Your humble Blog Goliard has taken some time to tardily commit his thoughts on the Libyan situation to paper (er…okay, to electrons); and it has been a bit of a struggle to reconcile an “I told you so” tone with the whole practicing-humility aspect of Lent.

That would be because it has been clear to this observer, since the day the Arab League called for action against Libya (said action to be taken by others for them, of course) that a heel turn was coming. Recent news reports indicate that this turn—from inciting the intervention in Libya to opposing and undermining it—is already underway. It may be coming a skosh sooner than some might have guessed; but in no other sense does any politically-aware grownup has any excuse to be surprised by this.

Why would the members of the Arab League have chosen to call upon us, and wait passively for us to act, if they were so deeply concerned for the well-being of their Libyan brethren? Have they not planes and ships and tanks of their own? (Of course they do. We sold these things to them ourselves.) Are they not capable of striking against their enemies without the assistance, or even approval, of anyone outside their circle? (Of course they are. Just ask Israel.)

But they are not lifting a finger militarily, and have no intention of doing so, because the fate of Libya’s “rebels” is a secondary consideration…one is even tempted to call it a pretext. Instead, foremost in their minds is the glorious opportunity they have been given to draw the United States and its allies into a trap. (Cue Admiral Akbar.)

Once the cruise missiles and bombs started falling, it was inevitable that a large enough share of them would come directly from U.S. aircraft and ships that it wouldn’t matter to the Arab world how many of our allies were also involved, or even technically “leading” operations. The average person in the Arab world would see this as a Yankee military action, full stop, and any and all collateral damage would be charged entirely to Uncle Sam’s account.

It was inevitable that such damage would ensue…and even more inevitable that Qaddafi’s goons would work to both maximize real collateral damage (you think his Tripoli compounds became crowded with civilians by happenstance?) and spin fanciful tales of invented carnage for the eager consumption of the Arab street.

Which would be all the Arab League would need to start their turn. “Yes, we called for a no-fly zone, but we didn’t mean for them to do this” is their opening line, but it is just the start. It won’t take long before they join Qaddafi and Putin (!) in baying about infidel crusaders spilling Muslim blood.

Here’s what we should have done, in your humble Blog Goliard’s opinion. When the Arab League called for action, we ought to have applauded them, and offered to rearm, refuel, and repair any of their fighter jets employed in the fight against Qaddafi, free of charge, at any airbase of ours or theirs they might find it expedient to use.

We would then have needed to set our diplomats to work crafting appropriately unctuous and rueful statements for release in the coming days and weeks, expressing our deep regret that the Arab League never took us up on our offer, and instead sat on their keisters while the people of Benghazi who are so dear to their hearts faced terror and massacre…which we join them in deploring in the strongest possible terms.

But no. That would require us both to correctly identify and to fully understand our enemies. It would also require us to be able to think at least two or three moves ahead. (Though right now, I’d be grateful for signs that they were thinking even one move ahead. Doesn’t anybody up there in D.C. know how to play this game?)

P.S. Looking forward now, here’s a question yours truly hasn’t seen asked yet. Let’s say we luck out, and the allied air campaign does soon lead to the complete triumph of the “rebels” in Libya. Suppose also that this victory leads to vicious reprisals (as victories of irregular forces tend to do) against Qaddafi’s supporters, collaborators, suspected supporters and collaborators, and also the odd innocent Tripolean or two…or hundred…or thousand. Do we then resume our air campaign, this time against Qaddafi’s vanquishers? And to whom will we then be able to look, to help us get rid of them?

The good folks at NRO’s Phi Beta Cons have taken notice of some of the problems in legal education, and today they link to a piece in the Washington Examiner where a Harvard Law grad (natch) argues for abolishing law schools…or, more realistically, for making them optional.

NRO’s George Leef comments, “Law school is a high barrier to entry that does not ensure competence, but simply drives way up the cost of entering the legal profession.”

Fair enough. Your humble Blog Goliard agrees that much of law school is pointless, and that reforms are badly needed.

But is it really a good idea to be reducing barriers to entry to a profession that is already way, way, way, way, way, way, way oversupplied with people?

The bottom line is, it is at once way too easy, and way too expensive, to become a licensed attorney. We need to raise the barriers, while at the same time making them more cost-efficient and also more tightly bound to actual competence to practice law.

My dream proposal would be the following:

1. 1) State bars shall no longer give any weight to ABA accreditation of law schools.
2. 2) Nor shall they, nor anyone else, give any consideration to US News rankings. Anyone who knows anything has known for a long time now that the whole business is fraudulent. Kill the rankings now…kill them with fire!
3. 3) The one-year law school model—which maverick schools were already pioneering, before the dead hand of the ABA started weighing down innovation and diversity in methods and approaches—shall be revived, even by some well-established institutions.
4. 4) State bars shall admit individuals to the bar exam upon the presentation of:
5. 1. a) A diploma from any law school that the bar, in its sole discretion, considers acceptable. The bar could maintain a list of schools considered acceptable in all cases; a list of schools considered unacceptable in all cases (and be bold about it! if a school’s bar passage rates have stunk for years, put them on this list!); and then allow a graduate of absolutely any other institution anywhere to petition individually to have his or her degree accepted.
   2. b) A certificate of completion from a reputable bar-preparation company. As with the previous item, I would suggest keeping a continually-updated list of acceptable and unacceptable firms.
   3. c) Proof of a certain amount of time spent as an apprentice, clerk, intern, or paralegal, accompanied by the endorsement of one of a select number of longtime members of the bar, to whom will be appointed the task of evaluating lawyers-in-training and their readiness to take the bar exam and enter practice.
6. 5) The bar exam shall be made considerably longer and vastly harder; and the greatest share of time (and largest portion of the grade) shall be devoted to applied tests of practical lawyerly skills. (For instance: “Good morning and welcome to day five of the bar exam. Each of you is being handed a packet which contains details of a fictional married couple with children. Your task is to provide the family with appropriate wills, along with any other estate planning and advance directive documents which may be appropriate. These documents will be due at three o’clock.”)

Comment threads and blogs have been exploding in response to Kay Hymowitz’s article in the WSJ. “Not so long ago, the average American man in his 20s had achieved most of the milestones of adulthood: a high-school diploma, financial independence, marriage and children,” she notes; and that this is no longer the case is obviously and rightly a cause of great grief and frustration for many women.

However, though it seems de rigeur these days to allow the concerns and perspectives of women to overshadow others, let us be sure to take a complete look at the situation from the male perspective; and in particular how much harder it is for today’s man in his 20s to achieve the education, financial independence, marriage, and fatherhood (not mere baby-daddy-hood, which is depressingly easy to attain) than for the most recent generations of his forebears.

Given the following:

1. a) The economy continues to transform in ways unfriendly to the “living wage” and many workers, and the Boomers are busy pulling up the ladder after themselves, making long-term job prospects grim, even for men with multiple degrees under their belts. Also, while women still face subtle discrimination in a dwindling number of areas, non-minority men face overt discrimination in a growing number.
2. b) A high school diploma, while still free through public schools, doesn’t get one very far these days; and as for higher education, even as its returns have diminished its costs have exploded. Many people are now forking over a sizeable portion of their paychecks to the student loan companies well into their forties.
3. c) Student loan burdens are high, and housing is still unaffordably expensive post-bubble, while mortgages have gotten much more difficult to obtain. Taken together with ruinous (and non-dischargeable!) student loans, this makes it notably harder than in the past for a freshly-minted college graduate to find his way to anything more than either a crash pad or moving back in with the parents.
4. d) Cultural cues tell us that immature, foolish, and stupid men are the norm, and manly virtues are either forgotten or proscribed or in a state of complete confusion. The ubiquity of “idiot-man adverts” is just one easily spotted manifestation of this.
5. e) Female empowerment has had certain side-effects; for instance, empowering women to be demanding, self-centered, and unforgiving, with unrealistic expectations; and empowering them to elevate female friends (sometimes along with the ever-popular gay male mascot) above all others—including any man they might marry, whom it is all too easy to relegate to the status of a junior partner.
6. f) Women are much more eager to get married than to stay married. Your humble Blog Goliard knows all too many good guys who married, tried—albeit imperfectly—to please their wives and be the men they wanted, stayed away from the worst vices, had children with them…and then wound up kicked to the curb or abandoned at the wife’s whim. (Refer to e) above: girlfriends are for life, men are disposable.) This is a very, very common story these days.

Given all of this, why not take a slacker McJob, share a crash pad with some buddies, and retreat to a world of videogames, TV, beer, hookups, and porn?

The American ideology of work—which underlies so much of the up-by-the-bootstraps advice one receives when one has fallen on hard times—generally holds that hard work is not only a necessary cause of success, but very nearly a sufficient cause.

Your humble Blog Goliard dissents. Hard work is highly correlated with success, yes. But much like intelligence and any number of virtues, it is not necessary…and is nowhere near sufficient.

The American ideology of work also holds that hard work is not only productive in se but virtuous in se.^* Again, I agree that there is often a strong correlation. But again, I dissent.

All of us have surely had colleagues who spent ridiculous amounts of time in the office or the library, spinning their hamster wheels so very hard, but to very little benefit. And all of us can surely think of any number of people who have worked tremendously hard to accomplish great evil.

What, she’s still around?

Apparently she is…but not for much longer, not on the radio anyhow. Because, as she told Larry King (what, he’s still around?), she has decided against renewing her contract, as she is tired of not being able to fully exercise her First Amendment rights.

Some of the usual suspects have responded with their usual lectures about what the First Amendment is and is not. It’s clear enough what she was trying to convey, though: Dr. Laura wishes to be able to exercise her First Amendment rights without worrying about blowback from her sponsors. Fair enough. Even those of us of a vastly more modest station, such as your humble Blog Goliard, can experience frustration over the things we would wish to say but cannot. And he can summon up a small bit of sympathy for a woman who has for years faced a relentless campaign against her…one that has shown itself capable of the same hate and intolerance it accuses her of having.

But only a small bit. For one thing, no one forced her into the arena. For another, she’s held on to her nationally-syndicated radio show for, what, 15-20 years? Put out a newsletter and numerous books that sold scads of copies? Had a TV show for awhile?

Yes, it would just kill your humble Blog Goliard to have such severe obstacles in his way when all he seeks is the freedom to speak his mind and the ability to have his little voice heard for once. (And that’s not even mentioning the added inhumanity of being paid millions of dollars to face those challenges.)

There have always been plenty of reasons to politely decline Dr. Laura Schlessinger’s offers of moral advice. Now there’s at least one more.

Today is the 90th anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment.

It is an occasion for your humble Blog Goliard to remark upon two things.

First, he would like to remind the rest of America (especially those who love to look down their noses at the rubes out in flyover country…even if they’re not entirely sure where Idaho or Iowa are, or even if they’re the same state or not) that we in the Mountain West were way ahead of you here.

Second, he would like to reiterate his main point from two posts prior (The Obsolescence of Article V). If it required a Constitutional Amendment to extend the voting franchise to women (or to extend it to 18-year-olds, or to end the poll tax), then it should absolutely require an Amendment for the Federal government to require states to expand or modify the scope and terms of marriage, or even to enshrine marriage in civil law in the first place.

This is stated so broadly because this is not a point that pertains only to same-sex unions. If the Federal government wishes to create same-sex unions, or legalize polygamy, or establish uniform national standards for age of consent or consanguinity, or compel states to either grant or deny annulments and divorces under certain circumstances, or anything else of the kind, it may only do so if the States relinquish to the Federal government the general police powers reserved to them under our system of government (see Amendment X).

And the only legitimate way to do that is to pass a Constitutional Amendment.

Tony Blair, the former Prime Minister, has announced that he will be donating his £4.6 million advance and all royalties from his memoir to a charity for injured British servicemen.

In response to this news, many of of our British cousins seem to be blowing a gasket. They howl in the tabloids and on social media about grievances real (underfunding and underequipping the troops) and imagined (the “lied us into” an “illegal” war canard) and everything in between. It’s as if they are opposed to this donation as a matter of principle—as if it were inseparable from everything they hated about his premiership, and because of that malum in se.

These are probably some of the same people who always insisted that Mother Teresa should have refused donations from the likes of Zaïre’s Mobutu…presumably she ought to have insisted that the money remain in his Swiss bank accounts, or be used to buy another armored Mercedes, instead. I am quite comfortable taking Blessed Teresa’s side of that argument. Similarly, in this context I don’t really care how much people may hate Tony Blair, or even how good their reasons may be for doing so. The man is giving a pile of money, which he earned and would be perfectly free to keep, to a good cause. Applaud that today; resume the Two Minutes Hate tomorrow.

Unless, of course, it just drives you too crazy to see someone whom you find repulsive turn around and do something good. If a bad man doing good (assuming arguendo that Blair is bad to the core) is such a grave violation of your categories that it outweighs the good the donation will do, then by all means continue to blow and rage and howl. You might just help keep something like it from happening in future…and then won’t you be so proud?

Your humble Blog Goliard was disappointed, but not surprised, by the utterly lawless decision issued last week in Perry v. Schwarzenegger. Plenty of people have had plenty to say about it in reaction, and there’s little need to add to it here. One thing that does strike one, however, is how much things have changed since 1971, when the 26th Amendment was ratified.

The marriage of same-sex couples is a notion which virtually every human being who has ever lived up until about five minutes ago—including the vast majority of homosexuals up until about fifteen minutes ago—regarded as an absurd impossibility, on the exceedingly rare occasions they had cause to regard the idea at all. If it is possible for courts to now rule that the Constitution affirmatively requires the states, God knoweth how, to marry same-sex couples, then how many of the post-Bill of Rights Amendments would today’s politicians (both the ones in Congress, and the ones wearing robes) have found necessary and bothered to enact?

• 13th: Slavery is self-evidently evil. If that can’t be declared unconstitutional based on Kennedyesque meditations on the nature of liberty and the sheer wrongness of a particular violation of it, then nothing can.


• 15th, 19th, 24th, 26th: No contemporary court would need an explicit Constitutional remit to determine that universal adult suffrage was essential to American (and even global) principles of democracy, or to order Federal and state governments to implement it.


• 18th, 21st: In a world where Wickard v. Filburn is good law, it seems flat-out bizarre that Amendments were thought needed to enable Congress to ban, un-ban, or otherwise regulate a controlled substance. Heck, with the latitude Federal agencies have nowadays (see the EPA’s CO₂ power grab), it’s quaint even to think that a specific statute like the Volstead Act would be strictly necessary today.


• 16th: If the Warren Court was able to abolish the death penalty despite explicit reference to capital crimes in the Constitution (cf. Amendment V), then I’d give at least even money that today’s courts would let Congress enact an income tax by simple statute despite what is written in Art. I Sec. 9.


• 23rd: Plenty of people on Capitol Hill seem to be perfectly okay with the idea of giving D.C. seats in Congress without an Amendment. Why wouldn’t that also hold true for allocating it electoral votes?

Note also the quaint final Section added to many of these Amendments: “The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.” Yeah, like Congress has needed, or cared about, express grants of powers these past 70 years or so…

It’s another interesting and frustrating election night for Blog Goliard—his state of residence has that pesky runoff system—and so he’s given to meditating once again on the wisdom/foolishness/randomness/inscrutability of the American electorate.

In recent times there have been plenty of rumblings of everything from tea tempests to crypto-revolution. But this election night, plenty of the usual skeevy and mediocre and crooked and dumb characters are managing to crawl home to victory like they always do. As a whole, American voters may indeed be fed up and angry and frustrated. But they’re not yet fully awake either.

As I’ve long said: we’ll know the voters are finally serious when name recognition becomes a bad thing. Until then, expect pretty much more of the same.

In the meantime, your humble Blog Goliard is expanding his existing pledge to cast no ballot, for the foreseeable future, in favor of any incumbent Congresscritter who has already served at least one full term. This pledge shall now encompass all statewide offices as well. May he meekly suggest that you, gentle reader, think seriously about doing likewise? (Or are you content with the officeholders you’ve got now?)

Your humble Blog Goliard welcomes the recent debate over the issue of birthright citizenship, especially if it winds up opening the issue of wrong-turns we have taken in interpreting the Fourteenth Amendment more generally.

Reforming birthright citizenship would, however, merely address a symptom of the overall immigration problem—as, for that matter, would a tightening of border security. To attack the root of the problem would require addressing the welfare state on one hand, and the question of national identity and cohesion on the other.

Given the current state of affairs and the contours of the debate, I am very much in the restrictionist camp; I believe it is my only choice. But I could learn to stop worrying and love open borders, if I could be assured of five things:

• No alien will be granted admittance to, or allowed to remain in, the United States if they have a criminal record in any country that contains anything more serious than a speeding ticket. (Exceptions made for political prisoners and similarly persecuted persons, provided they can demonstrate they are fundamentally peaceful and law-abiding.)


• Everyone who comes here must hold down a job or operate a viable business.


• Non-citizens are forbidden from receiving any sort of public assistance whatsoever. (Exceptions made for medical care in a bona-fide extreme emergency, and for one-way transportation back to one’s native country.)


• Naturalization will not become, in any significant way, any faster or easier to attain than it is now.


• Anyone intending on long-term residence must learn English and plan on their children speaking English as at least a co-native tongue. They must also learn America’s history and heroes and guiding principles—and if they aspire to be citizens, learn to revere them above all the symbols and totems and mores of the old country.

A fellow can dream, can’t he?