Unqualified Offerings

I was glad Bork lost at the time. Admittedly, I was a partisan Democrat back then. And admittedly he was the object of a partisan witch hunt. But he’s gone to considerable effort to keep me glad they fitted him for the dunking stool. OpinionJournal’s “Best [Neocon-Approved Items] of the Web,” offers the following bit […]

I have a cold. (Boo!) So I’m taking NyQuil. (Yay!) Dennis Leary’s famous NyQuil rant is on this page. You just have to hit Page Down a couple of times.

Never confuse politics with “current events.”

A chick who would surely blanch at dissing her husband to the media, writer Wendy McElroy, edits the website ifeminists.com. I’m a longtime fan of McElroy, having discovered her writing in the pages of Liberty (Motto: Print Magazines Don’t Need Dynamic Websites) and enjoyed her book, XXX.

The Post Style section has a chin-puller by Paul Farhi about “The Great Worry Divide.” Women are more emotional in the face of the recent terror attacks, more prone to worry and depression, men more analytical, distanced; if they have an emotion, it is anger rather than sadness. As is usual in such pieces, actual […]

This from his regular venue in the Chicago Tribune:
Take a people tired of being tyrannized, add an opposition force determined to overthrow the government, blend with a handful of B-52s, bake for a few weeks, and there you have it–victory. The United States used this recipe with startling results in Afghanistan, and a cadre of […]

Steve Chapman’s article today in Slate makes a compelling case against the arguments of the National Greatness crowd for attacking Iraq. To the argument that Saddam is a psycho and he might do anything, anything - which is to say, that deterrence wouldn’t work - Chapman points out that deterrence has worked on Saddam:
When he […]

Admiral R. James Woolsey writes in yesterday’s post against the longstanding policy of propping up autocratic regimes in the Arab world:
This ought to be enough to make us call into question some of the European-generated “truths” about another region, the Mideast, that have generally guided our conduct there for the past 80 years: that Arabs […]

from eerily-prescient Unqualified Offering items! Opinion Journal’s “Best [Neocon Approved Items] of the Web” links to this NYT piece reporting that “Saudis Balk at U.S. Request to Freeze Bank Accounts.” Unqualified Offerings first reported this as pre-news on October 31st, the day the USA Today reported that the Saudis would “freeze terrorist assets.” Surely investors […]

“Ashcroft has been nothing but a disaster as AG on issues cutting across the ideological spectrum” and she’s right. It is small consolation that he follows one of the worst attorney generals of all time. It’s small consolation that most attorney generals, as George Will would say, suck ass. Ed Meese, John Mitchell, Bobby Kennedy. […]

As libertarian Alan Bock says of himself, I too have always been better at the theory than the practice of capitalism. But that could change! Prominent among the spam I’ve been getting are come-ons for penis enlargement. Almost as numerous are ads for mortgage refinancing. So it hit me: Why not one company that does […]

I am by no means sold on the new Justice League cartoon series yet. But there was an amusing bit in tonight’s episode. Green Lantern is on trial on a distant planet for allegedly destroying its neighbor, standing before a panel consisting of what appear to be the images of three AIs on a giant […]

Michael Kinsley famously said. Last night I talked on the phone to an old friend of mine in the national security bureaucracy. Eventually the topic came around the the War, and the “What now?” question. Anent the possibility of war with Iraq (not to mention “Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and ‘parts of Egypt’ “) he adverted […]

Despite frequent cracks about our “many loyal reader” (sic), recent reviews of server statistics lead management to believe that Unqualified Offerings’ readership may actually be, according to our source, “in the high one-figure range.” The editorial staff would like to thank our early adopters.

I couldn’t work up the energy to dismantle Barbara Kingsolver’s stupid op-ed in yesterday’s Washington Post. Or Friday’s Post - I’m repressing. In it, Kingsolver compares the most appealing things (to a liberal) that Franklin Roosevelt said in one speech to the least appealing things (to a liberal) George W. has done. And, as with […]

Two potted histories of civilian casualties in warfare, one by blogger Steven den Beste and one by paleocon historian Joseph Stromberg. For den Beste, the special status of civilians was a brief sentimentality of history that needs to be put aside. Stromberg doesn’t think so. I’m with Stromberg, but you can read den Beste’s essay […]