Chicago Boyz

David Warren very plausibly argues that the Israelis are serious this time, and are going to “remove” Arafat. Regime change is becoming a regular practice, it seems. Which probably means they will kill him. One can hope. After all, how in Hell could they hope to get him out of there alive, surrounded as he is by his supporters, without a bloody fight? This is a move which is long, long overdue. “The Arab Street” will be upset. Fine. Let it break its own windows. Or its angry young fellows who want to kill Jews and Americans can all join Al Qaeda, if they can find the recruiting office. We should open one at Guantanamo, cut out the middle man. Whatever. The hurdy gurdy has been cranked for the last time. Arafat is responsible for the program of suicide bombings, so Arafat has to go. As to the Palestinians, they can never get past square one with this leadership. Once Arafat is dead someone rational can come to the fore, eventually, though probably not soon. The suicide bombing policy has to be shown to be a failure, with consequences. As to world opinion, the basic attitude is utterly hostile to Israel anyway. This will only make the shouting louder, but not change the substance.

So, go get the sumbitch. Do it in a harsh, brutal way, in broad daylight with live TV coverage. Send a loud message that violence will be met unwaveringly with massively greater violence, over and over again, as often and for as long as necessary. That message may penetrate the thick craniums on the Arab street. It is a language they understand.

Then put Arafat’s dead face on TV, like the Hussein boys.

One more link is now broken with an older, freer, wilder, harder America, a place of strong emotions, with little or no irony, deep loves, abiding hatreds, strong friendships, hard punches, hard knocks, hard work, too much liquor, loyalty and sacrifice, sadness and betrayal, forgiveness and a new start — dirt roads and train whistles in the night and sunrise on the open road. And it’s all still there, that lost world, in the music. And we saw that lost America too in the work ethic of a man who never retired and never became an oldies act, but kept on reinventing himself and kept pushing himself and his fans, old and new, until his body simply disintegrated. Lucky for us. But we’ll miss the Man in Black, and what he might have given us next. God rest his soul.

Don Luskin links to what he calls a fascinating op-ed by Admiral Poindexter.

It is indeed a fascinating piece, partly because of what Poindexter doesn’t say. He discusses DARPA’s data-mining proposal mainly in terms of intentions rather than nuts and bolts. And he attempts to deflect criticism of the scheme’s intrusiveness by asserting that it was designed to use non-U.S. databases.

My main objections to the scheme are not that it’s ill-intended but that it will generate huge numbers of false positives and be an invitation to abuse in the future. (See this post and this post for related comments.) Admiral Poindexter says that the overseas databases that are to be used for the project do not contain information about U.S. citizens. However, there is reason to be cautious in accepting such assurances, as initial rumors had the scheme searching through precisely the kinds of U.S. financial records that Poindexter now insists are not involved, and DARPA’s description of the program has changed in response to public and Congressional opposition. Even if you take Poindexter at his word, it’s reasonable to be nervous about such a program, because it’s impossible to know who will be running it in the future and whether the system’s anti-snooping safeguards, which require us to trust the good will of whoever is administering it, will be followed.

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I don’t have a TV, so I didn’t see the Osama video until tonight, when my wife insisted we find it on the Net. We did.

So, nu? That’s it? Osama walking on some rocks, with a voice over? Riiiiight.

This convinces me Osama’s friggin’ dead, or so beat to sh*t that they don’t want to put him on TV. It would have been nothing to just have him look at the camera and say “Paul Bremer will drown in fire and his own blood” or some such Islamo-flavored threatening bull pucky. That would absolutely prove he’s alive, now, today. But nooooo.

This is the best they can do? Ha. Dude. We’re winning.

Thanks to Ralf for calling my attention to this running commentary. The topic hits close to home, and I have forwarded on to my colleagues in the agricultural and trading industries. I hold out the possibility that Howard is a former Carter Administration trade official, but I doubt it.