Apropos of Feministing's Buffy clip, allow me to say that it's not my revolution if I can't stake to it. Is there a single feminist out there who doesn't love Buffy? A single sentient, Buffy-experienced human being? I am unashamed to admit that I misted up at the end of "Innocence"; think that Season 7 was a massive triumph; bought the Slayer Collection box-set on Amazon pre-order; and have a treatment ready to go for Season 8: War of the Slayers. Mutant Enemy, give me a call. (And, remember, Willow is a Tribeswoman.)

But back to Feministing. The first I heard of the blog was the boob-controversy that you reference. For the uninitiated, or those too lazy to click through Melissa's links, Jessica 'Nisting recently met with Bill Clinton and posed, along with some fellow bloggers, for a photograph. A conservative blogger named Ann Althouse found comfort in a pixilated version of motorboarding, absolutely obsessing over Jessica's chest and calling her feminism into question over the burning issue of whether or not Jessica was posing with her best boob forward.

The contretemps became a perfect illustration of why Feministing is an energetic blog: Jessica's response took an inane comment from Ann and explored its deeper significance. You see that in the blog's excellent deconstruction of things like the doggystyle table or the rather hideous vagina urinal. Maybe it's a case of the boy trying to be more feminist than the editrix here, but I was a contributor here, I wouldn't be sparing the bile — this dreck merits way more exploration and invective, and I wonder why it doesn't receive it. Do you think, Melissa, that expressions of feminism carry way too much imposed baggage of "humorlessness," and the self-imposed instinct to avoid the charge can lead to a measure of self-censorship? For my money, the perfect feminist statement remains Crass's brilliant album Penis Envy. Just try to front on "Berketex Bribe."

But we may be a bit wide of the mark when we focus on Feministing's chosen subjects of coverage. What makes it work, I think, is the interplay of the different posters, who have a clear enough sense of the mission of the site — which is as you describe, Melissa — to allow their individual voices to harmonize. There's a voice to Feministing that you don't get on other feminist blogs. Anyone who's ever contributed to a group blog knows this is way more difficult to pull off than it sounds. At any moment, I expect the dozen or so Feministers (Feministas?) to burst out a round of "Walk Through The Fire." But maybe that's just the slayage in me.

Spencer

[Movable Snipe is a Daily Shvitz feature wherein two writers spend a reading a handful of blogs and offering constructive (or savage) criticism in epistolary form. This week's Snipers: Spencer Ackerman and Melissa Lafsky.]

Now that we've dispensed with the inanities of Captain Ed, let's turn our attention to one of the most malignant influences on American Jewry: Marty Peretz. Marty, of course, owns The New Republic, and The New Republic for four years employed me, before Marty's chosen one, Frank Foer, shitcanned me, largely — though Frank denies it — because of my opposition to the Iraq war. So, let me say, Marty, as you sit there Googling yourself, thanks for four wonderful years of TNR. I think I'll subscribe!

Marty is an interesting figure to say the least. He surely knows he's a total joke to his staff, which laughs at him behind his back and sucks up to him when he comes in the office. (I admit my own cowardice in behaving exactly as my ex-co-workers.) But he won't let anything change his intellectual stride, and a priori, that's an admirable position. In truth, however, it's the ossification of Marty's beloved spine, as what won't change his intellectual stride are such things as facts, scruples or basic human decency. Not coincidentally, The Spine, is Marty's blog for TNR — I'm not just venting here! — and, there, all of these tendencies are on fascinating display. Several liberals of my acquaintance have told me The Spine is a must-read for them, in order to enjoy the intellectual equivalent of watching a decrepit old crank yelling at an unsuspecting supermarket cashier.

What gets me about Marty is that he eats at my Zionism. He fashions himself a defender of Israel, but what he really does is chip away at what gives Zionism its breathing soul: the universalism that demanded the same thing for the Jews as for all other nations. By that I mean his Zionism is so circumscribed and blinded that he conflates whatever a rightist Israeli government chooses for its prerogative with what is in the broader interests of the state. For instance, on the Lebanon war, he wrote yesterday:

The Lebanese war was not fought well by Israel. Not because of the fighting troops. But because the fighting men were prevented from fighting well. By the government and the top brass of the army, which put soldiers in and took them out, ordered them to fight and then not to fight, and, once they were winning and ordered something like a cease-fire (that turns out to have been a cover for Hezbollah rearmament), to fight again and then stop before the battle was won.

This used to be called the "stabbed in the back" myth, and it has an extremely ugly pedigree. In a very superficial sense, it's true that one day Olmert told the IDF to fight and the next he told them not to. But the Lebanon war was not lost because of gentleness on the part of the IDF or Ehud Olmert. It was lost because it was based on the ill-founded assumption that if Israel could inflict sufficient pain on the Lebanese, they would blame Hezbollah instead of Israel for their suffering, and thereby have the political will to crush Hezbollah from within Lebanon. It's no accident that once the Lebanese Defense Minister pledged to send the national army in support of Hezbollah to repel an Israeli invasion, Olmert started to send signals that he would accept an imposed cease-fire.

Yet the myth persists in Israel, and in right-wing quarters of American Jewry, that if only the IDF was allowed to be the IDF, Hezbollah would have been decimated at acceptable cost. Why anyone should buy this is simple to explain: it's a lot easier to stomach than the proposition that Israel can't always get what it want by virtue of its moral superiority to the vicious antisemites of Hezbollah.

That conflation of moral superiority with wisdom is what used to be called hubris, and it's what will lead to disaster for the state of Israel, either through the endless nightmare of the occupation of the West Bank or an attack on Iran or any number of other things. When a far-sighted Israeli government attempted something audacious to actually improve Israel's strategic environment — Oslo — Marty and his cohort bitched and moaned, and never looked at the failure for Israel to deliver on the expectations created by Oslo in the 1990s as a reason for its collapse. (It of course wasn't the only reason, as there was the small matter of the obstinacy and perniciousness of Yasir Arafat, but it was a reason why Arafat was able to get away with abandoning Oslo as well.) None of this has erased the fact that no one has come up with a better idea than Oslo since, and the failure of Olmert's unilateral disengagement plan demonstrates this all too well.

I would hope that one day, friends of Israel decide to agree that Israel faces more than one kind of threat, and among them is the triumphalism and near-sightedness of its so-called friends. Till then we have The Spine to remind us why that is.

Spencer

Have you ever read Captain's Quarter's? I haven't either. But, perhaps unlike you, I have seen it referenced a million times by the brighter lights — and I mean this purely figuratively — of the conservative blogosphere, like The Corner or Hugh Hewitt. As far as I've been aware, the big gimmick of the blog is the snappy rightist cartoon at the top of the page. In today's installment, our hipster GOPers — one a white midriff-baring sexy-secretary with an impressive display of décolletage, the other one of those black men that liberals associate with — lament the unchanging of the Republican guard and suggest that Nancy Pelosi will neuter all the conservative Democrats recently elected to Congress. Comedy! I don't think "Captain Ed," master and commander of the Quarters, drew the strip, either.

So, what's this blog about? Today, at least, the first post up is an adorable recitation of Captain Ed-and-wife's trip to Los Angeles. There's a picture up of the two of them (he calls his wife his "First Mate," or "FM," which I don't think means Female-to-Male in this context) that is rapidly draining me of my powers of scorn. In this photo, the Captain reveals himself to be large man of the briny big-box deep: he's got his Minnesota t-shirt, his man-shorts and his baseball cap. I've been known to dress like that myself when hung over, but I'm half the Captain's age and I would never describe myself as seaworthy. The Captain's wife, however, is heart-meltingly adorable in her sunglasses and mom-jeans. I think I'm favorably inclined to this blog right now, Melissa.

The next post shakes the favor straight out of me. Captain Ed seconds a friend's observation that Jim Webb's victory over George Allen in the Virginia Senate race demonstrates the success of the liberal blogosphere, and observes, "I think many of us felt more comfortable in providing analysis rather than engaging in a more participatory fashion." In my experience, it's generally true that the liberal blogs do way, way more to encourage readers to donate to Democratic candidates and get involved in tight races. But to view the Democratic congressional victory through the prism of which political blogosphere is regnant strikes me as the blogger version of the Pundit's Fallacy — the view that what I think is good policy is also the best politics.

What do I mean by that? Bloggers can't really recruit candidates, although they can give longshots momentum, like with Ned Lamont. Nor can they control the backroom machinations of party leaders. They can raise a ton of money and bite the press in the tuchis for negative coverage, and that's a big deal. But they also can't control an opponent's maneuvers or mistakes, nor buy paid-media spots to counter or highlight them, nor conduct focus groups to test a candidate's message, nor orchestrate a Get-Out-The-Vote operation. In short, it's rather flattering to bloggers to suggest that their impact on a race is decisive, and I submit that it's no accident that the only ones you see making this case are the bloggers themselves.

Now, if Captain Ed had sent his goodly lady-wife to campaign for George Allen, Virginians would have been like, Macaca-who? Macaca-what?

Spencer