Ain't dead yet.

To those of you who don't know me personally, my absence (if you even noticed it) has gone without explanation. I haven't been posting because about two weeks ago my wife gave birth to a beautiful baby girl. Thus, most of my time, free and otherwise, has been taken up with caring for my wife, caring for my daughter and work. I've been meaning to post here, but haven't found the time. I'm going to try and change that, but I thought I owed any readers I might still have an explanation. Please do check back in the coming weeks; I plan on blogging.

Pericles says, "Invade Patagonia NOW!"

If you haven't forgotten about the war in Iraq, rest assured that neither has the President and friends. Once they get their spin machines back in order and convince the 51% of the public that doesn't know how to tie its shoes and relies on velcro sneakers to get them to the voting booth to vote Republican that Louisiana's Democratic governor is to blame for the entire fucking mess we call the post-Katrina recovery effort, the President and friends will still have to convince this same 51% that Iraq is a success and that we shouldn't ever leave. At that time, the President and friends will rely on sycophantic weasels like Victor David Hanson to fill our ears with shit and tell us its a symphony. Fortunately, for the 49% of us who know how to read and are permitted by the good graces of our native intellect and dexterity to wear shoes that tie and thus may walk to the voting booths like civilized people, there are articles like this to prove to us that VDH is, in fact, nothing but a weasel.

Collective action problems?

Publius has a great post about why Democrats are making Hurricane Katrina a political issue and why Republicans should wash the sand out of their pussies and stop moaning about "politicizing the hurricane response" like the pathetic mass of whelping bitches they really are. Publius, being a smart and eloquent cookie, describes this phenomenon in terms of game theory and zero sum reasoning.

I prefer a more colloquial term. I call it the "You only wander into a dark alley and get mugged and ass-raped once" phenomenon. Fact is, if you wander into a dark alley and get mugged and ass-raped and survive, you will NEVER wander into a dark alley again. Why? Because you are a rational person and you learned your lesson. It's as easy as that. Now generalize that to politics. In the months after 9/11 Karl Rove and George Bush used tired tropes about "patriotism" and "national unity" to lure our weak-kneed and even weaker-willed Democratic representatives into a variety of political dark alleys. Having gotten them there, KR and GB got busy mugging and raping with reckless abandon.

Now, finally, four long fucking years later, it seems the Democrats have finally learned not to follow George Bush into a dark alley and, rationally and reasonably, have decided that being the royal fucknut that he is, he can busily mug and ass-rape himself which, as it turns out, he's pretty good at. Of course, Karl Rove (who is a big fat fruit with a gimp in his basement) is doing his level best to help the gullible swine called "red state voters" that that is not the case. We'll see if it works out. In the meantime, do please go over to Publius to read keen and inciteful blog posts.

More on the "general welfare"

Michael, over at Nameless Rantings (congrats on the engagement!) helpfully pointed out in earlier comments that Jack Balkin over at Balkinization has a new post in which he lays out a debate from the early days of this country as to whether the "general welfare" clause allows the federal government to provide disaster relief. If you don't care the read the whole thing, rest assured that the pro-relief forces won out.

This, I think, makes sense. The Constitution, as Justice Jackson once wrote in the context of a free-speech case, is not a "suicide pact". If citizens should expect anything from their federal government, it should be assistance in their time of most dire need. I think what is happening in New Orleans qualifies.

Of course, two different things are happening in New Orleans: people are starving and dying and other people are creating a state of violent anarchy. Thus, I'd like to point out Justice Jackson's full quote:

"The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either. There is danger that, if the court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact."

To whit, if the Constitution and Bill of Rights are not a suicide pact, than they should not prevent the government from providing relief and they should not prevent the government from fighting an orderless, liberty-less anarchy. In this case, I'm of the opinion that much harsher measures need to be taken with looters. There has been much commentary on the left side of the blogosphere about the lunacy of shoot-to-kill orders for looters. (I'll let you find the links, I'm short on time right now.) Today, I'm going to have to disagree. I think it's perfectly reasonable, albeit tragic and scary, to institute shoot-to-kill orders or something similar in cases where full-on anarchy is setting in. The question, it seems to me, is how do you differentiate between looters taking advantage of anarchy and looters trying to survive. I've got a simple answer: don't shoot anyone looting a pharmacy or grocery store. Everybody else, however, is fair game.

Harsh, reactionary and unpleasant, I know, but that's what I'd propose. I understand that shooting a looter no doubt violates his right to due process and forcefully rejects any assertion of human rights he might have made. However, the scope of process due in a state of anarchy is quite low I think, and I'm inclined to believe that human rights are not something that exist free of the fetters of civilized conduct (In other words, you don't just HAVE human rights, you earn them. HOw? I guess by acting human, whatever that means).

So, having put on my reactionary hat for the evening, I shall bid you farewell. Time to go contemplate building my arsenal and hoarding food and water for when the end-times hit DC....