12 page of comments and not a single dissenting view. Well, for what it's worth, I'll try to explain my position again.

I still think it's a bit misleading to describe Kerr as defending or promoting the administration's positions. From your description, I was left with the image of someone like Alan Dershowitz or John Yoo (as I'm sure were most of the other commenters, many of whom seem content to take your word without themselves reading the links). This image did not match what I saw in the posts, which was mostly someone thinking out loud and willing to be proven wrong (which he was). Again, it's mainly a difference of intent. Yours is an explicitly political blog of what should be done. His is a bunch of personal reflections and interpretative exercises. Nowhere is he saying "this MUST be done", and like I pointed out before, other material from his blog suggests that he is not ideologically supportive of Bush.

Earlier I made a distinction between someone like John Yoo, who actually has political power and uses it to enact atrocious policies, and someone like Kerr who is merely discussing them dispassionately. What you're saying is that since elites have the power to shape opinion, their discourse is in itself a political act. But does this extend to everything they say in any venue whatsoever? Are they never allowed to simply speculate as individuals, given that they are expressly NOT trying to effect some policy or agenda?

What is most odious to me about this whole thing is the claim that anyone who doesn't exhibit some level of personal emotional outrage is somehow an accomplice to the Bush crimes. Does anyone remember this Onion article? (http://www.theonion.com/content/node/30624) It was spot on. I was outraged when we invaded Iraq and when the Abu Ghraib photos came out, or perhaps I would have been if I had not already known about the Cold War, Latin America, Operation Gladio, our financing of Saddam and the Taliban, etc. At some point, there's just nothing more to say about it, and you devote your energy to other activities, some of which may involve idle speculation about laws as if they were an abstract code rather than something that has real consequences. To say that this is immoral is somewhat equivalent to the comments you see every once in a while on Salon's pop culture articles that are yelling about how wrong it is to talk about things like this when there's a war going on.

One last example. In an ethics class it is not uncommon to consider scenarios that would normally be labeled morally abhorrent as the result of commonly accepted philosophies. So if we are discussing Utilitarianism, someone could argue that human consciousness is more valuable than simply human life (as it has awareness of itself and the ability to derive value from its own existence), and therefore it is okay to harvest organs from brain-dead or severely retarded people. Now I imagining some right-wing blogger overhearing this discussion and writing a hysterical screed titled "PROFESSOR CALMLY ADVOCATES EXTERMINATION OF DISABLED PEOPLE" and starting a petition to get him fired. That is exactly the kind of response I am seeing in the letters here that are calling for Kerr's termination, assassination, or (really?) "eternal damnation". I'm sorry, but most of these posters sound like dittoheads who I am 99% sure did not bother to read the links and come to their own conclusions, but instead come here every day to post "You go, Glenn!" responses. And this kind of torch-and-pitchfork mentality is exactly what creates the marginalization of academia (most of which, need I remind you, is extremely left-wing).

There is a need in society both for political agitation and for dispassionate debate (by which I don't mean conservative agitation in dispassionate guise). Kerr is not trying to deny you your role.

In other words, take your weak debate society crap to a coffee shop and let people who actually give a shit actually discuss it here.

As long as we're talking about the things that enabled Bush to come to power, blatant anti-intellectualism like yours is as good a place as any to start.

Actually, the appropriateness of a given discussion to a particular forum was precisely my point. This is a blog where people who feel strongly come to rail against real-world injustices. The Volokh Conspiracy is a blog where professors dispassionately analyze legal arguments and contemplate hypothetical and extreme scenarios - roughly what I assume you mean by "coffee shop". And what you and nearly everyone else here are saying is precisely that this kind of talk should be forbidden. So I'm perfectly willing to let you rant angrily here, but I don't see that you're willing to return the favor.

Maybe I'm recalling incorrectly, but aren't Joan Walsh and Scarborough like bff or something? Wonder if she'll have anything on this.

Just as it is a mistake to dismiss all hunting as barbaric redneck activity, it is also misleading to claim that all hunters have respect for nature and are beneficial to the ecosystem. There are a good deal of NRA types who couldn't care less about overhunting a species to the point of extinction, because for them it is a sport and not a means of survival, and they can move on to some other prey. Then there are canned hunts. And let's not forget the hunting enthusiasts that advocate gunning down wolves from helicopters.

I've always found the sanctity of hunting to be a pretty weak argument against gun regulation in general. It seems to me like it should be pretty easy to keep large hunting rifles that can't be easily concealed in public fully legal, while regulating handguns and assault weapons. A similar distinction could be used for guns that one keeps for home defense. All of which makes me think that the pro-gun advocates who hide behind hunting are being insincere.