Richard Cohen has said it. Hendrik Hertzberg, too. Cokie and Steve Roberts have said it together. E.J. Dionne has (more or less) said it. Michael Kinsley was among the first to say it. Thomas Friedman and Zibigniew Brzezinski have now both said it on the same day. Foreign policy guru Senator Richard Lugar has said it. The conventional wisdom is unequivocal: the Bush administration has yet to make the case for invading Iraq and deposing Saddam Hussein.

Taken literally, this assertion is complete nonsense. The administration has laid out a clear and compelling case for the use of military force to get rid of Saddam Hussein. His regime is one of the most brutal in a generally brutal region; he has a long history of invading neighbors, building weapons of mass destruction (including biological, chemical and even nuclear weapons) and using them (in the case of chemical weapons, at least) against both internal and external enemies. He is a longtime supporter of international terrorism, including, most likely, Al Qaida. His agents have attempted to assassinate a former US president, and may even have been in direct contact with the September 11th hijackers. Numerous regimes with far less damning records than that have been targeted--quite sensibly and justly--for violent overthrow by past US governments.

On the other hand, the case against toppling Saddam Hussein has been heard only very softly, if at all, in the (mainstream) public square over the last few months. And that's a bit surprising, because there is a fairly strong case to be made. Hussein still has a formidable army that is capable of inflicting serious casualties on an invading force. And he has that arsenal of non-conventional weapons; faced with the prospect of elimination, he may well decide he has nothing to lose and unleash them. The death toll of an invasion could thus be extremely high--perhaps catastrophically so.

There is also a plausible alternative: regimes that are too powerful to destroy militarily are usually handled with a "containment" strategy. When well-executed, such a strategy can control and limit the regime's threat to the rest of the world, at relatively little risk and cost, until such time as conditions for its collapse or removal are more favorable. If "red lines" regarding its external behavior are explicitly drawn and forcefully backed up with harsh military responses short of full-scale war, they can sharply limit the hostile regime's capacity to make trouble. To this day, for example, just such a set of rules has protected the Kurdish sanctuary in northern Iraq from Hussein's troops; a broader version of this arrangement might conceivably succeed in containing him fully until old age, internal dissention or a well-placed rival takes its toll.

It's interesting to consider, then, why so many pundits, instead of stridently presenting this anti-invasion case, have satisfied themselves with carping about the supposed lack of solid pro-invasion arguments coming from the administration. One explanation is obvious: the US military's recent string of three spectacularly easy, relatively painless victories (in the Gulf War, Serbia/Kosovo and Afghanistan) has (probably unfairly) discredited the "body bags" argument. After three instances of worst-case scenario-believers crying wolf, it's much harder to claim--even when it's justified--that this time, the danger is real.

But the "body bags" argument's political problems go deeper than just its recent history of being refuted by events. Many of those past solemn cautions about the threat of huge casualties in Kuwait, Serbia and Afghanistan were in fact disingenuously inflated doomsday predictions coming from reflexive pacifists who wouldn't have supported those military actions even if they had been guaranteed casualty-free. The "quagmire" warning has thus become entangled, in public debate, with a broad geopolitical ideology that includes perennial strong distaste for (American) military action--regardless of the cost--and a preference for multilateral diplomatic "solutions" that amount to inaction and even active appeasement in the face of aggression. A perfect expression of this ideology can be found, surprisingly enough, in Brent Scowcroft's recent WSJ op-ed, which is amazingly retro in tone; like a 1980's peacenik or 1990's paleoliberal, he prattles on about the importance of "international cooperation", a potential "explosion of outrage" in the Arab world over America's placing the Iraq problem ahead of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the need for "pressing the United Nations Security Council to insist on an effective no-notice inspection regime for Iraq".

Since September 11th, that approach has been relegated (in America, at least) to a pacifist fringe; Americans are more likely these days to consider it a cause of than a solution to the resurgent terrorist threat they've been confronting of late. Politicians and pundits are therefore terrified of even appearing to embrace such a discredited worldview--by, for example, voicing more moderate qualms about military action that have been tainted by association with it. (No doubt that's why, as Frank Rich has noted, public doubt about the wisdom of an invasion of Iraq has come primarily from Republicans like Scowcroft, who are presumably more insulated--by virtue of their party's hawkish recent past--than Democrats against the charge of one-world Euroweenie woolly-headedness.) That's a shame, because the tough-minded, containment-based case against massive military action is as legitimate, and just about as credible, as the case for invasion itself, and therefore ought to be made and discussed more seriously--this time, at least.

It was bound to happen sooner or later, of course; the parade of steadily shriller and shriller denunciations of "corporate malfeasance" in the press have clearly all been heading in this direction. But who'd have expected a distinguished economist like Paul Krugman, of all people, to break the taboo by being the first (that I've seen, at least) actually to blame a company's executives directly for the terrible crime of permitting its stock price to rise too high, and then fall too far?

The company in question is Cisco. Says Krugman, "its market capitalization has fallen by more than $400 billion. Nobody from Cisco management — ranked No. 13 in Fortune's 'greedy bunch' — has been arrested." And to think that right here, in America, a stock's price can plummet, and the government just lets it happen!

Not that its current, reduced price is the problem, of course; at its height, admits Krugman, "[s]ome analysts flatly called Cisco a pyramid scheme." In fact, that's Krugman's real complaint: there was an "illusion of profitability" that "sustained the stock price", an illusion that the company conjured up by "using its own overvalued stock as currency — paying its employees with stock options, acquiring other companies by issuing more stock. Thanks to loopholes in the accounting rules — loopholes defended with intense lobbying — these transactions allowed executives to progressively dilute the stake of their original shareholders, without ever declaring this dilution as a business cost."

Now to some people, issuing more stock when it's grossly overvalued and using it to lure employees and buy other companies might seem like an astute way to try to preserve shareholders' long-term value in the midst of a bubble. What were Cisco executives supposed to do, after all, while investors were bidding up its stock price to ridiculous levels--use corporate funds to buy back its own shares at the inflated price? No, if customers are willing to overpay for your product, then you're betraying your shareholders by charging any less than the market will bear. And likewise, if there's a huge market demand for your stock at an excessive price, then creating more of it and selling it to new investors is the only way to fulfill your duty to your current shareholders (and to the new ones, for that matter, once their stupidity in coming aboard is behind them).

Of course, the bubble that carried Cisco stock to such absurd heights also enriched its executives (and other employees), through their stock options. And that really cheeses Krugman off: "the Cisco story...demonstrates just how much self-enrichment corporate insiders can get away with while staying within the letter of the law." What self-enrichment? Cisco's CEO, John Chambers, "was among the world's best-paid executives, receiving $157 million in 2000." Got that? In 2000. When the stock price was high, Chambers' fellow shareholders were all making a fortune along with him, and none of them was uttering a peep of complaint about Chambers' windfall. In fact, either Chambers kept most of his holdings and options too long--in which case he also lost a colossal bundle in the ensuing stock slide--or he liquidated most of his holdings and exercised most of his options at their peak value, in which case anyone who didn't follow his example (which would have been publicized, by law, as an insider transaction) was a fool.

And that's the real point. Nowhere--nowhere--in his column does Krugman so much as hint that Cisco executives falsified or concealed any information from anyone. Rather the felony of which they stand accused is that of failing to stop their stock from skyrocketing, attempting to maximize the company's long-term gain from its own high stock price, and then watching helplessly as that price fell back to earth. To Krugman (and to most of his fellow fulminators about "corporate malfeasance"), the entire stock bubble itself was clearly the fault of "unscrupulous" corporate CEOs, crooked accountants, lax regulators--anybody but the idiot investors who cluelessly poured their money into horribly overpriced stocks during the bubble years. Investors, that is, like a great many of Paul Krugman's (and his fellow fire-and-brimstone journalists') naive, confused, irate, savings-depleted readers, now searching for a scapegoat--and being shamelessly pandered to by a once-respected economist.

I'ts far less contagious than influenza, causes no symptoms in 80 percent of the people it infects, and is a serious threat only to the elderly and immune-impaired (putting it on roughly the same footing as certain fungal infections). So why all the hysteria about the West Nile virus?

My theory: It's all in the name. My imaginary uncle the Beverly Hills doctor ("G.P. to the stars") would almost surely have said (had he actually existed) that to get noticed, a disease first needs a catchy monicker--preferably one with a hint of dangerous-sounding exoticism. I'd say "West Nile" stacks up pretty well on that score, conjuring up images of destitute Egyptian peasants bathing in a highly septic river, or perhaps of adventurous tourists O.D.-ing on Immodium after buying cut-rate local "bottled" water.

Of course, had it been called "West Congo" instead, there'd be panic in the streets by now, even if the illness only involved the tiniest bit of bleeding out the eyeballs in the vast majority of cases. On the other hand, "Westchester" virus could easily have passed into endemic status without anyone even noticing. And "West Hollywood" virus would have everyone lining up around the block to get infected.

Just my two cents, as Larry King would say....

I don't normally link to articles just (or even mostly) to rave about them. But David Brooks' gently satirical sketch of America's "sprinkler cities" and their inhabitants, the species known as "Patio Man", is worth singling out. Its deft prose and dead-on social perspicacity make it the equal of any Tom Wolfe piece, but without any of the potent venom that can make Wolfe so discomfiting to read.

Brooks' subjects are the brand new, carefully planned "exurbs" that have sprung up well beyond the perimeters of the suburbs surrounding America's big cities. Populated predominantly by middle-class families, retirees and post-industrial high-tech and service industries, these communities represent a new and distinct demographic that has yet to be courted and analyzed by political operatives and pundits. In fact, they may well be the main host population for the blogging phenomenon--a neglected political cohort with the means to express itself on its own initiative, using modern technology.

What are Patio Man's politics? Brooks characterizes them as solidly Republican, culturally traditional, focused on entrepreneurial and educational achievement and fanatical about social and community harmony. But they are not the economically subordinate "red state" working-class right I have been claiming represents one half of the bipolar modern American polity. Rather, they seem to be a third, "middle" tier, politically allied with their economic inferiors, but (according to Brooks) fleeing the gradual penetration and downscaling of the suburbs by unruly immigrants and blue-collar workers as much as they're fleeing the snobbery of the new suburban liberal overclass. Patio Man is thus clearly a pure product of the nineties boom, achieving his intermediately successful economic status as a result of that decade's explosive spawning of mobile modern high-tech and service-industry start-ups.

It thus remains to be seen whether Patio Man can survive the current economic downturn. Mortgaged to the hilt and employed in a "new economy" enterprise of dubious durability, he can little afford higher interest rates, falling home prices or weakening consumer and corporate spending--let alone the impending combined onset of all three. It may be, then, that sprinkler cities will become the ghost towns of the early twenty-first century, as their residents abandon their forclosed or negative-equity homes and shuttered employers in favor of lower-paying jobs with greater stability, leaving the mega-malls to die of customer neglect, the perfectly-kempt lawns to wither unsprinkled, and the dreams of a prosperous white-collar conservatism shattered.

The latest in cosmetic surgery, apparently, involves navel display--converting "outie" belly buttons to "innies".

But what if you want a star on your belly?

Times have certainly changed. A couple of years ago, when the market was skyrocketing and investors seemingly couldn't go wrong, it was often argued that stock-picking was for chumps--after all, why throw away a percent or two of savings growth a year on managers' fees, or gamble everything on an insufficiently broad portfolio, when an index fund virtually guarantees near-double-digit returns over the long term? Well, now that the market's tanking, Daniel Gross is singing a different tune in Slate, criticizing the S&P 500 index for, of all things, being lousy at picking stocks--adding companies to the index just as their share prices peak, and then keeping them on the roster as they collapse.

The charge is, of course, utterly absurd; the S&P 500 is supposed to track the large-cap market, not beat it, and if investors are pumping up dubious tech stocks to absurd valuations, then it's not S&P's place to second-guess their judgment. Moreover, the index investing dogma of the nineties asserted adamantly that such fluctuations shouldn't matter anyway to the long-term buy-and-hold investor, who could look forward to excellent returns by explicitly not timing the market, buying instead at a constant rate ("dollar-cost averaging") year in and year out, and counting on the market's historically reliable high return rate to do its work.

The flaw in this strategy--as we have now all been so painfully reminded--lies in its assumption that stocks' consistently higher return rates are a blessing that simply drops out of the sky into the laps of delighted passive investors. In fact, their true source is the vigilantly skeptical discipline of history's (overwhelmingly active, portfolio-managing) investors, who have made a practice of avoiding stocks whose high prices precluded a sufficient return on their invested purchase price. By refusing to overpay, those finicky investors kept stock prices (relative to earnings) down, and thus returns (per dollar invested) high.

Passive (or uninformed) investors, on the other hand, show no such discipline; they robotically pour their money into index (or, for that matter, actively managed all-stock) funds, regardless of current share prices or prospective corporate earnings. And as their numbers increase, they can exert a significant influence on those share prices, lifting them to the point where the potential earnings (again, per dollar invested) of the companies they represent pale in comparison with the earning power of, say, Treasury bills.

Eventually, of course, sharp-eyed investors begin to notice that they're being fleeced and head for the exits, bursting the bubble and stranding the remaining shareholders with stock worth a tiny fraction of its grotesquely overinflated purchase price. That's exactly what happened to most of the millions of American investors who collectively lost trillions of dollars in the market over the last several years. By comparison, the effects of badly-timed additions to or deletions from the S&P 500 index are a piddling, deck-chairs-on-the-Titanic irrelevancy.

You might have been wondering, during the debate over government subsidies to Amtrak, how the money might otherwise have been spent. Well, here are some relevant figures: Amtrak was granted a $520 million capital subsidy in 2001, plus another $105 in "safety and operations" funding (another $130 million-odd was spent on sundry other passenger rail projects, including "research and development"). The previous year, Amtrak supplied about 5.5 billion passenger miles of rail transportation; total passenger rail subsidies thus amounted to about 13.5 cents per passenger mile.

In 2000 (the most recent year for which figures appear to be available), Greyhound bus lines took in a total of about $1 billion in revenue, while providing nearly 8 billion passenger miles of bus transportation, for a total of about 13 cents per passenger mile (and that's assuming zero profit and zero revenue from non-passenger sources such as its package-shipping service). Meanwhile, Continental Airlines brought in 13.44 cents of revenue per passenger mile; United's figure was 13.25 cents, and American's was 14.05 cents. (Since 2000, airlines' revenues per passenger mile have declined, while Amtrak's subsidy per passenger mile has increased. Greyhound's parent company, Laidlaw, has been granted bankruptcy protection, so Greyhound's recent revenue figures are hard to come by.)

Remember, these are revenue figures--the amount these companies charged for the transportation they provided. (And all were profitable during the year in question.) In other words, the government's 2001 subsidy of passenger rail would have been approximately sufficient to pay for all of Amtrak's passengers the previous year to take a bus or plane instead--absolutely free.

On the other hand, it's not entirely certain that Amtrak's passengers would have taken this deal, even if they could somehow have been identified and offered the switch. After all, Amtrak is hardly the price-sensitive traveler's first choice; its fares on the most popular routes are typically slightly above the best available airfare (as a bit of experimentation with Amtrak's and Expedia's Websites will show), let alone the cost of a bus ticket. More likely, rail passengers are opting for comfort and convenience--particularly compared to Greyhound, whose highly, uh, "price-conscious" clientele may be exactly what Amtrak's passengers are looking to avoid. Viewed in this light, the massive federal subsidy provided to Amtrak's affluent, luxury-seeking customers is, pace the "egalitarian" mass transit ideologues, an appalling example of expensive, wasteful government favoritism towards the well-to-do.

Bloggers the world over, led by Instapundit Glenn Reynolds, are hooting in celebration of John Leo's proclamation, in an entire column on blogging in the oh-so-mainstream US News and World Report, that "[t]he main arena for media criticism....will be the Internet." Now, I'm as enthused about the blogging phenomenon as anyone (okay, as anyone I know), but in understanding its growth and influence, it's important to separate form from content.

A stroll through the "blogosphere", as it's called, reveals that a very large fraction of blogs are nothing more than the appallingly tedious, self-centered ramblings of appallingly tedious, self-centered people (whether "I Could Be Wrong" falls into this category is of course a question for you, the reader, to decide). Many more are simply Web versions of the moderated electronic bulletin board, a medium that has been used for decades now by technical specialists and hobbyist-enthusiasts to disseminate information and host discussions targeted at a particular narrow audience.

The relatively small collection of political and media-critic blogs that have risen to such spectacular popularity and prominence lately are simply new-technology equivalents of the low-budget "alternative" publications that sprang up in the political ferment of the late '60's and early '70's. Like bloggers, "alternative" journalists used the cheapest publication medium at hand to give expression to a nascent political faction that just happened to catch on and mount a serious challenge to one of the dominant political coalitions of the day. Back then, it was a radical-left takeover by educated upscale youth of the previously working-class, mildly populist institutions of the liberal-Democratic coalition; today, educated, upscale youth on the libertarian right are hoping to conquer the distinctly working-class, mildly populist institutions of the conservative-Republican coalition.

If they succeed, then blogs will be the Rolling Stone, Village Voice and urban "alternative weeklies" of the early 21st century--an established, commercially successful media vehicle catering to a particular political demographic. And if they fail, then blogging will likely simply return to its obscure specialist-and-vanity roots, until the next political upheaval--or the next technology--takes over. Either way, it will be the content it carries, not the blog form itself, that will determine its fate.

It's chutzpah week on the Israeli left. Shimon Peres has apparently told the German news magazine Der Spiegel that he has "doubts" about Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's commitment to peace in the Mideast, and that he is not certain Sharon can be considered a partner for peace any longer. I had no idea that Peres had officially taken up his post as foreign minister for the Palestinian Authority, but now that he is openly (and negatively) evaluating the Israeli Prime Minister's suitability to reach a deal with him in that new capacity, it would behoove him, at least, to resign from his position in said Prime Minister's government. No such luck: "As long as I can serve as a balancing factor, I'll stay." A nation at war can ill afford a cabinet minister who sees his role as "balancing" the views of his loyal colleagues by representing the enemy within the government. Peres' continued membership in the cabinet is a serious danger to his country, lending credibility to anti-Israel agitators around the world, and undercutting the valid arguments of Israel's defenders in the battle against terrorism.

Meanwhile, Gideon Samet in Ha'aretz waxes furious about the killing of Hamas leader Salah Shehadeh and the supposed ceasefire it supposedly interfered with: "a genuine opportunity to break the cycle of terror and retaliation was buried in Gaza." Putting aside the vague, dubious nature of the alleged ceasefire proposal (Amir Oren, also in Ha'aretz, throws a ton of cold water on all the talk of a "breakthrough"), I don't recall Gideon Samet standing foursquare behind Ariel Sharon's firm policy of "no negotiations under fire", when the latter was refusing to make political concessions to the Palestinians in the face of terrorist attacks. On the contrary, I seem to recall him and his fellow peaceniks arguing at the time that military restraint and willingness to negotiate--even under the threat of terrorism--were necessary to the serious pursuit of peace. Why, then, would Samet believe that Israel's attack on a terrorist leader in Gaza--even one that killed several civilians as a regrettable side effect--can rightly be blamed for scuttling Palestinian ceasefire initiatives this time? Or does he consider "no negotiations under fire" a reasonable position for Palestians to take, but abominably warlike when held by Israelis?

"Instapundit" Glenn Reynolds has been arguing for a while now that "airport security is a dangerous joke", completely incapable of accomplishing anything beyond acute passenger harassment. I've generally been inclined to cut the security folks a little more slack than that, given the difficulty of their job and the constraints (including the political ones) under which they're working. But my experience yesterday at Sea-Tac International Airport (in the Seattle area) has gotten me thinking that maybe Prof. Reynolds has a point. You see, my fellow passengers and I were all subjected to the now-standard thorough security check, including baggage X-ray, before being allowed into the terminal gate area--from the plane. That's right--we were led directly from our overseas flight to the immigration officers, then baggage claim and customs, then the metal detectors, where they carefully searched us for any firearms we might have acquired in Europe and brought on board our airliner (but somehow neglected to use up until that point). They even checked my shoes for explosives, just in case I might have smuggled some C4 plastique onto the plane in the soles of my New Balances, only to change my mind and target the duty-free shop instead.

As I told them, "you guys are so lucky making jokes about this stuff is illegal."

Just in case anyone might have thought my characterization of the American criminal justice system as a bizarre cult was an exaggeration, the latest development in the Zacarias Moussaoui case should remove all doubt. In a scene straight out of classic film farce, the accused terrorist, having decided for convoluted reasons to confess, shouts at the judge, "I am a member of Al Qaida", and demands to plead guilty. But the judge refuses to accept the plea, and gives him a week to think it over.

One almost feels sympathy for the baffled Moussaoui. He was prepared to die a martyr's death, and probably even to be tortured and executed by the infidels; what he could never have expected was that he would instead be forcibly incorporated into their perverse religious rites. Having firmly and openly declared his guilt, he suddenly finds that guilt or innocence is no longer the issue; rather, he is told that he must follow the holy rules and procedures, which require him to accept the assistance of a cultic acolyte in seeking out instances of ritual impurity in his accusers' performance of the sacred dance of prosecution, and present those instances before a priest of the sect. If they are successful, then the accused wins his freedom; if he fails, he is punished as unworthy, although the choice of punishment is itself a highly ritualized process. (As Judge/Priest Leonie Brinkema tells him, it's "normal, in criminal cases, to plea bargain".)

And if he refuses to embrace this arcane liturgy with all his heart--as Moussaoui is now finding out--he is declared a madman, and is treated as such. For only a lunatic, saith the Priests, would reject any of the true teachings of the Law, or deviate in the slightest from the elaborate ceremonial practices specified therein--by, for instance, blurting out the blindingly obvious truth of his own guilt.

Last December, before this blog came to be, I posted a comment to the Slate Fray about the debate over John Walker Lindh, expressing concern that current American law, with its focus on concrete criminal actions, may not be up to the task of prosecuting terrorist "sleeper" agents stationed in the US, quietly awaiting the command to attack. I suggested the RICO statute, used so successfully against organized crime syndicates, as one possible solution to the problem. Well, the idea (which had unsurprisingly crossed other minds before mine) has finally made it into Slate--as a sarcastic, "Modest Proposal"-style critique of the broad reach of federal conspiracy law. Apparently, Stanford law professor Robert Weisberg considers RICO and its ilk such egregious abuses of government power that merely pointing out that they might cover "dirty bomb" suspect Jose Padilla is enough to discredit them completely. (Not everyone caught his sarcasm, and Weisberg ended up having to explain himself. I suggested in response that if he wanted to attack federal conspiracy statutes, he might consider pointing to at least one specific case of an actual not-so-horrible person who was unfairly prosecuted under those laws, rather than shouting, "they're so vague they could even be used to prosecute Al Qaida sleeper agents awaiting the call to commit murderous terrorist acts!")

Of course, a law professor can be expected to view the criminal justice system as a means to the end of satisfying the quasi-religious abstract aesthetic of civil libertarians. But what about the public response to the now-infamous Inglewood videotape? The whole country has now watched Inglewood police officer Jeremy Morse slam arrested teenager Donovan Jackson onto the hood of his car and cuff him in the face--no prolonged beating with batons, just a slam and a punch--and everywhere the reaction is outrage. Michelle Cottle, while defending the police against charges of racism, concedes without argument that "[t]he tape shows some pretty nasty business", and that it's "abundantly clear" that "excessive force was used". Jack Dunphy, the National Review's resident pseudonymous policeman and a stout defender of his profession, also acknowledges that "it seems plain from watching the videotape" that Morse "used excessive force", and suggests that the deputies on the scene of the incident "were troubled by what they had witnessed." And that's what the defenders of the police are saying. Perhaps that's why there are no fewer than five investigations underway, and the surreptitious videorecorder of the arrest can be heard on the tape commenting about the offending officer, "You just lost your job, buddy."

Now, we don't know all the facts of the incident, and it's possible that it was nothing more than an unprovoked display of sadistic brutality. But the officers in question apparently reported--before knowing about the videotape--that they had had to punch a lunging Jackson to subdue him before he was handcuffed. While the rules do supposedly dictate that once handcuffed, a suspect must be treated with kid gloves, it seems to be common knowledge that the police don't normally follow that particular rule. And in fact, I doubt that such a rule is even workable, for the simple reason that if a misbehaving suspect is treated exactly like a quiescent one once the cuffs are on, then the disincentive to "get one's licks in" before the cuffs are applied largely disappears. Although I don't have the statistics at hand, I would be very surprised, for that reason, if the number of "difficult" arrests hasn't skyrocketed since concerns about police brutality have made it harder for the police to deal harshly with those who resist arrest.

But complaints about the Inglewood videotape and the RICO statute are not about the messy practicalities of fighting crime and protecting the innocent. They're about obeisance to a strange American dogma, which requires that law enforcement authorities be assumed to be ruthless, oppressive monsters at all times, however honorable, difficult and carefully-performed their job. The dogma does not make law enforcement any more effective, nor, as the Iglewood incident shows, does it make the police any more gentlemanly towards the public; mostly it just encourages dishonesty and hypocrisy on the part of the authorities, as they struggle to maintain the appearance of adherence to the absurdly unrealistic standards of conduct imposed upon them. But societies are often willing to pay a high price for the sake of clinging to their religious beliefs, and America is no exception.

Tipper Gore apparently told her husband Al she'd like to see him run for president again in 2004. This time, though, he says he'd be less constrained by "polls, tactics and all the rest": "if I had it to do over again, I'd just let it rip....I would have poured out my heart...."

Hmm...one wonders what the happy couple might do on stage to celebrate his next nomination....

In the Washington Post, Afghan women's rights activist Belquis Ahmadi complains that post-Taliban hopes for progress towards equal treatment of women in her country have been "eclipsed by a growing sense of futility in the face of threats, bribes and intimidation by warlords and their supporters." Sure sounds like equal treatment to me....

In her 1961 classic, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs skewered the urban planners of the early-to-mid-20th century who viewed cities as, at best, necessary evils, idealized the majestic country estate as the perfect living environment, and hence devoted themselves to introducing rural elements--parks, open spaces, grand buildings--into city life, with disastrous results. The famous "urban renewal" public housing projects of the 1950's, huge high-rises surrounded by large, empty areas of greenery, are typical of the designs of that school, according to Jacobs, and their resounding failure to inspire anything but misery and social disintegration is a testament to the wrongheadedness of the ruralists' ideas.

Steven Spielberg's recent film, Minority Report, is ostensibly about the paradox of free will and moral responsibility in a deterministic universe. But (without revealing too much about the plot) it treats the whole issue in a fairly perfunctory manner; the hero, a futuristic policeman played by Tom Cruise, pursues a resolution to the conundrum of human autonomy pretty much the same way any action hero pursues his designated "McGuffin" (to use Alfred Hitchcock's term for the object--be it a black box, secret document, or missing person--that the hero must find to save the day).

The real focus of the film, in fact, is Spielberg's vision of life in the year 2054, and in Jane Jacobs' old argument about the city vs. the country, Spielberg comes down resolutely on the anti-urban--that is, anti-Jacobs--side. In Minority Report, the city is a filthy, corrupt, brutal place, where herds of soulless people file through soulless public spaces, bombarded ceaselessly with commercial pitches, tracked constantly by identity, and policed by a "department of precrime" that predicts their future offenses, arrests them before the fact, and "imprisons" them by drugging them into a catatonic state that seems little different from their previous urban lives. In an area called "the Sprawl", which resembles a present-day inner-city landscape, the grimy lower classes live squalid lives in decrepit high-rises, hustling to stay alive and ahead of the ubiquitous authorities.

But several times during the film, we see a glimpse of another world entirely: rural settings where happy, fulfilled, emotionally rich characters lead idyllic lives in isolated surroundings of breathtakingly peaceful natural beauty. It's never clear why these people, alone among the hordes, have been blessed with such picture-perfect country estates (there is no suggestion that any of them is particularly weathy, although one of them has a background story that suggests she might be). But it is very clear that any city mouse would switch places with one of these country mice in a heartbeat.

Visions of dehumanizing high-tech urban dystopias and pristine natural Edens are a staple of pessimistic science fiction, of course. But they are normally meant primarily as stylized or symbolic elements; the celebrated rain-soaked futuristic-film-noir Los Angeles depicted in the film Blade Runner, for instance, is more a (magnificently realized) stylistic backdrop to the story than an element of the story itself. The city/countryside dichotomy in Minority Report, on the other hand, is jarring precisely because it appears to be intended as a plausible extrapolation of the present into the future. (The ubiquitous ads pummelling the city folk, for example, are lent verism by the recognizeable real-world products that appear in them.) And as an extrapolation, it is missing the one crucial component that has rendered the city-country debate moot in modern America: suburbia.

Personally, I consider myself an urbanist at heart, and I sympathize strongly with Jacobs' defense of the city. But there's no denying that the suburbs, which already house the majority of Americans and are still growing, provide most people, particularly families with children, with an optimal (to them) compromise between the space and privacy of the country and the convenience and variety of the city. And in a technologically advanced, consumer-oriented world apparently possessed of ample rural space, one would only expect the flight to the security and comfort (not to mention the surveillance-unfriendliness) of the suburbs to expand still further. An imagined future in which suburbia has instead simply vanished without explanation can't be placed front and center in a film--even a science-fiction fantasy--without unduly straining the audience's credulity.

"The war-crimes tribunal in The Hague is supposed to put the bad guys behind bars. I never thought it would go after an American journalist," writes Peter Maass in the New York Times. ("First they came for the war criminals, but I said nothing because I was not a war criminal," he might have said.) It's not that he opposes the tribunal; "the attempts to offer justice to victims of genocide are one of the bright spots of our age," he believes. Nor does he "believe journalists should be exempt from subpoenas". It's just that "in most cases the decision to testify should be the journalist's," because "testifying at a war crimes tribunal could imperil a journalist's safety or make it difficult to uncover future misdeeds". (No word from Maass on whether ordinary non-journalistic peons, whose safety is presumably at much greater risk than that of globetrotting New York Times op-ed writers, are entitled to the same discretion about obeying the orders of international tribunals.)

I've written before about journalists' increasing confidence in their own political power, and about the dangers of judicial usurpation of democratic authority. But the two in combination are especially threatening in the context of international affairs, where there are no counterbalancing governmental institutions with genuine democratic legitimacy, and the conformist foreign press corps has a near-monopoly over channels of information about faraway events that reach the Western bodies politic. Now that the spectacularly unaccountable International Criminal Court has been established, it's not hard to guess what two self-appointed groups will be setting its agenda.

William Saletan complains in Slate that death penalty opponents like to object to certain aspects or instances of execution, when they really oppose execution altogether. I'll go Saletan one further: even those who argue against capital punishment in general are really arguing, more broadly, against punishment itself.

There exists, to be sure, one (single) argument against capital punishment: because it is completed instantaneously, it allows less time for evidence of innocence to be gathered, and is therefore somewhat more likely to be exacted in its entirety upon an innocent than, say, imprisonment for life. I don't personally find that argument convincing, but those who do at least have a case to make.

All other anti-execution arguments, though, are in fact simply arguments against punishment tout court that happen to gain extra force when invoked against the death penalty, by virtue of the fact that death is the most serious punishment currently under consideration in our society. Suppose, for instance, that capital punishment were to be abolished tomorrow; is it reasonable to assume that life terms of imprisonment would then be handed out with complete racial equity, sparing the mentally deficient and the rehabilitateable, and never imposed upon the innocent, or in a spirit of revenge, or upon kidnappers (thus reducing society, some would say, to the criminal's level)? On the contrary, all these familiar arguments against capital punishment can be applied equally to the case of life imprisonment--and would be, but for the severity of the death penalty, which makes a life term seem lenient by comparison.

In fact, we don't need to guess at this outcome; we can observe it empirically. When Canada abolished the death penalty in 1979, it was replaced with a maximum punishment of 25 years to life (that is, life imprisonment with no parole permitted for at least 25 years). The abolition was considered quite controversial, however, until a second parliamentary vote confirmed it in 1987. Almost immediately after that second vote, several prominent Canadians began arguing that 25 years was too long a minimum punishment for murderers who had demonstrated that they had been rehabilitated; not long thereafter, a Supreme Court decision created a murderer's "right" to a special hearing after fifteen years in jail, to determine parole eligibility. No such right had ever even been suggested, of course, until after the abolition of the death penalty had been assured. Only when the 25-year minimum became the "ultimate" penalty did its severity come under scrutiny--and unsurprisingly, it was found by many to be too severe.

Now, I actually sympathize quite strongly with those who feel a deep unease about punishment. Punishment is an ugly, painful, repulsive duty, and I would be the first to abandon it entirely if it were remotely feasible to do so. It gives disturbing expression to human moral imperfection--an imperfection that all of us, punishers and punished alike, share. It confronts us with the worst depths of our own flawed humanity, and rudely reminds the most honest among us that we, too, may require it, or the threat of it, to keep us from giving free rein to our evil impulses. It would be a much better world if we could abandon punishments altogether, starting with the most severe and continuing down to the mildest. But, alas, we cannot, and those who agitate to start that process, thinking it ennobling to do so, are living in a seductive but dangerous fantasy world.

In the wake of the WorldCom debacle, much ink is being spilled on the topic of "corporate greed". One might think, reading the fulminations of politicians and pundits, that the hapless stockholders taken in by WorldCom's accounting shenanigans had innocently invested in the company out of naive patriotism, or perhaps a selfless desire to help a poor, struggling telecom giant down on its luck. But who, exactly, were the victims of WorldCom's alleged accounting fraud?

WorldCom executives now admit that they had overstated earnings through 2001 and early 2002. But WorldCom stock peaked in early 2000, and has been sliding pretty much unremittingly ever since; had their accounting been honest, the stock would only have plummeted faster. That means that anybody who held WorldCom stock in 2000 or earlier actually benefited from the scam, having been given extra time to unload their worthless equity before the roof caved in. The losers? Short-term speculators picking up a tanking tech stock in the hopes of a bounce, and short-sellers squeezed by inflated profit reports. Real people, to be sure, but not exactly the widows and orphans conjured up by the rhetoricians of "corporate greed". The latter had most likely bought into WCOM on the way up, cheered all the way as their portfolios skyrocketed, and were being pandered to, not ripped off, by the company's stock-price-preserving earnings sleight-of-hand. If only they'd known to take advantage of the gift they were given.....

Sadly, their naivete wasn't merely confined to believing in the technical precision of WorldCom's auditors. The great crash of 1929 taught Americans an important lesson: Wall Street is a gigantic shark tank, and holiday swimmers donning their snorkels and diving in had better be prepared to lose a limb or two. Over the subsequent seventy years, casual investors slowly forgot that lesson, and in the last decade or so an astonishing number honestly thought that blind "momentum" investing in empty shells like WorldCom was a sure ticket to Millionaires' Row. Slowly, the lesson is being relearned.

Back in the days of the Enron scandal, I suggested that Americans had progressed from "denial" to "anger" in their passage through the five stages of grief over the collapse of the stock market (and their dreams of universal tycoonhood). Today we seem to have reached the "bargaining" stage, with public figures earnestly debating the strict new regulatory measures that must be put into place to guard against future cases of corporate accounting fraud--as though tighter controls on earnings reporting would have prevented all those thousands of investors from running up the prices of hollow tech stocks like WCOM to utterly absurd levels, and then losing their shirts in the subsequent crash.

The next stage, in case you've forgotten: "depression".

Western reactions to the Palestinian suicide bombing campaign, and to the strong support it receives from Palestinian society at large, fall into roughly two categories: some view it as a pathological phenomenon, an insane, self-destructive "death cult"; others see it as a legitimate, rational and morally defensible response to oppression coupled with military weakness. Both views are deeply mistaken; the Palestinian suicide bombing campaign, far from being an outburst of insanity, is a perfectly normal, human response to circumstances. But the normal, human response is not always the moral one; at times, in fact, it can be deeply immoral, even downright evil. This is one of those times.

As Matthew Parris, an unabashed apologist for the suicide bombers, points out, the ideal of self-sacrifice for the sake of country in wartime is ancient and venerated; it exists in the West as much as in the Middle East. Attacks on civilians are a different matter; but as recently as World War II the Western powers were bombing Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo and of course Hiroshima and Nagasaki, more to demoralize the enemy than to achieve concrete military objectives. Today, although similar attacks against purely or overwhelmingly civilian targets would generally be considered unconscionable, the historical attacks themselves are viewed with considerable ambivalence, and serious arguments are mounted in their defense.

In fact, it's not difficult to imagine a scenario in which most observers would concede the legitimacy of attacks on civilian targets. Suppose that an entire population (Palestinians, say)--men, women and children--were being rounded up and slaughtered en masse, and that suicide bombings stood a reasonable chance of slowing or even ending the killing. Couldn't a case be made for them, under those circumstances? Mightn't sacrificing the genocidal population's civilians in order to save many more of the victim population's civilians be a defensible tactic?

Of course, Palestinians are not being rounded up and slaughtered en masse. (Indeed, if they were, then those doing the killing would be unlikely to be deterred by a few civilian deaths on their own side. Palestinian terrorists, for example, are, as the suicide bombings themselves make clear, no more reluctant to sacrifice their own than they are to kill Israelis for the sake of their cause.) As Parris himself admits, "the dispute is about the ownership of land", not survival. Now, murdering civilians in tribal disputes over land is not irrational or insane behavior; it is how human beings have conducted their affairs for countless millenia. It is also the essence of barbarism, primitive savagery, amoral brutality. If civilization means anything, it is the end of such lawlessness and the advent of less bloodthirsty ways of resolving disputes over territory. Most of the ideas and ideals of domestic and international law are founded on the desire to prevent exactly the kind of butchery that Palestinian terrorists are perpetrating, and their apologists defending.

But the defenses always restrict themselves to Palestinian behavior alone--and for good reason. As Laurence Grafstein points out, Palestinian terrorists are "relying on the superior morality of their enemies"; if Israel were suddenly to accept Parris' gruesomely callous exoneration of murder for the sake of land ownership, then their subsequent conflict with the Palestinians would be short, extremely bloody, and a complete, virtually painless victory for Israel, resulting in the effective total annihilation of the Palestinian population. It would be no worse than than what thousands of nations have inflicted upon much more innocent enemies in their day, over the centuries. But that wouldn't make it morally justifiable. Perhaps the defenders of Palestinian terrorism should ask themselves why.

To those of us naively inclined to apply common sense when considering issues of Constitutional law and civil liberties, the answer to Eugene Volokh's question, posed in Slate--whether it's permissible to use geiger counters to detect a radioactive "dirty bomb" believed hidden in a residential neighborhood--is blindingly, staggeringly obvious (no nuclear pun intended). And Volokh the human being is compelled to concede that any constitution that prohibits such an obviously necessary, unobjectionable security measure is deserving of scorn, not reverence. But Volokh the Constitutionalist theologian has a problem: the high priesthood of the Supreme Court pronounced last year (and Volokh apparently agrees) that the infrared imagers sometimes used by police to detect signs of marijuana cultivation violate civil libertarian dogma. And if scanning for one form of radiation has been expelled from the Catechism, how can scanning for another form be permitted?

Again, common sense would dictate that the original decision--declaring infrared policing to be an unconscionable infringement on personal freedom--must have been ludicrously misguided, given its absurd consequences. But for the true believer, abandoning a holy decree for the sake of mere consistency is simply not an option, and Volokh has chosen instead to construct a Jesuitical distinction between the two rulings: searching for a dirty bomb with geiger counters is "reasonable", whereas searching for marijuana with infrared scanners is not. Hence, the Fourth Amendment, which forbids only "unreasonable searches and seizures", does not apply in the former case.

Note that Volokh clearly does not take the word "unreasonable" to mean "considered unreasonable by the people of the United States"; such an interpretation would, after all, leave the decision in the hands of the democratically accountable branches of government, eliminating any need for the Supreme Court to stick its collective nose into the issue in the first place. No, Volokh's interpretation of the meaning of the term "unreasonable" is crystal clear: a search is "unreasonable" if the community of the civil libertarian faithful (including himself) believe that it is, and the Supreme Court is fully justified in imposing his sect's cultic beliefs on an unwilling populace in direct contravention of their democratically expressed wishes. (Similarly, Dahlia Lithwick argued a few months ago for a Constitutional ban on high school urine tests for recreational drugs--but not necessarily for steroids--based on her sincere civil libertarian conviction that the former were "unreasonable", whatever the broader public might think. And just the other day, the Supreme Court sprang to the defense of a polemicist's absolute First Amendment right to go door-to-door unimpeded, marching right up the front steps of family homes--raising the burning question: what if your home contains an abortion clinic?)

Now, I'm not generally opposed to religiosity, and if Volokh wishes to adhere to his rather arcane creed of hairsplitting constitutionalism, then I wish him well. Theocracies are another matter, though, and if recent events haven't demonstrated to enough people's satisfaction the dangers of allowing fundamentalist fanatics to override the will of the majority in setting the law of the land, then I fear the grand project of Volokh and his correligionists--the wholesale replacement of representative democracy with Constitutional Shari'a--may well continue to advance at its current alarming pace.

Let's say I'm the national law enforcement arm of a superpower government, and I discover that an operative of the world's largest, most dangerous terrorist organization is arriving by air for a mission that is unclear, but includes reconaissance and possibly participation in a major attack. My course of action would seem obvious: I would keep him under round-the-clock surveillance, monitoring all his travels and communications--meetings, telephone calls, Internet traffic--hoping to learn everything I could about his colleagues and their activities. I would only arrest him on arrival--jeopardizing a potential future intelligence bonanza on the off-chance he might have been supplied with a lot of advance information, and that he might actually reveal it before legal chaos ensued--under two circumstances: desperate need for a P.R. victory, even at the expense of future successful investigations, or lack of confidence in my ability to prevent him from slipping underground, disappearing to pursue his mission undetected.

It's hard to say which circumstance would be more appalling.

Both E.J. Dionne and George Will have now expressed their reservations about the way that Title IX of the Civil Rights Act is being used to equalize male and female participation in college sports--typically by gutting men's programs. Will considers the whole business a travesty, whereas Dionne sympathizes with the goal, but advocates that additional funds be raised to support the newly threatened "marginal" men's sports like wrestling.

I have noted before that political correctness in universities is largely a function of the decline in the value and utility of a liberal arts education, and that academia's more substantial, socially esteemed functions, such as medical, scientific and legal training, have been less seriously affected by it in direct proportion to their perceived fulfillment of a goal too important to undermine. Well, if the liberal arts have decayed into triviality, then college athletics are (and always were, really) downright frivolous. With the exception of big-ticket sports like football and basketball--which are essentially unaffected by Title IX, because universities prize the scads of money they bring in more than they value their own educational mission, let alone some abstract ideal of gender equality--college sports are so obviously and readily expendable that remolding them in the image of some feminist fantasy of gender equivalence seems hardly more foolish than letting them adhere to the old traditionalist fantasy of the "scholar-athlete". Personally, though, I'd treat them as I'd treat the liberal arts faculties: let them find themselves a legitimate educational purpose, and start serving it--or let them perish altogether.

In the New York Times, Diane Ravitch--normally a rare voice for sanity in the largely insane world of the education academy--has attacked the bowdlerization of famous texts in the New York Regents Examination, in the name of "sensitivity". (The practice has apparently now been abolished.) I understand her motivation; it's unfortunate that students are deemed too delicate to read various quite harmless passages from great works of literature because somebody, somewhere, lodged a far-fetched complaint of "offensiveness". But the problem with today's schools--as Ravitch herself would probably admit--is not that students are exposed only to sanitized versions of classic writings; it's that too few students are exposed to such writings at all, because they're crowded out by meaningless, mind-numbing or play-like "activities" and crass political propagandizing masquerading as education. Even after the censor's scissors have done their work, there is still a great deal of learning to be had from the masterpieces in question, and teaching them in that form would, for most students, be a massive improvement over the pap they're currently getting. Moreover, the precedent is a valuable one; if politically correct sensitivities must be respected when choosing materials to present to students, then perhaps more respect will be given as well to the sensitivities of those who oppose pseudoscience, or creationism, or political propaganda of the right or left (or the center, for that matter), or any of a host of other, more immediate threats to education that are constantly being insinuated into the modern classroom.

It is true that if nearly everyone has a veto over what is taught in the schools, then the curriculum will be more limited than it might otherwise be. But it most likely will continue to include the basics, at least, while excluding a lot of the junk that gets in today. And if what's left doesn't even reach the level of a rudimentary, bare-bones curriculum, then at least we'll know that there lacks a solid social consensus in favor of one--and if that's the case, then public education is probably doomed in any event.

Timothy Noah, in Slate, points out some interesting parallels between the FBI and CIA failures leading up to September 11th, and the alleged New York Times failures catalogued by Ken Auletta in the New Yorker. One parallel he didn't note, though, is that press coverage of both controversies focuses inordinately on process, rather than substance, in explaining the claimed failures. This may be a quirk of journalism; in the business world, "process-oriented", when used to describe a manager, is a euphemism for "clueless", but many journalists (including, apparently, Noah) have swallowed the fiction that management is an elaborate art/craft/science in its own right, and can be improved through technical adjustments in methodology.

For example, both the Times and the Feds are accused of operating too centralized an organization, and giving insufficient leeway to agents in the field. The infamous "Rowley memo", in which a Minneapolis agent complains that pre-September 11th investigation of Zacarias Moussaoui was blocked by FBI headquarters, is cited as evidence of too much central control at the FBI. Similarly, Auletta invokes the threatened departure of Jill Abramson, Times Washington bureau chief, as proof that editor Howell Raines is too heavy-handed with his subordinates. But highly centralized organizations are sometimes more effective than decentralized ones, and there are certainly plausible reasons for exercising considerable central control in a visible, politically sensitive institution like the FBI (or a newspaper of record like the Times). If the D.C. headquarters of the FBI was staffed with incompetents (or, for that matter, with highly competent leaders who happened to have made a single very bad call), then that says nothing about whether field agents should in general defer to their superiors or be granted more leeway. (Similarly, Jill Abramson, for all I know, might be a primadonna who could use a little "bigfooting" from Raines.)

The finger-pointing and apparent lack of coordination between the FBI and the CIA is also less clearly problematic than it might appear. Rivalries--even bitter ones--between allied organizations can be spurs to industriousness and innovation. (They can also, of course, be merely petty and destructive; what matters most is how effective each organization is, not how many rivalries it nurses.) And the FBI and CIA are, to some extent, supposed to be at odds; one mission of the FBI, after all, is hunting for moles within the CIA.

By no means am I suggesting that either the FBI or the CIA (or the Times) is a healthy organization. Their problems, though, are unlikely to be a matter of management science. Rather, large organizations fail mostly due to incompetent leaders, low-quality rank-and-file, or an obsolete, ill-chosen or ill-defined mission. With respect to the CIA and the FBI, September 11th took care of the last problem, and will likely solve the second one over time, as the agencies in question become attractive career paths for top-notch people with a patriotic bent. Whether the first problem has been solved remains to be seen; but I can predict with confidence that degree of centralization, intragovernmental rivalry, or some other pet issue of "process-oriented" managers will not determine the ultimate answer.

A federal court has ruled that the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA), requiring public libraries to install pornography-filtering software on their Internet kiosks, is unconstitutional. This ruling is of a piece with a lower court's Brooklyn Museum v. Giuliani decision, which invoked the First Amendment to prevent the mayor of New York from cutting off funding to a museum showing an exhibit he judged offensive. In NEA v. Finley, the Supreme Court ruled that decency considerations could be taken into account by "diverse advisory panels" deciding government funding of art, but in language that implied that any more specific provision would be unconstitutional. The Brooklyn decision then demonstrated that the government's prerogative to determine what art to fund had indeed--as Scalia and Thomas wrote in a scathing concurrence--been "gutted" by the Finley ruling. The CIPA ruling simply extends the same principle, preventing taxpayers from deciding, through their representatives, to exclude from their subsidies of expressive media certain forms of expression they find offensive.

Of course, these rulings have nothing to do with any broad, overarching notion of free speech; there is in fact any number of classes of speech that the Supreme Court is willing to see restricted, or even to restrict itself. Suppose, for example, that the Internet filters in question had blocked lists of names and addresses of known sex offenders. A Federal Appeals Court has already ruled that publishing such lists on the Internet violates the rights of those offenders; the Supreme Court will thus decide, later this year, in effect, not whether such filters would be permissible, but rather whether they would be mandatory. Whole classes of speech--commercial speech, for example--are routinely excluded from the courts' First Amendment protections; even political speech is narrowly circumscribed with respect to subsidy: religious organizations, for example, receive a tax exemption only if they refrain from explicitly endorsing political candidates for office, and the Supreme Court nods. And then there are the myriad ways in which the government--through public service advertisements, for example--directly funds speech that embraces a particular point of view (such as "just say 'no' to drugs").

No, this sequence of First Amendment rulings, like the Fourth Amendment shenanigans I discussed previously, is a transparent effort to impose the judicial community's collective public policy preferences on Americans in direct contradiction to the latter's democratically expressed will. Just as the courts, by declaring high-school urine tests for recreational drugs (but not steroids) unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment, effectively vetoed a specific democratic decision to discourage recreational drug use among teenagers, so has it now vetoed a specific democratic decision against subsidies for pornography-viewing at public libraries (but not for campaigning in churches). Even those who agree with the courts' political views on these particular issues ought to be concerned with the breathtaking sweep of the courts' arrogation of political power through judicial diktat. At this rate, after all, it's probably only a matter of time before they start, say, meddling with the presidential election process....

Catherine Millet is a 54-year-old French art critic with a very unusual hobby. Since her teens, she has performed housework for literally thousands of men she has never met. She especially enjoys doing laundry, but cooking, cleaning, polishing, tidying--she loves it all, and has done it for strangers (sometimes several in one day) for decades, with abandon and panache. She says she'd never become a professional maid--she has no taste for such "mercenary" domesticity--but, as she writes in her recent memoir, she "cannot put a number on those" whose homes she has cleaned.

Okay, I lied a little--Millet actually performed sexually, not domestically, for those thousands of strange men. But how much of a difference does that make, really? Sure, the number of women who list sex among their favorite activities is probably higher than the number citing housework. Still, there are women who throw themselves into domestic chores with at least as much energy as others devote to sex--though, in both cases, usually in the context of the proverbial "committed relationship", or (among some) for material reward, or (if single) alone, strictly for personal satisfaction. Yet Millet the nymphomaniac is either lambasted as a harlot or applauded as a brave bohemian, while a hypothetical Millet the promiscuous scrubber would most likely simply be dismissed as a prize chump. Why the difference?

The key distinction is that the downsides of cleaning--discomfort, exhaustion, sensual unpleasantnesses--are inherent, whereas the costs to women of sex--pregnancy and disease risk, possible social opprobrium, the danger that a strange male will turn out to be violent--are conditional on circumstances. And from Messalina to Catherine the Great, there have been powerful women in a position to insulate themselves from these costs, some of whom have then chosen to indulge themselves in Milletian levels of casual sexual promiscuity. Such behavior has thus acquired something of an aristocratic association quite lacking (needless to say) in housework.

As I have mentioned before, During the sixties and seventies (before AIDS), the combination of penicillin, prosperity and the pill created a set of circumstances that made Western middle class women, in this respect, a kind of mass aristocracy. Those inclined to follow their ravenous urges were thus suddenly quite free to do so without substantial risk--indeed, acquiring a distinct aura of elite invulnerability in the process. It is that mystique which now provokes such strong reactions from those who read Millet's story (and separates her starkly from, say, a common housecleaner).

The risks of promiscuous sex never disappear, though, and they are more widely recognized and better understood today than they were, say, thirty years ago. In that light, Millet seems to have been making quite a significant sacrifice for the sake of her string of anonymous liaisons. She may in the end have turned out little the worse for wear, but given all the risks she took, she might well have been wiser, in retrospect, to have confined herself to dusting all those men's homes instead.

Anthony Lewis calls them "provocative". Robert Wright calls them "famously provocative". Thomas Friedman referred to them as "a cancer". Eric Alterman identifies them as "[s]ome of the people who piss me off most in the world". British Poet Tom Paulin is more succinct; he says, "I feel nothing but hatred for them", and that suggests that they "should be shot dead".

In case you haven't figured it out, these people are talking about Jews--in the latter case, American-born Jews--living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Now, it's not usually considered a provocation merely to live in the wrong place; in most civilized countries, objecting to (let alone hating) people of a particular race or religion living in one's neighborhood is a symptom of crass prejudice, not injustice. In Israel, for example, where twenty percent of the population is Arab, only a tiny fringe of fanatics opposes the presence of Arab citizens in the country. Yet the idea of Jews living in a future Palestine is considered (as it was during Egyptian/Jordanian rule over the territories) unacceptable not just to Palestinians, but also to many--probably most--Western journalists.

The reasons offered are pretty weak. The classic "humiliation" complaint I have ridiculed previously is often invoked; Anthony Lewis even blames the settlements for having "ravaged the environment". The most common (and least implausible) claim is that they represent an attempt to alter the demographics of the territories, turning them into Jewish-majority areas. That might indeed be the goal of some Israeli nationalists, but their "greater Israel" vision peaked in popularity in the 1980s, is not widely shared among Israelis today, and has never even been close to plausibly implementable. (The Jewish population of the territories these days is less than 10% of the total.) And throughout the Oslo process, dismantling of most of the settlements was more or less assumed to be part of any future final deal (the 1979 peace treaty with Egypt included evacuation of settlements in the Sinai; and at Camp David in 1999, Ehud Barak explicitly offered the Palestinians removal of all the Gaza settlements and most of those in the West Bank).

Moreover, far from acting as if they view settlements in the territories as a crucial issue, Palestinian terrorists have shown a conspicuous lack of interest in distinguishing between Jews living in the occupied territories and Jews living in Israel proper. Their victims are disproportionately in the latter category, despite the obvious greater ease with which the nearer, more isolated settlements can be attacked. Indeed, Hillel Halkin argues, plausibly, that if "the notion that [the settlers] could live in a Palestinian state may seem laughably quixotic", then "so is the notion of a genuine Israeli-Palestinian peace". After all, what kind of relations can a future Palestinian state be expected to have with a neighboring country whose dominant ethnicity has been officially banned from their soil?

But most of the settlement critics are clearly unconcerned about such matters; for them, the settlements are merely a pretext for condemning Israel. That much can be readily deduced from the fact that their obsession with Jews living in the West Bank is in precisely inverse proportion to their level of concern about Palestinians murdering Jews. Thomas Friedman, for example, used to fulminate at length about the evil settlers; having recently ratcheted up his rhetoric against Palestinian terrorism, he now voices his objections to the settlements at a somewhat toned-down level. Anthony Lewis, on the other hand, continues to show, in this recent article as in his past columns, far more concern for where some Jews live than for whom some Arabs kill. Alterman, as well, has a history of condemning Jewish settlement (among other sins) as an outrage while mentioning Palestinian terrorism in passing as a regrettable matter. And Tom Paulin, from the sound of it, finds terrorism against Jewish targets quite unobjectionable altogether.

This imbalance of attention is understandable; if one were to give serious consideration to both issues in turn, then the overwhelmingly greater severity of Palestinian terrorism would be self-evident (as it has lately been to Friedman), severely undercutting one's anti-Israel rhetoric. It is a measure of Israel's remarkable scrupulousness in the face of the terrorist threat that so many of her critics continue to focus so much of their ire on her supposedly heinous crime of building homes in the wrong places.

According to Mackubin Owens, the "failure of intelligence" leading to 9/11 was a result of "congressional reforms that forced [the CIA] to shift to from the use of human assets to reliance on technology." Of course, Peter Beinart was blaming a bureaucratic CIA back in February (although he complained that Congress wasn't overseeing it enough). And former agent Reuel Marc Gerecht was explaining the fecklessness of the CIA's efforts against Osama bin Laden last summer, before the WTC attack even happened. Another former agent, Robert Baer, has written a book more or less corroborating the others' views.

Personally, I've always taken it for granted that a huge, widely-known government bureaucracy can't possibly be an effective intelligence agency, and I've therefore been assuming all along that the CIA has been a dead letter (and known as such by those who matter) ever since it became every paranoid's favorite obsession back in the 70's. In recent years, the NSA, which had taken over from the emasculated CIA the role of main source of intelligence for the US government, has also become noticeably huge, famous, and popular among paranoids--right around the time that the proliferation of effective encryption technology has rendered its signals intelligence-based approach nearly useless against many of its most important targets. Even the shadowy NRO, the agency responsible for satellite reconnaissance, has become relatively familiar of late--along with its commercial competitors, who sell the same capabilities at surprisingly affordable rates--prompting those with secrets to take care to hide them from the skies.

So who's doing the real spying these days? Well, I've spotted scattered mentions of something called the Special Collection Service, or SCS, a small organization specializing in more "direct" intelligence collection methods than the NSA's and NRO's (to say nothing of the CIA's, which, according to the aforementioned critics, amount to sitting in plush offices in embassy compounds). There seems to be little publicly available information about them, though.

Sounds promising to me.

Myriad commentators have been arguing that heads should roll as a result of the government's failure to heed advance indications that something like the 9/11 attack might occur. But as the New York Times reminds us, "[i]n recent months, officials have issued threat alerts regarding nuclear plants, financial institutions and even specific structures like the Seattle Space Needle and the Golden Gate Bridge". Why, then, aren't these pundits now advocating heavy-duty security measures to protect all of these alleged targets? And if, heaven forbid, one of the latter should suffer a terrorist strike in the near future, will the finger-waggers again be calling for government officials to pay the political price for the same complacency, in the face of vague or inconclusive reports, that they themselves are exhibiting today?

In Salon, Ann Marlowe argues that feminists should reject the tradition of men paying for dates. "[A]s long as we construe gender as being about the flow of funds from men to women," she writes, "in some deep but inescapable way all women are prostitutes, and all men are johns." Lisa Dusseault agrees.

I could be snide, of course, and ask why a hardcore "equality" feminist would object to women being prostitutes and men being johns in the first place. After all, few men would consider themselves devalued victims if women paid them for their sexual services; why, then, should women feel any differently?

Fortunately, I'm not a hardcore "equality" feminist, and I know what I disparage about prostitution: not "the flow of funds from men to women", but rather the reduction of something as personal and central as sexual intimacy to a cash transaction between strangers, degrading both parties in the process. Most men who pay for a date's meal, on the other hand, do so for roughly the same reason most women on a date wear lipstick: it's a simple, popular and effective way to enhance one's attractiveness to the opposite sex. Both might seem slightly unsavory if analyzed too closely for anthropological origins and social meanings, but in practice their immediate motivation is nothing more disreputable than a natural desire to put one's best foot forward and make a good impression--in short, to "look good". (And, as Billy Crystal's "Fernando" would say, "to look good is to feel good.")

No doubt there are plenty of people--both male and female--who see dating finances in Marlowe's coarse transactional terms. But such people are also far more likely to embrace "equality" feminism, with its disdain for chivalry and hearty endorsement of cold sexual self-interestedness, than traditional romance, which recoils from crude notions of sexual barter. In other words, it's not the man who always automatically pays, but rather the man who doesn't always pay, who's obviously thinking carefully about what he's giving up--and what he might get in return.

If the aftermath of the Jenin pseudo-massacre has demonstrated anything, it's the absurdity of European opinion makers' claims to a more "nuanced" and "complex" view of foreign affairs than that of their brashly "simplistic" black-and-white-thinking American counterparts. The parade of EU politicians and journalists visiting Jenin, calling for war crimes investigations of the Israelis and condemning--with what has sounded remarkably like resounding moral clarity--the destruction and suffering visited upon the Palestinian people, has made George W. Bush's language about Islamic terrorism sound downright diplomatic by comparison. And at least the US president had most of his facts right.

Not that anyone should be surprised; in a world of imperfect souls, it is natural for both people and nations to appreciate the "complexities" of their friends' faults and misdeeds, while passionately decrying the myriad sins of their enemies. In fact, throughout the Cold War, the US demonstrated exactly such a "double standard" with respect to pro-Western and pro-Soviet tyrannies in the Third World, forgiving or excusing (if not actually defending) human rights abusers lined up on the American side, while excoriating Soviet-leaning regimes for their cruelty. European leftists, of course, did the same--only in the opposite direction. This time around, it's Israel getting the breaks from its American friends, while Europe sides with the Arabs in general, and the Palestinian Authority in particular.

A good example is German author Peter Schneider's column in (where else?) Sunday's New York Times. Schneider claims to want "to get past these destructive clichés" of America's "Manichean world view and simplistic solutions", and Europe's "weaklings and cowards". But his column is really all about how the US should join him in cutting (only) the Palestinians a break. Take Israeli settlements in the occupied territories: "When American commentators mention this problem," Schneider writes, "they treat it as inappropriate behavior, but hardly justifying any kind of strong response." They don't mention the settlements much, he suggests, because "to do so might present a motive for the suicide bombings." Schneider never mentions what "might present a motive" for building settlements; Israeli wrongdoing, in his view, need not be probed for possible mitigating justifications. As for those suicide bombings, "nothing has hurt the Palestinian cause more than its strategy of terror". Schneider never even bothers to mention those other victims of the bombings; but then, I suppose it is only natural to worry about harm to one's friends first.

Now, Peter Schneider (who, we should not forget, speaks, in the end, only for Peter Schneider) is free to choose his allies as he pleases, as are his fellow European intellectuals--or, for that matter, Americans of all stripes. (As he puts it, "European skepticism about American views of the Middle East arises from the very strong alliance between the United States and Israel." Well, it would, wouldn't it?) But perhaps Schneider and his friends might wish to pause and consider what happened scarcely a decade ago, when, following the collapse of the Soviet Union. those fond of giving Moscow, rather than Washington, the benefit of the doubt in international disputes found themselves sporting world-historical-scale volumes of egg on their faces. Defending corrupt, ambitiously irredentist autocracies in their efforts to destroy vibrant pro-Western democracies has not always proven, in retrospect, to be a wise choice.

Apparently, it's "don't call me a Jew-hater" week over at Slate. On Tuesday, James Fallows complained that while "[t]wenty years ago it would have seemed insultingly obvious to say that disagreement with Israeli military policy did not make you an anti-Semite....in America, a combination of conservative Christians and Likudnik Jews has started waving the anti-Semitism flag" against critics of Israel. On Wednesday, Robert Wright admitted that "most people who truly are anti-Israel probably are anti-Semitic", but pleaded that "many of Sharon's critics, such as [Israeli ultra-dove] Yossi Beilin, are quite pro-Israel. In fact, they oppose Sharon's policies precisely because they think the policies are bad for Israel." Both men obviously have a point, but their manner of complaint also seriously undermines their own arguments. In essence, they both protest too much, while explaining too little.

Certainly, mere criticism of Israeli policy implies neither anti-Semitism nor even an anti-Israel bias. But it's hardly surprising that the connection is being made more frequently these days, given the explosion of overtly anti-Israel and anti-Semitic sentiment around the world, and the growing solidarity among Jews and Israel's defenders in support of the Israeli government's recent actions. As a simple statistical matter, opposition to Israel has become (as Wright admits) more closely correlated with anti-Semitism than ever, and vigorous opposition to the current Israeli government's policy correspondingly closely associated with an anti-Israel stance.

Not that any of this demonstrates that either Wright or Fallows is anti-Israel, let alone anti-Semitic. But it sets up a mild statistical presumption that requires addressing, not mere dismissal. If I were to advocate, for example, that James Fallows and Robert Wright be pushed off a cliff, I might not hate them (perhaps I believe death to be a route to their greater spiritual elevation) or even wish them physical harm (perhaps I believe they both can fly). But because most people who want to push these two men off a cliff do in fact hate them, it is my responsibility to make some argument as to why the statistical presumption is wrong in this case.

And if I did so, I wouldn't need to gripe about people assuming I hate them; my argument would speak clearly for itself in refuting that assumption. Yossi Beilin, Robert Wright's favorite pro-Israel opponent of the current Israeli government, is no doubt occasionally accused by his less tactful opponents of being anti-Israel. But he doesn't spend much time explaining how it's possible to be both pro-Israel and anti-Sharon; he's too busy, as a pro-Israel dove, arguing with his fellow pro-Israel Israelis that his own political approach is better for his country than Sharon's. Likewise, there are a fair number of fervently anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox rabbis who accuse the largely secular Israeli state of blasphemy, but they never wring their hands over critics who call them "self-hating Jews". Like anti-Sharon Israeli doves, they let their arguments demonstrate that, however unpopular their opinions may be, their intentions towards the Jewish people are in fact wholly benign.

At the other extreme, there are people like Wilhelm Marr, the 19th-century German originator of the term "anti-Semitism". Now there was a fellow who really cared about distinguishing gradations of opposition to Jews. Marr believed that it was very important to separate his scientifically based disdain for Jews from mere religious bigotry; recognizing Jewish moral and intellectual inferiority, he insisted, was not tantamount to "Judenhass"--Jew-hatred. Jean-Marie Le Pen and other far-right figures with a record of anti-Semitic remarks are similarly finicky about distancing themselves from hatred of Jews; they may, say, decry the excessive power of Jewish commercial interests in America, they argue, but that doesn't make them anti-Semitic. Somehow, though, concrete indications of their non-hostility to Jews--indications that normal politicians eager for votes ought to be happy to display--just never seem to arise.

And that's the point--political positions that are explicitly not anti-Israel, and even anti-Israel positions that are explicitly not anti-Semitic, are their own best defense, and need no supplementary whining about false accusations to bolster them. Both Fallows and Wright conspicuously declined to express any such positions, though, confining themselves instead to snide protests that one can't oppose the Israeli government these days without being accused of anti-Israel bias or worse. Perhaps they both have genuinely nuanced beliefs that lead them to loathe the current Israeli government out of love for Israel and the Jews. But if they did, then why weren't they ready to come out and present them, instead of hiding behind what amounts to an "I didn't do it, nobody saw me, you can't prove anything" defense?

Am I the only person who's disturbed at the bizarrely roundabout way in which the Benevolence International Foundation and its director were prosecuted? According to informants, Osama bin Laden used the group as a conduit for funds and information--including information on chemical and nuclear weapons--during the 1990s. But that wasn't enough for an indictment. It was, however, enough to allow the FBI to raid their offices and freeze their assets in December. And when the organization sued to recover its assets, it committed perjury by denying that it had aided terrorist groups.

Al Capone was famously convicted on income tax charges, of course; but that was because the feds couldn't pin anything else on him. Here, the problem is much more disturbing: the kind of assistance the organization was giving bin Laden apparently wasn't illegal at the time. (Otherwise, they'd have been indicted for it from the start.) Presumably the Patriot Act has fixed such loopholes, but obviously that statute can't be applied retroactively.

All of which raises a question I first posed back when John Walker Lindh was first captured: suppose that a known, Afghan-trained Al Qaida "sleeper" has been stationed in the US (perhaps even become a US citizen), but has not yet committed any terrorist acts. What, if anything, can the law do about him? If he were to receive his training today, I believe he would likely be a felon under the Patriot Act; but again, that law cannot be applied retroactively. It seems as though America may well end up paying for years to come for its past lack of statutorial vigilance with respect to the threat of foreign terrorist organizations.

Mickey Kaus has discovered another loophole in the recently-passed McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law. His last discovery, which I discussed a while ago, was an obscure, complicated hack that involved a wealthy contributor pretending to be an electoral opponent. The new loophole, however, is so wide and straightforward that it completely changes the character of the law--turning it from an appalling-but-incomplete limitation on legitimate political speech into a fairly benign--even useful--"clean campaigns" measure.

According to Kaus, the law does not actually prevent independent organizations from purchasing campaign advertising in the runup to an election. Only corporations and labor unions fall under this prohibition; unincorporated organizations do not. And as Kaus points out, the main purpose of incorporation is to shield individual co-owners from legal liability for the action of the corporation. Kaus neglects only the last step of the argument: that the main effect of the new law is therefore to require political advertisers to accept personal legal accountability for their speech. In other words, advertise all you like, but if you engage in last-minute libelous accusations, you can't protect yourself from lawsuits. That's not only not a threat to free speech--it sounds like excellent public policy. So why isn't the law being celebrated as a victory for accountability in campaigning, instead of being both praised and lambasted as a restriction on campaign spending?