JOHN COLE WONDERS what the Hell those Haitians were thinking by trying to emigrate to the United States.

Me, I figure anyone willing to make that trip because they want to become Americans ought to be allowed to stay.

I WAS BUMMED by Paul Wellstone’s death, but these guys can barely hold back the tears.

UPDATE: Reader J. Michael Neal says that the above post is nasty and inappropriate. I don’t think so — I was struck by the photo, and the caption that went with it. Maybe it’s the caption that does it (follow the link to read it) and that’s not exactly Clinton’s fault, but still, it’s a freakin’ funeral . . . .

ANOTHER UPDATE: Okay, Oliver Willis sends this picture of a glad-handing Trent Lott, and Ted Barlow thinks the post is nasty too. Well, I’m not sure which way the Trent Lott picture cuts (I think it just underscores my sense that politicians don’t actually experience authentic emotions) but you can follow the links and form your own opinions. I still feel that this isn’t how you should act at a memorial remembering how a man, his wife, his daughter, and several other people died in a fiery plane crash.

STILL ANOTHER UPDATE: Tom Maguire says that we’ve seen this before. Here’s Margaret Carlson:

The most pointed moment of Instant Grief Analysis came when NBC did a frame-by-frame deconstruction of the President walking along after Brown’s funeral, laughing at something he was being told–then going all somber when the camera was trained on him.

Meanwhile a bunch of people who watched the ceremonies on CSPAN2 say the whole thing was rather unseemly, more like a fundraiser than a funeral. I didn’t see it, but that would get Clinton, Lott and Mondale off the hook, I guess. It’s perfectly seemly to laugh and gladhand at a fundraiser.

Michele of A Small Victory watched the coverage and found it unseemly. You can read her comments. Local coverage is here and here.

The other day, when I wrote that there were more important things than who took the Senate, I thought I was chastising partisan Republicans. Seems like a lot of Democrats need chastising on this point too. But, hell, at least they’re not claiming that Bush had Wellstone killed, as Ted Rall is in his latest column.

LAST UPDATE: Driving my daughter to school, I heard NPR reporting that the memorial service “turned into a political rally.” So it’s not just my perception, here. NPR didn’t seem to mind, but I think it’s tacky. Rachel Lucas notes: “[I]t wasn’t just Democrats. The problem is, they’re politicians, who more and more make me believe that they just aren’t human.”

THE ANGRY WHITE MALE MYTH: A reader sends these links in opposition to the Daily Howler’s claim, which I mentioned earlier, that people didn’t widely portray the sniper as an “angry white male.”

Sniper Facts: “According to former F.B.I. profilers, he’s probably a white man in his 20s or early 30s who lives nearby — and who has a score to settle.”

Star Tribune: “The retired FBI agent from Minneapolis said Thursday that while he didn’t have the specific details of the homicides, he had speculated that the killer was a lone sniper in his late 20s who was white, had military experience and lived near the shooting sites.”

Washington Times: “Mr. Aamodt had predicted the sniper was an angry white man. He said the standard profile of the young white male is often correct, because, ‘if you lump serial killers together this is what we get.'”

Courtland Milloy, Washington Post:

I needed a sniper’s face just to keep it real, and for a while I tried to imagine a white male, a mid-thirtyish, household-handyman sort of guy. After all, that’s who does these kinds of serial killings, right?

Maybe I’d been watching too many weekend cable hunting shows where white men move steathily through the woods, lie in wait for some unsuspecting animal to come along and — with deadly accuracy — drop it.

“When you break down the demographics of the Washington region, there is a statistical probability that the sniper is a white man,” Gregg McCrary, a retired FBI profiler, told me recently.

Male I could understand. But why white? “It could be the backlash effect,” Jack Levin, director of the Brudnick Center on Violence and Conflict at Northeastern University in Boston, told the Post and Courier in Charleston, S.C. “White males belong to a long-advantaged group that is now having to share power and control. But I think it has less to do with race than social class.”

Baltimore Sun:

The gunman “is somebody who is cold, who is calculating, who has the skills and doesn’t care who they hurt,” Van Zandt said.

“Statistically, this is something white males normally do,” he added. “(But) You don’t want to exclude any race, any ethnicity because there is always the aberrant behavior.”

(Points to Van Zandt for the disclaimer at the end, though in fact, as has been pointed out elsewhere, white males are underrepresented in the sniper-murder pool.)

Christian Science Monitor:

“This person is kind of a wallpaper white male, a disenfranchised, disrespected man who’s getting back at society,” theorizes Levin. “That’s one of the reasons he’s kept his distance from inner D.C., where he might loose his cover.”

Not hardly. Well, this isn’t, by itself, proof that the newspapers and airwaves were rife with such speculation — you’d have to do some sort of all-encompassing content analysis for that, I guess — but I think it’s enough to explain why people think so. And, having seen the coverage myself, I have to say that the “angry white male” theory sure seemed to be everywhere. And surely this undercuts the Howler’s statement that “Nonetheless, there was very little speculation about the killer’s race.”

UPDATE: Of course, there’s always this theory from Tacitus, but I think we can all agree that it didn’t exactly reach saturation level in the media. . . .

ANOTHER UPDATE: Justin Katz has comments.

YEAH, ME TOO: Stephen Green writes:

I’m a Falwell-tweaking, gay-marriage supporting, drug legalizing, pro-abortion, pro-immigration, anti-trade barrier, wary-of-organized-religion kind of conservative.

You know, one of those conservatives.

UPDATE: SKBubba, meanwhile, is one of those liberals. Maybe we do need a third party.

GUESS WHO GOT MARRIED! There are pictures. Well, naturally. Congratulations!

HERE’S A WEBSITE that says it’s dedicated to documenting true stories of armed self-defense, which generally don’t get a lot of media play.

JOSH CHAFETZ writes about Harvard’s project of documenting Iraqi atrocities.

There are quite a few.

SUSANNA CORNETT looks at the different spin CNN and the New York Times are giving to basically the same story about the release of some prisoners from Guantanamo.

FINALLY, A DIVESTMENT PETITION I can get behind. Sign it now!

BRINK LINDSEY AND JOHN MUELLER are debating the war over at the Reason site.

LOOKING FOR AN ANGRY WHITE MALE? Here’s one:

The media lapsed into the same denial mode the last time a forty-year-old radical Muslim called Mohamed opened fire on U.S. soil. July the Fourth, LAX, the El Al counter, two dead. CNN and The Associated Press all but stampeded to report a “witness” who described the shooter as a fat white guy in a ponytail who kept yelling “Artie took my job.” But, alas, it was — surprise! — a Muslim called Hesham Mohamed Modayet.

Broadly speaking, in these interesting times, when something unusual and unprecedented happens, there are those who think on balance it’s more likely to be a fellow called Mohammed than, say, Bud, and there are those who climb into the metaphorical burqa, close up the grille and insist, despite all the evidence, that we should be looking for some angry white male. I’m in the former camp and, apropos the sniper, said as much in The Chicago Sun-Times. I had a bet with both my wife and my assistant that the perp would be an Islamic terrorist. The gals, unfortunately, had made the mistake of reading The New York Times, whose experts concluded it would be a “macho hunter” or an “icy loner.”

Speaking as a macho hunter and an icy loner myself, I’m beginning to think the media would be better off turning their psychological profilers loose on America’s newsrooms.

I think the Hadayet case cost the media, and the authorities, a lot of credibility. I don’t think they’ve gotten it back this time around.

JAMES Q. WILSON ON ISLAMIC REFORM:

We are engaged in a struggle to defeat terrorism. I have no advice on how to win that struggle, but I have some thoughts as to why it exists. It is not, I think, because Islam is at war with the West or because Palestinians are trying to displace Israelis. The struggle exists, I think, because the West has mastered the problem of reconciling religion and freedom, while several Middle Eastern nations have not. The story of that mastery and that failure occupies several centuries of human history, in which one dominant culture, the world of Islam, was displaced by a new culture, that of the West.

Interesting piece. Wilson notes that the West had the same problem, and that its success is a result of successfully addressing it:

Freedom of conscience has made the difference. In an old world where knowledge came from libraries, and scientific experiments were rare, freedom would not be so important. But in the new world, knowledge and all that it can produce come from the sharp challenge of competing ideas tested by standards of objective evidence.

Worth reading. Much of it will be old news for Blogosphere readers, and some of it will be cause for disagreement. But not the conclusion: “If the Middle East is to encounter and not merely resist modernity, it would best if it did this before it runs out of oil.”

UPDATE: Reader Tom Holsinger emails:

IMO we’re at war with the Saudi form of Wahhabism, which is using Saudi oil funding to propagate its particular nastiness. We’ll find out what kind of legs it has after it loses that funding.

Another major question is whether that will happen before the American people get so angry that they run over the Bush Administration to intern or expel (a) non-citizen Arab Muslims or (b) all non-citizen Muslims. My next Strategy Page article will touch on this.

Many different things could happen. The deafening silence of non-Wahhabis means a lot.

Yes. One reason I want a vigorous effort now is that I fear the nastiness of a protracted low-level conflict. The good news is that the non-Wahhabis are starting to speak out.

WHERE SERIAL KILLERS UNWIND: Somebody sent me another story on this yesterday, but I couldn’t post it because of the server outage. Now the story’s in the New York Times — about the bar in Bellingham where serial killers hang out. Weird.

Since it’s extremely unlikely that there’s much more than coincidence here, this is a useful warning that, though Occam’s Razor is a handy tool, strange things do happen for no reason. Or almost no reason. The story suggests that the bar’s problem may be that its patrons are too nice:

Despite the guest list, people who drink at the Waterfront described themselves as warm, well-adjusted. Perhaps it was their accepting attitude, they surmised, that let so many notorious characters feel welcome.

Go figure.

I WONDER WHEN THE VIOLENCE POLICY CENTER WILL TAKE THIS off its website:

Early America was vastly different from the handgun-happy images one sees on television, in movies, and in the pages of gun magazines. Serious historians have documented that early Americans had little interest in guns. Until the mid-1800s, owning a gun was surprisingly uncommon. Those who owned firearms almost always owned long guns.

Historian Michael Bellesiles, for example, examined more than a thousand probate records from northern New England and Pennsylvania filed from 1765 to 1790. He found that only 14 percent of household inventories included firearms–and more than half of these were inoperable.22 Colonial settlers got meat mostly from domesticated animals like cows and pigs. When they wanted wild game, they bought it from native Americans or professional hunters, most of whom trapped their prey.

Well?

UPDATE: John Rosenberg writes that the Bellesiles dispute is just another round in the culture wars:

At the risk of oversimplification, on one side of the increasingly barbed cultural barricades are those who believe truth is whatever serves justice, i.e., women, minorities, critics of American foreign policy, gun control. . . .

On the other side of the cultural divide are those still dedicated to an older “correspondence theory” of truth as reflecting, however imperfectly, some objective even if not completely knowable reality. They are indifferent to, or at least not transfixed by, the “political implications” of the work and more concerned with whether the book’s basic honesty and whether the history profession relaxes its professed standards for politically correct interpretations.

He has a lengthy discussion of the Bellesiles affair, the Wiener article, and the context in which they appear that’s well worth reading if you’re interested in these sorts of things. He also notes the disparity between the coverage afforded by the Emory Wheel and that contained in publications that one might expect to be more interested:

It is all the more remarkable that the NYT has dropped the ball on Bellesiles because it claims special pre-eminence in covering “culture,” including especially its largely home town publishing industry. Knopf, which published Arming America, is just across town; the New York Review of Books, which gave Bellesiles a glowing review that has not been retracted, is just uptown; Columbia University, which administers the Bancroft Prize Bellesiles won and still has, is farther uptown; and of course the New York Times Book Review, source of another glowing, unretracted review, is right down the hall.

Perhaps these august institutions (well, except for the NYT, which is, after all, a daily) have been waiting for Emory’s decision and will weigh in soon.

AMERICAN GRAFFITI: I think we should send people to spraypaint this picture in, well, lots of places.

BLACK NATIONALISM, “THIRD POSITION” FASCISM, AND ANTISEMITISM: Chip Berlet discusses the connections. (And follow this link for more specifically on the Nation of Islam.) Berlet’s got a strong ideological position (he’s quite left, leaning toward Marxist, I believe) but his research is generally well-regarded.

One of the things that this illustrates is that too-quick distinctions between “domestic” and “Islamic” terrorism are probably, well, too quick.

THE MEXICO GOVERNMENT REPORTER claims that a hostile-to-Mexico editorial in the Wall Street Journal was inspired by the White House as a means of telling Mexico to play ball in the Security Council. I don’t know if it’s true — but the White House certainly ought to be telling Mexico to play ball in the Security Council.

JOHN LOTT WRITES THAT BALLISTIC REGISTRATION OF GUNS is likely to backfire. Meanwhile the Fraternal Order of Police is reportedly opposed to it. Eugene Volokh, on the other hand, links to both positive and negative government studies on the subject.

DICK MORRIS SAYS THAT BUSH IS BLOWING IT by futzing around with the U.N., thus losing focus and a sense of urgency.

Morris focuses too much on polls, of course, but on the other hand domestic support is the main determinant of whether we win this war.

UPDATE: David Hogberg says that Morris is wrong. Hogberg is persuasive, but arguing with Dick Morris about polls is a serious proposition.

THE DAILY HOWLER says that the “angry white male” myth was a myth. He’s got some evidence there, though I’d have to see something a bit broader before I’d take his sweeping statements as true, given that my impression from watching the cable shows was that people did think it was an angry white male.

Meanwhile, John O’Sullivan writes something that’s not quite the same:

Most reporters and editors wanted the sniper to be a white male rather than an African American or a Muslim. For the underlying assumption that colors coverage of race, ethnicity and religion in the typical newsroom is that the great American majority that never went to the Ivy League schools is made up of racists, sexists and homophobes who need to be protected against their own tendency to white racist bigotry.

Thus, when the journalists fear a story might inflame white racism, a Muslim terrorist like the LAX shooter perhaps, they play it down. When a story might challenge white racism, a Tim McVeigh maybe, they play it up. So when the sniper was still an unknown quantity, it was second nature to seize on anything–even racial profiling–to suggest that he was another Tim McVeigh rather than another Muhammad Hadayat.

Perhaps this desire for it to be an angry white male shaped coverage enough to give that impression, even when people didn’t explicitly say “Bob, I think it’s an angry white male.”

At any rate, this Newsweek story says that authorities were telling reporters that that’s what they were looking for:

Not just the cable-TV criminologists but also the government’s own experts were fooled. Until the last couple of days, most top officials at the state-local-federal joint command center in Rockville, Md., thought they were looking for an “intelligent, well-organized white male,” one veteran federal investigator told NEWSWEEK. . . .

Then there was the Good Ole Boy. He was another gun-crazed white man with suspicious habits. The police put him under surveillance. One night in the middle of the siege, he was observed shooting pool and drinking beer with his buddies until 2 a.m. “Not serial-killer behavior,” the cops concluded. . . .

Remarkably, law-enforcement sources tell NEWSWEEK, some investigators continued to cling to the belief that the sniper or snipers were driving a white van or truck. Like the talking heads on TV, they had convinced themselves that the snipers must be white men driving a white truck. They had trouble accepting that they should have been looking for two black men driving a blue car. . . .

What’s more, a passage even supports O’Sullivan’s assertion about vigilantism, as — even when they realized their suspects weren’t angry white males — police were afraid to release information:

The investigators hotly debated whether to release the suspects’ photographs. Some feared that would only tip them off and make them flee. Or worse, provoke them to strike again. Others feared the suspects would be found first by vigilantes. “The concern was that, God forbid, it’s not the people [the real snipers] and someone takes matters into their own hands,” said Duncan.

In light of this, I think that it’s a bit of a stretch to say that the “angry white male” myth is itself mythical. At least, I’d need to see a lot more evidence in support of a proposition so inconsistent with my recollection, and most other people’s impressions. And I think that O’Sullivan’s interpretation of what went on in the reporting is closer to the facts than the Daily Howler’s.

UPDATE: Reader Michael Steele writes:

I think they all miss the mark to some degree…. I think the “desired outcome” was actually a “gun nut” The Anti-gun forces have been reeling since 9/11, they needed a stereotypical redneck gun owner to bolster the cause….”see they’re all nuts!!!!! ban guns!!!!” or something like that.”

Yes, if the Chevy had had an NRA sticker, I’m sure we would have heard about it. Over and over and over. And some people didn’t wait for any evidence to make a connection. Brendan Koerner of Slate certainly remembers it the way I do: “The universal consensus was that the killer was white, despite the fact that just over half of sniper homicides committed between 1976 and 2000 were carried out by whites.” Actually, I remember it a bit less strongly than Koerner — my wife was on a few talk shows opining that it was probably a Muslim who supported Al Qaeda, though she didn’t specifically say it was a non-white. But she was very much the exception, as the producers told her at the time.

MORE LATER: Sorry, but I spent the morning with my daughter at the dentist, and now I have to teach Administrative Law (it’s the octane-posting case, which is one of my favorites — no, really).

Between this and being unable to respond to email for much of yesterday, the backlog is big. I’ll try to deal with it later, but no promises. In the meantime, you can amuse yourself by reading this gentle Fisking of antiwar preachers — in the Harvard Crimson.

DOCTOR WEEVIL WONDERS at certain anti-war activists’ hostility to fellatio.

I’m for it, personally.

RACHEL LUCAS is attempting to perform a clue transplant on Michael Moore.

Trust me, Rachel, it’ll be rejected. But it was kind of you to volunteer as a donor.

UPDATE: Jay Caruso says that Moore is even wronger than Rachel realizes.

JAMES LILEKS looks at Avril Lavigne and Walter Mondale — with a nod in passing to Daryl Hannah’s spiritual daughter, and some comments on newspaper delivery that are not for the weak-stomached.

THE MOTIVATION ISN’T ENTIRELY CLEAR, but the Iranian Navy is helping to enforce the blockade of Iraq.