Now that you have surfaced again, Jamie, I await the nutters that you always draw, as they burrow their way to the surface in savage fury. This year, watching the huge ratcheting up of piracy off of Somalia's coast, I too have seen the need to counter this with a vigorous military response. These thugs will not be sweet-talked into surrender by Ban Ki-moon.

While I have your attention, I recently came across a piece by you where you horribly misrepresented some positions taken by Eric Alterman and Ezra Klein.  That was at least sloppy and I wondered if you learned anything from that episode. I have defended you out here even as I often disagree with you. At the same time, in his reply, Alterman tried to blacken the name of TNR by citing controversies at this publication that had nothing to do with you. I thought this hilarious, giving that his beloved Nation has been dragged kicking and screaming into the 20th century ( as well as the current century) on such matters as the Alger Hiss case, the Venona intercepts and more generally, the role of Communist spies and the American Communist Party practices and funding during extensive slabs of the Cold War. Intellectual honesty is always at a premium and hence, we see little of it much of the time.

I don't want to click the link because I don't want to end up rooting for the pirates.

Woody :))

The video link in the article points to a piece by Jonathan on Obama and the auto bailout, not James on pirates.

I hope that Ben's summary of Kirchick's video is not accurate: "[I]f we won't aggressively respond, there'll be more of the same in the years to come" is a policy opinion of sub-Kristolian insight. Dude, the International Maritime Bureau has been shouting this from the rooftops since 1996. The counterterrorism community has been pretty freaked out about the pirates (not as freaked out as about, say, potential Hizballah metastasizing or other top-tier issues, but the back burner is still on the stove) since piracy and al-Qaeda have a lot of external factors, interests, and organizational traits in common. And the current uptick in piracy was predicted after the Indonesian tsunami, which killed most of the pirates (and destroyed their boats) who prey on the Strait of Malacca, temporarily suppressing piracy there and creating openings in the world of organized crime for other Indian Ocean pirates to fill. The scope or potential danger of the maritime piracy threat is not news to anyone who's been paying attention to security issues.

Hopefully, when the link is fixed, it will show that Kirchick is not merely expressing a twelve-years-late echo of current facile conventional wisdom in the mainstream right which is just now waking up to the reality of the pirate threat that's been worrying informed people for a decade.

Hey wasn't that an old comic strip in the early 40's:  Jamie and the Pirates?