Credit Where Credit is Due Oh Yes! Dept.
Unqualified Offerings is pleased to report that Justin Raimondo credits this site by name for coming up with the term “split-screen republicanism,” especially since, ahem, he hasn’t always done so.
Raimondo’s Friday column is a response to Glenn Reynolds’ most recent FoxNews.com column. For my part, I think that Justin both mistakes the intent of Reynolds’ column and finds its central flaw. When Reynolds writes about how “we have to be able to trust the government,” I don’t think he’s urging the people to trust the feds or expressing his own faith in them - he’s calling for the feds to actually act in a trustworthy manner. Where I agree with Justin is that, structurally, we can’t trust them. All the demands that federal law enforcement and intelligence act honorably are wasted. Where there is secrecy and vagueness of mission, there will be chicanery and bureaucratic self-interest.
A note on an old, unrelated issue: A few months ago, some bloggers noticed the relatively low number of hits they were getting from attacks on them in Justin’s columns and from there questioned his traffic claims for Antiwar.com. There are two reasons why you’d get low referrals from antiwar.com regardless. For instance, I got no referrals from Friday’s article. Why? Because his link to my site was to a Google cache page. Someone may have clicked through from the Google cache page to the actual Unqualified Offerings site, but they’d show up as referred by Google, not antiwar.com. The other reason is that, assuming I’m a typical antiwar.com reader, I don’t actually click through many links from Justin’s columns. He puts a lot of links in there, and if I followed them all I’d read nothing but antiwar.com stuff all week. (Yeah yeah, I know: you figured that was the case anyway. You’re killin’ me, you know that?) And the prose has a certain…propulsive quality that tends to carry you right past opportunities to click out.
