BOY, THIS didn’t take long. I do, however, want to stress what I said in the update to this post.

UPDATE: Ted Rall, on the other hand, writes this like he means it. [LATER: That link is dead now: Go here to read the column.]

He really is a loathsome human being.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Bill Hobbs has identified a suitable Rall-related charity.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Armed Liberal has related comments.

MORE: Andrew Sullivan on Rall:

After 9/11, I was roundly criticized for daring to suggest that there were some people in America who wanted the terrorists to win. But if you read Ted Rall and others, there can be no mistake.

The antiwar left — if it wants to be taken seriously, which is at best an open question — should disavow the likes of Rall. But it won’t, because too many of its supporters agree with him.

STILL MORE: Hmm. According to this, Ted Rall is an award-winning moderate. Sheesh. Remember this the next time antiwar folks say it’s unfair to associate them with losers like Rall.

MORE STILL: An antiwar reader emails:

Now, if you’re going to play gotcha with us everytime some member of the radical fringe of my side says something stupid on DU or Ted Rall decides to pipe up, I ask you: when will you repudiate Misha or the posters on FreeRepublic? It’s a two way street.

Yeah, but this is a cop-out because they aren’t comparable. Whenever I mention people who want the United States to lose, I’m told “yeah, but they’re the fringe.” But they’re NOT. Misha and the freepers don’t have syndicated columns. They’re not winning awards from allegedly-mainstream outfits. They’re not published with those views in allegedly-respectable newspapers. Rall is.

Ditto with ANSWER — they’re the indispensable core of the antiwar movement. You can try to dismiss them as a fringe, but no alternative group has been able to replace them because, in fact, they aren’t the fringe of the antiwar movement. Their hostility to America, their desire for America to lose, is just a more distilled version of something we see all over. Look at what Gary Kamiya wrote last spring:

I have at times, as the war has unfolded, secretly wished for things to go wrong. Wished for the Iraqis to be more nationalistic, to resist longer. Wished for the Arab world to rise up in rage. Wished for all the things we feared would happen. I’m not alone: A number of serious, intelligent, morally sensitive people who oppose the war have told me they have had identical feelings.

Kamiya gave this a redemptive spin, but I see plenty of examples where that’s entirely lacking. Here’s Tom Robbins:

Quite probably the worst thing about the inevitable and totally unjustifiable war with Iraq is that there’s no chance the U.S. might lose it. America is a young country, and intellectually, emotionally, and physically, it has been exhibiting all the characteristics of an adolescent bully, a pubescent punk who’s too big for his britches and too strong for his age. Someday, perhaps, we may grow out of our mindless, pimple-faced arrogance, but in the meantime, it might do us a ton of good to have our butts kicked. Unfortunately, like most of the targets we pick on, Iraq is much too weak to give us the thrashing our continuously overbearing behavior deserves.

Then there’s Chrissie Hynde:

Between songs, the pugnacious Hynde, in a classic black T-shirt and jeans, bantered and battled with the crowd. She dedicated “You Know Who Your Friends Are” to “all you junkies and f–,” gave a shout-out to the late Joe Strummer, opined that she hopes the United States loses if it goes to war with Iraq (“Bring it on! Give us what we deserve!”), and introduced the song “Fools Must Die” with the self-deprecating quip, “I’ll show you how it’s done.”

If these people were on the “fringe,” they’d be repudiated — as they’d be if they were, say, calling black people by racist terms. But wishing for America to lose, apparently, is unexceptionable. Fringe? Of society, maybe. Of the antiwar movement? Doesn’t sound like it. They may not reflect majority opinion, but they’re clearly not regarded as beyond the pale.

YET MORE STILL: Tacitus has more links on this. Some of his commenters accuse me of deliberately blurring the line between antiwar and anti-America. But I don’t think I’m the one doing that.

I’ve drawn the distinction repeatedly, but the fact is that the real energy in the antiwar movement comes from people who don’t like America. A.N.S.W.E.R. is central to the movement. Nobody else can organize the protests or turn out the bodies. It’s as if the religious right relied on Fred Phelps to do their organization, then tried to claim that they weren’t like him. But they’ve been very careful to distance themselves from guys like him. I don’t see similar care from the antiwar movement — I see happy solidarity until someone makes an issue, followed by righteous indignation when this stuff is pointed out.

If you’re embarrassed to be in bed with these guys, here’s my advice: Get out of the bed. Meanwhile LT Smash has more on this.

YESTERDAY I MENTIONED A RATHER ONE-SIDED SYMPOSIUM sponsored by the International Society of Political Psychology. John Ray was until recently a member of the ISPP and writes:

I was a member once. And I have had quite a few articles published in their journal. It is in many ways a fairly typical academic association but they have moved further and further to the Left over the years — making their journal so boring that I discontinued my subscription a couple of year ago. I am still on their mailing list, however, and did get the email Instapundit refers to but it was so normal for them that I did not think to remark [on] it.

Sad, isn’t it, that this sort of thing is so unremarkable in academia?

A WHILE BACK, I joked that Fred Phelps might as well be a paid agent provocateur for the ACLU. This Slate article by Emily Bazelon explains why at considerably greater length.

HELP, HELP — I’m being stalked.

Er, but not, you know, “actually, personally stalked” or anything.

I DIDN’T SEE this episode of Hardball, but I wish I had. Read the whole thing, which offers a lot of interesting insight into what’s going on in Iraq.

MORE ON THE EDUCATIONAL QUAGMIRE: If you’re not reading Erin O’Connor’s blog, Critical Mass, you probably should be.

GHOSTS OF OCCUPATIONS PAST: Here are some fascinating clippings about resistance to the American occupation in Germany, including the murder and mutilation of American soldiers and clashes with German gangs.

Meanwhile, Justin Katz comments on war critics’ ignorance of history.

GARY MILHOLLIN ON IRAN:

VIENNA (Reuters) – Arms experts say a U.N. nuclear watchdog report on Iran supports U.S. claims that Tehran has a secret atomic weapons programme by detailing a two-decade cover-up of research possibly linked to bomb making.

Despite Iran’s secretiveness and the array of activities possibly associated with weapons, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) concluded there was no evidence to date Iran had a weapons programme. Iran has always denied the charge.

“The report is a stunning revelation of how far a country can get in making The Bomb, while pretending to comply with international inspections,” said Gary Milhollin of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, a U.S.-based non-profit think-tank. “This is a classic case of a bomb in the basement.”

“Iran has secretly enriched uranium, made plutonium, and hidden the evidence of it from the world,” he told Reuters. “There’s only one reason why anybody would do that — because they want to make the bomb.”

And what’s an appropriate response to that?

JIM MILLER POINTS OUT another similarity between GWB and JFK.

EDUCATIONAL QUAGMIRE UPDATE: Joanne Jacobs remarks: “The Ody brothers are black, like 70 of 107 students searched at the majority white school. The ACLU is investigating. It’s going to be lawsuit time in Goose Creek, South Carolina.”

I certainly hope so.

FRANCE’S ELF PETROLEUM CORRUPTION SCANDAL has produced jailtime for several:

Stiff sentences were handed out on Wednesday to the three central figures in France’s biggest ever corruption trial involving the diversion of €300m from Elf, the former state oil group, for personal enrichment and bribes during the late eighties and early nineties. . .

Elf, set up as a state run company by Gen Charles de Gaulle to ensure French independent sources of oil, had long been used as an unofficial arm of French foreign policy, as well as to provide under-the-table funds to political parties.

There’s also a roundup here.

Stay tuned for developments in the Credit Lyonnais scandal, which may produce trials in the United States!

GEORGE SOROS AND ANTISEMITISM: The New York Daily News says that Soros is twisting history.

UPDATE: Meryl Yourish comments on Soros: “The brainwashing took on this man. He’s a relic from an earlier age, a classic example of the Jew that is taught to hate what he is and what he stands for.”

THE EDUCATIONAL QUAGMIRE CONTINUES TO DEEPEN:

Juhl, 18, is still wondering what authority allowed the Clark County School District to punish him. His journal was not a school assignment and was not posted using a school computer or a school message board.

“The dean told me that what I’d written wasn’t school appropriate,” said Juhl, who was Valley’s homecoming king this year and also was president of its drama club. “He said it wasn’t appropriate for a journal. I just feel like I’ve been violated, like they’ve punished me for expressing my personal opinion.”

And that’s because they have. (Via Joanne Jacobs).

AUSTIN BAY WRITES:

Now we’ve come to the long trial in Iraq. Dictatorships are the biggest cause of terrorism and the biggest cause of poverty on this planet. The Iraqi people have a truly blessed opportunity — the chance to build a democracy in the politically dysfunctional Middle East. However, defeatist poobahs chant, “No one told us the job would be tough.”

Malarkey. Early on, defense and policy analysts publicly vetted post-Saddam challenges. In a recent column, I trotted out a quote from an article I wrote in The Weekly Standard’s Dec. 9, 2002, issue. Forgive me, it must trot again:

U.S. and allied forces liberating Iraq will attempt — more or less simultaneously — to end combat operations, cork public passions, disarm Iraqi battalions, bury the dead, generate electricity, pump potable water, bring law out of embittering lawlessness, empty jails of political prisoners, pack jails with criminals, turn armed partisans into peaceful citizens, rearm local cops who were once enemy infantry, shoot terrorists, thwart chiselers, carpetbaggers and black marketeers, fix sewers, feed refugees, patch potholes, get trash trucks rolling, and accomplish all this under the lidless gaze of Peter Jennings and Al Jazeera.

Winning a war is difficult. Ask the World War II generation.

Every experienced strategist understands warfare is, at its most basic level, a clash of human wills. The motive will of a man who spends years preparing to smash a jet into a skyscraper is large in big letters. His cohorts are betting that America is a sitcom nation with a short attention span. We’ll change channels, cut and run.

Mature Americans recognize that everyone has a leadership role, especially in times of crisis. The cooperation and common trust demonstrated by Americans evacuating the World Trade Center not only saved thousands of lives, it was indicative of America’s capacity for individual leadership.

Self-critique is one thing, the acid of self-doubt spurred by lies is something else. It’s time for every American to be a leader, to bury these lies — from unilateralism, to quagmire, to “no one told us” — and get on with the hard business of winning the War on Terror.

Read the whole thing.

PORPHYROGENITUS has a good post on war, anti-war, and the stereotypes that anti-war people have about pro-war people. Read it all, but here’s an excerpt:

One of the bits of conventional wisdom that vexes me is the widely-held assumption that people who are in favor of fighting this war (or any given war) just love war and/or have no conception of the consequences of war, of the suffering involved, the sacrifices that we are asking people to make, the loss people will experience as a result, and the fact that many of those we are sending to fight, and quite possibly innocents elsewhere, will never be the same even if they live.

Over the last several days I have been particularly melancholy. Yesterday was the hardest Remembrance Day of my life. I’m deliberately using the name for the holiday that is common in other countries, because its connotations are apt in this case. I couldn’t stop tearing up. I couldn’t stop weeping. Which is sort of a problem when one is at work, so I kept to myself and I left early.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the lads in their trench. I couldn’t stop thinking about the men and women who are not only fighting, but dying or suffering horrible wounds in a war I supported and continue to support. About people in hospital beds with their faces or limbs blown off. About people who, even if they are not injured in this fight, will see things – see things they do to others – that are difficult to live with. This is of course only appropriate.

My belief is that it is the pro-war people, not the anti-war people, who tend to have a deeper understanding of exactly these things. Frankly I hope this belief is correct because it must be correct, because it is a responsibility we bear and must accept when we favor such a course of action. In some moral sense, those who oppose the war do not have to have it to the same degree, because they aren’t asking people to face this. In other ways, I think it would be better if they did have a greater knowledge of both war and the alternatives to war than I think many of them do, because they bear a different moral responsibility, one that is no less grave, as a result of their opposition. And the consequences are really not as dissimilar as they seem to assume.

Yes.

THIS ATTACK in Iraq is bad news. Well, all of them are. That the other side has an offensive going, of course, doesn’t mean the war’s going badly — the Battle of the Bulge is proof of that. But it’s important to learn from what’s going on and adjust tactics to match. Learning faster is one of the keys to victory in war. Unfortunately, the poor quality of reporting from Iraq, coupled with obvious military secrecy concerns, makes it hard for me to know how well we’re doing in that regard.

Do we need more troops? I don’t know that, either. Josh Chafetz thinks we might. On the other hand people who are a lot closer to the situation than me seem to feel otherwise.

I suspect that these attacks are being sustained by Syria, Iran, and elements in Saudi Arabia, who want the United States thinking about problems in Iraq, and hence more reluctant to move against them. I wonder if this is a good move for them, though, given that the obvious response is to get them busy thinking about problems at home. . . .

UPDATE: Somebody just sent me a “but Bush said the war was over!” bit of snarkmail. Uh, no, he didn’t. Bush actually said that major combat was over in Iraq. The war on terror — really the war on fundamentalist Islamic terrorists, and those who back them — is nowhere near over. Bush knows that, and he’s said it repeatedly.

I actually got several variations on this theme, from antiwar types who always seem glad when people die in Iraq, so long as they’re Americans or our allies. They’re usually the same people who puff up if you “question their patriotism.”

I don’t question it. They’ve put its existence beyond question by wishing for America to lose.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Aziz Poonawalla emails to ask if I meant that all antiwar people are anti-American. Uh, no, and I’ve said that plenty of times. Just the ones who dance on the graves of our soldiers, and our allies. And I get plenty of email from them, so I know they’re out there.

Meanwhile Charles Austin emails:

like your analogy to the Battle of the Bulge, but I’d like to extend it a bit. I’ve been trying to point out for some time that we are engaged in a War on Terrorism, of which Iraq is merely a prolonged battle. We do not refer to the War of Midway, the War of Sicily, the War of Okinawa, the War of Monte Cassino, the War of Stalingrad, or, as you noted by extension, the War of the Bulge. All of these battles were extended activities within the context of a larger war, some of which lasted longer than the major combat actions of the Battle of Iraq. So why should we continue referring to the War of Iraq?

Good point. And, to be fair, the Administration has made pretty clear that this isn’t the end.

IF I WERE PARIS HILTON, I’d be deeply hurt by this report.

UPDATE: Reader Edward Baer emails:

No, if you were Paris Hilton you’d just be waking up with a wicked hangover (it’s 4 p.m. EST) next to some vapid rich (or famous) prettyboy on some yacht or in some fancy hotel somewhere exotic (or expensive) thinking “What in the world can I do next to try to get my parents (or, failing that, the media) to pay attention to me?!”

Good point.

ROGER SIMON RESPONDS to the Tom Tomorrow item I mention below.

WINDS OF CHANGE has a Korea roundup that’s chock-full of interesting (and disturbing) information. Also, here’s a new Korea blog that’s worth checking out.

In a non-Korea-related development, blogger Arthur Silber is in a spot of trouble, and Armed Liberal, among several other L.A.-based bloggers, is trying to help him out. If you’ve enjoyed Silber’s blog, you may want to join in. You can read more about it here.

THE EDUCATIONAL QUAGMIRE DEEPENS:

Sixteen-year-old Ryan Richter got kicked out of school Monday morning for a stick-figure drawing that another student thought was a violent threat.

Richter, a LaBelle High School sophomore, sketched a figure shooting another figure. He did the sketch in a recent geometry class and passed it along to a friend and thought nothing else of it.

The classroom doodling, however, got him suspended for a week and as of Monday’s disciplinary hearing, got him kicked out of LaBelle High and recommended for a 45-day stint in Hendry County’s alternative high school.

Violent drawings — though this one doesn’t sound like it qualifies anyway — ought to be looked at as potential warning signs, something that might lead to appropriate treatment of kids who are genuinely troubled and dangerous. Instead — because school administrators are, basically, stupid and lazy — they’re often treated as disciplinary problems and subjected to “zero tolerance,” a bogus solution that only makes things worse.

(Via Matt Welch, who observes that “Based on today’s lunatic standards, the material in my early-’80s high school notebooks would probably qualify me for the death penalty in a dozen states.”)

RANDY BARNETT’S PROPOSAL for mass recess appointments in response to Democratic filibustering on judicial nominations is getting serious play on the Hill, reports Larry Solum, who thinks we’re in a “downward spiral of politicization” regarding the judiciary.

UPDATE: Randy Barnett replies that a wave of recess appointments might be what it takes to end the downward spiral.

I would have a conflict of interest on this — I’d actually rather be a recess-appointment federal judge than a life-tenured one — but I’m spared from that by the fact that nobody would appoint me. I’m pretty sure that my views are equally unpalatable to both Republican and Democratic administrations.

KENT BROCKMAN ON UNEMPLOYMENT: My new TechCentralStation column is up — and it’s got the coolest graphic ever.

MORE CRUSHING OF DISSENT at Yale.

CAPT. HARRY HORNBUCKLE: A Veterans’ Day story that’s worth reading.

RESEARCH CHEMIST DEREK LOWE is Fisking a New York Times editorial on drugs. “So, your editorial bungles its key scientific and legal points. Then you follow that up by lecturing academic and industrial researchers who actually know what they’re talking about. . . . Well, speaking as a member of the vaunted American research establishment, I find it irritating to be harangued by the New York Times about a subject you’ve clearly made little attempt to understand.”