Thanks to NRO's The Corner, this catch from the Boston Herald:

Yarbrough, a part-time bartender who plans to wear leather pants, tuxedo shirt, and leather vest during the half-hour ceremony, has gotten hitched to Rogahn, a retired school superintendent, first in a civil commitment in Minnesota, then in Canada, and now in Massachusetts, the first U.S. state to recognize gay marriage.

But he says the concept of forever is``overrated'' and that he, as a bisexual, and Rogahn, who is gay, have chosen to enjoy an open marriage. ``I think it's possible to love more than one person and have more than one partner, not in the polygamist sense,'' he said.``In our case, it is, we have, an open marriage.''

For years Andrew Sullivan has argued that letting gays marry won't change the nature of the institution itself.

Now that he's gotten his way, expect him to become more honest, and begin arguing that he thinks it's healthy that gays will change the institution of marriage; that all of us prudish breeders just have to loosen up a bit and get on the polyamory kick.

Because really, isn't the concept of faithful monogamy a bit outdated? A We're sexual beings, first, foremost, and finally, after all. Isn't the monogamy straightjacket a bit antiquainted?

When you think about it, isn't monogamy a bit... medieval? Honestly, it's something that The Taliban could have come up with. It certainly is no overstatement to say that if we allow marriage to remain as it has been understood for millenia, the terrorist Islamist fundamentalists will have won.

Our Constitution: guaranteeing us life, liberty, and the right to swing, baby.

[Note that all of that is intended sarcastically. We don't agree with that. We're putting those words into the mouth of Andy "Swinger" Sullivan.]

Posted by: Ace at 11:39 AM | Comments (32)
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Narrowing Kerry's lead from 13 points to 5 points, largely due to anti-Kerry commercials raising doubts about his national security resume.

Posted by: Ace at 10:59 AM | Comments (10)
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Bad news all around today. Maybe a little humor is called for.

Top Ten Euphemisms for Self-Love/Self-Abuse in the Star Wars Universe

10. "pulling the ears off your Gundak"

9. "petting the Wookie"

8. "doing the Jedi Hand Trick"

7. "strangling Jabba the Hutt"

6. "polishing your R2 unit's sensor dome"

5. "feeling a strange disturbanceÂ… in your pants"

4. "wrangling the ol' tauntaun"

3. "brandishing your Gaderffii stick"

2. "strokin' Yoda"

...and the Number One Eupehmism for Self-Love/Self Abuse in the Star Wars Universe...

1. "setting your blaster to fun"

Posted by: Ace at 10:29 AM | Comments (75)
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Difficult question for the media: How can we report that yet another two soldiers have been harmed in Iraq while avoiding all mention of how they came to harm?

According to Drudge, of course, Hans Blix rushed out to inform us that the existence of Sarin in Iraq was no evidence ofthe existence of Sarin in Iraq.

Oh, and the discovery of a mustard gas shell is also no evidence of the discovery of a mustard gas shell.

Posted by: Ace at 10:24 AM | Comments (8)
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It's tonight...!

At the tone, the Andrew Sullivan Kerry-Endorsement Watch displays a time of:

(bong)

11:59:57 pm (three seconds to midnight)

Really, he won't be able to pass up on the perfect opportunity. He'll rail that Bush has betrayed his last ideal, and that there is no difference between Bush and Kerry at this point. (Here's a difference: under Kerry, the Iraqis wouldn't have the chance to govern themselves and secure their own future.)

But, as many conservatives are going to be grievously upset by this news, we can't imagine Andrew Sullivan doing anything else but making The Announcement. Making It Official.

Tying the knot, as it were, with a Massachusetts man. Might as well wait for 12:01 am (when "gay marriage rights" become the law in Massachusetts) to make it official.

Key words to look out for:

Arrogance

Incompetence

Playing politics with the world's security

Karl Rove Von Clauswitz

Posted by: Ace at 06:05 PM | Comments (10)
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Well, Drudge is blaring that the USA and UK plan to hand over security functions to the Iraqis "as soon as possible." We think Drudge is probably overplaying the implications here -- after all, weren't we always planning to turn over internal security "as soon as possible"? Surely we weren't planning on continuing to police Iraq past the point at which Iraqi internal-policing became "possible."

That quibble aside, there can be no doubt that Bush has shifted to the "sooner better than later" camp. This isn't a wholesale sea change in policy, nor a bug-out, but it does signal that we're getting out when the criteria for stability are only marginally satisfied, as opposed to more fully satisfied. It's a major tack, yes, but still only a tack. A shift.

And not one we're particularly upset about, although we reckon many of our readers will be.

As we've said, our full, "carry all burders" obligations to Iraq were premised upon full (or near full) Iraqi cooperation and assistance. We haven't gotten that. Yes, a majority of the country do support us, but only in an intellectual fashion, and often secretly. It's one thing to spend blood and treasure to assist a nation whose men are fighting side-by-side with you, eagerly confronting the same enemies you fight. It's quite another thing to spend blood and treasure to assist a nation whose "men" refuse to fight the terrorists who bomb their schools and whose inhabitants do very little but criticize and condemn you for daring to liberate them.

We've long believed that a big part of our problem was psychological: the psychology of the powerless, in which the only contribution to the public good is conspiracy-mongering and complaint. The psychology of Arab men, in which the Westerners who liberate you are to be despised more than the fellow Arabs who slaughter you. And the psychology of a long-repressed people, in which "action" is something that is either avoided, or is something that the government takes care of.

Remember, early after the liberation, unemployed Iraqi men were complaining their streets were dirty? Anyone else think to themselves, "Well, pick up a frickin' broom, Achmed"?

The confluence of these psychologies is killing our troops, and not significantly advancing the cause. Looks like we're changing our strategy; we hope that doing so will also provoke a change of psychology amonst Iraqis.

It may be that the change in strategy will instill it in the minds of our Iraqi friends that we're not solely responsible for their damn fates. If they want to improve security: Pick up a phone and call the CPA to inform on the terrorists, Achmed. It's not our country, it's yours. We shouldn't have to guess where the terrorists might be.

There will be those who say an early exit will represent a cutting of losses, and that those Iraqis who genuinely supported us, and tried to help us, will feel in their minds a sense of being betrayed.

Perhaps. But there is another feeling this announcement might engender. All of those Iraqis who didn't support us, and who never tried to help us, and perhaps who even aided and abetted in the killing of their brave American protectors, might now begin to understand that America feels betrayed, and that betraying America is never good for business.

They'll either get their shit together or they won't. It's their country. We cannot guarantee their peace, progress, and prosperity, especially with so many Iraqis actively undermining our efforts. We gave them an opportunity. We can't grant them an outcome. That's their job.

We still think that there is very little likelihood the terrorist can actually take over the country. The Iraqis don't want the terrorists in control; if they did, the terrorists wouldn't have to fight us, as the political power they crave would be delivered the moment we departed anyway.

Which means that what our boys are dying for at the moment is not really to safeguard the future of the Iraqi state, but to spare the lives of Iraqi men who would otherwise die fighting the terrorists in the early months or years of the new nation's life.

We think there are nations of the world who might almost deserve such a selfless gesture -- let our boys die so that yours might live -- but at this point we can't say Iraq is anywhere on such a list.

It's not laws or a constitution or even prosperity that keeps a democracy alive, although of course all those things help. It's the desire of the citizens to keep democracy alive. Nixon might have simply seized power when confronted with impeachment, but he did not. Not because we have a paper Constitution forbidding such a thing -- a lot of banana republics have similar Constitutions, and they haven't prevented coup d'etats very well -- but because the American people would not stand for such a maneuver. We would not accept it.

Ultimately, democracy and freedom cannot be forced on anyone, nor can it really be taught to anyone. Ultimately it comes down to the character of a people. If they want it. If they will work to have it. If they will, when necessary, fight for it.

We don't know if the Iraqis want democracy and freedom enough to work for it or fight for it.

But we do know that if they do want democracy and freedom enough to work for it and to fight for it, they will probably have it, with little need for assistance by America.

And if they don't want democracy and freedom enough to work for it and fight for it, they probably won't have it, and all the legions of Rome probably couldn't secure it for them.

Posted by: Ace at 05:59 PM | Comments (28)
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Under the control of Richard Clarke, the CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center (CTC) had established a specal bin Laden unit in 1996, and by 1998 had over one hundred case officers and intelligence analysts.

" With the help of the CTC, forty terrorists from the former Yugoslavia were captured and turned over to Arab governments, usually Egypt. Egyptian security is believed to have tortured, tried, and executed many of them. In this way, al Qaeda cells were quickly smashed in Albania, Bosnia, and elsewhere."

-- Losing Bin Laden, by Richard Miniter

We didn't hear the press complaining then. Indeed, Clinton's use of torture (which, by the way, we supported, and continue to support) was treated as proof of his "seriousness" about the issue of terrorism. It proved he was no limp-wristed hand-wringing liberal bleeding heart. It showed he was tough.

What a difference a partisan registration makes, eh?

This article is reprinted on what seems to be an anti-war site, but it's originally from the Washington Post, written by Dana Priest and Barton Gellman, with reporting by Bob Woodward.

We'd like to make several points here.

The article is completely nonjudgmental on the issue of torture. It's straight reporting. Actually, one could even claim it's somewhat positive on the subject, since most of the quotes from experts state that torture is necessary and effective, and there isn't prominent placement of "we should be above this" quotes from human-rights whiners.

Maybe that's just because Dana Priest wrote it, who seems, to the extent we're familiar with her (and we're not especially familiar with her) a fairly straight reporter.

But it might also be indicative of the general press attitude -- indeed, the general American attitude -- towards such nasty techniques in the aftermath of 9-11.

It seems strange to us that reporters used to claim they understood that this is a different kind of war, and that the old rules had to go by the wayside.

But now it's a whole year and a half later. Apparently the press is upset because while they supported tough interrogation tactics a year and a half ago, they've now changed their mind, and they're very, very angry that Bush hasn't changed his mind with them.

Either that, or it's an election year. What was accepted as being a necessary but repugnant practice in late 2002 is suddenly deemed abhorrent and anti-American and just plain godawful because it's far more important to drive George Bush out of the White House than terrorists out of their caves and sanctuaries.

On Fox News Sunday, Juan Williams claimed that he was terribly, terribly outraged about the Abu Ghraib abuses, but also claimed that he was in favor of using "legitimate" interrogation tactics to wrest crucial, life-saving information from terrorists.

He didn't specify what those "legitimate" tactics might be. He just asserted that the Geneva Conventions permit such tactics, without troubling himself to list them.

Indeed, one of the tactics Williams mentioned as especially abhorrent was "putting hoods over the heads" of prisoners. Sensory deprivation and deliberate disorientation would seem to us to be the least coercive and least brutal of all possible coercive techniques. And yet, Mr. Williams, claiming there are a whole host of tough tactics he supports which are in fact permitted by the Geneva Conventions, is outraged even by "hooding" prisoners.

Since the Geneva Conventions ban all coercive practices, we're not sure what "legitimate" tactics Juan Williams might have in mind. He objects passionately to even the least-brutal techniques known.

Perhaps he would lower himself to using harsh language, as Corporal Hudson once suggested.

Either that, or it's an election year, and Juan Williams has decided that it's okay to compromise American security by being suddenly "outraged" about practices he knows are completely necessary and justified, and which were, indeed, deemed just jake with him a scant year and a half ago.

More... The mainstream/liberal Atlantic Monthly headlined an article thus in January 2002:

A Nasty Business

Gathering "good intelligence" against terrorists is an inherently brutish enterprise, involving methods a civics class might not condone. Should we care?

The writer is torn by self-doubt and his precious conscience, as all good liberals always should be, but he recounts this story:

cannot use his real name, so I will call him Thomas. However, I had been told before our meeting, by the mutual friend—a former Sri Lankan intelligence officer who had also long fought the LTTE—who introduced us (and was present at our meeting), that Thomas had another name, one better known to his friends and enemies alike: Terminator. My friend explained how Thomas had acquired his sobriquet; it actually owed less to Arnold Schwarzenegger than to the merciless way in which he discharged his duties as an intelligence officer. This became clear to me during our conversation. "By going through the process of laws," Thomas patiently explained, as a parent or a teacher might speak to a bright yet uncomprehending child, "you cannot fight terrorism." Terrorism, he believed, could be fought only by thoroughly "terrorizing" the terrorists—that is, inflicting on them the same pain that they inflict on the innocent. Thomas had little confidence that I understood what he was saying. I was an academic, he said, with no actual experience of the life-and-death choices and the immense responsibility borne by those charged with protecting society from attack. Accordingly, he would give me an example of the split-second decisions he was called on to make. At the time, Colombo was on "code red" emergency status, because of intelligence that the LTTE was planning to embark on a campaign of bombing public gathering places and other civilian targets. Thomas's unit had apprehended three terrorists who, it suspected, had recently planted somewhere in the city a bomb that was then ticking away, the minutes counting down to catastrophe. The three men were brought before Thomas. He asked them where the bomb was. The terrorists—highly dedicated and steeled to resist interrogation—remained silent. Thomas asked the question again, advising them that if they did not tell him what he wanted to know, he would kill them. They were unmoved. So Thomas took his pistol from his gun belt, pointed it at the forehead of one of them, and shot him dead. The other two, he said, talked immediately; the bomb, which had been placed in a crowded railway station and set to explode during the evening rush hour, was found and defused, and countless lives were saved. On other occasions, Thomas said, similarly recalcitrant terrorists were brought before him. It was not surprising, he said, that they initially refused to talk; they were schooled to withstand harsh questioning and coercive pressure. No matter: a few drops of gasoline flicked into a plastic bag that is then placed over a terrorist's head and cinched tight around his neck with a web belt very quickly prompts a full explanation of the details of any planned attack.

It seemed widely understood, even by liberals, that such methods might be brutish and nasty, and possibly even forbidden, but they did seem to have an appreciation that "outrage" was out-the-window. After 9-11, it was no longer an easy moral call that "of course" torturing terrorists was outrageous.

And yet, now in this presidential campaign season, liberals seem to have recovered all of their moral certainty and moral posturing, conveniently just in time to make a political issue out of the techniques.

Posted by: Ace at 08:06 AM | Comments (32)
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There isn't any spinning this.

It's a bad number, and a number Bush can't win with. Bush managed to retain his relatively-decent popularity throughout these past two bad liberal-media-feeding-frenzy months, but it seems that this Abu Ghraib nothing was the straw that broke the camel's back.

Will the number change? We think so. There is great economic news out there that is still not known by the public generally; the improving economy is not yet baked into the cake, as stockbrokers say. Bush's economic stock is currently at submarket prices; it'll go up.

And we think that Iraq is about to become much more stable. The Sadrists seem to be on their last legs, for example.

Still. There are only five months of the campaign left. Bush has time to improve, but not much time.

Panic? Us? Hey, we're not panicking. But the facts are the facts. Presidents get re-elected with job approval ratings in the low fifties. They may or may not get re-elected with job approval ratings in the high forties. They have a difficult time getting re-elected with numbers in the mid-forites. And they lose with numbers in the low forties, or worse.

The election, of course, is not being held today. But if it were -- and if normal rules hold in this election -- Bush would lose.

James Taranto recently published a series of emails pointing out that someone could be disatisfied with Bush's performance and yet still vote for him. This is undeniably true; however, it was also undeniably true during Bush I's re-election campaign as well. It may be true that some are disatisfied with Bush and yet will still vote for him, but that is the case with all Presidents seeking re-election.

Presidents with low job-approval numbers lose their bid for re-election. That's the general rule. To prove that this rule doesn't hold in the case of Bush II, one needs to prove more than the fact that some will vote for Bush despite being unsatisfied with his performance. One would need to prove that this supporting-him-while-being-disatisfied effect is more pronounced now than it has been in previous elections; that the number of people who will still vote for Bush II despite their reservations is greater than it normally is in any election season.

That might be the case. This is probably going to be a strange election in a number of ways. But a few anecdotal emails certainly don't prove that's the case.

A lot of Republicans were disatisfied with Bush I in 1992. And he lost.

There are a lot of reasons to think that Bush's job approval will rise. After all, he's still being clobbered as to his economic performance, and that, strangely enough, is a good thing. Were people satisfied with his economic performance, and yet still disatisfied with him as President, he'd have no room to rise as the economy improves. The economy is improving, and dramatically, but the public still doesn't seem to appreciate that fact, or credit Bush for that.

As they do begin to appreciate it, Bush's greatest nagging problem could turn into his greatest strength-- and that would obviously have a great impact on his support from the public.

Let's just hope the media isn't able to keep the explosive jobs-creation numbers a state secret through November.

Posted by: Ace at 03:19 PM | Comments (26)
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Yeahp, you could knock us over with a feather too.

She's so utterly unpredictable. Who would have guessed that she would take a silly little swords-and-sandals popcorn movie and actually link it to the current war on terror?

Posted by: Ace at 03:14 PM | Comments (5)
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We don't want to malign a man gruesomely executed in an Islamic murderporn video. But there are a lot of interesting questions about Nick Berg.

We were watching FoxNews today, and a former FBI agent stated the obvious: the reason the Iraqi police suspected Nick Berg of engaging in suspicious activities is because his activities, and possibly-coincidental associations, were in fact suspicious. "Suspicious" does not mean "blameworthy" or "wrongful," but it does mean "requiring additional scrutiny."

A man walking back and forth at night in front of a building he does not live in is acting suspiciously. That doesn't mean he's guilty of anything. He could be doing any number of quite-legal things; but it is beyond doubt that the police would be justified in asking him what he's up to.

This former FBI agent did not draw the conclusion that Nick Berg was dirty, as Wizbang did (prematurely, we think). He did, however, seem quite insistent that these coincidences were not in fact coincidences at all; he said that such coincidences were like being struck by lightning. (It should be noted, of course, that people frequently are struck by lightning; this FBI agent, however, didn't seem to give that objection much consideration.)

He suggested that Nick Berg might have been "working for someone else;" he went on to specify he thought Berg might have been "working under the flag of another country." He didn't say which nation, but it seems to be a fair guess that he was thinking of Israel.

Which was a suspicion apparently shared by the Iraqi police, whom we were perhaps too hasty to malign as being anti-Semitic.

This speculation, if true, might make Berg technically a traitor, but it wouldn't necessarily mean he was actually working against US interests or allying himself with our enemies.

It could be that Nick Berg was an extraodinarily gutsy operative looking to make connections with terrorists, not to harm our country, but to harm the terrorists.

All of this remains bullshit speculation at this point. But the FBI agent's opinion would seem to suggest that those of us thinking there's something else going on here are not necessarily crazy. True, the FBI agent himself might have been crazy; he was not, however, wearing a clown nose or pope-hat or otherwise displaying the sort of behavior one associates with the floridly insane.

Furthermore, it would seem to suggest that, even if one believes there is more to Nick Berg's beheading than coincidence and uncanny bad luck, there is no compelling reason to assume the worst about him. There are possible explanations in which Nick Berg winds up being, at worst, an agent for an allied country working approximately in tandem with US interests.

Actually... It remains quite likely he was CIA. We've gotten used to the government identifying CIA contract officers upon their deaths; but just because the CIA discloses the affiliation of some operatives doesn't mean it discloses the affiliation of all.

Announcing that Nick Berg was CIA could, for example, expose some of his fellow agents as CIA.

Posted by: Ace at 01:38 PM | Comments (30)
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