Iranian President in NYNY.

I'm feeling lazy so I won't even look up how to spell the man's name. Let's just call him A.

Some very quick notes:

1) Have you noticed how just about every other part of the world, from the American South to the Levant to Latin America or the Far East prides themselves on their virtue of hospitality? That is a nice virtue. We were embarassingly bad hosts.

2) Some editorials, as with the local daily here, actually thought this was America's finest hour, because Mr. A was actually able to speak. Let's get over ourselves. We don't have a monopoly over free speech. The fact that we grudgingly offer a hostile forum is not so exemplary.

3) Most of the people calling Mr. A and idiot are themselves idiots. Joe Lieberman said he "literally" had blood on his hands. So, let the man use a washroom, and your problem is solved.

4) Remember when Chavez spoke at the UN last year and insulted Bush? The Democrats rushed to condemn him as a bad guest, and all you heard all over was how Bush may be a bad president, but an insult against him by a foreigner was nevertheless a disrespectful gesture to the whole nation (despite questionable elections). So guess how Iranians will see this?

5) Mr. A loves the press. The only thing that gets more press than efforts to censor are ineffective efforts to censor.

6) Mr. A is not the supreme leader and does not set the policies, so most of the attacks on him that presume otherwise are deeply flawed and, when coming from people who should know better, mostly fraudulent.

7) One cartoon I saw had Mr. A dressed as a Nazi but with sharp jutting teeth, as though to say, Hitler was at least a civilized European gentelman who happened to be evil, while you, Mr. A are a mere animal of the feral third world and not worthy of that comparison.

8) Hitler comparisons were also all over the place. Why? Because we blame Hitler too much for anti-Semitism, and not enough for aggressive war and genocide. That is why it is so wrong to compare Bush to Hitler -- he may have killed his first million now in Iraq, but he likes Jews, so it's okay.

9) Mr. A makes lots of sense in some of his arguments. He's also effed up on other stuff, which makes him bad company and an embarassment for those who would otherwise like to support him, or at least his rights and the good things he says. Nevertheless, outside of the US, these points are often uncontroversial, and even within the US outside of its dominant political class, these arguments would carry some resonance if they reached people. Instead, from the papers you'd think Mr. A's entire speech was about the absence of gays in Iran.

10) Since when have visitors to Ground Zero been vetted for their perceived moral character, and why? If we let Karamov go lay a wreath, we should let almost anyone do so. And what about Giuliani's license to appropriate 9/11 as an omnipresent political backdrop? Can we revoke that? I think secular, public memorials should be treated as neutral ground and not politicized -- anyone who is willing to display the proper decorum should be free to go.

11) Iran's place in the Axis of evil has been promoted by most of the Democrats, who show their distaste for the cruelty of war by constantly lamenting that war prevents America from redirecting its resources to more important and humane matters, like some other war. Iran is currently the most popular other war.

That's all for now.

Jena Prosecutor Walters in the NYT

Reed Walters, the prosecutor of the Jena Six, had an op-ed today in the NYT. Short version: Don't blame me.

Actually, the guy sounds mostly reasonable on the surface, at least if, like most people, you still don't know the facts of the case. He made his job easy by using a layperson speaking out on a legal issue as the representative of all the arguments against him. At least, the easy ones he wanted to respond to. Someone says, why prosecute these kids for assault, and not prosecute the ones who hung the nooses which set off all this racial fighting in the first place? Reed answers, I tried to be fair, but terrorizing and provoking blacks by hanging nooses where they're not wanted is perfectly legal. I had to prosecute the assault because it's my job.

The National Lawyers Guild statement lays out more of the case. Reed leaves out that he has already had to scale back his prosecution because the law would not sustain his original overreaching, charging attempted murder for a series of blows that resulted in no serious injury persisting for more than a few hours. Compounded by the decision he scarcely justifies of charging one of the youths as an adult. He also does not mention his history of similar bias, or his apparent conflict of interest in the matter.

I also disagree with Walters' description of his job (to lay the facts against the statutes and seek justice for victims, he says). The prosecutor's role is to vindicate societal justice by employing the criminal law, not just for victims but for everyone in the jurisdiction.

I find some aspects of his account vague: what was the criminal record of Mr. Bell that he refers to?

I get sick of officials admitting that they made a mistake, but only a PR mistake. The truth is, he did make a PR mistake, and most of the time, a PR mistake is a symptom of a bigger problem.

And he hides behind an African American federal prosecutor to imply that what he did was no different, which is horrendously misleading because most crimes, unless they happen on Indian reservations, cross state lines, or involve the government, are state crimes.

All of this appears dishonest to me. That's five things that look fishy without even starting on his facts. I don;t know the facts, but a good rule of thumb is, when you can catch 'em on what you know, expect them to be twice as dirty with what you don't.

But it's not all his fault. The judge, and lax DOJ Civil Rights apparatus that permitted all this comes in for some blame, as does the community, and the Louisiana Legislature -- can the noose display really not be a crime? Surpringly, that seems very plausible to me, because from what I can see, the criminal code there is a mess. To larger extent than in any of the midwestern states whose criminal laws I've studied, it's a big stack of specific offenses that are semi-random in what they cover.

This just in...

The Senate has just voted against a bill which would have ordered the Pentagon to assure that all U.S. servicemen and servicewomen performing in Iraq have adequate water to function. The bill would have required the armed forces in theater to maintain stores of water, or make plans to obtain water, sufficient to keep all troops there hydrated except when doing so would interfere with the military mission. The defeat of the bill was seen as the latest victory for those in favor of supporting the troops. "The signal this sends to the troops is one of no confidence in their ability to overcome thirst. The best way to bring the troops home faster is to let them win by letting the generals on the ground follow their own best judgment."

Opponents also said the bill was unconstitiutional. The Bush Administration has said that it does not believe the Congress has authority to pass legislation concerning the military, and that it considers the entire Title 50 of the United States Code, dealing with military matters, to be void.

Definition: A Gathering of Eagles

Noun. (1) A support group for the endangered species which continues to back the failed occupation of Iraq; (2) A coming together of members of this group, typically numbering in the single digits, but ranging into hundreds for exceptional occations: A Gathering of Eagles counterprotested the anti-war march.

Completely Heterosexual

It finally makes sense to me; no, wait, I'm still confused.

Larry Craig, like Ted Haggard, is completely heterosexual, although it has not yet inspired a Roy Zimmerman song. For several days, Leno has been pumping a video clip from MSNBC with anthropologist William Leap (identified as a Northwestern) professor, but I find him identified online at American U). Leap states that the Craig bathroom incident does not involve gay sex, just sex between men who are seeking sex with other men, which generates an apparent amount of skeptical laughter from the crowds in Burbank. Dan Savage helps with a CNN appearance, also referred to in his column. Some insight also comes from a seminal 1970 work, recounted, among other places, in this article. (So today, I'm actually giving some links!) Short upshot: guys who seek out sex in mensrooms are nearly all "straight-identified," rejecting the gay label and gay culture, and are disproportionately conservative, Republican men. This goes along with the well established phenomenon that among those who identify as straight, homophobia and homoerotic arousal are strongly correllated. Some experts, apparently including Leap, think Craig is not dishonest in denying he is gay, that the term is not properly applied to the deeply closeted, that it makes more sense in some ways to separate what closeted men do from what we label as gay, and that Craig may be completely sincere, although deluded, in describing himself to others as straight. At some level, he sees himself that way, never having heeded columnists like Savage, who have written a million times that, hey, guess what, if you like sex with other men or other women, that is rest-assured, straight-up, end-of-argument gay.

Should police patrol mensrooms? There're various problems justifying the patrols -- the concerns are overblown and exaggerated by prejudice; policing legitimizes the apprehension, which is counterproductive; the interest in preventing exposure to facts of life that are not inherently harmful is somewhat dubious in an open society, even where those exposed would be children; the actions employed, while not entrapment, tend in that direction; the menace at maximum is small, while most metropolitan police departments have more serious issues to worry about. None of these, save the last, is a knockout.

Is Craig a hypocrite? Not as obviously as most assume, but yes, for the reason Savage notes: he probably would have voted for tough penalties against the very thing he was caught doing. But there is no contradiction between his vile opposition to healthy gay identification and activity, on the one hand, and his inulgence in unhealthy closeted behavior on the other.

Should Craig be investigated if he does not voluntarily resign? Yes. Merely being a pervert or a hypocrite, or using his position for political self-interest are all normal. But: He insists his guilty plea, made under oath, was a perjurious lie. The police account shows an apparent attempt to use his official position to avoid the consequences of the crime. His status as a closeted man active in same-sex hookups raises a concern that he would be exposed to blackmail. Any of these could be a legitimate ground for further examination. Less seriously, he may enjoy a good roasting. Recalling his Meet the Press appearance in 1999, one can almost imagine him saying, "Yes, by all means, investigate me, censure me; I've been a bad boy, a naughty boy. I need to be disciplined."

What is the larger lesson? The conservative majority in the redstate world is not as crazy as it may seem. If you lived in that world you would see the natural appeal of conservative positions. Gay people in blue America go about leading ordinary lives, albeit coping with prejudice. In red America they are more likely to sneak off from the closet to the toilet for anonymous sex. It may seem offensive for Santorum or Scalia to liken gay sex to bestiality, but in red states, there're a lot of farms, and boys do what they will do. It's not just gays, but the risk of animal sex is a lot more present if discipline were to fail. You can see why they may be more preoccupied over there. They also have more crime, more teen pregnancies, more abortions, they draw more of their economy from the public sector, and in general suffer more of the problems that their policies claim to fix. The Republican party and allied institutions are just about the only loci in the nation where unqualified minorities are routinely given positions over better-qualified whites. Look at Clarence Thomas, or a more spectacular laughingstock, Alan Keyes. The redstate right is focused on real problems, they just have not attributed their sorry state to the spectacular failure of these policies, or noticed that these problems are less severe in the civilized world outside their own.