A Quiz

OK, let's see what you know. Nothing too hard, mind you, but tricky. What do the following antebellum American politicians have in common?









David R. Atchison (Missouri)
John Bell (Tennessee)
John M. Berrien (Georgia)
John Minor Botts (Virginia)
William G. "Parson" Brownlow (Tennessee)
John M. Clayton (Delaware)
Schuyler Colfax (Indiana)
John J. Crittenden (Kentucky)
Andrew Curtin (Pennsylvania)
Millard Fillmore (New York)
John P. Hale (New Hampshire)
Eugenius Aristides Nisbet (Georgia)
Godlove Orth (Indiana)
Thaddeus Stevens (Pennsylvania)
Henry Wilson (Massachusetts)
Felix Zollicoffer (Tennessee)

The Secret Ballot

At the Volokh Conspiracy, Jonathan Adler recently posted a short item indicating that electronic voting machines might generate information that would allow officials to identify who voted for whom.

Which got me thinking . . . where does the idea of the secret ballot come from, and why is it such an article of faith today? Jonathan called even the possible breach of secrecy "disturbing." But why?

To the best of my knowledge, before the Civil War voting was an intensely public act. The best description of the process of voting before the War that I have read is contained in a book by Christopher Olsen, which focuses on Mississippi. There, particularly in rural areas, the local polling station was often a local plantation house. The senior election inspectors, appointed by the county board of police, were respected local citizens, often the owner of the plantation and other neighborhood planters. The assistants and clerks who checked election records and recorded votes might be their sons or the sons of other planters, usually in their twenties and making their entry into the public sphere.

Parties and candidates printed their own ballots, with only that party's candidates named. The ballots were often different colors or sizes, making them easily recognizable. As the voter approached the porch, ballot in hand, the owner might well greet him by name and shake his hand, ask for his family or comment on the weather, and offer him food and drink. The other inspectors would do likewise. They might also introduce the voter, if he were relatively new to the area, to the younger members of the gentry who were serving as clerks.

After a clerk checked his name against the county records, the voter then handed his ballot to the returning officer, also a wealthy member of the local gentry. The officer certainly knew at a glance which candidate's ballot he was receiving. In addition, because most preprinted ballots did not name candidates for all offices (particularly the myriad of local offices), some voters might ask for help in writing additional names on the ballots they were turning in. The returning officer then took the ballot and placed it in the box.

In short, one's vote was not secret in the slightest: in excess of a dozen members of the local gentry might know which candidate's ballot was being cast. Nor is there any evidence that anyone thought that voting should be secret, or believed that that fact impinged in the slightest the democratic nature of Mississippi society. Voting was a public, ceremonial act, not a private one.

I have no doubt that voting in say, New York City or Springfield, Illinois, differed dramatically in many respects. But I have no reason to believe that it was not equally public and not secret.

All of which brings me back to the initial question. Why and how did it become such a bedrock article of faith that the secret ballot is an essential element of democracy? More importantly, does that assumption stand up to scrutiny?

The Death of Maximinus Daia

The other death, after that of Galerius, that seems to have given Lactantius the most delight, was that of Maximinus Daia.

Daia -- full name Gaius Valerius Galerius Maximinus -- was born circa 270. The son of Galerius's sister, he was adopted by Galerius. When Galerius became Augustus in 305, Daia became Caesar.

During the incredibly confusing series of maneuvers following the death of Constantius I Chlorus in 306, Daia vied for power against Maxentius, Severus, Licinius and Constantius' son Constantine. Since Constantine is known to history as "the Great," you may suspect that Daia did not prevail.

His end came in 313. On April 30 his army was crushed by that of Licinius near Perinthus, in what is now Thracian Turkey. Daia fled first to Nicomedia, and then to Tarsus, in Cilicia (on what is now the south-central Turkish coast). There, according to Lactantius, Daia poisoned himself, probably in July or August 313. Lactantius gleefully reports that Daia died only after suffering excruciating torment:

There [in Tarsus], being hard pressed both by sea and land, [Daia] despaired of finding any place for refuge; and in the anguish and dismay of his mind, he sought death as the only remedy of those calamities that God had heaped on him. But first he gorged himself with food, and large draughts of wine, as those are wont who believe that they eat and drink for the last time; and so he swallowed poison. However, the force of the poison, repelled by his full stomach, could not immediately operate, but it produced a grievous disease, resembling the pestilence; and his life was prolonged only that his sufferings might be more severe.

And now the poison began to rage, and to burn up everything within him, so that he was driven to distraction with the intolerable pain; and during a fit of frenzy, which lasted four days, he gathered handfuls of earth, and greedily devoured it.

Having undergone various and excruciating torments, he dashed his forehead against the wall, and his eyes started out of their sockets. And now, become blind, he imagined that he saw God, with His servants arrayed in white robes, sitting in judgment on him. He roared out as men on the rack are wont, and exclaimed that not he, but others, were guilty. In the end, as if he had been racked into confession, he acknowledged his own guilt, and lamentably implored Christ to have mercy upon him. Then, amidst groans, like those of one burnt alive, did he breathe out his guilty soul in the most horrible kind of death.

A Bountiful Harvest

Thank God I have a 79 year old mother in law who labors like a serf.

Lions and Crocodiles and Buffalo, Oh My!

I know, I know, nature videos are a dime a dozen. Watch this one anyway.

Lactantius

Lucius Caecilius Firmianus Lactantius (c. 250 - c. 325) was a rhetorician from North Africa who became a convert to Christianity. I recently ran across Lactantius' De Mortibus Persecutorum, which has got to be one of the stranger works ever written. As the title suggests ("On the Deaths of the Persecutors"), the work concerns itself with the manner in which various persecutors of Christians died. What the title does not convey is the glee with which Lanctantius recounts the stories he relates.

In the 280s and 290s, the Emperor Diocletian realized that the Roman Empire was too big for any one man. In order to address this, as well as the secession problem, which had bedeviled the Empire from its inception, Diocletian created the Tetrarchy. He appointed a trusted general, Maximian, as co-ruler, bearing the title Augustus. The two Augusti then appointed sub-emperors, titled Caesari. Diocletian appointed as his Caesar the general Galerius (full name Gaius Galerius Valerius Maximianus). (Maximian appointed as his Caesar Constantius, the father of Constantine the Great.)

In 305, Diocletian and Maximian retired as Augusti. and Galerius and Constantius moved up and became the new Augusti, or co-emperors. The latter, in turn, appointed new Caesari. Diocletian and Galerius were primarily responsible for the eastern half of the Empire. Maximian and Constantius were primarily responsible for the western part.

Meanwhile, beginning in 303, what Chistians call the "great persecution" began. In fact, the vigor with which Christians were persecuted varied greatly in different parts of the empire. Galerius seems to have been the only one of the four tetrarchs who pursued the persecution with unrestrained zeal. As a result, Galerius became despised by Christians in general, and by Lactantius in particular.

Galerius died in the year 311. Scholars have speculated that it was some form of bowel cancer. Whatever it was, Lactantius described the progression of the disease with gleeful delight:

And now, when Galerius was in the eighteenth year of his reign, God struck him with an incurable plague. A malignant ulcer formed itself low down in his secret parts, and spread by degrees. The physicians attempted to eradicate it, and healed up the place affected. But the sore, after having been skinned over, broke out again; a vein burst, and the blood flowed in such quantity as to endanger his life. The blood, however, was stopped, although with difficulty. The physicians had to undertake their operations anew, and at length they cicatrized the wound. In consequence of some slight motion of his body, Galerius received a hurt, and the blood streamed more abundantly than before. He grew emaciated, pallid, and feeble, and the bleeding then stanched. The ulcer began to be insensible to the remedies applied, and a gangrene seized all the neighbouring parts. It diffused itself the wider the more the corrupted flesh was cut away, and everything employed as the means of cure served but to aggravate the disease.

“The masters of the healing art withdrew.”

Then famous physicians were brought in from all quarters; but no human means had any success. Apollo and Æsculapius were besought importunately for remedies: Apollo did prescribe, and the distemper augmented. Already approaching to its deadly crisis, it had occupied the lower regions of his body: his bowels came out, and his whole seat putrefied. The luckless physicians, although without hope of overcoming the malady, ceased not to apply fomentations and administer medicines. The humours having been repelled, the distemper attacked his intestines, and worms were generated in his body. The stench was so foul as to pervade not only the palace, but even the whole city; and no wonder, for by that time the passages from his bladder and bowels, having been devoured by the worms, became indiscriminate, and his body, with intolerable anguish, was dissolved into one mass of corruption.

“Stung to the soul, he bellowed with the pain,
So roars the wounded bull.”

They applied warm flesh of animals to the chief seat of the disease, that the warmth might draw out those minute worms; and accordingly, when the dressings were removed, there issued forth an innumerable swarm: nevertheless the prolific disease had hatched swarms much more abundant to prey upon and consume his intestines. Already, through a complication of distempers, the different parts of his body had lost their natural form: the superior part was dry, meagre, and haggard, and his ghastly-looking skin had settled itself deep amongst his bones while the inferior, distended like bladders, retained no appearance of joints. These things happened in the course of a complete year; and at length, overcome by calamities, he was obliged to acknowledge God, and he cried aloud, in the intervals of raging pain, that he would re-edify the Church which he had demolished, and make atonement for his misdeeds; and when he was near his end, he published an edict of the tenor following [the edict in effect decriminalized Christianity].

Galerius, however, did not, by publication of this edict, obtain the divine forgiveness. In a few days after he was consumed by the horrible disease that had brought on an universal putrefaction.

Did Millard Fillmore Ever Endorse the Wilmot Proviso?

Here's a little mystery.

Elbert Smith asserts several times in his The Presidencies of Zachary Taylor & Millard Fillmore that, before he was nominated for the vice presidency in 1848, Fillmore expressed support for the Wilmot Proviso. For example, on page 165, Smith asserts that "Fillmore had once been a vocal supporter of the Wilmot Proviso, but listening to Clay and Webster eloquently denounce it [during the senate debates leading to the Compromise of 1850] . . . had undoubtedly helped influence him to consider it as unnecessary." On page 23, Smith states that "Conscience Whigs [at the 1848 Whig convention] . . . knew that Fillmore had consistently supported the Wilmot Proviso."

Are these statements true? Michael Holt seems to disagree.

In his The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party (pp. 357-58), Holt describes efforts of Democrats to locate "incriminating evidence" on Fillmore. They found some. Among other things, Fillmore "had consistently voted against the gag rule." In addition, "they found and printed an 1838 Fillmore letter to abolitionists endorsing congressional abolition of both slavery in the District of Columbia and the interstate slave trade."

What southern Democrats did not find, apparently, was any evidence that Fillmore had ever endorsed the Wilmot Proviso. "Southern Whigs . . . bombarded Fillmore with questions after the convention about whether he had ever publicly endorsed the Proviso, and they expressed enormous relief when he replied he had not."

Conceivably, with a lot of stretching, these statement are reconcilable. Perhaps Fillmore privately endorsed the Proviso to friends, but left no public paper trail. Alternatively, perhaps Smith or his source took Fillmore's letter endorsing abolition of the interstate slave trade as roughly equivalent to endorsement of the Proviso. Or perhaps Holt simply fails to tell us that Fillmore's denial was a lie (although I find that hard to believe).

Can anyone out there solve the mystery?

Elagabalus

"Aurelius Zoticus, a native of Smyrna, whom they also called 'Cook,' after his father's trade, incurred the emperor [Elagabalus's] thorough love and thorough hatred, and for the latter reason his life was saved. This Aurelius not only had a body that was beautiful all over, seeing that he was an athlete, but in particular he greatly surpassed all others in the size of his private parts. This fact was reported to the emperor by those who were on the look-out for such things, and the man was suddenly whisked away from the games and brought to Rome, accompanied by an immense escort, larger than Abgarus had had in the reign of Severus or Tiridates in that of Nero. He was appointed cubicularius [bed-chamber servant] before he had even been seen by the emperor, was honoured by the name of the latter's grandfather, Avitus, was adorned with garlands as at a festival, and entered the palace lighted by the glare of many torches. Sardanapalus [Elagabalus], on seeing him, sprang up with rhythmic movements, and then, when Aurelius addressed him with the usual salutation, "My Lord Emperor, Hail!" he bent his neck so as to assume a ravishing feminine pose, and turning his eyes upon him with a melting gaze, answered without any hesitation: 'Call me not Lord, for I am a Lady.'"

Roman troops killed Elagabalus, together with his mother, when he was just eighteen years of age. Their heads were cut off and their bodies dragged through the streets and then thrown into the Tiber.

Millard Fillmore: 1848 Presidential Candidate?

I have repeatedly expressed my admiration for Millard Fillmore, and so was delighted to see Big Mo’s post outlining the career and character of our 13th president. I wholeheartedly agree, for example, with Big Mo’s bottom-line assessment:

But like many of the forgotten presidents, and many of the so-called failures, Fillmore has gotten a raw deal from history. Although he served 2½ years and his party would not re-nominate him—and he would sink to obscurity following a second failed presidential attempt—Fillmore definitely deserves far better than he’s been treated.

Big Mo’s entries on the presidents are witty, charming and informative, and I urge anyone with even a passing interest in our country to read them.

Writing short biographies is a task that is impossible to execute without mistake – the very nature of the exercise means that the writer is trying to shoehorn an entire life into a short essay. I would never attempt anything so foolish or so creative. It is with this understanding, with thanks to Big Mo for daring the impossible, and cognizant of my own limitations that I will confine myself to posting, from time to time, nit picks about Big Mo’s posts. This is the first. Here goes.

Toward the beginning of Big Mo’s Fillmore post, he states:

A skilled lawyer and a man initially hungry for political power, Fillmore had the unfortunate luck to have lost the nomination to Zachary Taylor then be shoved aside as almost a non-entity for 16 months.

This sentence appears to imply that Fillmore was a leading candidate, or at least a viable candidate, for the Whig presidential nomination in 1848, ultimately secured by Zachary Taylor. After all, Millard presumably could not have “lost the nomination to” Taylor unless he made a reasonable run at that prize. I'm virtually positive Big Mo didn't mean this, because he later states that in 1848, "on the national level, no one knew [Fillmore]."

At all events, to the best of my knowledge, Fillmore was never a candidate for the Whig nomination in 1848, much less a viable one. Elbert B. Smith does not suggest this, so far as I can tell, in his The Presidencies of Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore. Likewise, in his magnificent and endless The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party, Michael F. Holt devotes almost seventy pages (basically, Chapters 9 and 10) to reviewing in microscopic detail the joustings among the plethora of Whig candidates, including Taylor, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Supreme Court Justice John McLean of Ohio, Senator Thomas Corwin (also of Ohio), and General Winfield Scott. No mention of Millard anywhere.

Millard Fillmore was many things; but he does not seem to have been a candidate for the presidential nomination of the Whig party in 1848.

Kai Su, Teknon?

You scored as Augustus, You are Augustus! First emperor of the Romans and one of the greatest statesmen in the ancient world. You brilliantly eased the old Republic into the Principate and set the path for an empire that would last for centuries and form the underpinnings for all western civilization. Hail Caesar! Augustus 71% Trajan 68% Tiberius 68% Claudius 64% Antoninus Pius 57% Vespasian 54% Hadrian 46% Domitian 46% Marcus Aurelius 39% Vitellius 39% Commodus 25% Caligula 25% Nerva 25% Nero 21% Which Roman Emperor Are You? created with QuizFarm.com

The Wit and Wisdom of Cato the Elder IV

On extravagance:

"How can we expect to save a city, where people are prepared to pay more for a fish than for an ox?"

Kurt Lash

I'm a big fan of Kurt Lash and his articles on the Ninth Amendment. I'm excited to see that the good Professor has yet another paper publicly available on SSRN, this time about the Tenth Amendment, "The Puzzling Persistence of a Missing Word: The Tenth Amendment, Popular Sovereignty and 'Expressly' Delegated Power." Here's the abstract:

Today, courts and commentators generally agree that early efforts to strictly limit the federal government to only expressly enumerated powers were decisively rebuffed by Chief Justice John Marshall in McCulloch v. Maryland. According to Marshall, the fact that the framers departed from the language of the Articles of Confederation and omitted the term “expressly” suggested that they intended Congress to have a broad array of implied as well as expressly delegated powers. As Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story later wrote, any attempt to read the Tenth Amendment as calling for a strict construction of federal power, “was neither more nor less, than [an] attempt to foist into the text the word 'expressly'. Modern courts often cite to McCulloch's “omitted text” analysis of the Tenth Amendment in support of broad interpretations of federal power. In fact, Marshall's point regarding the significance of the missing word “expressly” is probably one of the least controversial claims about the original understanding of Tenth Amendment as currently exists in legal commentary.

It is puzzling therefore to learn that courts and commentators during the early decades of the Constitution regularly inserted into their description of federal power the very word that Marshall insisted had been intentionally left out. James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, early Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase, and numerous other members of the Founding generation insisted that Congress had only expressly delegated power. Upon investigation, it turns out that this rephrasing actually reflects the original understanding of the Tenth Amendment. Completely missed by generations of Tenth Amendment scholars, adding the phrase “or to the people” to the Tenth transformed the clause into a declaration of popular sovereignty. This declaration established what the Founders referred to as the principle of “expressly delegated powers,” meaning that Congress could utilize no other means except those necessarily incident to its enumerated responsibilities. Particularly when read in combination with the Ninth Amendment's declaration of the retained rights of the people, these twin assertions of popular sovereignty established a rule of strict construction - the very interpretive principle rejected by John Marshall in McCulloch v. Maryland.

How am I going to get any work done next week? I've got to sneak in time to read the articles on Dred Scott recently published in the Chicago-Kent Law Review (mentioned a few posts ago), and now Professor Lash's as well.

"The Clerkship from Hell"

Over at the Right Coast, Mike Rappaport tells an amazing story of a well-known federal appellate judge who is, apparently, a sadistic nut-job whose abusive behavior resulted in four clerks quitting in seven years.

My judge was, I'm happy to report, a dream, but my co-clerk did quit. Both my co-clerk and I started in late August. One day in October, I went out for a hair cut. When I returned, say around 2:30, my co-clerk (I'll call her "Deb") was not in her office. At first, I thought nothing of it, but after a while it seemed a bit odd. So I walked into the judge's office and asked her:

ME: Where's Deb?

JUDGE: Oh . . . Deb's not here . . .

ME: Oh?

JUDGE: I think she left . . .

ME: Oh?

JUDGE: I went in to talk with her about some things . . .

ME: Oh?

JUDGE: And she got upset . . .

ME: Oh?

JUDGE: And I think she left . . .

ME: Oh?

Piecing it together later, it seemed that the judge had used my absence to try to give Deb some gentle, constructive criticism, and Deb simply stormed out. Deb never returned, never even called to arrange to pick up her stuff (shoes, books). To this day, I have no idea what ever happened to her.

At all events, Deb's loss (or the loss of Deb) was my gain. I was the sole clerk for a couple of months until the judge could secure a replacement. What a great time I had!

A Bunch of New Dred Scott Articles

The latest issue of the Chicago-Kent Law Review is devoted to a "symposium" on Dred Scott. There are articles by Jack Balkin, Paul Finkelman, Mark Graber and others.

I have read only one of the articles, by Balkin and Sanford Levinson entitled "Thirteen Ways of Looking at Dred Scott." Unfortunately, I found it a lightweight affair, the sort of effort a prestigious academic dashes off between "real" articles, confident that some journal will take a second-rate stream-of-consciousness article because of the author's name.

It's also marred by Balkin's bizarre radical-leftist politics. It turns out that, on issues ranging from gay rights to Guantanamo and "what the Bush administration terms the 'global war on terror'" (note the obligatory quotation marks), conservatives are the intellectual descendants of Chief Justice Taney. Ho hum. Whatever.

I'll be reading the other articles and will report back on anything noteworthy I find.

The Wit and Wisdom of Cato the Elder III

On a man notorious for his dissolute and disreputable life:

"That man's mother thinks of it as a curse, not a blessing, if anyone prays that her son should survive her."

John Quincy Adams, Pimp!

Michael Holt reports a Nineteenth Century campaign slur that's got to run a close second to the alleged perversion of Martin Van Buren that I mentioned the other day:

[In the presidential campaign of 1828, Jackson supporters] disseminated propaganda . . . reminding voters that [Jackson] had been the victim of a corrupt and cynical bargain, pillorying the supposed misdeeds of the Adams administration, and lacerating the president himself as an effete intellectual snob who spoke Latin and quoted Voltaire; as a papist or an antipapist, depending upon the audience; and even as a former pimp for the czar of Russia.

John Quincy Adams was born in 1767 and served as an assistant to Francis Dana in St. Petersburg in 1781-82 -- he was fourteen years of age at the time!

All I can say is, Wow!

It's worth noting that in 1781-82, the "Czar" of Russia was Catherine the Great, and she was then over 50 years of age (born 1729). Maybe John Quincy brought her a horse!

EMBARRASSING CORRECTION:

I overlooked the fact that JQA served as Ambassador to Russia between 1809 and 1814. The tsar he supposedly pimped for was Alexander I. See this follow-up post for more details.

The Wit and Wisdom of Cato the Elder II

On women:

"All mankind rule their wives, we Romans rule all mankind, and our wives rule us."

A Separate Civil War

I've mentioned Jonathan Dean Sarris' excellent A Separate Civil War: Communities in Conflict in the Mountain South before. There's a nice review of the book up at H-CivWar.

Above is the only known full view photo of the Dahlonega Mint building. At the time of this photo (1877 or 1878), the facility was operating as the North Georgia Agricultural College. Cadets of the school are lined up in formation in front of the former mint.

Martin Van Buren, Pervert!

The presidential campaign of 1840 pitted Whigs William Henry Harrison and vice presidential candidate John Tyler against incumbent Democrats Martin Van Buren and Richard Mentor Johnson. The campaign is most famous for the Whigs' use of potent symbols -- Log Cabins and Hard Cider -- and slogans -- "Tippecanoe and Tyler too" -- to whip up support for their notably mediocre candidate.

However, the Whigs also did not hesitate to "go negative" on Van Buren. In the process, they managed to create one of the most bizarre caricatures in the history of American politics.

One of the Whigs' principal "attack ads" was a pamphlet that reprinted a speech by Charles Ogle, a Whig congressman from Pennsylvania, entitled "The Regal Splendor of the Presidential Palace." Much of the pamphlet was devoted to the opulent splendor in which Van Buren allegedly lived while the nation suffered through a major depression. But it also included lurid suggestions of sexual depravity. As Sean Wilentz relates, Ogle asserted that

the degenerate widower Van Buren had instructed groundskeepers to build for him, in back of the Executive Mansion, a large mound in the shape of a female breast, topped by a carefully landscaped nipple. Van Buren . . . was a depraved executive autocrat who oppressed the people by day and who, by night, violated the sanctity of the people's house with extravagant debaucheries -- joined, some whispered, by the disgusting Vice President Johnson and his Negro harem.

In order to fully appreciate the closing reference, you need some background on Vice President Richard Mentor Johnson (shown seated in the cartoon above). He was a Kentucky slaveholder who made no effort to disguise his liaisons with black women. Again, Sean Wilentz tells the story succinctly:

Johnson had two daughters, Imogene and Adeline, by his housekeeper, a mulatto ex-slave named Julia Chinn. After Chinn died in 1833, Johnson took up with another woman of partial African descent, and in Washington he accompanied his out-of-wedlock daughters (whom he had provided with excellent private educations) to public functions and festivities, sometimes in the company of their respective white husbands.

* * *

[After Johnson's election in 1836, there was] talk that he had entered into yet another illicit liaison with a mulatto woman, aged eighteen or nineteen, who was the sister of one of his previous consorts. (After a trip to Kentucky, Amos Kendall informed friends that Johnson was devoting "too much of his time to a young Delilah of about the complexion of Shakespears swarthy Othello.")

Harrison won the election, but Van Buren and the Democrats had the last laugh. Harrison died after only one month in office. Henry Clay and Tyler, now president, fell into heated disagreement, and Clay ultimately read Tyler out of the Whig party. The Democrats won the next election, although their candidate was not Van Buren -- but that's another story.

Darfur

About a month ago, I attended a friend's son's bar mitzvah. Apparently, the latest trend is for the celebrant to ask the guests to make donations to a specified charitable cause rather than buy him a gift. This celebrant asked invitees to donate to a save Darfur organization.

After inspecting the organization's website, I gave the requested donation, on the theory that it would probably do no harm. But what really struck me was how utterly useless the organization appeared to be. From what I could tell, the organization's only idea was to raise "awareness" about how terrible things were happening in Darfur, and insist that someone do something. Unfortunately, it wasn't clear who that someone was, and it wasn't clear what it was that it or they should be doing. To the extent the website gingerly mentioned the possibility of peacekeeping forces or no-fly zones, the suggestion seemed to be that they would be undertaken by UN or other international organizations.

All of which got me thinking about Rwanda. I think it was Philip Gourevitch in his excellent and gut-wrenching book, We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families, who pointed out that, if the U.S. had used a single cruise missile or bomb to take out the Rwandan national radio station, that act would likely have saved hundreds of thousands of lives, because the mass murderers were using the radio station to direct the killing squads where to go.

So, too, in Darfur: everyone knows perfectly well that the Sudanese government is behind the Janjaweed killers. A surprise cruise missile attack or bombing sortie on the Sudanese government offices in Khartoum would reduce the mass murder in Darfur immediately. And yet the Save Darfur organizations, such as the one whose web site I viewed, cannot bring themselves to demand the one action that everyone knows would be the most efficacious.

Why? They will have to look into their own hearts, but my guess is the usual mix: hatred of Bush and of the US military make it impossible for them even to conceive of the use of force except, possibly, by corrupt international organizations that will never act.

Pathetic.