Help Chris Muir Find TEH CONSTITUTION!

As a follow-up to Amanda’s long-running series, we can perhaps help Chris Muir out by pointing him to an obscure document he seems to be unfamiliar with, the United States Constitution. As you can see, in his latest attempt to be as didactic and unfunny as Mallard Fillmore in a more pretentious way, Muir’s reactionary stand-in responds to a claim that the press should have the final decision about what to publish by quipping: “I don’t quite recall when the press was directed to run national security.” Ha-ha! You see, national security requires that the government get the final say about what’s publishable, not those silly editors. One minor problem, however:

Amendment I: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.

Strange. While the press indeed was not “elected” to “run” national security, it was given the right to report information important to the public. Oddly, there isn’t a “national security” exemption. The reasons for this were very effectively explained by Hugo Black, when the Nixon administration–Muir surely would have approved!–tried to suppress the publication of the Pentagon Papers:

In the First Amendment, the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government’s power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell. In my view, far from deserving condemnation for their courageous reporting, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other newspapers should be commended for serving the purpose that the Founding Fathers saw so clearly. In revealing the workings of government that led to the Vietnam war, the newspapers nobly did precisely that which the Founders hoped and trusted they would do.

[...]

The word “security” is a broad, vague generality whose contours should not be invoked to abrogate the fundamental law embodied in the First Amendment. The guarding of military and diplomatic secrets at the expense of informed representative government provides no real security for our Republic. The Framers of the First Amendment, fully aware of both the need to defend a new nation and the abuses of the English and Colonial governments, sought to give this new society strength and security by providing that freedom of speech, press, religion, and assembly should not be abridged.

As fashionable as it is nowadays to use “national security” as a universal solvent which instantly dissolves the restrictions on executive power contained in the Constitution, I find Black’s reading of the First Amendment rather more persuasive.

All Your Baseball Are Belong To Us

All bow before Canada…BASEBALL SUPER-POWER! Adam Stern, Stubby Clapp, Pete LaForest, immortals all! I can’t say that I was terribly excited about the WBC, but I admit I enjoyed watching the last 4 innings I saw. My only regret is that Slappy Rodriguez didn’t make the final out…

“Wow, those hosers sure did choke, eh?”

“And Derek Jeter is even more annoying than my voice!”

Here’s An Anecdote Christina Hoff Summers Can Recycle For 30 Years

Given the incessant whining from busybody reactionaries obsessed with the idea that The Vagina Monologues might be performed on a college campus and therefore permanently emasculate Dr. Prof. Mike Adams Ph.D, I note that it is currently being performed, courtesy of the Women’s Studies Department, in the 3rd-story walkway here at Hunter. Good for them…

Stunned Disbelief

Myself and the lads are currently enduring another episode of ESPN’s chronic ineptitude regarding its fantasy baseball responsibilities. Long story short, we are now eight days behind the promised target date for setting our fantasy league draft, and no relief is in sight.

Given this context, you can imagine my surprise that ESPN2 has decided to stick with the excellent (6-6 in the 11th inning) Cuba-Panama game, and pre-empt “Jim Rome is Burning” and “Pardon the Interruption” by moving the US-Canada game (which Canada now leads 3-0) onto the main ESPN network.

Probably Gay, Pro-Abortion Terrorists

Or maybe not.

Three college students from the prosperous suburbs south of Birmingham, two of them 19 and one 20, were arrested today in the burning of nine Baptist churches in rural Alabama last month that federal officials say was a prank that spun out of control.

Benjamin N. Moseley and Russell L. DeBusk Jr., both 19 and students at Birmingham Southern College, were arrested after admitting their involvement in the fires to federal agents who had been led to them by tire tracks left behind at several of the burned churches, officials said.

Arrested a few hours later was Matthew Lee Cloyd, 20, a student at the nearby University of Alabama-Birmingham whose mother was the owner of the 2000 Toyota 4Runner that had left the tracks, federal agents said in an affidavit accompanying the criminal complaint against the three men.

The identities of the accused came as a surprise to investigators, who had speculated that the arsons were the work of people intimately familiar with the remote rural roads where the fires were set, not products of Birmingham’s upper-middle class, one the son of a doctor and another of a county constable.

[...]

Mr. DeBusk, who was interviewed and arrested a short time later, also admitted behind present at the five arsons on Feb. 3, as well as kicking in the doors of two of the churches. He said the three had been out shooting deer in Mr. Cloyd’s S.U.V. prior to the fires.

Chris Matthews must be disappointed.

After South Dakota, Pt. 1: The Side of Principle

Between the confirmation of Samuel Alito and the appalling recent legislation passed in South Dakota this is a grim time in many respects for pro-choicers. For Blog Against Sexism Day, over the next three posts I’ll point out why the pro-choice position is more coherent, principled, and popular than the pro-criminalization position, why pro-choicers should not be reluctant to embrace Roe, and why the South Dakota legislation may be a political opportunity.

If there was any question of whether the advice of Vichy pro-choicers such as William Saletan and Amy Sullivan to fight for reproductive freedom by accepting the anti-choice framing of the issue and by capitulating on everything but the formal legality of first-trimester abortions had any value, its endorsement by the folks at RedState should remove all doubt. Trying, no doubt, to be a selfless good sport, one Leon H. Wolf wonders about why pro-choicers won’t take Lord Saletan’s sage advice:

Saletan is one of the few pro-abortion writers who can manage an argument more cogent than “you pro-lifers just don’t want women having sex!” His advice, if the pro-abortion forces in this country are smart enough to listen (they aren’t) is that it is time for Roe to go, that defending second trimester abortions is an ever-increasing political loser which raises (gasp) ever more serious moral questions as fetuses become viable at earlier stages of development. In other words, second-trimester abortions are the anchor which threaten to drag down the entire pro-abortion movement.

Politically speaking, Saletan is right. But it is also a virtual guarantee that those whom he is defending will not listen. First, they are generally of a stripe that does not understand that sometimes, as a matter of strategy, you must surrender untenable ground to solidify your overall position. Second, while Saletan’s position is a winner politically, it creates an internal incoherency that the forces which drive the pro-abortion movement cannot abide: it provides legal rights to some unborn humans, while depriving others of the most basic human right, the right not to be killed.

I agree with Wolf about one thing: the pro-choicers who argue that abortion should be nominally legal but burdened by a number of pointlessly burdensome and grossly inequitable regulations are taking an incoherent position, although Wolf’s own example is inept: it’s perfectly rational and defensible to say that the state has a greater interest in protecting a viable fetus than a non-viable one. (And, as I will get into in a second, these contradictions are trivial compared to those of the American pro-life movement.) But the rest of this is just nonsense. In particular, as I explain in detail here the implication that “grave moral questions” are being raised because technology is making second trimester fetuses viable is just a flagrant lie, and nor does he provide any evidence that it’s a “political loser.” (He also, of course, ignores the fact the abortion regulations he urges pro-choicers to support make second trimester abortions more likely by making it harder for women to obtain abortions in a timely manner.) The fact that Saletan is willing to advance these evidence-free arguments proves nothing except that many pro-choice pundits have the remarkable ability to fall into every rhetorical trap, false claim and diversionary non-sequitur floated by the forced pregnancy lobby. I urge supporters of reproductive freedom to avoid doing this. When somebody claims that second trimester fetuses are becoming viable, the appropriate response is to point out that it isn’t true, and pro-lifers are lying about it as a part of a disingenuous smokescreen in order to camouflage their extremely unpopular agenda of using state coercion to force women to carry almost all pregnancies to term.

But, wait, it’s about to get a lot worse:

The pro-abortion forces in this country are thus faced with a choice. They can either continue to defend wildly unpopular abortion practices, or they can render their position internally incoherent, and bank on the hope that the American public will not notice. It’s not a very enviable position to be in. By contrast, all that the current pro-life position in this country demands is that the states be allowed, on a local basis, to set abortion regulations in accordance with local norms and practices. This is an eminently reasonable, and increasingly popular proposition, especially as the American public grows more educated about what exactly Roe stands for, and the monstrosity it entails.

This is far too much to bear. First of all, the claim that Roe is becoming unpopular is, again, simply a baldfaced lie: Roe remains extremely popular with the American public, and the position that abortion should be criminalized is highly unpopular, which is why the GOP did everything it could to obfuscate Alito’s opposition to Roe. But even worse is his critique that the pro-choice opinion, if not absolutist, could fail because it is internally incoherent. Really, being lectured by an American pro-lifer about incoherence is like being lectured about ethics by Duke Cunningham, or having Orson Welles piously inform you that you’re letting yourself go. Take Wolf’s purportedly “eminently reasonable” position that ” the states be allowed, on a local basis, to set abortion regulations in accordance with local norms and practices.” Except that earlier he claimed that “unborn humans” have “the right not to be killed,” and you’re unprincipled if you believe that this right varies at all during pregnancy. If this is true, how on earth could it be acceptable for some states not to respect this right? According to Wolf, in Mississippi a fetus has an inalienable right not to be killed–but this right vanishes entirely if a woman boards a plane to New York! To state the obvious, this argument and the word “principle” should not even be mentioned in the same sentence. It could not possibly be the policy advocated by someone who really believes in the right of “unborn humans not to be killed.”

But, of course, most American pro-lifers don’t believe it, or at least are not willing apply this position with even a shred of consistency. American pro-life politics is in fact a moral, legal, and ethical shambles, defined by risibly illogical arguments and comically transparent internal contradictions. To cite a few examples, first of all according the GOP platform, abortion should be first degree murder in all 50 states–but women should not be punished at all for obtaining one. (The SD law also makes this indefensible distinction, which is straight out of late 19th century law, when women weren’t seen as responsible enough to practice law or vote.) They attach scary names to morally neutral medical procedures in order to pass wholly arbitrary and irrational regulations. They oppose policies that would unquestionably reduce abortion rates, while unquestioningly supporting the highly ineffective policy of criminalization. Which is why Wolf wants to pre-empt arguments about the obvious importance of the regulation of female sexuality inherent in abortion laws. Whatever individuals have subjectively convinced themselves, it is self-evidently true that while the policies supported by most American pro-lifers don’t make a shred of sense if they were trying to protect fetal life, they certainly do make sense if seen as an expression of discomfort with the ability of women to have sex without the “consequence” of pregnancy.

None of this is to say that pro-choicers will never need to make any compromises, or that there’s anything wrong with Hillary Clinton’s strategy of pointing out that the bundle of policies favored by pro-choicers both promotes female autonomy and happens to lead to lower abortion rates than those favored by pro-lifers. But pro-choicers need to go on the offensive. Our position is popular, it is right, and it is also far more principled than the “pro-life” position as it manifests itself in American politics.

(Cross-posted to Firedoglake.)

A Side Gig

In addition to posting here, for the next couple days I’ll be joining some other excellent bloggers at Firedoglake. Make sure to check it out!

Championship Week

Does anyone else find Championship Week more exciting than the first week of the NCAA tournament? I love watching all the little regional tournaments, with dozens of teams I’ve never heard of, or know only from the 1993 tournament, or know only from applying to for a job on several occasions, play desperately hard for a 14 seed. When else do you get to see these teams? There’s also a certain chaos and disorder about the system that appeals to me.

The Loyola Marymount-Gonzaga game in particular was great this year. LM hasn’t made the tourney since 1990, and given that their run was one of the most exciting tournament stories I’ve seen, I was pulling for them. Didn’t work out, and Gonzaga doesn’t even need the automatic bid.

The consensus feeling here seems to be that the Wildcats are destined for a eight seed.

PLAN Maintenance

Budding Sinologist at MeiZhongTai points us to this article about the maintenance record of the PLAN, or People’s Liberation Army Navy. Naval maintenance may not seem like an exciting topic, but it’s interesting in two ways.

First, the actual maintenance of naval equipment, like most other miltary equipment, is pretty critical to military effectiveness. I discuss the example of the Brazilian Navy here, but it’s worth revisiting. In 1910, Brazil purchased two of the most advanced and powerful battleships in the world and incorporated those ships into its Navy. By 1917, when Brazil entered the war on the side of the Allies, the two ships were nearly useless and had to undergo a two year refit before entering the Grand Fleet. Brazil had purchased the ships as symbols of national greatness; in practice, the Brazilians had no interest in making them operational vehicles of war. Apart from the question of training and doctrinal execution, simple maintenance procedures matter a lot for military organizations. I’m inclined to think they matter most for the Navy, the most capital intensive of all the services. Another example would be the Russian Navy after the fall of the Soviet Union. The Russian Navy retains many of the powerful ships that the Soviet Navy possessed, but its maintenance procedures collapsed in 1991. Now, many Russian ships can’t safely leave port, and one of the Russian Navy’s top admirals described the flagship, a nuclear battlecruiser, as “likely to explode at any moment”.

A second, but related, question has to do with doctrine, training, and execution. Given the same material, some navies will be more effective than others because of more intense or useful training. We have come to expect that the United States Navy will out-execute any navy in the world, but it wasn’t always so. In World War II the USN excelled at damage control and carrier operations, but fell short in such skills as night-fighting and anti-submarine warfare, at least at the beginning of the war. In World War I, the German High Seas fleet could out-execute the Royal Navy in just about every aspect of fleet combat, although the German tactical advantage could not overcome the British material advantage.

This last example is particularly interesting in the context of the article on Chinese naval maintenance. The article makes a very plausible argument regarding the strength of China’s surface naval force, pointing out that the experience of the PLAN with major surface combatants is extremely thin, and that this probably means that the PLAN will be less effective than its surface assets suggest. The article is probably right, but I couldn’t help notice that it was long on circumstantial and short on direct evidence. Fact is, there HAVE been navies that have achieved a high degree of tactical execution in a short amount of time. The German Navy barely existed in 1871. By 1914, it could outfight the Royal Navy, a military organization with a MUCH longer history. Much of the success of the German Navy has to be laid at the feet of a political class committed to naval power. Similarly, the Soviet Navy went from being a joke in the 1940s and 1950s to being an extremely effective organization by 1970.

It could be objected that the complexity of warships in 2006 makes these comparisons inapt. I can’t agree. The destroyers of 2006 are far more technically advanced than the ships of 1914, but it does not follow that they are so much more difficult for a military organization to learn how to use. The skills needed to run HMS Victory, for example, are much different than the skills needed to operate an Arleigh Burke destroyer, but not necessarily far more complex. I would allow that aircraft carrier operation, which involves a whole set of complex skill systems, probably does take a lot more time to become proficient at, but I’m less certain of surface ships, even those with advanced equipment.

The upshot is that we can’t assume that the USN will maintain its “competence dominance”. It may actually be easier to close the training gap than it is to close the technological and numerical gaps.

World Baseball Classic

Frequent commenter MHS requested that we write a bit about the WBC, and since that was my intention anyway…

It would be wrong to say that I’m wildly enthusiastic about the WBC, but I’m happy that it’s being put on. I’m glad to see competitive baseball at any time of the year, and although Japan’s 18-2 defeat of China stretches the term “competitive”, at least both sides were genuinely trying to win. I’m of two minds regarding the use of Major League players. I can see why Hideki Matsui or Pedro Martinez would bow out of the games, and I don’t hold anything against anyone who decides not to play. On the other hand, better players make better baseball, and I’m happy to see that many of the best players in the world have decided to play.

I will be cheering for Team USA. I actively cheer against the US in international basketball, partially because I can’t stand the NBA, and partially because I am put off by the arrogance of the US team (at least until 2004). In this case, it’s hard for me to cheer for another team. I like the Dominican Republic’s team a lot, hoped that China would manage to at least come near a win, and think that Canada is a bit under-rated. I wouldn’t mind seeing Venezuela, Mexico, or (especially) Cuba do well in the tournament. I can’t manage any sympathy for the European teams that have to fill out their rosters with third generation Americans; they can crash and burn, for all I care.

The WBC is ideally structured for this distribution of talent. Team USA is the best, but it isn’t all that much stronger than DR, Venezuela, or Japan. Over the course of a 162 game season, the US team might win by twenty or thirty games. On any given day, however, an inferior baseball team can beat a better team. This is more true of baseball than of football, basketball, soccer, or any other sport. Since the WBC involves a relatively low number of games, it’s possible for any of the solid teams to go on a hot streak and win the tournament. Clay Davenport, (subscription required) working out of the Baseball Prospectus, rates the chances of a US victory at 33%. The Dominican Republic follows at 21%, Venezuela at 16%, and Japan at 8%.

And the best part is, David Ortiz and Adrian Beltre just hit consequential two run home runs, and it’s only March 7.

…oh, and the first Derek Jeter error of the year. My heart beats faster.

…and, of course, you have an outfield of Randy Winn, Ken Griffey, and Johnny Damon in which Griffey plays center. That should cost us a few doubles…

…it would be quite the embarassment for Canada to lose to South Africa. Down 4-3 in the 6th…

Fortuitous

Jeff Goldstein should probably go back to doing what he does well. I’m not sure what that is, really, but it can’t be blogging about national security. Regarding a report that some insurgent weapons have been made in Iran, Jeff lets loose:

Well, sure—if true, this is a declaration of war. But the real question is, why is Iran willing to take such provocative steps at this juncture? Are they farther along in their nuclear program than we know? Or is there something else to this?

[...]

The answer, it seems to me, is that the Mullahs have done the poltical calculation and believe that a western coalition (outside of the US, who is already fighting in several theaters), lacks the will to act in any but the most feckless of ways. And even if they could gin up the will, the inevitable 6-8 month “rush” to war would give the Iranians time (and an excuse) to accelerate their nuclear program.
I’m not sure. But I do know that it is fortuitous that we are staged in both Iraq and Afghanistan. And I don’t think we can waste much time. If it turns out Iran (and their Syrian allies) are behind the manufacture and supply of weapons being smuggled into Iraq to kill Americans (and bomb both Shiite and Sunni targets in an effort to foment civil war), we have no choice, it seems to me, than to quickly isolate both countries, and launch a series of strategic attacks with the hope of fomenting an uprising of our own among the Iranian student movement.

Where to start….

First, it’s entirely possible that the Iraqi insurgents are getting some of their weapons from Iran, Syria, and various other states that border Iraq. Indeed, I’d be pretty surprised if this wasn’t the case. Part of the problem with getting from this to a declaration of war, however, is that support may well not be state instigated. It’s entirely possible (and I would even say likely) that various Iraqi insurgent groups have made deals for weapons with various groups in other countries, probably without the consent of the governments of those countries. Iran and Iraq have a very long border, one that is hard to guard on either side. So, the Iranian government, rather than declaring war, may well simply be ignorant of what’s going on.

Second, the bugbear of “outside actors” has long been a preoccupation of the United States military in counter-insurgency operations, and has helped the military to ignore the very real problems of fighting an insurgency. In Vietnam, the United States Army relentlessly obsessed over the relatively meagre trickle of supplies coming to the Viet Cong over the Ho Chi Minh trail, while largely ignoring the much more significant supply base that the Viet Cong had in sympathetic South Vietnamese villages. This mis-focus is not terribly surprising; supply lines can be interdicted with firepower, while pro-insurgent villages cannot be so dealt with. This is a long way of saying that Iranian support, even if tacitly or explicitly consented to by the Iranian government, almost certainly isn’t significant to the outcome of the conflict. It is attractive militarily and politically to believe that the problem in Iraq is the cause of outside forces, but it just ain’t so, and operating as if it were so will be quite detrimental to our efforts.

Third, it’s nifty how Jeff moves so quickly from a few shipments of arms across the Iranian border to war with both Iran and Syria. It is here that Jeff moves from simple fancy to sheer idiocy; he apparently genuinely believes that a few airstrikes might foment a student uprising in Iran resulting in the destruction of that regime. Let me be as clear as possible; to believe that airstrikes will bring about a revolution in Iran, you have to be either stupid or deluded. Airstrikes have, invariably, made target regimes more and not less popular. If the United States attacks Iran, the state will become, at least in the short term, much MORE popular with its people. It will have, if anything, greater capacity to crack down on dissidents. Iran may have a revolution at some point in the future, but airstrikes ain’t going to bring it about. Jeff seems to have internalized some kind of neocon fantasy here; just demonstrate US resolve, and all of the nasty regimes in the world will fall like dominoes.

Yup.

Fourth, and this brings us to the basic contradiction in Goldstein’s argument, if we have enough force to deal with both Syria and Iran (and, presumably, to occupy the both of them), then we really, really don’t need to be in Iraq anymore. If the troops we have in Iraq are free to be used elsewhere, then it seems to me that they don’t need to be in Iraq. Thus, we should feel free to withdraw them anytime, just like lots and lots of lefties have argued. It’s hard for me to see how someone with who believes the things that Jeff Goldstein believes could argue this, but I suppose asking for consistency is really too much. US troops continue to die in Iraq at a reasonably high rate, and the country has not, to the naked eye, been pacified. If this constitutes a finished job, and really a model of what we’d like to do to Syria and Iran, then I really…. well, I just don’t know what to say about it.

I suppose that I could rattle off an analysis of the military situation with Iran… much larger territory… much larger population… no particular reason to believe it will be any easier to manage or occupy than Iraq… but I’m not sure that would make any difference to Jeff; he’s escaped reality based analysis, and wandered wholly into some fantastic world where Iranian students will launch a revolution as soon as the first bomb hits Tehran, and where the people of Iran will greet us with flower petals, etc etc.

In fairness to Jeff, he’s already prepared a dodge. He’s just talking about “options”, and hasn’t come to any firm conclusions. Great…

Kirby Puckett, Rest in Peace

It was fun to watch him play.

1783 games
.318/.370/.477
207 home runs
2 World Series rings (1987, 1991)
.296 lifetime EQA

UPDATE: Joe Sheehan has a good column on Kirby.