Whenever there is a disaster — whether man-made (9/11) or natural (Katrina) — we’re reminded of some inescapable facts about our fellow human beings:

• A few people are hatefilled, obnoxious, insensitive, exploitive loudmouths who should be ashamed of themselves. 
   
• This country is brimming with truly extraordinary "ordinary" people who respond to a crisis by lacing up their boots and getting to work.
   
• Some small number of people are sociopathic predators and parasites who can only be stopped by decent people prepared to use force:

John Carolan was sitting on his porch in the thick, humid darkness just before midnight Tuesday when three or four young men, one with a knife and another with a machete, stopped in front of his fence and pointed to the generator humming in the front yard, he said.

One said, "We want that generator," he recalled.

"I fired a couple of rounds over their heads with a .357 Magnum," Mr. Carolan recounted Wednesday. "They scattered."

He smiled and added, "You’ve heard of law west of the Pecos. This is law west of Canal Street."

I have no problem at all with people obtaining the means for their survival in any non-violent way the can under these conditions. Decent people will do what they have to (but will feel bad about it). My sympathies and best wishes go to people such as this:

One woman outside a Sav-a-Center on Tchoupitoulas Street was loading food, soda, water, bread, peanut butter and canned food into the trunk of a gray Oldsmobile.

"Yes, in a sense it’s wrong, but survival is the name of the game," said the woman, who would not identify herself. "I’ve got six grandchildren. We didn’t know this was going to happen. The water is off. We’re trying to get supplies we need."

But the gangbangers trying to break into a children’s hospital to steal drugs? The people carting off jewelry, DVDs, HDTVs, and iPods? They need to be stopped — fast and hard. Ted Frank at PointofLaw.com explains it well (HT: Instapundit; emphasis added):

I fully acknowledge that shooting looters is an inappropriately disproportionate response if one views looting as mere larceny. But one doesn’t shoot looters to protect property, one does so to protect order. Somebody is going to suffer unjustly when society breaks down. I don’t understand why Muller thinks it preferable for the law-abiding citizens to be the cost-bearers.

And Frank points out a cogent remark by Jeff Goldstein:

That many progressives I’ve been reading are so willing to advocate for an anarchic condition wherein stronger, better armed, and more ruthless civilians are able to lord it over the weaker victims of Katrina—all for the sake of maintaining their critique of materialism—is, frankly, astounding.

So why haven’t the looters been stopped? Frank notes the "almost third-world levels of corruption" in the New Orleans police department. Goldstein thinks the feds are reluctant:

…  to risk sending armed troops in to quell rioting, only to find that video of looters being shot dead is being played over and over again on the nightly news … while some talking head drones on about how the PATRIOT Act and global warming lead inexorably to this “sorry spectacle for Amerikkka.”

John Longenecker thinks a big part of the problem is that so many of the decent, honest citizens have been disarmed by the flooding — their guns are in their homes, under water (emphasis in original):

New Orleans is not a matter of looting – it is in a condition of complete anarchy. But it is much more of an example than that: the murder, mayhem, bedlam and rampant crime is an example of citizen disarmament. Only this time, the guns of defense have been submerged, floated away or otherwise irretrievable.

The power of the people to participate in their own defense has been drowned.

There are reports of individuals protecting their homes with shotguns and handguns where the property was not entirely inundated, and the people can even remain at home and even have something left to defend. Non-evacuation is the key. But for the countless lawful guns that are beyond the reach of their owners because of inundation and because owners are not permitted to return home, the city is basically defensless.

I wonder how many of the honest, decent residents had firearms — and how many of those had been persuaded to keep their weapons unloaded, locked up, and inaccessible.

One of the grave weaknesses of our culture is that most people have come to believe that it’s not merely acceptable, but necessary and proper for them to completely surrender responsibility for their own safety and well-being to others. In the best of times, I believe this is foolish — do you know what the average police response time is for a 911 call in your community? Assuming you can and do make that call when the need arises…

In the worst of times — and this is the worst of times in New Orleans — such helplessness and dependency can be deadly. It’s not just that having a gun helps the honest, decent people stave off the predators. There’s a more subtle psychological factor: Someone who owns a gun (I’m talking about the honest, decent people, not the sociopaths) accepts responsibility for her own safety and for her own responsible behavior; gun ownership both empowers and disciplines you.

Someone who doesn’t — who’s adopted the mindset regarding self-defense that "there’s nothing I can or should do, I have to depend on the police" — that person will carry that same mindset of helplessness and passivity to all aspects of his life. Those are the people who, after a rescue boat drops them off where I-10 emerges from the water, stand around looking dazed and tell the reporters they’re waiting for someone to tell them what to do.

Glenn Reynolds wrote a sentence this morning that’s my nominee for Quote of the Year (lots of emphasis added):

If you’ve got a week’s supplies, and a gun, you’ll usually do okay after a disaster.

No disrespect of Glenn intended, but I wonder if he realized just how right he was. I suspect he was thinking about the physical comfort and safety afforded by the supplies and the gun. But by procuring a week’s supplies and a gun, you’re preparing psychologically to cope with a disaster. You’re accepting responsibility for yourself (and your family). In many cases, that will be even more important.

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My God, that Lileks can write! His latest Screedblog post, written while visiting a suburb of Minneapolis, is all about the difference between the city and the suburbs — and about the people who hate suburbs:

As it happens, the suburb in which I’m sitting now is denser than my city. There are vast townhouse projects cropping up on every ridge, spilling along the highway. Not ugly ones, either. None of those “ticky-tacky” houses that so offended the sneering sensibilities of ungrateful Boomer brats forced to do childhood in the godless potato fields of Long Island, dreaming of the day when they could move to the city, live on the fourth floor, read Kerouc by a candle stuck in a fiasco, and wake to the sound of beer bottles dumped out when the bar closed. Real life. True life. What do you have in the burbs but starlight and silence? What’s real about that?

…
… It’s built around the car, and while this bothers some, it means that you can get the necessities of life far more efficiently than you can in a city.

… Instead of having foodstuffs, clothing, cafes and boozeatoriums spread out along the long spine of Broadway or Main, it’s concentrated in one dense blob of free-standing structures. You can buy what you need for the week and go about your life. Now: some will find this less attractive than the daily urban forage, the small thrill of bringing home your daily sustenance in thin plastic bags, the undeniable contented pleasure of shopping in a tiny corner market. I’m serious – you do feel like a Man of the World sometimes when you’re poking through the produce at Smiler’s or Dean and Delucca. The big city growling outside, the unpredictable clientele, the stolid storekeeper, the mix of chaos and order, the skyscraper lights, the smear of dusk in the indistinct distance – New York enobles the smallest task. I never feel more cosmopolitan than when I’m getting supplies at this grocery in the Roosevelt Hotel or the thin typical joint across from the Millennium, right up to the moment when they tell me I owe them $36.93 for muffins and a beer. There’s just a buzz in these places, be it ten PM or 8 AM. The city is full of juice and it spills into every shop.

Like I said — he can write! Read the whole thing, you’ll enjoy it.

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Initially, observers thought New Orleans had dodged a bullet, but apparently, that’s not true. According to the latest reports, at least two levees protecting the city have been breached. That means that — unless the Army Corps of Engineers and their supporting forces can plug the levees under daunting circumstances — the entire city, which is below sea level, is going to fill with water.

In most of the city, the depth will be 20+ feet. In the historic French Quarter, the water will range from 0 to 20 feet. 

My heart goes out to the victims of this horrendous tragedy. At the same time, I wish I could blow away the scum who are using this tragedy as an excuse to loot every store in their neighborhood. If I were a shopkeeper in New Orleans, I think I’d be sitting on the roof of my store with a rifle and targeting everyone trying to target me.

I’m concerned about my fellow Life, Liberty, Property blogger, Kevin Boyd (Louisiana Libertarian). I only ‘cyber-know’ him, but he’s from a northern suburb of New Orleans. He hasn’t posted since Saturday, and I hope that’s only because he’s resting safely in a motel a few hundred miles north.

Meanwhile, if you want to help, visit your local Wal-Mart or Sam’s Club. Wal-Mart is donating $1 million dollars to the Salvation Army for relief efforts and is facilitating donations at all its locations and at Wal-Mart online to either the Salvation Army or the Red Cross.

I strongly suggest you donate to the Salvation Army (or some third alternative). I’m not too fond of the Red Cross since I found out that they gladly partnered with an Arab affiliate (the Red Crescent), but refused to associate with the Israeli equivalent (the Red Star of David) because it’s "too controversial" to offer emergency aid to Jews.

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Oh, look! Gullyborg has the new Carnival of Liberty up! You know you want to read each and every one of the libertilicious posts he links to. After all: Resistance is futile!

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Before you rejoice over the latest good news about coffee or despair over the new dire warnings about grilled chicken, consider this: A new study reports that there is less than a 50% chance that the findings of a published scientific research paper are true:

John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at the University of Ioannina School of Medicine in Greece, says that small sample sizes, poor study design, researcher bias, and selective reporting and other problems combine to make most research findings false. But even large, well-designed studies are not always right, meaning that scientists and the public have to be wary of reported findings.

"We should accept that most research findings will be refuted. Some will be replicated and validated. The replication process is more important than the first discovery," Ioannidis says.

Of course, it’s possible that Ioannidis’ research is wrong…

* Everything You Know Is Wrong is the title of a classic Firesign Theater album. Truly wonderful. Read the short review and see if you’re not tempted to order a copy.

Check out the lunch menu at Basil’s Blog. And the open post at Mudville Gazette.

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Callimachus has a wonderful new post at Winds of Change. A lot of people have declared various wars — from the American Revolution to Iraq, and especially Iraq — to be "unnecessary." He wondered what, in their eyes, a "necessary" war would look like, and offered his own idea:

I’ll give you my version of a necessary war: The brief 1936 conflict between Germany, alone, and France, Britain, and Czechoslovakia.

It began when Hitler, the German dictator now little remembered in history, marched 20,000 troops into the Rhineland demilitarized zone, in violation of articles 42 and 43 of the Treaty of Versailles. France pulled itself out of a political crisis and united behind this threat from its old enemy. It used the treaty violation as a pretext to declare war. …

Go read the rest. It’s a marvelous alternate-history idea very nicely told. I especially like his take on what your average opponent of the Iraq War, transported back to 1936, would say about the "unjust and unnecessary" war on Hitler’s Germany.

Great minds think alike: In the comments to my post, "Purity" vs. principles, which discussed the right to self-defense and the non-aggression principle, Eric and I exchanged some ideas about the morality of pre-emptively killing Hitler.

Eric proposed that killing Hitler would have been justified in 1929. I disagreed, but thought it certainly would have been justified in 1939. I argued that somewhere between 1929 and 1939, "the decision tips, depending on the evidence available to you and your best judgement."

I like Callimachus’ idea of taking action in 1936. By then, it should have been clear that stopping Hitler was necessary and justified, and his sending of troops into the Rhineland provided the perfect excuse for military action. And I love the fantasy scenario of the French acting decisively and unilaterally.  

Listed at Mudville Gazette.

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To stay healthy, eat your veggies and drink your coffee. Coffee? Yep, coffee. It’s chock full of polyphenols, powerful antioxidants that protect you from a host of diseases. And, if you’re like most Americans, you’re getting far more antioxidants from coffee than from fruits and vegetables:

… Coffee not only helps clear the mind and perk up the energy, it also provides more healthful antioxidants than any other food or beverage in the American diet, according to a study released Sunday.

The University of Scranton researchers measured the antioxidant content of more than a hundred foods and drinks, and then used USDA consumption data to calculate their antioxidant contributions to the average diet:

They concluded that the average adult consumes 1,299 milligrams of antioxidants daily from coffee. The closest competitor was tea at 294 milligrams. Rounding out the top five sources were bananas, 76 milligrams; dry beans, 72 milligrams; and corn, 48 milligrams. According to the Agriculture Department, the typical adult American drinks 1.64 cups of coffee daily.

Wow. If 1.64 cups of coffee provide 1,299 mg of antioxidants, then most days, I’m getting … [mumble, mumble, carry the one] … around 8,000 mg! No wonder I vibrate sometimes — it’s the force of billions of free radicals being quenched all at once.

There has been a lot of good health news about coffee in the past few years. Recent studies suggest that moderate to heavy coffee drinkers have half the risk of type 2 diabetes and liver cancer, one-third the risk of Parkinson’s disease, and significantly fewer cases of Alzheimer’s disease.

Back in May, I was pleased to note the health benefits of drinking single-malt whisky, drinking beer, being slightly overweight, and masturbating. I’m delighted to add drinking coffee to the list.

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While you’re waiting for the new Carnival of Liberty to appear at Resistance is Futile!, why not check out the top vote-getters at the Watcher of Weasels?

The Watcher’s Council votes every week to pick the most link-worthy pieces of writing around. Posts from both council members and non-members are nominated. Here is the most recent winning council post, here is the most recent winning non-council post. The voting results are here, and here is the initial posting of all the nominees that were voted on.

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TKC at The Pubcrawler raved about Christopher Hitchens’ latest, demonstrating with quotes that it starts strong, finishes strong, and:

And there really is no soft spot in the middle.

Wow.

It is a must read.

Ditto from me. I’ve admired Hitchens’ writing ability for some time, and I’ve praised him before (here, for instance, as one of the voices of sanity on the left). He outdid himself in this Weekly Standard column, both in quality of writing and clarity of content. Pubcrawler provided the marvelous opening and closing paragraphs, so I’ll take a look at the middle. It’s a long and ambitious middle.

Hitchens argued that the "post-Cold War liberal Utopia" — Fukuyama’s "end of history" — didn’t last long. He cited Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, Milosevic’s attempt to destroy Bosnia, Khomeini’s offering a price on Rushdie’s head, and the beginnings of genocide in Rwanda, and he then made a couple of interesting observations about this list (emphasis added):

Milosevic (anticipating Putin, as it now seems to me, and perhaps Beijing also) was riding a mutation of socialist nationalism into national socialism.  It was to be noticed in all cases that the aggressors, whether they were killing Muslims, or exalting Islam, or just killing their neighbors, shared a deep and abiding hatred of the United States.

I’m glad to see a leftist recognize the short distance between "socialist nationalism" and national socialism and notice the omnipresence of anti-Americanism among murderous, genocidal, aggressor regimes and movements throughout the world.

Hitchens contended that, in the decade after the fall of the Soviet Union, almost everyone — and he included himself, as an early opponent of the first Iraq war — was hypocritical and inconsistent on these critical international issues. He noted a few exceptions (emphasis added): 

But there were consistencies, too. French statecraft, for example, was uniformly hostile to any resistance to any aggression, and Paris even sent troops to rescue its filthy clientele in Rwanda. And some on the hard left and the brute right were also opposed to any exercise, for any reason, of American military force.

The only speech by any statesman that can bear reprinting from that low, dishonest decade came from Tony Blair when he spoke in Chicago in 1999. Welcoming the defeat and overthrow of Milosevic after the Kosovo intervention, he warned against any self-satisfaction and drew attention to an inescapable confrontation that was coming with Saddam Hussein. So far from being an American "poodle," as his taunting and ignorant foes like to sneer, Blair had in fact leaned on Clinton over Kosovo and was insisting on the importance of Iraq while George Bush was still an isolationist governor of Texas.

Astonishingly, Hitchens argued that bin Laden "did us all a service" by attacking the U.S. on 9/11:

Had he not made this world-historical mistake, we would have been able to add a Talibanized and nuclear-armed Pakistan to our list of the threats we failed to recognize in time. (This threat still exists, but it is no longer so casually overlooked.)

I get his point, but I’d still like to think we could have recognized the threat without having to watch people jump from hundred-story buildings…

Hitchens then laid out the case for following up Afghanistan with Iraq about as clearly and succinctly as it can be done, and followed up by addressing something that’s bothered a lot of us who agree with his case for Iraq (emphasis added):

However, having debated almost all of the spokespeople for the antiwar faction, both the sane and the deranged, I was recently asked a question that I was temporarily unable to answer. "If what you claim is true," the honest citizen at this meeting politely asked me, "how come the White House hasn’t told us?"

I do in fact know the answer to this question. So deep and bitter is the split within official Washington, most especially between the Defense Department and the CIA, that any claim made by the former has been undermined by leaks from the latter. (The latter being those who maintained, with a combination of dogmatism and cowardice not seen since Lincoln had to fire General McClellan, that Saddam Hussein was both a "secular" actor and–this is the really rich bit–a rational and calculating one.)

There’s no cure for that illusion, but the resulting bureaucratic chaos and unease has cornered the president into his current fallback upon platitude and hollowness.

There’s more — much more:

• The probable state of Iraq if we hadn’t toppled Saddam.
• The good fortune of war proponents in having "an astounding number of plain frauds and charlatans" on the other side.
• The further good luck (and I’d argue that it’s not luck at all) of "a certain fiber displayed by a huge number of anonymous Americans."
• His frustration with the Bush administration’s inability to effectively defend its policy and its unfortunate reliance on the "provincial and isolationist" appeal to fight "over there" so we won’t have to fight them here.
• The top ten positive accomplishments that the Bush administration should be touting.

You simply must read this column. Again, wow.

Jim Forsyth’s "The Racism of the Anti War Movement" — which TKC recommended and quoted in the same post — is a much shorter piece, succinctly making the point of its title, and also well worth a look.

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Thanks to John Lott for calling attention to this story of outrageous behavior by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (BATFE; the story uses the agency’s older acronym, ATF) and three Virginia law enforcement agencies:

(CNSNews.com) – The federal agency that regulates U.S. gun dealers stands accused, along with at least three Virginia law enforcement agencies, of trying to shut down legal gun shows through alleged intimidation of gun buyers and sellers. The law enforcement organizations also allegedly broke the law by sharing gun buyers’ information with members of the public.

Apparently, at least 30 BATFE agents and hundreds of state, county, and city police descended upon a Richmond, VA, gun show. They positioned over 50 police vehicles around the entrance. By one exhibitor’s count, 72 uniformed and plainclothes police and agents were stationed around the vehicles at the entrance. Many others roamed the aisles of the show. According to the show organizer, this massive, intimidating police presence cut her attendance almost in half.

But the attempt to intimidate gun show attendees pales compared to what BATFE allegedly did to actual gun buyers:

Philip Van Cleave, president of the Virginia Citizens Defense League, told Cybercast News Service that he has received numerous complaints alleging that as handgun buyers were waiting for their National Instant Check System (NICS) background investigations to be completed, ATF was secretly conducting the so-called "residency checks."

According to the complaints he received, Van Cleave said officers were dispatched to the homes of the prospective gun buyers to speak with family members, asking for example: "Gee, did you know your husband was going to a gun show today? Do you have his cell phone number? Did you know he was buying a gun?

"If people weren’t home they, in some cases, went to neighbors" to ask the same questions, Van Cleave said.

That’s just outrageous and intolerable. Not to mention illegal. I don’t know anything about the Virginia Citizens Defense League, but I hope they’ve got some good lawyers, and I hope they’re preparing FOIA requests and lawsuits on behalf of the buyers who were victimized.

These "residency checks" required significant advance planning, resource allocation, and coordination with local police. Someone needs to find out who authorized this operation, both in BATFE and in the local agencies that were involved. How high up was there knowledge and approval of such a despicable and illegal operation?

Heads need to roll.

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This lovely Saturday evening, I’d rather compare the Glenmorangie and the Scapa (and, yes, they’re rather different single malts, aren’t they?) than try to write something serious. Instead of posting nothing, I thought I’d offer a quote, since it’s been a while.

Then — influenced by the Scotch, no doubt — I thought I’d offer several quotes. I’ve been collecting amusing, thoughtful, or otherwise worthwhile quotes for some time from a variety of sources. Here are a few, with attributions where I have them (some are from sig lines or other unattributed sources):

If guns are outlawed, only the government will have guns. Only the police, the secret police, the military, the hired servants of our rulers. Only the government — and a few outlaws. I intend to be among the outlaws.
 — Edward Abbey

Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
 — Benjamin Franklin

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
— Albert Einstein

The optimist says the glass is half full. The pessimist says the glass is half empty. The engineer says the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

Nobody’s last words have ever been, "I wish I had eaten more rice cakes".
— Amy Krouse Rosenthal

Eliminate government waste no matter how much it costs!
  — graffiti reportedly scrawled in a restroom in a government building

Finding errors is easy. Finding truth is the hard part. If you focus all your energy on avoiding errors, you won’t have any time left to identify truth. And truth is NOT the absence of error.
— Andrew Plato

Discovery consists in seeing what everyone else has seen and thinking what no one else has thought.
— Albert Szent-Gyorgi

Here are a few specifically for those who write — professionally, as an avocation, or both:

Be a scribe! Your body will be sleek, your hand will be soft. … You are one who sits grandly in your house; your servants answer speedily; beer is poured copiously; all who see you rejoice in good cheer. Happy is the heart of him who writes; he is young each day.
— Ptahotpe, c. 2350 B.C.

Some people have a way with words; some people… not have way.
— Steve Martin

No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else’s draft.
— H.G. Wells

Honest criticism is hard to take, particularly from a relative, a friend, an acquaintance, or a stranger. 
— Franklin Jones

Your turn! Post a quote you like in the comments!

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Michael Yon is in Iraq at his own expense as an independent war correspondent. Yon is embedded with the 1st Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment — "Deuce Four" — and writes about its missions in Mosul. You can read his dispatches at his blog. In fact, I can’t urge you strongly enough to do so. This is war journalism as it ought to be done. And as no one else is doing it.

A while back, I read Yon’s Jungle Law and The Battle for Mosul: Reality Check. I promptly contributed $10 to help support his mission, and I intended to blog about him then, but got sucked into a Heinlein book and forgot. I’ve just read his latest, Gates of Fire — awesome. Set aside some time and read these three dispatches in the order I linked them. They’re long, but riveting, and Yon includes some remarkable pictures. You’ll get to know the Deuce Four commander, Lt. Col. Erik Kurilla, and his men. There are gripping stories of Stryker operations and night-time raids, fascinating descriptions of the "insurgents" and their tactics and weapons, and an honest and intelligent look at what’s going well and what’s not in Iraq. And, by the way, Yon can write:

Thursday night, a revised plan had me following some Deuce Four soldiers on a midnight raid. They had night vision gear, so they moved quickly. I had only moonlight, so I nearly broke my leg keeping up. Sleeking around Mosul under moonlight, we prowled through the pale glow until we came upon a pond near a farmhouse. Recon platoon had already raided one house and snagged some suspects, then crept away in the darkness to another target close by.

Five soldiers from Recon—Holt, Ferguson, Yates, Welch and Ross—were moving through moon-cast shadows when an Iraqi man came out from a farmhouse, his AK-47 rifle hanging by his side. Suddenly encircled by the rifles, lights and lasers of four soldiers, the man was quickly disarmed. A fifth soldier radioed for the interpreter and together they sorted out that he was a farmer who thought the soldiers were thieves skulking around his property. Recon returned the man his rifle, and started making their way back, umbral and silent across the ploughed fields.

Hugh Hewitt noted that a long list of bloggers had posted about and linked to Michael Yon’s reports:

Why such interest?

Because courage is the most hypnotic of virtues, and Yon is a courageous man reporting on the deeds of other courageous men. I quote Thucydides in my review of The Great Raid, but it serves here as well:

"The secret to happiness is freedom and the secret to freedom is courage."

We know that. Everyone knows that. But it is only rare occasions on which we acknowledge it.

Go read Michael Yon’s dispatches and remind yourself of what it means to be courageous. You’ll feel better just knowing such people exist. And if you can spare a few bucks, please help keep Yon’s work going.

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Probably the easiest way to make fools of the left is to quote them. On the subject of Iraq, John Henke did so at QandO, and with devastating effect. See if you can guess the "victim" of Henke’s ruthless quoting:

Prior to the war, he said of Saddam, that "tyrant remains firmly in power, resisting by every means the will of the international community. No wonder so many Americans ask themselves whether our victory over Saddam [in the first Gulf War] will ultimately prove an illusion", while criticizing the previous administration for a "blatant disregard for brutal terrorism, a dangerous blindness to the murderous ambitions of a despot".

He attacked the opposition for ignoring acts of Iraqi terrorism, such as "the fact that it was an Iraq-based group that masterminded the assassination attempt against Israel’s ambassador to the UK" and "the fact that the terrorist who masterminded the attack on the Achille Lauro and the savage murder of American Leon Klinghoffer fled with Iraqi assistance" and that "the team of terrorists who set out to blow up the Rome airport came from Baghdad with suitcase bombs".

Of course, it’s not those quotes that reveal this leftist as a fool. It’s putting them in context and contrasting them with his positions today:

The VP went on to argue that old Neocon chestnut, that, as a result of our previous willingness to overlook his intransigence, "Saddam had every reason to assume that [we] would look the other way—no matter what he did". On the contrary, he claimed, "Saddam Hussein’s nature and intentions were perfectly visible", and that we needed a leader who believed "that the enemies of freedom cannot be anything but the enemies of our country".

That Vice President, however, had not yet become Vice President. At the time, he was still Senator Al Gore.

In 1992, Al Gore questioned whether "a man who mistook Saddam Hussein for a docile ally" until it was too late should "have a second term as President of the United States?" Today, he and his Moveon.org crowd wonder why a man who decided not to make that mistake has a second term as President of the United States.

In 2002, Al Gore said he "felt betrayed by the first Bush administration’s hasty departure from the battlefield". Today, Gore’s Moveon.org crowd rally around demands that we pull another hasty departure from the battlefield.

Ouch. That’s gotta sting.

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Larry Kudlow, who knows a thing or two about business and markets, interrupted all the wailing and hand-wringing over the price of oil to offer a calmer, more optimistic assessment. First, he reminded us that, when the price of something rises, the supply increases and the demand decreases. Then, he noted that nuclear power is returning to public favor and that some of the government barriers to development of energy supplies are coming down. Finally, he predicted that the long-term consequences of the oil price rise are likely to be good:

Meanwhile the spread of global capitalism to places like China, India, eastern Europe and elsewhere (which is a very good thing for world prosperity) is the main cause of the spike in energy.

So supply will rise exponentially in the years ahead, demand will slow a bit and we’ll all live happily ever after. The moral of this story: markets work if you let them.

That kind of Pollyanna attitude may grate a bit if you’ve recently had to fill your gas tank (I drive a Pathfinder, so it grates a bit on me). But he’s probably right.

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Oh, look! It’s a new Carnival of Liberty! Judging from Dan’s very nice introductions, it’s brimming with bloggy goodness! Better schedule some serious reading time. I’m especially looking forward to the "Irregular Verbs" category.

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