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So former White House spokesman Scott McClellan’s tell-all book has hit the shelves. He treats it as an outpouring of conscience, horrified to see the presidential administration lie systematically to the American public. I’m not sure how much slack to cut him here: while conscience is a precious commodity in politics generally, and vanishingly rare in Bush’s gang generally, we’ve got a long list of Republicans suddenly very vocal about how little they really agree with the president. How very convenient, given record-setting low opinion polls and the looming sense that the public generally wouldn’t mind seeing a lot of these faces voted out of office, or even behind bars. Believing he was simply passing the unvarnished truth to the press during his term would require a mind-boggling naiveté on McClellan’s part; if he was deceived, it could only be with his willing cooperation.

Other members and former members of the White House staff are not at all uncertain how much slack to cut him: none at all. As you might expect from a group that, like other organized crime, considers loyalty more valuable than principles, honesty, or actual public service, they have nothing but contempt for a snitch.

Former White House counselor Bartlett considers claims in the book inappropriate: "Part of the role of being a trusted adviser is to honor that trust."

Former White House spokesman Fleischer is "heartbroken that Scott feels this way about his time at the White House." He blames McClellan for participating in the process: "If Scott had such deep misgivings, he should not have accepted the press secretary position as a matter of principle." (How he could have chosen not to accept on the basis of misgivings that arose after working as press secretary is unclear.)

White House spokeswoman Perino blames a personality change in McClellan himself: "Scott, we now know, is distruntled about his experience at the White House. For those of us who fully supported him, before, during, and after he was press secretary, we are puzzled. It is sad. This is not the Scott we knew."

Karl Rove states it more baldly: "It really doesn't [sound like McClellan]. Not the Scott McClellan I've known for a long time. Second of all, it sounds like somebody else. It sounds like a left-wing blogger. Second of all, you're right. If he had these moral qualms, he should have spoken up about them." Rove also feels that, because McClellan didn't experience every meeting, what he did experience is inconsequential: "And frankly, I don't recall Scott being in a lot of those meetings that first week, so maybe that's why he thinks we were in a state of denial."

But note a conspicuous absence in these responses. None actually go so far as to say that McClellan’s claims are untrue. Just inappropriate, disappointing, perplexing. President Bush himself is described as “puzzled” and “saddened.” (Bush is often puzzled and saddened when reminded of objective reality.) When you can’t dispute the message, attack the messenger.

Postscript: Between writing and posting this, someone called my attention to the following quote. Isn’t it just too perfect for words? I guess that settles the question of how much slack to cut.

"Well, why, all of a sudden, if he had all these grave concerns, did he not raise these sooner? This is one-and-a-half years after he left the administration. And now, all of a sudden, he's raising these grave concerns that he claims he had. And I think you have to look at some of the facts. One, he is bringing this up in the heat of a presidential campaign. He has written a book and he certainly wants to go out there and promote that book"

—Scott McClellan, March 22, 2004, on the publication of Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies

Posted by at 1:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

After recovering the boxes with the software keys from an inconspicuous closet, I got a chance to try some of Dan’s games after all. The first item on the menu was Age of Empires III, for the following reasons, in ascending order of importance:

1. It got good reviews.
2. I already enjoyed previous AoE titles.
3. I bought my own copy of AoE3 when it came out, but couldn’t get it to run on my machine.

That last was pretty frustrating, so it was good to get a second opportunity. Now that I’ve taken a look, I have to wonder what all the fuss was about. Anyone familiar with the RTS generally will understand the basic pattern: buildings produce military units or upgrades; civilian gathering units collect resources with which to buy them; players fling armies at one another until in an attempt to hamstring enemy resource collection; eventually, the balance tips to the more efficient collector and producer, and once armed resistance collapses, the soft underbelly of the economic units is exposed and the game is effectively over. Anyone familiar with the AoE series specifically might find some of the hallmarks of that series missing.

The AoE line was never strong on innovation in the RTS genre; instead, it earned its kudos for polishing the genre to a mirror finish. While other games toyed with elevation or weird support units or complicated production networks, AoE chose to focus on basics, like designing pathfinding algorithms that actually allow units to go from point A to point B when ordered to, something sadly absent in a lot of RTS games. Where AoE did innovate, it was in the interface and fine-tuning the game elements: workers who would automatically begin gathering resources after building a warehouse, for example, or double-clicking to select all units of the same type as the target. Innovations like this were so simple in concept, and so simple to code, that gamers would slap their foreheads with each AoE game or expansion and think, “Why didn’t anyone ever do this before?”

That trend is reversed in AoE3. Instead of polishing someone else’s ideas, AoE3 strides boldly into new territory with the concept of “home cities.” Operating in the colonial era, it is only appropriate that your fledgling kingdom receive support from the motherland back in Europe (or elsewhere, in the less historical expansions). You earn this support through a variety of achievements that prove to your Old World sovereign that you’ve got what it takes to make a New World colony a going interest: found trade stations with the natives, recover treasures with your explorer, ship excess material back to the motherland, that sort of thing. When you earn enough brownie points, you get a significant payoff: extra settlers, a detachment of troops, a prefabricated fort or factory, raw materials, free technological improvements, unique units like the field medic—the list is huge. So huge, in fact, that you can’t earn all those benefits in a single game. You have to decide at the beginning of the game which ones you want available when the time comes. The process is likened to building a personalized deck in collectible card games: an aggressive player might select a lot of cards that give him free troops, to hasten the moment when he can attack, while a player who prefers to choke opponents with a superior military-industrial complex might choose defensive buildings and economic bonuses. AoE3 steals an idea from RPGs, as well as CCGs: you earn “experience” in successive games, unlocking more and better cards from which to design your deck. The idea is interesting, and received a lot of attention in critical reviews. I’m not sure just how big an impact it has on actual play; I found it easy to win without using a single card, much less “tuning” my deck into an unbeatable combination of bonuses. Maybe the idea’s impact is only felt in games between humans.

Which sort of brings me to the flip side of the new formula: the things that used to work smoothly don’t always work so smoothly any more. The AI got markedly less intelligent in this incarnation. Truly smart AI is tough in any game, so I don’t begrudge any designer a less-than-brilliant computer opponent. Still, I found I had to keep on my toes to beat high difficulty opponents in earlier titles, so I know Microsoft Games is capable of pretty respectable AI. In AoE3, I was able to cream two difficult computer opponents at once on the high difficulty setting before the first day’s exploration was over. Also missing is the smooth interface: the map is just too gosh-darned small for the buildings and people that inhabit it. While colonial-era battles did indeed occur on ridiculously small fields—the entire battlegrounds of the Battle of Lexington, for example, are preserved in a grassy triangle smaller than a city block—the larger military-economic struggles of the colonial era stretched over great distances. The designers fell so much in love with their own detailed unit graphics that they didn’t leave room for the terrain in which those can exist. Zoomed out to maximum, a half dozen buildings can fill the screen; zoomed in close-up, a single fortress does the same. Selecting units can be awkward when the box you draw around them repeatedly dips a corner into the mini-map, causing you to jump to viewing an area of the map far from the battle at hand.

The scale makes everything feel…well, small. Like Caesar IV and CivCity: Rome, both of which were supposed to take the beloved city-builder series to new heights, AoE3 manage to feel like a descent from epic history to toy soldiers. Sure, those towers and Napoleanic musketeers look great individually, but the entire French and Indian War feels like a street fight, the Thirty Years’ War like a neighborhood riot. Judging by the buildings and armies, Philadelphia and New Amsterdam (now New York) were only separated by a fifteen-minute walk. No wonder Washington found it so easy to surprise the redcoats; crossing the Delaware was as quick as walking around the corner of the local grocery store. It takes a lot of the fun out of the game.

Posted by at 4:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We held Dan’s memorial service this morning. It was an anxious, wearing experience, which is only to be expected. A funeral is a sad time. It’s also an event where everyone, even those closest to the departed, is surrounded by strangers (My parents and I, for example, didn’t know anyone from Dan’s job or some of his circle of friends.) so there’s always the awkwardness of people you don’t know, and trying to remember names of those you do but haven’t seen in a long while, or know only distantly, and the embarrassment of failing to recognize those you haven’t seen in a very long while. Add the emotionally charged atmosphere and your own emotions, and the whole thing can be quite uncomfortable. For me at least as much as anyone—I am particularly uncomfortable surrounded by strangers, and with the open display of emotions, whether mine or anyone else’s.

But it also proved surprisingly happy. I got to see some old friends, who I usually only see at our annual Christmas get-together, which we missed last year. I got to see some of Dan’s childhood friends, who I remember quite well but simply had no contact with for a long time. I got to marvel at the height of teens who used to be little kids, thus reinforcing the fact that I am an old fart. It was a chance to touch base, however briefly, and trade a few stories. There was a lot of laughter among the tears, much more than I ever would have expected.

And that’s as it should be. Funerals, of course, are not for the departed but for the grievers who survive him. While it’s important to recognize our grief, an unbroken diet of weeping would be almost unbearable. Laughing despite the occasion, and the undeniable reassurance it brings that happy times are still possible, does a world more good than crying, however necessary tears may be.

I’m glad to have seen so many people today, as wearing as it was. Even the strangers.

Posted by at 8:32 PM | Permalink

I confess to being spoiled by the fantabulous selection of cuisine in and around New York City. My family dined out tonight in a Thai place. It wasn’t actually bad, but there wasn’t anything particularly praiseworthy about it, either. No doubt most of the foreign food we sample back home is at least a little adulterated to appeal to the American palate, but here on the cusp of suburban and rural Illinois, foreign cuisine is nothing like authentic.

I’m proud of having mastered the use of chopsticks. Well, I haven’t actually mastered them—I can’t duplicate the efforts of an ex-girlfriend who could handle an egg in shell with lacquered chopsticks—but I’ve at least reached a respectable competence. Part of that education was learning to handle not just the chopsticks, but the bowl, holding it in the left hand, close to the face. You pick a choice morsel or two from your plate, pop it in your mouth, then, holding the bowl very close to the face, shovel a mouthful or two of rice. Although properly sticky rice helps with any technique, the short shovel from bowl to mouth works far better than trying to lift a lump of rice all the way from table to mouth, as Americans are prone to try without practice.

This technique also tends to lead you to eat more rice per unit, um, stuff. You know what I mean by stuff: whatever it was you ordered from the menu that automatically comes with rice, like fries with a burger. One of the easiest ways to recognize whether your Asian dining experience has been Americanized is that you get a little bowl of rice for a big plate of stuff. If you’re handling your chopsticks right, you end up about 25% done with your stuff when you run out of rice. Either you’re left to ask for three more bowls, or pack it up in a doggy bag and take it home to your six-cup rice cooker.

You’ve got a rice cooker, right? Cooks rice like a charm, no muss, no fuss, just right every time with the push of a single button. First- and second-generation Asians already have one, but any of you fresh-out-of-college Anglos take note: this is a terrific device for cheap, easy, and satisfying meals. Stir-fry a bit of meat with a bit of garlic, bell pepper, onion, bean sprouts, or, if you want to get fancy, canned water chestnuts or bamboo shoots. Add soy sauce and MSG to taste. (The MSG is important; without it, your stir-fry won’t taste Chinese.) The basic recipe is readily adaptable to a huge variety of meat-vegetable combinations. Now get a little bowl of rice in your left hand, and practice using those chopsticks. Handling them will become easy much faster than you think.

Posted by at 8:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

You learn something new every day. Today I learned about Midwest plant life.

Lesson one: farmers who decide to let their field lie fallow don’t simply stand aside and let nature take its course; they actively plant grass seeds.

A small field about a block away from my parents’ house is slated for new houses, although I have no idea how swiftly the developer will pursue construction in the current market. In the past couple years, they grew corn while progress was underway on earlier houses, but for whatever reason—soil depletion, an intention to start building before the crop is in, something—they aren’t growing corn this year.

Instead, coarse grass is growing there. At first, I thought this was natural reclamation by native grasses, despite the way the grass came up in tidy little rows. My theory about the tidy rows was that the stalks of grass cropped up far more easily along the ridge of last year’s corn stalks, where there was little cover for the soil, and did not come up at all between last year’s stalks, where the old stalks had become tamped down into a thick, sunlight-choking carpet. But no, I gave nature too much credit. Dad told me the field was deliberately planted, and that the grass is all timothy, which is a common choice for cattle feed, mixed with clover and alfalfa.

In retrospect, I feel foolish. If the new growth really were natural, it wouldn’t all be the same plant, would it?

Lesson two: wild mustard is bad.

I always liked wild mustard. It’s a hardy plant with tiny, bright yellow flowers. They stay in bloom a long time, and they make a pretty addition to grassy fields, especially the strips along the highway.

But Aunt Linda cursed the wild mustard flowers we saw along the roadside yesterday. When I asked why, everyone else in the car explained that the Midwest is undergoing an invasion of a different kind of mustard of Chinese origin. Unlike the wild mustard I saw growing up, this stuff kills surrounding plants, and spreads like crazy. Allowed to go to seed one year, the next will see hundreds of its progeny in the immediate neighborhood. It’s highly invasive, the kudzu of the Great Plains.

Takes the fun out of seeing one of the few plants I can recognize and adore.

Posted by at 8:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Flying into Chicago gave me another opportunity to eat a Chicago-style hot dog, whose virtues I only discovered in the past year or two.

A Chicago-style hot dog sounds, and looks ridiculous: along with the dog, the bun must accommodate a wedge of dill pickle, two tomato wedges, and two or three of those powerful little bullet-shaped green peppers (usually pickled), relish, ketchup, mustard, onion, and celery salt. With all those odd lumps inside, they are difficult to eat neatly, and with all that vegetable matter piled on top, it might seem like the dog would be hard to find.

It isn’t. It’s a warm core of meaty-fatty goodness that can be found by temperature alone. But even if it were hard to find, that would hardly be the point. The Chicago-style hot dog isn’t about the hot dog; it’s really more of a vegetable roll, with the flavor coming from the pickle, and especially from those potent little peppers. The hot dog is there just to reassure your taste buds that you’re getting a dose of protein with all that piquancy, and it works. The whole thing fits together admirably, in flavor if not mechanically.

As a kid, suspicious of anything involving vegetables, I found the very idea of a Chicago-style dog offensive. I ate pickles, but only sharp dill pickles, and would prefer them outside the bun, thank you very much/. Onion and peppers were unwelcome flavors. I especially found the idea of the tomato wedges distasteful, both unwieldy and yucky. And sweet pickle relish, too? Blech! Besides, the only place you could get a Chicago-style was from Vienna Beef shacks, and nobody in his right mind would go with a vegetable-laden dog when a chili dog was available. Or, if you were of a mind to make a mess, drippy-rich Italian beef.

Both of those remain good to this day. But I grew up. After years of chili dogs, I’ve learned that most places don’t do a chili dog very well; they let the chili cook too long, or season it badly, or pour on too much, drowning the dog and guaranteeing drips on my shirt. And I learned to like the other ingredients, although I never thought to add any of them to a hot dog; that was still for a bit of mustard on a plain bun. Maybe a drop of ketchup, if I felt like living on the edge.

But the bus terminal attached to O’Hare doesn’t offer much selection: pizza or hot dog. Put off by the pizzas, baking slowly into rock beneath a heat lamp, I went with two hot dogs while waiting to make my connection. And as it happened, I was on a pepper kick, so I agreed to a few of those little peppers.

They were surprisingly good. It took me a year to return (I visit my parents twice yearly through O’Hare, and sometimes there’s time to stop for a dog, sometimes not), and when I did, I tried one with the works. I’m converted. Against all expectations, I find I really like Chicago-style dogs, with all the works.

Except that sweet relish. Blech!

Posted by at 9:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My brother, Dan, has died. He was careless with a grill, and died of carbon monoxide poisoning. He was 37.

I will be visiting my parents for the next several weeks, both to grieve together, and to help them clean up whatever he has left behind. I don’t know how long this will last, but I expect it to take a minimum of two weeks, and possibly much longer.

I don’t know how much time I will have to write for the next several days. I will certainly not be in much of a mood to write, nor do I expect to have much to say that isn’t about his death—which could be interesting once or twice, but probably not for several weeks running. Nothing duller than somebody else’s troubles. So for the next several weeks, my performance here will be spotty, especially since I’m not sure how convenient my parents’ computer connection will be. I’ll write when I can, but I’ll pick up again properly once my brother is taken care of.

Posted by at 8:23 PM | Permalink

In exploring the possibility of running a Star Wars RPG campaign, I started my research with our own collection of Star Wars RPG supplements—the proper d6 system designed by West End, not this d20 crap. I was a little surprised at how much we had; I only bought the rulebook, and I won a few odd prizes at conventions, but Eileene bought rather a lot. Buried in that stack are not one, but two copies of “Imperial Doublecross,” a solo adventure.

A very few systems dabbled in solo adventures, which are little more than choose-your-own-adventure stories, the only difference being that solo adventures employ game rules—not only do you choose whether to shoot the bad guy or run, but you also roll dice to see whether your decision worked, reading the appropriate paragraph for either. Solo RPG adventures also tend to provide a little more objective coherence, in the sense that they portray more fixed elements, like a floorplan or characters with fixed motives, but that’s just a rule of thumb, reflecting their roots in the tactical dungeon crawls of D&D.

Solo adventures were never very popular. By dispensing with an intelligent human judge, the player is restricted to a sharply limited set of options, namely, what the author could think to include. But, while they fail as adaptations of true RPGs, they can perform other functions. “Imperial Doublecross” feels more like a promotion than an adventure in its own right. It highlights the virtues of the d6 system in a way that seems more tutorial and exposure than anything. A complete newbie picking it up can see enough about how the game works that he may decide to get the main rulebook, and away he goes. (In fact, now that I think of it, we may have two copies because West End was handing those out as convention prizes one year, a cagey way to disguise an ad as entertainment.) Also, the adventure is clearly aimed at kids, which West End wisely targeted as a new crop of customers.

I say the target audience is kids largely because your character in “Imperial Doublecross” is a kid, a pre-adolescent who decides to run away from home by stowing away on a smuggler’s starship, a decision so spectacularly stupid that I instantly hated the alter-ego the adventure saddled me with. Additionally, the NPCs’ motives are transparent, excuses are found to isolate the PC from adult supervision as often as possible, and the situations place a premium on hiding, dodging, and perception, which a kid can do pretty well, as opposed to, say, piloting a starship or wrestling a Wookiee. In several possible plot branches, people just give the PC stuff, including thousand-credit tokens and laser pistols, for very little reason—a situation that children, still provided for by their parents, can relate to far better than adult players can. Also, several of the branch points are inappropriately forgiving: in one spot, for example, you try to shoot a bounty hunter before he nails the smuggler/pilot hero to which you play the sidekick. If you hit, the bounty hunter goes down…but if you miss, he still goes down, anyway; your wild shot hits a steam pipe, which scalds him and buys time for your partner to shoot him.

But above all, every damn NPC in the whole damn book calls you “kid” (if they’re a good guy) or “brat” (if they’re a bad guy). “Good work, kid.” “Stick close to me, kid; you’re good luck.” “Okay, kid, I want you to stay here while I negotiate the arms payoff.” “You’re pretty resourceful, kid.” Which brings me to my point.

Nobody wants to be treated as “the kid” when they’re supposed to be thrilling to vicarious adventure. It’s patronizing, and makes such victories as they earn seem undeserved, just like Johnny Quest’s inexplicable ability to topple three or more thugs by bolting through the door of his cell when the bad guys come to check up on him. When Batman got his sidekick Robin, and a host of superheroes followed suit, Robin was meant to be someone for young comic book fans to identify with. They didn’t want to be Robin, eternally second fiddle, they wanted to be Batman. When young Anakin of Star Wars: Episode I “accidentally” got locked into an armed spaceship, and “accidentally” started up the controls, and “accidentally” pushed just the right buttons to activate the blasters and zap the bad guys, saving the day, it looked stupid, a condescending way for George Lucas to make kids in the audience feel like they should identify with the kid because he’s the real warrior-hero of the film.

Kids are smarter than that. West End was smart to employ a solo adventure as a high-class ad. If they were really smart, they’d have let their target audience play the smuggler, instead of the child sidekick to the smuggler.

Posted by at 5:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Saw a lovely game this morning: Chronotron. The premise is that your robotic alter-ego’s time machine is broken; without skip chips, you can only make short-range jumps. So you have to collect all the lost skip chips to travel time freely—that is, you have to fetch the doohickey from each level and bring it back to the starting point in order to progress to the next level. The clever gimmick that drives the game is that you can use your time machine to replay a level while your past selves retrace your earlier steps.

So, to give you a very basic example: the chip is sealed behind a heavy door, where you can’t reach it. An obvious switch opens the door…but as long as you’re holding the switch down, you can’t go get the chip. The solution is to go hold down the switch for a while, holding the door open, then return to your time machine. On returning to the level, your new beta-self can walk to the door while your alpha-self goes and holds the switch, just like you did earlier. The door swings open, your beta-self gets the chip and returns to the time machine. After a while, your alpha-self, bored with standing on the switch, returns to the time machine, just like you did. A screen is complete when the skip chip and all your incarnations return to the time machine.

The time travel replay isn’t perfect; it’s entirely possible to engineer events to contradict earlier ones. For example, your alpha-self might wait twenty seconds, then go and pick up a crate. If you then drop the crate and return to the time machine, your beta-self can rush in, snatch the crate, and carry it off, so that your alpha-self finds no crate to pick up when he arrives where the crate was. Instead, he stands helplessly, pushing the space bar to lift and drop a crate that doesn’t exist before returning to the time machine. I can see that recording and replaying this kind of instruction list, independent of objects, is much easier than recording the entire sequence of events would be, but requiring the player to avoid such paradoxes would be more satisfying. Instead, the game only recognizes a paradox if you screw things up to the point where a past self fails to get to the time machine when he’s supposed to, at which point a warning message pops up and you’re forced to replay the level.

It’s possible to screw things up—and rest assured, you will do so—to the point where the level is insoluble, but the penalty is mild: you can restart the level, or you may choose to rewind only to the start of your last incarnation, a welcome time-saver.

I’m only a little way in: the seventh level out of forty, and I can already see how this is going to go. Soon, the levels will contain switches that affect multiple obstacles at once, and so need to be activated and deactivated at the appropriate times, instead of merely activated once to provide access. Soon thereafter, active elements will require timing your incarnations and their switches, instead of merely doing everything in the right sequence. When enough elements must be activated, it will become fiendishly difficult to estimate the necessary delays. And then, my past selves will start sabotaging my current self by doing things at the wrong time.

Fans of Doctor Who and similar time-travel adventures might enjoy grappling with the threat of time paradoxes themselves, but there’s a more obvious market in fans of the brilliant if frustrating game Lemmings, which required you to herd the suicidally oblivious lemmings by assigning them to build staircases and dig tunnels, hoping to create a safe path to the exit point before too many of them marched into various deathtraps. Chronotron is very similar, except that in Chronotron, if those stupid robots drifting around on auto-pilot ruin your plans, you have no one to blame but yourself. After all, they’re only doing exactly what you told them to—in fact, what you yourself did not two minutes earlier.

Posted by at 12:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yesterday, I commented on the breaking investigation of Scott Bloch at the Office of Special Counsel, who far from pursuing his duty to protect federal whistle-blowers, used his office to expose and squelch them. We might hope to see actual justice come from this were it not for the presidential power of pardon.

The US Constitution provides that the president “shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment” (Article II, Section 2). I have no particular objection to this provision, nor to its use, as such, but it is prone to gross abuse, as it was when Ford pardoned Nixon, disgraced in the Watergate scandal and likely to face criminal charges:

“Now, therefore, I, Gerald R. Ford, President of the United States, pursuant to the power conferred upon me by Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution, have granted and by these presents do grant a full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from July (January) 20, 1969 through August 9, 1974.”

Note that the pardon does not mention any particular illegal act. The pardon excuses “all offenses.” Not just Watergate, but the infamous “enemies list” and the illegal harassment of political liabilities that came with it, war crimes, illegal taping of conversations in the Oval Office. I doubt Nixon sold vital national secrets wholesale to the Russians, or that he strangled three dozen pregnant women in the Oval Office during his term, but if he did, he’s covered. The pardon excuses “all offenses.” Note, too, that the pardon precedes conviction. While everyone knows Nixon was complicit in the Watergate coverup, he is not legally responsible—nor can he be, in a nation that presumes innocence until guilt is proven. Without the possibility of conviction, even the investigation is effectively closed, and with it the possibility of catching an expanding ring of corrupt officials.

Employed this way, presidential pardon ceases to be an expression of mercy, and instead becomes a blanket license to break the law. “Not saying my good friend Special Prosecutor John Smith did anything wrong, but if he did, he’s still not liable, neither in person nor in his execution of office. Also, you can’t use the threat of prosecution to get him to spill the beans on anything I did wrong—not that I did, of course—or to seize any correspondence he may have that just happens to mention me—not that there is any. But you aren’t allowed to investigate, regardless.”

Nixon’s pardon marked a sea change in the power of presidential pardon. Before Nixon, pardons were given primarily to a president’s detractors: Washington pardoned the leaders of the Whiskey Rebellion, angry at his agricultural tax; Andrew Johnson pardoned Confederate soldiers; Harding pardoned labor leader Eugene Debs; and Truman commuted the death sentence to life imprisonment for Oscar Collazo, who attempted to kill Truman. After Nixon, we began to see an expanding list of increasingly brazen pardons for close friends and political supporters: Reagan pardoned George Steinbrenner, a major campaign contributor; Bush the elder pardoned officials complicit in the Iran-Contra Affair, including pardoning Weinberger before a trial; Clinton pardoned his Whitewater business partner, his Secretary of HUD of lying to the FBI, Democratic Congressman Dan Rostenkowski of laundering money through the post office, and his own brother of drug charges.

Such pardons tend to come at the end of the presidential administration, when the president can take little heat for pardons offered for corrupt motivations. Indeed, it seems likely that Clinton has set a precedent for the technique in his widely criticized pardons and commutations delivered on his final day in office. There is no reason to expect Bush the lesser to be any more circumspect in his behavior. He has proven willing to stand behind his supporters indefinitely, and in the face of well-documented cause for condemnation. He has also proven eager to place the presidency above the law, and even above the Constitution, in his claims that executive privilege extends not only to presidential behavior, but to the entire executive branch of government. Already he has commuted Scooter Libby’s sentence, in part to repay loyalty and in part to prevent any further investigation. We can expect to see blanket pardons for Bush’s personal network on his departure from office that will put Clinton’s sleazy little list to shame. Granted, Bush’s gratitude is largely limited to those who can serve Bush himself in the future—nobody seems willing to give Gonzales a job despite taking a bullet for the president—but simply hushing investigation should be motive enough for our scion of entitlement.

I’m not a big fan of Constitutional amendment; too often it’s a method of placing an unconstitutional law above objection, and, being unconstitutional, amendment proposals are often pretty objectionable, too: proposed marriage amendment, a flag-burning amendment, a prayer-in-schools amendment. But curbing the abuse of a constitutional power is entirely appropriate for an amendment. Sharper legal minds than mine will need to work out the details and close loopholes, but at a minimum, the power of presidential pardon should be limited in two critical ways. One: presidential pardon should apply only to specific crimes, and not to criminal behavior generally. Two: presidential pardon should apply only to crimes for which a conviction has already been secured.

If anyone digs in his heels on the grounds that law should err on the side of compassion, argue it this way: our legal system presumes innocence. It is impossible to pardon anyone for a crime which the law does not recognize he has committed. A presidential pardon implies guilt, even as it denies legal liability. And for the law-and-order types, pardons should be anathema in the first place.

Posted by at 12:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Exciting things are happening in Washington, where the game of “legal immunity musical chairs” is in full swing. That’s the process by which it’s decided who takes the fall for those sins of the presidency which can’t be hidden. And since this presidency has so many visible sins to account for, this term’s game promises to be particularly lively.

The most recent chair to be tugged from the dwindling ring is a free pass on abuses in the OSC. The Office of Special Counsel is charged with protecting federal whistle-blowers from government retaliation for their whistle-blowing, and especially from getting fired for exposing abuses. I dimly remember the scandal when Scott Bloch took over the office in 2004 and immediately began dismissing out of hand complaints against Republican-appointed officials, and, when his own department began blowing whistles on such behavior, creating a new field office in Detroit where complainers could be assigned to undesirable posts. Or fired, if they preferred.

The FBI just raided Bloch’s office and home, seizing computer and paper records. No official statement of the charges the warrants pursue is yet available, but the smart money is on violating the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from using their offices for partisan political goals, because two of Bloch’s deputies, also under investigation for Hatch Act violations, were subjected to warranted search and seizure at the same time. Perhaps the move was motivated by Bloch’s decision to have a “virus” purged from his computer, which, by a startling coincidence, had apparently infected his two deputies’ computers as well, without touching the rest of the department—the FBI calculated it had more to lose than to gain by waiting for evidence to mount.

I await further developments with delight, especially since the OSC itself is investigating the White House, and especially Karl Rove, for improper firing of federal prosecutors and the use of federal offices in Republican political events. I hope that unleashing the FBI on the OSC is not simply a convenient way for the White House to stop investigation into its own misdeeds.

Posted by at 12:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last weekend, we attended a wool festival in the general vicinity of Washington, D.C. Because I can no longer travel for hours on end without a pit stop, we pulled into one of those highway rest stops along the way. It offered the usual selection of grossly overpriced fast food--$2.69 for a single, plain hot dog—and emergency entertainment in the form of magazines and paperbacks. I suspect the newsstand owner was a bit of a prude; even Maxim was considered too racy to go without a plastic sheath, and the paperbacks were heavily dominated by religious reading.

Rest stop paperbacks are already pretty low-grade in general; when even Danielle Steele is culled to make room for “Heavenly Humor—inspiring humor from women writers” you know you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel. Just before I turned away, I spotted the puzzle offering: Christian word-find. Word-finds occupy the lowest rung of the puzzle ladder: they require no particular reasoning, knowledge, or creativity, just patience. Any damn fool can, given time, find all the words, possibly moving his lips as he spells to himself. These word-finds qualified as “Christian” because the words in every puzzle were taken directly from biblical verse, including words like “of,” “to,” and “the.” (It must have taken some work to avoid including two instances of two-letter words.)

Or rather, I thought word-finds were the bottom of the barrel. A few seconds later, I spotted “Biblical Sudoku.” Now, pause a minute before reading on to try to guess how Sudoku puzzles could qualify as biblical, since they consist of nothing but a 9x9 grid to be filled with the numbers one to nine in such a way that no numeral is repeated in row, column, or 3x3 sub-grid. The numbers from one to nine are hardly exclusively biblical material, so I confess I was stumped.

Looking inside the book, I had a second surprise: the grids were all empty. This confused me for a moment, since an empty grid gives you nowhere to start the process of filling in the rest of the squares. In fact, it doesn’t even require a unique solution; any of the frajillions of Sudoku puzzles ever printed could legally fill an empty grid. My confusion lasted only a moment, however, because on the facing page were the answers. Not printed directly, but concealed in biblical references: for every square was a “hint,” telling you were to find the answer: How many months should fields lie fallow before planting oats (Leviticus 13:6)? Or something in that vein.

Effectively, there was no Sudoku at all to biblical Sudoku; the characteristic grid played no part in the puzzle, which could as easily have been eighty-one unrelated blanks at the end of the “clues.” All the logic, the whole purpose of a Sudoku puzzle, was removed and replaced by that ancient puzzle challenge known as “looking up the answers.” Small children would find their intelligence insulted by such a puzzle.

I know Christianity has produced some great thinkers. Medieval scholars, many of them from largely illiterate cultures, struggled to make sense of some very heady ideas, and nearly managed to do so, their efforts at logic foundering on experimental knowledge. Scholars of the Renaissance and the age of reason continued to praise Christian teaching even as they challenged its foundations. Sadly, such titans are not the norm. At the other, larger end of the scale lie the credulous and dim-witted, not much given to literacy or critical thinking, but eager to embrace any book as long as the word “Christian” is printed on the cover and the words aren’t too big. For them, and their desire for intellectual challenge, we have not-really-puzzles-at-all. It seems “Christian puzzles” aren’t profound questions like how a perfect god can co-exist with a manifestly imperfect world, or how free will can exist in the presence of an all-knowing, all-powerful deity. No, they’re just imitation puzzles for very stupid people.

Posted by at 3:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The infamous DC madam, Deborah Jane Palfrey, is dead. The official word is that it looks like suicide, although they’ll be looking into it. Can’t afford to leap to any conclusions when dealing with someone possessing secrets so dangerous to so many of the rich and powerful, although I’m sure it will turn out to be suicide. Palfrey’s station in life has deteriorated considerably: public exposure, a prison sentence, her business dismantled, her reputation for keeping her clients’ anonymity ruined (whether or not it was her fault). Some accounts say she vowed to kill herself before going to prison, others that she declared no intent to kill herself and a suspicion that others would have her done in. Reports of either kind of claim might be true; if both are, it suggest a disturbed mind. And some people commit suicide even without something to be depressed about. As deliciously Ludlum-esque as a murder arranged by some powerful Washington insider to tie off one last loose end would be, it doesn’t seem very likely, if only because bringing the name back into the news is more dangerous than letting it sink into dim memory. Grand, showy conspiracies like that don’t happen.

But smaller, equally ugly conspiracies do. What Hannah Arendt termed “the banality of evil,” referring to the dry, clerkish way the Jews were marked for mass murder by Nazi leaders, settles like heavy dust wherever power operates, and where good, vigorous sweepings are quietly disposed of. I’m very interested in what is about to happen to Palfrey’s list of clients. She may have kept that list private, out of a misplaced sense of honor or decency, a belief that exposing the Johns wouldn’t be proper. Or she may have fully intended to stick to her claim to “bring every last one of [the records] in if necessary” for her legal defense. But whoever inherits that figurative “little black book” may not feel bound by the same code of honor at all.

Whoever gets that list might consider it a golden opportunity for some very, very cautious blackmail. Or maybe, if it goes to a colleague, it could become a chance to round up business for her own swanky house of ill repute. But it might go to a relative, someone who, rightly or wrongly, feels just a bit of resentment towards some very heavy hitters who slipped into the background and left Palfrey to her fate, and decides to publish the list in revenge. It’s even conceivable that the inheritor might publicize the list out of simple civic devotion, letting us see how the men we’ve elected are serving. Or it could disappear into some dusty file as “evidence,” if all the copies can be tracked down.

Evidence of nothing in particular, just…“evidence.” The material equivalent of a “person of interest,” only more liable to disappear down the rabbit hole.

Palfrey’s name will be all over the headlines for a day or two. If something particularly shady comes up, the story may linger a bit longer. It will remain indefinitely, like the smell of a rodent dead in some inaccessible corner, on conspiracy theory blogs. Don’t watch for her name; she’s dead and gone. Watch for news on what happened to the list of clients’ names.

Posted by at 6:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

He was well past his prime, he knew. The few stray wisps of hair combed from ear to opposite temple could not conceal the passage of ages. But he could still show some get-up-and-go, as he had in taking over the little sandwich shop, pursuing the American dream of entrepreneurial success.

Winning new customers was important. The sandwich shop lay just far enough off the main drag to lack visibility, so drop-ins were rare. Despite a sudden collapse of competition within the last year—when two blocks of more visible shops, including five food joints were closed down to pursue some new real estate project—customers remained scarce, which was part of the reason he was now at the counter, in place of the previous manager. So it was important that everything was right: the counter clean, the tables tidy, the menu accurate. Can’t impress the customers if everything isn’t perfect.

And yet these disposable menus he’d just had printed up weren’t perfect. The first section of entries, the hot sandwiches, were numbered, from one to twelve, just as they should be, with a tidy little period after each number. But the second section, the cold sandwiches, were not. Customers couldn’t simply walk up and ask, “Gimme a #27,” but would instead have to ask for a ham, salami, and provolone instead. Slow. Inefficient. It might put off customers who were in a hurry, and repeat business was vital. Quick service, that was the key.

Painstakingly, he pulled the first menu from the stack, and a felt-tip pen from beside the register. Bowing low over the menu, he began to number the entries by hand. One. Three. Period. One. Four. Period. One. Five. Period. One. Six. Period. His handwriting wasn’t so regular as a proper print job, but it would have to do. One. Seven. Period.

Someone was standing at the counter. The man could see it just in his peripheral vision. It nearly broke his concentration. One. Eight. Period. One. Nine. Pause. Touch up the nine—there, that’s better. Period. Two. A nice, even “O,” not too wide, not too short, but a proper oval…yes, that was good. Period. Start the next column. Two. One.

Whoever was standing at the counter began to drum his fingers. It was very irritating, very distracting. The old man pointedly decided not to look up. Maybe whoever it was would take the hint, and leave him to his task. It was very important to get everything just right. Customers want everything just right. Period. Two. Two. Period. Two.

“Hello?”

Whoever was standing at the counter spoke. It was very rude. This was almost as distracting as the finger drumming, but the old man managed to keep his head down. He could just detect a second person now, standing behind the first, waiting at the counter. He considered calling Vinnie from the back room to take care of the nuisance, but he hadn’t reached the end of the second column, and didn’t want to screw up his count. Three. Period. Two. Four. Period.

By the grace of God, whoever had been standing at the counter trying to get his attention gave up. He could hear whoever it was slip his jacket back on and pick up his bag. A moment later, the door swung open and shut again. The old man continued his counting. Detail is important. It’s vital to do everything you can to keep the customers coming back.

[Mostly true story. I was the distraction waiting at that counter, and, although I couldn’t swear to what he was thinking, it’s the most sensible explanation I could think of. I don’t know how the guy waiting behind me fared, but I wound up eating Chinese take-out instead.]

Posted by at 12:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)