So the 15 British sailors and marines held by Iran will apparently be released.  This strikes me as the least expected outcome, since I assumed that the Iranians who were foolish enough to detain these people would also want to maximise the propaganda value of their captivity for as long as possible.  Sad to say, that is what Mr. Bush would do and has done with our own detainees.  However, the overwrought display of clemency by Ahmadinejad (not one generally associated with clemency) is a very nicely calculcated move, as if to say, “We have so much leverage over you that we will be magnanimous and give you a little gift.”  The only way that Tehran could have humiliated the British more than by holding the detainees was by releasing them as a goodwill gesture, managing at once to defuse the ‘crisis’ and deflate to some degree the anti-Iranian rhetoric that these people are all soulless monsters.  All of the people hyperventilating about the uselessness of NATO, the EU, the UN and the British Government all now appear to be fairly silly, insofar as the ‘crisis’ to which they failed to respond “effectively” (i.e., by massively counterproductive sanctions and/or military action) was resolved quickly and without recourse to the usual hamfisted attempts to intimidate and bludgeon this or that country.  The jingoes have lost their latest pretext for a war with Iran, which will not by any means diminish their enthusiasm to find another one. 

All this said, the gullibility of some people in the antiwar movement that Faye Tunney’s letters were genuine or “eloquent” (!) has been as stunning as the particularly pathetic de rigueur outrage that the Iranians are holding a woman captive.  As for those letters and her interview, the big giveaway for me (besides the obviously staged nature of her “confession” as Tunney stares at what must have been her cue card or script) was the frequent use of the word “compassionate,” as if the Iranian propagandists were trying to find the English word that most epitomises the opposite of what most Westerners associate with the Tehran government.  As for the other phenomenon, we are supposed to simultaneously think the Iranians brutes for capturing the woman sailor, while deploring a mother’s lack of willingness to fight to the death for (allegedly) the sake of Iraqi territorial integrity, while actively pretending that there is nothing at all strange about sending a mother on patrol in potentially dangerous waters. 

Ahmadinejad’s “family values” line works so well rhetorically because so many people in the West know just how crazy it is to have women on patrol and in potential combat zones, but you wouldn’t have heard a single pundit, particularly none on the right, say peep about this.  Virtually every conservative pundit has learned to mechanically utter the set phrase, “our servicemen and women,” and they all know that right-thinking people no longer make a great fuss about having women in what could potentially be combat situations.  Why, that’s the sort of thing Jim Webb used to do (as George Allen so lamely tried to argue in ’06), and if there’s one thing that unites conventional conservative pundits it is reflexive opposition to whatever Jim Webb believed or believes.  Naturally, Sullivan still distinguishes himself with the most asinine comment about the entire affair:

The only downside for Ahmadinejad was his ugly, stupid statement about women servicemembers. But it may go down well with the D’Souzaite masses in the Middle East.

D’Souzaite masses?  The masses in the Middle East are probably not likely to identify with a secular Westernised intellectual with a Portugese last name–just guessing! 

The remark wasn’t ugly or stupid, except to a utopian egalitarian who thinks that mothers should be sent to the front lines (apparently because they have nothing better to do, such as, say, raise their children).  It was a valid observation made for completely cynical, self-serving purposes by a demagogue who cares no more about “family values” necessarily than he actually cares about destroying Israel; these are useful things for him to say to play to the sentiments of the crowd and embarrass the foreigners (which also works as a crowd-pleaser in pretty much every country), but Ahmadinejad must fundamentally be a survivor and a smart manipulator if he has lasted as long as he has and climbed to the position where he is. 

Had the Iranians taken an extreme opposite route and executed the fifteen as spies or for whatever other made-up charge they could think of, that woman’s child would grow up to tell people, “My mother died to keep the Shatt al-Arab under the control of the Iraqi ‘government’ controlled by Iranian influence.”  And there are actually a lot of people, at least over here, who think that would be a worthwhile sacrifice, and they would say as much, right before they decry the breakdown of the family.

Note on the use of language: many people have referred to the detainees as hostages, which doesn’t have much difference in the way of real meaning historically from detainee, but it carries with it strong emotional and moral connotations.  To detain someone sounds vaguely legal or appropriate (thus when pro-administration flacks speak of the torture of prisoners, they always speak of “treatment of detainees” rather than, say, “abuse of hostages”), while to take a hostage sounds aggressive and vicious, because we have become accustomed to thinking of hostage-taking as relating to terrorists or bank robbers taking civilians hostage during their attacks (or as the main target of their attacks).  However, applying this sense of hostage to captured soldiers or sailors is perverse and ridiculous, much as it was idiotic how every media report referred to the “kidnapping” of Israeli soldiers in the summer of last year, as if the captured soldiers had been picked up after school by a strange man offering them candy.

To hear Mitt Romney talk on the campaign trail, you might think the Republican presidential candidate had a gun rack in the back of his pickup truck.

“I purchased a gun when I was a young man. I’ve been a hunter pretty much all my life,” he said this week in Keene, N.H., to a man sporting a National Rifle Association cap.

Yet the former Massachusetts governor’s hunting experience is limited to two trips at the bookends of his 60 years: as a 15-year-old, when he hunted rabbits with his cousins on a ranch in Idaho, and last year, when he shot quail on a fenced game preserve in Georgia. ~Newsday

I’ve been shooting once or twice in my time, I have been on a horse a few times in my life (mostly when I was very young), my school had all of us do a five-day backpacking trip in the Jemez, and I have been fishing on occasion, so by Romneyian standards I must be the Great Outdoorsman.

The quail hunting trip might at least work to Romney’s advantage in a very narrow sense, in that he did not shoot any of his companions in the face.

So I will leave this post as the tombstone for this ugly little blog that brought out the vilest in me and has now left me in deep shame for the rest of my life. ~Ilkka Kokkarinen, c. September 2006

Apparently, he got over the vileness and the shame, since he has been regularly blogging for the last month here beginning with this random post.  I don’t hold it against the guy that he came back to blogging–she is a powerful mistress, as I well know–and I don’t mind that one of the sharper bloggers has returned to regular posting, but I do find it a bit odd that he departed from the ‘sphere with the huffy self-righteousness of a grand opera prima donna who has screamed at the conductor that she would no longer work with such mediocrities and yet he has re-entered this world without so much as a brief explanation of why he now thinks blogging is something other than the desecration of humanity that he seemed to regard it a mere six months ago.  We don’t need much, but just maybe a word or two on “Why blogging is not nearly as vile and evil as I used to think.”

Ross and Matt Yglesias attempt to redeem vlogging, and rehash the recent arguments while making many smart and funny remarks.

Let me preface this by saying that I haven’t yet seen Children of Men, so what follows is based on what occurred to me as I was reading this interesting Christopher Orr review of the movie.  He first notes Cuaron’s scrubbing of any meaning, polemical or otherwise, from what was originally, as Orr calls it, a “Christian fable.”  With this phrase in connection with the story’s theme of childbirth (or the absence thereof), I am reminded at once of That Hideous Strength, since it is childlessness (albeit not barrenness) that blights the main female character, Jane, in the last installment of the Space Trilogy.  Lewis makes it fairly explicit that there is something deeply awry and unnatural in the woman’s marriage and life that she doesn’t have any children, and once Merlin and the animals destroy the horrid Atlee-esque bureaucratic machine (now that‘s what I’m talking about!) the trilogy’s hero, Ransom (a philologist!), is there at the end of the story to advise Jane on how to live in a God-pleasing manner.  (For some reason, no one has ever made film adaptations of these Lewis stories–I wonder why!)  Now, cue angry ranting from Amanda “Some of the Non-Procreating Women Escaped” Marcotte; score one for the natalists.  Orr then also notes the odd, incongruous introduction of anti-immigrant sentiment as a feature of the non-natal future, and cites Ross’ objection that this feature makes no sense at all.  Just as a matter of sheer practicality, dying societies will take whatever labour they can get.   

Therefore, as I was reading Orr’s review, a thought occurred to me: the movie Children for Men is a much better-made, savvier attempt at making something like V for Vendetta.  The similarities are quite plain, so it struck me as odd that I have not seen anyone else compare the two.  Perhaps someone has, but probably no one has thought of the two together since most sane people seem to agree that Children for Men is a very well-done film and those same people seem to agree that Vendetta is the most awful waste of time you were likely to have experienced last year.  Consider: both are set in the near future of an authoritarian/neo-fascist Britain, both are making not-so-subtle criticisms of 2006-07 U.S. policy, both think that the most put-upon groups in such a future authoritarian dictatorship would be improbable selections from the list of Officially Designated Minority Victim Groups (Muslims and homosexuals in Vendetta, immigrants in Children of Men) and both vest their hopes for social and political change in more or less empty symbolic actions carried out by desperate revolutionaries.  Cuaron has taken a story of redemption and renewal and turned it into a rather hollow paean to predictable leftist shibboleths of diversity and “empowering women” (which is why Marcotte thought so highly of it), much as the original Vendetta and the film version took a story of a Catholic rebel fighting for the True Faith and turned him into the symbol for nihilistic anarchism.  The difference is that the entirety of Vendetta was shot through with intellectual and spiritual emptiness, which made it an obviously bad film; Cuaron has enough talent and skill as a director that he can take something of even Vendetta-like pretentiousness and make it into a watchable movie.

Warfare is like hunting.  Wild animals are taken by scouting, by nets, by lying in wait, by stalking, by circling around, and by other such stratagems rather than by sheer force.  In waging war we should proceed in the same way, whether the enemy may be many or few.  To try to simply overpower the enemy in the open, hand to hand and face to face, even though you might appear to win, is an enterprise which is very risky and can result in serious harm.  Apart from extreme emergency, it is ridiculous to try to gain a victory which is so costly and brings only empty glory. ~Maurice’s Strategikon, Book VII

I’m told that that number will be “at least” $11.3 million, and could go a little north of that. I’m told that would make his “burn rate”—i.e., the percentage that he has spent of the money he has raised—51%. The $11.3 cash on hand would be in the ballpark of what McCain raised in the quarter. Also, a source in the Romney camp provides some historical background by way of showing that 51% is a very respectable burn rate. Bush was a champion at frugality, with just a 35% burn rate in the first three quarters of 1999. Of the other candidates in the same time frame in 1999, Forbes had a 100% rate, McCain 85%, and Dole 91%.  In the first three quarters of 2003, Dean had a rate of roughly 50%, Edwards 66%, Kerry 53%, and Lieberman 65%. ~Rich Lowry

So there should be no worries for Romney, except that all but one of the aforementioned candidates failed to win the nomination and most of them were reduced to being bad punchlines before it was all over.  The one who won the nomination was, of course, Kerry, the man Romney is so terrified of being compared to that he has made Francophobia one of the central planks of his platform.  I await evidence that my assessment of Romney as an “overfunded joke candidate” is mistaken.

He’s not a Martian running for president of the earthlings. ~Kathryn Jean Lopez on (who else?) Mitt Romney 

Just for the record: I did not “dream up” the biggest rate of increase in discretionary non-defense government spending in generations. I did not dream up the bankrupting Medicare prescription drug benefit. I did not dream up the festival of pork that this president has signed into law. I did not dream up the fact that in Bush’s first five years, federal spending on housing and commerce jumped 86 percent,   that spending on community and regional development leaped 71 percent, or that Medicaid’s costs went up by 46 percent. I did not hallucinate the Federal Marriage Amendment. I did not dream up federal intervention in the Terri Schiavo case. I did not dream up big increases in farm subsidies or an explosion of pork-barrel spending. I did not dream up the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court on the basis of her religious faith. I did not dream up Karl Rove’s meticulous effort to mesh local churches with local Republican organization. I did not dream up all the many aspects of the Bush administration that can fairly be described as Christianist welfarism. The term “compassionate conservatism” was not my invention. In his attempt to dismiss the conservative critique of Bush that is fast becoming the consensus, Ross says that Bush actually favored means-testing social security. Or did I misread that? ~Andrew Sullivan

For the record, I think Ross means that Sullivan dreamed up the “Christianist-dominated” part of “Christianist-dominated welfare state.”  I’m guessing this because Christianists don’t exist except inside Sullivan’s mind, so they can only dominate the welfare state in the same way that pixies or unicorns dominate the welfare state.  Which is to say, not at all.

Update: Yes, that’s pretty much exactly what he meant.

Very quickly, let me say that any Romneyite spin you may be hearing that he now polls at 17% in Iowa is misleading because of the stupid methodology of the poll: there is an open-ended question (which is basically a prompt to name your preferred candidate), and a “forced-choice” question that artificially limited the field to the top six.  Romney scores 9.6% on the open-ended question among registered Republicans, and 17% on the “forced-choice” question.  In other words, when people are given the option of picking any candidate half of his “support” evaporates and moves to other candidates, leaving him more or less stuck at the 8-9% mark where’s he been for months.  Amusingly, in the “forced-choice” question, Obama pulls 11% of registered Republicans, and overall 27% of self-identified Republicans picked a Democratic candidate.  That means that, when forced to choose among the six, more Republicans in Iowa prefer a Democrat over any one of the Republican Terrible Trio.   

Update: Okay, I jumped the gun a bit.  The numbers most people are talking about are the likely caucus-goer numbers, which also happen to put Romney at just about 17%.  That may be more significant, but the underlying lack of support among Republican voters for Republican candidates cannot be considered a good sign for any of the GOP contenders.