Crooked Timber leads me to urban drift uk, who is commenting from a far-left point of view on Gordon Brown and the future of the Labor party.

The worst possible outcome is not necessarily that of a Labour party shut out of power for the foreseeable future, but that of a Labour government enjoying sustained electoral success in a society that has become more rightwing under its watch. Gordon Brown may harbour a progressive vision of the ideal society, but without a different approach, and with time, and the patience of the left running out, the challenge of rectifying the rightward drift of British society will be insurmountable.

The notion that the government should be empowered to move society to the right or left, rather than somehow implementing policies through programs, is somehow kinda disturbing to me. Then again, I don’t have a Mao or Che poster in my living room.

The inter-Democratic chattering class wars are heating up, as the somewhat checkered backgrounds of netroots heroes Joe Trippi and Jerome Armstrong float to the surface. But hey, I’ve got a checkered background as well (nothing in their league, but there was this one time I was trapped overnight in a sorority…).

There are real issues there, which I’m chewing over – at a basic level, it’s the cooptation of ‘trusted recommenders’ by advertising – the political equivalent of BuzzAgents. And, to me, it exposes the hollowness of the positions of the netroots leadership – it’s not that they want to break the iron ricebowl that’s been feeding the political elites; they just want their own chopsticks.

I’ve been casting about for a post explaining where I stand on this, and after a number of false starts, discovered just what I wanted to say on someone else’s site.

Bull Moose is another liberal who the TAPPED folks probably look at askance.Monday, he put up a great post:

The Moose calls for moderates with attitudes.

These days if you want to be taken seriously in politics you have to have an attitude. Just look who the MSM pays attention to – blowhard bloggers and pugilistic pundits. In fact, Coulter and Kos are kissing cousins.

They deserve each other. The primary difference between the two is that the Republican Party leadership does not grovel at the feet of Coulter nor do their Senate candidates give her a staring role in their commercials.

…

It is time that changed. The Moose suggests that our nation desperately needs moderates with attitudes. No, they should not be course, crude and crass. But they should be unafraid and unapologetic about their centrism.

First and foremost, the immoderate center should not temper their views when they come under assault from the fever swamp of the left and the right. There is no accommodating these folks.

America needs national unity as never before. We are faced with a Jihadist enemy that poses a potential existential threat to our nation. The stakes are high. That is why the McCain-Lieberman Party in American politics must be bold and daring. While the two parties slavishly appease their respective bases, the broad swath of the electorate remains unrepresented.

He goes on to quote David Broder interviewing Joe Lieberman:

My opponent says it [the controversial Wall Street Journal op-ed] broke Democratic unity,” Lieberman said. “Well, dammit, I wasn’t thinking about Democratic unity. It was a moment to put the national interest above partisan interest…

“I know I’m taking a position that is not popular within the party,” Lieberman said, “but that is a challenge for the party — whether it will accept diversity of opinion or is on a kind of crusade or jihad of its own to have everybody toe the line. No successful political party has ever done that.”

Where do I sign up?

Over at Kevin Drum’s place, Christina Larsen links to the new “American Hunters and Shooters Association“, which she describes as aiming “…to be a pro-gun, pro-conservation, pro-safety alternative to the NRA…“.

In other words a less absolutist gun owner’s organization, premised on the notion that the NRA is so deeply involved in legislative affairs that it’s selling short it’s mission to encourage hunting and use of firearms in areas other than self-defense.

This ties to a Washington Monthly article by Larsen a while ago about “The Emerging Environmental Majority” in which she suggests that environmental concerns that impact outdoorsmen (and women) – those who fish and hunt – mirror those of environmentalists, and that a loose coalition may be forming.

It’s an interesting idea, and AHSA is a clear manifestation of it.

There’s a set of questions about the extent to which the organization is grassroots or Astroturf, and as those get answered, that’ll obviously have an impact on my view of it.

But I’m absolutely the target audience for a group like this – I shoot, I’m policy-oriented (i.e. not going to go ballistic because government proposes something), and I believe that in reality there is gun regulation that exists and could exist that’s a good thing both for society and gun owners.

I let my NRA membership lapse when I stopped competing in part because of my distaste for some of their political tactics, and even more because I do think it’s become a self-perpetuating bureaucracy, like many advocacy groups.

So what’s my initial reaction?

Tepid.

Here’s why.

On the website, there’s a clear message sent by the images – all of which are orange-vested long-gun toting outdoor sportsmen. No target shooters, no precision long-distance shooters, no handgun shooters at all (not even handgun hunters).

Go to the “Gun Rights” section, and there are two links: Working With Our Legislators and DC Gun Law.

Working with our legislators involves a day of bonding and upland bird hunting (hey, I like bird hunting…).

DC Gun Law encourages (sensibly) that the District allow law-abiding citizens to purchase guns.

Nothing earth-shaking.

Then we go to the Law Enforcement section. Here’s the lede:

AHSA is an organization committed to supporting our nation’s law enforcement officers and first responders in their fight against easy access to guns by criminals, terrorists, and others who would abuse the right to keep and bear arms.

Reading down the policy proposals, what it looks like to me is an effort to broaden the data gathered and stored about gun purchasers and purchases.

There’s a huge and recent history around this, in which current law pretty clearly prohibits law enforcement from retaining gun sales data gathered during background checks. Some agencies kept it anyway, thinking that it would have some future utility and Congress and the Administration jointly slapped their hands.

In other words, law enforcement administration attempted to use records that are by law to be used only to vet gun purchasers and are supposed to be destroyed as a backdoor registry.

My feelings about registration are complex, but at the end of the day if the option is a single federal or state registry, I’m against it. Go see how well it worked in Canada.

OK, one strike.

Let’s go to the section headed A Gun In The Home For Self-Protection?

The American Hunters and Shooters Association does not promote nor do we discourage keeping a firearm in the home for self-protection. We believe it is inappropriate for anyone to make a one-size-fits-all recommendation that an individual in Maryland, Texas, California or Massachusetts should or should not keep a firearm in the home.

In deciding whether a firearm in the home is a risk or a benefit, four common sense factors must be considered:

1. Is a firearm in the home more likely to be used to protect its owner or is it more likely to be used against a member of the household?
2. How frequently are guns used for self-protection?
3. How effective are handguns when they are used for self-protection?
4. Overall, how safe are guns in the home?

There are certain factors that weigh heavily against keeping a gun in the home for self-protection. One of the most widely quoted statements about guns is that a firearm kept in the home is 43 times more likely to kill a family member than an intruder. This comes from the Journal of Medicine in 1986, following a six-year review of gunshot deaths in Seattle, Washington, conducted by Dr. Arthur Kellermann and others. The validity of this study in determining the value and risk of firearms for home protection has been questioned. The Kellermann study focused only on defensive gun uses where the criminal intruder was shot and killed. Instances in which intruders or assailants were wounded or frightened away were not included.

This is waffling at a level I would have thought only John Kerry capable of. Strike two.

I don’t believe everyone in America should own a gun. I don’t believe that people who don’t have guns in their homes ready to hand are in imminent danger because they refuse to arm.

But here’s a place where a clear stance should be taken – and we ought to know exactly where the organization stands.

because in reality, that’s the fissure point in American society around guns. Most Americans wouldn’t have an issue with the Savage deer rifle in my gun safe, or the classic Remington 53 shotgun.

But the Scattergun Tech police shotgun or the handguns probably give them pause.

Because the fundamental question is: do you trust me and citizens like me enough to allow me ready access to the tools for deadly force in order to defend myself?

And do you in light of the incontrovertible fact that many people misuse those tools with tragic outcomes?

It’s a bright line, and you’re typically on one side or the other.

When I’m clearer which side AHSA is on, I’ll know more about how I feel.

But at this point, the cynic in me suggests that it’s a stalking horse designed to try and split the shooting community. It feels vaguely like a ‘womens rights’ organization that is ambivalent about women working outside the home.

I’ll suggest two steps the organization could take that would make me feel a lot more comfy.

First, clarify their position on nonhunting, nonsporting ownership and use of guns. There’s language on the site which could be taken either way, and that’s bad. Assuming their position is close to mine, clarity here would buy a lot of comfort from me.

Second, take a position on ‘shall-issue’ CCW. While John Lott’s data supporting lower crime rates in states with policies that readily grant weapons permits to noncriminal citizens is pretty much out the window, I have seen no data that suggests any significant negative impacts – and I know people are looking.

Overall, my problem with that isn’t Ray Schoenke, the former Redskin who’s the president of the group (although his campaign donations to Sen. Kennedy, Sen. Feinstein, Sen. Boxer and others on the anti-gun side of the world would seem to put him clearly on one side of the issue), or Bob Ricker, the executive director who left the NRA in a Fury and participated in several of the lawsuits against gun manufacturers (a particularly odious thing to do, in my view), or their consultants who include former Congressman David Bonior, who has been a reliable antigun voter. It’s quite possible that they could come to the conclusion that gun rights matter, and that a different organization than the NRA could do a good – or even in some lights better – job of defending them. My problem is that there is a space to the left of the NRA, but it’s a narrow one. And I wonder if these guys haven’t stepped too far away.

If they haven’t, it’d be a great opening to the Democrats to the ‘guys who have Confederate flags on their pickups’ – men and women whose support they need if they are going to start winning elections.

Robert Prather, writing over at James Joyner’s ‘Outside the Beltway’ has an interesting post up on anti-Americanism. It’s a riff on a column by Robert Kagan in the Post and concludes:

My own theory about these resentments includes the fact that, yes, we have done some things that were hurtful, but generally when our choices weren’t good in any case. One instance is our interference in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s. We were engaged in an existential struggle with communism and, as part of that struggle we opposed communist dictatorships and supported other types of dictatorships. It is clearly resented in Latin America, but I can’t say I would do things differently given what we were facing. The whole world was a chess board with us playing the Soviet Union in a series of proxy conflicts, at least in part because if we fought one another, the outcome would have been horrendous.

My other theory is that much of this comes from envy. Some of it is relatively benign, like French politicians using the U.S. as a whipping boy to get elected. I’m sure that stuff doesn’t go unnoticed, but most people understand that’s how politics works. The other things, like the African dictator’s son damning us for acting in one instance (Bosnia) and not in another (Rwanda) is simply throwing up things to see if they will stick. There is a market for this kind of nonsense in Europe and elsewhere, and given the detachment from reality and/or stupidity of the accusers, I’m not overly concerned with that either. We will be resented by someone no matter what we do simply because of our current place in the world.

One instance that demonstrates what we should do is the tsunami. We figured out the right thing to do, and we did it with the help of Japan and Australia. We had ships on the scene shortly after the catastrophe to help by flying people out of soaked areas, bringing fresh water and food to others and various other things. While we were doing this, to distract from their own incompetence, the UN had Jan Egeland complaining that we didn’t give enough of our GDP to international institutions. While they were having conferences about setting up more conferences, we were helping people. That’s how I believe we should handle these matters: Decide the right thing to do and do it; let others bicker over insignificant side issues. We should probably accept that no gratitude will be forthcoming when we do help. It’ll be another reason to criticize us later on.

We should help anyway.

In case you’re wondering, I agree.

But I also think that we have to be working toward international institutions that work as they should and have some measure of effectiveness and legitimacy.

Jim “the Joos” Moran (D-VA and several large banks) has been someone who’s checkered career I’ve followed since 2002, when the news broke that he sponsored a precursor to the bad bankruptcy bill – four days after MBNA gave him a $447,000 debt-consolidation loan.

Wouldn’t you love to have been a fly on the wall during the meetings with that lobbyist?I’m already a reprobate Democrat in many people’s eyes, and I’m genuinely sorry about that. I think of myself as a strong believer in Democratic values and have some small hope for the future of the party. But in this case, I’m going to step further off the reservation and ask people to go visit the site of Moran’s opponent Tom O’Donoghue, the GOP candidate for the 8th CD seat in Virginia.

He’s a veteran, and seems like a decent guy. It wouldn’t hurt to toss a few bucks his way.

How can he be worse than Moran?

Why am I doing this?

Here’s Moran’s history, as I’ve blogged it.

Took $400K from MBNA and then sponsored a bad bankruptcy reform bill.

Blamed American Jews for the Iraq war.

Explained that if he got the chairmanship of Appropriations, he’s “earmark the shit” out of the spending bills.

Today, Instapundit points to an undelivered weapons system that has cost $37 million dollars – with the strong support of Moran, delivered for a $17,000 contribution.

If you want to have some fun, go check out the goodbyejim.com site – it’s got an astounding set of stories about Rep. Moran.

His wife is a real estate developer, seeking a HUD grant and financing – do you think she’ll get it?

Now while he’s probably among the worst in Congress, we ought to see some progress by the Democrats in cleaning their own house, right?

Wrong.

The time to criticize the Republicans’ “culture of corruption,” a Democratic refrain for nearly a year, is at an end, Pelosi said; Democrats need to begin promoting their own vision of America.

I’m going say that I called this one when I posted back in 2002:

WHY MY OSTENSIBLE PARTY, THE DEMOCRATS, WILL NOT BE ABLE TO USE BUSH’S CORPORATE HISTORY AGAINST HIM

So if they won’t turn him out, it’s up to the voters.

At some point, the Democratic Party leadership will get the idea that there’s a market for genuine reform, and clean our house. I’ll keep kicking them until they do. Want to help?

[Update: Corrected dumb typo “Murtha” for “Moran”]

The LA Times today has a disapproving article about the new Canadian Conservative Party-led government’s move from registering guns to arresting criminals.

Police began kicking down doors before dawn on a chilly May morning while gang members in Toronto’s Jamestown neighborhood still slept. By lunchtime, officers had made 106 arrests, collected 33 guns and announced that they had broken an international gun ring run by the notorious Jamestown Crew.

The raid was a shot across the bow from newly elected Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who says his Conservative Party government is going to spend its money on crime control, not gun control.

The sweep came two days after Harper announced plans to dismantle Canada’s controversial gun registry — a system reviled by conservatives and gun owners, but lauded by others for reducing homicides and helping police.

The article makes a case for Canada’s peacefulness:

Compared with the United States, where there are 220 million guns among 300 million people, and 10,800 gun-related homicides in 2004, Canada is a peaceful backwater, with 7.1 million registered guns and only 175 gun homicides that year. Los Angeles alone had 416 gun-related killings that year.

But whether out of laziness or other motives, Maggie Farley fails to do some simple math:

Canada vs. US Gun ownership & Gun Homicide

	Canada	USA	ratio
population in 000’s	33,098	298,444	9.02
guns in 000’s	7,100	220,000	30.99
guns/person	0.21	0.74	3.44
firearms deaths	175	9326	53.29
per 1000 people	0.005	0.031	5.91
per 1000 guns	0.025	0.042	1.72

So the US has 9 times Canada’s population, and 53 times the number of firearms murders (Canada’s numbers from the Times article, the 2004 US numbers from the FBI Uniform Crime Reports). We have 31 times the number of guns.

So we have 5.9 times the number of murders/person and 1.7 times the number of guns. These may suggest that there’s something cultural afoot, instead.

But Canada’s gang-related killings have gone up fourfold in a decade, along with the growth of gangs largely imported from the U.S. that attract what police and social workers describe as young black males from mostly West Indian immigrant families. And with the gangsta culture come the guns.

“If you want a gun, you can get one in a day, a couple of hours maybe,” said Andrew Bacchus, 30, founder of Toronto’s Vice Lords gang who is now working with Breaking the Cycle, a gang-exiting program. “The gun registry hasn’t made any difference on that.”

Homicide rates have increased, but shootings have mostly been confined to neighborhoods inhabited by gangs, such as Jamestown in the northeast part of the city. But the death last year of a 15-year-old girl caught in gang crossfire in a downtown shopping center the day after Christmas — and in the middle of an election campaign — was a turning point.

Fighting crime became a part of nearly every stump speech, a theme that hit home not just with Conservatives, but with middle-class voters across the spectrum. Harper promised stricter sentencing, but also a repeal of the gun registry, saying the millions it cost a year to track hunters would be better used for cracking down on gangs.

The article makes two of the three arguments I’ll make about a program like Canada’s.

1. It doesn’t work.

Washington DC and New York City are among the highest crime cities in the US, and yet have the most Draconian firearms laws.

2. It costs a lot – financially in this case – and that money would be better spent on other programs to reduce crime.

The registry was an obvious target. When it was created a little more than a decade ago, it was expected to cost only a few million dollars, and to be largely self-sustained by user fees. The expense of creating an extensive computerized database spiraled out of control, however, and an auditor general’s report this month estimated the cost to be nearly $1 billion over 10 years. It also showed that officials with the former Liberal Party government buried budget overruns so they wouldn’t have to go before Parliament to seek more money.

So if it has halved the firearms death rate in Canada, from 350 to 175, it has saved 175 people a year, or 1,750 people over ten years at a cost of a billion dollars. I’ve got to believe that you can do better than that by spending the money somewhere else.

My third reason is visible outside my dining room window, in the park across the street that’s just being renovated.

The playground used to have a 20’tall climbing structure and slide that was one of the most heavily used in the park. It’s gone now, because it’s considered unsafe to let children play in an environment where they might injure themselves. There are new standards for playground equipment, and many of the favorites that my older sons played on are now illegal.

The idea that we would leave people free to make mistakes in order to create a culture of responsibility is one of the major victims of laws like those gun control aimed not at legitimately restricting some aspect of firearms ownership (and I do think there are legitimate restrictions we could enact). Instead they are about changing the culture:

Although it doesn’t directly address the problem of illegal handguns, the registry helps create a culture in which guns are seen as dangerous and owners are held accountable, said Wendy Cukier, a professor of justice studies at Ryerson University and the co-author of the book “The Global Gun Epidemic.”

And that’s why people like me, who believe that some firearms regulations can have impacts and are sensible and equitable tend to side with the absolutists.

Because regulators like Prof, Cukier don’t really care if the regulations work, or if they are the best expenditure of the state’s money or legitimacy.

They just want a world where there are no guns, and no playground equipment is more than 4′ off the ground.

Back when I was 30 pounds lighter (30 years ago, coincidentally…) I raced bicycles. I was (for those of you who know anything about the sport) a pretty good sprinter, a decent pacer, and – like most sprinters – pathetic as a climber (see this for definitions).

Climbing was all about suffering, and the suffering was worse as I watched everyone else slowly (or not so slowly) pull ahead of me. It mattered to my team that I make it to the top, because part of my job was helping control breaks by other sprinters, so one day the leader – the senior, best racer and an excellent climber – rode next to me as I sweated up a hill and cursed and said “You know, it’s hard for everybody. Everybody’s hurting right now. You just have to be willing to keep hurting until you get to the top of the hill.”

“Everybody is hurting” became my mantra, and it helped motivate me to keep turning the pedals over. Later, in my short-lived career as an amateur motorcycle road racer, I changed it “he’s scared too” to keep myself headed into the corner alongside antoher rider for another second before braking at (what seemed to me) the last possible moment.

It’s important to keep that in mind. We always focus on our own fear and weakness, without realizing that the people we are competing with – riding, running, or for a business deal – are weak and afraid too.That’s on reason I keep emphasizing sitzfleisch (an iron butt, or the willingness to just stay in the game) in talking about Iraq.

We don’t think about what it must be like for the other guys, until we get a glimpse – from a captured letter, for example – of how they think they are doing.

Recently, a letter claimed to be found in Zarqawi’s bombed house was released. It doesn’t paint a pretty picture of what’s going on in the insurgency.

I want to take a moment to divert and talk about the response to this kind of document by otherwise sensible people. Marc Lynch – Abu Aardvark – has commented here and he and I have had constructive disagreements.

His response to the letter, though, was just risable:

So about that “treasure trove” of documents allegedly found with Zarqawi which proves that the insurgency is on the run, that American military strategy is working, that the Iraqi security forces are developing into a formidable force, and that all in all everything is going America’s way…. well, how can I put this?

Let’s just say that were I a strategist for a military which had just killed an insurgency leader such as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and seized a bunch of documents full of actionable intelligence, I might not choose to, you know, release them to the media. On the other hand, had I just killed an insurgency leader such as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and I wanted to follow up on that operational success by sowing confusion and disarray among his followers (and maybe even scoring some points with the domestic public opinion which my Secretary of Defense has identified as a principle theater of conflict), I might very well release a bunch of “documents” showing that the recently deceased was highly pessimistic about his prospects and that his movement was on the run. (I might also announce that said movement had just declared some random character as its new leader, just to sow more confusion.)

Oh, enough delicacy. These documents seem like a fairly obvious bit of strategic communication, psy-ops, whatever you want to call it. Nothing wrong with that as a way of pressing a temporary advantage against the jihadi wing of the insurgency, spreading confusion, that sort of thing – kind of a textbook move, even. Just as long as nobody serious is silly enough to actually believe any of it. Wouldn’t want blowback now, would we?

My issue with this is simple; the only evidence he presents that this is disinformation is that he wishes it were so. He wishes it to be so because it disagrees with the way the he sees things.

It’s an inconvenient truth, so it must be false.

It’s certainly not impossible. But there’s no data that supports his contention, and in fact there is significant other data – specifically other correspondence that has been intercepted or captured and released without disclaimer – which generally fits the points, tone, and issues raised in the new letter.

Back to the new letter.

I’ll skip over the operational details, but it’s clear that it makes one simple point: “Everybody is hurting.”

We certainly are. The Iraqis certainly are. But so are the bad guys.

And we’d do well to keep remember that.

Just heard Eliot Spitzer speak, and boy am I depressed. We get Angelides vs. Schwartzenegger and New York gets him.

I think I’d trade them both for him and throw in the Lakers…more later

Reporters Without Borders just did a study of major search engines in China, and discovered that Yahoo is actually more evil than Google there – which takes quite a stretch.

Reporters Without Borders said it found Yahoo! to be the clear worst offender in censorship tests the organisation carried out on Chinese versions of Internet search engines Yahoo!, Google, MSN as well as their local competitor Baidu.

The testing threw up significant variations in the level of filtering. While yahoo.cn censors results as strictly as baidu.cn, search engines google.cn and the beta version of msn.cn (beta.search.msn.com.cn) let through more information from sources that are not authorised by the authorities.
While Microsoft has just said it does not operate censorship, Reporters Without Borders found that the Chinese version of its search engine displays similar results to those of google.cn, which admits to filtering its content. Searches using a “subversive” key word display on average 83% of pro-Beijing websites on google.cn, against 78% on msn.cn. By contrast, the same type of request on an uncensored search engine, like google.com (http://www.google.com/intl/zh-CN), produces only 28% of pro-Beijing sources of information. However, Microsoft like Google appears not to filter content by blocking certain keywords but by refusing to include web sites considered illegal by the authorities.

The press freedom organisation is particularly shocked by the scale of censorship on yahoo.cn. first because the search results on “subversive” key words are 97% pro-Beijing. It is therefore censoring more than its Chinese competitor Baidu. Above all, the organisation was able to show that requests using certain terms, such as 6-4 (4 June, date of the Tiananmen Square massacre), or “Tibet independence”, temporarily blocked the search tool. If you type in one of these terms on the search tool, first you receive an error message. If you then go back to make a new request, even with a neutral key word, yahoo.cn refuses to respond. It takes one hour before the service can be used again. This method is not used by any other foreign search tools; only Baidu uses the same technique.

Go read their whole study. And when Google, Yahoo, and MSF try and tell you they’re “the good guys”, keep it in mind. I’ll join in calling bull**** on that and asking the Yahooligans “how do you sleep at night?”

I’ve been a fan of Peter Beinert’s for some time (and may even forgive him for caving on Iraq).

His recent book is on the list, and recently he went – I was going to say mano-a-mano, but it was described as ‘a pissing match’ and so that’s probably the wrong body part – with Michael Tomasky over at Slate.

Go read the exchange, it’s kinda amusing to watch public intellectuals try and out-Jim Harrison each other.

But the telling quote for me was this, by Tomasky:

Is that will there now in either Democratic leadership or the American people? It is not. And the fact that it isn’t is not the fault of the “abject pacifists.” It’s the fault of the warriors. It’s because of Iraq. The war in Iraq is why we “missed” Darfur, a moral error that your magazine (under new editorship) recently lamented. And the war in Iraq looms over our national future. I fear that it renders the grand visions for liberal internationalism that you and I share useless nullities, for a generation, maybe more. That is the tragedy of Iraq; that’s why I dwelt, and dwell, on it. And I tremble with fear—not for “my” side, but for the country and the world—that, should a Bush administration and an Iraq come around again, we will have forgotten everything I just said.

This segues neatly into Mark Schmitt at TPMCafe, talking about Beinert:

I think that in the long run, getting worked up about the very few who say silly things about Islamic terrorism itself or reject use force is going to be seen as the equivalent of anti-anti-communism: fair, but a distraction from the big moral issue of the day. The big moral question for our time, the one we have to get right just as the postwar liberals had to get totalitarian communism right, is the Iraq War and the ideology that underlies it.

[emphasis in the original]

Once again, what’s the issue? Us, our behaviour, our “helpless strength”.

I’m just puzzled here…

…there are other actors in the world than us, right?

[Update: In a related discussion, James Joyner is asking if the Democrats have become a ‘one-issue party’.]