Via Sebastian, David Hardy offers a a nice, scholarly fisking of the Stevens dissent in Heller.

Mark Greenbaum has an uncommonly silly op-ed in today’s Los Angeles Times in which he advocates stripping the ABA of its law school accreditation process, not because of its loony-left leanings (a pretty good reason in its own right, but that’s another topic) but because it … get this … obeys antitrust law. That’s right, while most normal people accuse lawyers of behaving like a guild and protecting their own from the market place (see, e.g., Standard Mischief and Jody laying the guild trip on me a few years back over UPL issues in SC), this guy is actually complaining about the ABA not doing so. Greenbaum writes:

Remember the old joke about 20,000 lawyers at the bottom of the sea being “a good start”?

Yes, but I also remember the old jokes about lawyers charging too much. For those of us who understand the law of supply and demand, pick one. What cheaper X? Then do what you can to create a glut on the X market. Would 20,000 lawyers at the bottom of the sea be a good start? Sure it would – for us lawyers, unless we ourselves happen to be among those 20,000. Fewer competitors vs. same demand for the services I offer? I’ll take that.

Well, in an interesting twist, thousands of lawyers now find themselves drowning in the unemployment line as the legal sector is being badly saturated with attorneys.

That kinda sucks for all of us lawyers, and it really, really sucks for those trying to enter the profession now. For those who may have the need to hire an attorney, not so much. Quick, let’s get the federal government involved!
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Kudos to the Los Angeles Times for giving Patterico another year’s worth of mockworthy material. That craptastic year 2009 won’t be fully over until you RTWT.

Via Les Jones, attorney Ellen Brown argues that the recent Kansas Supreme Court decision of Landmark National Bank v. Kesler calls into question the validity of 60 million mortgages. Perhaps it does, if you put two and two together, get 1.2 million, and then assume 49 more Supreme Courts will follow suit. Otherwise, probably not.

Here’s what happened in Landmark. The borrower, Boyd Kesler, secured a first mortgage from Landmark National Bank, and a second mortgage from Millenia Mortgage Corporation. The second mortgage named Millennia as the “lender,” but identified Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc. (MERS) as acting “solely as nominee for [Millennia], and [its] successors and assigns.” The second mortgage was later transferred to Sovereign Bank, which diligently, brilliantly and competently forgot to record the transfer. So when Kesler defaulted on the first mortgage (probably the second as well, though the court doesn’t say), Landmark served notice on the two defendants it could reasonably expect to have to serve notice on: (1) Millennia, as the lender it reasonably believed to hold the note on the second mortgage (as the real holder had been too lazy, stupid and/or incompetent to record the subsequent assignment) and (2) Kesler himself.

Kesler, the borrower, knew he was in default and filed no answer. Neither did Millennia, who had sold the note to Sovereign and could therefore give a flying fig how this case turned out. Sovereign cared, of course, by they weren’t served because they had been too stupid/lazy/incompetent to record their ownership of the note when they bought it from Millennia, and had also been too stupid/lazy/incompetent to start paying attention when Kesler filed for bankruptcy 3 1/2 months earlier, naming Sovereign as a creditor. By the time Sovereign got around to answering, the foreclosure sale was over.

In a rational world, Sovereign would have simply owned up to the reality that it had screwed up royally, and was now paying for it big time. Instead, Sovereign took the concept of chutzpah to ACORN-esque levels, and effectively argued that their own failure to record the transfer of the deed meant that MERS – who, I might remind you, had never had any role on the second mortgage except as nominee for Millennia before it sold the note to Sovereign – was entitled to service of process as a nominal party independent of both Sovereign (the real party in interest now, who had no relationship to MERS) and Millennia (who, as previously noted, could now give a flying fig about the note it no longer owned), and that Landmark’s failure to serve process on MERS somehow prejudiced the rights of Sovereign, which had no relationship to MERS in this transaction except perhaps as its unrecorded nominee (or as the recorded nominee of the original lender, which was served).

If that last paragraph is a bit hard to follow, and strikes you as an aggrieved second mortgagee’s answer to the Chewbacca defense, it’s because that’s precisely what it is. Maybe if Millennia had given a flying fig about a note they no longer owned, and had wanted to help Sovereign out of the goodness of its corporate heart, it could have notified Sovereign as soon as it were served. Maybe if MERS had been served, and given a flying fig about the note they may or may not even have servicing rights to, and which had since been transferred to a lender they never had any dealings with in the first place, they too could have notified Sovereign immediately. Or maybe monkeys would have flown out of my butt. All three scenarios are distinct possibilities; none are terribly likely.

Brown rightly notes that MERS’s role as a “straw man” precluded it from being a contingently necessary party to a foreclosure action it had not brought, from which she wrongly concludes that this means MERS would not have had standing to bring a foreclosure action of its own, either. She then goes completely off the rails by arguing that no one else has standing to enforce the note, reasoning that:

MERS as straw man lacks standing to foreclose, but so does original lender, although it was a signatory to the deal.

Wrong, on two counts. First, this case is about who has “standing” (so to speak) to set aside an existing default judgment on theory that they were a “contingently necessary party” to the original action who had to have been served for the original judgment to stand, and not about who would have had standing to bring an action of their own in the first place. Big difference. Second, and more importantly, the Supremes did not rule that it was unnecessary to serve the original lender on the second mortgage (Millennia) but instead relied on the fact that process had been timely served on them. Not because they were the original lender, of course, but because they were the last recorded one.

The lender lacks standing because title had to pass to the secured parties for the arrangement to legally qualify as a “security.” The lender has been paid in full and has no further legal interest in the claim.

This case said absolute squat about the securitization of anything. Brown simply made that up out of whole cloth. Either that, or she confused security interests with securitization, two wholly unrelated concepts. I’m not sure which is worse.

Only the securities holders have skin in the game; but they have no standing to foreclose, because they were not signatories to the original agreement.

Again, Brown simply made this up. The note was transferred from one lender to another, not securitized (i.e., packaged together with many other loans and converted into a security that trades much like a stock). The court made it clear that the reason the transferee was not entitled to intervene in the case (again, not the same as lacking standing to enforce on their own) was because it had failed to record itself as the new holder of the note, not because they weren’t the signatories to the original agreement.

They cannot satisfy the basic requirement of contract law that a plaintiff suing on a written contract must produce a signed contract proving he is entitled to relief.

Sure they can, if they have the note in hand, which as far as we can tell from this decision, both Sovereign and MERS did. It seems that Brown herself has missed a pretty basic provision of contract law, namely that any contract that does not specifically forbid assignment, may be assigned to third parties, who will then have all the same rights to enforce the contract as the assignor did prior to the assignment.

UPDATE: Apparently I was a bit too hard on Sovereign for failing to record the transfer. MERS advertises on its web site that their clever arrangement “eliminates the need to prepare and record assignments when trading residential and commercial mortgage loans.” Perhaps it does, but not in Kansas.

I had originally planned a full-blown meta-fisking of JRM’s uncommonly silly fisking of Radley Balko’s recent Reason/Culture11 article on the war on drugs, but I see Radley himself has beat me to the punch and made most of the points I would have made (and some that I did make, namely that the mere fact of overall police shootings being down since 1996 is congruent with the overall drop in crime being down for the same period, not evidence for or against Radley’s premise). And Radley doesn’t need me to defend him; after all, he’s got the traffic while I’m just some dim-witted, quick-tempered, angry douchebag that nobody reads.

So rather than defending Radley (though he’s clearly got the better argument here) I’ll just say this: drugs have become a religion on both sides. On the one hand, drug prohibitionists have an annoying tendency to ignore the fact that prohibiting a substance causes the price to skyrocket, thereby creating the motive underlying most “drug-related” crime. On the other, legalization and decriminalization advocates have an equally annoying tendency to ignore the fact that repealing the prohibition (or reducing enforcement efforts) on that same substance would cause the price to plummet, thereby causing recreational use (and, inevitably, abuse) to increase. It seems as though one side of the debate can’t wrap its head around the law of supply and demand, while the other fails to grasp the law of … errrr … supply and demand. For those who do understand that raising the price of anything is bound to deter someone from doing it, it seems to me there are only three defensible positions on the legalization or prohibition of any particular drug, to wit:

1. Drug X [a variable, not a nickname for Ecstasy or any other particular drug] is so bad that it is worth reducing our civil liberties and accepting more violent crime in return for fewer people using it.
2. Drug X is bad, sure, but most people who don’t use X now have the good sense to stay away from it even if it were legal and as cheap as aspirin, so saving 3 addicts a year is NOT worth reducing our civil liberties and accepting all that crime associated with the black market.
3. Drug X is very bad, and banning it almost certainly benefits society on balance by any objective measure, but dammit, this is still supposed to be a free country, and if people want to muck up their own lives without hurting others, that’s nobody’s business but their own. [See this comment for a mirror image of this argument.]

Note that I deliberately set this up on a drug-by-drug basis, to reflect that some drugs are far worse than others. A rational person could, for example, take the view that all currently illicit drugs are bad for you, but marijuana isn’t bad enough to be worth the costs of prohibition, while cocaine probably is and PCP almost certainly is. But I don’t think there are any other rational options as to any particular drug. Do you?

Hillary Clinton Tamara Dietrich of the Newport News Daily Press pokes fun at gun owners who think Barack Obama is not a friend of gun owners.

A black man gets elected president and half the country dives for the panic room, buying up guns and squirreling away supplies like fatalists awaiting the End of Days. That’s an exaggeration, of course. Barack Obama is biracial, not black.

Lovely of Ms. Dietrich to bring up race in an article on guns, or for that matter, any other topic except … um … race. I know plenty of gun owners who fear new restrictions on their right to own or carry guns. I also know plenty of gunophobes who think guns are icky, can’t imagine why an sane person would want to own one, and would be delighted to see government take everyone else’s guns away. I do not know a single individual, however, who is in favor of having his guns taken away from a white guy, but opposed to having them taken away from a black guy. Do you? Does Dietrich? If not, what the hell point is there in bringing race up?

Further, even if race were a legitimate topic of discussion in this context, the notion that Obama’s white mother precludes him from being “black” is evidence that the infamous “one drop rule” never really went away, it just came full circle. In the days of Jim Crow, one drop of black blood meant you were black. Now, per Ms. Dietrich, one drop of white blood apparently means you can’t be. Query how many American blacks meet Ms. Dietrich’s definition of “black.” It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know why the average African-American has a lighter complexion than the average African-African. But I digress.

“Hee hee heeeee …” chortles “HG Robinson” in the very first post to reporter Peter Dujardin’s story last week on the local run on weaponry. “Clearly President Obama is looking to ban handguns and close loopholes in the law first chance he can. … You gun nuts better stock up now.”

First, Obama hasn’t said he wants to ban handguns.

His former colleague John Lott begs to differ on that, but just for grits and shins, let’s go Lambert on the guy and assume he’s lying. For all you or I know, maybe Obama never really did say he wanted to ban handguns. He did, however, write that he did, nodded when asked if he did, voted against the law stripping his home town and a few suburbs of their “right” to perosecute homeowners who use otherwise lawfully owned handguns in otherwise lawful self defense, refused to sign the Heller brief supporting a common-senes reading of the Second Amendment (or even the wishy-washy brief offered by the Bush Administration) and appointed Eric Holder, who had signed a different Heller brief advocating the “collective” (read: no) rights interpretation, a view too extreme even for the four dissenting Justices in that case. So pardon me when I refuse to take an ounce of solace from the fact that Obama supposedly never came out and said “I hereby want to ban handguns.” To the extent that actions speak louder than words, he screamed it.
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George Will offers a perfect example of why I stopped reading George Will years ago. In his latest screed he writes:

From the invasion of Iraq to the selection of Sarah Palin, carelessness has characterized recent episodes of faux conservatism.

As opposed to Real Conservatism^TM as practiced by whom? Patrick Buchanan? Andrew Sullivan? Will’s own private fantasies? Will doesn’t say, but he has made it clear over the years that he detests every nominal conservative who has either held or sought the Presidency since Reagan, so with all due respect to Mr. Will (and note that I did say “due”), there can only be so many real world examples of X that conflict with your personal concept of the “real” X before the real world becomes the real thing and your conceptions become faux.

Tuesday’s probable repudiation of the Republican Party will punish characteristics displayed in the campaign’s closing days.

Right, ‘cuz everyone is really itching to elect the real conservative, Barack Obama, not because they buy into Obama’s personality cult, as some do, and not because they are socialists or near-socialists themselves, as some are, but because they all just want to punish John McCain and the Republicans for not being conservative enough. But hey, you never know. If on Tuesday the first candidate in history to win with almost no experience on an essentially socialist platform is swept into office with a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate on the side, maybe the Democrats will interpret this as a strong mandate to become the party of Real Conservatism and limited government. And maybe monkeys will fly out of my butt.

Some polls show that Palin has become an even heavier weight in John McCain’s saddle than his association with George W. Bush.

Will doesn’t name any such polls, of course, nor does he explain what it is about the polls that supposedly show this. Before naming Palin as his running mate, McCain was down by about 10 points. If he ends up losing by significantly more than that, then sure, it would be reasonable to suggest that Palin may have been a limiting factor (though even then it wouldn’t be a slam dunk). But if the net effect of the Palin nomination is for McCain to lose the election but beat the spread, all this Beltway mumbling about Palin hurting McCain is little more than wishful thinking.

Did McCain, who seems to think that Palin’s never having attended a “Georgetown cocktail party” is sufficient qualification for the vice presidency,

Can you say “projection?” I knew you could. McCain never said anything about not having attended a Georgetown cocktail party supposedly being a qualification for anything; if that were the rule he should have nominated me, instead. What he did say was that not having attended such parties is not a disqualification. Apparently, this statement struck a nerve among Georgetown cocktail party animals.

… lift an eyebrow when she said that vice presidents “are in charge of the United States Senate”?

Probably not, but perhaps the real question should have been, “How many Georgetown cocktails must one consume in order to conclude that someone can be the President of something without being ‘in charge’ of it?

She may have been tailoring her narrative to her audience of third-graders, who do not know that vice presidents have no constitutional function in the Senate other than to cast tie-breaking votes.

Apparently, third-graders in Georgetown are taught a much more comprehensive version of civics than I ever got in high school or law school (not to mention law professors themselves). It isn’t until the fourth grade that they learn about the hidden “ha ha, just kidding” clause of Article I, Section 3 or the corresponding “ha ha, not kidding this time” clause that kicks in in the event of a tie. It’s probably not until the fifth or sixth grade that they learn about the hidden clause in Article II that assigns some unspecified executive roles to the Vice President (aside from waiting around for the President to die, be impeached or otherwise become incapacitated – inert “duties” which could just as easily deem the Speaker of the House, the Senate president pro tem, or anyone else in the presidential succession an “executive” as well).

But does she know that when Lyndon Johnson, transformed by the 1960 election from Senate majority leader into vice president, ventured to the Capitol to attend the Democratic senators’ weekly policy luncheon, the new majority leader, Montana’s Mike Mansfield, supported by his caucus, barred him because his presence would be a derogation of the Senate’s autonomy?

I didn’t know that myself, but then again, like Sarah P. I haven’t downed enough Georgetown cocktails to understand what part of the Constitution allows the Senate majority leader (a nonexistent position from a constitutional perspective) to overrule the “President” of the Senate, who in turn is forbidden to “preside” over anything until and unless a tie arises among the votes while someone else was “presiding.” And I’m not even sure I want to ask how many Georgetown cocktails I’d have to imbibe to understand how the “President pro tem” of anything could outrank its “President.” And I guess you’ll have to wait for the hangover before even asking why Vice President Lyndon Johnson even tried to attend a Senate luncheon if he too didn’t have the crazy notion that being “president” of something makes you part of it.

Perhaps Palin’s confusion about the office for which she is auditioning comes from listening to its current occupant. Dick Cheney, the foremost practitioner of this administration’s constitutional carelessness in aggrandizing executive power, regularly attends the Senate Republicans’ Tuesday luncheons. He has said jocularly that he is “a product” of the Senate, which pays his salary, and that he has no “official duties” in the executive branch.

All of which is true, but never mind that. They don’t talk about this stuff at Georgetown cocktail parties, so apparently it does not exist.

His situational constitutionalism has, however, led him to assert, when claiming exemption from a particular executive order, that he is a member of the legislative branch and, when seeking to shield certain of his deliberations from legislative inquiry, to say that he is a member of the executive branch.

Well, sure, but that kind of goes with the territory of simultaneously being “President of the Senate” by virtue of the Vice Presidency and an executive by virtue of membership in the Cabinet. If Will has a problem with that, he should be arguing, as Reynolds does, that all members of Congress including the Vice President should be forbidden to serve in the Cabinet or to work as an agent of the Executive Branch in any way. Congress can pass that law any time they want. But until they do, no law forbids anyone to wear both hats, and in fact a longstanding tradition of having Vice Presidents serve in Cabinets all but compels them to. If that doesn’t suit Will and his fellow de facto Democrats, then I’m afraid that’s just damnum absque injuria.

In a post titled “What’s Wrong With a Pit Bull,” by Christine Bowman tries to be clever in attacking Sarah “Pit Bull” Palin by comparing her to literal pit bulls. In so doing, she spewed every lie in the book about the breed itself, just to get at a Republican.

Update 9/11/08: It appears based on comments received that some readers have misconstrued my purpose in posting this article. I chose Sarah Palin’s pit bull metaphor as a means of criticizing her, as well as other GOP leaders. I had no desire to criticize pit bulls themselves. — CB

Now what on earth could have possibly given readers that impression?

Sarah Palin likes to describe herself as a pit bull. She rolled out the “pit bull in lipstick” idea in her first address to the American people, and she uses the image in her everyday stump speech.

“What’s the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull?” she asked.

“Lipstick.”

The analogy is actually a good one.

Indeed it is. Pit bulls are tenacious, and loyal to a fault. Which of course was the point Palin was making, so having confirmed as much, you can end your article here, Sweetie.

Just think about it. What images and feelings do the words “pit bull” conjure up? (… with apologies to all sweet-spirited canines)

Here you see Democrat thinking at its worst: forget verifiable facts: “images and feelings” are all that matters. If you have bad thoughts about Republicans and pit bulls, well, that must mean that they are bad, right?

* A pit bull is a programmed fighter. Its handlers throw it into the ring, and it attacks.

The other pit bull, sure. That’s what Vice Presidential candidates are supposed to do in an election season. So far, Sarah the Pit Bull seems to have done a pretty good job of that, certainly better than the Yorkshire terrier they’ve got yipping for the other side.

* A pit bull fights indiscriminately. A pit bull mauls small children, innocent neighbors. It even bites the hand that feeds it.

* A pit bull is dangerous.

Some are, sure. Some dogs of every breed are.

* A pit bull can’t be trusted.

A Democrat can’t be trusted, that’s for sure, but since when can’t a good dog be? Most dogs, pit bulls included, are WYSIWYG.

* A pit bull is mean.

Nope, no desire to criticize pit bulls there. Sweetie sez so in an update!

* A pit bull is tenacious. It never lets go.

OK, so after smearing innocent dogs just to get at an innocent Republican, you finally found the point! Congratulations, Sweetie, you can go home now. Oh wait, there’s more…

Now, we can’t say necessarily that Sarah Palin is a pit bull. It is Palin herself who is saying that.

What? You mean that when Sarah Palin gave that speech comparing herself and her fellow hockey moms to pit bulls, that was actually Palin herself doing the talking? Wow, that’s, like, a real freaky coincidence, like.

We do think it’s fair to point out that the Republican National Party — the party running Palin as their vice presidential candidate — values a dangerous, untrustworthy attack dog.

I suppose Sweetie does have a point there. After all, where would the RNC and the dextrosphere have been for the last few months if it weren’t for Andrew Sullivan, Keith Olberman and Chris Matthews? To their credit, however, none of these three have smeared pit bulls by comparing these beautiful dogs to themselves.

On August 29, 2008, the GOP made a calculated judgment. They decided they needed an attack dog as a counter-balance to the top of their ticket.

Yeah, we all know that John McCain chose Sarah Palin on the very same day he announced her nomination. Gotta hand it to both of them, those were two hells of impromptu speeches they delivered on the very same day McCain made a calculated judgment to choose a Republican as his running mate.

John McCain was trying to run for president as an honorable man, but it just wasn’t looking like a winning strategy. He wasn’t catching on. So the party elders, the K Street campaign managers, and the Karl Roves who shape GOP campaigns and GOP policy put their heads together. Enter Sarah Palin.

Hate to burst your bubble, Sweetie, but there’s nothing dishonorable about appointing a woman, or a person of either sex who is likely to appeal to members of your own party.

But is a pit bull good for America? Haven’t we Americans had our fill of pit bulls?

Xrlq 2.0 hasn’t.

Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld were unmistakable pit bulls. For better or worse, they were fierce, single-minded, and unwavering. Pit bull warriors, pit bull diplomats, pit bull economists.

Where did they lead America? Was the war they and John McCain believed in the right one?

You know, I was asking myself that very same question on September 11, 2003, when two years had passed since the infamous 9/11 attacks, and the next attack was due any day now. I asked myself the same question again on September 11, 2004, and on September 11, 2005, etc.

And how did their energy plan work out for the country? Cheney sure was tenacious in protecting his secret energy task force, but that wasn’t a case of putting “Country First,” was it?

Right, it wasn’t the Democrats who keep us from drilling offshore, in ANWR and the shale, it was those eeeeevil Republican pit bulls in Washington scheming to keep oil prices high, while sending Karl Rove out to secretly underinflate everyone’s tires and lull them into believing they won’t need a tune-up for at least 100,000 miles or so.

We now know the GOP pit bulls still in power bit off more war than they could possibly chew. They leapt into an attack on Iraq without a reasonable long-term plan or exit strategy. They ripped their teeth into the wrong enemy, and they have spilled way too much human blood.

While the Democrat Yorkies rushed into the same war, only to yelp and submit at the first nip, even if that meant leaving newly liberated Iraq to descend into civil war, followed by a terror state rivaling what existed there before.

Snarling and snapping, they created more enemies than America ever had back in 2001.

Maybe, but they seem to have done a pretty good job of keeping the one enemy at bay that mattered most in 2001.

Worst of all they turned their tail to the biggest threat in the fighting pit.

Right, ‘cuz if there’s one thing a pit bull is well-known for, it’s its tendency to turn tail and run. That’s why we need Democrat Yorkies in Washington to replace those mean ol’ Republican pit bulls.

Think about it.

I’d like to, but frankly, but with every sentence I read of this article, I feel my own IQ slip 3 or 4 points. I’d rather make it through this exercise without becoming a complete retard, so I think I’ll take a pass on actually thinking about it further.

And what do Americans really think of pit bulls? In 16 of these United States of America we have enacted or drafted laws to restrict and control pit bulls: in Florida, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Tennessee, Kentucky, Washington, Utah, Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, Colorado, Maryland, Oklahoma, Mississippi, and Kansas.

Colorado drafted a law to protect pit bulls from bigots like Bowman. It didn’t work because only Denver was passing such idiotic ordinances anyway, and as a home rule city they can ignore state law pretty much whenever they want. But leave it to a Democrat to cite the fact that other people have a bad perception about someone or something as though it were evidence that that someone or something is bad (and then to have the audacity to update the piece and deny any intent to insult the same).

That list includes a lot of states that might be up for grabs in this 2008 presidential election.

Indeed it does. Here’s hoping that of the states Bowman actually got right (as opposed to Colorado, the only one I bothered to check), voters understand that just because they may vote against allowing their next door neighbors to personally own pit bulls or nuclear weapons, that doesn’t mean we as a nation shouldn’t have either.

So what will it be? The GOP pit bulls, or a Democrat who thinks like a diplomat?

A better question is, would we rather have a Republican who barks at our enemies to keep them at bay, or a Democrat who barks at us? Fortunately or unfortunately, I can’t think of a dog breed that warrants a comparison to “malaise” Democrats, so rather than smearing innocent dogs I’ll skip the analogy.

Voters can say no to the GOP pit bulls here and now.

Indeed, we can vote out the tenacious fighters and replace them with wimps who cut and run at the first sign of trouble. The question is, why on earth would we want to?

No more pit bull campaigning.

Meaning: no more criticizing The One. The other side’s pit bulls are free to attack as often as they like.

No pit bull foreign policy.

Meaning: no more tenacious fighters, let’s bring in the new ones who are all bark and no bite.

Democrats. Wrong on literal pit bulls, wrong on figurative ones.

In yesterday’s Human Events Online, the usually sensible John Hawkins offers a piss-poor defense of the War on Some Drugs. Hawkins writes:

Libertarians often attack the war on drugs as a waste of tax dollars and an infringement on personal liberties. That is misguided thinking that comes from trying to apply unworkable theoretical concepts in the real world.

Either that, or it is “misguided” thinking that comes from trying to examine the actual effects of a government program, rather than judging it according to its proponents’ intentions. Libertarians also attack the war on poverty. Is that misguided thinking that comes from a theoretical concept that poverty is a good thing (“povertarianism,” perhaps)? [Yes, some looneytarians also attack the war on terror, but that's another issue altogether. If you think you can defend yourself against terrorists as easily as you can against drugs, try "just saying no" to a terrorist sometime.]

For example, you often hear advocates of drug legalization say that we’re never going to win the war on drugs and that it would free up space in our prisons if we simply legalized drugs. While it’s true that we may not ever win the war against drugs — i.e. never entirely eradicate the use of illegal drugs — we’re not ever going to win the war against murder, robbery and rape either.

Here we have a cheap attempt to score a rhetorical point with a creative definition. Of course we will never completely eradicate anything. World War II went a long way toward rolling back fascism around the world, but it didn’t eradicate it completely, and no one argues as a result that the War on the Axis Powers was a failur.e. A more sensible working definition of “winning” is improving the status quo. Banning drugs almost certainly causes some potential users to go or stay straight. It also causes a hell of a lot of violent crime, and probably causes its share of police corruption as well. The question is how much crime and how much of our civil liberties we are willing to give up, in exchange for how much of a reduction of drug abuse. If you think the trade-off is a good one, the War on Some Drugs is already being won. If you think it’s a bad trade-off, it’s not, and query whether it ever can be.
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Others wiser than I have often said, Never wrestle with a douche, it wastes your time, annoys the douche, and leaves you feeling disturbingly “fresh.” Being less wise than them, by definition, I’m going to go against my better judgment and take on the Biggest Douche in the Blogosphere one last time before I MoveOn. Why, you might ask? One reason, and one reason only: far too many on the left side of the blogosphere actually seem to admire the guy, and quote him as though he were a credible source. His widely quoted attack on right wing bloggers for attacking that psycho Deb Frisch is as good a post as any to establish that he is not.

I should warn you upfront that this post is going to be an extremely tedious read. If, after reading Patterico’s rebuttal you are already convinced that Glenn is a douche, then it may not be worth your while reading this post to examine just how many different angles of douchitude he has exhibited in the post. If, on the other hand, you’re like Greenwald’s fawn, Q&O commenter Mona, who insists that apart from one itsy bitsy boo-boo about Patterico, Greenwald’s crap is ice cream, then it behooves you to read it. Mona writes:

My view is that Greenwald’s post is correct, but contains one example that is not. And that is my view whether folks here announce him decimated, or folks there crown him Pope.

Did I say “apart from one itsy bitsy boo-boo?” Actually, later in that same thread she attempted to wish even that error away, arguing that a 2 1/2 year old link by a then-obscure blogger makes Greenwald’s identified boner fake but accurate:

But a commenter at Greenwald’s just posted some items from your blog that cause me to question whether I was a tad quick in assuming you’d been wronged. You are familiar with Misha; you welcomed him to your own place, and described his blog as great.

Yeah, and the same frickin’ post also describes yours truly as “a luminary,” so take that for whatever it’s worth. Mona continues:

You did that while referencing — with no criticism and a hearty welcome — Misha’s eliminationist rhetoric about judges stated in your own comments section.

Apparently, subtlety is lost on Mona, who took Patterico’s reference to “the always controversial Emperor Misha I” as … what, exactly? A backhanded compliment? Memo to Mona: when people respond to your brilliant insights by rolling their eyes and saying “O……kay,” that doesn’t really mean they are “okay” with what you just said. It means they are being polite. Patterico the power-blogger probably wouldn’t be that polite nowadays, but as a then-obscure blogger who was barely cutting his teeth, he was a bit of a wimp toward other, already established bloggers like Misha. So what? Even if he hadn’t distanced himself from Misha’s goofy rhetoric at all, WTF has any of that to do with his more recent criticism of Frisch’s psychotic ramblings?

Adding a final dose of irony, Mona topped off her rant with this:

In light of the foregoing, I’m not so sure you are in a good position to be leveling charges of “dishonesty” at Greenwald.

O-kay. Er… I mean … that’s the word, coming from the always controversial Mona.

Of course, if Mona were just one random commenter, pointing out that Greenwald’ post is garbage from top to bottom might not be a worthwhile endeavor. Unfortunately, she’s far from his only sycophant. TGirsch, a normally sensible if left-wing blogger quoted him on this very blog, as a supposed rebuttal to a post of mine that said nothing about Frisch’s politics at all, apart from my use of the category “Liberal Morons” to file it. Even Jon Henke, no moonbat he, offers this pig a healthy dose of lipstick. So all in all, Greenwald gets a hell of a lot more traction than your average douche does, even after his most obvious error – attacking Patterico for not criticizing the likes of Ann Coulter – had been exposed. Thus, it’s worth wading through his entire post just to see how much of his ramblings hold up. Short answer: not much. Longer answer: some right-wingers support the death penalty, at least one right-winger has Misha on his blogroll but failed to condemn his hyperbolic rhetoric within the permissible 10 hour timeframe, and most (but not all) of Greenwald’s links actually point to other web sites.

Proceed at your own risk.
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