ON THIS ANNIVERSARY, Dave Kopel remembers a hero of Gettysburg.

UNSCAM UPDATE:

When the head of the U.N.’s Oil-for- Food program got a copy of a letter in October 2002 suggesting that a bribe had been paid to Saddam Hussein’s cronies as part of the program, what do you think was the first thing he did?

If you guessed “informed the authorities, particularly his employers at the Security Council” — guess again.

According to a report Monday on Fox News Channel (a Post sister company), the program’s director, Benon Sevan, took the letter and went directly to . . . Saddam.

But of course.

WHAT WOULD BUGS BUNNY DO? Something like this, perhaps:

Toy stores around Baghdad are doing a quick trade in dancing Saddam dolls — foot-high battery-powered puppets of the former president, kitted out in full insurgent regalia, who swing their hips to cheesy pop music at the flick of a switch.

Decked out with hand-grenades, daggers, a walkie-talkie, binoculars and an AK-47, Saddam dances to the “Hippy Hippy Shake” when turned on. . . .

At first it was the hip-shaking Osamas that sold best, but slowly Iraqis grew less fearful of ridiculing their deposed president and started buying the Saddam ones too.

Heh.

KEN SILBER WRITES that Arthurian legend still matters.

DAVID ADESNIK CRITIQUES THE ONION: “In the final analysis, the skewered vision of American politics presented by The Onion may be clever, but instead of educating its audience, it reinforces misleading stereotypes that embittered elitists use to justify their pessimism about America’s thriving democracy.”

I just wish they were funnier.

UPDATE: Ed Cone calls Adesnik “humourless,” but does not attempt to argue that The Onion is especially funny anymore. I mean, they still get a chuckle now and then, but they’re no Scrappleface. Heck, they’re not even Jeff Goldstein.

Well, maybe occasionally.

WANT TO FIND SOME NEW BLOGS? Visit the new blog showcase!

THIS SEEMS LIKE A POSITIVE DEVELOPMENT:

LONDON (Reuters) – Jordan said Thursday it was willing to send troops to Iraq, becoming the first Arab state to do so, if Baghdad’s new interim government requested it.

King Abdullah, whose country would also be the first of Iraq’s neighbors to send troops, was speaking in a television interview with Britain’s BBC Newsnight program. He said he had not yet discussed the issue with Iraqis.

Abdullah’s comments, welcomed by U.S. officials, reflect a major shift in his country’s views on the international military presence in Iraq now that Washington has handed power to Prime Minister Iyad Allawi’s interim government.

Stay tuned.

“A GREAT DAY FOR JUSTICE, A CONFUSING DAY FOR THE MEDIA:” Arthur Chrenkoff looks at how Saddam’s trial is being spun.

Hey, he may be a murderous ex-dictator, but at least he’s anti-Bush! Of course, there’s a risk of blowback.

Meanwhile, Jeff Soyer at Alphecca wants your help in imagining how today’s media would have covered D-Day.

HUGH HEWITT:

Why is John Kerry stonewalling the release of his wife’s tax returns? . . .

John Kerry is stonewalling because his fortune in benefiting from his wife’s fortune surely contains the facts of a hundred hypocrisies. The media’s indifference to this cover-up is number 101.

It seems like a mistake to me. Like Howard Dean’s sealed gubernatorial records, this seems likely to hurt Kerry.

SEVERAL INTERESTING POSTS at Asymmetrical Information. “Dreck’s Law” seems about right.

THE COMFY-CHAIR REVOLUTION claims another victim.

This is a scene from my local mall, earlier today.

They say that revolutions eat their young, but I’m not sure that’s what’s going on here. Whatever it is, he doesn’t look all that unhappy about it.

And the chair does look rather comfy, doesn’t it?

HOLLYWOOD IS GETTING BEHIND THE WAR EFFORT, according to this report. Well, sort of.

“LET FREEDOM REIGN” — inspired by Nelson Mandela?

PEJMAN YOUSEFZADEH looks at the rage of the Arab Street, July, 2004 version.

BLACKFIVE would like you to help protect the troops.

MORE CRUSHING OF DISSENT: In Montana. (Via TaxProf).

Eugene Volokh has thoughts on this case.

DARFUR UPDATE: Jefferson Morley rounds up world opinion.

HERE’S AN ANALYSIS of the charges against Saddam.

KERRY’S “STEALTH STRATEGY” is looking smarter. Back to Nantucket!

UPDATE: A commenter at Pejman’s says that the story linked above is wrong.

ANOTHER UPDATE: John Rosenberg responds to Oliver Willis.

MORE ON UNSCAM: Claudia Rosett says follow the money, and offers the story of one oil-for-food bribe.

EUGENE VOLOKH WANTS YOUR THOUGHTS on sex with teenagers.

Here’s something I wrote on the subject (well, a related subject, anyway) a couple of years ago, which got me some flak from the right side of the blogosphere. (And here’s the blog post it was based on).

UPDATE: Not everybody hated it.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s an interesting, semi-related essay, featuring this observation: “I wonder if anyone in the world works harder at anything than American school kids work at popularity. Navy SEALs and neurosurgery residents seem slackers by comparison. . . . Adults can’t avoid seeing that teenage kids are tormented. So why don’t they do something about it? Because they blame it on puberty. . . . Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance were working dogs. Teenagers now are neurotic lapdogs. Their craziness is the craziness of the idle everywhere.”

Read the whole thing.

MORE: Kimberly Swygert has thoughts on the essay quoted above.

UNSCAM UPDATE: Some thoughts about what to do regarding the oil-for-food corruption scandal:

The Oil-for-Food fraud is potentially the biggest scandal in the history of the United Nations and one of the greatest financial scandals of modern times.1 Set up in the mid-1990s as a means of providing humanitarian aid to the Iraqi people, the U.N.-run Oil-for-Food program was subverted and manipulated by Saddam Hussein’s regime–allegedly with the complicity of U.N. officials–to help prop up the Iraqi dictator.

Saddam’s dictatorship was able to siphon off an estimated $10 billion from the program through oil smuggling and systematic thievery, by demanding illegal payments from companies buying Iraqi oil, and through kickbacks from those selling goods to Iraq–all under the noses of U.N. bureaucrats.

Members of the U.N. staff that administered the program have been accused of gross incompetence, mismanagement, and possible complicity with the Iraqi regime. . . .

The most effective way to ensure that the United Nations fully cooperates with its own commission of inquiry, and with investigators in Washington and Baghdad, is to threaten to reduce U.S. funding for the U.N., specifically the United States’ assessed contribution. In particular, the U.S. should target funds going to the U.N. Secretariat, the political arm of the U.N. system, that had responsibility for overseeing the Oil-for-Food program.

That might get their attention.

KNOW A BLOGGER WHO DESERVES MORE ATTENTION? That’s what the celebrating the underblog approach is all about.

NORM GERAS notes that another anti-war pundit has admitted she hoped for failure in Iraq, regardless of the cost to Iraqis. (“I am ashamed to admit that there have been times when I wanted more chaos, more shocks, more disorder to teach our side a lesson. On Monday I found myself again hoping that this handover proves a failure because it has been orchestrated by the Americans.”) But at least Yasmin Alibhai-Brown has the grace to be ashamed.

Fortunately, Iraqis — even Iraqis interviewed by the BBC — seem to think it has all been worth it. Even Iraqi communists are praising Paul Bremer. Will Western pundits follow this lead? . . .

UPDATE: Interesting observations from the pro-liberation lefties at Harry’s Place: “There really isn’t any kind of sensible response to barely-contained nihilism like this. So I’ll tiptoe away and leave Ms. Alibhai-Brown to struggle with her anti-American demons, once again shaking my head at what her segment of the Left has come to represent.”

It would be nice, wouldn’t it, to see these folks wishing to see the other side taught a lesson now and then?

MORE: More discussion here.

RALF GOERGENS emailed me, upset that I hadn’t responded to an earlier email of his. I had just missed it. Sorry — even a year ago I was kind of keeping afloat, but I’m getting more and more email and now if I’m offline for even a few hours I get hopelessly behind. Usually when people email me angrily about missed emails I just refer ’em to what I say in the FAQs (if I reply at all) but Ralf was actually pointing to a post saying that an item I linked to on German media was way overblown. Anyway, there’s an interesting discussion there in the comments between Ralf and Medienkritik’s David Kaspar, so go read it.

In general, to help minimize this problem, if you’re correcting a factual error, please put something in the subject line — like ERROR CORRECTION — to make that clear. Note that opinions with which you disagree do not constitute factual errors. . . .