Month: December 2002

Hey, here’s a switch for you: Christopher Hitchens is channeling me, as opposed to the other way around:
in Slate, 12/10/02:
A condition of the new imperialism will be the specific promise that while troops will come, they will not stay too long. An associated promise is that the era of the client state is gone and that the aim is to enable local populations to govern themselves. This promise is sincere. A new standard is being proposed, and one to which our rulers can and must be held. In other words, if the United States will dare to declare out loud for empire, it had better be in its capacity as a Thomas Paine arsenal, or at the very least a Jeffersonian one. And we may also need a new word for it.
Several steps ahead of you, Christopher!
N.Z. Bear, 6/24/02:
…it is now in the United States’ direct, selfish interest, to ensure that every single nation on this planet provides a stable, democratic government to its people where freedom is respected, and the rule of law enforced. This used to be the stuff of idealists : now, it is the bread-and-butter of hard-nosed cynics and pragmatists.
But Empire is not really the correct word to use here, although it will be used by those who oppose this effort. The appropriate word is “Confederacy”.
Yes, some interesting resonances with American history there, but nonetheless, the term fits. Dictionary definition (from Encarta ) : “an alliance of people, states, or parties for some common purpose, or the people, states, or parties in an alliance.”
If I may impose upon you, go read the rest of my old piece if you didn’t on its first run; it is one of my better works (a statement which involves no hubris on my part, as I concede readily that everything is relative…)

Folks –
We have a (late) winner for Cause of the Week at the Center:
12/01: Misha: Support the Brave Students of Iran.
If you want to support this cause, please link to Misha’s post at your earliest convenience…
-N.Z. Bear

So several folks are the arrival of Reason’s new group blog, Hit and Run today, which indeed appears to be a quality collection o’ bits.
But this simple bear is confused: why is everyone behaving as if this is the blog’s opening day, when it appears to have archives from November?

I’m feeling a bit better today; this cold has dragged on more than I had hoped. I’m hoping today will be that day in an illness where you clearly still feel sick, but now the sickness is just a collection of irritating symptoms, rather than something which dominates your entire perception of the world.
So far, so good.

So Cardinal Law. But you knew that.

Yes, I think Lott should resign (or be shown the door in less voluntary fashion). Doesn’t everybody?

Okay, so now the game is truly afoot. Iraq has its declaration to the United Nations, and now the fun starts.
First, an observation: Why does the AP story on this event say the following:
The Iraqi government presented to the rest of the world Saturday a mass of documents detailing its nuclear, chemical and biological activities and formally declaring to the United Nations that it has no weapons of mass destruction.
What we know of this document is that it is apparently 12,000 pages long, and that, as of now, nobody but the Blix team has access to it (not even the Security Council — but hold that thought).
Now, yes, the story quotes Lt.-Gen. Hossam Mohammed Amin, the Iraqi general who prepared the document, as stating flatly that they have no WMDs.
But that doesn’t count. The only thing that counts is what is actually in the document, as I understand it. And bottom line is, we won’t know that for several days, at least.
(Absurd, you say, why would he say that if the declaration didn’t actually back it up? First, think about who you are talking about here, and second, you don’t think there’s a vast amount of room for arguments of definition (“The Iraqi people do not consider sarin gas a WMD…”) in this situation?)
Bottom line: is it clearly premature to be saying that Iraq has “formally declared” that they have no WMDs. We just don’t know that.
But ok, let’s assume for the sake of argument that the declaration does say, in terms everybody can agree with, that Iraq has no WMDs. What happens then?
Well, one of two things happen:
1) The Bush administration presents some very hard evidence that it has been holding in reserve as to specific Iraqi violations, thereby showing all those who have been whining about the lack of specifics up until now exactly why they haven’t gotten them yet. (And not incidentally, restoring some of my faith that this President is serious).
2) Nothing much at all happens for a few weeks, in which case I start getting very, very worried.
Incidentally, about this whole flap regarding the disclosure of the declaration to the Security Council. Seems to me this is likely a communications snafu, not any serious disagreement.
I say this partly because, when I heard of it, the idea of not wanting to release the full document to a wide audience actually made some sense. The argument, as I understood it, was that the disclosure could very well take the form of something close to a how-to guide for a nation that wanted to pursue nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.
When you remember that currently, Syria is on the Security Council, it starts to make a bit more sense why maybe giving that document out to everyone might not be such a hot idea, doesn’t it?
But this, of course, just points out a basically insoluable problem; you can’t get around the fact that Syria is a SC member, so they’ve got as much of a right as anyone to see the sensitive info, according to UN rules. Just yet another problem with ascribing moral and legal authority to a body that is nothing more than the sum of its (rather imperfect) parts…

Hesiod a comment on my Betrayal of Faith post which I thought required a response. Here’s his comment in full:
Nope.
It means us “liberals” WERE right all along.
Any trained monkey could have figured out that we needed to invade Afghanistan.
And the VAST majority of liberals and Democrats AGRRED with that move.
But…once Dubyah got fixated on Saddam…and he started trying to compromise our national security by kissing Saudi butt, and covering up his administration’s screw-up pre-/911…we got the picture.
Too bad it’s taken you this long to understand what we already knew: Dubyah is an emperor waiting to happen.
Or rather, he’s arrogant, stupid, narrowminded, and ruthless.
All that would be bad enough if he were merely venal and powerhungry.
But…he’s also “on a mission.”
He’s a true believer in his own myth.
He’s a neo-utopian nutcase.
It’s time to fight him with every legal and constitutional means at our disposal.
First, Hesiod, there were plenty of liberals who opposed invading Afghanistan. If you were not among them, then good for you, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t a significant number carping about it before (and after).
The fact that Bush is not full dealing with all of our terrorist problems at this moment (Saudi Arabia) doesn’t mean he’s necessarily wrong in dealing with one of them (Iraq).
I won’t pretend to have a huge degree of confidence in the administration’s conduct towards Saudi Arabia based on their actions thus far, but I hold out a shred of hope that they will deal properly with the House of Saud once Iraq (and possibly Iran) have been helped to establish a beachhead for civilized democracy in the region.
But we’ll see. Your problem, Hesiod, is that your hatred for Bush blinds you to the merits or flaws in his actual policies. He supports something, so therefore you seem to reflexively oppose it.
This is just as bad (worse, actually) then blindly supporting Bush regardless of what he does. It’s worse because Bush is clearly not a torturing, mass murdering dictator, although perhaps he does have some of the negative qualities you ascribe to him.
I had a thought recently about the way our prejudices guide our thinking — how the positions that we have taken up to the present necessarily influence which side in a given conflict gets the benefit of the doubt when the situation is murky.
I thought about my support for Bush and his administration, and my natural distrust of Hussein; of the Taliban; of the PLO and of Arafat.
Was I leaning too far to one side?
And I concluded that even if I was, so be it. If after I am gone, on my tombstone is written this epitaph:
“He gave the benefit of the doubt too little to those who deliberately murdered innocents to serve their cause, and too much to those who opposed them.”
Well, then, I think I’m just fine with that.

Sorry for the light posting. My grand ambitions to get a lot of weblog work done today were squished by the cold I seem to have picked up.
More when I’m a bit recovered…
-NZB

So given the ongoing disaster that is currently known as the Catholic Church in America, there’s been much wringing of hands about whether the Church will survive, how they should handle the scandals, and even whether certain dioceses might declare bankruptcy to protect themselves. (Insert obligatory snide remark clarifying that as financial, not moral, bankruptcy here…)
I think Catholics are missing a chance, actually. Don’t like the current Catholic Church? There’s an age-old solution to that problem: found your own!
How long has it been since we’ve had dueling Popes — I need a little help here, my medieval history is rusty and it’s been ages since I’ve been to a SCA gather. But my answer is: too long!
My advice to disgruntled Catholics is this: pick your own Pope, declare your Catholic Church to be the one true one, and start ignoring anything that emanates from the Vatican.
You’d have to find a compelling Pontiff, of course. But there’s an easy answer for that. Two words:
Pope Rudy!
PS – I was baptised Catholic, so I claim some vague right to be snippy about the Church…

So it occurs to me, watching the recent attempts by the House of Saud to a pose of righteous indignation that anybody might dare suggest they have anything to do with terrorism, that there is an opportunity for some eager blogger here.
We’ve got Watch blogs for all sorts of things — methinks the time has come for Saudwatch.blogspot.com.
With the House of Saud mounting a determined public relations campaign, we need somebody focused on ensuring that for every word that comes out of a Prince’s mouth; for every press release they issue, there is an appropriate counterpoint providing a proper Fisking.
Certainly, folks like Charles & the gang over at LGF do some of this, but I think a more focused blog dealing exclusively with the statements of the Saudis would be of value.
I’d consider the job, but I don’t have the focus, and besides, I’ve got way too many projects in the air. Seems like a great niche for an aspiring young politiblogger, though. Any volunteers?

Can anybody help me pinpoint precisely when Tim Noah went completely, deliriously, ass-over-elbows bonkers?
It didn’t happen suddenly, I know that for sure. He’s been drifting down a slippery slope for a while now. But recently, he’s crossed some ill-defined borderline: I fear that tinfoil headgear is not far in dear Tim’s future, truly I do.
Case in point: yesterday, Noah an entire column out of the concept that he has difficulty identifying the moral difference between S&M sex involving consenting adults and torture commited by Saddam Hussein’s regime.
My theory: it’s got to have something to do with the whole referring to yourself in the third person thing. That just can’t be healthy over long periods of time. (I have this unbidden vision of dinner at the Noah household: “Chatterbox will have more meatloaf, please!”).
Noah’s always struck me as a decent fellow, but lately, in the words of Will Smith… Damn! I’m unclear on the etiquette here: is there an appropriate way to schedule some kind of intervention? (Hey Mickey, little help? )
Noah used to be obnoxious-but-entertaining. Lately he’s just wacked.
And no, not in a good way.
Thanks to Handy Andy for both the pointer to yesterday’s piece and for his own analysis of ChatterGuy’s latest.

The following is a review of the theatrical release of Lilo and Stitch originally posted at The Truth Laid Bear. I am currently restraining myself from buying the DVD (which was just released on DVD December 3rd) — it’s on my Christmas list — but once I do get it, I’ll do another review.
This review is also available over at
I’m not a huge modern-era Disney fan. Little Mermaid was fun; everything else since I could pretty much take or leave. Didn’t even bother with Mulan and Atlantis; although Emperor’s New Groove was a blast.
But Lilo and Stich… this one’s a classic.
I first encountered Stitch in one of the many mini-preview “inter-Stitch-als” that Disney released on the Web in the leadup to the release — starting way back about six months ago. It was a takeoff on Beauty and the Beast, which Stitch crawls out on a chandelier to observe Beauty and her Beast dancing gracefully through the ballroom — and then proceeds to come crashing down in the middle of the dance floor, nearly squashing the pair.
Beauty dusts herself off, raises her nose and sniffs, “I’ll be in my room — Get your own movie,” walking off stage — and Stitch, muttering something incompressible in his own odd language, then gives an unmistakable wolf-whistle as the fair lady passes out of sight.
I was hooked. I liked this little guy’s style.
And it only got better. Watching the Interstitchals that followed, and the full length preview that eventually came after them, gave tantalizing glimpses of a film that combined beautiful handpainted animation with a central character who embodied fun in a way that I hadn’t seen in a Disney flick — or any other — in ages; if ever.
So when I finally saw the film last weekend, I expected to have a good time. I expected to laugh; I expected to revel in Stitch’s blithe disregard for all civilized norms of behavior and his sheer perverse joy in wreaking havoc on the world around him.
What I didn’t expect was to be touched. The goddamn thing actually brought tears to my eyes.
Because in Lilo and Stich, writer/directors Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois have created characters and story that mines deep veins of human emotion and need — for belonging, for family, for a sense of self and of place in the world.
These are not new or original themes to find in an animated feature by any means. But Lilo and Stich does something few ‘kids’ films attempt: it tackles deep and intense emotional issues headon, without sugarcoating them with the now-common postmodern wink-and-a-nudge that excuses the audience from any actual need to feel for the characters. And so it delivers the fun and mischief that the trailers promised — but it demands that you come along on a rocky ride through dark emotional territory along the way.
And in doing so, it ascends to the level of animated masterpiece the likes of which hasn’t been seen since — well, since Bambi.
I saw one review of the film which said that criticized it for being too derivative of ‘E.T.” I don’t recall the reviewer’s name, but this totally misses the boat. Stitch is not E.T. —- he’s Frankenstein for kids.
But he’s more than just the pathos and loneliness of the Frankenstein monster shrunk down into an odd-looking six-armed blue doglike package. Stitch lights up the screen with his utter delight in destruction and mischief. He is in this way, a direct descendent of that classic of ‘toons, Bugs Bunny. But part of Stitch’s charm is that unlike Bugs — who causes trouble in a generally honorable way, but does so with full moral knowledge of his actions — Stitch is a true innocent. He truly has no concept of right and wrong; he just knows that smashing stuff and wreaking havoc is fun.
And that combination — the abandoned loneliness and monsterous innocence of Frankenstein blended with the joyful mischief of Bugs — is what makes Stitch the most compelling animated character I’ve seen in years. Maybe ever.
Go see the movie, and let the little fellow introduce himself.
You might cry — but you won’t regret it.