Leave it to Jane Galt to explain, far better than I could, why I won’t be voting for any Democrats for federal office any time soon. Not that Mississippi Democrats are any better; they mostly combine the statist impulses of their federal brethren with a social conservatism apparently calculated to out-flank Pat Buchanan for the hearts and minds of voters. (In other words, it’s just like Huey Long, albeit 70 years later.)

Jane may have been inspired by this Daily Kos piece (which laughably describes the Democrats as “the party of personal liberty” — apparently, the only difference between me and Cynthia McKinney in Kos’s mind is that I like the NRA), or perhaps this Samizdata rebuttal, which includes in part this sensible summation of American politics circa 2003 (or, for that matter, circa 1938):

What we have here is a fundamental failure to understand that what separates Republicans and Democrats is mostly a matter of policies within a largely shared meta-context (the framework within which one sees the world)… that is to say the Elephants and Donkeys both pretty much agree on the fact the state exist to 'do stuff' beyond keeping the barbarians from the gate and discouraging riots. The language and emphasis may be slightly different (forms of educational conscription with the tagline "No child left behind"… media control legislation described as "Fairness"… etc.), but the congress exist to do much the same sort of thing for both parties, just that whoever is their favoured group should have their snouts deeper in the trough.

Yet almost everything the Dems or Republicans do, beyond a narrow range of legitimate functions that can be counted on the fingers of one hand, are regarded as grievous abridgements of 'personal liberty issues' by almost all libertarians. That Democrats like Daily Kos cannot see that it is at the level of axioms and meta-context that libertarians disagree with them, not mere policies is astonishing. Sure, the absurdly named 'Patriot Act' is a monstrous abridgement of civil liberty, but the idea that this Republican law should make the Democrats more attractive to libertarians indicates just how little understanding there is of what makes libertarians think the way they do.

Alec Saunders has a roundup of links about a purported effort to increase the number of nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal (based on a story in the Australian).

Far be it from me to speak on administration policy. However, the Los Angeles Times report (that Alec also links to) almost buries another far more plausible explanation:

Energy Department officials vehemently denied that they are actually producing nuclear weapons and said they need the capability of producing plutonium parts to ensure the reliability of the existing stockpile of U.S. weapons, which is aging and may need new components.

By the time the new production facility is online—in 15 years—it is quite possible that considerable portions of the current nuclear deterrent force will be over 60 years old. Unlike Alec, I think it would be irresponsible for the government to have nuclear weapons that simply don’t work (or, worse, could accidentally detonate due to aging components), and I don’t think complete disarmament is a realistic alternative, particularly with both China and North Korea developing their arsenals and the likelihood of more nations going nuclear in the coming decade.

James Joyner at Outside the Beltway kindly dismantles the latest ONDCP waste of taxpayer’s money, which I too witnessed while watching Special Report with Brit Hume (I TiVo it daily, mostly to watch the panel). Now the Drug Czar’s running ads that explicitly lobby for Congress not to change the drug laws using tax money. If a non-profit tried this crap, they’d have their tax exemption revoked faster than their head would spin. Truly disgusting.

Glenn Reynolds points to a post at WizBang that suggests perennial cable news also-ran MSNBC is moving to the right in a quest for ratings.

As perhaps the only American to have watched MSNBC regularly for the past few weeks (and not just to gaze into the eyes of Chris Jansing, mind you), I have to say that they’ve found a fairly winning formula of late—regular news updates every 15 minutes, coupled with decent analysis and good use of NBC’s newsgathering resources, without all the annoying sound effects that accompany Fox News’s coverage (which are downright comical when listening to the audio feed on XM). This despite the following liabilities:

1. Neither Buchanan nor Press represent any mainstream political movement in the United States (this also applies to CNN’s Bob Novak fetish).

2. Matthews is just plain annoying. I find his politics enigmatic at best.

3. Scarborough is sort of a lame ripoff of O’Reilly (he even does the “talking points” thing O’Reilly does) crossed with Fox’s weekend Kaisch show; the upside is he isn’t as annoying as O’Reilly.

On the other hand, they actually have some ethnic diversity (although my mom took some convincing that Lester Holt is black), unlike Fox’s Aryan Brotherhood approach to newscasting, and you actually get the sense that they take news seriously. (By contrast, Brit Hume and Tony Snow are the only two personalities on FNC that actually seem to act like they’re involved in a newscast. Compare that to John Gibson and Shepard Smith, who behave more like overexcited puppies than newscasters.)

Are they ripping off the Fox formula? To an extent; MSNBC feels like the “kinder, gentler” FNC in a lot of ways. And the news-watching audience is older, wealthier, and skews more male than the population at large—all conservative demographics—so it makes sense to go after that audience, especially if you can attract an audience that might agree with FNC’s ideology but dislike the Fox “attitude” approach to news.

Radley Balko’s latest FoxNews.com column celebrates a group that will make you shelve your lawyer jokes forever: Washington’s libertarian law firm, the Institute for Justice. If you’re not familiar with them, just think of IJ as our answer to the ACLU. I suspect by the time I’m old and grey, IJ will have done more to expand personal freedom and individual rights than any other organization in American history.

Radley sums it up best: “These guys are right on every issue, and deserve a little sunlight.”

James Joyner at Inside the Beltway (and possible closeted roadgeek, judging from his header graphic) links to Bill Quick’s discussion of some recent recess appointments. Bill notes the direction the screaming is coming from has shifted with the partisanship of the head of the executive branch, and James thinks the recess appointment power has outlived its usefulness:

The recess appointment power is one whose purpose has long since passed into history. In the early days of the Republic, Congress adjourned for months at a time. It was inordinately hot in DC in the summertime in the days before AC, for one. For another, the Federal government didn’t have all that much to do. Of course, all that’s changed now.

Now, granted, the Senate is abusing its constitutional authority by filibustering nominees and otherwise stalling the process. So, in that sense, it balances out. But it doesn’t make it right.

I pretty much agree with that assessment. I’d have to check out a copy of Unorthodox Lawmaking by Barbara Sinclair—a must-read if you’re interested in the contemporary legislative process—but I’m pretty sure that the incidence of filibusters is increasing of late; at some point in the not-too-distant future, I’d expect a rule change to either narrow the scope of what can be filibustered or to limit the duration of a filibuster, but that largely depends on the majority leader’s willingness to force the issue by requiring “real” filibusters rather than the costless “virtual” filibusters that take place now. Make the senators sleep on cots in the cloakroom for a few nights—or not sleep at all—and I suspect they’ll decide to sharply curtail the filibuster rule in short order.

By the way (as part of my endless quest to make this blog vaguely pedagogical), the recess appointment power is buried in Article II, Section 2, Paragraph 3 of the Constitution:

The President shall have the power to fill up all vacancies that may happen during the recess of the Senate, by granting commissions, which shall expire at the end of their next session.

Just in case you were wondering…

Kevin “CalPundit” Drum, at his spiffy new Movable Type digs (this ought to be a new trademark, a correlate to “Blogger Permalinks Aren’t Working” and “Read the Whole Thing”), favorably discusses Dick Gephardt’s almost-but-not-quite-Hillarycare plan. The nicest thing I’ll say about it is that at least it isn’t single-payer.

Universal healthcare is the lefty nirvana that won’t die, for some odd reason, even though it has no natural constituency. The dirty little secret in the health insurance debate is that most people who don’t have it are young, not poor, and healthy, and hence don’t need it. What universal healthcare is fundamentally about is dragging these people into the risk pool to further subsidize the healthcare of the old and chronically ill. Everyone gets to sleep better at night knowing we’ve cut per capita expenses on healthcare while ignoring the fact that we’ve added 30 million new payees who didn’t need to be in the system in the first place. (The more I write about it, the more I realize that this is lefty nirvana: find people to subsidize something you want, and pretend they’re getting something out of it too.)

What would I do instead? Give people access to low-cost catastrophic insurance coverage (with a high deductable) and a dollar-for-dollar AGI deduction for routine medical care and out-of-pocket expenses. Not quite as sexy, but it has the advantages of not creating perverse incentives to get higher tax credits (“we’ll just reincorporate in Delaware to get the full 100% credit”) and placing more pricing pressure in the hands of health care consumers, rather than oligopolistic HMOs and insurance companies.

One problem the left has faced in trying to prevent some of the excesses of the Ashcroft-led assault on civil liberties is their inability to get the instinctive libertarians, including libertarian-leaning Republicans, on their side. Part of the issue may be rhetorical: by framing the issue as a problem with Ashcroft, many on the right will instinctively react to it as partisan bickering rather than a serious issue that needs to be addressed; this is hardly helped by the perception that objections to Ashcroft’s policies are played up for fundraising efforts by the ACLU and other left-wing interest groups. Part of the issue may be a failure of many in the left to take seriously libertarian claims that they have a distinctly different view of the role of the state than conservatives, and thus are dismissive of the left’s ability to gain allies.

So it’s somewhat heartening to see the folks at TalkLeft talking about building coalitions with politicans and citizens outside the traditional left to defeat “Son of PATRIOT” and other Ashcroftian idiocies—and, as Glenn Reynolds points out, Ashcroft’s idiocies have plenty of willing allies on the “left” too, including Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer. It’s clear that civil liberties are a good fund-raising issue for the left, but Democrats in Congress mostly aren’t sticking their necks out for them—if they were, they’d be filibustering the RAVE act being inserted into the AMBER Alert bill in addition to a couple of relatively minor judicial nominees.

If the policies are going to be fixed, it’s going to require a full-court press, not just from the left but also from the people on the right who are more likely to be listened to by a Republican administration. That means building long-term, cross-party coalitions that care about these issues that transcend the historically “left” and “right” interest groups in Washington and can build a real pro-civil liberties caucus in Congress that isn’t hostage to a particular party.

Charles Murtaugh makes much the same point today (22 April), far more eloquently than I did:

Too often, liberal bloggers dismiss the libertarians as sleeper GOP activists, but I continue to be impressed by how much common ground there is between liberal and libertarian critics of the Bush administration's excesses. It's a shame that so many liberals allow tax cuts and tort reform to separate them from potential allies—conservatives, it's worth noting, don't let disagreements about abortion and drugs deter them from cautiously embracing the libertarians.

The blog.lordsutch.com Word of the Day: logrolling. Liberals might want to try it sometime…

The Baseball Crank pithily sums up what’s wrong with everyone’s favorite members of the left fringe of the Blogosphere. (By the way, I personally recommend Matthew Yglesias or CalPundit if you want to read liberals who aren’t divorced from reality.)

It’s amazing that Meryl Yourish would get Atrios and Hesiod confused, no?

Until this weekend, I didn’t know who Barbara Cubin was. Now I do. This is the best they could do in Cheney’s former seat?

More, of course, at your one-stop shop for Republican shoe-eating coverage. There seems to be some debate as to whether she was just making a poorly-thought-out analogy or something worse.

Mark Kleiman, rightly taking to task an effort to strengthen the already-draconian federal sentencing “guidelines,” asks:

Note to my libertarian friends: WHEN ARE YOU GUYS GOING TO WISE UP AND STOP VOTING REPUBLICAN?

Ironically, he gives the answer earlier in his own post:

This is truly horrible public policy, but if it can’t be killed quietly in conference I’m not sure I’d want the Democrats to self-immolate over it.

If the Democrats aren’t willing to have the testicular fortitude to stand up for their alleged social liberalism, why should anyone who cares about social liberalism vote for them? We had eight years of Bill Clinton, during which I dare say he advanced the frontiers of personal liberty exactly none; he went along with the War on Drugs, he frequently jumped at the opportunity to portray himself as “tough on crime,” and he acquiesced in the continuing “federalize everything” drive that the alleged states-rights Republicans and freedom-loving Democrats in Congress led. The most generous thing anyone can say about personal freedom during the Clinton administration under Janet Reno is that at least it wasn’t as bad as John Ashcroft, and it’d be a stretch even to say that with a straight face.

In short, Mark thinks Democrats need to choose their battles—but I’m not sure they’ve chosen one yet.

David Adesnik at OxBlog notes that Josh Marshall is sticking up for John Kerry’s inane statement calling for “regime change” at home, as well as abroad. (However, Adesnik’s a bit more surprised than he should be at this development, given Marshall’s partisan credentials.) For those who’ve been under a rock or hung over for the last few days, Kerry said:

What we need now is not just a regime change in Saddam Hussein [sic] and Iraq, but we need a regime change in the United States.

Now, as a political scientist, “regime change” has a fairly specific meaning: the change from one system of governance to another. For example, France had a regime change when the Fourth Republic became the Fifth in 1957, while Alberto Fujimori transmuted Peru’s democracy into a dictatorship after his “self-coup” in 1992. In normal political discourse, the government of a democracy isn’t referred to as a “regime,” although one might refer to a particularly centralized administration as a “regime” to make a political point (e.g. the “Blair regime” might be assailed by critics; however, a neutral observer would call it the “Blair government” or “Blair cabinet” instead). Webster’s Unabridged (1913) defines a regime (which still had its accent at that time, as it was imported from French) as:

Mode or system of rule or management; character of government, or of the prevailing social system.

By most definitions of “regime,” Kerry would be calling not just for the replacement of the executive, but of the entire government—a government in which he serves as a senator, and in which he has a great deal more influence than the man on the street. It’s the sort of rhetoric one would expect from a commenter at a popular lefty blog, a discontented minor foreign politician, or perhaps on a sign at an anti-war protest, rather than from a serious presidential candidate. And while it may be a cute piece of rhetoric for pandering to the Democrat base now in the nomination chase, it won’t be much help if Kerry wins the nomination, because you can bet it’ll be the centerpiece of a Bush-Cheney ad campaign in late 2004.

Pieter at Peaktalk has posted a brief overview of the political career of Pim Fortuyn, the Dutch conservative-libertarian politician who was gunned down by an animal rights extremist in 2002. No excerpts; go Read The Whole Thing™.

Radley Balko today discusses campaign finance “reform”, pointing out that it’s more about incumbent protection than restoring faith in the political process. I couldn’t agree with him more.

Michele at A Small Victory quite rightly takes to task those that make an analogy between our treatment of the Gitmo detainees from Afghanistan to Hussein’s treatment of allied POWs. However, it does raise the question: what’s the long-term plan for the Afghan prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay? Some have apparently been released recently, but many others still remain in custody, apparently indefinitely.

Obviously the idea is that eventually they’ll be put in front of some sort of tribunal, but there have been no public indications of when these tribunals will come about, nor are there any suggestions of handing them over to the new Afghan authorities for trial on charges there. It seems to me that the administration has, at the very least, dropped the ball on communicating what it plans to do to resolve the situation of the detainees.

Conrad and Peaktalk ask the same question that I'd been wondering about: what happened to Chris Patten? The only conclusion I can reach is that spending too much time in Brussels has turned him into a Eurocrat drone. As Peaktalk reminds us, Patten once was relatively clueful:

There was a time when I deeply admired Chris Patten. That was when he was still Governor of Hong Kong. I met him a few times when I lived in Hong Kong, the last time when I picked up a few signed copies of his marvelous book “East and West”. You see, Patten was one of the people who promoted free markets and democracy as he so firmly believed in the theory that markets can flourish only in free societies where the rule of law guarantees freedom. That is why he set out to make some drastic changes in Hong Kong’s electoral process while that was still possible before the territory was handed back to China in 1997. He antagonized almost everyone at the time, the Hong Kong and international business community (who were afraid of missing out on deals with China), Hong Kong politicians (afraid of their new masters) and a variety of others who felt the need to be gentle with Beijing. Patten was at the time a lonely crusader supported by only a few. It was brave, it made sense and it was the right thing to do.

Meanwhile, Iain Murray thinks Patten is now eminently qualified to lead Oxford University. If so, let's hope they deprogram him when he crosses the Channel.

Colby Cosh considers the same question I considered here: is a transition to full-blown liberal democracy likely to produce a stable regime. He concludes:

If it takes an army to protect my most basic liberties, I'm comfortable with that, irrespective of what the rabble thinks. Would majoritarian democracy, free of army constraints, be the best thing for Turkey? Don't ask me: I'm not a Turk. I don't think there's much question about whether it would be good for Europe (no) or for international order generally (nope).

In a more general vein, Daniel Drezner discusses “illiberal democracy” worldwide, talking about The Economist's review of Fareed Zakaria's The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad.

I can't add much to either account, although I will say that generally upholding the rule of law is much more important to preserving liberty than the mechanisms of democracy. One of the sure signs of erosion of liberty in Hong Kong has been the gradual increase in arbitrary meddling from Beijing, while the undemocratic nature of the SAR government has had relatively little to do with it (for even in a democratic Hong Kong, there would still be plenty of levers for Communist Party meddling from outside the SAR).

Eric Muller apparently received a phone call from Rep. Howard Coble (R-N.C.) this morning to discuss Rep. Coble's rather questionable remarks on Japanese internment.

While Muller comes away fairly impressed with Coble as a person, he still has some concerns:

It was also clear to me, though, that Mr. Coble does not yet appreciate that he was mistaken when he said that Japanese Americans were placed in camps for their own protection. He explained during our discussion that he'd heard from people, including Japanese Americans alive at the time of Pearl Harbor, who reported to him that Japanese Americans felt unsafe on the streets. From this information he's received, he concludes (and I jotted these words down) that "in some instances, Japanese Americans were beneficiaries of the internment." "There were some," he reiterated, "who became beneficiaries by being in the camps."

In some ways, this strikes me much as the Trent Lott Syndrome; it's not so much that Coble said something offensive, it's that he doesn't understand why what he said was offensive.

Even accepting Coble's premises — if the government's policy been justified as “protective custody” and a large percentage of Japanese Americans approved of it as protective custody — throwing the rest of them in camps hardly seems reasonable, fair, or just. And bearing in mind the historical record — that Japanese Americans had their property stolen, that internment had nothing to do with protecting them, and that they were arbitrarily imprisoned — his views seem remarkably callous and misinformed.

Then again, I'm not sure Coble's behavior is on the order of Lott's. But it does call for some repudiation; perhaps the House can do a bulk censure of him, Jim McDermott, and Marcy Kaptur to clear up the past few months' books, at least.

Link via Eugene Volokh.

One of the pleasures of the Blogosphere is Howard Bashman's “How Appealing,” a weblog that discusses issues relating to appelate courts. His summary of today's four U.S. Supreme Court decisions is a classic; here's a sample:

Gary Ewing had been convicted of ten previous criminal offenses before he committed the crime that gave rise to yesterday's decision in Ewing v. California, No. 01-6978 (U.S. Mar. 5, 2003). Had each of those offenses counted as a strike, in baseball he would have had more than three outs and his side would have been retired. But four of those offenses did count as "serious" or "violent" felonies, subjecting Ewing to a twenty-five years to life sentence for his next felony conviction.

Perhaps aware of that fact, and undoubtedly growing tired of the life of crime, Ewing apparently decided to try his luck as a professional golfer. Successful golfers earn lots of money and don't have to resort to petty thievery just to stay afloat. Ewing's plan, however, had a minor hitch that revealed itself when he was apprehended while attempting to limp away from a golf pro shop with three golf clubs stuffed down his pant leg. As they say in the biz, "Strike Three."

And where else would you find out about both the use of kitty litter in the railroad industry and the mysterious properties of crystal formation in the same day?

Lexington Green of the Chicago Boyz has dug up an interesting Walter Mead piece on French anti-Americanism and its historical roots; it may help U.S. readers understand what's going on in the minds of the French intellectual elite. Meanwhile, I think Dan Drezner's update to his earlier “Dark Day” post is on-target:

I strongly suspect that France has grossly miscalculated the administration's willingness to act regardless of what transpires at the Security Council this week.

Chirac and de Villepin think U.S. foreign policy is not that different from that of the French. In that, they have indeed “grossly miscalculated.”

By the way, $20 says that the increasingly batty Helen Thomas hasn't been credentialed for tonight's primetime press conference.

Daniel Drezner describes today as a depressing day for U.S. foreign policy, an assessment I largely agree with, even if it may be a necessary day for our foreign policy — in the sense I'm not all that sure that there's much that could have been done differently*, short of calling the whole thing off. As Dan says:

The U.S. has to deal with the resentment that comes with being the global hegemon, China, Germany, France and Russia acting like spoiled teenage brats, and a lot of trouble spots in the globe. The Bush administration has not been dealt the best of diplomatic hands. That said, today is one of those days when I think the administration could be husbanding its valuable cards a little better.

In a better world, we could do right by the Mexicans, but 9/11 changed the domestic calculus there (erroneously, in my opinion — Mexican immigrants are no more a threat to America's way of life than Canadians are). In a better world, China and South Korea would be stepping up to the plate to deal with North Korea, the latter's bluster aside. On the other hand, American global hegemony is the only viable global order for the forseeable future — and the actions of France and Germany in this crisis, much to their eventual dismay, will perpetuate that hegemony (a hegemony that most Americans would just as soon have no part in leading, by the way) by further demonstrating to the world that the European Union's alleged leaders do not take their responsibilities toward global security seriously.

* We're firmly in the could have been done stage; what we're witnessing now is very much the calm before the gathering storm.

Bill Hobbs links to this fascinating piece by Naval War College professor Thomas Barnett. Rather than selectively blockquote, I'll just recommend that you Read The Whole Thing™.

The more I read about John Ashcroft, the less I like the guy (not that he started on a very high plateau in the first place in my book...). Gary Farber and Kevin Drum have the latest.

And then there's Ashcroft's bong obsession (via InstaPundit).

Something's been bothering me for a while, but it took two posts in Steven Den Beste's blog (U.S.S. Clueless) and Bill Whittle's latest (“Confidence”) to crystalize it all.

The first post of Steven's was his response to a correspondent named Dev. Dev wrote:

England, Ireland, France, Russia, Spain, Italy, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, the Lebanon, most of Africa, much of Asia, Australia, and many other countries in the world have suffered at the hands of fundamentalist terrorism for most of the last century. It is quite hideous to see the response of America to one attack. To be quite honest it frightens the hell out of me. I have lived in England for 2/3 of my life and in that time have experienced terrorism first hand on three occasions. I am only 29. I realise that I am lucky compared to those in countries where it is a way of life. Yet I do not think that the whole barrel of apples should be thrown overboard for the sake of a few rotten apples.

Steven's second post was his commentary on D-Squared Digest's attack on him for having the gall to feel victimized by 9/11. Notably, both correspondents are British.

As Dev says, Britain has suffered its fair share of terrorism, most notably in Northern Ireland (but also notably in the Lockerbie tragedy, the work of Libyan agents), as have other European countries. But comparatively speaking, most European terror has been either political or communal in nature; the participants in the Irish “Troubles” (both the IRA and its offshoots, and the Unionist paramilitaries of the pro-British community) targeted political and communal targets about equally, while the Basque ETA and most of the Communist-inspired domestic insurgents in other countries largely went after political targets. The closest parallels to the terror visited on the U.S. in September 2001 is to the Palestinian attacks on Israeli noncombatants or the IRA's targeting of members of the royal family and civilians on the British mainland in the 1970s — a strategy that ultimately was abandoned.

Yet the British example is instructive. Between July 1969 and December 2001, just over 3500 people were killed as a result of the conflict over Northern Ireland, according to Malcolm Sutton (also see this table that breaks the deaths down by year and status). Much is made of the relative size of the death toll in Northern Ireland, but the fact remains that about as many people died in three hours on 11 September 2001 as died in three decades of conflict over the Emerald Isle.

The political result of terror in Britain is also instructive. The ongoing Troubles led to Britain's passage of anti-civil libertarian laws, such as the Prevention of Terrorism Act and its successors (including the Terrorism Act 2000), that make the PATRIOT Act look positively enlightened by comparison. London is blanketed by surveillance cameras; some estimate that the city has over 150,000 of them. Britons no longer bat an eye at truly Orwellian imagery in the streets. All largely in response to — or justified by — terrorism.

D-Squared and Des don't understand America's response because the only responses they've ever seen to terror are restriction of liberty at home (the British response) or sheer capitulation (the Franco-German response; ask your favorite Frenchman about Algeria some time). They didn't understand why America retaliated against the Berlin nightclub bombing in 1986, or why the Israelis retaliate against bombings by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, because their societies are cowed by terror — to use the banal phrase, beaten to death post 9/11 here, in Europe the “terrorists have won.” Every governmental response, from getting rid of the trash cans at train stations to blanketing the streets with surveillance cameras to having jackbooted paramilitary police with submachine guns on patrol at airports, was as much a victory for the terrorists as the Achille Lauro, Enniskillen, Lockerbie, or Munich.

What Europeans don't understand about America is that we refuse to accept that solution. America's attitude may be best summed up in an unlikely source, James Madison's Federalist 10:

Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires. But it could not be less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency.

To paraphrase Madison, like faction, terror too is nourished by liberty. Give up enough of our liberty and perhaps terror can be extinguished. But how much is “enough”? Terrorism persists in some of the most illiberal societies in the world, such as China. More to the point, without our liberty, what is the point of preventing terror? If we can't live our lives in freedom, what value is there to life itself?

The left calls on America to recognize the so-called “root causes” of terror. Perhaps there are root causes, but if so they are hardly the shiboleths of the left; Kahlid Shaikh Mohammed doesn't care if the United States ratifies Kyoto or the International Criminal Court treaty, and neither topic has ever come up in the ravings of Osama bin Laden. Rather, the root causes are a diseased credo dressed up as religion that incites its followers to murder innocents and the failure of contemporary Arab states to provide their populations with any real hope for the future. If we are to defeat terror, we shall have to address both of these “root causes,” and the toppling of Saddam Hussein and the establishment of a truly functional Arab state in the Middle East will have far more effect on them than either the diplomatic flummery of the Franco-German axis or cowering behind yet another layer of surveillance and neo-Securitate.

I'm with Dan Drezner on this one; his resignation letter read more like a string of quotes from Sen. Diane Feinstein's talking points than it did as a coherent philosophical statement.

In the morning: why the Europeans don't understand America's reaction to terror, and why it really doesn't matter. Before I write it, though, I have to get some sleep.

Speaking of sleep, I won't be losing any over what's probably happening to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and his al-Qaeda buddies (via Michele, who's collecting suggestions on what to do with him). This is the same bozo who admitted in an al-Jazeera interview in 2002 that he masterminded 9/11, so I think it's pretty safe to say he's not going to ever meet a U.S. executioner — if he ever sees a U.S. trial, he won't last a week past sentencing. I say we just put him in the exercise yard at Rikers Island and tell the guards to take a long lunch break.