If this on-line poll is to be believed, Arnold is right–California legislators really are girlie men. So far, the polling is running a hundred percent in favor of the proposition.

I think that the reaction of the Dems to this is hysterical, in both senses of the word.

[Update at 5:30 PM]

The legislators have gained some support. Now over one percent of the respondents don’t think they’re girlie men.

A quick break from conference blogging to point out yet another reason, via Mark Steyn, in the wake of the exposed lies of Joe Wilson, why I can’t even consider voting for Kerry:

Some of us are on record as dismissing Wilson in the first bloom of his unmerited celebrity. But John Kerry was taken in — to the point where he signed him up as an adviser and underwrote his Web site. What does that reveal about Mister Nuance and his superb judgment? He claims to be able to rebuild America’s relationships with France, and to have excellent buddy-to-buddy relations with French political leaders. Yet anyone who’s spent 10 minutes in Europe this last year knows that virtually every government there believes Iraq was trying to get uranium from Africa. Is Kerry so uncurious about America’s national security he can’t pick up the phone to his Paris pals and get the scoop firsthand? For all his claims to be Monsieur Sophisticate, there’s something hicky and parochial in his embrace of an obvious nutcake for passing partisan advantage.

A comment from someone at Roger Simon’s site, with which I have some sympathy (though I came to that realization during the 1990s, not as a result of the latest lying and viciousness in the war):

I ask myself why I feel such animosity towards the Democratic party, a party that I belonged to for so many years. Betrayal is the word I come up with, I feel betrayed by the triviality, immaturity, and sheer lunacy of the party. It’s not like some other party, say the Republicans, whose oddities I can tolerate as the eccentricity of the neighbors, no, it’s like finding that my wife has run off with a derelict with whom she had a long standing secret affair. Not only do I feel betrayed, but I wonder how I could have been such an idiot, overlooking all the signs and clues.

According to this test.

It was more than a little irritating, though, because all (not just a few) of the questions should have had a “No Clue” option.

I generally do well on multiple-guess tests, but I don’t think they’re a useful gauge of knowledge, and I particularly dislike those that don’t have an “I dunno” option.

According to this test.

It was more than a little irritating, though, because all (not just a few) of the questions should have had a “No Clue” option.

I generally do well on multiple-guess tests, but I don’t think they’re a useful gauge of knowledge, and I particularly dislike those that don’t have an “I dunno” option.

According to this test.

It was more than a little irritating, though, because all (not just a few) of the questions should have had a “No Clue” option.

I generally do well on multiple-guess tests, but I don’t think they’re a useful gauge of knowledge, and I particularly dislike those that don’t have an “I dunno” option.

Brad DeLong makes an excellent point about the torture memo:

It seems to me that Yoo misses a great many points. The hypothetical he describes–Osama bin Laden himself, a ticking nuclear bomb, a city that cannot be evacuated, et cetera–is not a situation in which torture should be legal. It is, however, a situation in which torture is pardonable. If you find yourself interrogating Osama bin Laden in such a situation, you do what you must do–and then you ask the president for a pardon. And the president has the power to give you one.

That’s what the procedure is with respect to torture. And I think that’s what the procedure should be.

As a nation we have no compunction about asking our defenders to risk death in order to protect us. Why are we so lilly-livered about asking them to risk legal hassles? Is it really worth sacrificing the legal protections that previous generations fought (and yes, died) for in order to spare someone in a highly unlikely scenario from having to ask for a pardon? I don’t think so. Not only is the indictment vanishingly unlikely to ever be brought in the first place (since it would destroy the career of the attorney general who brought it), but even if a jury could be found that was willing to strictly construe the applicable law, there is still the presidential pardon available as a final stopgap.

The reason the administration wants to have the rubber hose option legally available has nothing to do with the ticking bomb scenario. The ticking bomb is such an unambiguous case that even a blatant violation of the law is not going to be punished. The scenarios in which the legal loopholes are needed are the ambiguous ones, the ones where finding an AG willing to indict, a jury willing to convict, and a president unwilling to pardon are a real possibility. It is precisely those scenarios where torture should not be used.

The alternative is a legal regime in which torture can slip through the cracks, growing in application to more and more crimes and suspected crimes. Once our expectations are renormalized to allow torture on people suspected of terrorism, it’s only a matter of time before major drug crimes are included under the theory that drug money funds terrorism. From there we slouch on to lesser drug crimes, cybercrime, and so on. Perhaps you trust the current administration not to slip down this slope. But do you trust all possible future administrations?

What we give up by not legalizing torture is a small measure of safety. What we lose by legalizing it is not just the moral high ground, but also our own future safety from abuses by our own government.

The instinct to legalize torture comes from the same misguided mode of thinking that wastes time and effort figuring out all possible scenarios in which it’s legitimate to violate traffic laws. Nobody is under the impression that it’s wrong to blow a stop sign if you’ve got a guy in the back seat with arterial bleeding and you’re headed for the hospital. There is no need for a legal exception, and if a cop stops you he’ll more than likely give you an escort. Ditto the ticking bomb – if Alan Dershowitz is around, he’ll help you clip the electrodes to the guy’s nuts.

Even while traveling, Glenn has a good roundup of links about the collapse of the credibility of Joe Wilson, and continuing pathetic efforts to defend him.

This is the kind of thing that (like all of the lying, spinning and prevarication, and unashamed defense of it, in defense of Bill Clinton in the nineties) make it impossible for me to even consider voting for a Democrat any more. As a one-time Democrat in my youth, I went through the eighties thinking that I simply had policy disagreements with them, but since the Clinton years, and particularly since 911, I now think that it’s simply too dangerous to put the fate of the nation back in the hands of such people. Joe Lieberman would have been the only possible candidate who could overwhelm my increasing distaste for the Donkeys, but they rejected him, and anyone like him, quite decisively.

Golda Meier once said that the Middle East situation would only be resolved when the Palestinians started to love their children more than they hated Jews. I’ll think that we’ll once again have a functional two-party system, in which I can vote for the candidate rather than the affiliation, when it starts to appear that the Democrats love truth and integrity more than they hate George Bush and Republicans in general. (Which is not to say that I’ll necessarily vote Republican–with the ridiculous things coming out of the Libertarian Party since September 11, right now, I have no party.)

[Update at noon Eastern]

Michael Ledeen has more.

…sitting in a tree.
K I S S I N…

I think all this touchy-feely-huggy stuff is going to backfire on Kerry with the non-pansy male demographic.

Allah is divinely inspired today.

Allah is divinely inspired today.