MARK STEYN agrees with Steven Den Beste that “stability” in the Middle East is overrated:

When Amr Moussa, secretary-general of the Arab League, warns the BBC that a US invasion of Iraq would ‘threaten the whole stability of the Middle East’, he’s missing the point: that’s the reason it’s such a great idea. Suppose we buy in to Moussa’s pitch and place stability above all other considerations. We get another 25 years of the Ayatollahs, another 35 years of the PLO and Hamas, another 40 years of the Baathists in Syria and Iraq, another 80 years of Saudi Wahabbism. What kind of Middle East are we likely to have at the end of all that? The region’s in the state it’s in because, uniquely in the non-democratic world, it’s too stable. It’s the stability of the cesspit.

Indeed.

IN RESPONSE TO MY FOXNEWS COLUMN TODAY on guns and violence in England, several people have emailed to ask what has happened to violent crime rates in Australia since it enacted its draconian gun ban a few years back. I haven’t studied that subject closely, but here is one story that suggests the Australian situation mirrors England’s.

A READER CALLED THIS ADAM CLYMER STORY about Bob Barr “juvenile” and biased. I disagree.

Barr was handling a firearm at a party. It went off, though it’s not entirely clear who accidentally hit the trigger — Barr, or the host who handed it to him.

Clymer notes that they followed the most important safety rule, which involves making sure your weapon isn’t pointed in a dangerous direction, but violated the others. I think he’s right.

Personally, I wouldn’t bring out firearms for handling at a party anyway. Too many people around, too high a likelihood that someone has been drinking. But jeez, if you’re going to, you need to be sure they’re unloaded and safe — and the person being handed the weapon has that responsibility every bit as much as the person handing it to him. I heard Neal Boortz making these points on the radio yesterday, and he was absolutely right.

VIA ELECTROLITE I found this post by Brad De Long on the way in which neo-liberals are transformed into neocons.

I posted something along these lines in an Electrolite comment, but it’s worth expanding on a bit here. Patrick’s post calls this process “seduction,” but it’s seduction in the way that a man whose wife constantly checks his collar and screams at him is eventually “seduced” by another woman. It’s as much a push as a pull.

I see this all the time as someone whose views straddle the left-right divide. I disagree with the Christian bloggers on most of their core issues; probably the only thing we’re in full agreement on is that the Catholic Church’s behavior in covering up its sex scandal has been shameful. We’re at odds on cloning, on abortion, and often on birth control and evolution, though the Christian bloggers aren’t as unified on those last two issues. But they’re always polite.

On the Left, though, we find all these pseudonymous name-calling bloggers whose specialty seems to be abuse aimed at those deviating from the party line. De Long isn’t one of those, of course, but this line from his post bespeaks a certain tribalism: “There’s still time for Kaus to return to his neoliberal roots.”

As the old saying has it, the left looks for heretics and the right looks for converts, and both find what they’re looking for. The effect is no doubt subliminal, but people who treat you like crap are, over time, less persuasive than people who don’t. If people on the Left are so unhappy about how many former allies are changing their views, perhaps they should examine how those allies are treated.

ERIC BOEHLERT’S invocation of the Arab News to bash James Taranto was dumb. But his coverage of the radio and record industries has been great. Here’s his latest effort. This is good too.

SOME QUESTIONS ANSWER THEMSELVES — like these, asked by Howard Kurtz, regarding the child-snatching hype:

Are we all in the exploitation business?

Are journalists basically vultures who pick at the carcasses of tragedy victims?

And are politicians also getting into the act?

Three guesses — and the first two don’t count, as we say around these parts.

INSTAPUNDIT’S FIRST ANNIVERSARY: Click here and scroll up to see what was going on a year ago.

REMIND ME AGAIN why the United Nations is regarded as having any moral authority:

Patients at United Nations mental institutions in Kosovo have been raped and physically attacked under the eyes of UN staff, held in “filthy and degrading” conditions, and threatened with punishment if they report the abuses, according to a damning investigation published in New York yesterday.

In one case, a woman patient was raped after UN employees locked her in a room with a male patient because they wanted to “calm her down”, while employees who observed another rape in a hallway said they did not intervene because the victim “must have asked for it”, according to the independent campaigning group Mental Disability Rights International (MDRI), which produced the report.

“This is a pervasive pattern of serious abuses. The rule of law simply does not apply within these psychiatric facilities,” Dr Eric Rosenthal, MDRI’s founder, said yesterday. “We found extreme, inhuman and degrading treatment, arbitrary detention and the physical and sexual assault of women, and we received a blanket denial from the authorities.” . . .

Two former patients there, along with a physician working for another organisation, were also threatened by a staff member to prevent them revealing that the staff member had had sexual relationships with the two patients, the report said.

Where are the people whose cries of outrage we heard over Guantanamo?

UPDATE: Reader Insta Punditwatch emails that this story comes from George Soros’s Open Society Institute and that it complained about Guantanamo. I don’t remember that, but OK. With bated breath, I await similar complaints from Amnesty, Chris Patten, and almost the entire Euro press.

GEITNER SIMMONS has some observations regarding the Saudis and nuclear weapons.

They’re not our friends. And they’re trying to get nuclear weapons. What does the Bush Doctrine say about that?

PATRICK RUFFINI is riffing on the theme of populism — in politics, in real estate, and in the blogosphere. Nice job.

PEOPLE IN NEED OF A CLUE: An apparently endlessly continuing series.

MY FOXNEWS COLUMN IS UP: It’s a review of Joyce Malcolm’s book, Guns and Violence: The English Experience.

NEWS from Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere. Fred Pruitt is on a roll.

RYAN OLSON SAYS the future is now. And he appears to be coping with Future Shock very sensibly.

JAMES MORROW has found another thread on the ClearGuidance.Com website, this one threatening President Bush. The poster, Abu Dujanah, appears to have uploaded a photo of himself with the post, which should make life easier for the Secret Service.

Of course, ClearGuidance is probably another sting operation designed to lure gullible Islamists with terrorist aspirations into giving up their identities, after which it will turn into something entirely different.

UPDATE: ClearGuidance appears to be taking this stuff down, or at least requiring a member login to view it. I’ve saved a copy of the page in question, though, in case any authorities are interested.

WOULD INVADING IRAQ DESTABILIZE THE MIDDLE EAST? Maybe, says Steven Den Beste, but “that’s not a bug, that’s a feature.”

Hmm. Well, things are dreadful there now. Stability is the absence of change, meaning that so long as the situation is stable, things will stay dreadful. And we don’t want things to stay dreadful, do we?

Actually, some people do. But that’s because they’re comfortable with the current dreadfulness, since it either doesn’t affect them, or redounds to their benefit. How, exactly, does this justify a pose of moral superiority?

STEREOSCOPIC VISION: PostWatch is now joined by WashPostWatch.

THE MOVING FINGER WRITES: Mickey Kaus: Dupe? Or fearsome unleasher of elite hackers? You decide. But be sure to click through to the new and improved Jihad website that he references. Chortle.

What would Bugs Bunny do? Something like this, doc.

UPDATE: Here, courtesy of a reader, is the Google cache of what used to be there. Double chortle. Or as Bugs would say, “What a buncha maroons!”

THE HUGH HEWITT SHOW went pretty well. I love radio, not least because you can do it from home with your shoes off. He’s looking for lefty bloggers to add to his stable of guests. I recommended Ted Barlow and Josh Marshall. If you’ve got suggestions, you might want to contact him through his site. Of course, it’s a bit hard to recommend people for the radio when you’ve never heard them speak. . . .

I’M GOING TO BE ON HUGH HEWITT’S RADIO SHOW in a few minutes. Here’s the link for live streaming.

ERIC OLSEN weighs in again on the Searls/Winer/Denton/Reynolds/Devon war debate. And scroll down for an earlier installment I somehow left out.

NOT INDIVISIBLE: Brad Knickerbocker reports on prospects for splitting the Ninth Circuit in two. Personally, I think it’s past time — it’s a huge and unwieldy court. The old Fifth Circuit was bigger in terms of square miles before it was split, but I doubt it had as many people, and I’m sure it didn’t have as many cases.

THE INDEPUNDIT reports that Iran’s mullahs are using “Arab” muscle to put down riots, and suspects that they are fugitive Ladenites now doing mercenary duty.

Sounds like desperation to me.

BIG BOOBS: Homeland Security remains a joke.

INSTAPUNDIT SPY SATELLITE IMAGERY SHOWS U.S. war preparations underway in Qatar.

Well, okay, it’s not exactly an InstaPundit spy satellite, but that just sounded too cool to pass up.