At this point, I just feel sorry for him

What? A post?

2007-07-15T22:55:00.000-07:00

Yep, a post. Oh, and a title change. This isn't really a return to blogging -- there are a few thoughts on Bush I want to share, and then I'm done. Well, unless I get the blogging bug again.

Those with long memories (i.e. fellow bloggers) will remember that the title of this blog was originally "Trust Me, You Have No Idea How Much I Hate Bush". That was back in 2004. Then it became "Trust Me, You Have No Idea How Much I Hate Bush, And Dick Isn't That Great Either", mainly because I liked the acronym TMYHNIHMIHBADITGE.

But TMYHNIHMIHBADITGE eventually gave way to the much milder "I just don't like this George Bush prick". Yes, he won re-election, but the swing of American public against him satisfied my outrage. "Finally," I thought, "People are beginning to get it."

Now, it's time for another title change. Explication to follow.

I hate Michael Moore (Part 1)

2006-09-12T19:12:00.000-07:00

Well, hate’s not the word, but I don’t like him.

I did like Bowling for Columbine. Even though I now have regrets about liking it I have to admit that it was an amazing movie. It was funny. It seemed profound.

I think I responded to it the way a conservative would respond to a flawed movie about Planned Parenthood. So, you’d have problems with the movie on some points, but on the whole you’d enjoy it.

And I did like Fahrenheit 9/11 even though I was seriously troubled by it. Remember the scene with the kite? I agree with Christopher Hitchens about that. And when I agree with Christopher Hitchens you know there’s a problem.

The big controversy was whether Fahrenheit 9/11 deserved the Golden Palm at Cannes. I think it did. Even if it was a seriously flawed movie it had real strengths as a work of cinema.

Disgusting propaganda. But a work of cinema. Not as bad as Triumph of the Will because that was propaganda in the service of a rotten cause. But bad in the sense that propaganda is bad. Bad in the scene that it’s not honest.

Of course, it was a polemic. I don’t want to fall into the trap of attacking him for making a polemic instead of journalism. As a filmmaker he’s free to make any kind of movie he wants. It would be like attacking Quentin Tarantino for not making love stories. It’s not his shtick.

And a few years ago I saw part of Roger & Me and laughed at it. So, Michael Moore’s a person who makes good movies, that much I can agree with.

And I was disgusted by the response to Fahrenheit 9/11. Michael Moore gets this much scrutiny and Bush gets a pass? As someone joked at the time, thank God President Michael Moore is under scrutiny and not maverick documentary maker George Bush. It shows you democracy’s in a good state.

So I have qualifications as a Michael Moore critic. I think he’s a good film-maker. I don’t expect him to be fair. I’m just as angry with the way the media reacts to him. Maybe my politics are more moderate than his. But I’m not going to say he’s a hack, he’s biased or that he’s fat.

I do think, however, that his arguments are weak and that he's not as careful as he should be about the facts.

What's this now?

2006-07-09T14:33:00.000-07:00

What's this? The George Bush prick blog, back in action? Say it isn't so!

You can thank Bert Prelutsky for it:

And, finally, it annoys me that every time I type “illegals,” my computer insists on underlining it in red, as if the word doesn’t even exist.

"My computer's dictionary has a liberal bias!" Now, that's wingnutty. Sad, yes. But also wingnutty.

But, wait, there's more.

Leftists ask little more of life than that they be regarded as more compassionate than Dr. Albert Schweitzer on one of his nicer days. It explains why they will always identify with the criminal rather than the victim of a violent crime. The heart of a normal person naturally goes out to the victim and the victim’s family. But how bourgeois is that?! By displaying concern for the perpetrator, the liberal highlights how special he is, how sophisticated, how broad-minded. It is, I contend, a particularly loathsome form of perversion in this country, and it’s more pervasive than rape or pedophilia.

Liberals always identify with the victim.

Identifying with the victim is a loatheome form of perversion.

So all liberals have a "particularly loathsome form of perversion".

I'm just glad he just said that it's more pervasive than rape or pedophilia, not actually worse.

Now that the ACLU has managed to get some loony judge to grant an injunction against executions on the grounds that lethal injections might be painful, I am reminded that when the plugs were pulled on Terri Schiavo, we were assured by all the liberal experts that starvation was totally painless.

All the liberal experts? Really?

Let's see. According to ABC News, "Death from Dehydration Is Usually Serene" (It's dehydration, not starvation, Bert):

"The process of starving to death seems very barbaric but in actuality is very peaceful," said Dr. Fred Mirarchi, assistant clinical professor of emergency medicine at Drexel University College of Medicine in Philadelphia.

Serene, peaceful -- not painless. What kind of pain would be involved?

The physical process of dying after life support is removed follows a pattern familiar to hospice workers. And the fact that Schiavo is in a vegetative state will likely make her death faster and less painful, Lynn said.

"It depends on whether she has the ability to swallow anything — and if that anything is offered," she said. "If she's unable to swallow anything, the course toward dying, so far as anyone can tell, is fairly comfortable."

Most patients who cannot eat or drink will enter a physical state known as ketosis. During ketosis, the body begins to use fat and muscle as a fuel source.

In advanced cases of ketosis, the nervous system response is dulled, and patients rarely feel pain, hunger or thirst. There is also some evidence that ketosis can produce a state of well-being or mild euphoria.

So, basically, the nervous system shuts down and the patient no longer feels pain, hunger or thirst. It's a horrible way to die, but it sounds like it's not actually painful.

So, once again, Bert won't let the facts get in the way of getting mad about stuff.

The Selling of The Internet

2006-04-22T02:42:00.000-07:00

In 1996 the US congress gave away the digital frequencies to existing broadcasters, value $10 billion. Democrats, Republicans, and the press were ebulient: privatisation will set us free, and God damn the cost to the taxpayer.

10 years on, they're giving away the internet. AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and other telecommunication companies are getting control of the operation of the internet. And they're not paying a damn thing for it. As Josh Marshall said, this is the "grand ole daddy of special interest giveaways".

This is an example of socialising the risk and privatising the profit. The US taxpayer spent billions to develop the internet and now they have to pay for it again in the form of profits to private industry.

Why is this an issue? Because it will mean the end of the internet as we know it. As Ed Whitacre, CEO of AT&T said: Google shouldn't be allowed to“use " my pipes (for) free.” The internet will become like television: a medium beholden to commercial authority. Premium lanes and anti-competitive charges are one thing; imagine the corporate owner of an internet company shutting down websites because they have politics incompatable with the corporate line.

It's Howard Beale's world, we just live in it.

Hitchens Revisionism

2006-04-19T01:02:00.000-07:00

Christopher Hitchens told David Horowitz's Frontpage Magazine:

Christopher Hitchens claims that his moment of truth about Islamic fascism arrived in 1989, and that by September 11, 2001, he had fully come to "[t]he realization that American power could and should be used for the defense of pluralism." He then says that after seeing the World Trade Center atrocities on television, he was exhilarated: "Here we are then, I was thinking, in a war to the finish between everything I love and everything I hate. Fine. We will win and they will lose."

But as historian Sean Wilentz points out, in the September 13 2001 Guardian, "Twenty-four hours after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon -- barely two years ago -- Hitchens fiddled on about the evil Americans and their taboos and their refusal to reckon with their wickedness".

Hitchens:

With cellphones still bleeping piteously from under the rubble, it probably seems indecent to most people to ask if the United States has ever done anything to attract such awful hatred. Indeed, the very thought, for the present, is taboo. Some senators and congressmen have spoken of the loathing felt by certain unnamed and sinister elements for the freedom and prosperity of America, as if it were only natural that such a happy and successful country should inspire envy and jealousy. But that is the limit of permissible thought.

In general, the motive and character of the perpetrators is shrouded by rhetoric about their "cowardice" and their "shadowy" character, almost as if they had not volunteered to immolate themselves in the broadest of broad blue daylight. On the campus where I am writing this, there are a few students and professors willing to venture points about United States foreign policy. But they do so very guardedly, and it would sound like profane apologetics if transmitted live. So the analytical moment, if there is to be one, has been indefinitely postponed.

Fantasyland

2006-04-18T18:04:00.001-07:00

Digby spots this commentary from CNN military analyst Don Shepperd:

But our message to them as analysts was, look, you have got to get the importance of this war out to the American people.The importance message is that this is a forward strategy. It's better to fight the war in Iraq than it is the war on American soil. And further, the message needs to be imagine an Iraq, imagine Iraq under the control of Zarqawi with another conveyor belt combined for tourists, combined with oil, water and land and resources, imagine the effect of that. That's a message that has to get out to the American people because the American people do not feel they are at war.

Well, that hit a few talking points, didn't it? It's not a question of doing better, it's a question of getting the message out. If we don't fight them there, we'll have to fight them here. If we pull out Zarqawi will control Iraq. Fantasyland.

And this from a retired U.S. Air Force Major General.

2006-04-18T18:04:00.000-07:00

But our message to them as analysts was, look, you have got to get the importance of this war out to the American people.The importance message is that this is a forward strategy. It's better to fight the war in Iraq than it is the war on American soil. And further, the message needs to be imagine an Iraq, imagine Iraq under the control of Zarqawi with another conveyor belt combined for tourists, combined with oil, water and land and resources, imagine the effect of that. That's a message that has to get out to the American people because the American people do not feel they are at war.

I'm as mad as Hell -- and I'm a bit of a dope, too

2006-04-16T00:59:00.000-07:00

This Washington Post profile of liberal blogs is shameful.

The story opens with an exemplar of the "Angry Left":

the rage begins as soon as she opens her eyes and realizes that her president is still George W. Bush… awaiting her building fury: the Angry Left... "One long, sustained scream" is how she describes the writing she does for various Web logs… wonders what she should scream about this day… Bush, whom she considers "malevolent," a "sociopath" and "the Antichrist"… Vice President Cheney, whom she thinks of as "Satan," or about Karl Rove, "the devil"… the "evil" Republican Party, or the "weaselly, capitulating, self-aggrandizing, self-serving" Democrats, or the Catholic Church, for which she says "I have a special place in my heart . . . a burning, sizzling, putrescent place where the guilty suffer the tortures of the damned"...

And that's just the first 3 paragraphs.

But she's not just angry, she's also a bit of a dope:

Darfur, she finally decides. She will write about Darfur. The shame of it. The culpability of all Americans, including herself, for doing nothing. She will write something so filled with outrage that it will accomplish the one thing above all she wants from her anger: to have an effect.

"Darfur is not hopeless," she begins typing, and pauses.

"Ugh," she says.

"You are not helpless," she continues typing, and pauses again.

"Weak."She deletes everything and starts over.

Well, that's one strawman down for the count. I bet if scribe David Finkel was really serious about nailing the liberal activist web as vague and unreasoningly angry, he'd go straight to some of the big names -- Atrios, Kos?

"I just want to see these [expletive] swinging from their heels in the public square," reads a recent comment from someone named Dave in a discussion about the Bush administration on a Web site called Eschaton.

Crude times, too.

Yep -- someone named Dave who left a comment on Eschaton. Is he a liberal? Is he a conservative pretending to be a liberal? David Finkel doesn't know, and he doesn't seem to care.

To what, effect, though? Do the hundreds of thousands of daily visitors to Daily Kos, who sign their comments with phrases such as "Anger is energy," accomplish anything other than talking among themselves?

Well, David is concerned enough to do a hatchet job. I wonder if he'd say the same thing to Howard Beale? "Yes, you're as mad as Hell and you're not going to take it any more, but aren't you and the millions of outraged Americans who watch you just, well, talking among yourselves?"

"If I can't rant, I don't want to be part of your revolution" is how she signs her comments, in the place other people might write "Sincerely."

The Internet: a big tent.

And then there's the money quote:

"I'm insane with rage and grief."

And then David dips into the comments again:

To which Nite74 responds, "ADD implies that some attention span is already present to be deficient."

To which Linnaeus responds, "I might say, though, that saying he has ADD is an insult to those who actually have it."

David's indictment, so far, consists of a liberal "insane with rage and grief", a handful of comments on blogs (which of course can come from anyone), and The Rude Pundit. And not only is insane-with-grief liberal a bit nuts, she's a hypocrite:

She agonized over low wages for overseas workers every time she bought a $40 leather purse.

Did David actually ask her this?

"Nice purse -- leather, right? How much did it cost? Uh-huh... Ever worried about low wages for overseas workers? Yeah... OK, ever worried about low wages for overseas workers at the same time as you purchased a purse? Right, thanks. Now: petitions. Sign 'em?"

I think the subtext is that if liberals were really serious about all this stuff they'd don a sackcloth and become a tribe of mendicants.

Why is she so crazy? Fortunately, Doctor Freud is on hand with an answer:

And the photo album is because of a 25-year-old Marine who died fighting in Vietnam three months before she was born, which she thinks helps explain the note, the alcohol, the cigarettes and the very first piece of writing she ever published online, a rant against the war in Iraq that began, "Every single millisecond of my life was directly affected by the nightmare that was Vietnam."

As Finkel says: "from lost soul to angry soul."

I eagerly wait for Finkel's follow-up, where he trawls Little Green Footballs and Free Republic for signs of anger.

Look! A post!

2006-04-15T21:54:00.000-07:00

Yep, I've brought this blog back. Our long national nightmare is over. Blogger, all is forgiven!

2006-02-27T21:25:00.000-08:00

OK. Posted here, later to be posted over there. Right.

Anyway. In Movie Wars, Jonathan Rosenbaum pointed out that there's no such thing as an anti-war movie. Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now and The Big Red One show us war is Hell, all right, but unfortunately that's the sales point: human beings love war, and the more Hellish the better.

Stephen Speilberg, about the time he made Saving Private Ryan, fautously said that all war films are anti-war films. He had it backwards -- all war films are pro-war, including Saving Private Ryan. Chayefsky explains through Charlie:

War isn't hell at all. It's man at his best; the highest morality he's capable of. It's not war that's insane, you see. It's the morality of it. It's not greed or ambition that makes war: it's goodness. Wars are always fought for the best of reasons: for liberation or manifest destiny. Always against tyranny and always in the interest of humanity.

What's Saving Private Ryan about, anyway? It's about glorious self-sacrifice. And it's glorious self-sacrifice that's the problem. At the very end of the film, Charlie has a chance to expose war as a farce by revealing how the Navy set him up to become a symbol and war hero. The problem is that he'll be locked up for five years as the price of revealing the truth. But Emily convinces him not to. She's been "americanized", meaning that she's internalised something Charlie said early in the film:

It's not war that's unnatural to us, it's virtue. As long as valor remains a virtue, we shall have soldiers. So, I preach cowardice. Through cowardice, we shall all be saved.

Virtue is how wars get started. The world needs more cowardice, then maybe we won't have so many wars. So, Charlie elects to embrace his role as a war hero: if he was to act selflessly now, he would be betraying his commitment to the end of war.

This is a war movie that isn't: it accepts the glory and justice of war (this film is set during WW2, after all) but eschews all that for a little basic humanity:

I don't want to know what's good, or bad, or true. I let God worry about the truth. I just want to know the momentary fact about things. Life isn't good, or bad, or true. It's merely factual, it's sensual, it's alive. My idea of living sensual facts are you, a home, a country, a world, a universe. In that order. I want to know what I am, not what I should be.

2006-02-05T06:45:00.000-08:00

Hey, I've moved: here's my new blog. I'd just had enough of blogger: these outages were the last straw.

I'll leave this up for a while but I do plan to trash this blog. So change your links!

Now this is nice.

2006-02-02T14:58:00.000-08:00

Who'd rig a Mulligan? The Republican Party would.

Wow. They can't even have an honest straw poll.

Politics makes for strange bedfellows

2006-02-02T04:27:00.000-08:00

Australia's government is currently in trouble because it turns out the Australian Wheat Board was paying kickbacks to Saddam Hussein. We have met the enemy and he is us.

And who's spearheading the American Senate Investigation? Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman. But don't think he's motivated by concern that justice is done: in negotiations over the Australian Free Trade Agreement, he argued for the altogether abolition of the Australian Wheat Board.

Note also that Coleman isn't strictly a free trader: he wants barriers down for wheat, but was unprepared to do the same for sugar.

He's a putz, and his interest in this scandal is completely self-serving -- but if we're lucky, he just might embarass the Howard Government. So, good for you Norm -- but, you know, if Al Franken actually does manage to unseat him in 2008, that'd make me happy too.

We're going to cut imports by 75% -- metaphorically, that is!

2006-02-01T21:49:00.000-08:00

This will amaze even the cynical:

One day after President Bush vowed to reduce America's dependence on Middle East oil by cutting imports from there 75 percent by 2025, his energy secretary and national economic adviser said Wednesday that the president didn't mean it literally.

Yes -- his State of the Union was non-core.

What did the President say again?

"Keeping America competitive requires affordable energy. Here we have a serious problem: America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world.""

We're addicted to oil -- well, to be fair, it is a metaphor. He doesn't mean we're freebasing it. But I have to idea how you can say "we're goingf to cut imports from there by 75% by 2025" and not mean it literally. There's not much wiggle room.

What the president meant, they said in a conference call with reporters, was that alternative fuels could displace an amount of oil imports equivalent to most of what America is expected to import from the Middle East in 2025.

Glad we cleared that up. You know, with all the effort that goes into writing the State of the Union, I'm surprised they didn't catch this mistake earlier. Well, unless they wanted to mislead people into thinking Bush actually gave a fuck about America's energy independence, knowing most people would never hear the retraction.

Holy shit!

2006-02-01T20:47:00.000-08:00

This is fantastic:

Samuel Alito split with the court's conservatives Wednesday night, refusing to let Missouri execute a death-row inmate contesting lethal injection.

Alito, handling his first case, sided with inmate Michael Taylor, who had won a stay from an appeals court earlier in the evening. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas supported lifting the stay, but Alito joined the remaining five members in turning down Missouri's last-minute request to allow a midnight execution.

The new David Souter?

SOTU: FUBAR

2006-01-31T20:21:00.000-08:00

Bush wants to "pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research" such as "human cloning in all its forms".

Human cloning in all its forms? You mean, like, twins?

No, because if it's done in a laboratory it's bad, but if it happens naturally it's good. Pathetic, Mr. Bush. I'd be more impressed if you had an argument for why human cloning is an "egregious abuse" -- no, really, impress us all. Tell us why human cloning is evil.

And, by the way, you'd better have a chat with God about this -- the frequency of "natural clones" is 3.5 per 100 births.

Uh, isn't that, like, genocide?

2006-01-31T02:14:00.000-08:00

Quick! Captain Ed wants us to "prevent" the Palestinians from the effects of their own choices! No, really, he does. It's down the bottom:

The US should not subsidize Hamas, nor should it give money to a people whose only aim appears to be genocide. Second, the US should allow Israel to respond militarily to any and all provocations -- no more pressure from Washington on Tel Aviv to moderate their responses to suicide bombings and missile attacks. And if Hamas and the Palestinians still want to wage war after that, then let the IDF roll across the West Bank and Gaza Strip and push the whole lot of them right into the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea. That's what total war means, and as soon as the world stops preventing the Palestinians from the risks of their own choices, the sooner they will conclude that war is the worst possible choice for them.

When Arabs talk about pushing Jews into the sea, it's bad. When conservatives talk about pushing Arabs into the sea, it's doubleplusgood!

I wonder if there's a Palestinian Captain Ed out there saying "if the Jews still want to wage war with us, then we should push the whole lot of them into the sea!"? Palestinian moderates then say "No way, that would be evil!" But Palestinian Captain Ed replies, "that's what total war means" -- as if pulling a leaf from Hitler's book of evil things to do on a rainy afternoon needed no further explanation.

So, basically, if you read conservative blogs, you get a lot of insight into why the world's so fucked up -- it's because the lizard brain is king.

The Forer Effect and Cognitive Dissonance

2006-01-31T01:42:00.000-08:00

For the life of me, I’ve never been able to tell the difference between the Forer effect and the Barnum effect. Both seem to describe the same phenomenon: how when we see a vague description of our personality, we’re likely to describe it as accurate. This is the principle on which newspaper astrology columns work: they’re so vague the predictions could fit almost anyone,

If there is a difference between the two, it’s subtle: perhaps that the Forer effect is our propensity to rate a personality profile as accurate and the Barnum effect is our propensity to take vague statements as referring to ourselves. So, the Barnum effect is a component of the Forer effect. The Forer effect is broader, encompassing both our tendency to take vague statements as true and a kind of confirmation bias whereby we don’t give weight to the parts of the personality profile that don’t fit. That’s consistent with what we know about confirmation bias: just as lies are neat and truth is messy, we accept the parts that fit and downplay the parts that don’t. But that implies a need to believe in the profile.

Standard explanations of this phenomenon are unconvincing: it’s gullibility, it’s vanity. The most compelling explanation, I think, lies in cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is motivation theory. When we have two ideas that clash, we try and do something about it. We drop one of the ideas, or we downplay the contradiction, or we rationalise our way out of it. The need to believe in an idea makes us more likely to try and rationalise away the contradiction.

Suppose that we don’t have a clue about who we are – and we really don’t. Our self-knowledge is tentative and superficial. The Barnum effect occurs because we just can’t rate personal statements with any accuracy – humans are so mutable that just about any statement seems personal. We need a coherent sense of self to interact with others in a symbolic network of exchanges, but we are haunted by these sense that our front is just a pose. To resolve this cognitive dissonance, we long to be told who we are. We are confronted with powerful evidence that self is an illusion but a powerful need to believe our self exists, so we greedily accept personality profiles as the truth.

In other words, a deep psychological need underlies the Forer effect. We sift the personality profile for the parts that fit. And we define “fitting” in that context extremely broadly. We do this because we desperately need to believe in the illusion of self. We’re just a metabolism with a narrative self that imposes a sense of continuity on us. Our bodies are fresh every seven years, every atom replaced: it’s the sorites paradox of existence. How can we say we continue to exist when the body of made of different matter every seven years? Self and memory are ongoing reconstructions, patchworks built by firing synapses.

It’s the appeal of astrology, tarot, fortune telling, palm reading, even the Myers-Briggs test – we believe in these vague profiles because we don’t know who we are well enough to judge the veracity of these tests. They provide an incoherent, jangling existence with a patina of meaning – something to face the world with.

Next: Jacques Lacan, and why language only works because it's impossible!

Go on -- prove the negative

2006-01-30T03:19:00.000-08:00

Jim Holt challenges atheists, asking "Can you prove God doesn't exist?"

I don't know. Can you prove nursery rhymes didn't really happen?

In other words, the burden of proof is on the person who wants to prove something exists, not the person who wants to prove it doesn't. But nice try.

Anyone who attends the World Economic Forum is French!

2006-01-30T00:27:00.000-08:00

Nevertheless, the Republicans may have added a complication to their expected Alito victory parade by ridiculing Kerry for making his filibuster announcement while at an economic summit in Davos, Switzerland.

Even weirder, Davos is the mecca of pop Libertarianism -- Kerry was there for the World Economic Forum. So, everyone who attends the World Economic Forum is an etiolate fop?

The Boston Herald described it as " This week, too busy attending the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, to participate in the Senate debate on the nomination of Judge Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, Kerry nevertheless phoned in with a thought."

By the way, John McCain was also "too busy attending the World Economic Forum" -- could this criticism of Kerry be any dumber?

Nobody knows what's it's like to be a wingnut, on campus.

2006-01-28T05:23:00.000-08:00

Nathanael Blake, senior in microbiology at Oregon State University and Townhall Columnist:

We had pro-choicers gather with signs to counter-protest again, though this year they remained surprisingly civil. The more virulent opposition relied on hit and run tactics: quickly tearing up crosses (sometimes breaking them), yelling obscenities while walking by, flipping the bird at us, and the like.

They just wanted to draw attention to the silent genocide of the unborn and at them flipped was the bird. Every sneer is a dagger, every insult poison -- and the like, and the like, and the like.

"Nobody knows... what it's like... to be pro-life... on campus... to be a wingnut..."

After asking a couple of questions, she could no longer contain herself, and began expounding upon how pro-choice she was, and how dishonest and wrong the pro-lifers were. Turning the interview to questions of what tactics might be used in the future to counter the cross display, she helpfully informed the protestors that the pro-lifers really had no way to stop vandalism or theft of the crosses. Afterwards, at least one protestor expropriated a cross.

The crosses pro-life Christians have to carry. Well, the crosses that get carried away, really.

What produces this menagerie of vandals and protestors, screaming passersby and biased reporters? These phenomenons are meticulously documented and described in myriad forms, but the impetus behind them is not always clear. What causes people who pride themselves on the compassion of their creed to champion the violent killing of the weakest human beings?
Many reasons have been offered, most with some truth to them. For the sexual revolution to achieve its goal of sex without consequences, abortion was necessary. Guilt is another factor; those who have had or encouraged abortions are desperate to justify themselves. An obsession with convenience is an oft-named culprit, with the ease of eliminating the unwanted trumping moral considerations.

I think the reason conservatives opine about how evil liberals are (more in sorrow than in anger, of course) is to distract us from their vociferous oppositon to social programs that really would lower the abortion rate. A girl in France is seven times less likely to have an abortion than a girl in America -- so, when you think about it, fundamentalist Christians are responsible for the majority of these abortions because they elect Republicans who torpedo programs like pre-natal care. And in places where the fantasy of illegal abortion and no comprehensive sex education is manifest the abortion rate is stratospheric: Latin America has five million abortions a year. But don't hold your breath waiting for crosses to be put up to the weakest among us dead for want of social programs. Or the forced abortions of Saipan, come to think of it. Ah, but conservatives are responsible for that practice, and that's the wrong agent.

If we may modify the words of Lady Galadriel, the unspoken mantra of today is, “I shall love me and despair!”

The future Jonah Goldberg?

Existence without meaning is a horror, and it is now accepted that man is but an animal, and an animal is but atoms assembled by random chance. Those who believe this may still seek to gratify themselves, but they haven’t the will to procreate. Reproduction is a defiance issued against ennui. To welcome children is to assert that life is meaningful and worth living; voluntary sterility consummates the opposite.

Chance didn't assemble the atoms, natural selection did, and natural selection is anything but a chance process -- but don't worry, it's a common mistake. They don't know what evolution is, but they sure do know they're against it!

The culture of contraception and abortion bespeaks Western civilization’s belief that it neither deserves nor wishes to exist.

Ah. So when they made abortion illegal, it was really themselves they were aborting. In fact, the condom ("culture of contraception") also bespeaks the desire for non-existence. And I thought it was just about being able to fuck while reducing the risk of pregnancy. So there weren't as many abortions. By the way, this is a good example of why Roman Catholic countries where abortion is illegal have the highest abortion rates in the world (50 in a 1000 for Columbia).

Mmm, wingnutty.

2006-01-28T03:06:00.000-08:00

Burt Prelutsky: "Because the entire process of appointing Supreme Court justices has become so politicized, many people would like to see the job description changed to include term limits."

A political appointment, politicised? The fuckers.

Jim Kouri misses the obvious:

When asked by the media for his thoughts on the Hamas triumph in the Palestinian parliamentary elections, former President Jimmy Carter replied that while they have a terrorist past, at least they're not corrupt. One of the complaints by many in the Middle East was the corruption within the Palestinian Authority and Yasser Arafat's Fatah Party.

Arafat himself squirreled away millions of dollars from aid packages that were intended to help the Palestinian people. However, Carter's comment appears to dismiss the years of death and destruction perpetrated by Hamas on the Jewish State.

...

But, as Jimmy Carter said, at least Hamas isn't corrupt. There's some bad news and some good news for the people of Israel: the bad news is Hamas attained legitimate power within the Palestinian State; the good news is that Jimmy Carter is leaving the Middle East.

Jim, he was there as an election observer -- and if election observers aren't neutral, they don't have credibility. So, Carter had a damn good reason to not make a ringing denunciation of Hamas. But, hey, pretend he didn't, it just makes you look like a dope.

And Mary Mostert is insane:

In his press conference today President Bush articulated a policy that is a dramatic change from that of the Clinton Administration in America's treatment of terrorists who end up in control of their national governments.

Clinton supported two known terrorist leaders who seized control of their governments: Nelson Mandela, head of the Africa National Congress in South Africa (ANC) and leader of the terrorist organization called Umkhonto we Sizwe. Mandela was elected president of South Africa in 1994.

But Bush wouldn't pander to no black terrorist, right?

Random Burt Prelutsky Highlights

2006-01-26T08:39:00.000-08:00

"It’s been 48 years since I last reviewed a movie without first seeing it"... begins a column where he reviews two movies without seeing them. I wish I was making that up.

Burt: imagine how trenchant your insights would have been if you had seen them.

"On Tuesday, it could be the pointy-headed crowd at the ACLU that’s in full throttle, demanding that illegal aliens are entitled to all the rights and privileges of American citizens, not to mention a chicken in every pot."

It was, in Burt's view, a huge mistake for the founding fathers to apply the constitution of the United States to all persons, not just citizens.

"Not being a constitutional scholar, I am naturally reluctant to become too embroiled in these matters"... he says as he embroils himself in constitutional matters.

And he has a roundabout way of plugging his book, "Conservatives are from Mars (Liberals are from San Francisco)":

Which brings us to liberals. They perplex me, not merely because I believe they are wrong about virtually everything, but because they don’t even seem to dwell on the same planet as the rest of us. If we were to discover one day when they all took off in a large spaceship that they were merely tourists from another solar system, or perhaps criminals who’d had to serve their sentences on this distant penal colony, I might be as shocked as everybody else, but I wouldn’t be too surprised.

...as you'll be able to find out if you read my book!

Liberals aren't like you and me -- they're aliens. In fact I, as a liberal, am not like the rest of us -- which is probably why I get these headaches.

If they're dumb know-nothing snobs, how would getting rid of liberal bias make it better?

2006-01-26T07:47:00.000-08:00

Townhall, everyone's favourite conservative "information portal". In other words, click on the link and you find yourself in an alternate reality. Like He-Man when he passed over into Etheria to find his sister Andora, but Borkier.

Glut with choice I am, with fresh Ben Shapiro, Marvin Olasky and Michelle Malkin on offer. Let's see -- Ben is going on about Hillary Clinton, and Michelle Malkin is mocking opponents of the death penalty (how Christian)... But who am I kidding? It's going to be Burt Prelutsky, who had me at "highly-educated academicians at UCLA":

There is currently a brouhaha brewing here in Los Angeles. On one side are the highly-educated academicians at UCLA, while on the other side are all the really smart people.

Ah, fake populism. Go on, Burt, tell us how smart people who agree with you are.

It seems that a young UCLA alum named Andrew Jones came up with the nifty notion of getting students to tape their professors’ lectures. He figured that was the one sure way to discover whether or not the pedants are really just a bunch of leftist windbags using their lecterns as soap boxes, indoctrinating rather than instructing.

As Michael Berube spotted: 13 bias complaints in the last 5 years, faculty of 8,000 professors and instructors. It's the leftist windbag mecca!

This isn't about fairness. It's about intimidation. They want to subject university professors to flak so they skew to the right. But Burt pretends:

When I read some of the attacks leveled against Mr. Jones, calling him a Nazi for instance, and contending that any student bringing a tape recorder to class is nothing but a Benedict Arnold in a sweatshirt, I can’t help wondering in what parallel universe such people reside.

It's not Nazism, but it is a culture of intimidation that stifles free debate. So, as I understand it, conservatives would record lectures, the recordings would be analysed for the best bits, the names of these professors would be published on the internet and the professors themselves would then get a flood of right-wing hate mail (and perhaps death threats). Oh, not to intimidate them, of course, but to help parents decide what university to send their kids to. Cute.

In fact, dear professor, inasmuch as your salary comes to you courtesy of the poor, beleaguered California taxpayer, anything you say in a classroom is definitely our business.

No, it's the government's business, and if you don't like how the government's handling it you can change the government.

What I don't get it -- if those ivory tower eggheads are so dumb, why would you want to send your kids there, freedom from liberal politics or not? The incoherence of the complaint exposes it as a pretext for intimidating academics and slanting university culture to the right.

Burt reminds me of an Intelligent Design advocate who claims "teach the controversy" -- clothing a sinister intention in the language of fairness.

I had no idea Those Who Trespass was about... that

2006-01-24T18:58:00.000-08:00

Those Who Trespass: Bill O'Reilly's pseudo-pornographic novel. Not as bad as Scooter Libby's, but pretty awful. But somehow, the book's plot trumps both the bad writing and sleaze:

O’Reilly’s novel, Those Who Trespass, which reads like an eighth grade writing assignment, is about a blustery news correspondent, demoted from foreign correspondence to less prestigious work (as O’Reilly was when he moved from ABC News to Inside Edition), who murders a string of colleagues he feels have hindered his career. “I kill you on page six,” he told Charlie Gibson on Good Morning America.

Um. Well.

How many abortions are the pro-lifers responsible for every year?

2006-01-24T16:39:00.000-08:00

Michael Gaynor:

The "choice" that pro-abortioners demand and pro-lifers dispute is the choice of life and death over a preborn baby. Pro-abortioners want it to be the mother's choice and opine that fathers and society have no legitimate interest and spousal notification is an "undue burden" and "demeaning" to the mother. Until a baby is born, they insist, the mother has the right to choose between thumbs up and thumbs down for the preborn baby she is carrying. Like a Roman emperor choosing whether a defeated gladiator should be slain or spared. If the mother puts her thumbs down, then her baby's life should be terminated, at taxpayer expense, if possible, pro-abortioners argue.

OK, let's talk about abortion.

American girls are just as sexually active as Canadian and European girls, but somehow a girl in America is seven times as likely to have abortion as a girl in France. The unholy trinity responsible for a high abortion rate is lack of access to contraception, ignorance and bad social services. The pro-life movement, while opining high-mindedly about abortion, fights against giving young people access to contraception and sex education and is alligned with conservatives who fight against social services. So who's really to blame for high abortion rates?

There are countries where abortion is illegal and they have few social services -- unfortunately, they have the highest abortion rates in the worlds: Peru, Brazil, Chile, Columbia. Columbia's abortion rate is a stunning 50 per 1000. Roman Catholic means no condoms.

Cue former President Jimmy Carter: "It has long been known that there are fewer abortions in nations where prospective mothers have access to contraceptives, the assurance that they and their babies will have good health care, and at least enough income to meet their basic needs."

You see, in the pro-choice movement, we're Roman Emperors -- preventing millions of abortions a year. Unfortunately, conservatives are at best non-combatants in the war against abortion, forced by ideology to see pregnancy as punishment for intercourse and therefore unable to help themselves from making the abortion problem worse: more abortions, more suffering, more misery, and all because conservatives lack the guts to abandon cant about permissiveness and the welfare state.

Typical cynicism and stupidity from Bush:

This is the path to the culture of life that we seek for our country. And on its coldest days, and one of our coldest days, I encourage you to take warmth and comfort from our history which tells us that a movement that appeals to the noblest and most generous instincts of our fellow Americans — and that is based on a sacred promise enshrined in our founding document that this movement will not fail.

The noblest and most generous instincts -- in this case, conservatism -- marching boldly on into a future where there are more, more, more abortions -- enough to glut the greediest pro-lifer.

Somehow, movies were just wholesome!

2006-01-24T16:15:00.000-08:00

Chuck Baldwin, once upon a time:

I also remember going to the Saturday matinee unsupervised (it was unnecessary) and never hearing God's name taken in vain or any other profane speech, for that matter. There was no rating system then, of course, because virtually every movie was suitable for the entire family.

Um, that's because The Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors Association (later the MPAA) had a Production Code, first adopted in 1930. From 1934 films had to recieve a certificate from the Production Code Administration to be released.

Virtuallly every movie was suitable for the entire family -- because that's the only kind of movie people were allowed to make. It wasn't government-enforced, but it was worse than the ratings system because it made certain kinds of movie impossible to make:

The ridicule of religion was forbidden, and ministers of religion were not to be represented as comic characters or villains.

The depiction of illegal drug use was forbidden, as well as the use of liquor, "when not required by the plot or for proper characterization".

Portrayals of miscegenation were forbidden.

"Scenes of Passion" were not to be introduced when not essential to the plot. "Excessive and lustful kissing" was to be avoided, along with any other treatment that might "stimulate the lower and baser element."

There you go! You could make movies, you just weren't allowed to make fun of religion, depict a priest as a villain or a buffoon, tell a story about illegal drug use, show a black and white couple, or have an erotic kiss. Suitable for the entire family -- even Archie Bunker.

Of eurodollars and Iran

2006-01-23T11:38:00.001-08:00

One of the big developments in Iran that doesn't have anything to do with nukes is their progress towards establishing their "Bourse", or oil exchange -- something similar to NYMEX or IPE. The Bourse will trade in Euros, simultaneously stimulating the European economy and weakening the US dollar. This prepares the way for a switch from a petrodollar to petroeuro standard, and may even lead to the adoption of the euro of the world's reserve currency.

This may be the right time to be paranoid -- in 2000 Saddam Hussein switched from the dollar to the euro. In 2003 the US switched the dollar right back. Now, with Iran on the verge of a similar political maneuver, the drums for war with Iran are beating loud -- so it's easy to understand why people are cynical about American motives.

Here's the problem with an Osirak-style bombing of Iran -- under the nonproliferation treaty, Iran is entitled to nuclear power. It's just not allowed to build bombs. We could watch for a clear sign of a bomb development program -- a heavy water reactor, for example -- but that's not Bush Administration policy. The National Security Strategy: not pre-emptive but preventive, eliminating threats where phantom intent can be matched up with a high school chemistry lab's capability.

It's important to point out that the Iranians already accept payment for their oil in euros, but still price it in dollars. This is because the three oil "markers" that set the price are all in US dollars. The Bourse, a fourth marker, will be the first euros-based one, and will enable the Iranians to list their oil price in euros.

This is a Catch 22 for the US. If they invade and can't win quickly, the price of oil could pass $100 -- Iran controls the strait of Hormuz, the bottleneck of gulf oil. But if the Americans let the Iranians do this, the dollar will take a hit -- and the Bush debt makes that dangerous.

Here's a slightly paranoid account of what could happen:

America monopolizes the oil trade. Oil is denominated in dollars and sold on either the NYMEX or London’s International Petroleum Exchange (IPE), both owned by Americans. This forces the central banks around the world to maintain huge stockpiles of dollars even though the greenback is currently underwritten by $8 trillion of debt and even though the Bush administration has said that it will perpetuate the deficit-producing tax cuts.

America’s currency monopoly is the perfect pyramid-scheme. As long as nations are forced to buy oil in dollars, the United States can continue its profligate spending with impunity. (The dollar now accounts for 68% of global currency reserves up from 51% just a decade ago) The only threat to this strategy is the prospect of competition from an independent oil exchange; forcing the faltering dollar to go nose-to-nose with a more stable (debt-free) currency such as the euro. That would compel central banks to diversify their holdings, sending billions of dollars back to America and ensuring a devastating cycle of hyper-inflation.

...This is not a “liberal vs. conservative” issue. Those who’ve analyzed the problem draw the very same conclusions; if the Iran exchange flourishes the dollar will plummet and the American economy will shatter.

The good news: Bush will be fucked. The bad news: so will everyone else.

But even saner minds caution:

Not so. This could be a far more profoundly punishing blow to American interests than Iran's ability to manufacture a crude atom bomb that would have little credibility until it became small and stable and reliable enough to be delivered on some putative target.

The relationship between the oil price and dollar is intimate and important, and very useful to the dollar's highly profitable status as the world's reserve currency. The prospect of a rival bourse and futures market opens the intriguing possibility, beyond hedging the future oil price, of profitable arbitrage between the euro and the dollar.

And if oil and gas are to be denominated in more than just one currency, why not open the trade to others? Why not denominate the price of a barrel of oil in Japanese Yen, or in Chinese yuan, the currency of the world's second biggest oil importer?

Why not, in short, end the monopoly rule of the almighty dollar?

Such a move would not be welcomed in Washington, which swiftly moved after the fall of Baghdad in 2003 to reverse Saddam Hussein's impudent decision to start selling Iraqi oil for euros, rather than dollars. After all, the great benefit of running the world's reserve currency means that if all else fails, the United States Treasury can just print more and more of the stuff and pay for its oil imports that way.

There are, naturally, limits to the degree to which the United States can debase its currency, as the world found with the first great OPEC price rise of 1973, when the price per barrel tripled. This is usually attributed to the political decision by Saudi Arabia and other Arab oil producers to punish the United States for its decisive support of Israel in the Yom Kippur War. That is partly true, but the crucial OPEC decision was as a direct result of President Richard Nixon's Aug. 15 decision to end the dollar's link to the gold standard.

That tears it for me -- George Bush must be a radical leftist, bent on destroying the world economic order to build a communist utopia from the ashes of the old!

If you're black... Al Franken will punch you.

2006-01-23T11:38:00.000-08:00

OK, Mike S. Adams is now my favourite columnist at Townhall. Why? Because he's almost as lazy as I am -- most of his columns are based either on e-mails he's recieved or letters he's written to people, to say nothing of the follow-ups! A kindred spirit, united in sloth.

The reason for my fear of Al Franken – which my team of psychiatrists dubbed Franken-phobia – began when Franken challenged Rich Lowry to a fistfight in 2003. Those who consider this to be Franken’s most tasteless moment have forgotten the time he made a joke about the menstrual cycle of one of Newt Gingrich’s daughters.

Rich Lowry called Democrats wimps; Al Franken challenged him to a fistfight (ala Fight Club); Rich Lowry refused; Rich Lowry demonstrated to be full of shit.

And -- "team of psychiatrists"?

But there is a rational explanation for the apparent hypocrisy of Al Franken. In order to understand it, you have to listen to Al Franken’s “nuanced” explanation of the difference between “unfair mean” and “fair mean” jokes. Here’s an example of a “fair mean” joke made by Franken himself:

A good example is his John McCain joke -- why's this guy a hero? I mean, he sat out the war!

After calling Rush Limbaugh “fat” 37 times on a single page of the book "Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot", he said he was justified because Rush himself was so “mean” – presumably “unfair mean.” Now that we see this “meaner” side of Franken, there may be attacks on him that focus on physical appearance rather than ideas.

Having actually read the book, I can report that he makes constant references to how the ad hominem is a response to Rush's ad hominems. And, he does attack his ideas, Mike -- before you write a column, read the book?

And, who knows, maybe homosexual liberals will start to throw quiche at Franken when he speaks on college campuses. Food throwing is an example of “fair meanness,” largely because conservatives don’t do it.

Mike, if Al has advocated throwing food at conservatives, I will paypal you a shiny digital dollar.

Thanks to the research of Peter Schweizer, I learned that both executive producers and all four researchers at Air America just happen to be white. And of the 14 researchers who worked on Franken’s book "Lies", all just happen to be white just like all of the researchers for his previous books.

Uh, what about the black guy who hosts a show on Air America?

And his feature film Stuart Saves His Family used, not just a white director, but all white writers, producers, editors, and cinematographers.

I find it hard to believe Mike is actually attacking Al Franken for the skin colour of his movie's producer. I mean, blaming him for having white cinematographers is one thing (I had no idea the writer hired the cinematographers!), but the producer?

On his films When a Man Loves a Woman and One More Saturday Night, all senior administrative personnel were white.

Get the feeling Mike's cherry-picking?

Of course, I’m not really calling Al Franken a racist.

Oh, good to know!

Feminists lie because they don't believe in truth, they're like the fascists in 1984, and the name Daisy sounds like it belongs to a stripper

2006-01-23T11:09:00.000-08:00

Mike S. Adams cried: "I can’t think of many names – with the possible exceptions of Coco, Mercedes, and Jasmine – that could make you sound less like a feminist and more like a stripper in a club that offers two-dollar table dances."

The name? Daisy. "Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer Daisy..."

Someone call Disney, Mike S. Adams thinks Donald's girlfriend sounds like a stripper!

First of all, let me tell you how thrilled I am to receive hate mail from a feminist named “Daisy.” I can’t think of many names – with the possible exceptions of Coco, Mercedes, and Jasmine – that could make you sound less like a feminist and more like a stripper in a club that offers two-dollar table dances. Nonetheless, I will try to answer most of your questions, sent via e-mail.

And then there's the obligatory shrill comparison to feminism to the nightmare of totalitarianism:

Despite the fact that the conversation began with one feminist trying to sooth another, they soon worked themselves into a frenzy. The mere repetition of words such as “patriarchal,” phallocentric,” and “male-dominated” has an effect like the one described in George Orwell’s 1984. If you want to see the “two minutes hate” in practice just attend an annual “Take Back the Night” march or The Vagina Monologues.

The Vagina Monologues!?

And I can't tell whether or not this is supposed to be a parody:

Another example comes from a former secretary in my department. One day she left work crying because I criticized campus feminists (for hanging racist posters on campus showing Condi Rice standing in a cage holding a bunch of bananas). The next week she was back in the office tearlessly (and tirelessly) criticizing her husband for his inability to maintain an erection.

The hypocrite! One day she's upset because someone criticised feminists, the next she's making fun of her husband because he can't keep his penis up!

Increasingly, these campus feminists strive to be a) constantly offended, and b) constantly offensive. One unanticipated consequence of the feminists’ unequal application of the “right to be un-offended” is that many people now deem feminists to be emotionally inferior.

Yes. Why can't feminists get upset about rational things, like the hypocrisy of crying when someone criticises feminists and then turning around and making fun of your huband's failure to maintain an errection! It's almost as though they look for things to offend them!

Feminists just can’t help but lie because there really is no such thing as the truth.

Since so many feminists cannot tell the truth - because it doesn’t even really exist - I simply cannot take them seriously.

You know, it started out fun, but now this column is really starting to scare me.

Those are just a few reasons, Daisy. I eagerly await your response, so I can treat my readers to part two of the series. After all, these may be the best tips you get all year.

It also means Mike will be able to base another thrilling column on an e-mail, fleshed out with even more dubious anecdotes -- to say nothing of paranoia.

Michelle Malkin thinks black people don't even have "half a brain"

2006-01-21T23:01:00.000-08:00

Oh, Malkin:

The freaks come out at night. The demagogues came out on Martin Luther King Day.

"The freaks come out at night"?

But she's learning:

The Canaan Baptist Church welcomed her pandering with what the Associated Press described as "thunderous applause."

See? Attribution's not hard!

Asked to explain the difference between Democrats and Republicans, Hillary's response oozed with righteous flava (did Bill "Our first black president" Clinton help her practice?):

Dishonest and misleading -- Tori Amos said that, not Bill or Hillary Clinton.

What racial demagogic stunt will Hillary sink to next? Cornrows and a cameo on Bush-bashing rapper Kanye West's next album? Go on, girl. Go ahead. Get down.

<>Actually, this is a very good opportunity to talk about populism. I think it's helpful to distinguish between the good and evil populists. The good populists work to make the lives of ordinary people better. The bad populists, or demagogues, flatter ordinary people by praising their wisdom and virtue but use their position to pursue policies that fuck them. So, the best example of a demagogue today would be Bill O'Reilly. But conservatives lapse naturally into demagoguery when they try to be populist: they flatter to beguile, like Regan and Goneril. While liberals are, of course, Cordellia:

Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave
My heart into my mouth: I love your majesty
According to my bond; nor more nor less.

These calculated moments of Democrat demagoguery illuminate liberalism's three-decade-old moral bankruptcy on issues of race.

Yes -- they were doing just fine... until 1976. I don't know what happened! I mean, 1975: no moral bankruptcy. Moral solvency, even.

From the party's smearing of Clarence Thomas

Or "From Anita Hill's smearing of Clarence Thomas"...

to its opposition to school choice for inner-city students

Yes -- because opposition to school vouchers that would allow white people to decamp to gated communities, using public dollars to subsidise the well-off at the expense of the ghetto, is tantamount to racism.

the Left has offered nothing but slime and obstructionism.

And yet, black people -- perhaps because they've been beguiled by honeyed words -- keep voting for them.

It's time for conservatives, Republicans in Washington and minorities with half a brain to call their bluff. Stand up. Defend your honor. Don't let it pass.

Oh! So, minorities who vote for Democrats... don't even have half a brain!

Michelle Malkin: thinks black people don't even have half a brain.

The within precinct discrepancy for Ohio falls in proportion to Kerry's share of the exit poll.

"Dissent will become pointless unless it boils over into revolution"

2006-01-21T21:36:00.000-08:00

From Mark Crispin Miller's blog, quoting Paul Craig Roberts' review of Fooled Again:

"Miller describes considerably more election fraud than voting machines programmed to count a proportion of Kerry votes as Bush votes. Voters were disenfranchised in a number of ways. Miller reports incidences of intimidation of, and reduced voting opportunities for, poorer voters who tend to vote Democrat....

"Miller directs our attention to Bush's high-handed treatment of dissenters. If electronic voting machines programmed by private Republican firms remain in our future, dissent will become pointless unless it boils over into revolution. Power-mad Republicans need to consider the result when democracy loses its legitimacy and only the rich have anything to lose."

Or, if the rich don't look after the interests of ordinary people, ordinary people will look after their own interests -- and you might not like that.

It's worth noting that the NEDA study has found that the WPD is consistent with just taking a proportion of Kerry votes and giving them to Bush:

The within precinct discrepancy for Ohio falls in proportion to Kerry's share of the exit poll.

Uh, could it be that there's just a market for smut?

2006-01-21T20:39:00.000-08:00

OK, enough with feeling like Cassandra. I could cry "within precinct discrepancy" until I'm hoarse, but instead I think it's time for some two-fisted, good ol' mockery. I can always finish every post off with "The within precinct discrepancy for Ohio falls in proportion to Kerry's share of the exit poll", ala "Carthage must be destroyed".

Who are we making fun of today? I'll give you a hint: like a virgin, touched for the very first time...

Yes, Ben Shapiro, America's favourite prig!

As I explain in my new book, "Porn Generation: How Social Liberalism Is Corrupting Our Future," in today's America, being a proud virgin is no easy task.

Don't hold your breath waiting for Ben to make the connection between free markets and smut: that is, the connection between Fox News and Fox television. He's wrong -- it's not social liberalism that's corrupting us, it's economic liberalism.

Those with values are under attack in a culture that treasures "tolerance" above morality.

Well, I think I'm moral and you're immoral, but I also think it's a better idea to let you be than force to have sex. So, yes, "tolerance".

It's no wonder that because of my outspoken advocacy of traditional morality in general and of virginity in particular, I've become a favorite target of Internet leftists, who often refer to me as "The Virgin Ben."
It's all about pussy, Ben; the rest is so much bullshit.

The Internet is riddled with writing like this: "In [Ben's] case, it is helpful to remember that some people choose celibacy, while others have it thrust upon them. Poor Ben. He no more chose abstinence than Clarence Thomas chose to be black."

<>Poor Ben. Well, let's have a look at him:

Wow -- looks like that and sanctimony. His virginity must indeed be preserved against constant temptation. Remember: they're not pimples, they're love bumps.

Such heated, inarticulate and unreasoned hatred for moral standards should not be shocking. Social liberalism seeks to promote a "live and let live" society wherein all types of deviant behavior is tolerated and accepted.

No, social liberals have standards. It's the corporatists, your allies, who preach a Libertarian ethic -- tax cuts and nose studs.

Those on the left have thrust their notion of a "civilized," amoral society upon all of us.

See how this is a conspiracy theory? As Thomas Frank says, liberals run the country whether they like it or not. Liberals have somehow "thrust" all this on us. As an institutional analysis, it doesn't even have explanatory force -- it tells you who, but it all it says about how is "liberal bias".

The fact of the matter is that "live and let live" directly contradicts the notion of communal society; we all have to abide by certain rules to live together. An amoral society minimizes the rules under which we live together; any change in those rules is bound to affect all of us.

So, if you let fags marry, it's a violation of my individual rights!

And it has. By discarding traditional morality in favor of amoralism, we have catered to the lowest common denominator. Social liberals have taken control of our culture through music, film, television and other mass media.

See? Liberals have taken control -- no word about the politics of the producers and owners of the mass media, though. And why do they cater to the lowest common denominator? It's not because of a conspiracy to destroy values -- it's because they want to make money, so they obey the market. If you want to fix culture, you have to short-circuit the market forces that deform it.

R-rated films today often include soft-core pornography;

If anyone can make sense of this complaint, there will be a small prize.

television shows like "Friends" promote a fun-filled, promiscuous lifestyle with no consequences; rap music is misogynistic, glorifying its own degradation; pop music holds aloft cultural wrecking balls like Madonna as empowered feminist heroes.

Postmodernists love Madonna because she's so much emptiness and imitation, but for the same reason most feminists don't like her.

Advertisers take advantage of the "sex sells" phenomenon to push our culture to new lows, while teen magazines for young girls push boy-craziness and dispense dating and sex advice.

Yes -- they "take advantage of" it because it's not their real motive, just the excuse to cheapen culture.

They have used sex education as a means of indoctrinating children into a cult of moral relativism and hedonism.

Remember what I said about Ben's worldview being a conspiracy theory with no explanatory force? Case in point.

Following in the footsteps of Alfred Kinsey and his trumped-up research, the sex education movement has viewed its goal as the promotion of an acceptant and inevitable attitude about teen promiscuity. "[Our goal] is to be ready as educators and parents to help young people obtain sex satisfaction before marriage," wrote Planned Parenthood staffer Lena Levine in 1953. "By sanctioning sex before marriage, we will prevent fear and guilt."

<>Sex before marriage doesn't mean "promiscuity", Ben.

Fifty-two years later, Levine's dream has come true; we live in a society where condoms are dispensed to seventh-graders, where 12-year-olds are told about the glories of oral sex and where children are given the "opportunity to develop their values and increase self-esteem," to quote Debra W. Haffner, former president of the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States.

Yay!
But the future is not yet lost. Social conservatives must not retreat and cloister themselves; they must fight back against the continuing destruction of standards. Together, we can restore America's innocence.

Must fight back -- by voting for economic liberals whose policies will trash culture even further. Brilliant plan, Ben!

The within precinct discrepancy for Ohio falls in proportion to Kerry's share of the exit poll.

"The Smoking Gun": A Report on the Report

2006-01-20T19:17:00.000-08:00

As promised, the rest of my thoughts of NEDA's new study charging election fraud.

First off, it's important to stress that the report doesn't say that Kerry won (although he well may have). Or even that Bush's people cheated. And, of course, we don't know how much Bush knew about what was going on.

As I see it, there are two key points:

1. The discrepancy between exit polls and the official vote is consistent with a vote miscount.

2. The discrepancy cannot be explained by differing exit poll completion rates.

Unfortunately, the logic that underlies these claims is complex. I'll try to make it clearer because this is important.

On the consistency between a vote miscount and the exit poll results:

"Vote miscounts that leave the total number of votes counted equal to the total number of votes cast, could take a portion of votes belonging to one candidate and add them to the total of the other candidate, or could simply add votes to one candidate, or simply subtract votes from one candidate. In all cases, if we plot WPD by exit poll share, then WPD produced by vote miscounts benefiting Bush will become more negative as Kerry exit poll share increases, WPD produced by vote miscounts benefiting Kerry similarly increase in magnitude as Bush exit poll share increases."

The WPD on the Y axis is the "within precinct discrepancy" calculated by subtracting the difference between Bush and Kerry in the exit polls from the difference between Bush and Kerry in the vote count. So, on the graph, the bars that point downwards are precincts where Kerry's exit polls were better than his final result, and the bars that point upwards are precincts where Kerry's exit polls were worse than his final result.

Notice how when Kerry polled better than his final result, the difference is large, but when Kerry polled worse than he finally got, the difference is tiny?

But that's not the really interesting thing. The really interesting thing is that the higher Kerry's exit poll share was, the worse his final result relative to his exit poll was likely to be! In fact, the realtionship is so clear that you can see a gradient.

My response: holy fucking shit. The higher Kerry's exit poll share (and perhaps his true share of the vote), the greater the difference between his exit poll result and the official vote count! Not only does the difference hurt Kerry and help Bush, it hurts Kerry it direct proportion to how well he did in his exit polls! Again: holy fucking shit!

They also debunk differing completion rate as an explanation for this data -- as if it needed debunking. Yes, because Bush voters are a demure sort shy to tell people who they support for President. But they do away with this by showing that the exit poll errors rest on a gradient -- if they really were so shy about it they lied to the exit pollers, there would be no gradient because the errors would be randomly distributed among precincts. Clever technique!

Well, just another thing for the articles of impeachment, huh?

Update: Parts rewritten for clarity.

The Clinton Scandals: Stubborn Facts

2006-01-20T18:48:00.000-08:00

In The Right Man, David Frum outlines the scandals that flocked around Clinton when he left office: suspect pardons, theft of White House furniture, trashing the White House, and soliciting gifts. Frum argues that these scandals were what pushed Bush's approval rating up to 60%; he might not be much, but at least he's not Clinton.

But how true were they? Fortunately, The Daily Howler is there for us:

Those stubborn facts: Again we quote the stubborn facts that the press corps has known to ignore (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 2/17/01):

CALMES AND KUNTZ: A look at recent years' reports of presidential gifts indicates the Clintons' overall take during their term isn't greatly out of line with the two previous administrationsPresident George H.W. Bush, Mr. Clinton's immediate predecessor, kept an average $39,614 worth of personal gifts a year in inflation adjusted dollars during his four years in office. Mr. Clinton took gifts valued at an average of $38,838 a year, adjusted for inflation: both took more than President Ronald Reagan.

How does propaganda work? If reporters had simply repeated these facts, even our novelists might have seen them. And it's hard to keep thinking that Bill and Hill stole the White House blind when you see that H.W. and Bar took more gifts. Why did these facts disappear from sight? Because they mess with the press corps' favorite story. Someone may have been "conning" our artists. But it may not have been that Wild Bill.

George 41 and Barbara took more gifts than Clinton and Hillary. So, David was repeating claptrap.

And as Bob Somerby points out, Bush himself said that the reports of a trashed White House were "simply not true". Frum says, correctly, that the GAO found about $13,000 worth of damage to the White House, but did not repeat the report's qualifier: that scattered damage is typical of White House transitions.

Now, Dave, to be fair I'm a cynical man, but it seems to me Bush's people pimped these stories -- a trashed White House, stolen furniture and gifts -- to make Clinton look bad. You know, as a way of making Bush look better by comparison.

All I'll say is: not very Christian.

Scenes from the Bush Administration (Part 1)

2006-01-20T11:03:00.000-08:00

And I thought I knew the Bush administration.

Some highlights from The Right Man, David Frum's insider account of the Bush Administration (chapter 2):

[Bush] insited on accuracy to the point of pedantry. If his schedule called for him to record a radio address in Washington to be broadcast during a visit to California the following day, nothing could induce him to say, "Today, I am in California." He would look up from the script with exasperation. "But I'm not in California." (p. 14)

When Bush was in a kidding mood, he would direct the staff like an orchestra conductor: He would press his palms down to direct them to sit and then, when they had taken their seats, raise his palms up to order them to rise again. Only then would they get the final palms-down. (p. 15)

If my boss did that to me, I'd quit.

The Bush White House was the last place in America where a man could feel a little underdressed if he came to work in a brown suit... Women could wear brighter colors -- but never higher than the knee. (p. 16)

The Bushies did not curse, either. Early in my White House stint... I replied emphatically: "Yes, I am damn sure." The temperature in the room suddenly seemed to drop several dozen degrees. There was a prolongued silence as I tried to figure out my mistake. (p. 16)

Except for Dick "Fuck You" Cheney, George "Fuck Saddam" Bush, and Karl "We're going to fuck him! We're going to fuck him like he's never been fucked before!" Rove, of course.

Goodness had been one of the main themes of the campaign speeches of George W. Bush. He often observed that if the government could ever write a law that could make people love their neighbors, he would be glad to sign it. (p. 17)

The television show The West Wing might as well have been set aboard a Klingon starship for all it resembled life inside the Bush White House. (p. 18)

You would not find any of the doubtful characters that had filled the Clinton White House in our halls... no court intellectuals who doubled as rumor-mongers and conspiracy theorists. (p. 19)

Sidney Blumenthal?

I had written some remarks Bush liked, and when he saw me in a corridor just after he delivered them, he lightly whacked my widriff with a roll of papers he was carrying and said, "Nice to see you, Davey me lad." (p. 23)

The writers were summoned into the Oval Office for a get-acquainted chat on a mid-February afternoon at four o'clock... As I reread [my notes] now, I am startled at how much of what would happen over the next year is prefigured there... his determination to dig Saddam Hussein out of power in Iraq... (p. 26)

Can we stop pretending Bush didn't come into office intending to invade Iraq?

Bush's fiercest critics paid tribute to his likability, but in private, Bush was not the wasy, genial man he was in public. Close up, one saw a man keeping a tight grip on himself. (p.27)

Gore, a bigger man than Bush, was attempting to assert some kind of primal dominance. But any sportsman could see in that single glance of Bush's that if it came to a fight, the man to bet on was the fierce, wiry guy, not the lummox. (p. 27)

You're easily impressed.

But [Bush] ended up working harder on that Yale speech than any speech he gave that spring except the State of the Union... "Life takes its own turns, makes its own demands, writes its own story. And along the way, we start to realize we are not the author." / And that was why Bush was so confident: not because he was arrogant, but because he believed that the future was held in stronger hands than his own.

So how's that working for him now?

The Trust Me You Have No Idea How Much I Hate Bush Dating Guide

2006-01-19T22:18:00.000-08:00

A real journalist from a genuine news organisation tells me: Malkin isn't a plagiarist, because she just took a quote. Duh, it's not plagiarism to take a quote. But Malkin took an entire paragraph, not just the opening quote, and changed the verbs to make it look like original work. It also verges on plagiarism to take a lot of quotes from a single source and not acknowledge it; because you're taking their work and claiming it's your own.

By the way, not to be snarky, but I do post-graduate work in political science, and if I started lifting paragraphs from essays and news articles I'd be kicked out out of my university. Being a genuine true-blue journalist doesn't count for much if standards are that lax.

But, enough of that! And more Instapundit (highlighted on alicublog), on Norah Vincent's new book. Well, actually, not really on Norah Vincent, but on the private lives of people who send him e-mails. Reader E.J. Boysen:

The "feminist" demand runs from fathers to brothers to sons and husbands, to their friends and acquaintances and chance encounters; it is endless. "I am woman, hear me roar" has produced a psychological wasteland that would put Sherman's march to shame and into which any man who travels does so at his peril. My assessment certainly does not apply to all women, of course, but the damage done by what I'm calling the "feminist" demand is so severe and pervasive that at my age, it just ain't worth it to go through it all again only to end up with yet another petulant woman-child unwilling or incapable of accepting responsibility for her own happiness and success in life, and who deeply resents the fact I have found my own without her, and so becomes determined to destroy it. I'm too old, I'm too tired, and the scars are too deep and too close to the bone. Stick a fork in me, I'm done.

Sounds like you need help from the Trust Me You Have No Idea How Much I Hate Bush Dating Guide. Don't worry, it's short:

1. Don't treat women like something on a pedestal; just treat them normally.

2. Join a gym, tubby!

And the Norah Vincent quote that started it all:

It's hardly surprising, then, that in this atmosphere, as a single man dating women, I often felt attacked, judged, onthe defensive. Whereas with the men I met and befriended as Ned there was a a presumption of innocence -- that is, you're a good guy until you prove otherwise -- with women there was quite often a presumption of guilt: you're a cad like every other guy until you prove otherwise.

So: your dates would watch you to see what you're like, but your friends wouldn't care. Unless you were coming on to the guys too, I don't see how you can generalise about men and women from that.

Why do they hate the ACLU so much anyway?

2006-01-19T20:38:00.000-08:00

Auguste responds to Malkin's call to take a stand against the ACLU better than I could:

Okay, let's take a stand.

Against:

* The right to due process
* The right to a jury of one's peers
* The right to assemble peacefully
* The right to distribute religious literature
* The right to hold union meetings
* The right to travel freely between states
* The right of minorities to vote in primary elections
* The right to the Jeffersonian seperation of church and state
* The right of minorities to live where they like
* The right to artistic freedom
* Brown vs. the Board of Freaking Education
* The right of veterans not to sign a loyalty oath
* The right to privacy
* The right to nondemoninational prayer
* The right to a state-appointed lawyer
* The right to a lawyer during police interrogation
* One person, one vote
* The right to privacy in political mailings
* The right to contraception
* The right of the accused to understand their rights
* The right to criticize US foreign policy
* The right of juveniles to due process
* The right to marry interracially
* The right of illegitimate children to inherit
* The right of the poor to choose their domestic living arrangements
* The right of students to self-express
* The right to procedural due process
* The right to offensive speech
* The right to publish whistle-blowing material
* The right of women to administer estates
* The right to choose
* The right of a woman to have dependents
* The right of The People to hold their president accountable
* The right of the mentally ill to live outside of confinment when appropriate
* The right of, yes, even Nazis to Constitutionally protected freedom of speech
* The right to distribute poltical pamphlets
* The right to unpopular political speech
* The right of prisoners not to be beaten
* The right of women to serve on juries
* The right to practice one's chosen religion
* The right to display political signs

So. This is what Malkin would take a stand against.

We'll have to start calling him President 3 Billion

2006-01-19T03:26:00.000-08:00

I've just started reading the National Election Data Archive's new report, "The Gun is Smoking: 2004 Ohio Precint-Level Exit Poll Data Show Virtually Irrefutable Evidence of Vote Miscount."

It'll be a few days before I've made enough progress with the report to go into much detail about it. But for now, here's an amazing statistic.

For precinct 27 (out of 49) in the Edison/Mitofsky study, the probability of Kerry getting a higher exit poll share than his official vote count was 1 in 867,205,553 and the probability of getting a lower vote count than his exit poll share was 1 in 2,881,322,159.

Yes -- there's a precinct in Ohio where the probability of Kerry's official vote count, relative to his exit poll result, is almost one in three billion.

The report rules out obvious reporting, low response and other exit poll errors as an explanation for this result.

Doctrines Alien to America

2006-01-18T19:58:00.000-08:00

From Gore's MLK day speech. I hope he runs again in 2008.

One of the other ways the Administration has tried to control the flow of information is by consistently resorting to the language and politics of fear in order to short-circuit the debate and drive its agenda forward without regard to the evidence or the public interest. As President Eisenhower said, "Any who act as if freedom's defenses are to be found in suppression and suspicion and fear confess a doctrine that is alien to America."

Fear drives out reason. Fear suppresses the politics of discourse and opens the door to the politics of destruction. Justice Brandeis once wrote: "Men feared witches and burnt women."
The founders of our country faced dire threats. If they failed in their endeavors, they would have been hung as traitors. The very existence of our country was at risk.

Yet, in the teeth of those dangers, they insisted on establishing the Bill of Rights.

Is our Congress today in more danger than were their predecessors when the British army was marching on the Capitol? Is the world more dangerous than when we faced an ideological enemy with tens of thousands of missiles poised to be launched against us and annihilate our country at a moment's notice? Is America in more danger now than when we faced worldwide fascism on the march -- when our fathers fought and won two World Wars simultaneously?

It is simply an insult to those who came before us and sacrificed so much on our behalf to imply that we have more to be fearful of than they. Yet they faithfully protected our freedoms and now it is up to us to do the same.

We have a duty as Americans to defend our citizens' right not only to life but also to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is therefore vital in our current circumstances that immediate steps be taken to safeguard our Constitution against the present danger posed by the intrusive overreaching on the part of the Executive Branch and the President's apparent belief that he need not live under the rule of law.

I endorse the words of Bob Barr, when he said, "The President has dared the American people to do something about it. For the sake of the Constitution, I hope they will."

2006-01-18T05:34:00.000-08:00

Anonymous has accused me of being deceptive. Here's the complaint:

I just read the article and your post is very deceptive. You cut off the part of the paragraph that shows it was more rhetorical than anything else. Here is what he said --"Granted, the Commission did say, “There is no evidence that Iraq responded to this request.” But my question today is: what about any evidence to suggest Iraq did not respond? There is no such evidence, and to me that is a far more important question, considering the fact that the Commission concluded, “The ensuing years saw additional efforts to establish connections.”"

Well, I disagree that he was asking the question rhetorically because, as you say, he wrote "There is no such evidence, and to me that is a far more important question" etc. He's saying the onus is on people who think it didn't happen to prove that it didn't, which is of course impossible.

I don't agree with you, but in case there's something I'm not seeing here, I'll put the rest of the entire paragraph up in my previous post.

Why do they hate Hillary so much?

2006-01-18T04:46:00.000-08:00

Why does the right hate Hillary so much? George Lakoff, in Moral Politics, has a theory.

The answer lies in the conservative conception of the ideal conservative. According to Lakoff, the ideal conservative:

1. has conservative values and acts to support them

2. is self-disciplined and self-reliant

3. upholds the morality of reward and punishment

4. works to protect moral citizens

5. acts in support of the moral order

Lakoff believes Hillary is so hated because she's the antithesis of the ideal conservative: she doesn't have conservative values, she isn't self-reliant, she doesn't protect moral citizens, she undermines the morality of reward and punishment and she works to upset the moral order.

Well, it's easy to test this -- wade through conservative diatribes against Hillary Clinton, identify the specific grievances (distinguished from name-calling and sneering) and see how they match up with Lakoff's list.

And, Hell, I've been on a Michelle Malkin kick lately, so let's start with her. Hillary's big nanny hotline:

When the Founding Fathers established the Constitution of the United States of America "to promote the general welfare," it is safe to say they could never have envisioned Hillary Clinton's latest welfare-promoting gimmick.

That's 3 -- because Hillary Clinton is an agent of welfare, she upturns the morality of reward and punishment that's the bedrock of conservatism. (Remember Hillary-care?)

This week, the senator from New York unveiled the "Calling for 2-1-1 Act of 2003." The legislation, co-sponsored by Texas Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (shame on you, Kay!) would provide $200 million to establish a nationwide community help line, including almost $4 million for Clinton's "home" state.

First: well, there are 52 states, and $200 million divided by 52 is almost $4 million, so I don't know what's dishonest about that.

And: well, you may not think it's her "home" state, but they did elect her.

Again, here's 3 -- Hillary is spending government money to help people, so she's inverting the system of reward and punishment (3) and acting to destroy the moral order (5).

There are already 2-1-1 call centers operational in 21 states, staffed by private volunteers and funded by local and state governments, corporate sponsors and the United Way (which pioneered the idea in 1997).

There's also the old-fashioned telephone book.

Not to mention the community bulletin boards at every local library, supermarket and church.

This is 2 -- people should be self-disciplined and self-reliant, looking up the phonebook and checking out their supermarket bulletin board, not relying on the government to give them a phone number to ring.

Oh, and then there's the Internet that Hillary's old friend Al Gore invented, where countless Web sites such as www.govbenefits.gov "provide improved, personalized access to government assistance programs" for everyone from farmers to cops, students to veterans, victims of disaster, violence, abuse or crime, members of Alaskan Native villages, and citizens of the Northern Mariana Islands, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, the Republic of Palau, and the Federated States of Micronesia.

3 yet again -- it rankles that the government is interfering with the struggle to survive that is the crucible of morality.

Centralize, centralize, centralize. From health care to education to the economy, it's the Clinton way. She views her constituents as hapless, confused victims -- unable to cope with information overload and in dire need of one-stop federal aid at all times. Clinton's latest pet project is quite reminiscent of an earlier Clinton-Gore brainchild, the national "N11" hotline, which would have used the 211 number as a national clearinghouse for traffic information, such as road conditions and bus schedules.

Now, to liberals, the criticism seems insane -- the N11 hotline sounds fantastically useful. What a great idea! But to conservatives, doing something to help people for free is an affront to the system of morality itself (5). It's bad enough that people can look up bus schedules on the internet, but to have them available by phone!? They should walk to the bus stop and check there! And they'll be better people for it.

Explaining the rationale for a federalized transportation report, then-Vice President Al Gore pontificated: "When parents are on the car phone talking to their kids explaining why they can't get home for dinner or can't do bedtime stories, that really has an impact on the quality of life." He never did explain why it's the taxpayers' problem if those parents didn't check the local traffic reports on the radio or on television before leaving the office.

See? Here's 2 again! If you're not willing to check to radio before leaving the office, you deserve a cold dinner!

Wow, Lakoff is really on to something.

Even Hayek's Road to Serfdom is brandished in defense of not helping people:

"One argument frequently heard is that the complexity of modern civilization creates new problems with which we cannot hope to deal effectively except by central planning. This argument is based on a complete misapprehension of the working of competition. The very complexity of modern conditions makes competition the only method by which a coordination of affairs can be adequately achieved."

Hayek continued: "There would be no difficulty about efficient control or planning were conditions so simple that a single person or board could effectively survey all the facts. But as the factors which have to be taken into account become numerous and complex, no one center can keep track of them. The constantly changing conditions of demand and supply of different commodities can never be fully known, or quickly enough disseminated by any one center."

So, the 211 number won't work because modern affairs are too complex for central planning.

Notice the disconnect between the moral grounds of Malkin's argument against the 211 service and this pseudo-Libertarian argument that it can't work. It's not that the 211 service can't work; it's that she hates the idea of it working, because she believes it will help human cockroaches who don't deserve it.

Hillary Clinton doesn't get it; she should act in support of the moral order by championing asceticism, so people become self-reliant and therefore moral. Because the way she is, she's just making people immoral by giving them something for nothing!

(List of conservative values taken from onegoodmove; I don't have the book handy.)

But you can't prove the pyramids weren't built by aliens!

2006-01-17T23:22:00.000-08:00

W. Thomas Smith, Jr:

Granted, the Commission did say, “There is no evidence that Iraq responded to this request.” But my question today is: what about any evidence to suggest Iraq did not respond?

Go on -- prove the negative!

I also think the burden is on people who believe that Galactic Overlord Xenu didn't repeatedly nuke our virgin planet to give evidence he didn't.

Update: a reader thinks this quote needs fuller context, so here it is:

Granted, the Commission did say, “There is no evidence that Iraq responded to this request.” But my question today is: what about any evidence to suggest Iraq did not respond? There is no such evidence, and to me that is a far more important question, considering the fact that the Commission concluded, “The ensuing years saw additional efforts to establish connections.”

Oh, George, you make me so mad!

2006-01-17T21:46:00.000-08:00

Ah, Townhall.com. Norman Rockwell, we hardly knew ye, we shall miss ye.

I was drawn to this David Limbaugh column by the tantalising headline: "A curious for of optimism". Wow, David's finally started to speak in tongues!

Unlike our president, who spent Martin Luther King Day paying respectful tribute to MLK and Abraham Lincoln, Democratic Party notables, Hillary Clinton and Albert Gore, used the holiday as another opportunity to character-assassinate President George W. Bush.

Much the same way MLK was assassinated, huh, Dave? So, in a sense... Al and Hillary killed MLK.

The fuckers.

Just when we were beginning to think Hillary Clinton had found her voice -- albeit a decidedly phony one -- as a mature, seasoned politician poised for a presidential run, she reverts to those cacophonic utterances that find little resonance beyond her embittered but indispensable base.

Projection much?

If one could momentarily suspend his powers of discernment, he could almost sympathize with a woman saddled with the dilemma of trying to sound reasonable without permanently alienating that cabal of reliably unreasonable malcontents. But alas, Hillary obviously has no real beef with her base on principle, and from time to time, it insists she demonstrate her loyalty by paying homage to its cynicism and hysteria.

I know you are, but what am I? I'm rubber, you're glue.

During a speech at the Canaan Baptist Church of Christ in Harlem, the fair-skinned wife of the first black president wasted no time proving her bona fides by exhibiting her penchant for negative hyperbole in critiquing the president and Congress.

That's a new charge against the Clintons -- miscegenation.

And, never passing up a chance for political exploitation, Hillary offered up some racially charged red meat to the Hurricane Katrina evacuees in attendance. She apologized "on behalf of a government that left you behind, that turned its back on you" -- a government, I suppose, she denies being a part of when it suits her immediate interests.

Didn't your guy run as the candidate of change -- after having been President for four years?

Then, picking up on the Democrats' latest mantra demonizing President Bush as a megalomaniacal dictator, Gore characterized Bush's attempts to intercept Al Qaeda phone calls for the purpose of protecting America's security as a "constitutional power-grab by the president."

Hey, if the epaulettes fit...

Old Albert could have fooled me. He sounds more like George Bernard Shaw's description of a pessimist -- one who "thinks everybody is as nasty as himself, and hates them for it."

Hey, isn't your brother Rush Limbaugh? So, I guess you'd know from nasty and hating.

The End of News & The Enemy Within

2006-01-17T21:33:00.000-08:00

Two fantastic articles in the New York Review of Books by Michael Massing about the shortcomings of modern journalism.

The End of News:

In 1979, conservatives discovered a new basis for criticizing the press when S. Robert Lichter and Stanley Rothman released a study purporting to show the leftist leanings of national journalists. Of 240 journalists surveyed, eight out of ten said they voted Democratic in presidential elections from 1964 to 1976. Nine out of ten said they supported abortion rights, more than half said they saw nothing wrong with adultery, and few attended church. In 1985, Lichter and his wife Linda, with the financial support of such conservative foundations as Scaife and Olin, formed the Center for Media and Public Affairs, a research institute that, while presenting itself as nonpartisan, sought to document instances of liberal bias on the networks and in newspapers. Its reports helped complement the Reagan administration's efforts to portray the press as out of step with "mainstream America." The impact of these efforts was apparent in journalists' often uncritical coverage of such issues as supply-side economics and the abusive activities of the Salvadoran military, the Nicaraguan contras, and other forces allied with the US in Central America. (There were exceptions, however, such as The New York Times's investigation of the CIA's relations with Panama's Manuel Noriega in the late 1980s.)

The Enemy Within:

In late October 2004, Ken Silverstein, an investigative reporter in the Washington bureau of the Los Angeles Times, went to St. Louis to write about Democratic efforts to mobilize African-American voters. In 2000, the Justice Department later found, many of the city's black voters had been improperly turned away from the polls by Republican Party officials. Democrats were charging the Republicans with preparing to do the same in 2004, and Silverstein found evidence for their claim. Republican officials accused the Democrats of similar irregularities, but their case seemed flimsy by comparison, a point that even a local Republican official acknowledged to him.

While doing his research, however, Silverstein learned that the Los Angeles Times had sent reporters to several other states to report on charges of voter fraud, and, further, that his findings were going to be incorporated into a larger national story about how both parties in those states were accusing each other of fraud and intimidation. The resulting story, bearing the bland headline "Partisan Suspicions Run High in Swing States," described

"the extraordinarily rancorous and mistrustful atmosphere that pervades battleground states in the final days of the presidential campaign. In Wisconsin, Ohio, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Oregon and other key states, Democrats and Republicans seem convinced their opponents are bent on stealing the election."

The section on Missouri gave equal time to the claims of Democrats and Republicans.

Troubled by this outcome, Silverstein sent an editor a memo outlining his concerns. The paper's "insistence on 'balance' is totally misleading and leads to utterly spineless reporting with no edge," he wrote. In Missouri, there was "a real effort on the part of the GOP...to suppress pro-Dem constituencies." The GOP complaints, by contrast, "concern isolated cases that are not going to impact the outcome of the election." He went on:

"I am completely exasperated by this approach to the news. The idea seems to be that we go out to report but when it comes time to write we turn our brains off and repeat the spin from both sides. God forbid we should...attempt to fairly assess what we see with our own eyes. "Balanced" is not fair, it's just an easy way of avoiding real reporting and shirking our responsibility to inform readers."

2006-01-16T22:28:00.000-08:00

I love you Phyllis Schafly:

This year's spectacular Rose Bowl game attracted a phenomenal 35.6 million viewers because it featured what we want: rugged men playing football and attractive women cheering them on. Americans of every class, men and women, remained glued to their television sets and nearly 95,000 spectators watched from the stands.

The runaway success of this game proved again that stereotypical roles for men and women do not bother Americans one bit. Political correctness lost out as all-male teams battled and women cheered.

Um, maybe Americans just like football?

It's too bad that male sports are being eliminated on most college campuses. Except for Texas, USC, and a few other places, radical feminism rules in the athletic departments at the expense of popular male sports.

Phyllis, you're full of shit.

Feminists oppose anything that is all-male or all-female unless it's gay marriage.

What about line dancing?

They won't be able to ban the Rose Bowl anytime soon, but the Feminist Majority Foundation posts this warning on its Web site: "By encouraging boys to become aggressive, violent athletes, and by encouraging girls to cheer for them, we perpetuate the cycle of male aggression and violence against women."

Feminists want to ban the Rose Bowl?

Meanwhile, feminists are censoring out hundreds of traditional manly college sports teams. If your favorite college once had a wrestling, baseball or track team, check again: there's a good chance it has been eliminated.

Why do I get the feeling this is only happening in Phyllis Schafly's head?

Several years ago, Howard University Athletic Director Sondra Norrell-Thomas announced the elimination of both its wrestling and baseball teams on the same day.

It should surprise no one that Howard University's male enrollment has dropped to only 34 percent compared to 66 percent female

Hey, Jonah Goldberg, sounds like your kind of college!

I don't know what she's on. I checked the website for sports at Howard University, and while it's true that they don't have wrestling and baseball teams, they have men's sports and women's sports, putting the lie to Phyllis' argument.

On June 2, 1997, the feminist National Women's Law Center announced that it would file a complaint against Boston University, the fourth largest private school in the nation, over its sports programs. Within months, BU ended the football team that had been in existence for 91 years.

It is no surprise that male enrollment at Boston University is now down to 40 percent. One transfer student expressed his dismay in the student newspaper upon learning that his new school has 16,000 undergraduates but no football team.

Schafly could be being dishonest here. The National Women's Law Center filed complaints against 25 universities because they discriminated against female athletes in scholarships. I don't know if that's the specific complaint Schafly is referring to, though.

In the entire state of Washington, there is no longer a single major college wrestling team, despite wrestling's huge popularity in high schools. Wrestling is one of the least expensive sports, requiring almost no equipment and having a low risk of injury, but feminists are working to eliminate all masculine sports.

This woman is nuts.

The lack of college sports teams and camaraderie makes many high school boys wonder, "Why bother going to college?" Despite the bloated price of college tuition, college doesn't even offer the sports opportunities that they enjoyed in their poorer high schools.

Uh, to get an education and a good job?

The Rose Bowl proved that public demand is for all-male sports, not female contests. Boys do not want to go to a college that eliminates the macho sports, and that is true even if the boy does not expect to compete himself.

Gay men are also dead-set for it.

The effects of the feminists' attack on men's sports are now coming home to roost. By the time this year's college freshmen are seniors, the ratio will be 60 percent women to 40 percent men, and women are now crying that there are not enough college-educated men to marry.

"That's right, sweetie. You can get a college education, or you can have a college-educated man. You can't have both!"

China's brutal one-child policy has artificially created millions of young men for whom no wives are available. Right here at home, the feminists have created millions of college-educated women for whom no college-educated men are available, and the trend is getting steadily worse.

Comparison of persecution fantasy to Communist China... check.

Hey, wait, that's the solution -- American college-educated women can marry Chinese college-educated men!

Part of the change in the ratio of male to female college students is due to the ruthless interpretation of Title IX by the radical feminist bureaucrats in the administrations of former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Unfortunately, President George W. Bush and Secretary of Education Rod Paige chickened out when they were presented with an opportunity to remedy the mischief.

The pussies.

Congress should step into the gap and stop funding colleges that terminate men's sports to meet arbitrary feminist quotas. Congress should imitate its action in passing the Solomon Amendment that tells colleges they will lose federal funding if they discriminate against military recruiters.

Hey, if military recruiters want to enrol, I'm fine with that.

I like her solution: the government should make it illegal to enforce Title IX!

Congress should tell colleges they will lose federal funding if they discriminate against men's sports. The American people clearly want male football, baseball, track and wrestling, and colleges that cut these sports should be cut out of the federal budget.

Hey, I'm a boy and I want more out of my college than a football team, thanks.

Malkin and plagiarism: a history

2006-01-15T23:01:00.000-08:00

Michelle Malkin reports:

A poetry scholar is accused of plagiarism, the New York Times reports. He joins a club with a large and growing number of public figures in it:

-Doris Kearns Goodwin
-Stephen Ambrose
-Nina Totenberg
-Laurence Tribe
-Charles Ogletree, Jr.
-Alex Haley
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
-Joe Biden, Jr.
-Osama bin Laden
-Ruth Shalit
-Fox Butterfield
- Molly Ivins

And:

- Michelle Malkin

And it turns out I'm not to first person to accuse her of plagiarism:

In addition, Muller and Robinson have tossed out baseless charges of "plagiarism" and "slander" against me, only to retreat from those accusations while leaving a pile of falsehoods uncorrected.

But she's not slow to make the accusation herself:

Thanks to David M for pointing out a rotten link in my Lawrence O'Donnell post. Apparently, the blogger at "Dave's Blurbs" has a rude habit of filching other people's blog entries and passing them off as his own. That's not blogging. That's plagiarism. Knock it off.

Here's the substance of Greg Robinson's accusation:

The work also suffers from the author's perceptible shoddiness of method. Many of the author's contentions, and particularly her generalizations about popular perceptions (such as that the government confiscated Japanese American property), are barren of footnotes. In her section on the MAGIC intercepts, the author takes over David Lowman's work to the point of plagiarism. Not only does she cite the same MAGIC cables, she even indulges in the same selective quotation of sources such as Roberta Wohlstetter and John Costello in which Lowman indulged. For example, she cites military historian John Costello (p. 37) as saying that "The rising current of fear on the West Coast and the evidence from the MAGIC intercepts were important factors in the President's decision to sign Executive Order 9066," but fails to add Costello's statement almost immediately after that sentence that Executive Order 9066, "enabled the military to start to round up 120,000 innocent Japanese Americans." Thus the author ignores the fact that Costello regarded the Japanese Americans as victims, not instigators, of the Order.

So, she takes the work of other people and then passes it off as her own. Nice.

Perhaps she just doesn't know it's plagiarism to take someone's work, not just to take their words.

Wow! Famous and talented?

2006-01-15T22:26:00.000-08:00

Mark in Mexico:

the famous and talented John Lombard

Hey, thank you. Every little bit of praise helps.

OK, to be fair, that's out of context. He was being sarcastic.

In which he quotes Malkin quoting Hillary Clinton who was previously quoted by ABC News which makes Malkin a plagiarizing quoter - I think.

Nope, she ripped off a paragraph of an ABC News story, passing it off as her own work. And because the original ABC News story was misleading (and, lazy as ever, she didn't bother checking the source of the quote) the commentary in her column was predicated on her misunderstanding of the story.

Or she was just lying because she makes her living playing conservatives for fools. That's possible too.

We here at Mark in Mexico have a team of Mayan codetalkers attempting to decipher "" and "".

Tun tookik in nook'!

And on and on and on, yada yada yada. I guess that since he believes that Michelle Malkin is our greatest threat to Western civilization and life as we know it, he's not too worried about George Bush.

I'm cutting my blogging baby teeth on Malkin. She's good practice -- not only does she lie constantly, she rips off the work of other journalists.

And The Random Yak wonders in the comments:

Well, if he hates her so much, it's a good thing he isn't giving her any publicity...

She's welcome to my 20 hits a day.

Artificial Restriction

2006-01-15T17:59:00.000-08:00

More low-hanging fruit from the Discovery Insitute. William A. Dembski:

Not all scientists see that excluding intelligent design artificially restricts science, however. Richard Dawkins, an arch-Darwinist, begins his book The Blind Watchmaker by stating, "Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose." Statements like this echo throughout the biological literature. In What Mad Pursuit, Francis Crick, Nobel laureate and co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, writes, "Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved."

But Richard Dawkins believes intelligent design artificially restricts science. In The Blind Watchmaker he does say that many complex things have the appearance of design but then goes on to show how natural selection unaided produces this illusion.

Britney Spears is a tramp!

2006-01-15T05:35:00.000-08:00

Yes, it's Ben Shapiro again. After debunking another ugly Malkin column I need nice, harmless froth to relax with. And Ben, virgin par excellence, does not disappoint:

Society expected her to lose her virginity -- now. So she lost it retroactively, by admitting that she had slept with longtime boyfriend Justin Timberlake years before.

Ah, Ben, you're a soothing balm of backed-up sperm and homophobia.

OK, let's back up a bit.

What happened to Britney? She started to lose popularity. She was too old to maintain popularity as a "virgin." Society expected her to lose her virginity -- now. So she lost it retroactively, by admitting that she had slept with longtime boyfriend Justin Timberlake years before. But it wasn't enough. Society wanted a rebel, someone who could break the rules. Britney obliged by suggesting to Madonna that they swap saliva on MTV.

Um, perhaps she really had slept with her boyfriend Justin, and was just telling the truth? It makes more sense than Britney lying about having had sex with Justin to impress people.

Also: perhaps she got the idea for retroactive virginity loss from the evangelical concept of second virginity? If you can sex and then call yourself a virgin, maybe you can not have sex and call yourself a slut!

Society doesn't just demand rebellion and over-the-line behavior from its entertainers. It demands that girls (and boys) have sex before marriage, at younger and younger ages. It demands that young women (and men) "experiment" with their sexuality. It demands that biblical values be kept out of schools and that condoms be kept in them. Society demands that dignity take a back seat to salaciousness.

Society demands -- but Ben doesn't make the leap to "the market demands". The reality is that sex sells. It's the market that demands "dignity take a back seat to salaciousness". If he wants to do something about it, enforcing standards makes more sense than mau-mauing. (Note: I wouldn't personally support that, I love the world we live in, I'm just pointing out how weak Ben's argument is.)

Thousands of little girls idolize Britney. Who knows? After this display, they might aspire to make out with Britney some day.

I'm willing to bet thousands of girls already do. They're called lesbians.

Hey, I saw Fahrenheit 9/11 -- isn't Britney Spears a Bush-supporter?

Malkin is the MSM

2006-01-15T00:36:00.000-08:00

This isn't plagiarism -- just an insight into Michelle Malkin's working method. A comparison of the introduction to Malkin's August 17th 2005 column with excerpts from the August 12 2005 New York Times story she apparently got her facts from (notice her choice of quotes):

Malkin:

The Bronx-based Gloria Wise Boys & Girls Club has been duped out of a reported $875,000 meant for poor children and elderly Alzheimer's patients. Evan Montel-Cohen, the former chairman of the much-hyped liberal radio network Air America, is at the center of the erupting scandal. Air America radio host Al Franken, punctuating his discussion with nervous laughter, called Cohen a "crook" on his show last week and confessed to his left-wing audience that "I think he was robbing Peter to pay Paul."

The New York Times:

Gloria Wise Boys and Girls Club, run from an office in Co-op City in the Bronx, made improper loans of up to $875,000 to the radio network

a boys and girls club serving poor children and ailing elderly people in the Bronx

the loans had come to the network through its former chairman, Evan M. Cohen, a venture capitalist,

Mr. Franken took up the issue on the air on Monday afternoon, telling his listeners that Mr. Cohen was "a crook" who had borrowed money from Gloria Wise.

"I don't know where the money went. I don't know if it was used for operations. I think he was borrowing from Peter to pay Paul."

You, too, can be a right-wing pundit. All you have to do is chop up an article in the New York Times and slip in a few sneers. And, to cover your tracks, regularly attack the New York Times!

And, as usual, there's plain old dishonesty too. To bash Franken, she omits a key detail from the New York Times story. Malkin claims:

Franken and Air America management, by contrast, seem unusually eager to sweep the entire financial scandal under the rug. Meanwhile, the Boys & Girls Club hasn't seen a dime of the bilked money repaid. Hearts aren't the only things that seem to be bleeding at Air America.

But the New York Times story reports:

Mr. Franken also said that the network's new owners "don't legally have to pay it back" - referring to the loans - "because we're a different company or something."

"But morally we do," he said.

The question for newspapers that carry her syndicated column is why they would want to carry someone whose work is so shoddy and unprofessional?

Update: Also, after listening to an mp3 of Franken talking about the scandal, it's clear that Malkin is faking with this:

Curiously, Air America has shown little interest in urging law enforcement officials to track down Cohen and hold him accountable for "robbing" -- Al's word, not mine -- an inner-city charity in the network's name. Why is that? Franken says the subject of massive theft from one of the largest nonprofit charities for underprivileged residents in New York City is "boring."

Yes. "Boring."

Franken's actual comment: "there's more to talk about with it but it's boring" -- after more than 3 minutes of setting out the facts of the story. No, Franken didn't say the theft was boring, he said the additional facts were boring.

Update 2: So, that's two lies and one possible case of chopping and rewording. Nice! If a college student did this in an assignment, they'd get zero and face disciplinary action. But if you're on the right-wing, nobody gives a shit.

I no longer wonder how it is Malkin finds the time to do so much work. The answer is simple: she doesn't.

More Murtha Abscam

2006-01-14T23:33:00.000-08:00

The Daily Doubter:

Bottom line: he didn't take the money,he wasn't charged with anything, and he never did business with the fake sheik.

I'm not happy with the possible implication that he was suggesting a quid-pro-quo deal, however.

That's about how I see it too. He didn't take a bribe. He wasn't charged. And although he may have suggested a deal, he never did business with the fake shiek.

Of course, it hasn't stopped some conservatives from making baldly false statements about Murtha and Abscam.

Sweetness & Light: "You have to wonder which Arab Sheik crossed Murtha’s palm with silver this time?"

Of course, no Arab Sheik cross Murtha's palm with silver the first time. He's also upset because:

Oddly enough, the lone Republican, Richard Kelly, is the one we always hear about — as sticking $25,000 down his pants.

I wonder why we always hear about him? Oh, wait -- because he stuffed $25,000 down his pants.

So, Sweetness & Light lied. They claimed Murtha took a bribe. He didn't.

Curmudgeonly & Skeptical: "Jack Murtha, was one of the crooks snagged during an FBI sting operation known as ABSCAM."

We have to split the difference on this one: he was an unindicted coconspirator. He didn't take a bribe, he wasn't charged, he never did business with the sheik -- although he may have been interested in a quid-pro-quo.

And this is my favourite. Rick Banks, in the comments of MartiniPundit:

Murtha gained notoriety in the late 70s when he became entangled in an FBI sting called ABSCAM. Murtha was videotaped stuffing (what he believed to be Arab) money into suit pockets. Pennsylvanians have short memories.

See, Sweetness & Light? It is what people remember about the scandal.

Max Cleland: Lying Liar (with Murtha Abscam bonus feature)

2006-01-14T20:50:00.000-08:00

The Daily Doubter in high dudgeon:

The Daily Doubter has discovered via some investigative journalism that there is reason to suspect that former Senator Max Cleland (D-Ga) did not deserve the Silver and Bronze stars he was awarded during his service in Vietnam. But what's even more shocking is new evidence indicating that the story that Cleland lost two legs and part of one arm by picking up a grenade dropped by a fellow soldier is false.

Like fellow critics of the Bush administration John Kerry and John Murtha who are now known to have faked their injuries in the hopes of furthering a future political career, a source has revealed to me that Cleland blew his limbs off on purpose so as to be able to sell himself as a war hero when he returned from his tour of duty.

Cleland should not be able to use his "combat" wounds for career profiteering. To enlist in the military, go to war, and put your life on the line just to get elected ... how despicable is that. People like Kerry, Murtha, and Cleland are the very definition of anti-Americanism. Having gotten enough mileage from their military service they each turned their back on the United States and openly supported the terrorists.

This is the story that popped The Doubter's top: Murtha's War Hero Status Called Into Question at CNS News.

Unfortunately, as always, reality trumps satire. Ann Coulter:

Moreover, if we're going to start delving into exactly who did what back then, maybe Max Cleland should stop allowing Democrats to portray him as a war hero who lost his limbs taking enemy fire on the battlefields of Vietnam.

Cleland lost three limbs in an accident during a routine noncombat mission where he was about to drink beer with friends. He saw a grenade on the ground and picked it up. He could have done that at Fort Dix. In fact, Cleland could have dropped a grenade on his foot as a National Guardsman – or what Cleland sneeringly calls "weekend warriors." Luckily for Cleland's political career and current pomposity about Bush, he happened to do it while in Vietnam.

...

Cleland wore the uniform, he was in Vietnam, and he has shown courage by going on to lead a productive life. But he didn't "give his limbs for his country," or leave them "on the battlefield." There was no bravery involved in dropping a grenade on himself with no enemy troops in sight.

Of course, Coulter doesn't mention that Cleland lost his limbs picking up a grenade someone else had dropped. The bit about "dropping a grenade on himself" is invention.

The CNS News story on Murtha's "war hero status" is actually basic stuff -- silly, but nowhere near as "unhinged" as a good Peggy "the dead speak through me" Noonan. No, what's really intersting is the CNS story on Murtha's role in Abscam.

The charge:

This includes his reported role as an un-indicted co-conspirator in the Abscam bribery scandal of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Abscam ("Arab scam") was a FBI sting:

According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, "Murtha was one of eight members of Congress lured to a Washington, D.C., townhouse by a team of FBI agents posing as representatives of a fictitious Arab sheik. They handed out briefcases filled with $50,000 in return for helping the sheik gain residency in the United States."

But:

Noting that Murtha "is not squeaky clean," the Brattleboro, Vt., Reformer reported that the congressman "did not take the cash" offered by the agents. Instead, "he asked the fake sheik to consider investing some money in his struggling home town, Johnstown."

And:

But, a videotape of a Jan. 7, 1980 Abscam-related meeting involving Murtha shows that the congressman's rejection of the offered bribe was less than definite. "I'm not interested. I'm sorry," Murtha told the FBI agent, but added that he meant "at this point... You know, we do business for a while, maybe I'll be interested, maybe I won't," Murtha said on the FBI videotape.

So, according to CNS News: the FBI tried to get Murtha to take a bribe as part of a sting. Murtha refused the bribe but suggested the Sheik invest money in his hometown. So, he could have been offering the Sheik a quid-pro-quo: you help me out, and perhaps I'll help you out later.

According to USA Today:

In the probe of what became known as the Abscam bribery scandal, Murtha was the only congressman involved in the complex case to emerge without facing criminal charges. He declared he was innocent, saying he had "met with two men who I believed had a substantial line of credit that could provide up to 1,000 jobs for the district. I broke no law. I took no money." A grand jury and the House ethics panel cleared Murtha of any wrongdoing.

Dennis Roddy describes Murtha's conduct as playing "the political coquette". That's fair: he turned down a bribe, it's reasonable to find a quid-pro-quo in his attempt procure investment in his district.

According to Kos, after refusing the bribe, Murtha got up and walked out. (If someone can confirm that for me, I'd be grateful -- Kos' zeal sometimes trumps accuracy. CSI News has a video up, but it's too murky to be clear about what's going on.)

So, as near as I can tell: Murtha was lured to an FBI sting with an offer of a line of credit to create jobs in his district. When he got there, he was offered a bribe. He refused, reiterated his desire for the Sheik to do business in his hometown, and walked out of the meeting.

Well, his conduct wasn't impressive, but neither was it corrupt. Daily Doubter, what's your take?

There's a better way to spend Thanksgiving?

2006-01-14T18:50:00.000-08:00

Michelle Malkin:

Janeane Garofalo, left-wing actress-turned-Air America radio host, is a miserable woman. Last week before the holidays, she turned up on cable TV. No, not to count her blessings -- but to rant against conservative journalist Bob Novak, author Ann Coulter, and the Fox News Channel. She didn't have anything better to do for Thanksgiving?

Besides fighting the forces of darkness for truth and justice?

Dream... or prophecy?

2006-01-14T18:08:00.000-08:00

Watergate felon Chuck Colson:

Something very strange happened to me this past week. I was seated in my library chair, mulling over current events, trying to make a few New Year’s predictions, which is the custom for commentators. I was concentrating hard, when suddenly, I saw before my eyes a headline from the New York Times. It read, “Congress Votes to End War; Troops Ordered to Abandon Iraq.”

It's custom for commentators to try and predict the future?

And it's bad enough that Congress voted to end the war, but it's just like the New York Times to report it! You wouldn't catch Fox reporting that the war had ended, no sir.

The view changed. Just as in Vietnam three decades ago, I saw Americans clinging to helicopters, trying to get themselves out of Baghdad along with friendly Shiite Muslims. There was massive confusion, bombs going off in the background.

There are friendly Shiite Muslims?

And then, I saw pictures out of Afghanistan. Al Qaeda had toppled the new Afghan government. Marines and soldiers again were hurriedly boarding choppers. It can’t be real, I thought—but it was.

If we don't prevail in Iraq, we'll fail in Afghanistan!

The next thing I saw was a picture of Palestine, where most of the al Qaeda terrorists had now gone. The Israeli government was in disarray, reeling under a series of huge bomb blasts in Jerusalem.

And if we fail in Afghanistan, Israel will be next!

Country after country was falling to the Islamic fascists: Saudi Arabia. Turkey. Egypt. For the most part, the terrorists simply refused to ship oil, and what they did ship was priced at over $150 a barrel. It was a worldwide crisis. Europe quickly signed a non-aggression pact with al Qaeda in exchange for oil.

But what would stop the United States from toppling these Islamic fascist governments and taking over, as they've done in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Then came the most devastating picture of all: panic in the streets of Washington, D.C. as a dirty bomb exploded not a quarter of a mile from the Capitol.

And to think, it all happened under Bush.

Huge sections of the city were cordoned off, uninhabitable. Even people with the best protective equipment suffered serious radiation burns. Projections were that the area would be off-limits for years. Then came the bombing of the Holland Tunnel, connecting New York and New Jersey, then the collapse of the pillars of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Boy, you must feel like a dope for voting for Bush. The man's incompetent.

The government threatened retaliation, of course—but there was no one to retaliate against. The Islamo-fascists were spread throughout the world, and it was impossible to strike against all the countries that were harboring them or being run by them. Osama bin Laden himself appeared on Al Jazeera, boasting that he had known all along that the Americans wouldn’t fight.

Why not, to start, topple the governments being run by them? The Americans are really good at that.

Finally, Chuck reaches the denouement:

By now, most American television was not operating. But I could still get one channel. Talking heads were arguing frantically over how this could have happened. One man’s voice stood out when he said, “It was all so foreseeable. Once you rule religion a private matter, and declare all religions alike, no one in this country could understand the dimensions of a great religious struggle. No one understood the clash of civilizations or the evil of Islamo-fascism. We didn’t even have the language to describe religious beliefs anymore. Destruction was inevitable.”

If only we hadn't banned the 10 commandments, this would never have happened! Why didn't we listen to Roy Moore when there was still time?

Here's an idea: we abolish religion, and then this nightmare future will never be able to come to pass!

And that’s when I woke up in a cold sweat.

You need to have happier dreams. Like, I had this one once when aliens stole all of the ice on earth, so a friend's cat and I had to travel into outer space and trick the alien parliament into returning it.

It was only a dream. We’re okay, I told myself.

Or are we?

Dream... or PROPHECY!?!?!?!

It is, it is, a wonderful thing to be the forest king

2006-01-14T17:56:00.000-08:00

I'm in the mood for some Marvin Olasky:

If I were king of the forest, I'd probably nominate to the Supremes another Justice Scalia, ready to rumble with rhetorical brilliance against the legal theorists of the left.

And if I was King of the Forest, I'd order the acorns to dance!

It's the crazy-gay-disability-minority awards party jamboree!

2006-01-14T17:05:00.000-08:00

Ben Shapiro is trying to rationalise Brokeback Mountain:

In recent years, lack of quality from Hollywood has turned the Academy Awards into a special-interest-group get-together. If you're crazy, gay, have a disability or are a member of a minority race, you'll likely be nominated for an Oscar; if your film tackles a "deep social issue" (normally an issue dear to the hearts of Hollywood's liberal glitterati), you'll have an excellent shot at grabbing a gold statuette.

See? When Hollywood ends up stuffing those fags down our throat, I'll be able to say I told you so.

And then there's this year. "Brokeback Mountain," the stomach-churning story of two 1963 cowboys who get cozy while bunking down in Wyoming and then carry on their affair over the course of decades, is likely to grab Best Picture honors. The critics love it, mostly because critics love anything that pushes homosexuality as normal behavior.

Ah, to be conservative, and only able to enjoy films that conform to my political views.

Ah, fan mail

2006-01-14T03:07:00.000-08:00

The Lone Ranger cared enough to post this comment on my blog:

Since you obviously have closed your mind to all things not liberal, I guess you have not heard that the Democrats are being sued for their role in atrocities against African-Americans over the last few centuries.

It's worth visiting his blog and reading his History of Republican Evil, which is actually about how the Democrats are evil and the Republicans are really good. As far as I can tell, the argument he's trying to make is:

June 16, 1854 Newspaper editor Horace Greeley calls on opponents of slavery to unite in the Republican Party

...so you should vote for Bush.

They aren't denying it. Their lawyer has responded that the plaintif, Rev. Wayne Perryman an inner-city minister from Seattle, has no standing (legal authority) to bring the case to court.

I don't deny it either -- the Democrats were the party of racism. Until it wasn't.

Why isn't the MSM abuzz with this case? And why aren't you ashamed to sympathize with a party that is no better than the Nazis?

The Nazis killed about 5 million Jews. Now, the Democrats may not be great, but they're not that bad.

Come to think of it, the Democratic party is the perfect place for a hater.

To be honest, I think you're projecting. Seriously: you just said the Democrats are no better than the Nazis. You have a Manichean worldview. Benjamin Harrison signed legislation for land-grant colleges in the South and the Texas Democratic party had a whites only primary election system, so Democrats are evil and Republicans are good.

If you cherry-pick history, you can prove anything. So, a Stalinist might talk about how he industrialised Russia, but omit the purges. Likewise, you talk about how 18 Democrats filibustered the Civil Rights Act, but don't mention how a certain party (hint: they're the source of purity and light in the universe) made a home for those Senators. You don't mention how the Democrats lost the Solid South. You don't mention the Republican Southern Strategy. Where once they voted Republican, they now vote Democrat, and where once they voted Democrat, they now vote Republican.

By the way, it's dumb to equate the Democrats with liberalism: the Democrats are a coalition party of liberals and conservatives. You know, the same way the Republicans are a coalition party of conservatives and fascists.

You, too, can be a right-wing pundit

2006-01-14T02:39:00.000-08:00

The Ham Lock of Liberty has a good idea -- Malkinising a news article to write a column. Actually, that does sound like fun. Here's my attempt:

Heroic Democrats may delay next week's vote on Captain Scumfuck

After five days of hearings on whether Captain Scumfuck should fuck our country in the skull until it's dead, Senate Judiciary Committee Chariman Arlen Specter said he's going to, treasonously, send the vote to the Senate floor, where Republicans will use the constitution as though it was a tissue.

"I intend to vote to support Judge Alito for associate justice of the Supreme Court and I do not do that as having a party line vote," said the ego-bloated Republican from Pennsylvania, where he killed a hitchhiker. "If I thought Judge Alito should not be on the Supreme Court, I would vote 'no,' just as I did with Judge Bork."

Specter talked about giving Alito an up-or-down vote, further displaying his hypocrisy. Even so, absolutely fantastic -- nay, orgasmular -- Democrats may try to delay the committee vote, winning the good opinion of all mankind and the hearts of children everywhere.

"A number of our members are going to be home for Martin Luther King events this weekend, will not be back on time on Tuesday and so they will exercise their rights" to put off the vote, said the committee's ranking Democrat, Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, who has been known to salve the sick with the force of his infinite love.

But Specter said he wants to ram the schedule up the Senate's arse and have the committee vote Tuesday and the full Senate vote the following Friday, because Friday is the onholy Sabbath of the black Archons he worships.

"We [Leahy and Specter] have each other on speed dial at home … we'll talk about this over the weekend," Leahy said... as Captain Scumfuck made his wife cry.

Wow. So that's all it takes to be a right-wing columnist. I think it might be time to switch sides!

By the way, I contacted David Neiwert of Orcinus, who some years ago had to edit Malkin's syndicated column for the paper he worked for, and he explained to me that what Malkin did is customarily called "soft plagiarism", and although unprofessional is not normally a firing offense.

Unless, of course, we can find more -- time to start digging through those old Malkin columns!

The Materialist Superstition

2006-01-13T19:32:00.000-08:00

George Gilder is (as usual) full of shit:

About to upend the materialist evolutionary scheme in textbook biology is the same catastrophe that befell Newtonian physics at the beginning of the Twentieth Century when physicists discovered that the atom is not an "opaque massy particle" as Isaac Newton believed but a baffling domain of quantum effects. Overthrowing the Darwinian materialist paradigm is the similar discovery that the biological cell is not a "simple lump of protoplasm" as Charles Darwin believed but a complex information processing machine comprising some 50 thousand proteins in fabulously intricate algorithms of communication and synthesis.

George, point to one reputable modern evolutionist who believes cells are "simple lumps of protoplasm". Go on. Ernst Mayr? Richard Dawkins?

As Hubert Yockey has shown in his Information Theory and Molecular Biology (Cambridge University Press, 1992) and Stephen Meyer recounts in a recent article in the Smithsonian’s peer-reviewed Proceedings, material evolution alone cannot come close to explaining this panoply of effects. Even mutations occurring in cells at the gigahertz pace of a Pentium 4 and selected at the rate of a Google search could not accumulate the intricate interwoven fabric of information, structure and function of a human being in the allotted time.

The alloted time, unmentioned by Gilder, is 4 billion years. 4 billion years of mutations at the gigahertz pace of a Pentium 4? What if selection is cumulative?

Everywhere we encounter it, information comes from mind. Whether in biology or in technology, it moves from the general to the specific, from the concept to the concrete, from architecture to circuitry to device physics, in top-down, hierarchical patterns. Recognizing this phenomenon, some scholars uphold a view called Intelligent Design, which attempts to pry open agnostically the issue of whether ideas and information precede or follow their material embodiment. On this central point in the philosophy of science, however, I am not an agnostic. I believe that the notion that the intricate biological structures of the world bubbled up from a prebiotic brew and that ideas are an after-effect of a meaningless random material flux is the most sterile and stultifying notion in the history of human thought.

Whether you think it's sterile and stultifying is irrelevant to whether it's true.

Of course, evolutionists don't believe evolution is a random process. We don't believe humans "bubbled up". So "meaningless random material flux" is wrong. It's not random chance, it's natural selection.

Intellectuals should know better. In the insight of Nobel Laureate biophysicist Max Delbruck, the spectacle of scientists attempting to reduce the mind to material brain suggests nothing so much as Baron Muchausen’s effort to extract himself from a swamp by pulling on his own hair.

Max Delbruck won his Nobel for "discoveries concerning the replication mechanism and the genetic structure of viruses", not cognitive psychology. In other words, quoting Max Delbruck on consciousness is like quoting Einstein on pottery.

And, as it so happens, scientists have in fact made a lot of progress "reducing" the mind to the material bain. For example, I enjoyed Zoltan Torey's The Crucible of Consciousness.

To focus on random chemical mutations rather than on the majestic underlying and overarching logic of the universe reduces the presentation of biology to a confectionary zoo story, replete with cute pandas and Disney dinosaurs and free of the rigors of mathematics.

I don't know about the overarching logic of the universe, but evolution does encapsulate the majestic organised complexity of life.

This approach is less 21st century science than a retrograde retreat to 19th century materialist superstitions, which delude our students that they are learning the facts of science when instead they are imbibing the consolations of a faith-driven materialist myth.

George, you know damn well that it's the critics of evolution who are faith-driven, not evolutionists.

George Gilder, International Man of Mystery

2006-01-12T08:51:00.000-08:00

George Gilder, former house braniac for the Reagan administration and author of Wealth and Poverty, is the father of market populism. More than anyone else, we owe him our current conception of the internet as a Libertarian medium.

His ideas can be reduced to three (and a half) points:

1. History is a struggle between old money and dashing entrepreneurs.
2. Liberals are responsible for everything bad, ever, because markets don't like their cynicism.
3. Everyone who uses the Internet will become a Libertarian.

All three are powerful, but the magic happened when he combined them: those liberal snobs spead a sense of defeat so people will support them instead of businesspeople, but we can fight them by using the Internet. And by subscribing to The Gilder Report, just $295 a year, where you'll learn the investing tips Hillary Clinton doesn't want you to know!

And then there's the half point:

3 1/2: women and black people suck

Which is why Wired opened a story about him with: "Does he really think scarcity is a minor obstacle on the road to techno-Utopia? (And would he please stop talking about race and gender?)"

Man, you're bumming me out. That's so backlash. We love diversity, it's gnarly. I'm full of shit because I'm no different from a conservative Republican, except I have a goatee.

Fuck, I slipped out of narrative voice for a second there.

Thurow is the most liberal, if you can ever call an economist liberal. A liberal economist is one who thinks the government had better do something about American illiteracy... George Gilder, by contrast, is way off to the right of the other speakers. If you were to plot them all on a chart, when you came to plotting Gilder's coordinates you'd have to get another piece of paper. He believes government-run education is to blame for declining American literacy.

If Lester Thurow is your liberal, we have a problem.

See? There's idea #2 at work -- the government (i.e. the liberal elite) is to blame for declining American literacy, and not crap schools, because they don't believe enough in the power of the market, and did I mention they're snobs?

Gilder starts to speak about the coming revolution in sand (silicon), glass (fiber), and air (wireless). The millennium promises a billion transistors on a single sliver of silicon, 700 bitstreams in a single thread of fiber, and a cellular infrastructure a thousand times cheaper than today's. Taken together, these phenomenal advances will topple all centralized institutions.

One of Gilder's funny little quirks is that he'd make up laws to show how resistance is futile. The "law of the microcosm" meant we could say goodbye to centralised institutions. Like government. Which is bad for liberals, because they're in charge no matter who the public actually elects. Or who owns the TV stations.

Gilder's famous because he says stupid things and doesn't care:

He says sharply: "Unknown entrepreneurs will invent new technologies to solve the current problems that hex Internet commerce - including encryptions, viruses, and nanobuck transactions. The Internet will multiply by a factor of millions the power of one person at a computer."

We also get to see why Lester Thurow is touted as a liberal:

Lester Thurow sees his opportunity to defend Grove. "It may surprise you, George, but America doesn't lead in everything." It's not much of a zinger, but the crowd claps and laughs. It's the spirit of the comment that counts - be reasonable, be worldly, and above all be tolerant of others' ways. Thurow adds that it would be smart for all of us to learn some Spanish and maybe some Japanese and even - god forbid - learn to play soccer.

See? He refuses to clap his hands for the Tinkerbell market, which is why he's responsible for a of society's problems, so he's a liberal.

Lester Thurow, of course, is the liberal who wrote "Building WEALTH" and advocated measuring a society's value in terms of the number of billionaires it produced.

Michelle Malkin, plagiarist

2006-01-11T20:23:00.000-08:00

A few days ago, I looked at how Malkin's "Muslim-only banks" lie was picked-up by some right-wing blogs. After picking up on her recent misrepresentation of Hillary Clinton, I decided to look at how right-wing blogs had parroted her, ignoring Hillary's actual argument.

Reading military blogger Dadmanly, I discovered a mitigating detail: ABC News had already written a subtly misleading story. Like Malkin's column, it selectively quoted Hillary Clinton's letter to John Warner and others to give a false impression of the content of her letter.

Fine, so it wouldn't be fair to pick on readers of Malkin for having the wrong idea when a major news outlet got it wrong too.

However, it's interesting to look at why readers of ABC News would have the same false impression as readers of Malkin. First, ABC News:

"We perhaps could have avoided so many of these fatalities with the right body armor," said Clinton, who recently wrote letters to Sen. John Warner, R-Va., chairman of the Armed Services Committee; Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee; and Francis J. Harvey, secretary of the Army, calling for an investigation into why troops were not being protected.

And Malkin's column:

"We perhaps could have avoided so many of these fatalities with the right body armor," concluded Brigadier General Clinton, who immediately dashed off letters to Sen. John Warner, R-Va., chairman of the Armed Services Committee; Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee; and Francis J. Harvey, secretary of the Army. Smarter-than-thou Clinton is, of course, demanding an investigation (highly recommended by image consultants to boost one's pro-military posturing).

She just changed "said Clinton" to "concluded Brigadier General Clinton", "who recently wrote" to "who immediately dashed off" and "calling for an investigation" to "demanding an investigation", adding the snark about "smarter-than-thout" and "highly recommended by image consultants".

So, this is how Michelle Malkin writes her columns: she lifts paragraphs from the news, changes the verbs and adds snark.

If I could have an answer to one question from Michelle, it'd be whether she actually read Hillary Clinton's letter, or she wrote her column on the basis of that ABC News story.

Malkin lied about Hillary Clinton's body armour comments

2006-01-11T02:31:00.000-08:00

According to Michelle Malkin:

Last week, a group called Soldiers for the Truth leaked results of an unpublished Pentagon study that reportedly found that as many as 80 percent of a random sample of Marines killed in Iraq from wounds to the upper body could have survived if they had had extra body armor

…

Faster than you can say "quagmire," Hillary landed on ABC's "Good Morning America" to lambaste the Bush administration as "incompetent" and its failure to provide more armor "unforgivable."

"We perhaps could have avoided so many of these fatalities with the right body armor," concluded Brig. Gen. Clinton, who immediately dashed off letters to Sen. John Warner, R-Va., chairman of the Armed Services Committee; Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee; and Francis J. Harvey, Secretary of the Army. Smarter-than-thou Clinton is, of course, demanding an investigation (highly recommended by image consultants to boost one's pro-military posturing).

So, according to Michelle Malkin, Hillary Clinton called Bush incompetent because 80 percent of Marines killed by upper body wounds would have survived with extra body armour. So if we'd just put more armour on them they'd be alive today, right?

The response is obvious: it isn’t always possible for soldiers to wear more armour, because of the trade-off between protection and mobility. So, these deaths may not have been preventable.

But Michelle isn’t being honest about what Hillary Clinton said. From Hillary’s letter to John Warner:

The number of lives lost to inadequate armor could reach the hundreds if Army deaths attributable to inadequate armor not included in this survey are counted as well…

Lives may have been needlessly lost because of inadequate equipment.

So, what Hillary really said is that if 80% of the Marines killed by upper body wounds would have survived with more body armour, it’s likely that many soldiers have died unnecessarily because of their inadequate body armour.

So, when Michelle cites Second Lt. Josh Suthoff ("I'd go out with less body armor if I could"), Capt. Jamey Turner ("You've got to sacrifice some protection for mobility") and military blogger Baghdad Guy ("there are limitations as to how much armor you can add onto an individual and maintain his effectiveness as a soldier") -- she nimbly side-steps Hillary Clinton's actual argument in favour of a straw man.

Update: Auguste from MalkinWatch points out the Malkin was even wrong about the study:

I didn't post on this because it made me so goddamn angry and no time to research, but essentially these soldiers, even the ones that Malkin quotes who are serving currently, are assuming that the study refers to simply tacking on armor to the current interceptor jackets which are pieces of shit to begin with.

What the study says is, if we weren't so married to procuring from the lowest bidder/crony bidder, we could get the kind of armor that those bake sales are buying, which meet all the requirements AND are easier to move around in.

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan...

2006-01-11T01:57:00.000-08:00

The Tribune reports:

Amputation of hands and stoning to death will continue to be the punishment for thieves and adulterers in post-Taliban Afghanistan, country's new Chief Justice Fazal Hadi Shinwari was reported today as saying.

But it's not all bad:

"A thief's hand would be cut off, and alchoholics and others would be punished under Islamic laws, but the condition would be that their crime is proved," he said.

Well, that's nice. Yes, we're still going to stone adulterers to death, but we'll prove they're adulterers first. Due process and all that.

George Bush once said "free nations do not breed the ideology of terror." So, was he wrong about that, or is Afghanistan not actually free?

The Ambit of Responsible Debate

2006-01-11T00:51:00.000-08:00

Tristero (over at Hullabaloo) describes Bush's recent "comfort to our adversaries" speech as a "demand that responsible debate over Iraq must be limited entirely to arguments over exactly how much praise he deserves".

In other words, Bush's idea what's permissible in American politics has Hannity on the right and Colmes on the left.

Does the President really think he can fix the premises of the discourse by treason-baiting? Of course, the far-right will take his statement as an endorsement of their eliminationist fantasies. If the President says so, maybe Democrats are traitors after all?

But the irresponsibility of Bush's declaration aside, it's interesting that Bush felt it necessary to tell America to be nicer to him. It exposes the weakness of his current position. The President has been hurt by the chaos and confusion in Iraq. But he can't change the topic from Iraq to domestic policies; he's unpopular there too. The only option for him is to hit back and salvage his image as a War President.

But treason-baiting won't be enough. With Iran apparently trying to get a nuke, I predict Bush will put himself firmly behind the push to discipline Iran. I'm not saying that Bush will invade Iran; that option seems to be off the table. But I can see Bush bombing Iran's nuclear research facilities, similar to the Israeli bombing of Iraq's Orirak nuclear facility in 1981. It's a move many Democrats would get behind, too. A lot of people who are opposed to preventive war are perfectly fine with a proportional response (including this blogger). After all, we supported the first Gulf War after Saddam invaded Kuwait.

This foolish attempt to treason-bait his critics will fail; it only shows how diminished the bully pulpit is for such an unpopular President. But Bush will soon have a major opportunity to renew his support as a wartime leader; don't count him out yet.

Those who criticise the President in wartime give comfort to our adversaries

2006-01-10T18:37:00.000-08:00

George Bush has a warning for Democrats:

President Bush issued an unusually stark warning to Democrats today about how to conduct the debate on Iraq as midterm elections approach, declaring that Americans know the difference “between honest critics” and those “who claim that we acted in Iraq because of oil, or because of Israel, or because we misled the American people.”

Not about Israel? I thought one of the reasons for getting rid of Saddam was to remove an enemy of Israel and open the way to a settlement between Israel and Palestine.

Mr. Bush said Americans should insist on a debate "that brings credit to our democracy, not comfort to our adversaries."

Yes: George Bush just said people who say he lied about the Iraqi war are guilty of treason.

Mr. Bush was speaking in the same room in a Washington hotel where last month he described the effort to reconstruct Iraq before a skeptical audience: the Council on Foreign Relations, whose members greeted him with only tepid applause. But today 425 members of the V.F.W., which has passed a resolution supporting the Iraq action, interrupted the president repeatedly as he predicted that progress would be made in both fighting the insurgency and stabilizing the newly elected government.

He wouldn't have responded well to that. This is a President who demands unquestioning deference.

"The vast majority of Iraqis prefer freedom with intermittent power to life in the permanent darkness of tyranny and terror," he said, an amplification of the theme he hit repeatedly in December in an effort to rebuild support for the war at home.

I'm sure they would.

"There is a difference between responsible and irresponsible debate and it's even more important to conduct this debate responsibly when American troops are risking their lives overseas," he said without specifically naming his critics.

So, it's treason to criticise the President when troops are in danger.

Mr. Bush added that "a country that divides into factions and dwells on old grievances cannot move forward and risks sliding back into tyranny."

Oh, please. Conservatives haven't even gotten over the Civil War.

"Polls can be fun" with David Limbaugh

2006-01-10T06:21:00.000-08:00

On December 30, David Limbaugh had this to say:

It is amusing to watch liberals try to explain away the recent upswing in President Bush's approval rating, from around 39 percent to 47 percent. Sure enough, they've figured a way to attribute the turnaround to a validation of their positions rather than his policies.

Now, David goes on about this (it's the topic of a column), but let's point out Bush's current numbers: Gallup has him at 43/54 and CBS has him at 41/52.

To continue:

Ever since President Bush attacked Iraq, Democrats have been castigating him for doing it and for how he's handled the operation every step of the way. After all, their best political hope is either that we fail in Iraq or, if we succeed, that they can somehow taint the effort from its inception by showing he lied to get us into an unnecessary and costly war.

There's no glory in being right about a trainwreck, Dave. This is how Cassandra felt.

And to the Democrats' and MSM's everlasting frustration, President Bush has stubbornly refused to admit he lied about WMD for the simple reason that he didn't

Kool-aid much? OK, one Bush lie about Iraq, coming up:

"We have also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas. We are concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] for missions targeting the United States." -- President Bush, Oct. 7.

I like this one because it's dishonest and stupid: drone planes can't fly more than 300 miles and the United States is 6000 miles away from Iraq. Although, I suppose Iraqis could have smuggled UAVs into Canada and launched their attack from there.

Our neighbour to the North transformed into that place, from whence like the north wind, terror comes. Where have I heard that before?

Here's the problem: lots of people in the Administration suspected there were WMD. Even Tommy Franks thought so. But, as Woodward wrote, "suspicion is not proof". On the basis of suspicion, Bush and other Adminstration officials made statements of fact. Like Cheney's "no doubt" declaration.

Lies.

Nonsense. The president has never claimed personal inerrancy.

Dave, remember when Bush was asked if he'd made a mistake, and he couldn't answer?

Let me explain why that moment was a bad sign. It's because competent people know when they make mistakes. They can identify the mistake and they can do better. That's why people are asked what their worst mistake is in job interviews. It's the incompetent people who can't identify their mistakes: they just don't know what their mistakes are, so they continue to muddle along.

Bush calls himself a CEO President, but he couldn't satisfactorally answer a question that would be pro forma with an entry-level employee.

No, President Bush's popularity is returning because his Iraq policies are bearing fruit and he is fighting back in a systematic and sustained way against his partisan accusers. The public is finally hearing him defend himself with well-earned righteous indignation.

So, does that mean Bush's popularity is falling because the fruit of his Iraq policies is bitter (like the bible says, by your fruits you shall know them), and because his attempts to respond to attacks have put his character flaws into relief. Does it mean that the public is turned-off by hearing righteous indignation from a screw-up?

It's a beautiful thing.

It is indeed. It is indeed.

Christopher Lasch and the markets

2006-01-10T05:15:00.000-08:00

Sam Vakin has written an interesting essay on Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism. Although there was certainly a jump in self-involvement in the 70s (epitomised for me in the ridiculous New Age movement), I agree with Vakin that Lasch essentially transposed his own narcissism onto society.

The main focus of Vakin's essay is Lasch's confused politics. Not knowing much about the man (although I enjoyed his book), I was unaware he was a hard leftist. That puzzled me: from Lasch's writing, I got the impression of a staunch conservative. After all, he hated the welfare state, the New Left and advocated a return to family and God as the antidote to narcissism.

But Lasch hated Capitalism. He pointed out, correctly, that Capitalism corrodes traditional values. Vankin doesn't agree with Lasch, saying he has a "total lack of understanding of market mechanisms and the history of markets":

True, markets start out as mass-oriented and entrepreneurs tend to mass- produce to cater to the needs of the newfound consumers. However, as markets evolve - they fragment. Individual nuances of tastes and preferences tend to transform the mature market from a cohesive, homogenous entity - to a loose coalition of niches.

Grubby market populism -- and I can imagine Lasch producing a wry chuckle as he read that. After all, he wrote the book on people giving up on politics. With calls for genuine economic democracy gone (personally, I understand this more as strong labour unions and muscular regulation than Communism) markets, implausibly, are imagined as more democratic than elected governments. And all because the people who should have been out there fighting for what they knew was right gave up and turned to Deepak Chopra. From depoliticisation to stupidity.

And I disagree with this:

Zeal usually leads to inconsistency of argumentation: Lasch claimed, for instance, that capitalism negated social and moral traditions while pandering to the lowest common denominator. There is a contradiction here: social mores and traditions are, in many cases, THE lowest common denominator.

There's no contradiction here. Take television programming, where glib anti-authoritarianism is paired with crass stupidity. Lasch's point is coherent: liberal economic policies are destroying our culture.

Vakin also links Lasch to Allan Bloom, author of "The Closing of the American Mind". Both have written against having too open a mind: open your mind too far and your brains will fall out. Vakin is derisive, but I can see the wisdom in such a stance. There is such a thing as relativism of ideas, exemplified by George Bush's recent announcement that, on the Intelligent Design question, "both sides" should be taught. Never mind that one side is the bedrock of biology, tested and tested and retested, while the other is both unsupported by research and intellectually incoherent.

I'm sorry if this sounds too negative -- I really did like Vakin's essay. But I have a major problem with his market democracy:

Lasch failed to realize that democracy and wealth formation are two sides of the SAME coin.

My position is the same as Benjamin Barber's (in Jihad vs. McWorld): markets don't need democracy, and markets don't necessarily promote democracy. As a liberal, I like the idea of free markets, but as an end in themselves, because they're a dimension of human freedom. But market anarchy is tantamount to tyranny: the more market freedom granted, the firmer the countervailing forces have to be. And, yes, that involves government activism.

Sure, Bush is an average President, but not exactly ordinary!

2006-01-09T22:29:00.000-08:00

James Taranto:

George W. Bush is "average," but far from ordinary.

Why's that?

in a new survey of scholars ranking the presidents, Mr. Bush finishes almost exactly in the middle of the pack.

But:

Today's opinion polls are no guide: Warren G. Harding was a lot more popular when he died in office than Harry S. Truman was when he left, yet Harding now rates as a failure and Truman as near great.

So, scholars put Bush in the middle of the pack, and the survey was adjusted to give Democrats and Republicans equal weight, but who's to say they know anything, right?

Ominously for Bush:

The lowest-ranking presidents tend to be not those who aimed high and missed, but those whose administrations were plagued by scandal (Harding, Nixon) or who were passive as crises built (Buchanan, Carter).

So, Bush will be remembered as the President who lied his country into war, outed a CIA agent for political gain, and announced that the law didn't apply to him?

Hell, James, with a record like that, he's lucky to be in the middle of the pack.

The Democrats are Republicans, but they're worse than Republicans!

2006-01-09T21:55:00.000-08:00

Peggy Noonan:

The leadership of the Republican Party was now, in its avowed aims if not its daily practices, antigovernment. The party that was, in its daily operations if not always its avowed intentions, pro-government, the Democrats, remained in effective control of Congress and the courts.

So, the Republican Patry claimed to be anti-government but wasn't really, while the Democratic Party claimed to be anti-government but wasn't really.

Incoherence of language, incoherence of thought.

Ixnay on the Esmay

2006-01-09T18:31:00.000-08:00

Dean Esmay:

See, at first I thought he was trying to be funny. Not very successfully, just in a sort of 16 year old's version of Ted Rall or Janeane Garofalo--you know, shallow, stupid, and rage-filled.

Shallow, stupid, and rage-filled? Who's kidding who? From Dean's blog:

But then as soon as the bast**ds turned their backs, I had my hacker minions take their site down, disabling their posting capability. Revenge is a dish best served cold...

Muslims get interest-free loans! Life is so unfair!

2006-01-09T04:49:00.000-08:00

Here's what some other conservative bloggers have to say on the Muslim banking story.

Hyscience opens with "Interest Free Loans ...but only for Muslims". Weirdly, he points out at the end of his post that Muslims don't actually get interest free loans, they pay rent to avoid the prohibition on paying interest.

If he knows Muslims don't really get interest free loans, why did he use that line as his teaser?

Hold the Mayo is a wit: "With the cost of housing going so high in some parts of the country, I have to wonder what the Shariah penalty is for missing a loan payment."

Unfortunately, he repeats Malkin's canard: "a bank in Michigan that is setting up a division to serve exclusively Muslims". No, that's an invention of Malkin's, to make it look as if Muslims are getting an unfair advantage.

And in sorrow more than anger: "No mention of the pending ACLU discrimination suit."

Perhaps because anyone can get these bank accounts and redeemable leases, but they're only useful to fundamentalist Muslims (and perhaps Orthodox Jews and some kinds of evangelical)?

The American Princess lives in Ann Arbor. Unfortunately, she doesn't understand a basic fact of this case:

but if you happen to be a Muslim resident of the Birkenstock and Granola Capital of the Midwest... you can get a cheap (read that, interest free) home loan because its apparently against your religion to borrow money.

No, Muslims don't pay less than people who get home loans, they just pay the total cost (including projected interest) in a different way to avoid a religious prohibition. But I understand how a manufactured grievance can be used to justify an irrational hate.

But she gives us a good reason to move to her town:

only a $5.00 fine for smoking marijuana in public. We sports an annual "Hash Bash" where people come from miles around to do just that (and on the university campus, no less).

And, finally, Right Voices want to know:

Please share your thoughts on this! I would love to know if it is legal for them to turn away non-Muslims. I would also like to know if this bank is recognized by the feds.

While I want to know if you even read the article, or just Michelle Malkin's lying headline?

Hey, if people were charged more interest because of their faith, I'd condemn it!

2006-01-09T04:33:00.000-08:00

Alpine Summit:

A bank based on Muslim law doesn't strike me as too terrible an idea, but I doubt people would tolerate a similar bank if it catered to Jew-only or Christian-only values.

Jew-only? Depending on how you broadly you define ursury, Christians and Jews have the same prohibition as Muslims. (Some claim that "ursury" was only intended to mean charging excessive interest, not any interest at all. So, as a Muslim or a Christian, some interest would be fine.)

But you don't have to doubt people would tolerate it -- religious banking is a reality. As I pointed out in my previous post on this topic, there's the Evangelical Christian Credit Union. Beach Bank of Miami Beach observes the Sabbath to appeal to Orthodox Jews. So, yes, it does happen, and people do tolerate it.

In fact, how long do you suppose it will take for the left to hail this as an advancement in tolerance by business, and condemn traditional banks with their "racist" interest rates?

Well, I will say (on behalf of the left) this is a clever advance in niche marketing that enables fundamentalist Muslims to participate in the American dream.

As long as anyone is able to do business with this bank--Muslim, or non-Muslim--I really don't have a problem with this. Making Islamic membership a requirement to do business is religious discrimination and I would have a problem with that.

Well, that makes you a moderate. Becfause you don't think Muslims should be denied banking services on the basis of their faith. Which is rather sad.

And, by the way, people who take out these redeemable leases pay the interest they would have paid on a loan as part of their lease.

Otherwise, more power to the bank if they can make money off of serving a market niche.

See? It's like the 90s boom economy all over again. Niche marketing just makes us more of a democracy!

Michelle Malkin warns us about Muslim-only banks

2006-01-09T00:18:00.000-08:00

Michelle Malkin warns us: Muslim-only banks? Not in America, punk.

"The formation of the subsidiary allows us to have a financial institution which is 100 percent in compliance with the Muslim Shariah, the legal code of the Islamic religion," bank President and Chairman Stephen Lange Ranzini told The Ann Arbor News for a Saturday story.

Among the laws of Shariah is a ban against paying or receiving interest.

The bank's Islamic deposit accounts allow Muslims to open accounts where any profits are shared rather than paid as interest.

University Bank also offers a mortgage alternative loan transaction program - or MALT - which replaces a traditional home loan with a redeemable lease.

So, University Bank is offering Muslims kosher banking services. The same thing the Evangelical Christian Credit Union does for fundamentalist Christians. But don't hold your breath waiting for Michelle Malkin to bring attention to that example of religious discrimination.

But are the accounts really Muslim-only, or can anyone get them? The article only says that they're in compliance with Shariah, not that non-Muslims are excluded. The "Muslim-only" part of the story seems to be an invention of Malkin's.

I come to bury Europe, and to praise it

2006-01-08T22:23:00.000-08:00

You know you've been reading blogs for too long when you immediately identify "VDH" as "Victor Davis Hanson":

Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Herbert Hoover? Well, I can see why they like Bush -- he almost had negative job growth in his first term, too!

Despite all the trouble and harsh words and bruises between America and Europe, Victor Davis Hanson is conciliatory. In his latest National Review column, he writes:

Despite the bitter recrimination and growing rift between you and us, most Americans have not forgotten that a strong, confident Europe is still critical to the material and spiritual well being of the United States.

Hey, that sounds pretty sensible. A strong Europe is vital to our collective security. It was brave of you to come out against the Republican party line, Dave.

Amazingly, that introduction is mostly not sarcastic. He's sincere about Europe's good qualities and achievements in a way few on the right are. But I say "mostly" because there is another shoe waiting to drop -- what, you think a conservative could say something nice about Europe without getting to a "yes, but"?

But first, some polite disagreement:

Nor is our allegiance a mere matter of history. Europe is the repository of the Western tradition, most manifestly in shrines like the Acropolis, the Pantheon, the Uffizi, or the Vatican. We concede that the Great Books — we as yet have not produced a Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, or Locke, much less a Da Vinci, Mozart, or Newton — and the Great Ideas of the West from democracy to capitalism to human rights originated on your continent alone. And if Americans believe our Constitution and the visions of our Founding Fathers were historic improvements on Europe of the 18th-century, then at least we acknowledge in our humility that they were also inconceivable without it.

Ah, an alliance with Europe against the enemies of Western Civilisation. I guess if you care enough about the classical canon, it's easy to make up with the cheese-eating surrender monkeys.

But, America yet to produce a Newton, a Locke, or a Shakespeare? What about Thomas Jefferson? What about Santayana, or John Dewey, or even Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer? Raymond Chandler? Emerson? Hamilton? Benjamin Franklin? Walt Whitman? Henry David Thoreau? And then there are the Nobel Prizes. Since 1901 and the first Nobel awards, America has won "Americans have won 76 medicine prizes, 65 physics prizes, 44 chemistry prizes and 27 prizes in economics." (Source)

And this is just stupid:

No, there is a greater oneness between us, an unspoken familiarity even now in the age of global sameness, that makes an American feel at home in Amsterdam, Paris, Rome, or Athens in a way that is not true of Istanbul, Cairo, or Bangkok.

What, even in France?

And then there's this:

In the multiracial society of the United States, an American black, Asian, or Latino finds natural affinity in London and Brussels in a way not true in Lagos, Ho Chi Min City, or Lima.

Kind of like how, after World War 2, American blacks found natural affinity in Paris in a way not true of their own country.

Even in this debased era of multiculturalism that misleads our youth into thinking no culture can be worse than the West, we all know in our hearts the truth that we live by and the lie that we profess — that the critic of the West would rather have his heart repaired in Berlin than in Guatemala or be a Muslim in Paris rather than a Christian in Riyadh, or a woman or homosexual in Amsterdam than in Iran, or run a newspaper in Stockholm rather than in Havana, or drink the water in Luxembourg rather than in Uganda, or object to his government in Italy rather than in China or North Korea. Radical Muslims damn Europe and praise Allah — but whenever possible from Europe rather than inside Libya, Syria, or Iran.

In the same breath, he praises the West for its tolerance towards difference and damns us for multiculturalism. Being a conservative means never having to say anything even remotely coherent.

Although we Americans think the European Union is a flawed notion and will not survive to fulfill its present aspirations, we hope in some strange way that it does — for both our sakes of having a proud partner in a more dangerous world to come rather than an angry and envious inferior, nursing past glories while blaming others for self-inflicted wounds of the present.

Yes, a flawed notion -- like the American articles of confederation. By the way, Vic, if you really believe Europe is a proud partner in a dangerous world -- and if you do, the more credit to you, because it's the truth. Perhaps it would be a good idea for Republicans to execise some self-discipline and put a lid on crap about freedom fries and Old Europe?

As promised, the other shoe:

On the home front, a single, though bloody, attack in Madrid changed an entire Spanish election, and prompted the withdrawal of troops from Iraq — although the terrorists nevertheless continued, despite their promises to the contrary, to plant bombs and plan assassinations of Spanish judicial officials. Cry the beloved continent.

Deliberately misleading. The people who won the election had already promised to pull out the troops. It wasn't a response to the attack. Also, the two parties were neck and neck before the election and they were neck and neck coming out of the election: at least, the poll results were within the margin of error. So, there's no way of knowing if the bomb did tip the election against the government that failed to protect its people. Finally, the government engaged in a ham-handed cover-up of the nature of the Spanish attack. They hoped to hide the truth long enough to scrape past the election. By any measure, that's grounds for removal of a government.

Victor Davis Hanson: history goes in one end, propaganda comes out the other.

The European strategy of selling weapons to Arab autocracies, triangulating against the United States for oil and influence, and providing cash to dubious terrorists like Hamas has backfired. Polls in the West Bank suggest Palestinians hate you, the generous and accommodating, as much as they do us, the staunch ally of Israel.

As Eugene Debs might say, "this is too much even for a joke". Selling weapons to Arab autocracies? How did Saddam get all those weapons in the first place, Vic? Providng cash to dubious terrorists? Like the Afghani mujahideen?

Either your economy will reform, your populace multiply, and your citizenry defend itself, or not. And if not, then Europe as we have known it will pass away — to the great joy of the Islamists but to the terrible sorrow of America.

"Become us, or perish -- because we love you." Do you try this with girls too? Does it work any better with them?

Yeah! Why should we believe the CIA?

2006-01-08T03:51:00.000-08:00

Hey! It's (as James Wolcott dubbed him) the only kid in the playground with a Machiavelli lunchbox. Yep, Michael Ledeen, the man who thinks we need to throw some pissant country against the wall every few years to show the world we mean business.

Um, Mike, in the movie Shane -- you know Jack Palance is supposed to be the bad guy, right?

Well, Michael has a new column up on NRO: The Great Counterintelligence Fiasco. Why should we believe the CIA on Iran? Yeah! What are we spending [budget classified] dollars a year for, anyway?

Like everyone else in Washington, I’ve been reading excerpts from James Risen’s new book, the one that "exposes" the "crimes" of the Bush administration with regard to the war on terrorism.

Trust me, Michael -- everyone else in Washington scans the index for their name, and then sees what the book says about them. And if it's a Clinton book, they look up Monica, but that's the only exception.

The most recent excerpt deals with the CIA’s activities vis-à-vis Iran, and Risen says some very shocking things, things which a serious city would find far more troublesome than the legalities about NSA’s intercepts of conversations involving terrorists.

Hey, paired examples! You nabbed this bit from Noam Chomsky, didn't you?

Why stop there? "Sure, the CIA's activities in Iran -- vis-a-vis, even -- are well and good, but aren't the Stalin-era Gulags of the former Soviet Union so much more troubling?"

And if you're Jonah Goldberg you point out that Spider-Man's parents were incarcerated in the Soviet Gulags! That's how bad the Gulags were, they made Spider-Man sad. And when Spider-Man is sad, all New York suffers.

Well, OK, they weren't his real parents, just robots infused with artificial life by The Chameleon, but that's just like Jonah Goldberg, flubbing his pop-culture references.

Since I’m just an amateur at these arcane subjects, I thought it best to get some real expertise, and so I dusted off the old Ouija board for the first time this year, and got it up and running. After about 20 minutes of searching, I finally got my old friend James Jesus Angleton, once upon a time the head of counterintelligence at Langley.

Oh, please, please, please -- you're not going to have a fictional conversation with a dead person, are you?

JJA: Happy New Year! Hope everyone’s doing well.

Fuck.

Seriously, Peggy Noonan? I point my finger in your face and say, you encouraged this!

ML: Okay, let’s take them in order. The first one dates back to Clinton. It’s about an operation called "Merlin," and consisted of feeding doctored information about the design of nuclear weapons to the mullahs via a Soviet scientist who had defected "years earlier" to the United States. The concept was to get the Iranians to use the snafued version in their bombs so that they would fizzle instead of explode.

Wow, that sounds pretty cool! The CIA working to make us all safer. Even fictional James Jesus agrees:

JJA: Right. We’ve been doing such things for years, and for good reason. If you know that your enemies are trying to steal your blueprints, or buy good weapons on the clandestine market, you’re well-advised to try to get them to steal or buy things that won’t work, instead of running around trying to plug all the cracks in the dyke. Nothing wrong with the concept.

Like when The Joker took apart a cruise missile so he could smuggle it out of the United States and sell it to a terrorist, but he did a bad job putting it back together again and it exploded on launch!

But Michael Ledeen is Doubting Thomas and James Randi in one:

ML: Except that we never did it with nuclear stuff before, did we? And Risen’s got expert testimony that the Iranians could easily have sorted out the good parts of the blueprints from the disinformation, so that in the end we would have actually helped them.

Hey, Michael? Here's a clue. If the Iranians have a guy who knows what's good and bad in blueprints for a nuke -- they don't need American blueprints, because he can fucking build one.

So, Michael Ledeen's full of shit, but we knew that. To continue!

He goes on about how this Clinton-era program may have given the Iranians a bomb. Russian intelligence, spies, firing sets, etc. No mention, of course, of how the Reagan Administration knew Pakistan was getting a bomb but looked the other way, even lying about what it knew, because the Pakistanis were helping them fight the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Finally we get the answer to the question he posed at the start.

At least that’s what it sounded like. Anyway, you know how he thought: Anything could be its own opposite. He loved to tell the story of the "Trust," the Soviet disinformation operation that tricked the West into supporting a bogus army of presumed anti-Communists who were working for Soviet intelligence all along. We thought we had penetrated the Soviet Union, but it was the other way around; they had penetrated our intelligence services. They found out what we were up to, and they deceived us into striking at their strongest link. So it’s inevitable that he would wonder if Risen’s stories were much more important than Risen realized. Maybe they show that the Iranians have done something similar. They’re certainly up to it.

Yes -- we shouldn't trust the CIA because it may be infiltrated by Iranians. Brilliant, Michael.

If this is the kind of pap that gets you the "Freedom Chair" at the American Enterprise Institute, maybe I need to switch to conservatism, write some paranoid crap, and angle for a nice sinecure of my own.

A few days ago President Ahmadinejad said "we must prepare ourselves to rule the world." And he cheerfully commented on Sharon’s stroke, "The Butcher of Sabra and Shatila has joined his ancestors and others will soon follow suit."

You know, I just don't like that man. But because this blog prides itself on being fair to maniacs, I looked up the full quote on google.

"We must prepare ourselves to rule the world and the only way to do that is to put forth views on the basis of the Expectation of the Return." (referring to the return of the Shiite Messiah, the Mahdi.)

So, he didn't say Iranians had to prepare themselves to rule the world by readying their legions for way, but by spreading the gospel of the Iranian Messiah. Small detail, big difference -- and, because I have no qualms about cheap shots, I can point out that Michael Ledeen has the exact same belief about Jesus Christ. Isn't it weird how these Clash of Civilisations guys are so much alike?

Of course, as The Hue and Cry said, "Even I am tempted to side with the Administration upon hearing statements from the Iranian President such as" that one. Did I mention I really don't like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? But Ahmadinejad's lunacy (and idiocy) is a poor excuse for abandoning our self-interest to a policy of confrontation.

A regime with such ambitions is capable of anything.

No, Michael, intent isn't capability, and when assessing threats, you have to look at both.

Well, that was a nice "column" Michael. Keep up the "good work".

Narnia follow-up

2006-01-08T03:17:00.000-08:00

DuWayne Brayton said (on this blog):

Actually Lewis claimed religion had nothing to do with the books.

Well, he may have said so, but he also said that the books were supposed to prepare the way for learning about Jesus later in life. And I defy anyone to read The Last Battle and tell me straight-facedly that it's not a Christian allegory.

Figure the symbolism is more pagan than Christian and he wasn't even a christian when he wrote "The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe."

Again, I disagree. The bit where the lion dies and the stone tablet cracks is straight out of Christianity. Christ dies for our sins, and because that's happened the veil of the temple is rent. You see, a person had to be completely pure to go past the veil of temple. If they had even a single sin, they would drop dead. So they had to purify themselves thoroughly first. But with Christ's death, the veil rent; the old compact with God was no more, replaced with the new compact of Christ's salvation.

Now as far as guilt blame and suffering goes, well, he was British - of an old school, what do you expect?

Any comparison you can make between TLTWATW, you can make with much greater ease with "The Matrix" trilogy or for a bit of a stretch (no more than with Lewis work) "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy - especialy if you delve into Tolkien's volumes of histories of middle earth.

Well, Neo's a saviour, but in the vein of Luke Skywalker, not Jesus Christ. And although Tolkien was a Christian and in fact converted C.S. Lewis (a fun fact to impress people with at parties), Tolkien's work owes a lot more to Tolkien's encyclopedic knowledge of norse sagas.

A lot of fundies seem to make a big deal about it but these are people who see no contradiction in cutting social programs and Christ's teachings on the poor and downtrodden.

I think the thing for them is that they're Christians because of the promise of salvation. They get to go to Heaven and Jesus will tear out their guts if they don't. Now, Christ's a great guy and it's hard to find a better role model. But the ethical teachings take a backseat with lots of fundies.

Believe me Lewis had no monopoly on guilt and suffering in British childrens literature. I broke through my gums on it and everything before 1965 was chock full of it - funny thing though, nearly everything after '65 was quite the opposite. And it had nothing to do with Christianity either, the isle was chock full of agnostics and atheists before a couple dozen Americans even knew what those words meant.

I accept your point that British people are mopey. But I see in C.S. Lewis an attempt to plant a mustard seed of Christian guilt in children. There's Good News, but first you have to hear the Bad News, that you're damned from birth because of original sin, that you are therefore responsible for the death of the perfectly good man, and that your genitals may in fact be evil.

I can't wait until my son's old enough to enjoy them with me. Right now I'm trying to convince him that when his mom told him republican'ts are kind of like monsters she didn't mean that they're likely to jump out of his closet and eat him. . .

I can't wait to have children so I can tell them things like this about Republicans!

"Yes, little Misha, Republicans have no eyes, which is why they rap on bedroom windows at night. If a little child looks up at them, they climb in and take those peering eyes for themselves..."

I promise to never tell this joke again

2005-12-27T04:19:00.000-08:00

Word has it Bill O'Reilly was recently seen scuffling with a Jewish boy playing with his dreidel provocatively close to a nativity scene. Thumping the tyke, he was heard to yell, "This is the no spin zone, pal!"

Um. Well.

Liberal Quotes

2005-12-20T02:39:00.000-08:00

This mailing list is interesting: it publishes a good selection of Liberal Quotes. I don't know about buying the book, but it's a nice source of inspiration. Here are a few quotes from the last few weeks I liked:

There is a very good saying that if triangles invented a god, they would make him three-sided.-- Montesquieu

True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it understands that an edifice that produces beggars needs restructuring.-- Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.-- Henry David Thoreau (I, too, would like to be useful.)

I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own -- a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty.-- Albert Einstein

The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.-- Martin Luther King, Jr. (Now I know why Janeane Garofalo is always saying that on The Majority Report)

And, appropriately:

Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in your reading have been like the blast of triumph out of Shakespeare, Seneca, Moses, John and Paul.-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Poisoning children's minds with guilt, blame and suffering

2005-12-05T01:37:00.000-08:00

Polly Toynbee reviews the new Narnia film in The Guardian:

Why? Because here in Narnia is the perfect Republican, muscular Christianity for America - that warped, distorted neo-fascist strain that thinks might is proof of right. I once heard the famous preacher Norman Vincent Peel in New York expound a sermon that reassured his wealthy congregation that they were made rich by God because they deserved it. The godly will reap earthly reward because God is on the side of the strong. This appears to be CS Lewis's view, too. In the battle at the end of the film, visually a great epic treat, the child crusaders are crowned kings and queens for no particular reason. Intellectually, the poor do not inherit Lewis's earth.

...

Lewis said he hoped the book would soften-up religious reflexes and "make it easier for children to accept Christianity when they met it later in life". Holiness drenches the Chronicles. When, in the book, the children first hear someone say, mysteriously, "Aslan is on the move", he writes: "Now a very curious thing happened. None of the children knew who Aslan was any more than you do; but the moment the Beaver had spoken these words everyone felt quite different. Perhaps it has sometimes happened to you in a dream that someone says something which you don't understand but in the dream it feels as if it had enormous meaning ..." So Lewis weaves his dreams to invade children's minds with Christian iconography that is part fairytale wonder and joy - but heavily laden with guilt, blame, sacrifice and a suffering that is dark with emotional sadism.

To save America from her dangerous fascination with liberty

2005-12-02T22:34:00.000-08:00

Shadia Drury's Saving America:

In his book On Tyranny, Strauss referred to the right of the superior to rule as "the tyrannical teaching" of the ancients which must be kept secret. But what is the reason for secrecy? Strauss tells us that the tyrannical teaching must be kept secret for two reasons - to spare the people's feelings and to protect the elite from possible reprisals. After all, the people are not likely to be favourably disposed to the fact that they are intended for subordination.

But why should anyone object to the idea that in theory the good and wise should rule? The real answer lies in the nature of the rule of the wise as understood by Strauss.

It meant tyranny is the literal sense, which is to say, rule in the absence of law, or rule by those who were above the law. Of course, Strauss believed that the wise would not abuse their power. On the contrary, they would give the people just what was commensurate with their needs and capacities. But what exactly is that? Certainly, giving them freedom, happiness, and prosperity is not the point. In Strauss's estimation, that would turn them into animals. The goal of the wise is to ennoble the vulgar. But what could possibly ennoble the vulgar? Only weeping, worshipping, and sacrificing could ennoble the masses. Religion and war - perpetual war - would lift the masses from the animality of bourgeois consumption and the pre-occupation with "creature comforts." Instead of personal happiness, they would live their lives in perpetual sacrifice to God and the nation.

...

So, what is to be done? How can America be saved from her dangerous fascination with liberty? Irving Kristol came up with the solution that has become the cornerstone of neoconservative policies: use democracy to defeat liberty. Turn the people against their own liberty. Convince them that liberty is licentiousness - that liberty undermines piety, leads to crime, drugs, rampant homosexuality, children out of wedlock, and family breakdown. And worse of all, liberalism is soft on communism or terrorism - whatever happens to be the enemy of the moment. And if you can convince the people that liberty undermines their security, then, you will not have to take away their liberty; they will gladly renounce it.

In an essay entitled "Populism Not to Worry," Irving Kristol argued that Americans should embrace populism, or the rule of the majority, despite the reservations of the Founding Fathers. The latter feared the tyranny of the majority, and institutionalised safeguards to protect the liberty of individuals and minorities. But Kristol and the neoconservatives want to dismantle these very safeguards against majority rule. Kristol tells us not to worry. Why not? Apparently because the neoconservatives believe that America has been ruled by an unwise liberal elite for over two hundred years, and they are willing to gamble that the people will be wiser, which is to say, more likely to endorse conservative policies. Inspired by the same ideology, the Alliance party in Canada is willing to take the same gamble. But, luckily for Canada, it is sagging badly in the polls.

With the neoconservatives in power in the US, it will be difficult to conceal the real nature of neoconservative policies. The "stealth campaigns" are not likely to be as effective. The policies are by now very clear: no gay rights, no liberated women, no uppity blacks, lots of prayer in the schools, a strong commitment to the death penalty, and the re-criminalisation of abortion. The latter is particularly important. Of course it will keep the women at home and out of the way so that world can be ruled by men in the proper manly fashion; but that's not all. More importantly, it will keep women busy having babies - lots of babies. In this way, women will become useful once again; they will return to their vocation as factories for soldiers - and we need lots of soldiers, for we will have plenty of wars to fight, if the neoconservatives have their way. And it seems they have.

The neoconservative goal is reactionary in the classic sense of the term. It is nothing short of turning the clock back on the liberal revolution. And it will use democracy to accomplish its task. After all, Strauss had no objections to democracy as long as a wise elite, inspired by the profound truths of the ancients, was able to shape, invent, or create the will of the people. In his interpretation of Plato's myth of the cave, Strauss maintained that the philosophers who return to the cave should not bring in truth; instead, the philosophers should seek to manipulate the images in the cave, so that the people will remain in the stupor to which they are supremely fit.

The Conservative Palliative

2005-12-02T22:24:00.000-08:00

Christopher Lasch, What's Wrong With The Right:

Not only do conservatives have no understanding of modern capitalism, they have a distorted understanding of the “traditional values” they claim to defend. The virtues they want to revive are the pioneer virtues: rugged individualism, boosterism, rapacity, a sentimental deference to women, and a willingness to resort to force. These values are “traditional” only in the sense that they are celebrated in the traditional myth of the Wild West and embodied in the Western hero, the prototypical American lurking in the background, often in the very foreground, of conservative ideology. In their implications and inner meaning, these individualist values are themselves profoundly anti-traditional. They are the values of the man on the make, in flight from his ancestors, from the family claim, from everything that ties him down and limits his freedom of movement. What is traditional about the rejection of tradition, continuity, and rootedness? A conservatism that sides with the forces of restless mobility is a false conservatism. So is the conservatism false that puts on a smiling face, denounces “doom sayers,” and refuses to worry about the future. Conservatism appeals to a pervasive and legitimate desire in contemporary society for order, continuity, responsibility, and discipline; but it contains nothing with which to satisfy these desires, It pays lip service to “traditional values,” but the policies with which it is associated promise more change more innovation more growth, more technology, more weapons, more addictive drugs. Instead of confronting the forces in modern life that make for disorder, it proposes merely to make Americans feel good about themselves. Ostensibly rigorous and realistic, contemporary conservatism is an ideology of denial. Its slogan is the slogan of Alfred E. Neumann: “What? Me worry?” Its symbol is a smile button: that empty round face devoid of features except for two tiny eyes, eyes too small to see anything clearly, and a big smile: the smile of someone who is determined to keep smiling through thick and thin.

The Manifestation of Divine Purpose

2005-11-30T18:33:00.000-08:00

Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker:

Bush’s closest advisers have long been aware of the religious nature of his policy commitments. In recent interviews, one former senior official, who served in Bush’s first term, spoke extensively about the connection between the President’s religious faith and his view of the war in Iraq. After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the former official said, he was told that Bush felt that “God put me here” to deal with the war on terror. The President’s belief was fortified by the Republican sweep in the 2002 congressional elections; Bush saw the victory as a purposeful message from God that “he’s the man,” the former official said. Publicly, Bush depicted his reëlection as a referendum on the war; privately, he spoke of it as another manifestation of divine purpose.

The Lewis Doctrine

2005-11-24T21:41:00.000-08:00

Michael Hirsh on Bernard Lewis in The Washington Monthly:

Lewis's basic premise, put forward in a series of articles, talks, and bestselling books, is that the West—what used to be known as Christendom—is now in the last stages of a centuries-old struggle for dominance and prestige with Islamic civilization. (Lewis coined the term “clash of civilizations,” using it in a 1990 essay titled “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” and Samuel Huntington admits he picked it up from him.) Osama bin Laden, Lewis thought, must be viewed in this millennial construct as the last gasp of a losing cause, brazenly mocking the cowardice of the “Crusaders.” Bin Laden's view of America as a “paper tiger” reflects a lack of respect for American power throughout the Arab world. And if we Americans, who trace our civilizational lineage back to the Crusaders, flagged now, we would only invite future attacks. Bin Laden was, in this view, less an aberrant extremist than a mainstream expression of Muslim frustration, welling up from the anti-Western nature of Islam. “I have no doubt that September 11 was the opening salvo of the final battle,” Lewis told me in an interview last spring. Hence the only real answer to 9/11 was a decisive show of American strength in the Arab world; the only way forward, a Kemalist conquest of hearts and minds. And the most obvious place to seize the offensive and end the age-old struggle was in the heart of the Arab world, in Iraq.

...

Iraq and its poster villain, Saddam Hussein, offered a unique opportunity for achieving this transformation in one bold stroke (remember “shock and awe”?) while regaining the offensive against the terrorists. So, it was no surprise that in the critical months of 2002 and 2003, while the Bush administration shunned deep thinking and banned State Department Arabists from its councils of power, Bernard Lewis was persona grata, delivering spine-stiffening lectures to Cheney over dinner in undisclosed locations. Abandoning his former scholarly caution, Lewis was among the earliest prominent voices after September 11 to press for a confrontation with Saddam, doing so in a series of op-ed pieces in The Wall Street Journal with titles like “A War of Resolve” and “Time for Toppling.” An official who sat in on some of the Lewis-Cheney discussions recalled, “His view was: 'Get on with it. Don't dither.'” Animated by such grandiose concepts, and like Lewis quite certain they were right, the strategists of the Bush administration in the end thought it unnecessary to prove there were operational links between Saddam and al Qaeda. These were good “bureaucratic” reasons for selling the war to the public, to use Wolfowitz's words, but the real links were deeper: America was taking on a sick civilization, one that it had to beat into submission. Bin Laden's supposedly broad Muslim base, and Saddam's recalcitrance to the West, were part of the same pathology.

The Vanishing Medicare Surplus

2005-11-10T21:01:00.000-08:00

Paul Krugman, "Pants on Fire":

Medicare's hospital insurance program is run the same way as Social Security: it collects revenue from payroll taxers, and it is accumulating a trust fund to help pay benefits when the baby boomers retire. If you treated the hospital insurance surplus the same way you treat the Social Security surplus -- which you should, since the two programs work the same way -- it would already be obvious that you are paying for the tax cut with money that was supposed to be reserved for future retirees.

However, Medicare also runs a supplemental insurance program. This program has always been paid for out of general revenue -- just like defense -- but your administration insists that it must be lumped in with hospital insurance. That lets you declare that there is no Medicare surplus, and use the hospital insurance surplus to pay for tax cuts.

The Exterminator

2005-11-10T08:58:00.000-08:00

From the New Yorker May 24th 1999 article on House whip Tom DeLay, titled "The Exterminator":

In Texas, many DeLay backers aren't surprised that his attacks on Clinton have been so harsh. What does surprise some of them is that he has framed the battle in such moral terms. During the impeachment fight, DeLay said, "I wouldn't be sitting in the President's shoes and defending myself in a criminal investigation, because I wouldn't have been doing the things that the President is being accused of," and "Anyone who would lie to his wife would lie to the American people." At one point, he described the battle as a struggle of "relativism versus absolute truth". (p. 33-4)

Last fall, a wealthy Republican campaign contributor in Orange County, in southeast Texas, charged that DeLay and several associates directed him to launder campaign contributions. In 1996, this man, Peter Cloeren, who is a plastics manufacturer, wanted to help a conservative Republican candidate, Brian Babin, who was running from Congress. DeLay came down to campaign for Babin and, according to Cloeren, was seated next to him at lunch at a local country club. Cloeren gave DeLay a tour of his factory. During the visit, Cloeren says he told DeLay that he would like to donate more to Babin but had reached the legal limit. DeLay, he says, told him that he could help Cloeren find "additional vehicles." Soon afterward, Cloeren says, he was approached by a DeLay aide, who suggested that he contribute money to two out-of-state candidates, in whom he had no interest. Shortly after that, records reportedly show, those campaigns donated identitcal amounts of money to Babin -- a scheme that appears to be in direct violation of campaign finance laws. (p. 40)

The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt

2005-11-09T02:02:00.000-08:00

Quotes from Richard Hofstadter's essay "The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt", collected in Daniel Bell anthology "The Radical Right":

“Unlike most of the liberal dissent of the past, the new dissent not only has no respect for non-conformism, but is based upon a relentless demand for conformity.” (p. 64)

“It can most accurately be called pseudo-conservative -- I borrow the term from the study of The Authoritarian Personality published five years ago by Theodore W. Adorno and his associates -- because its exponents, although they believe themselves to be conservatives and usually employ the rhetoric of conservatism, show signs of a serious and restless dissatisfaction with American life, traditions and institutions” (p. 64)

“They have little in common with the temperate and compromising spirit of true conservatism in the classical sense of the word, and they are far from pleaser with the dominant practical conservatism of the moment as it is represented by the Eisenhower administration.” (p. 64) [temperate and compromising conservatism -- is that even possible!?]

“Their political reactions express rather a profound and largely unconscious hatred of our society and its ways -- a hatred which one would hesitate to impute to them if one did not have suggestive clinical evidence” (p. 64) [The American President: “people who claim to love America but clearly can’t stand Americans”]

“The pseudo-conservative, Adorno writes, shows “conventionality and authoritarian submissiveness” in his conscious thinking and “violence, anarchic impulses, and chaotic destructiveness in the unconscious sphere… The pseudo conservative is a man who, in the name of upholding traditional American values and institutions and defending them against more or less fictitious dangers, consciously or unconsciously aims at their abolition.”” (p. 64-5)

“The restlessness, suspicion and fear manifested in various phases of the pseudo-conservative revolt give evidence of the real suffering which the pseudo-conservative experiences in his capacity as a citizen. He believes himself to be living in a world in which he is spied upon, plotted against, betrayed, and very likely destined for total ruin. He feels that his liberties have been arbitrarily and outrageously invaded... He sees his own country as being so weak that is it constantly about to fall victim to subversion; and yet he feels that it is so all-powerful that any failure it may experience in getting its way in the world... cannot possibly be due to its limitations but must be attributed to its having been betrayed.” (p. 65-6) [see Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s “The Culture of Defeat”: after World War I, Germans preserved their feeling of cultural superiority by blaming their defeat on betrayal from within]

“He wants to have nothing to do with the democratic nations of Western Europe, which seem to draw more of his ire than the Soviet Communists, and he is opposed to all “give-away programs” designed to aid and strengthen these nations.” (p. 66) [because you shouldn’t give things to people who haven’t earned it, even if it’s in your interest!]

“All of us have reason to fear the power of international communism, and all our lives are profoundly affected by it. Why do some Americans try to face this threat for what it is, a problem that exists in a world-wide theatre of action, while others try to reduce it largely to a matter of domestic conformity?” {p. 69)

“Why is the pseudo-conservative impelled to go beyond the more or less routine partisan argument that we have been the victims of considerable misgovernment during the past twenty years to the disquieting accusation that we have actually been the victims of persistent conspiracy and betrayal -- “twenty years of treason?” (p. 69) [Ann Coulter?]

“pseudo-conservatism is in good part a product of the rootlessness and heterogeneity of American life, and above all, of its peculiar scramble for status and its peculiar search for secure identity.” (p. 69)

“this has become a country in which so many people do not know who they are or what they are or what they belong to or what belongs to them. It is a country of people whose status aspirations are random and uncertain, and yet whose status aspirations have been whipped up to a high pitch by our democratic ethos and our rags-to-riches mythology” (p. 70)

“In a country where physical needs have been, by the scale of the world’s living standards, on the whole well met, the luxury of questing after status has assumed an unusually prominent place in our civic consciousness. Political life is not simply an arena in which the conflicting interests of various social groups in concrete material gains are fought out; it is also an arena into which status aspirations and frustrations are, as the psychologists would say, projected.” (p. 70)

“We have, at all times, two kinds of processes going on in inextricable connection with each other: interest politics, the clash of material aims and needs among various groups and blocs; and status politics, the clash of various projective rationalizations arising from status aspirations and other personal motives. In times of depression and economic discontent -- and by and large in times of acute national emergency -- politics is more clearly a matter of interests, although of course status considerations are still present. In times of prosperity and general well-being on the material plane, status considerations among the masses can become much more influential in our politics.” (p. 71) [but this is of course a time of acute national emergency and material well-being]

“During depressions, the dominant motif in dissent takes expression in proposals for reform or in panaceas. Dissent then tends to be highly programmatic -- that is, it gets itself embodied in many kinds of concrete legislative proposals… In prosperity, however, when status politics becomes relatively more important, there is a tendency to embody discontent not so much in legislative proposals as in grousing. For the basic aspirations that underlie status discontent are only partially conscious; and, even so far as they are conscious, it is difficult to give them a programmatic expression.” (p. 71)

“Status problems take on a special importance in American life because a very large part of the population suffers from one of the most troublesome of all status questions: unable to enjoy the simple luxury of assuming their own nationality as a natural event, they are tormented by a nagging doubt as to whether they are really are truly and fully American. Since their forebears voluntarily left one country and embraced another, they cannot, as people do elsewhere, think of nationality as something that comes with birth’ for them it is a matter of choice, and an object of striving. This is one reason why problems of “loyalty” arouse such an emotional response in many Americans and why it is so hard in the American climate of opinion to make any clear distinction between the problem of national security and the question of personal loyalty.” (p. 74)

“What other country finds it so necessary to create institutional rituals for the sole purpose of guaranteeing to its people the genuineness of their nationality? Does the Frenchman or the Englishman or the Italian find it necessary to speak of himself as “one hundred percent” English, French or Italian?... When they disagree with one another over national policies, do they find it necessary to call one another un-English, un-French or un-Italian? No doubt they too are troubled by subversive activities and espionage, but are their countermeasures taken under the name of committees on un-English, un-French or un-Italian activities?” (p. 74-5)

“what better evidence can there be of the genuineness of earned nationality and of earned citizenship than military service under the flag of one’s country?” (p. 75) [citizenship earned by military service, like in Starship Troopers]

“We Americans are always trying to raise the standard of living, and the same principle now seems to apply to the standards of hating. So during the past fifteen years or so, the authoritarians have moved on from anti-Negroism and anti-Semitism to anti-Achesonianism, anti-intellectualism, anti-nonconformism, and other variants of the same idea, much in the same way as the average American, if he can manage it, will move on from a Ford to a Buick” (p. 76) [why it’s wrong to reduce the Great Backlash to the GOP’s Southern Strategy]

“Such status-strivings may help us to understand some of the otherwise unintelligible figments of the pseudo-conservative ideology -- the incredibly bitter feeling against the United Nations, for instance.” (p. 76)

“Conformity is a way of guaranteeing and manifesting respectability among those who are not sure that they are respectable enough. The nonconformity of others appears to such persons as a frivolous challenge to the whole order of things they are trying so hard to become part of. Naturally it is resented, and the demand for conformity in public becomes at once an expression of such resentment and a means of displaying one’s own soundness.” (p. 76-7) [the plen-T-plaint]

“There is just enough reality at most points along the line to give a touch of credibility to the melodramatics of the pseudo-conservative imagination” (p. 77)

“See also the comments of Leo Loewenthal and Norbert Guterman on the right-wing agitator: “The agitator seems to steer clear of the area of material needs on which liberal and democratic movements concentrate; his main concern is a sphere of frustration that is usually ignored in traditional politics. The programs that concentrate on material needs seem to overlook that area of moral uncertainties and emotional frustrations that are the immediate manifestations of malaise. It may therefore be conjectured that his followers find the agitator’s statements attractive not because he occasionally promises to “maintain the American standards of living” or to provide a job for everyone, but because he intimates that he will give them the emotional satisfactions that are denied them in the contemporary social and economic set-up. He offers attitudes, not bread.”” (p. 79) [Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Father Coughlin…]

“[Alger] Hiss is the hostage the pseudo-conservatives hold from the New Deal generation. He is a heaven-sent gift. If he did not exist, the pseudo-conservatives would not have been able to invent him.” (p. 80) [Cf. framing American Taliban John Walker Lindh as a “liberal” traitor]

The New Pickpocket Populism

2005-11-08T22:00:00.000-08:00

Thomas Frank, The Rise of Market Populism:

This is not to say that in the nineties Americans simply decided they wanted nothing so much as to toil for peanuts on an assembly line somewhere, that they loved plutocracy and that robber barons rocked after all. On the contrary: At the center of the "New Economy" consensus was a vision of economic democracy as extreme and as militant-sounding as anything to emanate from the CIO in the thirties. From Deadheads to Nobel-laureate economists, from paleoconservatives to New Democrats, American leaders in the nineties came to believe that markets were a popular system, a far more democratic form of organization than (democratically elected) governments. This is the central premise of what I call "market populism": that in addition to being mediums of exchange, markets are mediums of consent. With their mechanisms of supply and demand, poll and focus group, superstore and Internet, markets manage to express the popular will more articulately and meaningfully than do mere elections. By their very nature markets confer democratic legitimacy, markets bring down the pompous and the snooty, markets look out for the interests of the little guy, markets give us what we want.

Millenium Challenge 2002

2005-11-04T23:19:00.000-08:00

From Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink:

For a day and a half after Red Team’s surprise attack on Blue Team in the Persian Gulf, an uncomfortable silence fell over the JFCOM [Joint Forces Command] facility. Then the JFCOM staff stepped in. They turned back the clock. Blue Team’s sixteen lost ships, which were lying at the bottom of the Persian Gulf, were refloated. In the first wave of his attack, Van Riper had fired twelve theatre ballistic missiles at various ports in the Gulf region where Blue Team troops were landing. Now, JFCOM told him, all twelve of those missiles had been shot down, miraculously and mysteriously, with a new kind of missile defense. Van Riper had assassinated the leaders of the pro-U.S. countries in the region. Now, he was told, those assassinations had no effect.

“The day after the attack, I walked into the command room and saw the gentleman who was my number two giving my team a completely different set of instructions,” Van Riper said. “It was things like -- shut off the radar so Blue force are not interfered with. Move ground forces so marines can land without any interference. I asked, ‘Can I shoot down one V-twenty-two?’ and he said, ‘No, you can’t shoot down any V-twenty-two’s.’ I said, ‘What the hell’s going on here?’ He said, ‘Sir, I’ve been given guidance by the program director to give completely different directions.’ The second round was all scripted, and if they didn’t get what they liked, they would just run it again.” (p. 145-6)

First Post

2005-11-04T00:38:00.000-08:00

I decided to delete everything and start over.