Archive for February, 2003

IF YOU CAN’T SAY SOMETHING NICE, DO SOMETHING SURREALISTIC:

More than 100 Nashvillians turned out this afternoon to hit a French car with a sledgehammer in support of America’s troops and to protest French anti-American sentiments.

The ”Bash A Peugeot For Peace” event at the Beaman Automotive Group on Broadway was sponsored by WWTN radio talk-show host Steve Gill. All proceeds are going to charities that send supplies to troops overseas and their families, who have remained at home.

Futile gesture? But of course! But that’s the point:

”What does bashing a Peugeot have to do with peace?” said Steve Gill, rhetorically. ”Nothing. But most of the peace rallies have nothing to do with peace either. They’re just attacking America. By calling our rally this, we just wanted to underline that point.”

Tremble, O postmodern Frenchman. Steve Gill has your number.

(Via Timatollah).

NAT HENTOFF UNPACKS PATRIOT II: And it looks pretty bad.

TalkLeft suggests that the plan is to wait until war is underway and then introduce it while everyone is distracted.

I’m going to let my Senators and Representative know that I’m against this now.



THERE WAS AN ANTIWAR PROTEST, OF SORTS, across the street from the law school as I left work this afternoon. As you can see, it wasn’t very big. You may not be able to tell from this photo, but if you look at this close-up or this full-size version you can see that these aren’t students. Many of them look to be Vietnam-era protest alumni. There were signs that said “honk if you want peace.” People were honking, but some of the honkers were yelling “war now!”

I don’t claim any special representative quality for this assemblage — though the absence of undergraduates was certainly noticeable — but I had the digital camera on me, so there you are.

UPDATE: Sharp-eyed reader Bart Hall emails:

I could not help but notice the *unused* placards on the ground at left in your photo of the A-Peace-ment demonstration there at UT. There seem to be at least half a dozen of them. My interpretation is that they didn’t get more than about half the people they expected. The demo at UT is barely bigger than the standard Sunday ‘Honk if you’re for Hemp’ demos in downtown Lawrence, Kansas.

Hmm. Good point (it’s clearer in the full-size picture). It wasn’t the weather — by recent standards, yesterday wasn’t bad.

OVER AT GLENNREYNOLDS.COM I’m announcing that I’m proudly pro-sodomy! As, apparently, are the readers of Redbook.

IS IT THE 1930s ALL OVER AGAIN?

Western Europe has almost gone the way of Weimar. Amoral, disarmed, and socialist, it seeks ephemeral peace at all costs, never long-term security, much less justice. Furious that history has not ended in perpetual peace and leisure, it has woken up angry that Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair disturbed its fanciful slumber with chatter about germs and genocide.

In recompense, cranky Western elites, terrified of trouble, indict on the cheap the democratically elected Mr. Sharon, while the masses in the millions go to the street to protest a war against a monster like Saddam Hussein and pay fealty to the terrorist Arafat. As in the past we see ideals in the militarily weak but spiritually strong leaders of Eastern Europe, as the Czechs and Poles once more reveal themselves to be far more moral men and women than any in Germany and France — the historic duet that so often either started or lost wars. . . .

The world, not America, has gone off the deep end — just as it did some 70 years ago when faced with similar choices between cheap rhetoric and real sacrifice. And so just as the tragedy of Pearl Harbor for Americans put an end to all the nonsense of the 1930s, let us hope that the memory of September 11 and the looming showdown with Iraq will do the same for the present farce as well.

As I mention below, for multilateralism to work, you need — well, you need nations more honest, more capable, and more responsible than France and Germany.

LEE HARRIS WRITES on the idea of evil — and those who are embarrassed by it.

MICHAEL WALZER WRITES:

It would have been much better if the US threat had not been necessary —if the threat had come, say, from France and Russia, Iraq’s chief trading partners, whose unwillingness to confront Saddam and give some muscle to the UN project was an important cause of the collapse of inspections in the 1990s. This is what internationalism requires: that other states, besides the US, take responsibility for the global rule of law and that they be prepared to act, politically and militarily, with that end in view. American internationalists—there are a good number of us though not enough—need to criticize the Bush administration’s unilateralist impulses and its refusal to cooperate with other states on a whole range of issues from global warming to the International Criminal Court.

But multilateralism requires help from outside the US. It would be easier to make our case if it were clear that there were other agents in international society capable of acting independently and, if necessary, forcefully, and ready to answer for what they do, in places like Bosnia, or Rwanda, or Iraq. When we campaign against a second Gulf War, we should also be campaigning for that kind of multilateral responsibility. And this means that we have demands to make not only on Bush and Co. but also on the leaders of France and Germany, Russia and China, who, although they have recently been supporting continued and expanded inspections, have also been ready, at different times in the past, to appease Saddam. If this preventable war is fought, all of them will share responsibility with the US. When the war is over, they should all be held to account.

The trouble with multilateralism is that it requires other nations who are both morally responsible and militarily capable. There’s a shortage of both.

THE NINTH CIRCUIT has denied a rehearing en banc in the Pledge of Allegiance case, clearing the way for it to go to the Supreme Court. Howard Bashman has the scoop, naturally.

BLOOD-BLOGGING: Gabriel Mendel writes that donating blood is a good way to help the war effort.

Meanwhile Maj. John Heslin emails: “Blogging’s emergence as the Rugby of Opinion Peddling is crystallizing.”

INTERESTING STORY ON SADDAM’S WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION: From Iran.

ERIC MULLER THINKS that human shields may be prosecuted for treason — and that they may deserve it.

JOHN COUMARIANOS has some thoughts on the Administration’s ongoing — and major — foreign policy realignment.

KRAUTHAMMER IS RIGHT:

France is not doing this to contain Iraq — France spent the entire 1990s weakening sanctions and eviscerating the inspections regime as a way to end the containment of Iraq. France is doing this to contain the United States. As I wrote last week, France sees the opportunity to position itself as the leader of a bloc of former great powers challenging American supremacy.

That is a serious challenge. It requires a serious response. We need to demonstrate that there is a price to be paid for undermining the United States on a matter of supreme national interest.

First, as soon as the dust settles in Iraq, we should push for an expansion of the Security Council — with India and Japan as new permanent members — to dilute France’s disproportionate and anachronistic influence.

Second, there should be no role for France in Iraq, either during the war, should France change its mind, or after it. No peacekeeping. No oil contracts. And France should be last in line for loan repayment, after Russia. Russia, after all, simply has opposed our policy. It did not try to mobilize the world against us.

It should be expensive to cross the United States on an important matter. And this is an important matter.

BIGWIG IS PROPOSING AN EXPERIMENT and reports that preliminary results look promising.

MATTHEW YGLESIAS has more on blood donation, and says that the ever-stiffening requirements for blood donation are largely unfounded. I’m not so sure, though, that the motivation is to drive up the price of blood. That’s a suggestion I was skeptical of when I posted on this last year, and I still regard it as unlikely, though not impossible. More likely, I think, they’re just overreacting to their ball-dropping over HIV.

DOES THE NEW WTC REPLACEMENT DESIGN look like the Fortress of Solitude? That seems a common reaction.

HEY, THERE’S AN ANTIPUNDIT: If the two of us ever met, would we cancel out? Or suffer mutual annihilation and explode?

I hope not. He seems like a pretty nice guy.

CHARLES MURTAUGH DELIVERS A RIGHTEOUS FISKING to anti-cloning legislation — and politicians.

UPDATE: Dipnut emails that Murtaugh’s treatment isn’t a Fisking. “That’s a calm, rational refutation of Sam Brownback.”

“This,” he writes, “is a righteous Fisking.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Justin Katz has replied to Murtaugh.

BLOOD BLOGGING: Fritz Schranck responds to my blood-donation post and photo below by noting:

Some folks might have been surprised to see absolute proof that an attorney’s blood is in fact the same familiar red color found in humans and other mammals.

He also suggests that bloggers might want to get behind blood-donation efforts in general, and he’s created a nice little button, visible to the right.