Anne Applebaum, You Gotta Be Putting Me On

Henley has today’s edition. IOZ beat me to it as well, but this bit in particular deserves to have its 5-year waiting period waived and be granted immediate induction into the Wall Street Journal Non-Sequitur Hall of Fame:

If there are politicians, academics or journalists anywhere in Germany and France who have better ideas about how to improve the catastrophic state of Iraq, they aren’t speaking very loudly. There is no question that America’s credibility has been undermined by the Iraq war, in “Old Europe” as everywhere else. There is no question that America’s reputation for competence has been destroyed. But that doesn’t mean there are dozens of eager candidates, or even one eager candidate, clamoring to replace us.

I think the problem with the last part is quite obvious: Applebaum for some reason fails to consider the possibility that replacing an (admittedly awful) dictatorship that poses no threat whatsoever to the U.S. or Europe with a theocratic quasi-state is a job that nobody needs to do. Her next column will presumably start with the argument that “sure, people like to criticize David McNally, but who else is going to make movies about hip-hop talking kangaroos? You?”

Similarly, with respect to the first part, the erroneous premise is transparently obvious. EBW has already taken care of this fallacy in detail, but it’s silly to implictly blame “Europe” for not having solutions to an idiotic policy that they correctly predicted would produce insoluble problems.

I Think We Have An Explanation

As a quick follow-up to Rob’s post below, I think Publius adds a critical point: the odds of a similarly draconian sentence if the race of the victim and perpetrator were reversed are extremely low. I particularly recommend this follow-up post, about the Warren Court and race. As Publius notes, a lot of what seems problematic about the craft of some major Warren Court criminal procedure opinions is that many of these were largely race cases–cases largely about practices used against blacks in the apartheid South–although for conventional reasons judges didn’t want to talk about them that way:

Of course, I can’t say what motivated the prosecutor here. But it is strange that the most egregious prosecutions under this Georgia law that bubble up to the national consciousness (including Marcus Dixon) involve young black men and white prosecutors. But regardless of the motivation, it is a textbook example of an abuse of prosecutorial discretion. (As explained in the article, Wilson had no prior problems with the police).

And that brings me to a larger point. The criminal justice system in America depends heavily upon prosecutorial and police discretion. Both prosecutors and police officers have a number of tools and laws at their disposal, and at some point we just have to trust that they won’t abuse those powers. (That’s why you should be nice to cops when they pull you over — they can always make things worse). The point is that there is a very wide range of actions that fall into the “wrong, but legal” category, as the Wilson prosecution clearly shows.

The criminal justice system’s reliance on discretion explains the problem that civil rights activists faced in the Warren Court-era South. Quite simply, Southern judges, prosecutors, and police officers could not be trusted to exercise proper discretion on racial matters. Their abuses, however, were impossible to address because existing constitutional doctrine (e.g., respect for state criminal court decisions) prevented anyone from doing anything about it. Again, “wrong, but legal.”

So, in the face this outrageousness, the Warren Court stepped in and started making new law. In fact, one way to understand the Warren Court’s decisions is that they are a collective attempt to impose bright-line rules upon Southern law enforcement officials. Specifically, the Warren Court sought to limit police and prosecutorial discretion in the South out of racial concerns and distrust for law enforcement officials. (As I’ve explained in prior writings, Scalia’s formalism and bright-line rules are also motivated by distrust, but of hippy district court judges rather than 1950s Southern state troopers.)

I agree that it’s time to stop hand-wringing about the Warren Court, and will only add that the purportedly high level of legal craftsmanship shown by the conservatives under the leadership of William “Don’t Worry About the Reasoning” Rehnquist is grossly overrated. (There’s nothing about bright-line rules that ensures legally coherent derivation of those principles; Scalia’s clear rules about affirmative action, for example, are indefensible given his alleged theoretical commitments.) Hopefully more about this later.

UPDATE: Several commenters point out that, contrary to my implication, the victim is also black (although the prosecutor is white and the man being incarcerated is black.)

The Tragic Ineluctability of Bush’s War

People who have seen my writings about Ralph Nader will not be surprised that I tend to be skeptical of “heighten the contradictions” arguments. As such, I’m afraid that on the merits I have to side with Sam over Spencer or Rob on this one. If Congressional Democrats could end the war, then I think they should indisputably do so. This isn’t because I think that the narrative Spencer outlines won’t play out; it very well might. The problem is, the blame-the-war’s-opponents narrative will be trotted out and may hold no matter what the Democrats do. If the stylings of Glenn Reynolds have taught us nothing else–and they certainly haven’t–it’s that precisely because they’re unfalsifiable tautologies “stab-in-the-back” arguments can be deployed irrespective of the evidence on the ground or what the Democrats do. (After all, it’s not as if the narrative was a plausible explanation of Vietnam either.) There’s simply no question that the Republican Party and its lickspittles will blame everyone but the people responsible for conceiving and executing it for the failure of the Iraq war, and whether the narrative will have political force is dependent on factors (press coverage, future election results) that are both unforeseeable and not fully within the Democrats’ control. I don’t think it’s defensible to continue the senseless destruction of lives and waste of resources in Iraq for political benefits that may or may not materialize.

The good news for blogger comity, but the extremely bad news for Iraq and the United States, is that it’s all moot. This war will continue throughout Bush’s tenure no matter what. The odds that there will be the votes in Congress to de-fund the war with troops in the field are about the same that Tom Coburn will introduce a constitutional amendment mandating a French health care system with unregulated state-funded abortions. In modern politics, foreign policy rests mostly in the executive branch. Since there’s nothing the Democrats can plausibly do to end the war, political considerations are relevant, and while strategy isn’t my department making de-funding the centerpiece of Democratic policy probably isn’t politically wise.

[Cross-posted to TAPPED.]

1 Blow=10 years

See Eugene Volokh on a 17 year old who received a ten year sentence in Georgia for engaging in oral sex with a 15 year old girl. Also see Sully. Peking Duck makes the relevant point:

We recently had an impassioned thread on the inanities of China’s laws. Looking at this story, I can only say we sacrifice the right to lecture all others when we allow such obscene perversions of justice to take place in America.

Chestnuts, open fire, etc.

I’m off to Virginia for the holidays and — as one of those freaks who actually gets along with his immediate family — will probably be enjoying myself too much to blog for at least a week. I don’t know why, but none of the Noons have discovered religion, voted Republican, or otherwise surrendered their marbles over the years, so there are few of those awkward silences and tense, existential confrontations that mar the average American holiday.

Without being so presumptuous as to speak for Rob, Scott and DJW, I’d like to bestow early holiday greetings to some of our usual (and thoroughly deserving) targets of verbal abuse — Ann Althouse, Glenn Reynolds, Mickey Kaus, Victor Davis Hanson, Assrocket and the rest of the Powerline crew, Treason-in-Defense-of-Slavery Yankee, Jonah Goldberg, Michael Medved, John Podhoretz, Christopher Hitchens, Mark Steyn, and anyone else who has made life just a little more special over the past year. For the love of Christ, please continue to serve up your frothy brew of illogic in the New Year.

As a reminder of the sort of desperate hackery of which you’re all capable, here’s a classic Christmas Eve carol from Bob Owens, who earned the Crooks and Liars award for “Worst Post of 2005″ for this foray into the underworld of Christian sexuality. As I said, please — more of this in 2007.

An LGM Christmas

Do you suffer from the heartbreak of extra money? Do you still have cash left after buying everyone on your list a gift? Instead of exchanging that money for useless goods and services, consider perusing the LGM Wish Lists on the right sidebar. We won’t regret it!

"Centrist" Understatement

One might believe that the most notable part of Gene Healy’s discussion of Newt Gingrich’s Meet the Press appearance (via Ezra) was Gingrich’s suggestion that the First Amendment be modified such that a panel of judges could shut down “jihadist” websites, and that, moreover, the judges making up the panel should have combat experience. While I’ll acknowledge that the proposal has some merit, given that Newt, most of the Bush administration, and the vast majority of the neoconservative movement would be excluded from such service, I’d have to say that it’s rather disconcerting to hear a presumptive presidential candidate advocating the gutting of the First Amendment. But then again, I’m not a “centrist”. Our friend Justin Gardner, however, is a self-proclaimed centrist. Long time LGM readers will remember Justin from the Flight 93 Memorial fiasco, during which he defended the bizarre wingnutty argument that the memorial was, indeed, a shrine to radical Islam. Justin has also agreed that many Democrats are “rooting for the other side”.

So, what does the self-proclaimed centrist have to say about Newt’s appearance on MTP?

Listen, Newt does have some good ideas. There’s no doubt about that. But he’s a politician through and through, so handle his centrist proclamations with lead-lined gloves.

Uh, thanks for the warning. Of course, Justin misunderstood Healy’s first central point, that Gingrich, while a forceful rhetorician, really doesn’t have any new or interesting ideas and is the definition of a partisan shill. Justin entirely missed the second point, which is that Gingrich would like to replace the First Amendment with a Starship Troopers style arrangement in which those with military service get to decide what’s appropriate for the rest of us to think and say. Oh, and that this is a bad thing.

Way to go, Justin. Hope you get yourself an Insta-link.

Random Flickr Blogging

Tom Hilton, super-genius, explains Random Flickr Blogging.

And my contributions this week:

Steve “Tubesteak” Romero wasn’t sure if eating an entire case of sour cream would make him less of a disgusting slob, but he was — as in so many areas of his life — willing to experiment.

Rejected Rotating LGM Photos, Vol. 1.

The three founding members of Lawyers, Guns and Money agreed on the merits of the photo, but negotiations broke down when Rob and Scott each insisted that he would be the guy in the middle.

In the Sense That Good Charlotte’s Genius Ranges Somewhere Between The Clash and Television

Via Yglesias, how about this from Josef Joffe’s review of the Mark Steyn’s ode to xeonpohibic contempt for liberal democratic values in New York’s most irrelevant financial sinkhole:

Mark Steyn, the Canadian columnist who lives in “blue” New Hampshire, is a true “red-stater” whose genius ranges somewhere between Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce. He has got punch, wit, and smarts, and if he were teaching in a North American humanities department, they would send him off to “sensitivity training” for life, without parole.

Er, no. But I can imagine thinking Mark Steyn is comparable to Mark Twain if you still think that jokes about “sensitivity training” in “humanities departments” are still fresh and witty in 2006.

Final Exam

One of the great things about working at the Patterson School is that my classes are small (10-15 students) and consist entirely of skilled, engaged, and informed graduate students. This gives me a lot of latitude in the kinds of questions I ask, allowing very broad inquiries without running the risk of getting senseless or off topic answers. Here was my final exam for National Security.

Instructions: Answer one of the three questions. E-mail your answer to me. Your exam is due in two hours.

1. The US Defense budget for fiscal year 2007 stands at $470 billion. Is this enough? Too much? How do we go about assessing this question?
2. Evaluate the following statement: Neoconservatism didn’t fail; it was never properly tried.
3. What’s at stake for the United States in Iraq? What does the United States risk by staying, and what by leaving?

The answers were very good, with roughly a third taking on each question. One of the answers to the second question was publication quality. Good times.

. . . to the extreme . . .

Having just returned from the gym, where I watched 45 minutes of Fox News coverage of the missing — and presumed dead — Mt. Hood climbers, I am renewed in my sense of gratitude that my wife and I chose not to replace our television after it broke in August. I am also reminded of how little I sympathize with people who engage in pointless, anti-social, ego-driven gestures like these. Living in Alaska, I am all too familiar with the variety of (usually male, overwhelmingly white) knucklehead who would devote his life to mountain climbing, helecopter skiing, and other forms of “extreme sport” that regularly send people to early graves. I can’t ever recall a conversation with one of these people that didn’t reinforce my suspicion that all of them — allof them — are utterly mental and should be more or less permanently incarcerated for their own safety.

I have a colleague who claims to study the philosophy of sport, and he insists that there is something philosophically profound about ascending Mt. Everest, or Mt. Hood, or Denali; or free climbing some obscure Soutwestern rock outcropping; or squandering thousands of dollars in gear and transportation so you can risk being smothered by an avalanche on a slope that no one has ever skied before. Whenever he holds forth on these theories, I can’t help but wonder if he’s not crackers as well. Perhaps I’m a callous, risk-averse pantywaist who will choke, Prufrock-like, on a peach pit. But at least I won’t be hauled off a mountain by a C-130 whatever it is they use to haul dead bodies off mountains, frozen solid, with my entire family — left behind by my own stupidity — watching the spectacle on cable television.