NEW ADVENTURES IN HOMELAND SECURITY: Fishermen are blaming terrorists and aliens for a shortage of smallmouth bass. Hey, whatever excuse works:

Homeland Security Department To Oversee Protection of Fisheries

Washington DC, August 7 2002. Following reports of a recent panic by Midwestern anglers regarding the possiblity that Iraqi agents were responsible for a sudden disappearance of Smallmouth Bass from rivers in the region, Tom Ridge, the Head of the new Department of Homeland Defence, called a press conference.

“I am here to announce that the Department of Homeland Defence is making the protection of our nation’s waterways a top priority” said Ridge. “No longer will our fisheries be held hostage by the forces of evil. Effective immediately, metal detectors will be placed at points of access to all waterways. All sportsmen will be searched before being allowed to proceed to the water. Absolutely no weapons, including firearms, knives, scissors, nail clippers, d-barb tools or hooks will be allowed near the water. The Department of Homeland Security has annexed the Fish and Wildlife Division in order to facilitate this process.”

Reporters questioned Ridge as to whether such steps might be an inconvenience to sportsmen.

“This is no time for half measures.” replied Ridge. “These actions are for the safety of all, and we have no doubt that sportsmen will support such steps as part of the War on Terrorism. Further, we don’t believe these procedures will be a problem. With careful planning we hope to insure that fishing is as safe and hassle-free as air travel.

The Secretary closed by advising that “sportsmen show up at the water two to three hours before the planned time of fishing, so as to allow for screening.”

Lawyers for suspected terrorists, meanwhile, will no doubt accuse the government of going on a . . . . fishing expedition! All groan together, please.

Note to the reader who sent this: Yes, I took the bait.

“WHEN WE ARAB-MUSLIM STUDENTS CAME TO AMERICA FOR STUDY, WE HAD NO IDEA THAT WE WOULD BE FORCED TO MINGLE WITH JEW STUDENTS AND TAKE INSTRUCTION FROM JEW TEACHERS. THIS IS OFFENSIVE TO US since it is well known that the Jews are the most corrupt and violent people on Earth.” From a poster put up by Arab students at Florida Atlantic University, via Justin Weitz.

UPDATE: In Context says the University denies that it’s from an official group, but hasn’t denounced it yet.

ANOTHER UPDATE: The Anti-Defamation League says the flier is a hoax — though such fliers were actually posted on campus. That doesn’t make much sense, but I guess they mean they don’t think it was actually posted by “Arab-Muslim students.” Well, good. Though they should throw the book at whoever did post it, if they find them. We don’t need that kind of stirring-up of trouble. Though sadly, after the SFSU flyers, which weren’t a hoax, this was pretty believable.

DON’T LIKE THE IDEA OF THUGS FROM BIG ENTERTAINMENT HACKING YOUR PC? Then go here.

WELL, THIS IS ENCOURAGING: Missing laptops at the U.S. Central Command, which is coordinating the Afghan war.

MEETING THE CHALLENGE: HappyFunPundit is proving that warbloggers are better than anti-warbloggers even when it comes to thinking up arguments against the war. Read this post:

Saddam isn’t planning on fighting a conventional war against the United States. He tried that the last time, and the “Mother of all Battles” turned out to be the mother of all embarassing routs. Saddam is nuts, but he’s not stupid. He won’t make that mistake again.

So what’s he going to do? The above quote is telling. My personal belief is that he is going to fight a war of world opinion. He’s learned lessons watching Arafat fight a much larger opponent. He’ll sacrifice his cannon-fodder troops who are not loyal enough to be allowed to crowd into the cities with him anyway, and when they are gone (surrendering quickly, my guess), he’ll pull his remaining army of maybe 100,000 loyalists into his heavily fortified and stockpiled cities, and force the U.S. to dig them out one building at a time. In the meantime, he’ll pull an Arafat, appearing on TV regularly surveying destroyed buildings, with plenty of bodies of children scattered around for effect. He’ll play the martyr card, big time.

Think about the difficulty Israel is having with world opinion just trying to remove a few terrorists from the West Bank and Gaza. Now imagine if the Palestinians had 100,000 soldiers, the resources to reinforce buildings, set up machine gun nests and tank traps, and build warrens of interlocking tunnels under the city. That’s what the U.S. will face in Baghdad, assuming it doesn’t collapse from within. Throw biological and chemical weapons into the mix, and you have a potential disaster.

The danger for Saddam (and the Iraqis) is that the likes of Chris Patten have caused the United States not to care nearly as much about world opinion as it used to. It’s also doubtful that Saddam can actually find 50,000 people who will stay loyal to him once the war is actually under way.

But this is a lot better than playground references.

UPDATE: Jim Henley has more.

CONTRARY TO POPULAR BELIEF (which, inconveniently, was inspired by Kevin McGehee’s statement that he would be on hiatus until September) Kevin McGehee reports that Flyover Country is not on hiatus until September, it’s just in “Flyover Lightly” mode. Don’t miss the story about the FBI informant wearing a wire who wound up recording the WTC attack.

THE CONDI RICE JUGGERNAUT is in motion.

KEVIN HOLTSBERRY has a survey of arguments for and against war in Iraq.

OVER A YEAR AGO, before InstaPundit was even a blog, I advised the White House to pursue a stream of Clintonesque mini-initiatives. Now TAPPED is complaining that he’s doing just that. Advantage: InstaPundit!

UPDATE — PEOPLE IN NEED OF A CLUE: I got this email from “Insta Pundit Watcher,” with the subject line “‘advicing’ the White House:”

Hello Glenn,

You bragged:

OVER A YEAR AGO, before InstaPundit was even a blog, I advised the White House to pursue a stream of Clintonesque mini-initiatives. Now TAPPED is complaining that he’s doing just that. Advantage: InstaPundit!

No you didn’t. You didn’t meet with Bush or any of his advisors, you didn’t have contact with an administration official, you just posted a small article on a web discussion board.

Uh, yeah. And the whole post was, you know, tongue-in-cheek. Not to be taken seriously. Kinda like — oh, hell, never mind. What’s the point?

CHARLES JOHNSON has found something really disturbing. It’s a website featuring a chatboard for Islamic youth where they talk about murdering and decapitating jews, complete with supporting Koranic authority. Some are in America, and Canada. Excerpt:

hmmmmm has anyone here seen rushthroat?? where the mujahideen get a knife stab it into a jews throat and rips da head off and the jewz making all these sick

Another:

i’m gonna try this on some jew right now LOL

Charming.

UPDATE: Just saw that James Lileks has written about this too. His piece is long, sensitive, and moving, everything that my post isn’t. Go read it.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader writes:

The comparison for me to the Clearguidance.com chat room would be the various white supremacist web pages and chats (who are often equally convinced that God is on their side). The comparison between White Supremacists and Islamic Fanatics is perfectly apropos…

Yes, and they get along pretty well, actually. Except that White Supremacists can’t play the multiculti card.

DEBUNKING THE J-BOMB: Angie Schultz, a physicist with an interest in the history of the atomic bomb, is even more skeptical than me about The Independent’s report that the Japanese were “days away” from an atomic bomb at the end of the war.

They would have liked to have been, and there’s some evidence that the Germans were trying to help them (the U-234 was carrying uranium, and some technicians, to Japan when it was intercepted at the end of the war; the uranium was reportedly added to the U.S. effort and wound up in the Hiroshima bomb). But “days away?” She’s doubtful. Their biological warfare program, which was far more advanced, was a bigger threat and in fact killed a nontrivial number of people in China.

READER SEAN DOUGHERTY WRITES:

Maria Cantwell cashed in her RealNetworks stock just before the market crashed to finance her successful senate run in Washington. Now, the company is making layoffs. So having harvested the value from the company and turned it into a six-year guaranteed contract, is Cantwell being called to account like Bush and Cheney for what happened to the employees she left behind?

Where’s the outrage? Why isn’t she “Senator Lay?”

Maybe she can testify along with Martha Stewart.

UPDATE: Reader Travis Matthews says that Dougherty’s wrong, and sends links to prove it. Cantwell borrowed against her shares, which then plummeted in value. She probably wishes now that she’d sold them, but that’s not the same thing.

DIANE E. asks some questions of the peace movement and (scroll up) answers some as well.

UPDATE: Porphyrogenitus has a long and thoughtful post chiding those who claim that support for war against people who are trying to kill us is chest-thumping jingoism.

MY TECHCENTRALSTATION COLUMN IS UP! You’ll have to go there to find out the answer to the Blazing Saddles – quote question I posed earlier. But here’s the gist:

For years now, I’ve been saying that the record industry’s long-term legislative strategy had less to do with preventing copying than with sewing up the market to ensure that Big Entertainment companies won’t have to worry about competition from independent artists. It looks like I’ve just been proven right. . . .

What they’re trying to do is to create a system that’s not so much proof against copying – a mostly impossible task anyway – as a system that’s very unfriendly to content that comes from anyone other than Big Media suppliers. It’s not about copying. It’s about competition.

MARTIN DEVON is echoing a question of my own: why are the arguments offered by those opposing the war of such generally poor quality? I can make up better, more coherent arguments against the war than those who seem to have made it their mission to oppose it. (Fortunately, thanks to Jim Henley, I don’t have to). In Martin’s words:

Part of the reason that the New York Times’ approach to the coming Middle East war annoys me is because there are plenty of real questions to be asked without manufacturing fake dissent. From what I can tell, the real issue that troubles liberals about starting a war with Iraq (or Iran, ‘Saudi’ Arabia and Syria) is that it does not fit into their rule-based worldview. . . .

Yes, let’s have a debate. Do the bigwigs at the New York Times think that we should sit idly by while Saddam acquires weapons of mass destruction? If they don’t trust law-abiding citizens with handguns, why do they trust unbalanced dictators with nuclear weapons? How do they propose to keep America safe from attack?

Unfortunately, I think too much opposition to the war (like much support for gun control, as well) is cultural, not intellectual. The New York Times editorial board takes these positions because they feel they’re the positions people like them are supposed to take. Thus, no actual argument is really necessary. I think this explains why people will call warbloggers blustery warmongers, even when they ultimately turn out not to disagree all that much on the issues. It’s just so, well, not done, to actually say things like that, whether or not they’re right.

I love Martin’s opening quote, too.

GORE’S A LOSER, BUT . . . HILLARY’S LOOKING BETTER! That’s what Mickey Kaus is saying, anyway.

ANOTHER POST (ACTUALLY TWO) I DON’T HAVE TO MAKE: DOC SEARLS chronicles a drawn out debate (so I don’t have to) over the war that started with Nick Denton’s post on the need to shock Islamists with utter defeat, continued with Dave Winer making some comments about warmongering and playground bullies, and descended from there.

The problem, essentially, is that Dave came into this debate late, and he’s not up to speed. He’s a smart guy, God knows, and as entitled to an opinion as anyone, but a lot of people have been wrestling with these things in somewhat more depth. Vague, general statements about playgrounds and bullies are merely inapt analogies, not arguments. You can make an intelligent argument against invading Iraq. And — here’s the other post I don’t have to make — Jim Henley has done so. I think he’s wrong, but it’s a question of the weight you assign to various factors, which is something about which reasonable people can differ.

I don’t really like the term “warblogger” and my use of it in reference to Nick Denton’s original post was somewhat ironic, since Nick himself was rather skeptical of the war for a long time. But Nick’s been thinking about the war, and blogging about the war, in a way that Dave hasn’t been, so it’s not really enough just to dismiss him with an inapt analogy.

Doc’s take on the subject, once we get away from accusations of blowhardism aimed at warbloggers, is actually pretty much in line with what I think most warbloggers believe:

At its best, war is a lesser evil. That’s it. If you have to crush a regime and its armies to end the far worse things they’ve been doing — as we did to Japan and Germany in World War II, and to the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan — your actions are entirely justifiable in the death-for-death and misery-for-misery moral economics of war. Inflict a lesser misery to end a greater one. End of story.

And that, exactly, is the story George W. Bush is trying to tell, apparently with insufficient success. But bless him for trying to do the right thing for the all the people involved, including the citizens of Iraq. . . .

What groups is it most okay to kill? And how does that okayness vary with our distance and difference from them?

The “warblog” crowd is hardly a testosterone-drenched bunch of Rambos. Personally, I’d love to live in the pre-September 11th world, when seemingly all we had to worry about was who had the best abs at the Video Music Awards. But that world, as it turned out, was a fool’s paradise, as people were in fact plotting to kill as many of us as possible just two days later.

In answer to the last questions: What groups is it most okay to kill? The ones who want to kill us. And how does that okayness vary with our distance and difference from them? Not a hell of a lot. But there are a lot of people who currently believe that it’s their divine mission on Earth to kill as many Americans as they can. And they think that’s okay because of the “difference” they see in America.

Odd, then, that it’s people who point this out who are accused of intolerance and warmongering.

THE INDEPENDENT SAYS that Japan was days away from testing its own atomic bomb when the war ended.

This comes as, to put it mildly, news to me. But it’s certainly from a source that doesn’t usually exert itself to come up with pro-American story lines.

WELL THESE GUYS are against invading Iraq. And they’re in my referrer IDs. Yuk. Go away.

I’D BEEN MEANING TO POST ON THIS. But (as you may have been able to tell) I’ve been trying to do a bit less blogging during this lull in news. I’m trying to let my tortured back and joints recover from a year of too much computer time. Anyway, now I don’t have to. Via Jim Henley I found this post by Charles Dodgson regarding the New York Times Magazine’s piece on star-creation and the music industry. The conclusion is priceless.

ANN SALISBURY emails that Blue Streak has identified some examples of media bias in the Newdow case. Which, for those of you who have (perhaps understandably) already forgotten, is the case involving the Pledge of Allegiance that generated such a flap a while back.

STEVEN CHAPMAN TAKES ON U.N. HYPOCRISY:

And to think that a whole swathe of wet leftie know-nothings (including Assad’s man in the UNGA) called Jenin an instance of Israeli ‘brutality.’ Do any of them really know what brutality looks like? Were Israel to act like just another Middle Eastern shitpile, there wouldn’t be a terrorism problem in Israel because there wouldn’t be any terrorists because they, and their families, and their neighbours, and their neighbours’ neighbours would all be dead or deported to Jordan. Why send in the IDF on foot into Jenin going from house to house when they could simply have used the Assad method: encircle the town with tanks and artillery pieces and simply reduce it to rubble? Why bother with the specific targetting of militants when it would be far more thorough to simply do what the Kuwaitis did after the Gulf War, and expel a few hundred thousand Palestinians? When Israel occupied Lebanon there was outraged condemnation. Now that Syria occupies Lebanon no one is interested. While Hafez al-Assad was flattening Hama, the UN were too busy fulminating about the IAF’s attack on Iraq’s nuclear reactors to notice.

And in spite of this, Boy Assad’s lackey is able to pontificate in the UNGA meetings as though he were Gandhi’s fucking star pupil. That’s what I hate about the UN.

Yes, and I notice a certain selective indignation among the U.S. “peace” crowd, too. And if you point out that Arab nations, almost without exception, act horribly, you get the usual bogus accusations of racism in response.

One thing I admire about Chapman is that, though he’s opposed to most of the U.S. war effort, he’s not an apologist (or blind-eye turner) for dictators who happen to be anti-Western, the way that so many self-styled “peace” activists seem to be.

THE NATIONAL POST EDITORIALIZES that Amnesty International is becoming irrelevant because of its knee-jerk anti-Western stance and focus on relatively trivial issues. I think that’s about right, and I think it’s too bad.

PAUL O’NEILL can’t catch a break. Just last week he was being savaged as ruthless by NPR for worrying about whether a Brazil bailout would do any good. Now he’s savaged as hypocritical by TAPPED for thinking that bailing out Uruguay might be worth it.

WHEN I GET EMAIL that copies other people, I usually don’t respond. But Steven Den Beste got this letter, too, and he did respond, at length.