Month: February 2003

Dahlia Lithwick on Affirmative Action Jujitsu

Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick, a supporter of affirmative action, on why the debate over the Miguel Estrada nomination, particularly the debate among Latino groups, is yet another example of Bush destroying his political adversaries by doing exactly what they ask for:
This, then, is what the discussion has come to: a battle about who is Hispanic enough to warrant the racial preferences that most Americans oppose in the first place. What the Hispanic groups on both sides don’t seem to understand is that, with all this infighting, they are managing to dismantle every single argument for affirmative action and making the case that race should play no role at all in public life.
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[The attitude of Estrada’s supporters who argue for him on the basis of his race regardless of his views] reflects several justifications for affirmative action: Break down racial barriers, remedy past discrimination, and create minority role models. All these arguments decline to look past skin color in the interest of getting the bodies onto the bench. But this argument has boomeranged badly in the past, not only because the Clarence Thomases have simply not been better for blacks than the David Souters, but because this kind of single-minded race-consciousness can only denigrate the minority in question. By ending the discussion at skin color, it sets up the implication that minorities succeed only because of preferences, that they couldn’t have achieved such successes on their own merits. Could Miguel Estrada or any other minority candidate really sleep at night knowing that half his supporters would support a Honduran Hannibal Lecter as readily as they support him?
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[The argument of opponents who say that Estrada is not a ‘real’ Hispanic because he is a conservative] decimates the only other justification for affirmative action (and the only one that now counts as a matter of law)�the argument that racial preferences automatically generate “diversity” of experience. To his detractors, Estrada’s principal failing is that his privileged upbringing in Honduras and beyond were too “white” somehow�too Columbia and Harvard Law and Gibson, Dunn, and Crutcher. He was not born in squalor, nor did he rise from the barrio. As a result, he does not represent the “Latino experience.” By making this argument, Estrada’s detractors are merely proving that race is indeed not a proxy for diversity�and that if you really want to guarantee diversity of experience, favoring minority candidates over poor or rural ones is the absolute wrong way to go.
Meanwhile, another racially charged issue that I continue to follow, the Washington Times points to some anecdotal evidence that Southern African-American voters may not be willing to embrace Joe Lieberman, because Lieberman is Jewish, has questioned affirmative action, is a longtime member of the DLC and has said nice things about Strom Thurmond. Quote from Al Sharpton: “They don’t call themselves the Dixiecrats now; they call themselves the DLC.” I’ve said all along that, contrary to the media’s popular wisdom, the people most likely to hold Lieberman’s Judaism against him are Sharpton and his African-American supporters, not conservative white Southern Protestants. The interesting question is whether Sharptonism and its fellow-traveler, anti-Semitism, will sell in the South as well as it sells in urban areas in the Northeast and the West Coast; the WaTimes points to bitterness over Cynthia McKinney’s ouster, but remember that it was her own African-American constituents who dumped McKinney, and the same for Earl Hilliard. The counter-argument also focuses on the resovoir of good will for Lieberman having gone to Mississippi as a young ‘Freedom Rider’ in the Sixties, when it was legitimately dangerous to do so. I’m still not sure how it will all shake out, but without a real regional base, Lieberman will need to do well among African-American voters in the South if he wants the nomination.

International Legitimacy

Mickey Kaus, teasing out the meaning from a characteristically inconclusive Michael Kinsley piece, suggests that respect for international institutions like the U.N. requires us to abide by their decisions even when we believe they are morally wrong. (Note that Kaus’ blog has no permalinks because he works for such a low-tech outfit):
that’s what the international rules mean — that we sometimes have to do things that are worse for us, including things that increase the risks we face. That’s the price of having an international structure of law — a New World Order, someone once called it — which will be a handy thing to have when we’re combatting terrorism (which we’ll be doing for the rest of our lives). . . . Democracy, which we hope to bring to the Middle East, is basically a bunch of formal procedural rules too, no? We don’t ignore them when we don’t like the outcome. [Insert cheap shot about Bush actually losing the election?–ed. No! He won by the rules, with the Supreme Court playing the role of France.]
Uh, well, no. First of all, the issue isn’t abiding by international laws generally; the Administration is quite comfortable, as am I, that war here would not only be consistent with international law but is required to vindicate international law. The issue is, who gets to decide? I don’t think, for example, that the U.S. routinely condemns other countries for making war without U.N. approval (France’s intervention in the Ivory Coast being the most obvious example, or our own Kosovo campaign) — we condemn them if we think the wars themselves violate international law. But “international law,” like “natural law,” is not a body of juridprudence constructed by a legitimate authority, so much as it is a set of principles and precepts, which various sovereigns by agreement have made workable in at least some particulars, for reasons of self-interest.
The contrast to the rules of democracy ought to be obvious: those rules are not just general precepts but are, by agreement, a nearly irrevocable commitment to allow certain issues to be decided by certain people, who are in turn selected in specific ways. The “who gets to decide” question might get sticky sometimes in separation of powers disputes, but in no case are a group of people (such as the American people) forced to submit to a final decision made by unelected foreign powers. Kaus treats the U.N. as if it actually wielded legitimate sovereignty, when it’s more like just another alliance, which will go with us or not on a case-by-case basis but retains no sovereign authority to compel us to stop. Nor would it be consistent with any of our governing principles to give such powers to the U.N. that we denied to King George III. Such authority would be inherently illegitimate, not least for all the reasons you already know: because representation in the U.N. is neither proportional nor representative.
So, we respect international law, and endeavor to act within it — but we do not respect the ability of an unrepresentative body to decide what that law is. I think that’s quite consistent and defensible.
(For the record, the role of France in the recount was played by the Florida Supreme Court, which ignored or rejected the various rules, rulings and factfindings of the U.S. Supreme Court, the U.S. Constitution, the U.S. Congress, the Florida Legislature, the Florida Secretary of State, and the trial court).

Baseball’s Underappreciated Great Teams, 1970-99

Originally posted on Projo.com
The 1970s: 1974 Los Angeles Dodgers
102-60 (.630), 1st place (by 4 games), lost World Series to A’s 4-1, 4.93 R/G, 3.46 RA/G (Avg 4.15)
The Dodger infield of Steve Garvey, Davey Lopes, Bill Russell and Ron Cey became household names in 1974, but for me at least, the team was long identified with the squad that lost consecutive World Serieses to the Yankees — Tommy Lasorda’s team, with Reggie Smith and Dusty Baker in the outfield. But the 1974 team was the best Dodger team in the franchise’s tenure in Los Angeles, and would probably be remembered as such if they hadn’t lost to the Mustache Gang in the World Series.

Continue reading Baseball’s Underappreciated Great Teams, 1970-99

Threat Levels

MEMRI translates a threat, apparently from an Al Qaeda-linked group, of a terror attack within the next week or so. (It says “ten days or less,” and was posted February 24, so the threat would extend to about March 6) The website cited by MEMRI is registered to an address in Paris, France. (Link via NRO’s James Robbins). Is it serious? This is always unknowable until it’s too late. Meanwhile, the Department of Easily Mocked Initiatives has lowered the threat level from ‘Orange’ to ‘Yellow’; presumably, DEMI has decided that this particular threat is not worth losing sleep over.

Goodbye, Neighbor

I wasn’t going to blog today, but this demands comment: Mister Rogers has died.
We can all remember, warmly, the TV personalities of our childhood; as we grow older and outgrow them, we lose our innocence and move into a harder world. Yet, the loss of innocence that accompanes adulthood makes it all the more admirable to see a grown man who so efortlessly, for so many decades, produced the sort of kind, gentle entertainment that connected instantly with generations of preschoolers. Even with our own children, it can be hard to have that connection, to put aside all the trappings of adulthood. And everyone who knew Fred Rogers testified to the fact that he was really like that — soft-spoken, patient, understanding, deeply religious (he was a Presbyterian minister) and committed to an old-fashioned, small-town sort of decency.
You could’ve been my neighbor any day, Mister Rogers. Rest in Peace.

Bernie October

I’m sure you’ve seen this breakdown on Bernie Williams before:
ALDS/ALCS, 1995-2002 (61 games): .316/.575/.424; Averages per 162 games: 45 2B, 37 HR, 135 R, 125 RBI, 114 BB, 112 K
World Series, 1996-2001 (26 games): .158/.263/.292; Averages per 162 games: 6 2B, 19 HR, 69 R, 56 RBI, 112 BB, 150 K
The samples are still small enough that this could just be luck, exacerbated by the fact that (1) the World Series means better pitching, specifically more Maddux, Glavine, Smoltz, Schilling, Randy Johnson and Kevin Brown, whereas (2) the ALDS/ALCS means three series against the Rangers and two against the Indians. But Bernie is also a guy who started a little slow in his career and has shown broad development, as well as a guy who’s a slow starter in-season . . . I thought I’d check, via the splits on ESPN.com, how Bernie has done in interleague play the past 3 years:
vs. AL (1693 PA): .315/.525/.400; Averages per 648 PA: 36 2B, 26 HR, 105 R, 106 RBI, 75 BB, 79 K
vs. NL (242 PA): .330/.529/.430; Averages per 648 PA: 48 2B, 19 HR, 99 R, 104 RBI, 96 BB, 112 K
Conclusion: At a minimum, no sign of the same effect, although the pattern of more walks and strikeouts against NL pitching does persist. (It’s also true that Bernie’s done quite well against the Mets, who he now sees every year, but then he batted .111 in the 2000 World Series, which also suggests that the pattern is random). The sample size still isn’t big enough to draw a lot of conclusions. I’d still be interested, to see a study of how Bernie fares against a pitcher the first vs. later times to get to the bottom of the issue, but it appears that the more likely explanation for his World Series struggles is the simpler one — that the Yankees have seen a lot of good pitching, and Bernie has hit in bad luck.

Veterans Committee Vote

So it looks like the new Veterans Committee wants to wait until Marvin Miller is dead to enshrine him (he’s 86 and they won’t vote on him again for 4 years). I’m no fan of Miller but he does deserve enshrinement, as does Ron Santo.
Click here, meanwhile (and scroll up from the comments), to see an exceptionally thorough attack on your truly by the volatile and always interesting Don Malcolm, on the subject of Dick Allen’s Hall of Fame case (I’m still on the fence on that one — I’ve said my piece against Allen from conclusions I reached while researching my attempt to support his candidacy, but Malcolm has his points too, albeit stated in his usually over-the-top fashion, like comparing me to Al Qaeda (hint: Don, don’t use the comparison on a guy who Al Qaeda tried to kill; just don’t go there). You can go here to the Malcolm post that started it all, and here to my Projo column on the subject.

Grab Bag

Lord knows I’m no Noam Chomsky fan, but it still shocked me to read Chomsky’s visceral contempt for Vaclav Havel and his gratitude to America at the collapse of the tyranny that ran Havel’s country. (link via Instapundit)
Janeane Garafolo on why she’s qualified to be taken seriously on issues of war and peace: “Now that I�m sober I watch a lot of news.”
Joshua Micah Marshall has an interesting argument on why he thinks Dick Cheney is incompetent.
A great Goldberg File today, in defense of McCarthyism, then and now.
The Economist sums it up for all those who are reluctant supporters of war with Iraq:
“it would be wise [for the United States] to secure support for its threat through the UN, both to make the war less risky and to make the post-war peace more likely to be durable. But, in the end, the reality remains: if Mr Hussein refuses to disarm, it would be right to go to war. Saddamned, perhaps, if you do; but Saddamned, also, if you don’t.”
Count the uses of “I” by Bill Clinton in this item. Clinton even manages to make the death of Richard Nixon’s press secretary about himself, saying that Ron Zeigler was “wise in the ways of Washington, and battle-scarred as I am.”
Why am I not surprised that the mere existence in office of Jennifer Granholm has already pushed liberal writers to stump for abolishing the constitutional prohibition on foreign-born presidents?
Andrew Sullivan carries a reminder (second item) that it was also France who killed the League of Nations, in part by refusing to respect an oil embargo against Italy.

Mean John

I asked here and here, in handicapping the Democratic presidential candidates, who would be the Mean Candidate. I think Mickey Kaus is right that John Kerry’s addition of both Bob Shrum and Chris Lehane to his campaign team gives Kerry exactly the combination of advisers and temperament that produces the Gore-like candidate: mean, divisive, completely incapable of nuance or intellectual honesty, unwilling to concede even the possibility that the opponent and his supporters are anything but an eeeevil conspiracy. A successful candidate has to be tough and unsentimental about cutting the other guy’s legs out from under him, to be sure, and this approach has had its successes in congressional and gubernatorial races. But a campaign like this is totally unsuited to attracting the broad middle in a presidential campaign. Why?
1. Presidential candidates have to look, well, presidential. The public knows a rabbit-puncher when they see one, and sometimes appreciates sending such people to Congress (“I’ll fight for YOU to get money for OUR state and not send it to those big cities back East!”), but do people who think Bush isn’t diplomatic enough really want our leader to be a Manichean populist?
2. The Shrum divide & conquer campaign style requires picking out the fissures in the electorate and living with the consequences of completely alienating everybody on one side of several of them. It’s a lot easier to predict the consequences of that and wind up on the right side of the splits when you are dealing with a state or district; applied nationally, there are just too many ways to bet the wrong horse (think of Gore’s alienation of gun owners and coal miners), and its logical conclusion is the candidate who wins landslides in culturally liberal precincts on the coasts but winds up getting screwed in the electoral college because he couldn’t build a critical mass of support in any state that lacked a large urban African-American population (the one group that, for better or worse, will avoid being splintered by divisions on multiple wedge issues). Sound familiar?
Some time when I’ve got more time to blog, I intend to look more closely at the related issues of civility, intellectual honesty and mean-spiritedness in politics, media, punditry and blogging. But for now, I’ll just say that adding Shrum gives Kerry the inside track at the nomination just as it pushes him further from electability by solidifying precisely the weaknesses that did in Gore. I can almost hear Kerry sighing already . . .

It’s Everyone Else Who’s Crazy

Ratings flop Phil Donahue accuses the American viewing public of being part of a right-wing cabal!
Well, actually he accused MSNBC of trying to imitate FOX by sacking him to hire more right-leaning talk show hosts, but Donahue apparently ignores the little matter of his flatlining ratings. Donahue’s call for more patient management might ring truer if it were not for two facts:
1. His ratings weren’t going anywhere. Donahue compares his situation to the time it took FOX to overtake CNN, but FOX was a whole new channel (people gotta find it on the dial) and it was trending sharply upward for a long time. Phil’s show was stuck in the cellar with no prospect of improving.
2. I don’t have figures, but you have to assume that Donahue’s name recognition is still tremendous. Everyone knows who he is and that his show was out there; people just didn’t want to watch it. No amount of time will change that. Sure, NBC gave a little-known show called “Seinfeld” time to build name recognition — but there was no need to do that for, say, the Chevy Chase late night show; if it didn’t start well, it wasn’t going to get any better. Like Chase, Donahue just couldn’t recapture the magic of the mid-seventies. He should have had the grace to just admit that. But in Donahue’s world, it’s always somebody else’s fault.
Big Oil, maybe?

A RESPONSE TO DOUG TURNBULL

Doug Turnbull has set out, at some length, a thoughtful explanation of why he thinks that the case for a space program is just as grounded in impractical romanticism as much of modern environmentalism:

Can anyone come up with an argument for manned space flight that couldn’t, with a few changed words, also be used to support a ban on ANWR drilling, or almost any pro-environmental position, for that matter? Both seem to rest on a fundamental romanticism–in the one case of space, in the other of wilderness and wildlife here on earth. Both involve large economic costs to pursue this romantic goal, with either no economic payoff, or a highly questionable economic payoff in the distant future.
So why are so many of the same people who sneer at environmentalists’ arguments about preserving wilderness, who happily whip out their cost benefit analysis thinking caps when such arguments come up, perfectly willing to jettison any semblance of rational thought or cost-benefit considerations when it comes to space exploration?

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I’m more sympathetic to the environmental arguments, since the costs there (such as species extinction and habitat loss) are much clearer and more obvious than the supposed benefits of space flight, which seem to mainly focus on intangibles like the human spirit of conquest and exploration.

I’ve seen others make this point, and it’s a fair criticism. Certainly much of the terms in which the space program is described by its admirers is explicitly aimed at our imagination rather than any hard grip on the day-to-day world the rest of us inhabit. Charles Krauthammer’s stirring call to Mars is one of the best exemplars of this phenomenon.
In the end, though, I think that a fair distinction can be made between the two. Let’s count the ways (albeit with a lot of overlap between my arguments):
1. The Costs of The Space Program Are More Explicit. The space program costs money, a lot of money; Turnbull pinpoints the cost of the Space Shuttle and International Space Station at $5.5 billion/year. But we can see that cost, and publicly debate it. The big problem conservatives have with environmentalism isn’t the EPA’s budget, which I suspect (without checking) is a good deal larger than NASA’s. The problem is with all sorts of costs imposed by regulations on businesses, which impede economic growth in ways that are hard to measure and thus far less immediately subject to public scrutiny than NASA’s budget.
2. The Costs of The Space Program Are Far Smaller. As I noted above, the cost of the space program as a whole is unlikely, in the near future, to exceed the very low 11 digits. Now, $10 billion may be a lot of money, but that’s peanuts compared to the costs that would be imposed if we ever had to follow, say, the Kyoto Treaty.
3. The Space Program Places No Limits On Human Liberty. Costs aren’t only measured in dollars. The space program costs us nothing but taxpayer money, and while I don’t underestimate the cost of taxpayer money, environmental regulations impose other serious costs — restrictions on businesses, impositions on communities and their livelihoods, barriers on the aspirations of working people who want to be self-sufficient.
4. We Don’t Force Poor Countries To Have Space Programs. The environmental movement is forever trying to get the United States to insist on environmental restrictions on foreign countries, where people are trying to escape subsistence economies and raise standards of living to points that we take for granted in terms of our health and longetivity. The space program asks nothing of farmers in Zambia or the Amazon jungles, just the people who pay federal income taxes — and we know who they are.
5. A Private Sector Space Program Would Be Even Better. Most conservative thinkers about space would gladly see a larger role for the private sector in the space program — maybe not an exclusive role, but a larger one. Come to think of it, they’re the same people who think that voluntary private sector efforts on the environment can be good for the economy. (Krauthammer, by the way, is quite explicit in explaining that he thinks government is just better at things like the space program that involve linear goal-driven projects rather than ham-handed attempts to screw with incentives in private conduct).
6. The Space Program Does Not Harm Our Sovereignty Or Infringe On Democratic Self-Government. Again, I get back to things like the Kyoto Treaty — the environmental movement has made many efforts to get us to accept the dictates of international bodies our people did not elect. The space program makes no such demands, and instead proudly flies the American flag, even planting it on the moon (sorry, got a little emotional at the end there).
7. Space Has Military Applications. Now let’s talk turkey — as John Miller of the National Review noted (actually, I think he was quoting someone but I lost the article), space is “the ultimate high ground” — by pushing our space program further, we can develop more military applications that have enormous usefulness in dangerous times. Miller’s latest piece, on the use of Global Positioning Systems to improve the accuracy of our aerial bombardment and coordinate troop movements, underscores this.
8. Our Space Program Is Awe-Inspiring. I’m talking about the kind of awe that has practical uses: fear in the hearts of our enemies, respect of our friends. You can’t buy the kind of propaganda, in the backward and dysfunctional societies where we must now seek to win hearts and minds and strike terror in those who wish to do so to us, than being the only nation ever to put a man on the moon. What that says to people who can’t even get decent plumbing . . . it’s incalculable. Mars? They can barely even see Mars.
But we can go there. And it will cost us much less than capping our smokestacks and reining in our standard of living.

California and New York

There are few hardier perennials in the world of conservative journals of opinion than the article assuring us that, really, this time, Republicans are gonna start winning in California. It’s right up there with “any day now, African-American voters are gonna wake up and realize that the Democrats take them for granted!” (The Wall Street Journal’s John Fund is a master at both of these genres). Hugh Hewitt had a recent species of this in the Weekly Standard: Barbara Boxer’s a loony leftist! Bush is gonna win the state! Hey, Cubs fans find a way to have hope each spring, so I guess California Republicans can too. Me, I’ll believe it when I see it.
Here in heavily Democractic New York, though, I think Bush really can make inroads in 2004. My reasoning is simple:
1. Upstate New York has traditionally been good territory for the GOP, and Republicans have also proven competitive in the suburbs and on Long Island. In short, if Bush can neutralize Democrats’ huge advantages in the City (in 2000, he lost Manhattan by more than a million votes), he’s definitely in the game.
2. Voters in New York City have proven their willingness to vote for Republicans — albeit more liberal ones than Bush — when they feel their physical safety is at stake. Hence, we’ve had Republican mayors for the past decade.
3. Nobody cares more about progress in the War on Terror than New Yorkers. We’re the City With The Big Bullseye, and everybody knows it. We were the opening battleground of this war. If Bush can convince people that he has made real progress on ths front by the fall of 2004 — no major domestic terror strikes, Saddam gone, perhaps a new regime in Iran, maybe Osama’s head on a spike — he can be very competitive in the City, and maybe win the state.
It will all turn on the war — but then, if the war is seen as going badly, Bush will be packing his bags in 2004 rather than counting electoral votes anyway.

Injustice Douglas

From reading his opinions on matters I’m familiar with, I’ve long suspected that Justice William O. Douglas was a sloppy, careless, agenda-driven judge. To give an obvious example about which I’ve written at more length in an article in the Securities Regulation Law Journal (“The ‘In Connection With’ Requirement of Rule 10b-5 as an Expectation Standard,” 26 Sec. Reg. L.J. 1), Douglas authored a unanimous opinion for the Court in Superintendant of Insurance of New York v. Bankers Life & Cas. Co., 404 U.S. 6 (1971), the first Supreme Court case to recognize the implied private right of action under section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and Rule 10b-5 thereunder. Naturally, the opinion — a brusque 7-0 opinion (the Court was short-handed) delivered less than a month after the case was argued — gives no analysis to support the existence of such an implied right of action, but that’s not the problem. The problem is that the Court found that the alleged fraud in the case was properly considered to be fraud “in connection with the purchase or sale of any security” within the meaning of the statute, on the theory that the Board of Directors of the Manhattan Casualty Company was deceived into selling $5 million worth of Treasury bonds in exchange for a certificate of deposit based upon the representation that the CD was worth $5 million, when in fact it was worthless. See id. at 8-10 & n.1. If this were true, the case would be rather uncomplicated, which is how the Court treated it — but the Second Circuit Court of Appeals had rejected precisely the same theory below on the grounds that it was neither alleged in the complaint nor supported by any record evidence adduced after six years of discovery. See Superintendant of Insurance of New York v. Bankers Life & Cas. Co., 430 F.2d 357, 360 & n.3 (2d Cir. 1970), rev’d, 404 U.S. 6 (1971).
Seventh Circuit Chief Judge Richard Posner thinks the same about Justice Douglas as a judge, and more, in his review of a new book that sheds light on Douglas as:
one of the most unwholesome figures in modern American political history, a field with many contenders. . . a liar to rival Baron Munchausen . . . Apart from being a flagrant liar, Douglas was a compulsive womanizer, a heavy drinker, a terrible husband to each of his four wives, a terrible father to his two children, and a bored, distracted, uncollegial, irresponsible, and at times unethical Supreme Court justice who regularly left the Court for his summer vacation weeks before the term ended. Rude, ice-cold, hot-tempered, ungrateful, foul-mouthed, self-absorbed, and devoured by ambition, he was also financially reckless–at once a big spender, a tightwad, and a sponge–who, while he was serving as a justice, received a substantial salary from a foundation established and controlled by a shady Las Vegas businessman.
Posner also thinks Douglas would have been a good president, which probably says more about Posner’s view of elective officials . . .

Al Qaeda’s Choices

Newsweek has a fascinating profile of the malfunctioning of an overly complicated plot by Al Qaeda to blow up a U.S. warship on September 11. I’m convinced that these guys would be much more effective at spreading fear and chaos and economic disruption if they weren’t so ambitious — but then, that assumes that they really do, as advertised, have thousands of operatives. Their disinterest in staging a large-scale campaign of the type of attacks that we see in Israel suggests that they are much shorter on manpower than we think.

From the Department of DUH

This article, headlined “Coffee consumption ‘can increase stillbirth risk,'” sounds like a legitimate health piece on the risks of pregnant women drinking coffee. But read the opening line:
Pregnant women who drink more than eight cups of coffee a day increase their risk of having a stillborn baby compared with non-coffee drinkers, a new study has found.
(Emphasis added). Did we really need to research this? I mean, eight cups of coffee a day is bad for anyone, let alone a developing child scarcely larger than a mug of java him or herself.

Grab Bag

As if I even have to tell you, don’t miss Mark Steyn on that unilateralist cowboy Jacques Chirac, Jonah Goldberg on why liberal talk radio can’t be funny, and James Lileks on sword-wielding Iraqi imams and the idiotarians who love them (“When [Tony] Blair shows up in the pulpit cleaving the air with a scimitar, let me know. . . It takes a particularly rarified variety of idiot to look at a Jew-hating fascist with a small mustache – and decide that his opponent is the Nazi.”).

Mets sign Tony Clark

Mets sign Tony Clark to a minor league deal. I loved the Clark pickup by the Red Sox last year, and I could not have been more wrong: if the Sox had given Clark’s at bats to a merely average first baseman, they might have closed at least a game or two of the six-game gap that cost them the wild card. (Granted, Clark had just 275 at bats, but when you hit .207/.291/.265, you can do a lot of hurt in a little time). And given his injury history, Clark is a good deal less than a 50/50 shot to ever hit well again. But for the Mets — who have high-risk players at nearly every position, an injury-prone first baseman, and are only committing to a minor league contract rather than the millions the Sox paid Clark — there’s nothing but upside in even the outside chance that Clark’s bad back might relent long enough to give back some of the form that made Clark a consistently above-average hitting first baseman for five years entering 2002. The guy is only 30, after all.
I’d rather give him a minor league deal than what the Braves are paying Mike Hampton.
In other news, the same ESPN report notes that El Guapo has retired at the age of “31.”

The Belly of the Eagle

The Weekly Standard carries a scary analysis of the latest bin Laden audiotape, asking (on the assumption that it’s actually bin Laden, which is at least open to debate), where and how he means to strike when he refers to the “belly of the Eagle.” Perhaps this is undermined by the argument that bin Laden would target harbors, but let’s assume that the message is a coded order. Picture the typical icon of the American Eagle superimposed on a map of the continental 48 states, and ask where the belly is. I’d say somewhere in Texas, no? A symbolic place to target, given the Texan who has scattered bin Laden and his organization to the four winds.

Reality Bites

Mark Steyn had a great column the other day comparing the anti-war crowd to Hitler, and not entirely unfairly: his point (read the whole thing!) was that Hitler was consumed by the delusions required to sustain his world view, and wound up believing his own BS, like that Churchill was just a pawn of the International Zionist Conspiracy. We see examples of this all the time among the people who insist that Bush is worse than Saddam, or that the UN losing face would be worse than a WMD attack (see yesterday’s Lileks on that one), and it’s even become all too common among people who ought to know better, like Jimmy Carter saying that American policy depends entirely on “‘white skin or oil [being] involved,'” or Carl Levin insisting that Saddam’s noncompliance with inspections is the fault of sabotage by the all-powerful CIA, or, worst of all, Paul Krugman claiming that Fox News has essentially brainwashed the American people into agitating for war. Krugman talks about TV news in general, but even he can’t believe that CBS News is a Bush Administration propaganda outlet, which leaves him relying on the sliver of Americans who get news from Fox and CNN but not from the print media or the internet. Of course, by explicitly excluding the print media, Krugman is again able to write a column on media bias without mentioning his own newspaper, which is the 800-pound gorilla of any examination of media bias. David Adesnik of Oxblog summed up this rant the best: “If I hadn’t spent two minutes reading his column, I could’ve re-brushed my teeth instead.”

Can This Dictator Be Deterred?

Eugene Volokh has a post dissecting the claim that Saddam is a rational guy and therefore subject to deterrence even if he has or obtains weapons of mass destruction. He doesn’t cover every possible argument — like the possibility that Saddam could believe that he could get away with using terrorists to deliver WMD because he wouldn’t get tied to the attack — but the professor has the basic point that Saddam’s goals may not necessarily be all about sheer survival, and that a WMD attack might at some point play into a desire for historic glory on his part. Also, remember that Saddam is not a young man; if he grows sick or weak, he may see going down in a blaze of glory as preferable to steadily losing his grip and being removed quietly.

Logical Disconnect

Daniel Pipes uses opinion polls to argue that the Palestinians can’t be negotiated with because the Palestinian people want Israel destroyed, not relations normalized. But one of his suggested solutions, moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, doesn’t solve the problem he identifies. While I’m sympathetic to the idea on an emotional level, I don’t see the benefit of moving the embassy to Jerusalem. Pipes’ own analysis suggests that the issue is Israel, not the West Bank — and an embassy in Tel Aviv is plenty to support a permanent Israel, while an embassy in Jerusalem would align us more closely with Israel’s claims to disputed areas of the West Bank, and be seen on the Palestinian side as support for Israel holding title to all of what is now Israel and the PA territory.

Dick Is In

Dick Gephardt formally announces that he’s running for president (I was surprised to discover he hadn’t announced yet), promising to raise taxes and create a massive new federal health care entitlement. Presumably, an endorsement from Walter Mondale is in the offing. Gephardt does stick by the president on Iraq, though, despite some silly carping about “the president’s go-it-alone rhetoric.”
In a not-unrelated story, Canada has basically admitted that the costs of its program of socialized medicine (just the costs, leaving aside the crummy services you get for all this money) will spin out of control over the next decade.

Plane Crash in Iran

Should I file this under WAR? The plane crash in Iran, which apparently killed between 250 and 300 people, gets curiouser and curiouser, inasmuch as many on board were apparently “members of the elite Revolutionary Guards,” the jackboot on the throats of the Iranian people. I sympathize, as always, with the families of those who died, but the Revolutionary Guards are hardly innocents in the brutality of the Iranian police state. Coming at a time of internal unrest in Iran and just on the heels of Iranian-backed Shia rebels entering Iraq (see below), you have to wonder if there is more to this story, and if the truth will ever come out.