TAPPED is criticizing the Bush Administration’s decision to pull out of the International Criminal Court. It says that will hurt our war on terrorism. Yesterday I heard a long (even for NPR) monologue by Chip Pitts (who has also criticized the U.S. withdrawal from the disastrously anti-semitic, anti-American Durban conference) on All Things Considered making a similar point, and saying that the U.S. is abandoning the principle of reciprocity. Had the treaty been in force, Pitts said, we could have used it to extradite and try bin Laden.

There are two problems here. The first is that the “international community” and the United Nations have demonstrated that they are partisan, dishonest, and anti-American in everything from their bogus concerns with starving Afghans to the absurd protests over the Guantanamo prison camp to the unending dishonesty over Israel. As the continued feteing of Arafat as a legitimately elected leader and indictment of Ariel Sharon as a war criminal indicates, they simply can’t be trusted to run an International Criminal Court honestly.

As for reciprocity, I’ll repeat a question I asked about the Geneva Convention: who in the last 50 years has treated American prisoners in accordance with the Geneva Convention?

And does Pitts really think that the only reason we don’t have bin Laden in custody is that we didn’t have the International Criminal Court? What planet is he from? Listen to the monologue if you have time. You’ll see that I’m being charitable, here. As I’ve written before, the International Law community is doing itself, and international law, no favors by overselling international law.

SOME TIME AGO, John Scalzi suggested that some bloggers were lying about their traffic figures. He didn’t accuse me, but I felt that the honor of the blogosphere had been touched, so I gave Jonah Goldberg the password to view my counter. Here is his report.

Scalzi and I will square off with pistols at dawn at a date to be determined by our seconds. Or I might just say “Nyah, nyah.”

UPDATE: That link isn’t working, which means that The Corner needs to “republish archives.” Meanwhile you can go to the main URL for The Corner and scroll down.

I HAVEN’T WRITTEN ABOUT THE AFGHANISTAN FRIENDLY-FIRE incident involving Canadian troops because (1) I don’t know much about it; and (2) the reports I saw initially suggested that neither did the journalists reporting on it. However, Canadian military blog Flit has some extensive writing on the subject suggesting that there was near-criminal incompetence at work — though this later post pulls back just a little on the near-criminal part, if not the incompetence part.

Friendly fire is inevitable in warfare, of course, and too many safety rules may actually be counterproductive (you don’t want troops in a battle zone to think too long before shooting). But this doesn’t seem like a “heat-of-battle” case so much as a screwup. I hope that it will be properly investigated, not just whitewashed, because it’s very important to study these events in order to figure out how to prevent them in the future. And because we owe it to our Canadian allies. Canadian politicians may not be in especially good odor, but I’ve never heard anyone who has served with Canadian soldiers say anything bad about them.

THE POWER OF THE BLOGOSPHERE: Virginia Postrel’s posts say “no, no, no” — but her habit of posting says “yes, yes, yes!”

Seriously, Virginia responds to my comments on the traffic brought in by John Leo’s column by saying that there’s a reason that they call it big media, and by reminding blogospherians that big media have a lot more readers. Well, yes. But look at the comparison: Leo’s column runs in one of the three biggest newsmagazines (and more importantly for our purposes, on its website). It also runs on two other websites. Together they produced roughly a 30,000-visit boost to my traffic. That’s about ten times what an InstaPundit link can generate in referrals.

So on the one hand, I’m (at best) only one tenth of a John Leo, as Virginia Postrel is pointing out. But Virginia’s got the wrong metric. I don’t have a magazine. InstaPundit doesn’t run on big, high-traffic sites with lots of other content to bring eyeballs. It runs here, on a site that’s all me, that I do entirely by myself. (Er, and I’m paying $12/year for hosting). So my attitude isn’t “damn, I’m only one-tenth of a John Leo.” It’s “Damn! I’m one-tenth of a John Leo!”

It’s true that blogospherians shouldn’t get swelled heads. We’re individuals with our own websites, not Movers And Shakers. But for individuals, we have a lot more clout than we’re used to having, which is quite exciting. (And while a lot more people read Anna Quindlen’s maunderings, as Postrel points out, I suspect that Newsweek wishes its readership had the demographics of the weblog world).

So while bloggers shouldn’t get swelled heads, I think we should all remember, and live by, Webb Wilder’s words of advice: “You’re never too small to hit the big time.”

AMERICAN JEWS ARE BOYCOTTING FRANCE when planning their vacations. Well, yeah. Best quote:

“I’m absolutely livid, and I think other people should be too,” said Danielle Lewis, who had planned a honeymoon in France, but is now looking elsewhere. “I’ve lived in France, I’m a Francophile and I love French food and wine. But I don’t want to go there. Why would I want to give money to people who want to kill me?”

I’m not Jewish, but I wouldn’t plan a trip to France now either. And ever since last fall I’ve been substituting the amazingly good — and even more amazingly cheap — Chilean wines for French vintages, in a show of hemispheric solidarity.

LOTS MORE PIM FORTUYN COVERAGE over at the Independent Gay Forum. Sample quote:

Openly gay Dutch politician and sociology professor Pim Fortuyn has been assailed as a “right-wing extremist,” as if he were Holland’s answer to France’s Jean-Marie Le Pen. The charge is absurd: Fortuyn has urged immigrants to embrace their adopted nation’s liberal values of political tolerance, women’s equality and respect for gays. Yet he, rather than the Muslim clerical leaders he criticizes, winds up getting tarred as some sort of reactionary or fascist.

Yes, I wonder if Fortuyn’s gayness has something to do with the tone of his coverage — and I don’t just mean the rather un-PC characterization of him as “flamboyant” in the New York Times.

MICKEY KAUS AND ANDREW SULLIVAN have quite a few interesting things to say about Pim Fortuyn’s killing. I have to go give an exam. More later.

TRAFFIC YESTERDAY: 77,677 — beating the previous record by over 26,000. All hail LeoPower!

PIM FORTUYN’S KILLER is said to be an “extreme leftist” by authorities.

IF YOUR DOMAIN IS REGISTERED with Verisign, you might want to read this.

QUITE A FEW PEOPLE HAVE EMAILED ME to say that the Pim Fortuyn assassination feels bigger to them than it ought to. As David Carr writes on Samizdata, “I think those tectonic plates of history just juddered.” Such intuitions are often true when widely felt — but of course, when widely felt they are often self-fulfilling. We’ll see. Europe is in a bad way, as I’ve been saying since, well, before InstaPundit even started. Because the problems have been papered over, and because there’s an agreement among the elites not to talk about them, a lot of people haven’t realized how bad they were. Now they’re starting to.

And, you know, it’s not always bad for political “tectonic plates” to move. It just depends on how they move.

AIRPORT SECURITY: Your tax dollars at work. What a joke.

HOLY SH*T: Eric Olsen likes to talk about “InstaPower,” but here’s something that puts it in perspective. John Leo linked to me in his column, which is sending me referrals from U.S. News and from the Townhall.com and JewishWorldReview sites where his column runs. I typically send somebody I link to between a few hundred and a few thousand visitors. So far today, I’ve had about 68,000 pageviews, breaking my previous record by about 17,000 — and exceeding a typical Monday’s traffic by more like 25,000. InstaPundit also got linked by Slate’s “On Other Websites,” which sent a fair amount of traffic — but that’s happened before, and it’s done nothing like this. All hail LeoPower!

UPDATE: At 11:15 it’s 72,589. I’m going to bed, where I’ll dream about what life would be like if I got just one dollar per pageview. . . .

“EXCELLENT!” That’s Alex Beam’s blurb for Ted Rall’s book on this page. Can this be real?

ALEX BENSKY WRITES:

I wonder if you saw the front page of today’s Times. I’m sure it is sheer coincidence that the photograph illustrating the article on yesterday’s pro-Israel parade happened to have a large pro-Palestinian poster in the foreground. Just luck of the draw, I suppose.

I’m also enjoying their series on the pressures on high school students who are trying to get into college. Apparently if one can’t get into a private, prestigious college–Ivy League, Stanford, Seven Sisters, and the like–one’s life is ruined.

Now, I’m no one to talk since two of my degrees are from branch campuses of state universities and the simple country law school that gave me a degree is also a public institution. Apparently people condemned to, say, the University of Tennessee, or my obviously loser niece and nephew who went to the University of Washington, will lead lives of quiet desperation.

I’m sure the Times has no consciousness of the point they’re making, any more than Clinton did when he said he wanted a cabinet that “looked like America” and then went out and named people from elite and expensive private universities.

UPDATE: Reader Dave Ivers writes:

Tell Alex Bensky that I only hope his loser nephew and niece only lead lives of “quiet desperation” and that they don’t, instead, follow the practices of the disappointed in the Middle East and begin strapping explosives to themselves and blowing up in the midst of, say, a Renaissance Weekend meeting of the elite (or maybe a Trilateral Commission meeting). [Why do they hate us?] As a graduate of a Big Ten (Eleven?) school who got his doctorate in a very little-known discipline at a directional school (and who has taught almost exclusively in state directional schools –a Northern, a Southern, a Central, and now an Eastern), I got more than disgusted with a couple of Harvard PhDs who typically crapped up their survey instruments to the point that it was not at all obvious what they were trying to test (try asking 60-80 year-old farmers {after 8PM} questions with multiple clauses containing obscure words and see what kind of responses you get).

For an egalitarian society (?) with a left wing that insists on leveling schemes, it sure is funny who ends up in the power positions, no?

Yes. At a law professors’ meeting on affirmative action some years ago, I suggested that the best way to hire more scholars of color would be to get rid of a lot of tenured senior faculty. After all, most of the older white guys actually benefited personally from discrimination, while the young white guys we discriminate against now didn’t. Not surprisingly, it didn’t fly. Similarly, a visiting professor at Harvard was approached by students who urged that he decline Harvard’s offer of a permanent position in protest against Harvard’s inadequate diversity policies. He suggested that it would be a more touching statement if they quit law school in protest of such policies. The students declined. Most of those “leveling” schemes involve leveling other people so that the levelers can feel good about themselves.

ANDREW SULLIVAN has more background on Pim Fortuyn. He also says: “If this is a hit-job from the left, things could get really, really ugly in Europe. And some news reports indicate it already has.” The story Sullivan links to is about Fortuyn supporters clashing with riot police and blaming the politicians who attacked him as a right-wing extremist. Meanwhile immigrants from North Africa are reported to be celebrating.

KATIE GRANJU says more people should be sleeping with their children.

THE MISSING LINK has some pretty cool information resources on the Web.

READER JACK WILLIAM BELL says he’s got the explanation for the mysterious deaths of microbiologists, and he points to Greg Bear’s new book Vitals. Gee, I hope that’s not what’s really going on.

THE U.S., as expected, has announced that it’s repudiating the International Criminal Court. Given the complete abrogation of any moral position on the part of the “international community” over the past few months, this seems reasonable.

BRENDAN O’NEILL tries to relieve the lefty blog shortage.

DOC SEARLS has a great quote at the end of this article on weblogs: “We’re all stringers for each other now.” Dr. Weevil explores this very phenomenon in a post.

HERE’S AN interesting article on Pim Fortuyn from the Financial Times. This excerpt is worth noting:

Not only was he openly gay, but he made clear his sexual orientation directly informed his politics. He wanted to halt the arrival of immigrants from Muslim countries because he feared they were eroding the country’s tolerance of diversity.

“In Holland homosexuality is treated the same as heterosexuality. In what Islamic country does that happen?”

What country indeed?

FUKUYAMA NOSTALGIA UPDATE: Somehow, in all my linking last week, I forgot to link this piece by Rand Simberg responding to James Taranto’s defense of Frank Fukuyama’s anti-biotech piece.

ANNE APPLEBAUM says the French Left has learned nothing and forgotten nothing in a piece on the aftermath of the Chirac / Le Pen runoff:

She was speaking, of course, of immigrants in Marseilles. It made me think of a passage in a recent, much-lauded book by Larry Seidentop, Democracy in Europe:

Here we come again upon the pattern which has haunted French history since the Revolution, a pattern in which the political class or elite loses touch with popular opinion, only finally to be called to account by widespread civil unrest, if not revolution.

My worry is this: If people’s fears about immigration, crime, and national identity are not addressed in the next few years of President’s Chirac’s tenure, there may not be “widespread civil unrest,” but there may well be an even larger vote for Le Pen next time around. There is no reason France’s politicians shouldn’t be relieved by Chirac’s triumph—but the events of the past two weeks are no excuse for renewed complacency either.

I agree.

UPDATE: Reader John Kluge writes:

Its interesting how the European elites first reaction to 9-11 was to scold Americans for not sufficiently examining why people hate them so much. Now these same elites, congratulating themselves over LePen’s defeat, seem incapable of asking why a large percentage of their electorate is willing to vote for someone they believe to be a fascist.