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This lady has you beat. By a mile.

She's a great writer--good prose, plenty of passion. Tendency to conflate disparate events, though.

Oh well, what can you do?

Anyway, take a chill pill, Jill.

If this turns out to be true there'll be hell to pay here at 201k, as one of our main contributors has been suggesting something like it all along.

It had to happen.

The Bush Administration has finally done something we at 201k can whole-heartedly support. They've changed the name of the War on Terror to something we can--grammatically, at least--get behind:

From now on, the United States is no longer engaged in a "global war on terror," and instead, we're fighting a "global struggle against violent extremism."

According to officials interviewed by the Times, the name change came about after a series of Bush administration meetings held in January. The meetings caused national security officials to come to grips with the idea notion that fighting terrorism is not only a military endeavor, but that it also includes diplomatic, economic, and political tools. "It is more than just a military war on terror," Steven Hadley, the national security adviser, tells the paper. "It's broader than that. It's a global struggle against extremism. We need to dispute both the gloomy vision and offer a positive alternative." Also significant: Karen Hughes, the Bush aide known for her sloganeering skills, has just rejoined the administration; the name change, the Times subtly suggests, has Hughes' fingerprints all over it.

Sure, they're changing just the name, not the failing tactics. But at least we're no longer at war with an abstract noun.

We've been bugged by this for a while. Grammatical problems reflect thinking problems. Here's our post from 9/14/2003:

Declaring "war" on an abstract noun--in this case "terror"--may make for great soundbites, but bombing it turns out to be problematic. Ultimately you end up bombing places you think it may be hiding near, but that tends to create more problems than it solves--especially for the innocent people who happen to live in the vicinity.

What you end up with is a global game of "whack-a-mole", the carnival game in which no matter how hard you swing at the mole, it disappears while another one pops up somewhere else. You can turn around and shoot the carnival owner, of course, but then you have to contend with his family. Do you shoot them, too? Then what?

Welcome to "whack-a-mole".

The hard answer, of course, and one that makes for very poor soundbites, is that it's impossible to stop individual acts of terror, especially through conventional warfare. You can no more bomb away "terror" than you can bomb away "sin" or "ugliness" or "murder".

In fact, it's maddeningly hard to stop individual acts of any kind, really. That's why we have prisons full of people, each of whom committed an individual act. You can catch them and punish them, but you can only do so much to stop them in advance--and even that presumes they'll act somewhat rationally while sinning.

Let your mind wander over the myriad possibilities for small-scale terrorist attacks against ordinary Americans going about their daily business. What would stop violent acts by individuals whose aim is to terrorize, and who don't care if they get caught, or even survive?

Nothing. What stops normal people from doing those things is the thinly defined but widely recognized rules of behavior all sane people follow. Occasionally an insane person breaks the rules, and when that happens we're all shocked.

But the terrorists are doing it. They flew planes full of people into buildings full of people. They're sane people (depending on how you define it) doing insane things. Individual acts of madness from individuals who don't care about the consequences to themselves.

You can't declare war on that. And you can't bomb it away, no matter how many bombs you drop. In fact, the more bombs you drop, the worse things get.

So George W. Bush has replaced the first woman Supreme Court Justice in history with a white male who's anti-choice.

Apparently Sandra Day O'Connor, a moderate-to-conservative judge whose views reasonably match the majority of Americans--and who was plenty conservative enough for Ronald Reagan--wasn't right wing enough for George Bush.

And apparently he couldn't find a woman--any woman--in the whole country to replace her.

Anyone else think that, given a chance, George Bush would get rid of all the women on the court? Somehow we suspect that he and his fellow-travellers just wouldn't trust a woman in a lifetime appointment.

Note: 201k is on semi-vacation. We'll be posting sporadically for the next few weeks. Yes, we'll get to Dr. Egnor's letter.

Salon's Andrew O'Hehir seems to be channeling, well, us.

...wow.

One interesting part of this piece -- though by no means the focus-- is Rich's willingness to at least touch on the "special problem" Judith Miller has:

The Niger uranium was hardly the only dubious evidence testifying to Saddam's supposed nuclear threat in the run-up to war. Judy Miller herself was one of two reporters responsible for a notoriously credulous front-page Times story about aluminum tubes that enabled the administration's propaganda campaign to trump up Saddam's W.M.D. arsenal. But red-hot uranium was sexy, and it was Mr. Wilson's flat refutation of it that drove administration officials to seek their revenge...

"Notoriously credulous", while more than the Times is usually willing to allow, does not nearly bring the paper up to speed with its readership -- the vast majority of which is mighty angry at Judith Miller, the Times' own letters section notwithstanding.

And therein the problem bringing decent people to the table on the issue of protecting sources: Miller has no credibility. Honest Americans who would usually go to the mat in defense of journalists protecting their sources -- especially in the face of intimidation by an abusive executive branch--are furious at Miller, and that fury is driving their feelings now.

They don't trust her. They don't know who she's protecting, or why -- and they don't trust her. "She's probably protecting Karl Rove" is what we're hearing at barbecues. "Let her rot in jail".

Ridiculous? Spiteful? Short-sighted? Sure. But not incomprehensible. This is the woman who channeled Ahmad Chalabi for the Bush Administration on the front page on the NY Times.

People are angry, and there's been no reckoning.

If the Times -- and individual journalists -- want to bring Americans along with them on this they need to do better than "notoriously credulous". They need to acknowledge -- flatly -- what Judith Miller did, how it hurt her credibility, and why her dilemma is still important and worthy of our support.

They need to say, "Look, we understand what happened. We understand what you think Judy did, what you blame her for, and all that -- but you need to get on the right side of this anyway, and here's why..."

Until that happens, plenty of honest, decent Americans are going to put their better judgment aside, and give in to the angry urge to let Judith Miller suffer a little.

...think it's ironic that Judith Miller went to jail for something she didn't write?

Here's A.P. on a recent pronouncement from Honest George:

Bush: abortion won't decide court nominee

President Bush...said Wednesday he will not select a Supreme Court nominee based on his or her views on abortion or other hot-button political issues.

He urged senators to act "in a dignified way" in what is expected to be a contentious battle over confirming his first nominee to the nation's highest court.

The president said that as he reviews candidates to replace [O'Connor], "I'll try to assess their character, their interests."

Bush said he would have no "litmus test" that disqualifies candidates because of their opinions on abortion and gay marriage.

"I'll pick people who, one, can do the job, and people who are honest, people who are bright and people who will strictly interpret the Constitution and not use the bench to legislate from," Bush said.

Translation:

"I will nominate someone based on a litmus test but no one should criticize the nominee on those grounds."

It's fun once you know the code.

Noah Feldman has deposited a large lump of dung in the NY Times Sunday Magazine that suggests he's either a treacherous totalitarian or a complete fool. The only comment it merits here is a copy of the letter we sent to the editors:

To The Editors,

Re: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/03/magazine/03CHURCH.html

Noah Feldman says that,

"Values evangelicals say that the solution lies in finding and embracing traditional values we can all share and without which we will never hold together. Legal secularists counter that we can maintain our national unity only if we treat religion as a personal, private matter, separate from concerns of citizenship. The goal of reconciling national unity and religious diversity is the same, but the methods for doing it are deeply opposed.

"...neither approach deserves to prevail. Both are self-contradictory: they fail precisely where they want to succeed, namely in reconciling religious diversity with unity."

This conclusion is faulty by virtue of Feldman's accepting the goals of the "values evangelicals" at face value.

In truth they don't want to find "values we can all share"--they believe their values are the Word of God. At issue is the difference between the realm of faith and the realm of justice.

It is the difference between freedom and tyranny. To equate them is a tremendous, deadly error.

Regards,

Editor - www.201k.com