Over at Political Animal, Kevin Drum is properly ridiculing Jay Nordlinger for claiming that “those who despise Wal-Mart are the very ones who may not be so crazy about the United States.”

I’ve got a better criticism right here, from last week’s Business Week magazine which had a great article comparing Costco and Wal-Mart.

This fits into the ‘Good News’ category because it pretty conclusively shows you can do well by doing right.

A bad cop, with the likely connivance of a bad D.A. arrested 45 poor black defendants on trumped-up drug charges in Tulia, TX. They sued and ultimately got justice.

Now, the wheel turns.

The district attorney who prosecuted a succession of defendants arrested in a since-discredited drug bust in the west Texas town of Tulia now faces possible disbarment for his conduct during the trials.

In a disciplinary petition filed by the State Bar of Texas on Wednesday, Swisher County Dist. Atty. Terry D. McEachern is accused of failing to tell defense lawyers about the criminal history of his star witness, undercover agent Tom Coleman.

Note that they’re not talking about firing him from his post as D.A.; they’re taking about disbarring him, which would (rightly, it appears) end his career as an officer of the court.

I’ve commented in the past that righting these wrongs – that we live in a society where these wrongs can get righted – makes me happy.

I’m interested in why it is, when we correct the injustices of the past, and devise tools to ensure that it will be difficult to make the same mistakes again, we are dwelling on the “Oh, no, we were so bad” rather than the “we’re getting better”. See, I think that real liberalism…the kind that builds schools and water systems and improves people’s lives…comes from a belief in progress.

We aren’t perfect. No one is or ever will be…to quote William Goldman, “Life is pain, Highness! Anyone who says differently is selling something.” But we can either keep trying to get there or sit on the floor dwelling on our shortcomings. Which one would you rather do, and why?

Just when I was hoping to forget about constructively criticizing Kos and struggle with how to constructively criticize LGF, Stirling Newberry, over at Daily Kos lays a huge egg.

Here’s what he says, in criticizing Rice’s testimony today:

The picture that emerges is that Rice believed that dealing with terrorist threats was a matter that little people on the ground who were “alert” would catch the people responsible, freeing the people at the top to talk about the “structural” changes to America.

Yes, in fact, that’s how it’s supposed to work. The people on top think up strategy and policy and the folks on the street carry it out.

And, in fact, how it did work. In fact, it has worked without the benefit of policy direction or grand strategy.One Border Patrolwoman stopped the Millennium Plot to blow up LAX:

At Victoria, U.S. immigration pre-clearance agents were mildly suspicious of Ressam. They made him open his trunk, but saw nothing. He presented his fake Canadian passport, and the computer check turned up no previous convictions or warrants in the name of Benni Noris. Ressam drove his rental car, with its concealed bomb, onto the ferry heading for Washington state. Upon his arrival at Port Angeles, a U.S. customs agent became suspicious of his hesitant answers to her questions, and she asked for identification. Agents began searching the car. As they discovered the explosive materials — which they at first took to be drugs — in the trunk of the car, Ressam tried to run away. He was caught and arrested.

Flight 93 did not hit the Capitol because the passengers – the ‘little people’ Kos dismisses – stopped it.

In his interview in the Atlantic, Security expert Bruce Schneier points out that

“The trick to remember is that technology can’t save you,” Schneier says. “we know this in our own lives. We realize there’s no magic anti-burglary dust that we can sprinkle on our cars to prevent them from being stolen. We know that car alarms don’t provide much protection. The Club at best makes burglars steal the car next to you. For real safety we park on nice streets where people notice if somebody smashes the window. Or we park in garages, where somebody watches the car. In both cases people are the essential security element. You always build the system around people.”

(emphasis added)

There are a lot of things to criticize the Bush Administration for. There are a lot of things to criticize Condi Rice for.

But Kos has picked the wrong horse here.

The reality is that we would all be better served by pushing down the role of securing our country against terrorism to the ‘little people’, rather than to large, rigid, unresponsive policy-driven organizations.

Go read the Atlantic article for more on why, or better still go read Schneier’s book, ‘Beyond Fear‘.

Back to Kos, I think, simply that the root issue remains that Bush et al decided to respond to the sponsors of the terrorist acts, rather than the individual actors. That’s a legitimate policy distinction, and one where, as I’ve said in the past, I fall on the side of the White House.

But to somehow assume that the President and National Security staff will personally foil every plot (although the image of Condi Rice dressed up as Wonder Woman might be pleasing to some) – or even manage the response to every plot is ludicrous.

It’s up to us; not as vigilantes or even armed defenders, but just alert neighbors. And baggage handlers.

One approach to the War on Terrorism is to built giant formally structured security systems, backed by massive, centralized technology, and as the complex, ‘wicked’ world keeps asking questions the system can’t ask, add pages and pages to the three-ring binders of regulations and policies the minimum-wage front-line employees must follow. You can hire and retain them based on their ability to follow the rules, even when it means taking the wire clippers away from a uniformed Special Forces soldier—who has his mouth wired shut because he’s wounded, and needs the cutters to cut the wires in the event he has to throw up. Or who want to take away the Congressional Medal of Honor from an 80-year old man flying to give a speech at the Air Force Academy.

It will involve a massive investment in machines that will be rushed into production and still be obsolete long before we have finished paying for them.

I obviously don’t think much of this model in this application. I think it is based on old, Taylorian models in which you attempt to break the process into a finite series of discrete steps, and train the human portions of the system in performing these exact steps as precisely and efficiently as possible. It also removes the necessity for any kind of judgment or expertise on the part of the employee.

Update: Praktike busts me for not reading the byline, and thinks I’m completely wrong

Go read Tacitus “In Search of Lost Time,” about events in Iraq. Now.

I pretty much agree with everything he’s saying, especially this:

“In fact, fellow American, there are only two things in the world that can stop them, and make their earnest sacrifice for glory or for naught:

You and me.

UPDATE: I’ll add a comment from Clint Smith that seems somehow appropriate as well: “A gun isn’t a magic wand that will make your problems disappear when you wave it.” The same is true of armies.

I watched a bunch of the Rice testimony at the gym this morning; sadly I didn’t hear much of it, since 3 grown adults couldn’t figure out how to turn on the closed-captioning on the TV sets there; we obviously needed a kid to show us how.

I’ve read a bunch of it, and found it sadly predictable. Both that the partisan ‘blame game’ was really the context of the discussion, and that neither side was willing to take the blame for the true causes of the failure.

I’ll skip over the whole issue of historicity; that the infallibility of prediction only works in one way – backward.Conservatives are strongly lined up behind the “we never knew!!” and were shocked, just shocked, to find that the reports that terrorists planned something in the US were true. Of course, Rumsfeld had stopped flying commercial by that point, so someone in the security apparat took it seriously.

The reality is that Bush and his team weren’t looking for this, and so as the pattern emerged, they didn’t see it. It is human nature to look for patterns, and particularly to look for patterns we have already observed. While sitting at the side of the track, I read a wonderful book called ‘Complications,’ by surgeon Atul Gawande. In it, he tells the harrowing story of suspecting and then diagnosing flesh-eating streptococcus in a young woman’s leg, and then saving her leg through heroic surgery and treatment.

He suspected it only because he had just participated in another, failed surgery, in which a man infected with this disease died, so he was obsessed by this disease.

But let’s share the blame.

The left and the Democrats are also to blame for 9/11, and not because it was the culmination of eight years of events under Clinton’s administration (although in the histories, that has to be considered as well).

The reality is that had Bush responded to the warnings, the logical responses – to preclude Arab men from flying, from taking flight schools, or to have disarmed them (note that pre-9/11 it was perfectly legal to fly with a 3-1/2″ Spyderco Delicia, as I did on every flight. I pretty much have one around all the time; they are quite useful).

So, imagine of you would, the response from Senator Kennedy, from the academic Left, from the ACLU.

On vague, unspecified intelligence, we would have detained, inconvenienced, embarrassed, and enraged any number of men – mostly innocent.

And the odds are that most of the 9/11 hijackers would have been able to fly – and act – unchecked.

If not that day, than someday soon when the intense pressure from the Democratic side had forced this ‘profiling’ program to stand down.

So while we’re apportioning blame for 9/11 – and, personally, I’d like to see the entire national leadership stand up and take some – let’s do it correctly.

There’s been a lot of discussion on oil-for-food. In today’s LA Times, the French Ambassador responds, and raises at least one factual point (re banking) that should be addressed. Over to you, Roger!

First ‘Freedom Fries,’ Now Oil-for-Food Lies: Give France a Break

By Jean-David Levitte, Jean-David Levitte is the French ambassador to the United States.

…I have been deeply surprised in the last few days to see a new campaign of unfounded accusations against my country flourish again in the media. These allegations, being spread by a handful of influential, conservative TV and newspaper journalists in the U.S., have arisen in connection with a recent inquiry into the “oil for food” program that was run by the United Nations in Iraq during the final years of Saddam Hussein’s government.

These allegations suggest that the government of France condoned kickbacks — bribes, in effect — from French companies to the Iraqi regime in return for further contracts. They say Paris turned a blind eye to these activities.

Let me be absolutely clear. These aspersions are completely false and can only have been an effort to discredit France, a longtime friend and ally of the U.S.

As the former French ambassador to the U.N., let me explain how the oil-for-food program worked. Created in 1996, it was intended to provide Iraqis with essential goods to alleviate the humanitarian effect of the international sanctions that remained in place. The program authorized Iraq to export agreed-on quantities of oil, and allowed money from the sales to be used for food and other necessities. The program was managed by the U.N. and monitored by Security Council members.

Between 1996 and the end of the program in 2003, every contract for every humanitarian purchase had to be unanimously approved by the 15 members of the Security Council, including France, Britain and the U.S. The complete contracts were only circulated to the U.S. and Britain, which had expressly asked to see them and would have been in the best position to have known if anything improper was going on. Though a number of contracts were put on hold by the American and British delegations on security-related grounds, no contract was ever held up because malfeasance, such as illegal kickbacks, had been detected.

Was there corruption and bribery inside the program? Frankly, I don’t know. Iraq was not a market economy; it was under sanctions at the time. Customs experts had little choice but to assume that the prices set by outside companies were “reasonable and acceptable,” a criterion of acceptance used by the U.N. secretariat, and they had no way of checking whether some contracts were overpriced.

That is why France fully supports the independent inquiry set up by the U.N. The truth must come out.

Was France a major beneficiary of oil-for-food contracts, as several conservative columnists have claimed recently? Definitely not. From the beginning of the program to its end, French contracts accounted for 8% of the total. We were Iraq’s eighth-largest supplier.

In addition, throughout the program a sizable proportion of the contracts dubbed “French” were in fact contracts from foreign companies using their French branches, subsidiaries and agents. Among them were U.S. firms providing spare parts for the oil industry (including several subsidiaries of Halliburton). They submitted contracts through French subsidiaries for more than $200 million.

It is also suggested that the money from the oil-for-food contracts passed exclusively through a French bank, BNP Paribas. Wrong again: 41% of the money passed through J.P. Morgan Chase Bank, which, like BNP, was contracted by the U.N. with the approval of Security Council members.

This leaves us with one remaining accusation: that the French positions on the oil-for-food program and Iraq in general were driven by the lure of oil. Yet France was never a major destination for Iraqi oil during the program. In 2001, 8% of Iraqi oil was imported by France, compared with 44.5% imported by the U.S., which was the No. 1 importer all along.

At a time when the U.N. is considering a return to Iraq, and we all agree on the need for close international cooperation to help a sovereign, stable Iraq emerge, I don’t understand this campaign. Or the hidden agenda behind it.

No tome to research and comment now, but I’m sure a few of you folks have some time on your hands…

By its violent nature, war inflames our emotions. As humans, we have reactions that are in part biological as well as deeply ingrained through our cultures, and the naked confrontation which leads to war as well as the violence embodied in it trigger those emotions.

bq. “I have often preached that the proper antidote to fear is anger, and I see no reason to change my opinion on this. However, there is another mental condition that serves as well or possibly better, and that is concentration. I have discussed this matter at great length with people who are in a position to know, and I am not without experience of my own, and I can state positively that when you find yourself facing deadly danger, your ability to concentrate every mental faculty upon doing what needs to be done to save yourself leaves no room for fear.” — Col. Jeff Cooper

bq. “In strategy your spiritual bearing must not be any different than normal. Both in fighting and in everyday life you should be determined though calm. Meet the situation without tenseness yet not recklessly, your spirit settled yet unbiased… Do not let your spirit be influenced by your body, or your body be influenced by your spirit. Be neither insufficiently spirited nor overspirited. Do not let the enemy see your spirit.” — Miyamoto Musashi

Much martial arts training, and much military training (as I understand it) is about learning to manage those emotional reactions. But note that ‘managing’ them is not to completely deny them…Because, in truth, they serve as an engine for the human reluctance to confront or to risk and commit violence.

When faced with confrontation, hatred, or violence, part of our human nature is to withdraw, to look away, to act like prey – not predator. Another part reacts aggressively.

The question in any instance is which is the appropriate reaction?

In this case, we’re taking about the anger in response to the events in Falluja – and let’s make one thing clear; the events are not simply the attack on and killing of the civilian guards. That’s tragic, but in most of our worlds would have been a blip. It was the brutal treatment of their bodies once they were helplessly dead, in defiance of Islam, which like most religions, requires a certain respect for the dead.

So we’re angry. And to an extent, it’s important that we have some anger, because otherwise we would be helpless.

And to that extent, when we see things like suicide bombings, when we remember the images of 9/11, anger’s not a bad thing. It is, as Cooper says, far better than fear.

But in the actual conflict, in the actual decision to fight and fighting, I’ll take Cooper’s ‘concentration’ and Musashi’s ‘settled yet unbiased’ spirit. Showing anger – standing in front of the enemy or potential enemy, and frothing at the mouth in rage – does two bad things. First, it helps create a fight where it might have been possible to avoid one. And second, if your enemy is at all strong, it shows weakness.

One of the things that the Arab media shows me, with their constant displays of rage, is how weak the Arab world really is.

That doesn’t mean we have nothing to fear from them, and it’s not a suggestion that we ignore them.

Because, as I’ve noted, an eleven-year old with a shotgun still warrants your attention and reaction.

But if we want to win – which I’ll define as coming out on top without turning the Arab world into rubble – we’ll do it in the spirit of Jeff Cooper and Musashi.

I’ve been looking for a way into the Little Green Footballs v. Daily Kos issue, and it’s hard.

We’re dealing with pretty visceral emotional reactions at the same time that we’re trying to maintain some sense of moral clarity, and those are not easy things to do.

But I thought of something that happened this weekend, and it shed some light on the question, so I’ll open with a brief story.

TG took a motorcycle riding class held on a racetrack here in Southern California (I’ll be slightly evasive on exactly which one, where, so forgive me, but we’ve been to most of the big schools), and I was her pit crew (and I’m not bitter about not getting to ride, no I’m not at all bitter…). This involved hanging out, reading two good books, intermittent flurries of activity on her behalf, worrying a lot (there’s an interesting post on that), and chatting with folks, as I tend to do.One guy I chatted with was the father of an AMA professional road racer who has recently retired, whose son – a 15-year old – was interested in following in his father’s footsteps. The boy had a successful career in other kinds of motorcycle racing, and was ready to start roadracing, and so was at the class polishing his skills (he was, thank God, in a more advanced group than TG was). The grandfather was an unbelievably neat guy; he called me on my anxiety when TG was out on the track, and got me to sit back and relax and enjoy myself, and we chatted about racing and kids and marriage and life for much of the day.

At the end of the day. when we’d packed the bikes onto the trailer and were headed home, I stopped by his motor home and said goodbye, and wished him and his grandson success. I complimented him grandson, pointing out that he was amazingly polite, helpful, and just overall a good kid.

“Yeah, he is,” the grand-dad said proudly. Then his face changed, and he added, “but I worry that he’s too nice to succeed as a racer, and that’s something he really wants to do.”

Too nice to succeed. An interesting thought. But it makes sense to us; you automatically understand what it means, and it helps me put a frame around the questions that I’ve been wrestling with for the last few days.

Looking at the discussion we’re having – the criticism I leveled at Kos, and the responses from commenters here, Nathan Newman and others – it seems like we’re really talking about three things.

First, why is it OK for us to be cruel, and not OK for them?

Next, what is the place of anger in conflict?

Finally, is it legitimate for us to be angry at the Arab world or elements of the Arab world?

This is turning out to be longer and messier than I’d intended, and I don’t have time to do as good a job of editing as I’d like, so let me just jump into the first question today, and follow up with the others tomorrow.

Nathan Newman challenged those who criticized Kos by posting a graphic image of a dead child and asking why that child’s death didn’t spur the same level of outrage as the deaths of the American civilian guards, and by extension, why the deaths of Iraqi civilians in the crossfire in Falluja last week didn’t outrage us.

The answer to Nathan’s question is, in no small part, that we’re not that nice. We don’t value all lives lost the same way; we value ours more than theirs, those murdered more than those killed in accidents, and so on.

And the reality is that it’s impossible to value all lives equally.

If we did, we could never go to war. Some people might think that’s a good thing; but there are other people in the world who aren’t that nice, and they would then win; they would force us to do their will and we’d be back where we started. I believe that; others disagree; they see our not-niceness as the cause of the conflicts, not a defense against them, and in large part, that defines the boundary between the two sides in the conflict over this war.

But it’s not only war. If we valued all lives, no one would smoke, or drink, or engage in risky sports, or eat anything except tofu and lentils.

Every decision we make kills someone. Every dollar we spend is a dollar that doesn’t save a starving child, everything we buy leaves a trail of pollution, exploitation and death behind.

My father built high-rise buildings. He probably lost a worker on every third or fourth project; he was devastated when it happened. We would go to the funerals. But it isn’t possible to build buildings like that without risk.

I ride motorcycles; in my circle of fifty or so riding acquaintances, we’ve had 4 deaths in six years.

My oldest son wants to join the military and fly jet fighters. In reality, flying them is riskier than fighting in them.

I value TG more than myself; I know that I would die to protect her. And yet I sat by when she took her motorcycle out onto a racetrack and rode. I did that because there are some things more important than life itself; the freedom to express yourself and to act, for one.

So we do accept deaths as a consequence of what we do.

Making political decisions involves accepting deaths, too.

How much will we spend on emergency medical care versus home heating subsidies? How much will we spend on food stamps for the elderly versus prescription drugs? How much energy will we spend on creating jobs and how much on preserving the environment? Each decision means deaths; from disease or injury, from cold, from malnutrition (the elderly poor still suffer from that); from uncontrolled illness, from unemployment and descent into poverty, from illness caused by environmental conditions.

I’ve made a point of criticizing much of the modern left because of it’s desire for purity; for the belief that they can, somehow, stand apart from what Sartre called ‘the filth and the blood’ of living in the world. I said:

A long time ago, I talked about the moral importance of hunting… that I felt it somehow wrong for people to both eat meat that they buy in the store and yet somehow they deny their responsibility for the life that was taken for their consumption. For me, having hunted somehow solves this problem…I have taken the responsibility, I have had my hands up to the elbows in the bloody mess, and changed something from an animal to meat for my table.

But when I read much of what comes from the left, I’m left with the feeling that they want to consume the benefits that come from living in the U.S. and more generally the West without either doing the messy work involved or, more seriously, taking on the moral responsibility for the life they enjoy.

We enjoy this life because a number of things happened in the world’s (our) history. Many of them involved one group dominating (or brutalizing or exterminating) another, or specific actions (Dresden, Hiroshima) whose moral foundation is sketchy at best.

“Do you think one can govern innocently? Purity is a matter for monks, clerics, not for politicians. My hands are dirty to the elbows. I have shoved them in filth and blood,” Hoederer says in Sartre’s ‘Dirty Hands’.

Part of political adulthood is the maturity to realize that we are none of us innocents. The clothes we wear, money we have, jobs we go to are a result of a long, bloody and messy history.

I see my job as a liberal as making the future less bloody than the past.

But I accept the blood on my hands. I can’t enjoy the freedom and wealth of this society and somehow claim to be innocent. I don’t get to lecture people from a position of moral purity. No one spending U.S. dollars, or speaking with the freedom protected by U.S. laws gets to.

I want to make the future less bloody than the past; that may mean accepting my responsibility for the blood shed today.

That’s not a nice position to take.

But it doesn’t put me on a par with Islamists, and that matters.

It doesn’t for two reasons. First, because on a basic level, the world is divided into teams. One point I’ve also made in the past is the attachment of the modern left to cosmopolitan values, as opposed to patriotic ones.

On one level, that’s a good thing. Sharing the humanity of the rest of the world means something, and means something good. But as I’ve also talked about, there is a real value in patriotism, particularly the unique patriotism of America, which is based on shared values and not blood and soil.

Many on the left reject it, as Schaar pointed out:

Opponents of patriotism might agree that if the two could be separated then patriotism would look fairly attractive. But the opinion is widespread, almost atmospheric, that the separation is impossible, that with the triumph of the nation-state nation. Nationalism has indelibly stained patriotism: the two are warp and woof. The argument against patriotism goes on to say that, psychologically considered, patriot and nationalist are the same: both are characterized by exaggerated love for one’s own collectivity combined with more or less contempt and hostility toward outsiders. In addition, advanced political opinion holds that positive, new ideas and forces–e.g., internationalism, universalism; humanism, economic interdependence, socialist solidarity–are healthier bonds of unity, and more to be encouraged than the ties of patriotism. These are genuine objections, and they are held by many thoughtful people.

And those thoughtful people, by virtue of their attachment to the wider world, cannot take sides; they can’t view the tragedy of an American soldier’s death as deeply different than the tragedy of an Iraqi soldier’s death. They are one and the same; and so are paralyzed. They can’t make a decision because all deaths weigh the same.

They don’t weigh the same to me.

I value ours more than I do theirs; I value them most of all because they are fighting for me and the values which have created me and given me the life I enjoy. Yes, I value them because they are ‘like me’ as well, but the Pakistani troops who die fighting Al Quieda are, in the context of their own politics, fighting for me and my values as well. I don’t see the sides as morally equivalent, and even if I had opposed the invasion of Iraq – which I almost did – I wouldn’t see them as morally equivalent.

I feel for the deaths done to innocents; to children, woman, and men whose only wrong was to be in the wrong place in the wrong time. To me the enterprise of war is inherently tragic, and that tragedy is nowhere more represented than in these deaths.

But like the deaths we choose when we decide on healthcare policy – which are no less tragic for being less visible and shockingly photogenic – they are an inevitible consequence of the decisions we make. I’ve read a lot of history, some of which was military history, and I’ll point out that in all wars, from Attic Greece forward, innocents have suffered.

I’m proud of our military that they work so hard, and take such risks to minimize that suffering.

I’ll note here that there’s an interesting (if frighteningly depressing) theory that one reason why we will have so much trouble rebuilding Iraq is that we didn’t damage the civilian infrastructure enough, and that the civilians didn’t suffer enough. I’m a ways away from that position, but at some point, it’ll be something worth discussing.

But the reality is that there’s no way to pick apart what we want (and I think need) to accomplish and some quantity of suffering. Personally, I want to minimize the aggregate quantity of it.

But if there is a trade between ours and theirs, I’ll take theirs. Because I do believe that there is a ‘them’ and an ‘us’.

Next, the place of anger.

Not one of the Top 5 Dylan songs I chose made it onto Norm Geras’ Top 20.

Not one.

Statistically, that’s unlikely, although it may have something to do with Mike A’s comment on my disconnect from mainstream pop culture.

My picks were:

# If You See Her, Say Hello (Blood On The Tracks)
# Tears Of Rage (Basement Tapes)
# Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door (Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid – a cheap one, I know, but I still love it)
# I Pity The Poor Immigrant (JWH)
# I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight (JWH)

Update: Charles links over and a hockey match ensues in the comments below. More debate here, as Joe joins the scrimmage.

Folks, if you go to the comments, you’ll see that I’ve edited out a series of comments centering on the notion that LGF should be shut down or sanctioned because it promotes ‘hate speech’.

Sorry, not on this pitch; that’s not a topic of discussion I’m interested in having on one of my posts. Regardless of my bias toward (or against) any blogger, I’m not in the business of shutting people down.

If any of you post on this again, I may elect to ban you.

For all the visitors from LGF, I’m glad you’re here and hope you stick around. Our place is somewhat different from Charles’; think biker bar and college bull session. Each of us (there are a bunch of authors here) control the comments on our threads, and I tend to be fairly ruthless in criticizing and at some point banning people who don’t want to make arguments, but want to have them instead. Hope you browse around and we’re interested in what you have to say.]

I’ve been corresponding with ex-blogger (come baaack!!) and uber-commuter Ann Salisbury about the whole Kos issue, and snce she suggested it, I think I’ll just post our last emails:

…I didn’t get the impression that Nathan was cheering by posting the pic, but setting it out there for what it was — which, in my mind, is tragedy, plain and simple.

I can’t see any violence being “better” than another, but I can see “justified” or “more justified” violence. Self-defense and defense of others is usually “more justified,” but even the law in the United States requires that the perceived threat giving rise to the self-defense be a reasonable perception. (For example, “He looked at me funny,” just doesn’t do it.)

Glad to see you’re working through the hard stuff – and I appreciate you sharing it, because it’s helping me to work through it too.

-Ann

This was in reply to my message:

I’m breaking the issue into two basic areas:

Is our violence better than their violence? And if so, why?

What is the place of hate in conflict?

I’ve met Charles, and he’s a liberal who was shocked by 9/11 into reading Arab media, and shocked by what he saw there. I really do think he’s provided a service in opening that up to wider discussion, and I think he’s damaged the service that he does by allowing his comments to be as bile-filled as they are.

I think that the good thing about our side is that we’re willing to accept the humanity of everyone – including our enemies, which is why we grieve, not cheer, at the picture on Nathan’s site. When we stop doing that – as Kos did, and as many of Charles’ commenters do, we erode our own standing.

A.L.