of us had in 2000 -- aside from the fear that we'd soon have an android in charge of the nuclear codes, and that his alien masters would overrun us all -- was that the Wimp's wimpiness was congenital, and a dominant gene. This did not overly concern me, because, first, any idiot -- and George W. Bush is not an idiot -- could figure out what cost his father the Presidency; and, second, I watched the younger Bush absolutely annihilate that old crone Ann Richards, and not gently, either. Sure, he liked the bipartisan game, but he knew where the long knives were kept.

I maintain that I was right, but to a point; and the beginning of my error is the beginning of the explanation for the absolute fecklessness of the last two and a half years of President Bush's last term.

It is a commonplace analysis that the Bush Administration is actually a tale of two Presidencies: The first was staffed with Executive officers who could each have been President; remarkable for an attitude Hell-bent on establishing Republican dominance for a generation; characterized by a poorly communicated, but determined efforts to make absolutely certain that another September 11 never happened; and willing to pull out knives for use in impromptu surgery on the Democrats. The second term has been filled with Executive officers more notable for loyalty than competence; political missteps a-plenty; a squandered Congress; and even more sporadic attempts to fight, and marshal support for, a war that the Administration still holds vital. The difference, the common wisdom holds, is that the Bush administration (1) was too wounded by Katrina, (2) had lame-duck written on it in December 2004, (3) burned too much political capital on Harriet Miers and a badly prosecuted Iraq War, and/or (4) discharged too many good Executive officers for mere sycophants.

I say this is a mistaken analysis, if not in first premises, then certainly in its underlying understanding of the Bush Administration. I would submit that President Bush's administration has suffered from two, related, but not identical, problems.

First, although the left side of the political spectrum likes to imagine that President Bush and his administration are filled with relentless knife-fighters willing to cut any femoral to win, the unfortunate truth of the matter is that they're willing to play hardball on a tiny number of issues, and to give ground more or less everywhere else. While this might have been a viable governing strategy fifty years ago, the times have changed -- whether those times changed with Nixon, Reagan, or Clinton depends on your political perspective and your tendency to romanticize the past (and your party's involvement in it) -- and they have changed in such a way as to make bipartisanship on large issues more or less impossible. Because this Bush subscribes to his father's view of governance -- electioneering is for election time, governing is for everything else -- he has been wholly unprepared to deal with the world as it exists now. In other words, the single insight of the Clinton Administration worth noting for Republicans -- the need for a permanent campaign in today's media environment -- was and is not so much missed by this Administration as it is utterly repugnant to their way of doing things.

Think about it: Candidate Bush actually touched the third rail of Social Security reform. He suggested, let us be frank, privatization. He ran on it. He clearly wanted it. He talked about it. And come election time, he hammered on it. Then, when he finally had a Congress to work with; when he finally had his shot at ending the biggest boondoggle coming down the pike at us ... the term of art is "communications failure." Normal humans call it "silence." As a result, the Democrats -- then the minority, so for them, it's always campaign time -- campaigned against it. Republican Congresscritters, one of the latest evolved subphyla of invertebrates, naturally rolled over and played dead. In other words, the election campaign long over, Bush played soft, expected executive pronouncements (with the strength of a majority mandate behind him) to carry the day; the Democrats campaigned; and on the election of Which Social Security Option Wins, the Democrats won.

Any conservative -- any libertarian, any fusionist, any Republican -- with skin in the game has a similar tale to tell: A barnstorming, sincere Bush who charges out in front on a given issue, swinging for the fences come election time; followed by a quiet, almost passive Bush come governing time. Pick an issue; it's there.

This also goes a long way to explaining why the second term has seen a more withdrawn, less active President than the first term: Because there is no campaign coming. President Bush was out on the trail in 2002 -- making a critical difference there -- for a whole host of reasons, but undeniably to soften the terrain for 2004. In a development that I'm sure is still breaking a large number of moonbat hearts, there will be no Bush on the ticket in 2008; ergo, there is no need to campaign.

That silence -- that quiescence -- reflects the Bush family's somewhat patrician view of electoral and governing politics; and for that honorable, if somewhat (from today's perspective) daft reason, the Republican Party has one more weight on its back. (Fill in dozens of others as needed.)

Second, the related-but-not-identical problem is that candidate Bush made no secret of the fact that he openly disdained President Clinton's style of governance, which was, charitably, to publicly, loudly emote every time someone fell down and skinned his knee. Essentially, Bush said, you are wasting valuable, limited political capital; that capital must be hoarded for when you are swinging for the fences. If I may continue the baseball analogy -- and I may -- President Clinton's Administration was a story of constant political small ball: Here a hit, there a walk, oops, someone leaned into the pitch, pop fly, end of the inning. President Bush's administration is a story of putting the bat way above your shoulder, taking a lot of strikeouts looking, and when you get one clean over the middle or just a hair low and inside, swinging that bat for all you're worth.

I confess that even now I admire that approach to governance. That doesn't, however, eliminate its obvious flaws. In other words, you'd better damned well connect with one of those balls, preferably with the bases loaded, or you're gonna have a poem written about you and an out achieved by passing the ball over the plate three times.

Now, don't misunderstand: It seems beyond dispute that Bush -- candidate or President -- had a fundamental insight that Clinton -- adulterer or President -- lacked: If you keep wasting your time on small, ugly, inconsequential things, you'll never accomplish anything great. The story of 1993-2001 is nothing more than the story of a massive peace dividend unleashed as a result of the acts of 1981-1989, and a caretaker managing more or less nothing on his own, except a few things that fundamentally cheesed off his party's faithful, and and a handful of inconsequential things that enraged the faithful of his opponents. I say this not as a partisan, but as an honest observer: To what great accomplishment can William Jefferson Clinton point and say, I did that. Me. I wrested the direction of the country in the way I thought it should go, and for that, I am applauded, because I was right?

But behold the effect of playing an all-power lineup: A first term filled with landmark achievements, some awful, some great, some with a jury still trying to figure out who will be foreman; and a second term of strikeouts punctuated by a bare handful of home runs.

The fundamental insight that Candidate, and now President, Bush missed is this: Political capital, while assuredly not infinite, is not precisely finite either. It may be analogized to musculature: If you let it atrophy, you lose it; if you feed and use it, even minimally, you keep it. By failing to expend political capital on small things as well as great -- and there is a balance in this, to be sure -- the Bush administration is like the great warrior who felled his enemies with but a swing of his sword, and who has now gone to fat. He has lost his musculature because he so rarely uses it.

I would submit that in today's media environment, the only way to remain influential -- to retain political capital -- through two terms is to use what you have consistently, whether on offense or defense. Bush's failure to actually fire back at his opponents on a regular basis may or may not make him more noble, but it assuredly has left him enervated before them. Having been bludgeoned on social security reform, and lacking the quick musculature needed to fire back, this administration was gutted -- without basis in truth, but truth doesn't matter in politics or political perception -- by Katrina, and what came after. Lacking the will to constantly engage on the vital nature of the Iraq project, when the President elects to speak on it, he no longer commands a national audience, or even the opening clip on the evening news.

There is implicit in this the lurking suggestion that the modern media environment has made it impossible, or nearly so, to achieve a Presidency filled with great accomplishments; that 24/7 media and new media coverage has accomplished what a bloated bureaucracy could not, and has actually made it impossible for one man to stand successfully atop the Executive Branch. Perhaps this is true; perhaps not. That is something we will have to test with the next President, because the current one is -- sadly for those of us who remain fans of his -- pretty well done.

This is purely a test post.

A Review of The Virtues of War: A Novel of Alexander The Great, by Steven Pressfield



I begin by noting that, no pun, historically, I have hated historical novels. Loathed them. They take liberties with historical events, facts, and timelines. They write today's prejudices on worlds so long removed from ours, that our underlying assumptions might make no sense at all whatsoever to a man of that time. They are, usually, at best fantasy novels set in a definite time period, and, at worst, cheap polemics.

If it can be fairly said that I have detested historical fiction, there is simply no word in English for how I feel about first-person fiction. Perhaps it was too many epistolary novels in undergrad. Perhaps it is because of the awesome conceit attendant with writing from some great historical figure's voice, when one is clearly reading the author doing a particularly bad sort of impersonation -- like the joke in the Eighties that whenever someone claims to be reincarnate, one is always Cleopatra reborn, rather than one of the camp whores who followed Hannibal's army up and down Italy, or Napoleon, rather than a stable hand who once tended to one of Napoleon's horses, and who died of syphilis some years later.

I have since changed my mind.

When I was asked to review The Virtues of War, I honestly had no idea I'd be reviewing first person historical fiction. I would have said no, had I known. It would have been my loss. Fortunately, I'm also a classics geek, so I said yes.

Before I received Virtues, I decided to do some background reading, and so picked up Gates of Fire, one of Pressfield's earlier novels (this time, on the battle of Thermopylae). It, too, was an historical novel. It, too, was a first-person novel. It was incredible. (A good review of Gates of Fire can be found here.)

In fact, I was so taken with Gates of Fire that I actually approached Virtues with some trepidation. Gates of Fire was one of those rare novels in which you know the ending ahead of time, but still feverishly turn every page, trying to find out how it turns out. Truthfully, in such a case, I've never read a novelist's second effort that climbed the same height as the first.

Virtues is at least as good as Gates of Fire. Indeed, it may even be better. I won't know until I've re-read it (which I rather intend to do, just as soon as I get done writing this review). But before I gush too much, let me get my picked nits out of the way.

First, Pressfield takes, alas, some historical liberties, which, to his credit, he discloses up front. I'll spare you those, as Pressfield lays them out in some detail in the preface, and as they don't detract seriously from the novel's integrity. We'll count that as a minor strike.

Second, and this stems in no small part from the novel's structure and chief concerns, hints of Alexander's private life are virtually non-existent. While this hardly detracts from the novel's purpose, it does put a crimp on understanding why Alexander is who he is. We get cursory looks at his youth; at his relationship with his mother; at the awful pressure of growing up in the Macedonian court. His wives are mere phantoms. All but his comrades-in-arms, indeed, are mere phantoms.

Finally, and this is the recurrance of my old tic, Alexander is just a bit too aware -- of history, of the likely (and usually correct) course of the future, of, indeed, everything. It works to great effect, placing the reader in some historical context (for example, why the men of Thebes, rather than Sparta, are the dominant military power of the age of Philip); but it irks, slightly, to get obvious historical foreshadowings, such as Alexander's certainty on how his Empire will dissolve. And it tends, slightly, to bog down the narrative in pedantry. It also shades into Alexander as super-mortal, a god among men; while Alexander, and those around him, might have viewed him that way, gods don't die in their early thirties.

That is every single bad thing I have to say about this novel. Otherwise, this is a work of art; a beautifully written, delicately and expertly crafted, perfectly structured testament to the ability of an author to imagine a subject, and to share it with his readers. If that sounds like overkill, consider this passage (chosen at random):

All that being said, how does one make decisions? By rationality? My tutor Aristotle could classify the world, but he couldn't find his way to the village square. One must dive deeper than reason. The Thracians of Bithynia trust no decision unless they make it drunk. They know something we don't. A lion never makes a bad decision. Is he guided by reason? Is an eagle "rational"?

Rationality is superstition by another name.

What's great about that is not only the clear sentence structure -- it reads like someone would think -- but the way you would expect a warrior-king tutored by Aristotle, aimed squarely at a superhuman destiny, who traced his lineage through his mother to Achilles, to think. It's also a glimpse into a mind that is becoming ever-more obsessed with its destiny, and with a certainty that the gods themselves drive a man to greatness. Done incorrectly, this sort of prose can lend itself to mendacious trash like The Thin Red Line -- musings on the Platonic oversoul in the middle of an amphibious assault; done correctly, as here, it provides a textured background, a landscape on which the rest of the story unfolds.

And what a story. Alexander was the son of Phillip of Macedon, who had subjugated the Aegean peninsula, brought low the Thebans and Spartans, and planned on finally finishing off the Persian Empire once and for all. Phillip died at the hands of an assassin, and left behind a power vacuum into which his son (Alexander III, on ascension) stepped. Thereafter came, with the possible exception of Genghis Khan's empire-building, the fastest, most incredible creation of an Empire ever. Alexander marched, with the Macedonian phalanx and heavy cavalry, through Asia Minor, through the Middle East, through Central Asia, and into India, before being suddenly struck down with either a sudden illness or poisoning (historical sources differ). No army stood successfully against him; no general on an opposing battlefield truly thwarted his will. It is said of Alexander that he wept when he realized there were no worlds left to conquer. His name is legend even today. He was, in short, the sort of man coughed up only once every hundred or thousand years, if that; it is no wonder that he is called "the Great."

The novel is, as you might have guessed, Alexander's narrative (to his brother-in-law, a page in his camp) of his youth, his rise to power, his phenomenal march across the Persian Empire and beyond, and, inevitably, his demise. The novel begins on the banks of the last great river he will cross; the book carries a feel of imminent mortality, which only grows stronger as the narrative progresses, and Alexander wrestles more and more with his daimon, until it comes very close to consuming him. In a sense, it's almost as if his inner spirit, his daimon, consumes him from the inside (as Alexander is long fearful will happen), and this is the sickness that takes him. If Acton's axiom of absolute power has any truth, it is true not only on the spiritual, but on the physical level, as well; Alexander's flesh begins to revolt against him as his men cannot keep pace with his unyielding ambition. He rages. He grows feverish. He cannot speak. He is overcome and kills one of his oldest comrades.

To say that the military details are lovingly rendered is to engage in understatement. Pressfield brings the sort of love normally only an amateur historian can bring to the topic -- details about speed of hoof, armored cavalry charges, positions for lances, armor, tactics, and campaigns -- and somehow doesn't bog down the novel in the telling. Needless to say, I re-read those sections several times.

What really impressed me, at least as much as the storytelling and the narrative pace, was the structure of the novel. The novel is broken into Books, each of which describes an heroic virtue (such as "Contempt for Death") about which the Book loosely revolves. Impressively, without once conspicuously altering the narrative flow of the novel, each Book plays up that virtue through subtle emphasis and selective storytelling. The result is a novel that communicates those virtues; highlights Alexander's devout adherence to those virtues; and unsparingly demonstrates his ability to breach those rules, either by making a vice of them, or by ignoring them altogether. One cannot come away from Virtues without having absorbed, at least in some measure, those virtues. For example, is not our best brought out by striving against our enemies, and thus against ourselves; and should we not love our enemies for making us better?

A desire not to spoil the novel precludes further review. Suffice it to say, for the first time in something like four years, I have read a novel (other than Gates of Fire) that actually moved me in the reading. The best novels stay with you in your dreams and in your waking moments when you finish. I have dreamed of Virtues every night since I picked it up.

Even if Pressfield didn't bother to have Alexander slice the Gordian knot.

I heartily recommend Virtues, whether your penchant is for fiction, history, martial virtues, or, simply, a good time.

(A more political review can be found here.)

I'm not gonna post here much, for a while. Instead, I'll be at....


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Redstate is the shiznit, kids. Talented bloggers (and me!), coming together to irritate the hell out of Jimmy Carville, drive Mary Beth Cahill to use as many mind altering chemicals as her old boss, and, speaking positively, to push forward conservatism in (and with) the Republican Party.

The fun's just starting, kids. Pop over.

BOSTON, MASSACHUSSETS --

DEMOCRAT Presidental Candidate John Forbes Kerry announced today a new program to shore up his support with African-American groups, a key constituency in any Democrat bid for the White House.

Called the "Bling Bling" Initiative, the plan would give millions of taxpayer-funded pieces of gaudy jewelry to African Americans as part of the Kerry2004 economic platform.

"We live in the wealthiest nation in the world," Kerry told a rally here today. "Seventy percent of Americans have little or no bling of their own. Everyone should have enough bling; there is no such thing as too much bling. Bling is a right, and it is our duty to make it affordable to every American." The Kerry campaign has indicated that this rally will begin playing as an ad in key battleground states such as Florida and Illinois, states that the campaign describes as "amoung the hardest hit in the continuing bling recession."

The rally drew immediate criticism from Congressional Republicans, who called the Initiative "insane," "loony," "demeaning," "racist," and, in the words of House Majority Leader Tom Delay (R, TX) "worthy of Walter Mondale."

Kerry's press secretary responded angrily to those attacks. "This is simply typical of the losses Americans have suffered under 'President' George W. Bush," he stated, using the universally respected "hanging fingers" for the quotation marks around the word "President."

"Since Bush took office, American bling has fallen in quality and quantity. Ordinary Americans can longer afford thick gold chains and oversized, diamond-studded earrings. And too much bling is made overseas, by exploited and underpaid workers, at the behest of Benedict Arnold CEOs."

Kerry had been under fire from prominent African-American Democrats for, among other things, ignoring them altogether, failing to hug Al Sharpton, including virtually no people of color in his lily-white campaign team, naming John Edwards as his vice-President, and, finally, being altogether unsure what a black person looks like, except for the women who clean his wife's numerous houses.

Angel was a very good show.

Better than Buffy, by a long margin. Better than almost anything else on TV during its run.

God was open to debate. I joked for a while that, given Cordy's, then Fred's, death (and Darla's constant menace), the show was one of the most misogynistic of modern times. Good wasn't destined to win; good didn't have a decent chance of winning; and everywhere, all around, people just seemed to get worse and worse.

But it was noble. It was about noble ideals.

For those of you who have no danged idea what I'm talking about, a brief recap.

Angel was a spinoff of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, itself the TV series born of the movie of the same name. The title character in the first started off as a minor supporting character, then love interest, of the title character of the second.

The trick: Angel was a vampire. Buffy was not. Buffy killed vampires.

The second trick: Angel was a good vampire. He'd been cursed, yes, cursed, with a soul.

Final trick: Although Angel longs to be human again, to touch, to feel, to die, to have a chance at salvation, the instant he experiences true happiness, it's all over: He loses his soul, becomes a kick-ass, deadly, decidedly, monstrously evil vampire all over again. So he must toil and toil and toil, experiencing only glimpses of true happiness -- which is manifest by the consummation of true love -- until at some point, the nebulous Powers of good deign to release him from the penance of crimes beyond human imagination.

And what makes the show so noble, so great, is that, quite simply, Angel cannot win. There's no endgame in sight where he can slay all of the bad guys and get his humanity back. He can't even deal Evil a crushing blow. He can hold back the darkness in drips and drabs, but it keeps coming. He knows he's fighting a near-hopeless, and possibly suicidal, war; yet he fights.

There is glory in hope. In despair, there is only loss. Angel suffers most when he gives into despair. When he finds hope again, he still suffers -- there is no way around that -- but he has the strength to fight on, hoping that what he does will begin to make a difference. Hoping that there is salvation.

The WB -- let us not kid ourselves -- is a drek network. It is what Fox was for its first few years, absent Married: With Children, The Simpsons, and In Living Color. 99.9% of what it produces is simple dross.

Angel was not dross. Not only that: Its ratings, relative to the enormous amount of pap that network produces, were phenomenal. And so, showing the know-how and creativity that make American business the powerhouse of the world, the WB canceled the show.

I mention this because the last episode summed it all up quite nicely. Angel, coming out of a period of self-imposed despair, offers a pact to his friends: Join me in one final strike on the darkness. We cannot vanquish the darkness, but we can strike it a telling blow. We can remind Evil that it does not flourish unchecked; we can bleed the Void. We may die -- we will likely die -- but we will do something that matters.

Given that offer, I likely would have taken it.

Is there sin in striking at the darkness, though you virtually assure your own destruction? Put to the side the Manichaean overtones (I don't mean to presuppose a heresy for this question); is it licit to strike a blow for Light, though Death herself is a near-certainty? It's not precisely suicide, but the dictum that one may not do good through an evil act seems somewhat important here; condemning yourself to death for a perhaps ultimately unimportant wound on evil is not quite so simple as allowing another to kill you, rather than renouncing God. Martyrdom is not cheap, and not always so straightforward as all that.

But if this is not heroism -- willingly laying down your life to aid the light when the darkness seems so oppressive -- then what is?

Angel's friends, to a one, accept.

At the end of the episode (and therefore, one supposes, the show), Angel and his friends have succeeded, though at some cost. They have wounded the Powers of darkness, and in so doing, have unleashed the wrath of Hell. An army of darkness pounds toward the wounded band.

Angel steps forward, and lifts his sword for another round of battle. There, of course, the show ends.

I believe I would want to be in that alley with him, shouting Gloria in Te, Domine!

As I mentioned, the question of God's existence is at best up for debate in the show. And yet...

What other show has been so very Christian, so inundated with sacrifice for others' sake, though your pain be nearly unbearable? And if Angel was to have any hope of salvation, on Whom else could he count?

I cried Friday evening. I had cried three times in my adult life, each time for the loss of a life very close to me. I cried because Ronald Reagan was put to rest. I never met the man. I was four when he was elected, twelve when he left office.

But I knew what he stood for. He stood for hope.

A three year old does not understand politics. A four year old is not much better.

But I remember how gray and dark 1979 felt. I remember how it got a little lighter in the winter of 1981. I remember how, by late 1983, the world seemed to glow.

I remember what it was to fear nuclear war. I lived with that fear for ten years of my life, either directly or indirectly. I remember when I realized that it would not happen. I remember when I realized whom I could credit for that, and I assure you, it was not the man with the strawberry birthmark on his head.

Ronald Reagan was elected President when so many thought we could never win.

But he had hope.

He had hope because he believed in America, the nation and the idea.

He had hope because he believed in the risen Christ.

He had hope because in hope, there is glory.

He did not teach me to hope; my parents deserve the credit for that. He taught me the incredible power of hope, when there is resolve behind it.

To all of those who murmur about his support for right-wing anti-communist dictatorships, and the thousands dead as a result of that support, I point you to the millions who need no longer fear the darkness in quite the same way, the millions more who live and breathe today because there are no longer men and women forcibly herding them this way and that; and those men and women are no longer near the levers of power, no longer able to support left-wing dictatorships that leave tens of thousands, if not millions dead, because one man had hope, and strength in that hope.

I thank Joss Whedon, militant atheist though he might be, for creating such an incredible Christian narrative.

And I thank Ronald Reagan for showing us that Christ's hope can effect miracles in the world. Requiem aeternas, Mr. President. Godspeed.

I realized, just the other days, that Normandy was sixty years ago.

The beginning of the end for Hitler (in the West) was sixty years ago. Hitler has been dead (or in Argentina) for almost sixty years. Japan has been without an expeditionary military for almost sixty years.

Think about that for a second: The war that is still the touchstone for everyone when they think of war, the baby boomers notwithstanding, was two to three full generations ago.

The men who stormed Omaha, Juno, and all the rest, and lived, are dying very quickly now. They came back, usually voted for Democrats, raised a bunch of spoiled brats, and grumbled about health benefits for thirty years; they came back, worked their tails off, rarely ran around beating their chests about how heroic they'd been, and never once suggested that America had fought in the Pacific out of racism or imperialism.

Both of my grandfathers served in the Pacific. I was never very close to my maternal grandfather, but neither talked much about it: They simply went out, did their jobs, and returned home. The net effect -- combined with the efforts of millions like them -- was to stamp out right-wing tyranny in the Pacific, and hybridized left/right tyranny in Europe. It's not their fault that we lacked the will to kill off the left-wing tyranny in Asia and Europe on their watch.

Billions of humans are better off for their efforts. Billions more will live and die, wanting, laughing, needing, crying, loving, marrying, reproducing, mourning, praying, without once looking over their shoulders for the dark shadows that love to kill freedom.

The men five years after fought to keep the slow shadow of communism from bringing even more under its long night; it's not their fault that the people they saved have grown soft under the blanket of security they provided.

The men twenty years before them fought in a meat grinder, over some stupid European kerfluffle that should never have been; but without them, there would not be an England. And a France, but again, that's not their fault.

The men sixty years before that fought to preserve the idea of Union. They died by the tens of thousands on beautiful landscapes, near verdant forests and running streams, broad plains and the foothills of mountains. They fought so that government by the people would not perish. They fought -- perhaps incidentally, but bless them for it -- so that some day, all Men would be free.

The men twenty years before that fought so that Texas would remain part of the Union, and ten years before that, so that a petty dictator would not trample the rights of free men and women.

The men fifty years before that fought for the idea that government flows from the people; and that absent their consent, there is no government. We owe them boundless thanks for their pledge of their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor; and we owe them an understanding of what it means to pledge those things.

You'll note that I have not referenced any war after Korea. That is because I must segregate:

The men who fought bravely in Vietnam; Grenada; Panama; Kuwait; Somalia; Bosnia; Kosovo; Afghanistan; and Iraq: We owe them our thanks on our knees. They fought when others spurned the words "honor," and "duty"; they fought when it was harder than ever to do so, as so many spit at them for having the unmitigated gall to believe in the American idea, and that it was worth fighting for; they fought for us, and, in some senses, the world.

The men and women who spit at them: We owe them nothing. The men who fought, then came back to spit at the men fighting: We owe them less.

To all the men (and, sadly, now women) who have died for this great Nation: God keep you; God bless; and, from our hearts: Thank you.

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.)

So let me pose a hypothetical:

Suppose -- and I think we can take this as a given -- that there are people who so very much hate the existence of gay men and lesbians, that it actually hurts them. They are gnawed-upon from the inside over the existence of homosexuals, for whatever reason. And, unable to bear the emotional -- and physical, in an ugly biofeedback loop -- pain, they begin sneaking up on gays while they sleep and butchering them alive. Literally: They crush, slice, and dice the bodies of these men and women, ruthlessly. They feel better when it's over.

It would not be too much of a stretch to call this inhuman. Someone who did this, deliberately, with malice aforethought, is in a state of grave sin, and should not receive communion in the Catholic Church. This is straightforward stuff. Any politician who enabled this behavior -- who said, I disagree with his choice to murder these people, but I also understand how much pain he's in, and so I refuse to interject the State into what he does with his own body would rightly be considered at best deranged, and at worst, a cold-blooded murderer. I don't imagine many people would take issue with the decision of any Church to deny that politician its sacraments.

You see where this is going.

I understand Kerry, and Cuomo, and Kennedy, and other blood-letting, coldblooded, power-mad psuedo-Catholic politicians overlooking human biology and the teachings of their faith, and trying to pretend that their sin represents bravery. They're morally incomplete; they're, like most humans, greedy, grubbing little creatures who desire power more than they desire the warmth of God's embrace.

It happens to the best of us.

What I don't understand is their flackers. Like, just for example, Andrew Sullivan. So, without fisking his argument, let's just say it this way: If you put "murdering sleeping gay men and women" in place of "abortion," you kinda gotta concede that, first, he would never make this argument; second, that his Catholic formation, such as it was, was sorely lacking; and, finally, that it makes him a bit of a moral monster.

Oh: Ramesh was too kind.

Now, let us speak of war.

Before we go any farther, I should note that I think we're now at war, and it seems broadly self-evident to me that this is so. On September 11, 2001, as I stood in my living room and saw replay after replay of airliners striking the World Trade Center, I thought, So this is war. Strictly speaking, I now see that we've been at war for twenty-five years; we were just so caught up with the bigger war we were fighting, and then the joy at the end of that conflict, that we didn't notice until 3,000 of us died in a single day.

The default conservative position on war, contrary to the overly-feminized bleating of the sham of a Left we have these days, is powerful opposition to anything but obviously defensive war. That position, like most conservative positions, is open to a certain amount of give in the face of reality; but let us not forget that William F. Buckley, for example, was a determined isolationist up until Japan dropped tons of explosives on the U.S.S. Arizona.

I am not an isolationist. I am what Walter Russell Mead (incorrectly) calls a Jacksonian. If the rest of the world prefers to go to Hell in a handbasket, I invite them to make sure the door does not strike them in the posterior as they exit. I abhor nation-building, because although I hold certain truths to be self-evident, I'm not sure everyone else does, and if they don't, it can be one hell of a mess convincing them they're wrong. I don't believe in proxy wars, limited wars, or humanitarian wars. Each, in its way, is an oxymoron. And, worse, they don't work.

I have, historically, made exceptions. I favored at least arms supply to Bosnia and Croatia during the dissolution of Yugoslavia. I truly came to hate Clinton for how he treated Rwanda (for a man who could emote at the drop of a dime, and was allegedly our "first black president," he didn't show a lot of sympathy for the mass murder of thousands of black human beings). I was in favor of bombing Kosovo, though I was worried (not worried enough, as it turns out) about the KLA. (Hey, we bombed the Chinese Embassy -- at worst, it was a mixed-result war.)

I think, and thought, that intervention in Haiti was a mistake. Same goes for Liberia. I'd like to see Chavez executed in a specially arranged coup d'etat, if the CIA could get off its useless behind for ten minutes. (There, it would be All About the Oil and All About Killing an Obnoxious Marxist Dictator.) Same with that old loony in Cuba. We should have blown North Vietnam, then, as needed, China, into the Stone Age. We should probably up our military aid to Taiwan, build more nukes, and point them right at Beijing. We should be prepared to invade Paris on general principle, and especially be ready when either the French begin their genocidal purge of les beurrs, or, more likely, when France adopts sh'ria (yet another reason for the French to hate us -- you have to wonder why they haven't gone that extra mile yet).

Broadly speaking, though, I believe war is only acceptable to achieve some definite national goal, and, once begun, no amount of force should be held back (except in reserve, so you can pound any remaining resistance into the ground afterward). I might make an exception for genocides, but the caveat about unflinching use of overwhelming force remains.

That brings us to Iraq.

Like I said, I hate the idea of nation-building. And strictly speaking, Iraq did not pose an immediate, tanks-at-the-border threat to us. Actually, let's take that in reverse order:

The fundamental truth of the post-Westphalian world is not so much the Nation-State, but the border. Borders imply continuity; they define a State; they are lines from which you can separate the world into discrete pieces. Thus, the French did not place the Maginot Line ten miles from Paris; they placed them on the border with Germany. Up until very very recently, you knew your enemy was planning an invasion because he placed men and materiel on his border with you, and looked menacingly at you the whole time. Thus, one could say, Canada poses an imminent threat to us, because their cutting-edge 1960s military is looking right over the border at Vermont.

Transglobal terrorism changes the rules. An angry Iranian mullah could arm Arabs (or Persians, or Arab-Americans, or Persian-Americans -- while I have no doubt that the vast majority of the latter, American groups would not take part in such a thing, it is impossible to eliminate any possibility of a few malcontents) with nuclear suitcases, send them across the sea, blow up Boston Harbor, and we would never have seen it coming. The post-Westphalian model no longer applies, at least as well as it used to. The danger is not enemies staring at us across a common border, it is enemies walking among us, blowing us to pieces, with no advanced warning.

Hence, Iraq.

Maybe Hussein had no WMDs. Maybe he did. I tend to think he did, as any idiot can make sarin if he really wants to, Baby Assad has been awful nervous lately, and the "Bush lied about WMDs!!!" garbage demands a proof of a negative. Anyway, I think we can all agree that at the very least, it wouldn't have been too tricky for Hussein to make so-called WMDs. (A note: Chemical and biological weapons really aren't "weapons of mass destruction." They tend to burn out or dissipate too quickly for that. Nukes are WMDs. Asteroids could be WMDs. Ebola is a terror weapon.)

And that rather leads to my point: We thought Hussein had those weapons; it would have been far too easy to slip a vial of good ol' Black Death to some death-cult madman to take out a good part of a city to let that loony tune live. We live now in a world where the old certainties created by borders don't exist. Kim Jong-Il could decide to let loose on Seattle with a guided nuke, or with a suitcase nuke. We'd know how to handle the first; we wouldn't know whom to blame for the second.

Thus, it is better to preemptively blow our enemies into little bitty pieces. The stakes are too high to hold hands and sing, "Give peace a chance," on the odd hope that our enemies will do a lamb-and-lion bit with us. So when Bush said, "Hussein is going down," I was there with bells on. He might or might not have been a deadly foe; best not to take the chance, instead of mourn in three months when L.A. is up in glowing flames and NYC celebrities are worried that Americans will overreact. Why we haven't target-nuked every nuclear facility in North Korea is a continuing mystery to me.

These wars, you see, are for the explicit purpose of making sure no more Americans die from hostile, foreign action. No amount of force is "too much." Any amount that accomplishes the end is "just right."

Thus, I'd like to see "just right" amounts of force aimed at the following enemies, in descending order:

Iran
North Korea
Syria
China
Cuba
France

Let us not lie; these people are our enemies. They seek our humiliation, death, and/or subjugation. We no longer have the luxury to employ 19th Century Diplospeak for years on end. When the world is a safer place (for us absolutely, for democracy only as it makes the world safe for us -- see below), then we can retreat to arguments about the marginal tax rate and overtime for union employees, and global environmental initiatives. (That's assuming we reproduce enough to have those debates -- but that's a rant for another time.)

Curiously, that leads to Iraq and nation building.

Like I said, it would be an understatement to say that I detest nation building. Of all the trumped up left-wing idiocies ever, nation building seems one of the very stupidest, and that says a great deal. It combines all of the worst sins of the late British Empire with the worst naiveties and misconceptions of the perpetually stupid left side of the political spectrum into one magnificant waste of time, lives, and resources. And this is me toning it down.

But I'm prepared to start making exceptions.

Iraq might, just might, be the lynch pin that shows the Arab world, Yes, it is possible to live in something other than oppressed, wretched squalor. Maybe we can turn it into a functioning state -- I do not demand, and do not expect, American-style democratic federal republicanism -- but a normal, consent-of-the-governed modern State would do the trick. That's worth a gamble of men and materiel, especially (1) when we have so much of both, especially the latter, and (2) when you think that one of the more telling knocks on us, post-Somalia (another mistake, start to finish, by the way), was that we were an impotent giant.

And, assume for the sake of argument that Iraq falls to pieces. I'll grant that. Suppose it turns into a militant theocracy. I'd gauge that as extremely unlikely, but I'll grant it for the sake of argument. It's still better than what was there before. If we can get that much in place -- and make ourselves safer in the process -- I'll take it.

The old rules went out the window about three years ago. I just kind of wonder how long it'll take the Democratic party to catch on.

So now that I'm back, let's talk about a few things. We'll start with gay marriage. (Why not?)

I'd like, before I go any further, to direct you to my prior words on the subject here. And note a few changes since then. Most of them center around my naivete.

Three weeks after I wrote that, I had a discussion with a senior associate at my firm. Nice guy; if not brilliant (and he probably is), very close; thoughtful; and gay. I mention the last because he told me, in no uncertain terms:

(1) I'm not merely a bigot, but a monster, for trying to stop the legalization of gay marriage.

(2) This is not something that can be debated among rational people. I'm simply evil.

(3) My "noble, but meaningless" belief that "the law matters -- if you strip aside all the trees of the law, you'll have nowhere to hide when Satan comes looking" and my antiquated belief in a separation of powers are either dodges (at best), or more likely naive maliciousness (he explained how that's not oxymoronic; it made sense at the time). And:

(4) No weapon was beyond reach to make gay marriage a reality. The explicit comparison to Jim Crow -- from a man making six figures, with the respect and esteem of not only his immediate colleagues (including myself), but of the profession, who was never, you know, forced to sit at a different lunch counter, or drink from a rusty old water fountain while others were allowed to drink from the clean one -- was breathtaking in its force, conviction, and, let us not forget, absurdity.

So:

I am now wholly in favor of the most restrictive possible Constitutional amendment outlawing gay marriage imaginable and politically workable. If it must allow civil unions, so be it; I'd rather it forbade the whole slate. Screw federalism.

I say this because I now understand that I've been thrust into a war for which I did not ask; in which I never expected to be; against enemies whom I had never thought of as enemies, who in turn view this entire conflict as Manichaean in nature, who have absolute conviction behind them; and over an institution at the very base of society, the existence and nature of which no one would have thought to question with any seriousness for centuries. If a man who I would otherwise have thought thoughtful and moderate is actually a raging demon where this is concerned, I can only imagine what the activists preparing papers are like.

Norman Podhoretz once said something to the effect that in a contest between two sides, when one has unlimited aims, and the other has limited aims, the side with the boundless goals wins by definition every time. I therefore adopt a boundless goal: The complete denial of gay marriage throughout this country and, if I have my way, every other country in the world. (Except Europe: They're dying anyway. I don't want to waste the time on them.)

I'd also like to make a rather straightforward point. Conservatism is not an ideology; it's an inclination. It's the subtle but unmistakable certainty that changing things, while sometimes necessary and good, is almost always bad. Not to go all Andrew Sullivan and start casting my ideological opponents into the outer darkness, but you cannot be a conservative and advocate gay marriage, unless you believe that the harm society as a whole experiences is akin to the effects of slavery or Jim Crow. It's precisely that simple. To be in favor of overturning countless years of inherited wisdom and tradition based on a fifteen year old political movement, with spurious claims to victimhood and suffering, is not to be a conservative; it is to be an unapologetic radical.

Just so we're on the same page.

I'm aware that it's been about four months since I posted regularly. I probably owe all of my (two) regular readers an explanation; you'll just have to accept an apology. Life got hectic for a while. No catastrophes, no disasters, no emergencies (well, two, but they were small).

So: My apologies. It'll happen again, kinda. See below.

Anyway, here's the deal.

I'll be posting again, regularly. But probably not here, precisely.

I've spent the odd moment at five in the morning (while shaving, which wasn't the best idea ever) thinking about where to go from here. I have to maintain my anonymity, because lawyers are probably the most closed-minded people outside of a university campus, and let's just say my political beliefs don't line up well with most of the profession. (I had an opposing counsel recently tell me, offhandedly, that conservatism by nature of the tendency itself means that one is predisposed to bringing back chattel slavery. Seriously.)

Blogger has been pretty well ideal, and since June 2003, I haven't really had any problems with it. But Ben let me take Movable Type for a spin, and it was... well, you can't go back after that. And I'd like to upload pictures, and silly things like that. And have my own disk space.

On the other hand, while I'm not precisely a cheap S.O.B., I'm also loathe to spend money on server space. Well, not precisely -- more accurately, I'm loathe to spend money on server space and a domain name that could be fairly easily used to track back and find out more about me, and therefore disqualify me from future employment. (Brief caveat for those who know me: I really like my job. A lot. But I don't count on anything any more.) If you know my (Dungeons and Dragons reference) true name, you can find a lot of garbage I've already put out, that made its way net-wise, deliberately or otherwise. I'd rather not add to that stockpile.

But a personalized page would be sweet.

Anyway, long and short of it is, I'll probably post here a little longer, then get around to a new site. Probably.

I've also been invited to take part in something bigger. Cooler. Faster... well, you get the idea. I'd rather devote most of my blogging time to that, for a host of personal and political reasons. I'll provide a link, once it's operational.

Anyway, short of it is, hiatus is over. Let's rock.

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.

Last post before Christmas, kids. Let's see whom I can piss off.

* I just bought a Dell. Quite frankly, that hurts. I tried putting together my own machine, and found out that not only is it cheaper to have Dell put together the thing for me, it is much cheaper to have Dell put it together for me.

Some back story: Aw, heck, forget it. No back story. I declared war on Dell back in 1997 or 1998, I forget which. When I bought laptops, I went Compaq. When I went desktops, I went self-built. But my friend Jimmy loaned me his laptop, and while it's good, I feel lousy for using it. And the CD player broke. Sorry, Jimmy. I'll buy you a new CD ROM soon.

So basically, the enemy just took the gates of my capital city.

* I am soooooo looking forward to the 2004 campaign.

* I am coming to the slow, inevitable conclusion that the 19th Amendment was a mistake. Indeed, in my most misogynistic (let's be honest, misanthropic) moments, I think we should restrict the vote to landed men over the age of 25. (If you think this is racist, you haven't spent much time outside of cities.)

I'm fighting this conclusion, but the evidence is compelling:

Since the passage of the 19th, here are a few examples of the damage done to our nation:

(1) The Democrats, adopting in milder form many of the platforms of the Socialist parties of Europe, became a viable party again.

(2) FDR elected, making (1) worse.

(3) JFK elected, making (2) worse.

(4) LBJ elected, making (3) worse.

(5) (Anyone else see a problem with Presidents with three easy initials, by which they are commonly known?)

(6) Following from (2)-(4), Roe v. Wade. Current death toll: ~31 million children dead.

(7) Following from that, boy births are more common than girl births for the first time ever. So not only have women voters helped slaughter kids, but they've inadvertantly declared war on their own sex.

(8) Accepted expansion of the State well beyond its Constitutional limitations, so single women and widows can feel safer. The rest of us can choke.

Just something to think about. Doubtless, my wife will beat me for this.

I should add (but not hasten to add!) that I recognize the inherent unfairness in knocking somewhere between 50 and 70 percent of the population of the voting rolls, especially in a country founded on the link between governance and representation. I will be the first to admit that this is not the nicest thing I've ever said, is decidedly not Christian, and I'll probably repent of it later. But it's been working at me for a while.

* Can we all agree that Howard Brush Dean III is kinda funny looking? Long arms, big belly, stumpy neck.

* See that big space at the top of my blog? You're looking at why I'll be switching over to Movable Type some time in the next year.

* I think my profession is destroying our society.

* I think the French will launch a genocide within fifteen years. I just wonder if they'll win.

* Hillary Clinton is a miserable failure.

* Jimmy Carter lick ass.

* I've had doubts about Arnold Kling's mental rigor; that said, this is a respectable, if wrong, opinion. It assumes that the broad middle of American society is irrationally apathetic; that demagoguery was somehow less a danger when the Constitutional limitations on government were stronger (thus overlooking, at a glance, the years 1815-1823, 1850-1861, 1876-1918, the entire career of Huey Long, and the history of the Democrat party); and that the will of a few determined individuals is somehow more effective on the polity than it was before the Internet. I'll be the first to admit that the transactional costs of organization have decreased; but I'm yet to be convinced that the decrease is so substantial that the additional energy will translate into quantitative electoral differences.

Now, I think demagoguery might very well be a great danger, but for the following reasons:

* More women vote.
* More voters have passed through college, and are therefore stupider than at any equivalent time in the past.
* More men without a physical stake in society, i.e., without real property, vote.
* The media is polarizing, and providing more deliberately ideologically discreet information than ever before.
* The "blogosphere" is such a tiny sliver of the electorate that the moderation that comes from being exposed, directly and openly, to one's ideological opponents, is not well-shared enough to have any effect countering the trends toward polarization.
* Will and Grace is still on the air.
* Alec Baldwin lick ass. Sorry, couldn't resist.
* We are at a stage of true ideological clash between left and right; it has been about seventy, no, ninety years since anyone could say that.

Time will tell.

* I'm late on this, but I've been swamped: Happy Chanukah to any Jewish readers I have.

* I watched my side of the spectrum go loony during the Clinton years; but I never saw anything like what's happening to the Left now. Y'all are nuts, kids. Seek help.

* Following from my second point, the Sixteenth, Seventeenth, and Twenty-Second Amendments were mistakes.

* At some point, inferring the opinion of the entire Magisterium from the loud-mouth remarks of a single Cardinal is a signal that you're either (a) lazy (b) stupid (c) intellectually sloppy and/or (d) anti-Catholic.

* I wonder: If everyone who hates Evangelicals actually met one, would I still have to put up with utterly nauseating, vacuous references to the "religious right"?

* Paul Cella is wasted in his day job.

* Merry Christmas to all.

"I shouldn't take it personally. Because what (the Bush) administration was attempting to do was turn back the progress of the entire 20th century. They were not just after Bill Clinton - they wanted to undo Jimmy Carter, Lyndon Johnson, John Kennedy, Harry Truman, Franklin Roosevelt," Clinton said.

"They were on their way to Teddy Roosevelt. It was a bipartisan right-wing extreme agenda," she said.

You say that like it's a bad thing, Ms. Clinton.

I was wondering why the loons who give out the Nobel were swooning over a woman who spends her time saying bad things about the Iranian government.

Turns out it's because she hates the U.S.

Silly me.

So it appears that we are, indeed, bickering over the price.

Political speech is the right to call your opponent a dirty son of a bitch. We just lost that right, temporarily.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Maggie Gallagher, a thousand times the advocate I'll ever be.

Could it be? A Catholic Bishop with a spine?

Miracles happen, kids.

Can't see anything wrong with this. I know, I'm supposed to think Coulter's a lousy polemecist, but this bit:

Is there nothing five justices on the Supreme Court could proclaim that would finally lead a president to say: I refuse to pretend this is a legitimate ruling. Either the answer is no, and we are already living under a judicial dictatorship, or the answer is yes, and – as Churchill said – we're just bickering over the price.

Is pretty much dead-to-rights.

New link coming, because of this post. Boys, I know when I'm outclassed, and this fellow leaves me outclassed. I've eviscerated Lithwick in my time, but this is simply gorgeous.

And this simply confirms many of my pre-existing theories about PBS. If you're stuck with the Palestinian Broadcasting Service for a while -- as I was -- you learn that with the exception of some children's programming, Ken Burns, a few documentaries, some Nova programming, and British comedies, you have drek.

Andrew Sullivan says something unequivocally bad about abortion! It can be done!

Technophobes of the world, UNITE!

Just for the information of all the vaguely anti-religious folks out there, most of us like science, and its results. What we don't like is the sacrifice of human life for anything other than highly specific self-defense.

Gone for a week, kids. I'm posting over at Ben's place (I think he thinks I'm doing him a favor, when the reverse is quite clearly true). Wander over, and happy Thanksgiving.

In other news, Democrats unwilling to commit political suicide.

It's gonna get wild, y'all. Keep your mind on your riches, baby. Keep your mind on your riches.

UPDATE: Or maybe they are. Attacking the AARP is either brilliant or utterly insane for these guys. Who else is with me in voting the latter?

Let's get this out in the open: Joe Lieberman is not a serious candidate for the Democrat nod. He's way too likely to think before opening his mouth.

Dear Orrin and Ben:

I really hate to say this, but: Told ya so.

Donkeys in Louisiana have a time-honored tradition: Around noon on election day, they figure out how many votes they need; then, before the polls close, they produce them. Somehow. Certainly not illegally.

Sorry, guys. I was pulling for him, too.

Best regards,

T.

And Tacitus actually reads this trash.

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

It's official: Butch Davis is a moron.

Kids, this isn't hard. He's one of the best possession receivers in the NFL, if not the best. He's the leading receiver on the team. So of course they drop him.

Then again, they keep benching and mentally screwing with Couch, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

What happens when faith is just another argument.

Guys, look, here's the deal. First, the Church does not "represent you to God." You represent you to God. I take it from your actions that either, one, you do not actually care about the Faith, but rather you care about making asses out of yourselves, in a way that would embarass my 1.5 year old; two, you do care, but your Catechesis is so lousy as to defy explanation; and/or three, you forget: You have free will. You can go to another Church. The guy from whom I got this link did so.

I assume for the sake of argument that you're born "that way." I know that makes it harder for you to follow the Church's teachings. My uncle has severe Down's syndrome. This makes virtually everything harder for him. In other words: Deal. Or go.

I always thought Mark Shea's references to gay fascism were overblown. Mark, if you're reading this: Mea culpa.

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'.