Oh, There He Is Over There!

Sigh....

In yet another example of ego triumphing over prudence, I have accepted a kind invitation from Jason Kuznicki to join him and his colleagues over at Positive Liberty. Accordingly, I expect to post one or two pieces a week there until either (1) I find even that schedule too demanding or (2) more likely, my newfound colleagues decide to un-invite me.

In any case, gluttons for punishment my loyal readers -- rumored to number well into the low double digits -- are similarly invited to join us.

... or would Jason vs. Freddie be more apt?

Let's take a break from consideration of Emperor George's sweeping new antepenultimate claim of Executive Privilege. (The penultimate claim will be that even if Bush were impeached and convicted, actual ouster from the White House would require executive branch personnel whom, as a matter of Executive Privilege, the President can order to disregard the impeachment. The ultimate claim will be indefinite suspension of elections, "lest the terrorists win.") Let's look instead at something slightly less trivial than fired U.S. Attorneys like, oh, say, the war in Iraq.

Admittedly, taking sides in a p*ssing contest between the Bush Administration and Hillary Rodham Clinton is a bit like taking sides in Alien vs. Predator. To quote the movie's tag line: Whoever wins... We lose. Still, the contratemp between the Department of Defense and Hillary in her occasional capacity as a U.S. senator is worth a quick look. The story thus far is that Clinton wrote to Defense Secretary Robert Gates requesting information regarding current DoD contingency plans for troop withdrawal from Iraq or, if such plans did not exist, an explanation why.

Now, let's not kid ourselves, boys and girls. The letter was almost certain a political ploy from the start. Clinton knows that the Defense Department has contingency plans tucked away somewhere for just about every scenario imaginable probably including invasion by Vatican City. (That's not to say such plans have been approved at any high level, but only that they exist.) She also knows full well how Congress goes about seeking and securing information from the Defense Department and therefore how to make a 'request' designed to be rebuked, however politely and respectfully.

Be that as it may, all hell broke loose when recess appointee Eric S. Edelman, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, sent Clinton a reply, the verbatim second page of which (as opposed to the snippets commonly excerpted by the press and blogosphere) is as follows:

Although we share our commanders' belief in ours and the Iraqi Security Forces' ability to establish security in Baghdad, this is only a precondition for further political and economic progress, not a guarantee of it. Premature and public discussion of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq reinforces enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon its allies in Iraq, much as we are perceived to have done in Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia. Such talk understandably unnerves the very same Iraqi allies we are asking to assume enormous personal risks in order to achieve compromises on national reconciliation, amending the Iraqi constitution, and other contentious issues. Fear of a precipitate U.S. withdrawal also exacerbates sectarian trends in Iraqi politics as sectarian factions become more concerned with achieving short-term tactical advantages rather than reaching the long-term agreements necessary for a stable and secure Iraq.

I assure you, however, that as with other plans, we are always evaluating and planning for possible contingencies. As you know, it is long-standing departmental policy that operational plans, including contingency plans, are not released outside of the department.

I appreciate your interest in our mission in Iraq and would be happy to answer any further questions.

Courtesy of TPM Cafe, here is Sen. Clinton's reply:

July 19, 2007

The Honorable Robert M. Gates
Secretary of Defense
The United States Department of Defense
The Pentagon
Suite 319
Washington, D.C. 20301

Dear Mr. Secretary:

On May 22, 2007, I wrote to you to request that you provide the appropriate oversight committees in Congress – including the Senate Armed Services Committee – with briefings on what current contingency plans exist for the future withdrawal of United States forces from Iraq. Alternatively, if no such plans exist, I asked for an explanation for the decision not to engage in such planning.

I am in receipt of a letter from Eric Edelman, the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy who wrote that he was responding on your behalf. Under Secretary Edelman's response did not address the issues raised in my letter and instead made spurious arguments to avoid addressing contingency planning for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq.

As I noted in my original letter, "the seeds of many problems that continue to plague our troops and mission in Iraq were planted in the failure to adequately plan for the conflict and properly equip our men and women in uniform. Congress must be sure that we are prepared to withdraw our forces without any unnecessary danger."

Rather than offer to brief the congressional oversight committees on this critical issue, Under Secretary Edelman – writing on your behalf – instead claims that congressional oversight emboldens our enemies. Under Secretary Edelman has his priorities backward. Open and honest debate and congressional oversight strengthens our nation and supports our military. His suggestion to the contrary is outrageous and dangerous. Indeed, you acknowledged the importance of Congress in our Iraq policy at a hearing before the House Armed Services Committee in March, when you stated, "I believe that the debate here on the Hill and the issues that have been raised have been helpful in bringing pressure to bear on the Maliki government and on the Iraqis in knowing that there is a very real limit to American patience in this entire enterprise."

Redeploying out of Iraq will be difficult and requires careful planning. I continue to call on the Bush Administration to immediately provide a redeployment strategy that will keep our brave men and women safe as they leave Iraq – instead of adhering to a political strategy to attack those who rightfully question their competence and preparedness after years of mistakes and misjudgments.

Other members of this Administration have not engaged in political attacks when the prospect of withdrawal planning has been raised. At the June 7 Armed Services Committee confirmation hearing on Lieutenant General Douglas Lute, I asked General Lute "what level of planning has taken place" and "whether the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs have been briefed about the level of planning." I also asked General Lute to determine "what kind of timeline would exist if a decision for either military or political reasons were taken to begin withdrawal" and if he considered this kind of planning to be part of his responsibilities.

General Lute replied, "Thank you Senator. I do think such an adaptation, if the conditions on the ground call for it, will be part of this position."

I renew my request for a briefing, classified if necessary, on current plans for the future withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq or an explanation for the decision not to engage in such planning. I also renew my concern that our troops will be placed in unnecessary danger if the Bush Administration fails to plan for the withdrawal of U.S. Forces. Finally, I request that you describe whether Under Secretary Edelman's letter accurately characterizes your views as Secretary of Defense.

I would appreciate the courtesy of a prompt response directly from you. Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely yours,
Hillary Rodham Clinton

Okay, it is a fair reading of Edelman's letter that all public discussion of troop withdrawal is harmful to what he blithely calls "our mission in Iraq," but it is at least equally fair to read the entire letter as the Department of Defense, itself, declining to engage in such public discussion for fear of the consequences. Moreover, only an idiot could deny any plausibility to the concerns Edelman raises. That's certainly not to say that the American people or Congress shouldn't discuss withdrawal; but a blanket denial or disregard for those concerns is, from a strategic and tactical point of view, simply insane.

I don't have access to Clinton's original request and it seems to me impossible to pick a side in this dust up without that verbatim request. Given the administration's track record to date, the outrageous conclusions Clinton reads from the letter can't be dismissed out of hand. Given Clinton's ambitions and known political ruthlessness, however, one cannot dismiss out of hand that her original request wasn't specifically designed to generate controversy for political mileage, either.

It does seem likely to me, however, that there is more spin than substance on both sides here and that Sen. Clinton's personal outrage should be taken with at least a grain or two of suspicion.

What the Hell? This Blog is "Rated R"?

With a hat tip to Lance over at A Second Hand Conjecture, it turns out that my little blog thingie here is "Rated R" according to a clever marketing ploy by an online dating site. The site explains, in my case:

This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words:

* hell (6x)
* crack (4x)
* cocaine (3x)
* suicide (2x)
* shoot (1x)

So, what they're doing is crawling or spidering or whatever the hip web term is for it over a site, finding instances of certain words and cranking out a rating.

That is, I am sure, a small part of how the MPAA goes about its film rating business, but knowing the film industry (even now that Jack Valenti is dead), I'm betting the MPAA comes after the site for trademark infringement. Why? Here's a picture of a "widget" they offered me:



Them movie industry boys are serious about intellectual property rights, and this dating service site didn't even have the sense to remove the MPAA logo from the picture?

Two other points. First, if Live Free or Die Hard is any indication at all, these guys have set the bar way too low for an R rating and I deserve no worse than a PG-13.

Second, as porn sites found it useful to "voluntarily" use or cooperate with filter services like Net Nanny and so forth, I sadly predict it's only a matter of time before all internet web sites do have some sort of rating category assigned to them. (I say this, by the way, as a father of primary school children who have access to the internet.) Slowly, perhaps, but surely nonetheless, the wild, wild west days of the internet are coming to a close. God forbid, after all, that some sixteen year old should land at this site and read words like "hell" and "shoot."

Review: A Tragic Legacy by Glenn Greenwald

A Tragic Legacy: How A Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency by Glenn Greenwald. Crown, 320 pp.

There is an oratorical tone to Glenn Greenwald’s A Tragic Legacy, the rhythms and word choices of a trial lawyer making his case to the jury from opening statement to presentation of the evidence to closing statement. The defendant here, George W. Bush, is charged with a failed administration both proximately and primarily caused by his unbending Manichean world view, more about which in a moment.

Greenwald was an appellate attorney before turning author by way of political blogger, and appellate briefs do not admit the rhetorical flourishes of a trial; but it is the rare lawyer of any sort who does not at least fanaticize himself in command of the courtroom, mesmerizing the rapt jury. (The real aim of law school, after all, is to turn natural born anal retentives into oral aggressives and vice versa. Learning the law comes later.) In any case, A Tragic Legacy reads neither like the quiet work of a scholar nor the brisk, adjective starved prose of a professional journalist but, well, like the work of a lawyer who writes more clearly and interestingly than the average lawyer.

Okay, so there is a bit of damning with faint praise in that last, but for those who enjoy current events / political analysis books Greenwald's contribution is at least as worthy as the vast majority of the rest and better than more than a few I've suffered through in recent years. It needs to be said, however, that such books are not my cup of tea, lest the reader here take my somewhat tepid endorsement as more negative than intended. Disclaimer done, back to the book.

Manichaeism is the belief that the world is a battleground between roughly equal forces of Good and Evil, between the two of which there is no ground for compromise. A third century Persian religion, Manichaeism’s influences on Christianity were quickly deemed heretical (Satan may indeed exist but is surely no equal to God in orthodox Christian theology), but it is not the doctrinal Manichaeism that Greenwald accuses Bush of so much as the Manichaeism mind-set. As far as it goes, it strikes me as a fair charge. The question occurs, however, whether Greenwald required over three hundred pages to make his case or whether, more to the point, the reader requires plowing through same to be convinced that Bush’s simplistic moral absolutism has led to disastrous effect.

Here, striped of its quasi-theological trappings and with a few liberties of my own taken along the way, is a far shorter version of Greenwald’s thesis: Moral ambiguity and nuance are not George W. Bush’s strong suits. Raised in privilege, Bush has never had to suffer the consequences of his bad decisions nor even to abide, let alone compromise with those who were disloyal or who even merely disagreed with him. His conversion at age 40 to evangelical Christianity fitted him out not so much with a moral as with a moralistic lens processing the world in black and white, good and evil terms that were and still are largely indifferent to such trivialities as political theory or the rule of law. The enormity of 9/11 gave Bush both tremendous political popularity and thus political power but, more importantly, it became his blindingly bright focal point in the battle between good and evil with, of course, the Islamist terrorists on the side of evil and America and himself on the side of good. Public opinion, now that it has turned against him, be damned – Bush sees himself on God’s side and will not waiver in fighting the good fight.

Greenwald’s secondary agenda is a critique and criticism of contemporary conservatism and especially of what, I think over-broadly, he includes under the rubric of neoconservatism. Such conservatives (neo- or not) both cheered on and, among Bush’s inner circle of advisors, manipulated his policy and decision making at first. Now, however, the pundits, at least, have increasingly abandoned Bush rather like, to keep the religious metaphor going, Peter repeatedly denied Christ once things got ugly.

There is some truth to this, too, though I think rather less than Greenwald would have us believe. To cite, say, National Review’s Rich Lowery endorsing Bush for a second term as evidence of conservatives' belief in Bush’s conservative bona fides is a bit of a stretch. Political rhetoric is political rhetoric, and Bush was the better choice for conservatives in 2004, notwithstanding his manifold sins and transgressions against conservativism in his first term. The lesser of two evils is still the better choice and it would simply be naïve to expect advocacy journalists not to engage in, well, advocacy, especially in the midst of an election.

I don't recall there ever being a time when Bush wasn't the target of serious and often scathing criticism especially from economic / small government conservatives, nor will it do to conflate all conservatives of any sort who ever supported the war in Iraq as members in good standing of the neoconservative movement of the past few decades. Moreover, people do, after all, change their minds, the occasional disingenuousness in that fact which Greenwald accurately notes among some right-wing writers aside.

Indeed, one of the weaker points of the book is Greenwald’s heavy reliance on block quotes from various conservative pundits, both those who have continued to support Bush publicly (whatever they may believe in private) and those who have changed their public views, to make his case. There is a damned if you do, damned if you don’t quality about Greenwald’s take here, not to mention the very short shrift paid to the genuine differences and ongoing arguments inside what might broadly be called the American Right for far longer than the Bush years.

Though he takes some trouble at the onset to distinguish general conservative theory and principles from the actual policies of self-identified conservative office holders, Greenwald takes too little account of the differences between, say, Burkean or social conservatives and Hayekian or economic conservatives, nor do his occasional and arguably gratuitous swipes at Ronald Reagan’s administration take adequate account of the political realities precluding Reagan from dismantling more of the Great Society he inherited.

Speaking of which, Greenwald’s concluding comparison of Bush to Lyndon Johnson is insightful and, up to a point, quite apt. Johnson’s administration will forever be judged through the prism of the Viet Nam war which, unlike Bush, Johnson did not instigate but did significantly escalate. On the domestic front, his economic policies were doomed to failure because they were bad economics, but Johnson also did what no Kennedy could or Nixon would ever have done. This unlikeliest of civil rights champions pushed passage of civil rights legislation through force of will and a political ruthlessness and singlemindedness that would have made Richard Nixon, let alone George W. Bush, blush. That is Johnson’s real and lasting legacy. So what, then, is Bush's?

Greenwald concludes that Bush’s legacy will forever be not only his failed war in Iraq (and perhaps, worse yet, in Iran) with all the damage to constitutional law and America’s standing in the world it has wrought but also his failure, because of his Manichean obsession with terrorism, to accomplish anything on the domestic front beyond the unintended and tattered remains of the conservative movement in America.

Perhaps. Surely, much damage has been done to the American republic in these past six and a half years. As for Bush’s legacy in terms of his historical standing among other presidents, however, who cares?

For the Judeo-Christian theists among us, there is also a recurring theme in the Old Testament of God’s wrath being visited upon his errant people over and over again, nevertheless always sparing a righteous remnant for a new beginning. Theology aside and using that metaphor in purely political terms, especially for those of us who have always opposed the prospect of American Empire, it is at least worth suggesting that America is far better off now than it would have been had Bush’s holy war met with greater success. The Lord or, if you will, the Zeitgeist works in mysterious ways, after all.

Does This Mean Stallone Will Be Banned From Competitive Acting?

"Nothing is over! Nothing!" -- John Rambo

Among the many things Sylvester Stallone and I have in common must be counted a very limited talent for acting, aging flesh and the desire to self-medicate. The last, alas, cost Stallone fines and court costs amounting to around $13,000 after a guilty plea in Australia to possession of 48 vials of the human growth hormone Jintropin and four vials of testosterone.

I, by contrast, only wanted some antibiotic eye drops but ended up instead with a lingering eye infection and several unnecessary trips to an opthamologist.

Stallone, like several other old lions of his generation's action hero stars (notably, Bruce "I see old people" Willis's soon released Take the Blue Pills and Die Hard, or something like that), has been racing the reaper to complete his valedictory outing as Rambo. While his recent Rocky Balboa wasn't nearly as bad as I, in my affected and uncredentialed role of Constant Viewer, expected it to be, there was still something mildly bathetic about the sixty year old Stallone lumbering into the ring for one last round. Well, time and tide and all that.

"I will not be without these. I cannot be without these," Stallone said when discovered with the goods, and I can well understand why. Why the hell should he be without them? If the man is vain enough and deluded enough to want to pump himself with steroids and such to play the heroic lout one more time, I say more power to him. It's his career and his life, fergawdsakes!

And by the way, while Stallone's geriatric action heroics are easy to ridicule, Stallone is a very good screenwriter and director in his genre and the original Rocky easily deserved its Oscars as much as any of Frank Capra's legendary melodramas ever did. It is worth remembering that Stallone became the third person ever to be nominated for both acting and writing in the same year for Rocky, following Chaplin for The Great Dictator (1940) and Orson Welles for Citizen Kane (1941). Call that declining standards, if you will, but that's pretty damned good company. So, also, Bruce Willis turned out to be (or become) a much better actor than his Moonlighting mugging or early John McClane machismo would have led me to believe.

Anyway, enough of this Hollywood hoopla. Let's get back to the real topic which is drugs and me. (Me! It's all about me!) Being both lazy and stupid, I left a pair of extended wear contact lenses in for too long and ended up with an infection in one eye. Now, I admit it might not have been a mere infection. All sorts of things could have been wrong with my left eye, but an infection was by far the most likely problem, it having happened to me before and the prescribed treatment being antibiotic eye drops and refraining from wearing contacts for a while.

As it happened, being lazy and stupid and knowing I was due for an eye exam shortly anyway, I did nothing and, as will more often than not happen, my immune system kicked in, my eye felt better though not entirely well, and I decided to just leave the contacts out and wait until it was time for the regular exam. Now, had I been able to run down to the pharmacy to buy a bottle of antibiotic eye drops in the first place, the infection would have healed faster and that would have been that. Of course, as I said, it might not have been a bacterial infection, in which case the eye drops would have done no good (but no harm, either) and I would have known to seek medical attention at once. But you can't buy antibiotics without a prescription, dagnabit!

I know, I know. Antibiotics abuse is a public health problem, and some people are allergic to some antibiotics and so on and so forth. But if you can buy topical antibiotic creams and soaps and if you can buy tetracycline for tropical fish, ferchristsakes, then you damned well ought to be able to buy antibiotic eye drops without a prescription.

When I finally saw the doctor some weeks later, he noted the still mildly infected area and guess what? He prescribed antibiotic eye drops! Plus, of course, a couple of return visits to check the course of the treatment -- treatment which I could easily have self-administered weeks earlier at far lesser risk to my eye.

Okay, so I'm stupid and lazy and cheap and physician-resistant, as well. But they're my eyes and I don't need or want to be saved from myself. Or, if I do, it still isn't the business of the state to do so. (Who, oh who will save me from the state?) If I want to run the risk of self-prescribing the wrong medication, it's my own lookout. Yeah, I know. Literally, in this case.

Same with Stallone. If it's that bloody important to him to have one last fling as an action hero and it takes controlled substances to permit him to do it, why the hell should Australia or the U.S. or any other state prohibit him from doing so?

Transparency vs. Anonymity on the Internet

In today's Washington Post, former Post reporter and editor Tom Grubisich makes a bad case for greater "transparency" on the internet. It is a bad case because, among other things, Grubisich begins his argument with a false premise, as follows:

These days we want "transparency" in all institutions, even private ones. There's one massive exception -- the Internet. It is, we are told, a giant town hall.

The first sentence, taken literally, is obviously false. I don't want transparency in private institutions, do you? Of course you don't. Your family is a private institution, after all. How much transparency, whatever that means, am I entitled to about your private affairs, institutional or not. Precious little, and rightly so. Mr. Grubisich may want transparency in private institutions, though I seriously doubt it. Perhaps he's just accustomed to writing in the editorial plural. Regardless, the premise is false.

Furthermore, we're told all sorts of things about the internet. Sure, "town hall" is one such metaphor, but metaphors are not to be taken literally. You can't get arrested for speeding on the Information Superhighway, nor do you even need to buckle-up. The internet is a communications medium, similar in some ways to other media, different in others. That it can be used as a sort of public forum doesn't mean that it is sufficiently like a real town meeting or public gathering of any sort to make it reasonable to apply the same rules.

Anyway, Mr. Grubisich's principal complaint is the anonymity of many "hate-mongering" commenters on such websites as, well, as wasingtonpost.com. Grubisich again:

You would think Web sites would want to keep the hate-mongers from taking over, but many sites are unwitting enablers. At washingtonpost.com, editors and producers say they struggle to balance transparency against privacy. Until recently, many of the site's posters identified themselves with anonymous Internet handles -- which were the site's default ID. Now, people must enter a "user ID" that appears with their comments.

Hal Straus, washingtonpost.com's interactivity and communities editor, says the changes "move us in the direction of transparency." But the distinction is not quite a difference, because washingtonpost.com user IDs can be real names or fictional Internet handles. While the site prohibits comments that are libelous, abusive, obscene or otherwise inappropriate, Mr. anticrat424 could still find a well-amplified podium at washingtonpost.com.

The news and opinion site Huffingtonpost.com requires posters to register with their real names but maddeningly assures them that it will "never" use those names.

Well, now. Amused though I am to see the Washington and Huffington Posts thusly compared, a bit of perspective about those nasty anonymous commenters seems in order here.

In the first place, not that many people spend that much time reading that many comments on these or any other websites. Oh, sure, if a reader finds a particular article interesting he might well peruse the reader comments, agreeing with some, disagreeing with others, finding some amusing or insightful and others insulting or disgusting. There are a few popular websites where the readers' comments are at least as interesting and fun to read as the primary article (Reason's Hit & Run strikes me as one example, probably because I frequently comment there), but they are the exception to the rule, at least when it comes to MSM websites like the Post.

Knowing the writer's name would be of little additional value to the average reader at such websites and of no value to the website's owner and operator who can, in any case, delete offensive comments and ban commenters fairly easily. Yes, some internet trolls can get around such bans up to a point, but very few are willing or able to go to the trouble.

In the second place, while there are all sorts of reasons someone may wish to be anonymous on the internet (though some are better, in my opinion, than others), anonymity automatically carries with it a certain penalty in terms of credibility, the only exception being where anonymous commenters build up a reputation, for better or worse, at a particular website over time. In a sense, therefore, market forces are already at play in assigning value to reader comments.

Moreover, Mr. Grubisich's comparison to an actual public meeting is entirely inapt. Internet trolls or, for that matter, "hate-mongers," can't "take over" a website. They can't shout over other commenters and drown them out. Yes, they can collectively flood a site with spam; but that, in fact, rarely happens. In reality, Mr. Grubisich would apparently really rather that the anonymous "haters" have no voice at all on the internet or at least that they be marginalized beyond the extent to which both their anonymity and the substance of their comments already marginalizes them. After all, he already acknowledges that sites can prohibit comments that are "libelous, abusive, obscene or otherwise inappropriate," so what we are pretty much left with is that he would prefer those with whom he disagrees either identify themselves (why?) or, more likely, simply not comment at all.

Websites are free, and should remain free, to treat commenters as they see fit. As I have written previously, the notion that there is something special about an MSM website beyond the fact that it provides straight news reportage is a dubious proposition, though apparently a common one among professional journalists.

On a personal note, odd as it might seem, I am inclined to agree with Grubisich in that I, too, would prefer that commenters used their real names. Again, I understand why many believe they cannot or should not do so; but then I am, after all, merely stating a preference. In fact, my reasons are similar. Using one's real name tends to have a moderating effect on what one posts on the internet. At least it does for me, which is one of the primary reasons I use my real name here and elsewhere.

Now, I've written enough over the past five years or so on the internet that there are already any number of really dumb comments of mine encased in virtual amber for all times. Some of them I now recognize as dumb. Others I may eventually and probably already would have recognized as dumb were it not for the fact that I remain a bear of very little brain. Patience, dear reader, patience!

But the internet is a "big enough place" that there's room for dumb guys like me and for everyone else, too. Of course, neither the Washington Post nor any other website is obligated to give me or you or anyone a forum. But as is unfortunately more often said than believed in some journalistic quarters, the remedy for bad speech is more speech. Even including anonymous speech and even if the likes of Mr. Grubisich disapproves.

Cats and Dogs (Updated: Oh, if only a reporter had been there!)

Oh goody, a Blogwar! Well, a skirmish, anyway. Voicing his views with perhaps unintentional irony by using, of all outlets, a blog, "grizzled reporter" and "no ivy tower thumb-sucker," Jonathan Alter takes Radar's Jebediah Reed to task for his coverage of a conversation including Alter, Tom Edsall and former Sen. Mike Gravel. Salon's Glenn Greenwald then weighs in, skewering the underlying pomposity and arrogance of Alter's journalistic gripes with the blogosphere.

Greenwald gets the better, so far at least, insofar as the the argument is over the parasitic faults of the blogosphere versus the parasitic faults of news reporters. Damning a cat for being an unsatisfactory sort of dog is foolish, especially for someone like Alter who has gone from dogged reporter to feline columnist (and consultant to that hard-hitting news organization, MTV, no less!) over the years.

For that matter, whether Reed's reporting of the conversation was bad (as opposed to Reed merely being "a bad reporter") seems less a matter to Alter of getting the facts wrong than of not interpreting or understanding what was said in the way that Alter, himself, would have done. Yeah, well, welcome to the club, Jon. Wanna take a poll of the people you've reported on over the years who might make the same sort of complaint? Hey, maybe Reed just isn't grizzled enough yet.

One point, though, I'll give to Alter. If the now infamous lunch in question was really "off the record," Reed had no right to report it as he did. Maybe that's a fact in dispute, too. I couldn't say. But fair's fair. Even a mildly grizzled ivy tower thumb-sucker like me knows that.

UPDATE: But wait, there's more! Now Reed fires back, claiming Alter not only knew the lunch wasn't off the record, save for a moment, but that Reed had his tape recorder running and note-pad out the entire time! Well, it could still technically have been "off the record" as background only, but it sure sounds now like there's some pretty good evidence not only that it wasn't but that Alter clearly knew it wasn't. Hmmmmmm. I think Mr. Reed is calling you a liar, Mr. Alter. Care to respond?

Reed's priceless P.S. -- "Thanks for the cup of black bean soup! (Actually, please thank General Electric.)" Meow!

Why I'm Not Blogging About Ron Paul (Yet)

I'm probably missing the web opportunity of a lifetime by not blogging more about Ron Paul, as Technorati still amazingly lists him at the top of its Top Ten "Where's The Fire?" list.

The fact is, though, I have nothing of interest to say about Paul. He's a decent guy, I like his politics, and he has a Texas snowball's chance in August of making it very far in the Republican presidential nomination race.

Rumor has it all this blogosphere traffic about Paul is the result of some small coterie of diehard libertarian supporters spamming web polls and such. I suppose the possibility can't be ruled out, but if there was ever a political category for which "herding cats" was the apt metaphor, it's libertarians. Just try to get a concerted effort out of three or more libertarians at a time, I dare you!

Maybe Paul is just the internet flavor of the month. If so, it can't be for his less than sterling performance during the first Republican candidates' "debate." He gets national air time and wastes it confusing people about the "inflation tax" or original intent regarding presidential citizenship requirements? Oh puleeze!

Still, I'll happily jump on the Ron Paul bandwagon just as soon as I have reason to believe its current momentum isn't from already having plummeted over the edge.

Nothing, In Particular

While dallying earlier today over at Urkobold® (your one-stop shop for all things internet trollish), I did a bit of research (read: "typed in a Google search") and came upon an unauthorized posting of an article by the late philosopher Peter L. Heath. My high respect for intellectual property notwithstanding to the contrary, having some personal knowledge of Professor Heath's sense of humor, I cannot help but think that nothing would please him more. Herewith, then, a link to what may very well be the all-time definitive short article on the subject of "nothing."

Put a bit differently, you will find a better article on nothing in particular nowhere, but what are the chances of ever finding yourself there? Oh, sure, many philosophers have written extensively about nothing in particular or at least nothing that was especially interesting and the number of philosophical treatises about nothing worth reading are legion. Still, although nobody has written more cogently about nothing than Professor Heath, nobody's work wasn't as readily available. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, as no one I can remember at the moment once said.

Sadly, Professor Heath's other great work of philosophical whimsy, The Philosopher's Alice, a (serious) philosophical look at Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures In Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, appears to be out of print. Should you run across a used copy or find it in your local library, I strongly recommend it to you.

"Con" is short for conservative and "neo" is short for, um, conservative?

Camille Paglia, the liberal feminist liberal feminists love to hate, resumed her former Salon column not too long ago. Paglia’s style and wit reminds me of a fireworks display – brilliant, colorful sparks flying every which way all at once. It suits her well and I’m happy her unique voice is back.

Cohabiting Salon’s virtual digs these days is Glenn Greenwald, whom my friend and former co-blogger Mona much admires but whose pre-Salon blogging I admit to not having much read. His column yesterday, however, reminds me of the indefatigable Paglia, with salvos flying hither and yon over his contention that neoconservatives hold themselves or their compatriots personally above the law much as they have been accused of contending that the state in its war against terrorism must not be constrained by the law of the land. (The latter criticism, I hasten to add, is all too valid.)

Greenwald writes:

[N]eoconservatives automatically and reflexively defend any neoconservative accused of wrongdoing, before any facts are even known. They insist that they have done no wrong, that the real guilty parties are the accusers, and that even where they have done wrong, they should not be punished.

It’s a very, very busy piece of writing and it would take a very long time to give each accusation due deference. I don’t plan to do that here, nor do I mean to contend that there is nothing at all to Greenwald’s concern. Still, where he sees a seemingly vast pattern if not a downright conspiracy among those he calls neoconservatives of both the official and pundit variety and the latter's varied reactions to charges leveled against some of the former, I’m afraid I see little more than politics as usual and nothing uniquely neoconservative or even generally conservative about it at all.

Here’s the quick version of Greenwald’s thesis: Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Conrad Black, Paul Wolfowitz, and several AIPAC officials (with Eliot Abrams thrown in for good measure) have variously been accused, tried or convicted of various wrongdoings, some criminal, some ‘merely’ ethical, at least so far. They, in turn, have been defended “with virtual unanimity” by the “neoconservative” likes of pundits working for FOX News, National Review, the Wall Street Journal, and The New Republic . (Why doesn’t the Weekly Standard make the list? Bill Kristol, a writer who's so Neo that Morpheus probably thinks he's The One, gets mentioned but not his most quintessentially neoconservative platform. What gives?)

First, let’s note that there is a very wide spectrum of wrongdoing involved here. From charges of espionage (the AIPAC case) to the Libby conviction for his statements made in the investigation of the idiotic Plame debacle to the comparatively trivial case of Wolfowitz’s personal / professional conflicts of interest at the World Bank. So, at minimum, this is a very apples and oranges sort of list of wrongful behavior. Okay, apples and oranges are still both fruits; but I'd say selling secrets to foreign governments counts as more egregious conduct than juicing your girlfriend’s salary, wouldn’t you?

For that matter, yeah, I think Libby was a small potatoes fall guy in the Plame affair and should get a pardon, too. Does that make me a neoconservative? I hope the hell not. (Also, just for the record, I don’t really give a rodent’s hindquarters how Wolfowitz’s main squeeze, um, earned her raise at the World Bank -- which I, too, would like to see go bye-bye -- or how much U.N. coffers swag Kofi Annan managed to throw his son’s way, either.)

Greenwald writes, by the way, that Libby was “convicted by an obviously conscientious and unanimous jury.” Yeah, well, you need unanimity for any conviction last time I checked, and it isn’t as though the jury was entirely comfortable in doing its “conscientious” duty under the circumstances, either. I think for good reason. Apparently he disagrees.

But here’s really my basic gripe. Greenwald is simply painting with too broad a brush, or at least it seems so to me, when he rattles off all these various and admittedly conservative defenders of these various current and former administration officials and labels all such writers as neoconservatives. Thusly used, does “neo” do any work at all? Is Jonah Goldberg really a neoconservative? I think the fact would come as news to him (though that isn't to say he might not agree with some neoconservatives about some things some of the time.) Does it matter at all that what he actually wrote about Black was “to the extent I understand the charges, I am all in favor of defending Conrad Black” (my emphasis) and that even that sounds to me like a throw-away line in the context of criticism of a Tina Brown column? Is the entire editorial staff of the Wall Street Journal really comprised now exclusively not only of conservatives but of neoconservatives? Golly! No wonder Rupert Murdoch wants to pay a premium for it.

Look, conservatives, “neo” or otherwise, rising to the defense, sometimes inappropriately, of their fellow conservatives charged with wrongdoing is nothing new in politics, nor is such behavior unique to the right side of the political spectrum. It’s business as usual. Many of the writers Greenwald accuses of unprincipled defense of the likes of Wolfowitz or Libby do indeed qualify under the “neo” rubric, and I probably even agree with him about some of his examples.

But whether everything they or other "mere" conservatives write in such defense stems from the motives Greenwald ascribes to them seems to me a very different sort of thing. It is, after all, possible to do the right thing for the right reason, e.g., write against the onslaught of also dubious and biased liberal media criticism of such persons, even if one is a neoconservative, isn’t it? Or has "neoconservative" simply become a secular catch-all synonym for Satan and his evil minions in some quarters?

I gotta say, this sort of scatter-shot patterning is a lot more fun when Paglia is doing it.

POSTSCRIPT: Greenwald's piece in Salon today, urging Democrats to amend the Military Commissions Act of 2006 and restore habeas corpus is right on the money. I'd only add it would be nice to see more Republicans join in that effort, too. As always, I call 'em as I see 'em.

Ok, then, don't cancel my subscription. **

My cyber-friend and former co-blogger Mona asks me a few pointed questions, to which I respond, both here.

(** Inside joke.)

Afraid Of Being Shot On Your Way To An Illegal Abortion? Blame Ralph Nader!

I should start a regular feature called Mind Bloggling.

With the usual hat tip to memeorandum, we now find Martin Lewis easily outdistancing Barack Obama and Dr. Phil in the Warped Logic contest that is now sweeping the nation. Mr. Lewis asserts -- as Jack Paar used to say, I kid you not -- the following:

Thanks to Ralph Nader and those "holier-liberaller- progressiver-purer-than-thou" folks who voted for him, Al Gore and John Kerry lost their presidential bids and that led to weaker gun control laws and a more conservative Supreme Court and that, that, THAT, Ladies and Gentlemen, has resulted in "tens of thousands of women who will be denied an abortion as a result of the new Supreme Court decision" and "the slaughter in Virginia."

Truly, the mind boggles.

Mr. Lewis is not, as I first thought (having never heard of him before -- have you?), the love child of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, but:

[started] his career as a protégé of fabled Beatles publicist Derek Taylor – he has had a storied 36-year history as a journalist, columnist, writer, humorist, monologist, comedic performer, radio host, TV host, TV correspondent, Master of Ceremonies, producer (of movies, TV, radio, DVDs, stage shows and record albums), talent manager, record company owner, independent film distributor, film-festival curator, political commentator, pioneering organizer of benefit events, human rights activist - and as an award-winning publicity & marketing strategist.

And now we know why he can't hold a steady job. [bada-bing!]

Take a deep, cleansing breath, Mr. Lewis. The lapsed, so-called assault weapons ban never prohibited the 9mm or .22 caliber handguns used in the Virginia Tech massacre, and no president or would-be president could have possibly pushed through legislation banning or even imposing serious restrictions on such weapons in the last decade, nor is it at all clear that such legislation would, itself, pass Constitutional muster.

No responsible abortion rights advocate has ever claimed that there are or have been or are ever likely to be anywhere near tens of thousands of cases of the particular abortion procedure, the prohibition against which the Supreme Court did not overrule as being unconstitutional. Moreover, although the matter is disputed, there is evidence that, for the majority if not the overwhelming majority of women seeking an abortion whose physician might otherwise have considered that procedure, alternative procedures exist and remain legal.

Reasonable people can reasonably disagree about the likely alternative history of the U.S. since 2000 had Ralph Nader chosen not to run for president. But Mr. Lewis cannot be counted among such people. Opinions such as his should not be dismissed lightly; they should be dismissed with howls of derisive laughter.

Madness In Our Method

In his usual measured and even tempered way, Hugh Hewitt rhetorically asks if NBC’s decision to air portions of the video sent by Virginia Tech mass murderer Cho Seung-Hui is “the single worst editorial decision in the history of broadcast news.”

I’d still give the nod to the decision to hire Katie Couric for the Today Show chair formerly held by J. Fred Muggs, but reasonable people can disagree about such things.

I’m being flippant because, frankly, much of the commentary that has exploded in the aftermath of the Virginia Tech tragedy is worthy of, nay, begs for ridicule. I have already commented on the alleged causal connection between such tragedies and video game violence by America’s child psychologist for children of all ages, Dr. Phil.

Meanwhile, Radley Balko at Reason has nailed Barack Obama’s ludicrous comparison of the shootings to outsourcing as “ignorant,... exploitative and offensive.” And, of course, the finger pointing and ax grinding over everything from justifying more or less gun control to whether campus police and administrative officials acted properly or quickly enough and what about the early warning signs that Cho might have been mentally ill (you think?) and on and on and on continue to inundate the media and the internet and force their way into our collective consciousness.

Here’s a thought. It’s all garbage. The Virginia Tech massacre is the responsibility of one man and one man, alone. Cho Seung-Hui. He was a sick man, a deranged man and a tragic and pathetic man. None of the rest of the 20/20 hindsight pop psychology, ax grinding and blame spreading is worth a rodent’s hindquarters.

Yes, including my own ax grinding right here and now. None of us writing about this tragedy, when we attempt to say anything more at this point than what a tragedy it was and is and will remain, are contributing anything worthwhile to that terrible truth. Unforeseen, unforeseeable and unavoidable tragedies occur to innocent people every day, sometimes because madmen walk the earth, and innocent lives are lost as a result. The urge to make sense or to find something, anything redeeming from such events is understandable. So, even, are the baser urges to exploit those events to our own advantages. We are only human. But unlike madmen, we are supposed to be able to resist our urges.

Or at least to try.

Update: Coble and Kirk Settle Their Differences

I wrote several days ago about threatened litigation against blogger Katherine Coble by legal counsel for JL Kirk & Associates for libel stemming from comments Coble and her readers had posted on her blog. Coble now reports that the Media Bloggers Association took up Coble's cause and, as these things tend to happen, a mutually agreed upon resolution short of litigation appears to have been reached.

Here's an old joke: The only lawyer in a small town was starving to death until another lawyer moved in and then they both got rich. Here's the reality, at least in many situations: The threat of litigation is a double-edged sword at least once competent attorneys are representing both sides in the dispute. Sanity short of expensive litigation usually prevails.

Here's another reality, albeit of an anecdotal nature: Being once a "starving" young lawyer, myself, I was approached by a would-be client who wished to sue someone for slander. We discussed the facts and, as it turned out, she had a reasonably good case as far as meeting the technical elements of the tort of slander was concerned but her only real damages were her wounded feelings. I explained to her that even if she were to win her suit the court would in all likelihood award no more than nominal damages (traditionally, one dollar) as a token of her vindication. She thought about this and decided not to proceed. Much though I would have liked to earn the fee, I was glad she did the right thing; but if she had decided to proceed I would have taken the case and not because I needed the work. Part of the problem with the so-called law and economics school of jurisprudence is that life is not a business.

One last reality, also mostly anecdotal, but I think relevant here: a memory from law school. We were discussing rental contracts, that is, leases in class one day and the almost universal inclusion in such contracts of clauses giving landlords putative rights that we had already learned were unenforceable. If you went in those days to an office supply store (these days probably somewhere online) and found boilerplate, fill-in-the-blank leases, you would find they almost all included such unenforceable provisions. Now, the ethics of a practicing attorney including such provisions in the drafting of a lease for a client are dubious at best, but that happens, too, and not because the lawyer doesn't know the clauses are unenforceable. Indeed, what she does know is that the average tenant will assume that such provisions are enforceable and is unlikely to challenge them. As often as not, perhaps, the law is as much a game of poker as it is of chess.

"The Connection Between Race and Crime"

The shooter responsible for the Virginia Tech massacre has been identified as Cho Seung-Hui, a 23-year-old South Korean national and Virginia Tech senior majoring in English.

Cho’s identity now means we can add the topics of immigration and ethnicity to the cacophony that has already exploded throughout the media and the internet. Have at it, folks.

Meanwhile, over at The Agitator, Radley Balko yesterday posted what he called a Rambling Duke Post reflecting on what he took to be something wrong about the “comparative lack of coverage of the James Giles versus the Duke lacrosse case” and the concluding with “the fact that so many conservatives seem to have walked away from the [Duke] case thinking ... that we aren't doing enough to vilify black people, and that rich white people are the real victims here.”

Well, now.

Actually, I agree with much that Balko writes between those two quotes and most of where I don’t agree with him or don't agree entirely isn’t worth much argument. Moreover, I’m not a conservative, let alone an apologist for some of the conservatives he samples and links to in his post. I did, however, write with some passion about the sort of racism I take to be a motive force behind the deplorable behavior of Durham prosecutor Mike Nifong and I have never written about the James Giles case or the many other cases of wrongful convictions and cases of criminal injustice and police misconduct which Balko, to his great credit, reports on regularly.

What I want to say here, however, is that, while it is true that some in the largely conservative end of the media and blogosphere have made dubious comments about the “black crime rate,” just as many in the liberal end have made many dubious comments about the black incarceration rate in America, I’m not sure it follows that the former has especially been urging, as Balko puts it, the notion that “the media doesn't do enough to tell us about how black people are inherently more criminal and dangerous than white people.” (Emphasis in original.)

Some, no doubt have. We call such people racists. Some of them may be ignorant racists (“As opposed to what, Ridgely? Well informed racists?”) in the sense that they literally do not know, as Balko points out, that if you adjust for class and income the crime rate among whites and blacks is about the same. They may be oblivious or indifferent as to how, as Balko also points out, our idiotic War Against Drugs and some of its most insane policies drive up urban (mostly poor, mostly black) crime. Even so, it is one thing to note or decry that the incident of crime is higher among blacks as a percentage of the general population, with or without taking such factors into consideration, and quite another to claim or be accused of claiming that “black people are inherently more criminal and dangerous than white people.”

Take the Heather MacDonald City Journal piece to which Balko linked, for example. It is a column sympathetic to the New York Police Department and its officers and, by implication, sympathetic toward the subjective reasonableness of their perceptions and fears as they encounter what I will call (though MacDonald does not) the statistical realities of New York’s crime rates. MacDonald does indeed use the phrase “the connection between race and crime” and further states that “blacks aren’t stopped enough, considering the rate at which they commit crimes” and even, in what I would call a poorly worded disclaimer, says “most black residents are law-abiding and desperately deserve police protection.” (Don’t all black residents, law-abiding or not, deserve police protection?)

Of course, I’ve reprinted those quotes out of context, but I don’t read them individually or collectively, out of context or in context or, for that matter, the entire MacDonald column as stating or implying anything about blacks being inherently more criminal than whites. Maybe I’m missing something, but it seems to me that in that one example and on that one small but important point Balko is reading more between the lines than may really be there. Then again, maybe not. I have no more of a window into MacDonald’s mind or soul than I do into Balko’s or anyone else’s.

The thing is, race makes us all crazy. The War Against Drugs (if not drugs, themselves) makes us crazier still. When Homer Simpson calls alcohol "the cause of and solution to all of life’s problems," we laugh. When a young black man living in the inner city considers crack cocaine the cause of and answer to all of life’s problems, it isn’t funny at all. Does the Left truly want to lower the incarceration rate among black men in America? Does the Right truly want to lower the crime rate in the inner city?

Easily done. Legalize drugs.

Urban (black) crime rates will plummet as will incarceration rates, and not only the mere but far too many criminal convictions and incarcerations for possession and use but all the violent crime directly resulting from the illegality of such possession and use in the first place.

Or, if you can’t bring yourselves to support drug legalization, at least recognize that, for example, the criminal penalties attendant to possession of crack cocaine versus powder cocaine do more harm than good.

But let’s get back to race for a minute. Is there any reader here, is there anybody anywhere who, upon hearing yesterday of the horrible shooting spree at Virginia Tech thought to himself, “I’ll bet it was a Korean”?

Of course not. And no one thought to himself it was probably a black man, either. We all thought, at least I sure as hell did until later information emerged that the shooter was a white guy. Is that sort of subliminal racial profiling racist?

Perhaps it simply is beyond our meager powers of reason and reasonableness to think sensibly about race, itself a dubious and poisoned concept, or to think sensibly about how other people think about race. Perhaps we are like the divorcing couple whose rage at each other has blinded them both to any hope of seeing any remnant of good faith on the other’s part.

Some of us, indeed I would suspect the majority of those of us who have written, even in anger, at the travesty of the Duke lacrosse student prosecution did not do so because of some idiotic sense that rich white males are society’s new victims. Except, maybe, in this one highly limited sense: whatever the realities of racial profiling by the cop on the beat or the investigating officer at a crime scene may be, racial or class bias on the part of the prosecutor’s office is as ugly and inappropriate when it rushes to judgment against a rich white man as it is when it does so against a poor black man. Nothing more, but surely nothing less.

Of course, DNA testing should be performed wherever possible to exonerate the unjustly convicted, and perhaps the urgency of our moral imperative to do so is especially acute precisely because the majority of such men are black and poor and the criminal justice system has for too long been and still too much remains an institutional injustice to black men collectively.

But neither black men collectively nor white men collectively commit crimes. Individual men do that, one man and one crime at a time. And, yes, that is true even in the case of organized crime or criminal gangs – they are comprised of individual men, regardless of race or color or class, not the warped Platonic ideals of White Man, Black Man, Rich Man, Poor Man, etc.

We may try to understand the “underlying social causes and conditions” of inner city life that leads to high crime rates among young black men or we might find utterly incomprehensible the underlying mental causes and conditions leading to the horrific acts of a mass murderer. In the end, however, it remains that a single individual does what he does. In that sense, the racial accidents and even the socioeconomic class or status of his birth are entirely irrelevant. Or should be.

Which means, in turn, that just as MacDonald allows as how black (law-abiding) inner city residents deserve police protection, so too do rich white college students deserve unbiased coverage by the media and dispassionate and unprejudiced treatment from prosecutors.

The Internet v. The Immediate Jewel of Their Souls

Clearly, the biggest little story sweeping through the blogosphere today is that of the dispute between blogger Katherine Coble and JL Kirk Associates (the latter being represented by the law firm of King & Ballow) over apparently less than mutually satisfactory business dealings between the parties and statements subsequently posted by Ms Coble and readers on her blog. Ms Coble has now received a letter from legal counsel for JL Kirk Associates demanding that she remove allegedly defamatory statements from her blog site and cease publishing any further such statements.

Predictably, the blogosphere is closing ranks in favor of Ms Coble. (Bill Hobbs offers what appears to be a good roundup tracking the story, as does Nashville is Talking.)

I may be one of the few libertarians, not to mention libertarian bloggers, who continues to believe that the law of defamation, properly understood and applied, is a good thing; that is, that one’s reputation is properly the subject of legal protection under some circumstances. But that’s for another day. I care to weigh in only on a point or two that so far seems not to have been addressed by my fellow bloggers.

First, however, the inevitable disclaimer. I am not a member of the Tennessee State Bar, nor do I have sufficient factual information nor have I conducted sufficient legal research to hold or offer an opinion as to the legal merits of the dispute one way or the other. I’m not taking sides and I'm sure as hell not offering legal advice to anyone. I’m not quite that big an idiot.

(Besides, I’m more of a contracts guy than a torts guy, anyway. And some would say even that is stretching my dubious credentials to their limit. I would be fascinated to know, however, what my old sparring partner at the (unfortunately now defunct) blog Left2Right, Don Herzog – not, to his credit, a lawyer, but an expert on tort law at the University of Michigan’s Law School – thinks about the law of defamation as it applies or should apply in general to the internet. Don, any thoughts?)

I was intrigued, in any case, by a paragraph in the demand letter as reprinted at Ms Coble’s website ** because it struck me that it could be interpreted to be claiming that the applicable law of defamation in Tennessee was substantially different from the general law of defamation as I understand it. The relevant paragraph is as follows:

Under Tennessee law, any malicious publication expressed in writing intending to injure the character or diminish the reputation of a business is libel. Moreover, even if statements are literally true, the publisher of those statements is subject to monetary damages where “the meaning reasonably conveyed by the published words is defamatory.” Memphis Publishing Comany [sic] v. Nichols, 569 S.W. 2d 412 (Tenn. 1978)

[** - Lest either Ms Coble or Mr. Korpady, the attorney who apparently signed the demand letter, accuse me of libel per quod (see below), I have no idea whether the word "company" was misspelled by either or both of them nor do I imply nor should the reader infer any carelessness on either's part. I merely cut and pasted the excerpt from Ms Coble's blog site and noted the misspelling without correction. Indeed, I have only Ms Coble's blog as evidence for any of this affair, as far as that goes. There, now that that little bit of CYA is done...]

As a general rule of law, the truth of the defendant’s published statements being alleged to be defamatory is a sufficient defense against a charge of libel. So the question occurs when it might be, under the law of Tennessee, that truth is not a sufficient defense.

Unsurprisingly, because the cited case is not all that recent it could not be found online except through subscription legal research services to which I do not have current access. I did, however, find at the Tennessee Supreme Court website several subsequent cases citing Nichols, including one that briefly summarized its relevant facts, as follows:

... Plaintiff cites Prosser for the proposition that “[t]he form of the language used is not controlling, and there may be defamation by means of a question, an indirect insinuation, an expression of belief or opinion, or sarcasm or irony.” William A. Prosser, The Law of Torts § 111 at 746 (4th ed. 1971) (footnotes omitted). Our review of Prosser and the cases cited therein, leads us to the conclusion that Prosser was referring to situations where actionable defamation may occur through sarcasm, insinuation, and the like, when the truth is twisted by either omitting relevant facts and circumstances, or alluding to “facts” and circumstances that do not exist. The classic Tennessee case on point is Memphis Publishing Co. v. Nichols, 569 S.W. 2d 412 (Tenn. 1978). In Nichols, the Memphis Press-Scimitar published an article stating that Mrs. Nichols had been shot “after the suspect arrived at the Nichols home and found her husband there with Mrs. Nichols.” Although true, the Tennessee Supreme Court held that this statement could be defamatory because the story failed to mention that several others, including Mr. Nichols, were present at the time. Without this important fact, the article implied that Mrs. Nichols was having an adulterous affair with the suspect’s husband. The Court held that: “Truth is available as an absolute defense [to a charge of defamation] only when the defamatory meaning conveyed by the words is true.” Nichols, 569 S.W.2d at 420.

Hunt v. Tangel, C.A. No. 01A01-9705-CV-00199, __ S.W.2d __ (Tenn. Ct. App. 1997)

Ah, now that makes sense. It appears the court was grappling with the common law distinction between libel per se and libel per quod, a question of whether the published statements were defamatory on their face or required knowledge of extrinsic facts to make out the defamatory meaning which, in turn, affected the plaintiff’s burden of proof regarding damages. In its modern manifestation, however, one might say informally that a ‘falsehood’ is still required to prove a charge of libel when the published statements are themselves true in that the reader must be reasonably likely to draw a false and defamatory conclusion from those otherwise true statements as published.

Let me repeat that I neither know nor care to speculate on what statements were true or false or what sort of extrinsic facts there might be that could result in whatever truthful statements Ms Coble published being deemed defamatory or where, as lawyers are wont to say, "the equities" lie in this matter. It does not, in any case, appear that the law of defamation in Tennessee is especially different from that of other jurisdictions at least on the point herein considered.

One other observation, though. The phrase “intending to injure the character” from the demand letter also struck my eye. I don’t know whether that is the phrasing of Mr. Korpady, himself, or a phrasing merely taken from one or more defamation cases. Probably the latter. Courts, themselves, can be notoriously casual in their phrasing, causing much legal mischief as a result. Even so, as my long-ago torts teacher once observed upon hearing a student (not me!) use the often heard phrase “defamation of character,” defamation is about reputation, not character. False assertions can injure another person’s reputation; the quality of his character is up to him.

Adorable Kitty Prostitutes?

This blogging business continues to intrigue. I say business, of course, not in the sense of profitable enterprise, at least not in my case, but in the sense of cultural phenomenon. This site, for example, in existence less than a month so far (twelve days, in fact), has already attracted visitors from domains as far away as Ireland, Australia and Thailand, though I honestly can’t imagine why. Unless, that is, titles with words and phrases like “prostitute” and "rape fantasies" popped up in those viewers’ searches. Not to be too cynical, but that seems more likely than being led here by a Google search for “reductionism.”

Installation of a hit counter has helped assuage my curiosity to some extent about such matters, and I’m pleased to announce that readership is rapidly approaching triple digits. (How about them apples, Huffington Post and Michelle Malkin!) A few days ago, Memeorandum had begun to link an occasional post here again, as it had been linking a fair number of my posts previously at Inactivist; but then that seemed suddenly to stop, perhaps because I got boring, perhaps because I jokingly told former co-blogger Mona in a comment that it saddened me that she’d noticed a post here only via Memeorandum? Who knows. C’est la vie. To paraphrase Samuel Johnson, no man but a fool ever wrote except to be read; but I really haven’t a clue how web traffic works or why, and there is only so much pandering to the masses I can bring myself to do. I am, however, shamelessly planning on a special Shoes! article in the near future to lure former reader Susan W-G back to the fold.

Constant Viewer, my modest homage to Dorothy Parker’s far wittier reviews of yesteryear, has been disappointingly idle of late, there being damned little on the big screen worth seeing. In fact, my last such venture to the cinema house was to accompany my twelve year old son to watch TMNT, "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" for the over-thirty crowd, but I’m afraid a review of same would have to focus on the quality of the popcorn. (Not enough salt.) Perhaps the current drought will lead me to an occasional review of older films -- I hear that Citizen Kane flick is pretty good.

My intent was and remains to blog about the passing scene from a less than rabidly ideological libertarian perspective -- no, I don’t think children under twelve should be permitted to own nuclear weapons -- at least as opposed to what I call the “My Adorable Kitties” web-log alternatives. However, I think it’s already fairly obvious that my interests are as eclectic as my knowledge of many such matters is, or so I’m told, highly doubtful. One reader, not even here but over at Jim Henley’s shop, thought not only that my opinions regarding digital audio files were “absolutely full of sh*t” but that I, personally, was, as well. I quote: “You’re saying things that sound like they might be sensible, but are in fact completely crazy.” Sadly, he is not the first person to arrive at such a conclusion, nor will he likely be the last. What the hell, he may even be right.

And so it goes. Purely political blogs bore me almost as much as adorable kitties. I have lived most of my life inside or at least right next to Washington’s culture of political obsessives, and I have grown weary of self-important people espousing their self-important opinions, more often than not for mostly self-serving reasons. Yeah, I’m one of those people, but that doesn’t mean I have to like the fact or can’t occasionally resist my own self-important and self-serving inclinations, however briefly.

So this is the result so far. A little bit of this, a little bit of that, maybe a dog’s breakfast at the end of the day, but at least it’s fun in the making. Sure, blogging is largely an exercise in ego gratification. Who the hell am I, anyway? But when it comes down to it, what isn’t? And more to the point, will that guy from Thailand be back?

"Will Opine For Food"

And what is so rare as a day in June? Well, with apologies to James Russell Lowell, I’d say this blog praising something from The Nation. Still, there it is, as large as life, a column by Eric Alterman with which I almost entirely agree. Pity the poor pundit, once holder of the best gig in professional journalism. Yeah, right.

The advent of the Internet--particularly the blogosphere--has changed all that. Now, not only are the things pundits say and write preserved for posterity; there are legions of folks who track pundit pronouncements, fact-check their statements and compare them with previous utterances on the same and similar topics. They also demand a degree of transparency about methods of inquiry and the reasoning behind conclusions drawn. While proving pundits wrong--over and over and over--has not yet cost anyone a job, it has contributed to a precipitous decline in pundit prestige. The reaction to this decline varies from pundit to pundit, to be sure, but more often than not, it bespeaks a kind of panic.

Pity, for that matter, the poor reporter, whose copy not so long ago was scrutinized only by his editors and the occasional disgruntled reader. The latter had, at best, an irate Letter to the Editor as his sole opportunity for rejoinder. But now? Why, now anyone with a computer and internet access (take, well, me for example) to have his say literally moments after the professional reporter’s story is published. Hardly seems fair, does it?

Then, too, there’s that whole supply and demand thingie. While we mere amateurs may be ‘inferior goods,’ we’re still flooding the market, driving down prices, or at least demand for opinion and analysis from the boys and girls at the MSM. All you need to play are strong opinions and the sort of cocktail party education anyone with a liberal arts degree is likely to have.

The truth is, being a professional pundit or syndicated columnist of any sort is still a pretty damned good gig. A 700 word column once or twice a week and it’s back to the hot tub. The major players even have assistants to perform such drudgery as fact-checking for them. Sweet, huh? Of course, the pay varies considerably, depending on where you are published and how many other periodicals run your pieces and how popular you are on the talking heads circuit and lecture tour, but we’re still not talking about any heavy lifting, are we? So not only will I reserve the pity for the time being; I'd even be willing (grudgingly, you understand!) to take on a job like that myself.

As the old joke used to go, freedom of the press was freedom only for those who owned the presses. No more. I don’t know that I agree entirely with Alterman’s claim that professional pundits are “in thrall to the specious arguments of the powerful people they are supposed to critique.” (He’s writing at The Nation, after all, so he’d pretty much have to say something like that, wouldn’t he?) Still, how often does one read a New York Times column criticizing how the Ochs-Sulzberger family runs the paper? Far less often than once per F.U. and vastly less often than the Blogosphere takes its shots at the Times, I can tell you that.

“... because the stakes are so small.”

The beginning of that quip is, of course, “The reason academic politics are so vicious” But the observation is probably just as true of any number of realms of discourse, including (Ohmygawd!) the Blogosphere. From Scott Lemieux over at Lawyers, Guns & Money, via Memeorandum, I finally got around to reading up a bit on the internecine crisis of blogroll purging. Seems that, especially in the Leftosphere, so-called A-list blogs have been purging their blogrolls of many of the so-called B-list blogs, much to the consternation, gnashing of teeth and general whining of the latter. Or something like that.

By A-list and B-list it is presumably meant how popular the blog in question is and that, in turn, is measured by how many hits the blog gets, how many other sites link to it, list it on their blogrolls, etc. The metaphor that springs immediately to my mind, especially this time of year, is the various rankings of NCAA teams, and not only how the “majors” have unexcitingly dominated this year’s basketball tournament but especially, also, the Division I-A football schools versus, well, everyone else.

Them that’s got tries to keep it, of course. I’ll strive valiantly (if unsuccessfully) to avoid noting that redistribution of wealth of any sort is one of the more annoying perennial obsessions of the Left, but the notion that there is any merit to the practice of endlessly listing the blogs one has visited once or twice, or of one’s friends, or especially of sites one is angling to have list you back strikes me as both self-defeating and childish. I can speak, of course, only for myself (hence the title of this blog), but I almost never click on a blog from a blogroll in the first place, and the already slim chances of my doing so are inversely proportional to the length of the blogroll in question. If everyone is interesting, no one is. “All are winners and all must have prizes” is a philosophy best left to nursery schools, failed socialist states and, of course, Wonderland.

My own minor efforts to bring order out of chaos being in operation all of three days now, I’d guess that makes this blog a strong contender for Z-list status. (Unless, that is, the pecking order descends below the alphabet, in which case I’m sure I’d descend right along with it.) The fact is, though, life is too short to fret over such matters just as it is far too short to read blog after blog after blog, ignoring in the process what still passes for real news and, oh yes, the real world, as well. Yeah, I’ve got a few sites listed on my blogroll, and the list will probably grow (and occasionally be trimmed). But they’re sites I actually visit frequently in my own net cruising. Indeed, a few may not even qualify as blogs. So what?

My policy (and, hence, my advice) is to link to a site in a blog entry when doing so assists the reader in understand what I’m writing about or I believe the reader will enjoy or profit from reading that site or site entry. Beyond that, I link only to acknowledge - the proverbial “hat tip” - how and where I came to start thinking about the topic in the first place, as in the first paragraph above.

In blogistry, as in life itself, if you’re doing something simply for recognition or influence (let alone for money), chances are you won’t enjoy it, won’t do it all that well and won’t get either. If you do what you like and therefore do it as well as you can, chances are those other things will take care of themselves. Some of them that’s got, got it ‘cause they got there first; but none of them kept it for that reason alone, let alone because they joined the Million Man Mutual Admiration Society.