:(

I love this blog, but there's something about this post that strikes me as self important in the same way I can't really stand to watch Keith Olbermann's "special comments" - because their indignant tone completely misses the point of their intended message.

According to him, we've forgotten 9/11:

It's hard to remember the national mood right after 9/11. The pall that fell upon American life the moment the planes shattered the towers. Irony was declared dead. The late night comics went dark. Bush ceased to be a figure of fun. The world was dangerous, and existence was a heavy burden. It needed to be taken seriously.

Ezra forgot, apparently, about the wonderful semicolon - whose absence in the above passage is indicative of our neglect of one of the most fascinating, terror-inspiring and abused punctuation marks in our grammar.

Soccer vs. Culture in Austria

There's an incredibly snarky article in the International Herald Tribune today about how Euro 2008 is draining the revenues of Austria's venerated cultural institutions. The museums are empty, opera houses have cancelled performances.. The Kunsthistorisches Museum alone estimates its losses at around $150,000.

The deeper point isn't that this is a conflict between groups whom the article describes as "aesthetes and ruffians"

No, the situation points more toward an identity crisis.

Gerald Matt, the director of the Kunsthalle, where attendance has dropped by two-thirds during the tournament, explained the problem. "It's a very strange mixture between an inferiority complex and megalomania." He invoked the Córdoba syndrome, referring to what, for Austrians, was that glorious time 30 years ago when the national team beat Germany, 3-2, in Córdoba, Argentina, fanning eternal delusions of grandeur.

Austrian politicians don't seem to value the international reputation their country has as the cultural lynchpin of Central Europe. It's sad, I suppose, but both sides in this issue are being ridiculous. One person interviewed compared the situation to the Anschluss. Ok.

A little late, but....

I finally got around to reading Scalia's dissent today. It's kind of pathetic. Scalia is generally respected on both sides of the political spectrum, but this opinion is ridiculous in its hyperbole. There have been two excellent summaries of this case by Dahlia Lithwick - who only almost manages to make up for the fact that Slate publishes Hitchens - and Scott Lemieux, so I'll keep this pretty brief. But I'd like to repeat the most fantastically wrong thing that Scalia slips in his dissent:

In the long term, then, the Court’s decision today accomplishes little, except perhaps to reduce the well-being of enemy combatants that the Court ostensibly seeks to protect. In the short term, however, the decision is devastating. At least 30 of those prisoners hitherto released from Guantanamo Bay have returned to the battlefield.

If he wrote this himself, that's really puzzling. If one of his clerks put it in, he should be sacked because it was the Bush administration not the courts who released those 30 prisoners.

This is the third "devastating setback" to the Bush administration's war on terror, so I don't see too much cause to be optimistic that this will really deter crazy executive branches in the future; although, to be sure, this sets a good precedent that the United States can't indefinitely detain prisoners without habeas simply because they are being held outside of the country.

But, Scalia....really, I expect a lot better from him.