The American Expatriate

is posting away merrily. Like it says on the can, this blog is by an American expatriate, and he is particularly strong on American affairs.

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back is not the pamphlet of that name written by Lenin but a careful critique of an amended piece by the BBC’s Paul Reynolds on the Wilson / Plame / Libby affair. Scott Callahan argues that the amendments were not improvements.

In Just the cold, hard facts he describes the way in which a couple of BBC types will start off with a remark of the unfalsifiable “it is widely believed” type, toss it to and fro between them for a minute and come out with an “expert” consensus. He also slams Justin Webb’s “Banana Republic” quip, which has also been mentioned here by commenter “Big Mouth”.

And in Small but Important he nails down an error I keep seeing in BBC reporting of American legal matters. The only thing wrong with the post is that Scott Callahan apologises for it as sounding pedantic. It is nothing of the sort. The separability of the two questions of whether a law is good and whether it is constitutional is itself a crucial point. The BBC blurs the two issues for the same reasons that the Democrats (or more accurately those with the “unconstrained vision” in Thomas Sowell’s terminology) do. The distinction comes up again and again. The degree to which it is observed or ignored has vast practical effects on how America is changed by changes in its law.

As Vladimir Ilyich put it:

When a prolonged, stubborn and heated struggle is in progress, there usually begin to emerge after a time the central and fundamental points at issue, upon the decision of which the ultimate outcome of the campaign depends, and in comparison with which all the minor and petty episodes of the struggle recede more and more into the background.