I am trying to remember my Ender's Game - weren't Ender's brother and sister swaying public opinion with their writing on the nets? Or was that in the sequel? Either way, doesn't it now sound like blogging?

Of all the critiques of the President's inaugural speech, the one that has bothered me the most has been Peggy Noonan's. First, because she should know better. Second, because the Bush-haters could use it like a cudgel: even Peggy Noonan thinks he's a maniac.

It seemed to me that the reaction among many on the right was, "well, if Peggy Noonan didn't like it...." Finally, a rejection of her pessimism. Larry Kudlow at NRO takes her to task:

When you read that Jordan’s King Abdullah is taking steps to organize new elections in his country, with regional election districts that look a lot like Iraq’s, you realize just how wrong my friend Peggy Noonan is when she writes that President Bush’s inaugural speech “forgot context.”

I have to say that the level of skepiticism on democracy is a bit depressing. If we don't believe in our own system, then how can we possibly defend it? Is democracy a bad word now that W is for it? Is the hatred for the man so high that if he is for something good, it is now bad?

But then, I run into something like this:

Ahmed Abdullah al-Shaya, 18, told Iraqi investigators during an interrogation early this month that he was recruited to drive a car rigged with explosives to Baghdad and blow it up.

He said the objective was "to kill the Americans, policemen, national guards and the American collaborators."

But Shaya said he was injured even before he went on the mission when insurgents detonated a truck bomb he was supposed to leave at a target site.

Here is the world of a billion or so Muslims, all supposedly enraged at the US invasion of Iraq, and the terrorists can't even scare up enough suicide bombers. They have to resort to lies and trickery. (I bet this story is going to help recruiting!)

Amazing, our enemies are apparently down to desparation tactics, and many of us want to give up.

For you folks out there in non-legal world, prepare for the new latest and greatest thing from the world of legal scholars. The requirement that you mixup your usage of pronouns when speaking.

Now whether my irritation at the practice is due to my fatigue and irritation at having to retake another bar, or whether this practice would irritate me on its own is an open question, although I suspect that it is the latter.

I first became aware of this bit of law school tyranny, while dealing with career services. While discussing my career options, I guess I used too many masculine pronouns to describe aviation attorneys. She snapped something to the effect that women could be pilots too. At first I was absolutely incredulous. Here I am trying to get a job, and this woman is tightly focused on my pronoun usage. The other insulting part was the insinuition that I was incapable of thinking of women in the avaition profession.

Not being a person to put up with this type of crap, I brusquely informed her that my pronouns are asexual, that some of the people I most admire in the aviation industry are female, and where does she get off correcting my pronoun usage? I guess from that moment, I paid attention in law school.

And sure enough, throughout lawschool, professors and others seemed to place an inordinate amount of effort into mixing up their pronouns while they are speaking. What is frequently amusing is that you can see people hesitate before a pronoun comes up. Like they are thinking; " I used he the last time, and 5 times before that, so now I must use she at 6 times."

It is especially noticeable in our bar lecturer for the last two days. In fact, he sometimes stutters it. I've noticed this in a few others as well. Even worse sometimes they switch pronouns in the middle of a hypothetical so that he becomes a she, and visa versa. Not good if you are discussing assignments, 3rd party beneficiaries, or delegations. But entirely reasonable if you are trying to mix it up.

So I have a suggestion. How about the women use the female pronoun generically, and the men use the male version. That way, the female version will be used more often which will satisfy all the people who seem to care about this sort of thing, and then it will not force people to think about which pronoun to use freeing up resources for serious matters. Deal? It doesn't really matter because in any event, I will continue to refuse to mix and match my pronouns.

I am just having to prepare for the Arizona Bar. That will be two bars in less then 1 years timespan. The good news is that I retained most of my "bar" knowledge. The bad news is that the process seems to be more painful the second time around.

Below, I ask if we are afraid of democracy. Unfortunately, I think that many of us - too many of us - are.

But the good news is our enemies are afraid of democracy. I suspect they have good reason to be. Austin Bay notes that Zarqawi recently made a tape where he declared himself against democracy. This is regarded as good news, that he is showing his true colors, and now people may understand that, as the President put it, "they hate us for our freedom."

The problem with this, though, is that Zarqawi has been openly anti-democratic from the start, and it was clear in the Zarqawi memo released early last year:

1) if we fight them, that will be difficult because there will be a schism between us and the people of the region. How can we kill their cousins and sons and under what pretext, after the Americans start withdrawing? The Americans will continue to control from their bases, but the sons of this land will be the authority. This is the democracy, we will have no pretext.

That Zarqawi is anti-democratic is not news, and will not sway anyone. This is not an "in your face moment" for Michael Moore and his "Minutemen" comment. We did just have a close election where we came close to electing a guy who once said:

...you can satisfy those needs with almost any kind of political structure, giving it one name or the other. In this name (sic) it is democratic; in others it is communism; in others it is benevolent dictatorship.

This would all sort of be academic, so long as Kerry and Pelosi and Moore and the rest of those losers were with Zarqawi on the anti-democracy team, but even Peggy damn Noonan came out on the skeptical of democracy side. That is worrisome. And discouraging.

Captain Ed links to a NYT article that goes a little deeper than the usual MSM reporting on Iraqi Shi'ites. The key point is this:

The decision appears to formalize the growing dominance of secular leaders among the Shiite political leadership, and it also reflects an inclination by the country's powerful religious hierarchy to stay out of the day-to-day governing of the country. Among the Shiite coalition's 228 candidates for the national assembly, fewer than a half dozen are clerics, according to the group's leaders.

I wrote before that the reporting on the election will be wrong: "this will be reported as a huge defeat for the US, and Sistani's Shi'ites will be compared to Iran's." Maybe they'll get it right, or they are trying to get it more right so as not to lose any more credibility. I even heard a story about this on NPR this morning - this is the synopsis they provide:

Basra, in southern Iraq, is a predominately Shiite Muslim city. Many residents say they'll vote in Iraq's Jan. 30 election. The most revered Shiite cleric has declared voting a religious duty, but some Shia say they'll vote for secular candidates.

They report that as a "but" - as if they are surprised, as if we should all be surprised - that the Shi'ites of Basra are thinking of secular candidates. But we shouldn't be surprised at all by this outcome, and we wouldn't be if there were fact-based rather than agenda-based reporting going on.

Still, regardless of whether the MSM is getting right with Allah on this topic, you can rest assured that no matter the outcome, the elections in Iraq will be portrayed as a setback in some way for the United States, for the President, and for democracy.