I JUST HOPE THAT SOME AL QAEDA GUYS are starving to death in a shipping container because of this.

Bonus points for conspiracy theorists: Explain why this isn’t really about labor issues at all. That’s just a front, you see, for . . . .

The rest is left as an exercise for the reader.

MICKEY KAUS says the antiwar Democrats are snared in a contradiction:

No, unless Bush is planning to invade Korea and Iran after Iraq, the optimal cynical strategy for maintaining anti-terrorism as the “master narrative of American politics” would seem to require Bush, once the midterms were safely over, to keep delaying the Iraq invasion for a year or two, so that the real military crisis comes closer to the next presidential election….. In other words, to the extent that Bush is the purely cynical, self-interested dog-wagger that some Democrats (not me!) charge, he can’t also be the irresponsible cowboy who is going to rush into war in January. It’s not in his political interest.

My only question: January is “rushing?”

TALKLEFT HAS A ROUNDUP on studies concerning the dangers and benefits of Ecstasy.

JIM HENLEY ASKS what the heck the Turkish-uranium incident was really all about, and comes up with some alternatives of varying degrees of plausibility.

Regardless, I think it’s becoming clear (remember how Osama was duped?) that nuclear scam artists may be doing more good than many government programs against nuclear proliferation.

WILLIAM SAFIRE WRITES that the Administration is selling out the war on terror for a mess of corporate pottage:

Bush can say that in his 2000 campaign he promised business leaders to lift export controls. But that was before Sept. 11. Now those controls — which worked well for decades against the Soviets — need strengthening, not weakening. Perhaps our National Security Council has been getting pressure from India and Pakistan, each of which wants our missile technology. By accommodating these nuclear powers, we might gain two allies but would make the world more dangerous.

America does not need this dirty business. It amounts to only a few billion dollars in sales, and its military misuse — through copycat “reverse engineering,” a Chinese specialty — costs American taxpayers far more than that to defend against.

There’s something to this — but I should point out that export controls aren’t as simple as this makes it sound. At best, they’re porous, and there’s not much point trying to control technologies that are in widespread civilian use. In a few very advanced areas the United States has a monopoly. In the others, it doesn’t, and there’s much, much less we can do there — especially when other sources of the technology, like France, Germany, and Russia, take an, ahem, more relaxed view toward such matters.

The only really successful non-proliferation effort was the Israeli raid on the Osirak reactor.

THE ANTISEMITISM OF “PEACE ACTIVISTS” — Jonathan Alter points out the obvious:

Some argue that the blindness to Palestinian blame is merely misplaced romanticism, not anti-Semitism. The students and professors on campus with a weakness for this kind of politics also champion other oppressed peoples fighting entrenched power, and overlook their abuses. But at a certain point, persistent double standards start to smell of something more malignant. Funny how campus activists never seem to mention, say, Syrian occupation of Lebanon. They bemoan capital punishment in the United States but say nothing when the Palestinians routinely execute suspected collaborators, including the mothers of young children. They single out Israeli human-rights abuses that pale next to those of their Arab neighbors, which we know less about because of press restrictions. Anti-Zionism isn’t anti-Semitism—until it reaches a certain pitch.

Yes, and it’s reached that pitch in quite a few places.

DOUBLE STAR: Bigwig has a theory about Saddam.

KEN LAYNE uncovers a conspiracy. What’s frightening is that this makes perfect sense.

ANDREW SULLIVAN joins the list of those who regard Bonior and McDermott’s statements as near-treason:

At a time when the U.S. government is attempting some high-level diplomatic maneuvers in the U.N., when Saddam is desperate for any propaganda ploy he can muster, these useful idiots play his game. I think what we’re seeing now is the hard-core base of the Democratic Party showing its true colors, and those colors, having flirted with irrelevance and then insouciance are now perilously close to treason.

I wonder about this whole thing. We saw Gore’s speech last week, which was roundly denounced, followed by Daschle’s overheated speech, followed by this. A bunch of my readers think this is a cleverly orchestrated plan. I’m not sure about the “cleverly” part, but what could the plan be? Are the Democrats’ tracking polls so bad that they think they’re going to lose everyone but the Nation/NPR hard core among their base, so they’re just trying to energize that regardless of the cost among swing voters? This seems hard for me to believe.

The other possibility is that these guys are just idiots, and there’s no organizing principle beyond generalized hostility toward America.

This is a risky game. It’s likely to do a lot of damage in the coming elections. And if there’s another big terror attack, it’s going to kill the Democrats for years. What are they thinking? Are they thinking?

UPDATE: Reader Brian Jones emails: “‘We’ve lost on the war, so we’d better pray the war goes badly so we can look all prescient and stuff.’ That’s what they’re thinking.” How very patriotic.

Bob Bartley’s take is a bit different:

A good many Democratic Party cadres cut their teeth as anti-war protestors marching against Vietnam. Passion still runs too hot among many liberals, Democrats and intellectuals to allow mere political calculation to stand in the way.

I’m inclined to agree that it’s knee-jerkiness rather than calculation. Whether knee-jerk behavior that undermines American diplomacy at a crucial moment (and hence makes war more, not less, likely) is better or worse than calculated behavior that undermines American diplomacy at a crucial moment (and hence makes war more, not less, likely) is a matter of opinion. My opinion, to paraphrase a line from The Beverly Hillbillies, is that to me, they’ll always be jerky.

MORE ON THE WELFARE-TERRORISM CONNECTION, from The Corner.