Pandagon

That False Debate Thing Again

I can't resist a bad anti-same-sex marriage argument, and Kathleen Parker is a reliable fount of them in today's column.

This part is just totally nonsensical:

As it turns out, the state can't force churches to marry anyone, since the marriages aren't legal procedures, and since churches already have the right to discriminate in the practice of their religious rites. Which "legal scholars" is Parker quoting?

Uh...as far as I know, "marriage as we know it" will actually still exist, totally and unblemished. Straight people will still be able to do everything they could before, it's just that gays and lesbians will be able to do it, too.

God, can't You do something about this? Please? We're well past the point down here that breathtaking stupidity is actually breathtaking anymore.

Wasting Our Time, Political Style

There's a very basic reason that policy discussions are virtually verboten in today's modern political discourse - the fundamentals of the debates are often so divorced from the actual facts that in order to even engage in them is to participate in the willful legitimization of false information.

Non-wonky, there's a lot of lies, and oftentimes addressing them just makes them seem less like lies.

Bob Herbert writes in the New York Times today about the "medical malpractice crisis". I use the quotes, because although there are serious problems with the healthcare system, the problems that phrase brings to mind are really, really not the problems the system faces.

It does the article an injustice to quote a single part of it, so just watch the argument unfurl - the AMA participates in the tort reform scam, which gains the credence it does because it ends up blaming not the lawyers in the end, but the greedy patients driving innocent doctors out of business.

But think about this - how many debates do we have in this country that start off under patently false pretenses? Tort reform, the estate tax, Social Security, the war in Iraq, and many more. It's not even different interpretations of the facts, different glosses on the same basic ideas. The partisan divide comes from the fact that we're having totally different debates on the same issues, to the point where we simply are talking about disparate ideas and problems.

How can a policy apparatus produce good results when it's geared towards solving problems that don't exist?

Ryan Out?

Looks like Ryan's dropping out. Jesse had some comments on this earlier, though I'm not as sanguine about it as him. I always prefer the loser we know to the potential loser we don't, but I'm confident Obama can take on all comers. Between Ryan and Ryan, the Illinois GOP is going to need a few years to rebuild their image...

On another note, I agree with Fred.

Time to Go

Via Amy Sullivan, it looks like Zell Miller will have a prime, third-night speaking slot at the Republican Convention You'll recall that Miller gave the keynote for Clinton in 1992 and still calls himself a Democrat, a label he's stretched so far beyond recognition that he might as well be called a Lollicorn.

Can we kick him out of the party now?

Dat Damn Daschle!

Taking off of Ezra's post (which brings to mind disturbing images of Howard Kurtz attacking Tom Daschle for Daschle pointing out that Rush Limbaugh's calling him Satan and Saddam Hussein may have incited people to treat him like he was Satan and Saddam Hussein), I just wanted to point out Daschle's blogad at right.

He's running a petition that calls for having a South Dakotan race in South Dakota (imagine that!). Daschle is probably the second-most attacked and unfairly maligned Democrat in America (possibly third, considering how strong anti-Hillary sentiment is even when she's just eating lunch), and he's stepping up and asking for a race that's between him and Thune, not him and the entire Republican Party. He's also asking outside groups to stay out of advertising on his behalf, so it's not just him saying "some for me, none for thee".

Go and support him - if we can help keep Daschle in office, it's not just a political victory, but also a spiritual and, yes, moral one. It makes no sense that groups can run ads comparing him to dictators, slur him for doing things that he never did, and overall grossly demonize a moderate, mild-mannered senator simply because he's on the other side.

Getting It But Good

I'm reading this Fox News story, which is interesting, if only because activity in the WMD debate keeps revolving around the black hole of post-Gulf War to March of 2003, with evidence popping up after the invasion and up to the Gulf War in 90/91, but nothing in that vital period that would actually justify the war.

Look at the story - current al-Qaeda that came into the country after the war began wants to produce brand-new chemical weapons, and are contacting people in Iraq with that knowledge. They aren't using old stockpiles (hm...wonder why?), and the agents they've been able to get their hands on...well, they didn't even know they had their hands on them, largely because the sarin in the shell was made prior to 1991.

Certain people are saying that this is being "hidden by the media" or just going off the deep end and rewriting the story That's their preroggative, and just as I'm fine with them buying antibacterial soap, playing the lottery, or doing anything else that requires a low-level delusion, they can play around with this all they want.

But for those of us actually interested in having a serious debate about the efficacy of this war, does it bother anyone else that only after Saddam's regime has been toppled are we seeing terrorists seriously come into Iraq, operate, and seek the active development of WMD? Everything we went in to stop is now happening - the problem's being caused by the solution.

And, of course, that simply requires more of the solution.

Sick

This really says it all:

Crashing a Hard Bargain

Atrios is right, this is exactly how off-the-record lies should be dealt with:

Bush Factorial!

I worked something out yesterday. Anyone remember back in the good old days, when Iraq would cost us 1.7 billion dollars and nothing more? Well, using the tally at Cost of War, this war is more than 70 times the original cost projected. (Changed cuz math is hard.)

Interesting fact, but perhaps another reason the majority of the American people now seem to think that the war in Iraq wasn't worth it.

The issue for Bush isn't going to be the humanitarian impact of Iraq, which is still long-term uncertain. The issue is that the war was sold to the American people as the foremost effort to ensure our security. It's easy for Bush to argue a lot of things, no matter how dishonestly, about the impact of Iraq. But it's difficult in any meaningful sense to argue to a voter who's been paying attention that Iraq has significantly tilted the balance of the fight against terrorism in our favor, or that what we did actually got rid of an immediate, grave threat that justified the shift in focus.

At some point, Bush is going to have to stop justifying the war through alternate realities (would you like Saddam in power?) and start justifying it own its own merits. Problem is, I'm not sure he knows what the merits are anymore, at least ones that would be credible to those who waver on the war.

Well, When I Said Huge, I Meant In Relative Terms...

Economic growth of 1Q 2004 sort of revised downward, inflation sort of up.

Everyone sort of wondering where things are going from here.

Epidemiology

As World O' Crap notes, there seems to be an epidemic of people who are commenting on Bill Clinton and his book, but without having actually read the book, or in fact caring about what it says. Sean Hannity even goes so far as to say that he doesn't care about Clinton...during an interview session about Clinton.

Paul Greenberg, Jonah Goldberg, and Charles Krauthammer all in fits and spurts give columns tangentially inspired by the book, but without having read it, for the most part simply rehashing tired old anti-Clinton broadsides.

So, let's keep track of this. You see anything with someone either "reviewing" Clinton's book without having read it, or drawing ridiculous psychoanalysis not even from the man's book, but instead snippets of interviews, or just deciding that it's time to craft the man's legacy by a single sentence on Oprah, drop it here.

Online-Only For A Reason

I've watched the Bush campaign's "Coalition of the Wild-Eyed" a few times, and I can understand why it's stuck in the multimedia section of their site rather than being broadcast like a serious ad.

Besides equating responsible, if passionate disagreement with the administration with Bush/Hitler comparisons, the ad also manages to slur MoveOn.org (they show a part of one of the Bush/Hitler ads that the group barred from the contest and disavowed as soon as they found out about it, but the disingenuous part is that they show the "Sponsored by MoveOn.org" part of the ad prominently as if MoveOn actually had something to do with the design of the ad), as well as doing something regrettably laughable at the end of the ad.

Kerry's shown giving a speech where he uses the phrase "kick you in the ass". Now, this outrage would make a lot more sense if first Bush hadn't called a reporter a "major league asshole" during the 2000 campaign, and if Dick Cheney hadn't told Pat Leahy to go fuck himself (and/or fuck off) during the Senate photo.

This does raise an interesting question, though - can we hold Bush responsible for the Club for Growth's ads?

Tami, Tami, Tami

I covered this over on JFO yesterday, but it really needs an airing here, too.

On Monday, George W. Bush gave a "compassion" speech in Cincinnati. Nothing too out of line there - it's a heavily black area in a Republican-voting part of the state, where better to pretend that he has an actual domestic agenda to offer minorities? So, part of the speech was about criminal rehabilitation - part of an election year calculus, but also the right thing to do, George W. Bush is coming out in favor of stronger programs for rehabilitation of ex-cons to integrate them into society after they've paid their debt.

Notice that "after" part.

Bush put his arm around Tami Johnson, a convicted embezzler who'd been released, and showed her as an example of how a person can redeem themselves and make a better life for themselves.

There was just a teensy, tiny, oh...almost insignificant problem.

She still owes the family she ripped off the $310,000 she embezzled from them, and hasn't made a single payment in restitution.

Now, I understand that the victims of Johnson's crime, the victims of any crime, would be hard pressed to forgive the person who did it. That, however, isn't the issue here - if it was just the family being mad at her, I'd understand their anger, but I also wouldn't be criticizing the choice by Bush to highlight her. However, for someone who's trying to turn her life around and exemplified by the President, it might be a, I don't know, halfway intelligent move to be making the necessary restitution towards the family she hurt.

Pretty good question.

Mitakides For Congress

Last night, I got to go to Jane Mitakides' house for a fundraiser/luau. I did not know that it was a luau, so I went in my oh-so-festive luau suit and luau tie. (Jerry Springer was also there.)

Mitakides is the first Democrat from this area since Tony Hall that I've felt truly good about. She's a smart-as-hell politician, and it's kind of strange, because she's got a good sense of how to capture dissatisfaction with the one-party system in place in Ohio, but do so in a way that deals with Ohioans' specific needs, rather than simply tinkering with a party agenda in order for it to apply here.

She's up against first-termer Mike Turner, former (failed) mayor of Dayton who has the awesomest Representative office on Earth. By "awesomest", I of course mean "absolute worst". So far as anyone I've talked to knows, there's never actually been anyone representing Turner in the office, even though monthly office hours have been promised for quite some time. Nobody really likes the guy - which probably has a lot to do with the fact that he snatched up the seat in a run against an MIA Democratic challenger after getting booted out of the mayor's seat in 2002, and we really haven't seen him since then. He votes with Tom Delay 98% of the time, and, if that wasn't bad enough, he thought Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle was a great movie.

Okay, maybe not that last part.

Anyway, just giving you all a heads up about the race in my area, and letting you know that I will be pushing for her at various points throughout the election cycle.

NBA Draft

I'll hold my tongue, except to say that I miss the day, a few short years ago, where I could have actually watched most of the people that we were going to see in the NBA. The foreign players, not so much, but the sheer volume of high schoolers coming down the pike makes me wish that there was an age barrier in the NBA - if for the only reason that I could actually watch the college game and know some of these rookies before they step onto the court.

Sigh. At least the Lakers are being broken up.

Must...Talk Down...Clinton...

Media Matters discusses the Drudge Report's take on Clinton's book, which is about as relentlessly negative as you can get for the fastest-selling nonfiction book of all time.

My favorite part? The continual insistence by right-wingers that if the book doesn't sell well in "red" parts of America, it's not really selling that well. I'm from the "heartland", sort of (I'll get to that in a bit), and as I've said before, I really, really hate the fetishization of this area of the country.

First, "heartland" has a specific geographical connotation - the center part of a country. It's been melded with a values-oriented definition of the word, emphasizing "heart" over "land". It's expanded over the years, basically melding everything between Pennsylvania and Washington east-to-west, from Washington D.C. down to the Gulf of Mexico north-to-south. And this entire vast cross-section of America, minus whatever areas break with the ideological hegemony that loosely defines it, is the "heartland". Mississippi and North Dakota are both the "heartland". And it's a distinct, overt attempt to mass up a group of people so large, so faceless, that the people who choose to speak for it (conservatives) can declare its feelings and values with impunity. And because it's been swept up as a group so large that it takes up the vast majority of the land area, if not the population of the country, it's Nixon's old "silent majority" in action again.

Problem is, the "silent majority" was, as David Brock puts it in The Republican Noise Machine, a conservative minority trying to convince everyone else that it represents a larger movement than it does. But it works, particularly since many of the people encapsulated get valorized and defended through no effort of their own, and often even without their knowledge.

The worst part of all of this is that anywhere that's not the heartland gets shafted - as Brit Hume, Sean Hannity and their ilk point out, if it happens in New York, California or Washington D.C., it just doesn't matter. It doesn't stand up to the "heartland" test, where the heartland is as big or as small as it needs to be. It's a concept we all understand, but which is also meaningless - actually, not meaningless, but instead devoid of any meaning on its own. "Heartland" is a code-word for "conservative", and admission to it is based solely on that.

You really shouldn't be surprised that more conservative areas didn't buy a book by a Democratic president. But does that give them an inherent moral superiority? Only if you're a non-heartlander conservative trying desperately to maintain the facade that Americanship is dependent on agreeing with you.

It Makes Me Want To Buy Slander

I'm sure this book should enlighten many a debate on presidential history.

Especially Nooner's adjective-laden fluff about Kennedy. Mmm...

Loser One Or Loser Two?

Jack Ryan is "reassessing" his bid for Illinois Senate. I just want to know if the person who's going to succeed him will also follow around Obama with a stalker.

The worst part for Ryan is that it's a scandal with a mainstream actress - there are a lot of people who are going to be paying attention to this/watching this on TV because the hot lady from Star Trek: Voyager and Boston Public is involved, who probably didn't even know Ryan was running.

I'm not sure if I prefer that he stay in and drop out. Part of me says that he should stand up and take the ass-kicking that's coming to him in November. Another part of me wonders if a replacement candidate for Ryan might persuade Republicans to throw money back down the sinkhole of trying to win that seat in Illinois, whereas Ryan's continued presence is a big no-no for donors. Of course, would Republicans put any money into the placeholder sure-loser who would take Ryan's place?

I'm Suspicious

I'm not happy with this whole Nader endorsing Edwards for VP deal. Three building objections:

1) On some level, Kerry picking Edwards, particularly within the next week or two, may seem like caving to Nader. At the very least, it's potential spin for a lazy media and an easy angle into giving Nader air time ("I told him to pick him, good to see John Kerry finally following my advice"). Caving to Nader is, electorally speaking, a bad thing. To those who point to not caving to Nader in 2000 as a bad thing, I respond that any idiots foolhardy enough to vote for the spoiler twice are not going to be swayed by Kerry picking Edwards.

2) Nader shouldn't be endorsing Edwards. Aside from being a populist, Edwards is more conservative than Kerry, particularly on cultural issues. As a Southern Democrat who votes the part, he disagrees with Nader on all manner of thing and, considering Ralph is an ideological purist running a spoiler campaign because the liberal Senator from Massachussetts isn't liberal enough, I'm weirded out by his enthusiasm for a more conservative Democrat.

3) Nader doesn't like Democrats. Nader likes Nader. So how does this help Nader? Well, Edwards is even more pro-war than Kerry was (no caveats for him) and he's well within the moderate wing of the Party. Ralph may be looking for some air time and a nice pro-war foil ticket from the Democrats. I realize there are stronger hawks in the party, and Edwards isn't an offensive one so far as they go, but in shoring up his defense credentials during the campaign, he said more than enough to leave Ralph's peacenik base in a frenzy.

Maybe Nader has simple goodness in his heart and genuinely thinks Edwards will give us the strongest possible ticket. Maybe Nader is looking for a way to drop out with grace and repair his image. But a quick glance at how much love he's given the Party over the past few years certainly leaves him under suspicion. He said he entered this race to give us a hand and take votes away from Bush. Generally speaking, Nader lends the sort of hand we could just as soon do without.

It's The Hypocrisy, Stupid

Now I know this is a complex and subtle point, so I'll do my best to explain it slowly. To the many right-wing blogs jumping on every Democrat who mentioned Jack Ryan's sex scandal, you're missing the point in a spectacular way. Just because an issue deals with nudity and (gasp!) intercourse, doesn't mean everyone who mentions it is outraged over the sex.

Jack Ryan's private sex life, kinky as it may be, has absolutely no bearing on how good or bad of a senator he could be. Bill Clinton's private sex life, kinky and immoral as it was, had no bearing on how good or bad of a president he was. You with me? Good. Now, the reason liberals are cackling over the Ryan revelations is simple -- after spending the last decade beating Democrats with the club of "family values" and cutting down our politicians by exposing their private peccadilloes, Ryan's case exposes the flaming hypocrisy of the Republican Party.

Observe: Ryan himself made a faith-based appeal for votes, as Republicans often do, while fully aware that his sexual mores were anathema to those he was courting. That's dishonest. And Dennis Hastert, despite having been a dedicated member of the impeach Clinton club, now fully supports Ryan. That's hypocritical/

Sex doesn't bother me. Flaming hypocrisy that reveals a Party to have been politically motivated when they claimed moral outrage, does. And that's what I'm talking about here. if you can't get over the titillation aspect of the story, that's your own problem.

Oooooh...You Said A Bad Word...

Via Poynter:

First, the Unification Church is a cult. A cult. Its leader is a racist, anti-Semitic, xenophobic, genocide-endorsing madman. The "religion" deserves to be criticized. And Carter's simply rewriting history here - even the Unification Theological Seminary doesn't say that Shapiro was killed because he was a Moonie. As another letter-writer points out, Moonies call themselves Moonies.

If Moonie is the Moonie shorthand for themselves, from the founder and leader of the "church", why is anyone else wrong in using it? By the way, when were Moonies tortured, killed or lynched for being Moonies? I missed the Great Moonie Roundup of '94, myself.

I Deny That Which Is Deniable

Jesus fuckin' Christ.

The Moonie Times writes about all the women who alleged some sort of affair with Bill Clinton over the years. Who are these paragons of integrity that Clinton failed to address in his book?

As far as I can tell, other than the normal conservative suspects, her story was never lent any real credibility, and was summarily debunked.

Who said...and never actually, you know, proved it.

I think that this author actually just cobbled names from this list, but that's just the conspiracy theorist in me talking.

Anyway, there's a whole list of people - discreditied accuser Juanita Broaddrick, the National Enquirer's "black prostitute lover", so on and so forth. But where do they all come from?

Ah, Troopergate. Right up there with Vince Foster as the most nonsensical crap peddled about Clinton - oh, and also with the Mena drugrunning, the selling secrets to the Chinese, and Hillary being a lesbian/man.

Clinton could not have addressed these women, even to say that they were all bullshit. By doing so, he would have lent the accusations a credibility that they didn't merit, and we just would have gotten more Sullivan responses: by Clinton saying that things for which there are no proof didn't happen, he would have just been called a liar for saying what all the facts seem to point to. There's no reason for him to fight this fight, because the spiral of delusion prohibits him from being able to win with anyone who takes this seriously.

Why Can't We Lead?

In the how far we've fallen department:

Like yesterday's about-face on North Korea, Bush is moving towards the center and supporting policies totally divorced from those he's upheld throughout his term. It's unabashedly cynical political positioning, and the country would be well-served if the press would begin calling him on it.

Why Don't They Support Our Troops?

Does read:

What Was Bush Doing in 1971?

Oh, man...the Club For Growth's new anti-Kerry ad is so hilariously bad it has to be seen to be believed.

(It's the first one.)

Today's Bit Of Obviousness

Glenn Reynolds is a blinkered idiot.

Also, I use profanity a lot. Hells yeah.

Clinton's A Dirty Liar Because Clinton's A Dirty Liar

Andy Sullivan's always been a bit giggly over the idea of "fisking" - I can't find it right now, but there was a conference he was at where he made reference to the phrase "fisk your blog" as if it were a great joke, and he got zero response from the crowd.

Now, I'm going to admit to sometimes being a bit overzealous in my criticism of things people I don't like say, but I'd also like to think that I've toned it down as I've done this for a longer and longer period of time.

Unfortunately, Sully's the same irresponsible hack he's been since he was fawning over The Bell Curve and dishonestly sinking Clinton's healthcare plan, and now he's "fisking" Clinton's "because I could" statement.

Do you think I'd be talking about it if it made sense? Hell no, who do you think I am?

So, after blowing of Clinton's answer rather inappropriately, he proceeds to proscribe a whole series of motivations, pulled directly from the ether of irresponsible hypothesizing (the "drunk with his own power" is particularly pointless). Now, the answer isn't the most specific one Clinton could have given. But it is, in my mind, both highly morally indefensible as a response and a severe mea culpa - Clinton is saying that he did something for no other reason than that he had the opportunity to do so. (That, incidentally, is the plain meaning of what he said, but as we've learned from the Decade of Destruction-plus, nothing Clinton says can be taken as an honest assessment of anything, no matter how either factual or unverifiably personal the statement.)

What's also stupid here is that Clinton doesn't deflect responsibility for what he did. He does, however, assign responsibility for what happened because of it, which he is entirely right to do. Not allowed, though, for Clinton is the sole genesis of all evil during the 1990s.

I'm a bit amazed that a repeated, substantive liar like Sullivan continues to call Clinton on anything from a hastily constructed moral perch, but, then again, isn't that the entirety of the right-wing anti-Clinton movement? How dare he do something wrong, when Lord knows only we have the right to fuck up and shirk responsibility for it?

And, of course, after a lot of vacuous hyperventilating about Clinton not prostrating himself in front of Dan Rather and admitting that he was solely responsible for not only everything he did, but every overblown, hypocritical, opportunistic reaction to what he did, we get this:

See, he didn't call Clinton a sociopath. He just declared that Clinton is close to being one, and presumably could step over that line at a time of Sullivan's choosing. Of course, we have to skim past that, as we've reached my favorite point in the "fisking" process: I've run out of actual outrage, but there's more here to talk about.

I see no reason not to, particularly considering that Sullivan himself says he'd believe it if anyone else said it. Hell, if W. said it, Sullivan would defend it as a part of the man's character - then wonder why he couldn't apply that same character to the issue of same-sex marriage.

Just a small question - during the quoted part of Clinton's statement, he doesn't actually say it was the last year of his presidency. Also, him being the president and all, I'd imagine it was possible during the last part of a lame duck second term to, say, stake out some weekend time, maybe on Sundays (you think a therapist wouldn't treat the First Family on the weekends?) and do this. I don't know, because I wasn't there, I haven't reached that part in the book, and Clinton doesn't expound on it further.

But the interesting thing is that by adding in a little "factoid" that doesn't appear in the statement, then declaring that by virtue of it coming out of Clinton's mouth, it's untrue, Sullivan has reached a grand new plateau in fact-checking - "correcting" facts that he can't verify by arguing about the personality of the person giving them.

Sullivan is a total hack - but he's wrong here because he's wrong, not just because he has a history of being so. I could do the cut-rate psychoanalysis bit that Sully employs here, but it would do more to discredit me than to injure Sullivan, just as it's done here to Sullivan himself.

And thank you, even-the-lame TNR, for publishing it. I have no idea how the magazine can employ some really good political writers, all of whom are nowhere near played-up, and in the same breath think this is something worth publishing.

The Iron Grip

Yesterday, Bush proposed what was covered as new funding for AIDS drugs in Vietnam. As far as I can tell from this article, what he's doing isn't providing new funding, but instead redistributing a tiny sliver of the promised reservoir of AIDS funding he promised back in 2002.

Whatever sleight of hand Bush plays with funding, I think we all know by now that anything he does with regards to his compassion agenda is political ass-covering for some other goal: in this case, an internally contradictory plan to change the Ryan White Act.

I'd have a big enough problem with the idea that Bush wants to remove the impetus on prevention and move towards treatment, which is trying to stop a leak simply by mopping up the water flowing in. But what would a Bush plan be without a totally unnecessary contradiction in terms that also struck at the very core of what the government was trying to do? Nothing, that's what!

So, they want to cut down on "social services" (i.e., non-medical aid) by giving more money to religious groups to help people with AIDS. Now, I didn't know that religious groups manufactured medicine and trained doctors, but that's just me. Yes, the groups can hand out such drugs and provide access to doctors - but even if said groups can't use federal funds to promote religion, giving them the money to do the expensive part that gets them in provides a hell of a lot more opportunity to do the less monetarily expensive proselytizing and, yes, social work.

Chances are, little of it's going to be effectively preventative, but a great deal of it will be effectively evangelical. But isn't that great? Once again, bad science seems like it's going to win the day in Bush land (granted, it's not quite a fair fight, considering that bad science comes in equipped with an armory and good science comes in with a pocket protector and a safety whistle), under the guise of taking government out of the business of helping people in any way that doesn't shove religion to the forefront of their lives.

It's good shit. Or just shit, damn the superfluous adjectives.

AP At Its Worst

Following on tonight's lists, three things dammit.

1) This article is a hatchet job; alarmist with no reason, more than likely motivated by GOP fed research. Fine, that's how the game is played.

2) If the law does not prescribe permanent unemployment for convicted felons, then employing them should not be an issue. Particularly not for menial labor like registering voters.

3) Studies repeatedly show that employed ex-cons are less likely to turn to crime again. Common sense shows that time spent working for good pay -- and ACT pays well -- is time not spent, say, collecting welfare checks, dealing drugs or generally being a drain on society. For ACT to hire felons who've served their sentence is a profoundly positive thing to do, both from ethical and social perspectives. Ridiculous, fear-mongering stories like this one serve only to decrease employment opportunities for released prisoners and thus increase recidivism. Now does the AP really want that on their conscience?

The Danger of Balance

Digby rips up Saletan's underwhelming defense of Slate's "Kerryisms". Step back a bit and you have an enormously smart, complex and incisive observer (Saletan) committed to a staggeringly stupid, reductive and insipid feature (Kerryisms). Why?

It's balance -- that old bugaboo -- that so totally destroys our Press Corps' ability to actually report. If you mock Bush for being unable to string words together, you have to mock Kerry for something similar. Never mind that speaking with enormous precision is generally seen as the mark of an admirable mind and shuffling simplistic statements denotes an underpowered one, because Bush is being flagged for the latter, the rules require Kerry to take a drubbing for the former.

We can argue that Kaus's obsessive vendetta provides that balance, or note that Saletan and friends are clearly anti-Bush and shouldn't feel the need to follow the protocol, but the bottom line is that the concept itself is offensive and must end. When criticism is warranted it should be furnished; the fact that one candidate deserves it should not, cannot, force a partner critique to be invented for his opponent. To do so contravenes the whole idea and ends with reporting as negative and meaningless as the press releases they're supposed to be taking us beyond.

We Do Not Negotiate With Tyrranies

12/19/2003:

Just The Same, Except Different

Last time I talked about something like this, I got attacked by a bunch of people who entirely missed the point of what I was talking about. There's a push to market DVD players that will sanitize movies, removing objectionable content. My point, oh-so-long ago, was that if you have to buy a machine that scraps a movie to the point where it's not the same movie, just so that you can watch it, why not just look for movies that you can watch in the first place without all the editing?

I'm not here to relive that debate (and the attendant point-missing involved), but instead to talk about a different facet of it discussed in the L.A. Times.

That's something I hadn't known before. This isn't just a "market solution". This is the government actively intervening in the sale, production, promotion and dissemination of copyrighted materials, which changes the debate a wee bit. Just a wee one, though.

This part encapsulates a lot of my fears as a movie buff, although that's probably the least germane part of this debate:

Now, although the snarky asshole in me wants to say that the film wasn't watchable to begin with, I understand his point. By the time you censor out anything that might offend someone, there's no actual point to watching the movie.

I'm also a bit surprised at the reversal of what are supposed to be "traditional" roles in this case:

It's "unrealistic and impractical to expect parents to monitor their children's video habits 24 hours a day"? Really? This, I suppose, constitutes a marked turnaround on the issue of personal responsibility, asking the government to raise your child for you. Kids might see a boobie? Government to the rescue! Kid might not be able to get treatment for his strep throat? Stop looking for a handout!

I'm pretty firmly against these DVD players, both for issues of personal responsibility and for copyright reasons. If the government can allow my copyrighted property to be sold in an altered fashion without my approval, what barriers are in place to stop this law from being applied not just to the subjective concept of "obsecenity", but just to any dissemination of copyrighted material?

I've been shopping around this idea for a book called "The DaVinci Codex". It's exactly like "The DaVinci Code", except I took out every sixteenth sentence.

Testing Testy

Anyone remember back during the Starr Debacle when there were tales of Clinton getting incredibly angry after his testimony? And when the footage finally showed, it was little more than him talking in an impassioned manner to his lawyers, none of the head-ripping, chest-rending grotesquerie threatened by Republican observers?

The same thing's going on with this BBC interview (I hope that's the right link). I've seen quite a bit of reaction, from the online right to CNN, talking about Clinton losing his cool, going off on the interviewer, etc. Looking at the interview, he seems justifiably agitated about what he views as a long, pointless attack on his life and the lives of dozens of people connected with him. The reaction was in proportion to what he was talking about, and it would have been far creepier if he hadn't gotten agitated.

What should Clinton's attitude have been? "Oh, well, they ruined a lot of lives to get me. You know, that had to suck, I think. Yeah, now watch this swing."

The Looniness Goes Untouched

While I'm glad that Sun Myung Moon is finally getting some mainstream attention for his nuttiness, what he did at Dirksen was among his least offensive acts. The man hates everyone. He's anti-Semitic on a level that would make Hutton Gibson blush. He hates Christians, as is mentioned in the article he hates gays and lesbians, he hates America, he hates every political party, so far as I can tell...he hates ponies, or so I've heard.

What kind of monster hates ponies?

Moon is far too controversial and prominent a figure for his profile to become an issue just on this one event. Michael Getler's e-mail is here. Ask him why the paper hasn't spent more time covering the wannabe-genocidal, Messianic nutcase that operates on a massive scale in their own town.

Shorter Michelle Malkin

In a different time in a different place facing a different threat, Hollywood made different movies and actors behaved in different ways. Also, if George W. Bush, a totally different president from FDR, said the same thing as FDR, it wouldn't be taken in the same way, which is a moral failure on the part of Hollywood.

Okay, Michelle, you get to be in the next Harry Potter movie. Jeez.

BOLD Leadership

Via a commenter, Republicans aren't just rescheduling votes so that Kerry can't participate - they're undermining bills they support so that Kerry will be on the wrong side of the issue.

That's truly classy - Republicans will vote against America's best interests if it means undermining Kerry's campaign. The solution now is for Kerry to oppose a Democratic majority in Congress, making sure that Republicans support it.

Kerry '04: Reverse Psychology in the Hiz-ouse.

Lack Of Perspective

It'll get you kicked out of art school, but it'll likely get you a job as a partisan assault specialist. Today's example is a Bret Stephens article, taken from the Jerusalem Post, which seems to lump together a bunch of disparate critiques on different levels as fundamentally the same critique, including the general lumping-in of Krugman's articles with a couple of specific quotes from Blumenthal, as if it's all just the same.

Of the quotes he uses from Blumenthal, only one (a prison system we haven't seen since the U.S.S.R.) goes over the line, because it does seem to equate/compare the two in a way that doesn't fit. The quote from Gore is a perfectly valid opinion, and, in fact, isn't addressed by the statistics Stephens cites; since he can't even be bothered to say anything substantive about Paul Krugman except that he's anti-Bush (which is equated with insanity), I really can't correct him there.

What's most telling about the article, however, is that there's the undertone of Bush=Hitler comparisons throughout the whole piece - the title even overtly makes that statement. However, nobody quoted in any way compares Bush to Hitler. It is a simple (if entirely lazy) way of making a point without marshalling the evidence to do so: despite being able to find a sum total of half of an objectionable quote from one person, by comparing it to another phenomenon, you magically provide context without all the pesky work or, you know, context.

If you write a column on the preciseness of critical language, you should probably practice what you preach. Just a thought.

Workin' It, Democracy-Style

So, Republicans are getting on Kerry's case about not being in the Senate for a vote. Kerry shows up for a vote. What do Senate Republicans do?

Awesome. So, now you can just move around Senate votes to prevent the wrong Senators from voting for them. I have no problem with the normal congressional tinkering and rescheduling that goes on to shore up votes, etc. But, in this little forgotten corner of reality called "sanity" I'm trying to spruce up over here, don't you lose any credibility as a critic when you prevent someone from doing the thing you're mad at them for not doing?

In short, didn't they just shoot themselves in the foot by giving Kerry a ready-made excuse and Senate Democrats a ready-made line of attack? Has the giant collective Capitol Hill Republican brain been killed by years of steady movement conservative booze?

Punitive Editorializing

The Weekly Standard has a piece today on "Punitive Liberalism", which is basically a broad stereotype of liberalism-that-criticizes-America. It's one of those pieces taht if you're inclined to agree with it, provides a perfectly useful caricature of liberalism, and if you don't, you'll find a lot to puzzle over. It reminds me of nothing so much as "transnational progressivism", the movement that was taking over the left despite the fact that it was both an incoherent ideology and there was nobody who actually subscribed to it.

Anyway, the important part of this piece isn't the caricature itself, but instead how it's applied to former President Jimmy Carter. Long story short, Punitive Liberals want to "guilt" America into doing what they want - unlike regular politicians who tend to blame "not us", PLs blame you, for the suffering of people that aren't you. Whites are blamed for the suffering of minorities, the rich for the poor, the conservative for everyone else. Carter's "malaise" speech is used as an example of this.

One small problem - it doesn't actually apply.

Here's the full speech.

Here are some of the ways Punitive Liberalism works:

It's interesting reading this, because the malaise speech is almost the exact antithesis of what the author's talking about.

"Punitive liberalism" asks the American people to repay certain groups that the American people themselves are responsible for oppressing. The American people must be punished for what they did.

Carter's "malaise" speech was about a national attitude, and trying (however clumsily) to give the American people faith in themselves. Carter's address had jack to do with telling anyone that they needed to be punished for things they'd done wrong. It was a rallying speech - just a very poor one. Carter was communicating what he thought and hoped would be a message that countervailed how they were feeling. It was one of positivity, hope, and, yes, optimism. His problem was that he sat down with America and told them they felt like crap and that it was getting worse, then that he wanted it to get better.

Incidentally, the point of this entire piece is that Reagan "killed" PL, which, of course, only makes sense if you accept that PL actually existed as a viable movement, and that Carter represented it. Given that the first is doubtful in any meaningful sense and the latter is simply not true (the author summarizes PL as "cultivating guilt to leverage policy", and Carter wasn't trying to cultivate anyone's guilt), it's hard to see this as anything but another, rather lame, attempt to pad Reagan's resume by talking down any opposition he faced.

Sweetness.

Heartland

Jet Blue's in-seat Direct TV -- which is actually quite sweet -- made me aware of Fox News' show Heartland. Thomas Frank made me aware that it was, as the name implied, a post-2000 effort to capitalize on culture war feelings by appealing to Midwestern sensibilities. I noticed that they put Heartland on at 8 PM Eastern on Saturday nights, thus suggesting that Midwesterners are losers with nothing better to do on weekends than listen to a washed-up Ohio Congressmen blast the the ACLU for stopping schools from tattooing crosses on your child. The show is followed by "Big Story Weekend" and "At Large", thus suggesting that the Heartlanders are fat.

Why does Fox hate Americans?

I Wish I Was Shocked

On the science flap Jesse and I spoke about earlier, it turns out the Administration is not content to merely do it badly, they have to lie too:

I Don't Like Apples, Therefore I Am A Vegetable

That's some shoddy experimental design right there.

Worth Thinking About

Bush's approval rating of 47% is only 2% lower than Ford's was at this stage in the game, well within the margin of error. In the last 50 years, the lowest approval rating of a President who won reelection was Reagan in 84, who had 54% approval. The President's pollsters talk about how Bush is "historic territory", above those who lost badly and below those who won easily. They're wrong -- he's in Ford's territory. Kerry will still have to win this election, but there's little doubt that -- at least for now -- Bush is losing it.

Smells Like Family Values

What's that I smell? The party of family values? Swingers? Oh who can tell, it's all the same...

The Weakest Link

Um...oh.

Oh, and we found thousands of missiles in Iraq yesterday.

Wait a minute...thousands of things were misfiled in Iraq. Heh...my bad.

The Sun Isn't Rising

I'm not going to comment on the content on this story, but exactly who edits stories at the New York Sun?

The headline:

From the article:

The article's trying to have it two (contradictory) ways - the liberal judge shocked his audience, and the liberal audience is supportive of him. Shouldn't somebody have checked that before it went to press?

More Scientifery

Piggybacking off Jesse's post below, I love the Bush flack's response too, but for different reasons:

Clinton's Book

I'm headed out to get Clinton's book. Is anyone else picking My Life up today?

48 Nobel Prize Winners Can't Be Wrong

Yes, but the institution can't be trusted until they give a Nobel to one of the people doing great creation science work. Dr. Walt Brown has been widely ignored in the so-called "scientific community".

Anyway, 48 of these so-called scientists have endorsed John Kerry for president, mainly because Bush tends to not like the science, instead preferring the bullshit.

I did enjoy this response from a Bush flack:

Funny, cause those Nobel Prize winners don't agree with him - but, hey, it's the prize, not the person, right? Right? It's also interesting, because the "science funding" line really sounds strange coming out of a conservative's mouth. "We spent more money" is what someone who doesn't have any results from the science would say. Nobody's saying that Bush is underfunding science - it's that what he's putting out is utter crap. Bush can put another hundred million in science, but if it's all dishonest, edited science that hides results damaging to Bush, we might as well just give it to his campaign and be done with it.

Losing His Religion

Well, not quite his religion so much as his advantage over Kerry on the of terrorism - Bush is finally reaping the rewards of making the one-to-one equation between Iraq and the war on terrorism.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again - Bush's framing apparatus, or whatever you want to call it, is in serious need of a replacement. In terms of his run of the presidency, Bush has failed to successfully augment any public perception of his policies, and the only thing they stuck to Kerry (flip-flopper) still hasn't sunk him with relation to Bush. Kerry's also up by four to eight points (depending on if Nader's in the race.

I'm continually amazed at how this year is going for the Bush campaign. They pretty much negated the impact of their own ads (the strategy to overwhelm Kerry with negative ads, I think, just flooded people's living rooms with ads way too early, and turned them off to whatever message they contained - plus, it just put Kerry everywhere), and whatever policy apparatus they've decided to use has been either invisible or nonsensical.

If a similar movement is shown across multiple polls, it may be time for Bush's campaign to go into desperation mode. His approval rating's also at 47%.

In fact, other than Iraq (a narrow edge), Kerry leads Bush in every major policy category. Including, to my surprise, taxes. If Bush can't fall back on his major domestic initiatives after being unable to rely on his foreign policy...what, exactly, does he have?

A Torrent

Dude, did you know Randy Paul is a close personal friend of Tony Bennett? I didn't either, but the evidence is overwhelming!

I Have a Dream...

Mark Schmit, as he is wont to do, just put up a must-read. His prediction that Kerry's best hope for passing policy bears on the whole conversation about whether the Republican Party can be negotiated with.

No one doubts that DeLay, Frist, Hastert, et al are beyond hope, but the moderate Republicans, the Voinovich/Snowe/McCain/Castle faction, are great candidates for aid. Using them, and thus marginalizing their brethren, serves the alternate purpose of splitting the Republican Party directly after their hyper-partisan president has been defeated. That'll put the two directions the Party can go into stark contrast and, on the heels of a voter-led repudiation of the extremists, the moderates can win that fight.

That, at least, is the hope.

Damned Democrats

Another vicious Democrat attack on one of George W. Bush's judicial nominees is unfurled, and the pathetic liberal media picks it up faithfully.

The Democrat Party is probably taking its marching orders in this case from People for the Communist Way or NAMBLA or whatever group wants this guy gone and you know, I'm not surprised. These groups that run the Democrats have no real issues to stand on that the American people support, so instead they harp on minor procedural crap like this.

The American people already think there's too much regulation, why is it important if this guy had a law license? They're ducking the real question - was he a good lawyer? We need people as judges who are going to enforce the rules as they were written, not stick to ticky-tack little regulations like this that don't matter.

Fuckers.

Rowland Gone

Connecticut Gov. John Rowland to step down.

Y'see, he's a Republican, so even though he didn't do anything wrong, he's still going to resign because he cares about the office of the governor so much. (Also, he was a sure-shot impeachment away from getting thrown out on his happy ass.)

And aloha means goodbye.

Camejo for (snicker) Vice-President!

Ralph has chosen his running mate -- Peter Camejo, the Green's perennial failure for Governor in California. Politically, the reasoning is clear. The Greens are holding their convention in a couple of days, Ralph wants their ballot access but not their constraints, so his VP choice proves his (unstated) loyalty. He'll get their endorsement and thus move up to orange on the "pain-in-the-ass advisory".

The pick is kinda funny, though. Generally, VP's have achieved something, often an electoral something. Camejo has failed badly, often by spectacular margins. He was the Socialist's candidate for President in 1976 and lost that one, a streak that has continued to this day. His successes have come in socially-responsible investing, a disrespected proving ground for men who wish to govern a superpower.

I saw him speak during the California Recall. His appearance was put on -- utterly unpublicized -- by the Campus Greens. The event organizers spent the speech smoking pot (seriously) behind Camejo, whopping as he harangued all those unlucky enough to pass through the quad. His crowd was small, his speaking unimpressive and his audience bored. There I was, a young politico with the opportunity to hear the next Governor of California (maybe), and even I couldn't cut it for more than 5 minutes.

So congratulations Ralph, you did it. After looking high and low, you've found someone less successful electorally, and worse on the stump, than you. May voters flee from your oratorical path.

GORE! GORE! GOOOOOORE!

The Goring of John Kerry continues in earnest. Today's Nedra Pickler piece attains new levels of Picklerization, reading like an RNC piece, and a particularly transparent one, at that.

The "story" is rather tenuously based on Kerry's trip to Nantucket, which merits a couple of sentences followed by a lot of entirely irrelevant commentaries on Kerry's connections to wealth. It's not news - it's an excuse.

Oh, and the campaign took money from a bad person and then gave it back when they found out who he was. Will it explode into a controversy of untold proportions?

Does Dick Morris like toes?

Dispelling The Dispelling

Okay, so Mike Adams (proof positive that the academy's standards are declining) decides to "dispel the myths of gay activism". It's a slightly...not better, per se, but at least more strenuous effort than last week's recycled e-mail joke or letter to Muslims/Arabs, who are the same, that they all suck ass.

First, Mississippi State University's hosting an exhibit dispelling the myths around homosexuality:

That's it. That's the entire blurb. Now, since Adams, a college professor, has seen only this two-sentence summary of the exhibit, with no attendant parts of the display, the evidence marshalled for or against its points - nothing, in the parlance of the joe-on-the-street, what would it behoove a man versed in the finer points of educative experience and academic information to do? See the exhibit? Take notes, ask one of its organizers what it says?

HELL NO.

This is Mike F'n Adams, son! He's a Conservative Emeritus in the Liberal Academy! Why analyze when you can simply criticize? Adams' immediate assumption is that the exhibit is rote college activism, summed up not by what it does, but by the buzzwords that can be applied to it. "Multiculturalism", the "gay rights agenda"...I don't even know what he's saying, but I know I'm pissed!

Adams comes up with ten "myths" of the gay rights movement, each more chocolatey delicious than the last.

Gay George W. Bush: "We never said imminent! But your glasses are fabulous."

I'd be interested to see statistics, proof, or evidence on this. I say this now, because there's ten of these fucking things, and the same complaint applies to all of them.

I'd imagine some of them actually do. Do those with religious objections respect the views of people of who approve of it? Or is that a one-way street?

By the way, Mike promised to provide evidence of this in the display that he's never going to set up. As it is, we just have the Ten Commandments of Dumbassery, handed down from the mountaintop of old issues of National Review. Yea, and he did come down from Derbyshire Peak, full of the bitter resentment that was the Lord's gift to him.

To speed this up: evidence please, wha?, and not only redundant, but lacking in that evidence thing we've been talking about for so long. Adams must have sucked the royal hoo-hah at science fairs.

"I have proven that microwaves cause IQ growth of up to five points a week. I will argue in full detail why this is true at national science fair, when my treatments are completed and I am up to a 195 IQ. Anyone smell hot dogs?"

What's the "truth", incidentally? Or is that another one of those "you're wrong, so I'm right" dealies?

Wha? Note to self: must become Creationist to believe that homosexuality is natural and not condemned by God. To do right after monkeys fly out of ass.

Gladly, abstinence-only programs tell the truth about STDs and contraceptives, so there's a viable alternative to the bugchasers and liars in the "gay" "rights" "movement" "."

So what, exactly, should groups on the MSU campus be able to do with regards to homosexuality? Should public schools shut down all debate on controversial topics, lest Mike Adams organize boycotts against them? Should college professors be advocating that schools shy away from controversial topics to protect the bottom line?

Does Mike Adams actually like education or (far more likely) is it something that he's sticking with as an effort to increase his viability as a far-right pundit? Also, are there any students of Prof. Adams out there who might like to attest to his classroom demeanor? I'm interested to find out what this guy who seems to think liberalism has no place in the halls of academia is like in the classroom.

Updates

Just got to Washington DC yesterday, starting at the Washington Monthly in an hour or so, and taking it from there. I have no idea what posting will be like today, maybe a lot, maybe none -- either way, tomorrow will have me back to full strength, and, hopefully, cable internet in my apartment.

The Headline You Thought You'd Never See...Unless You Did Think That

Iraqis might welcome a strongman.

It's not really surprising - the model for Iraqi leadership (and quite a bit of Middle Eastern leadership) trends towards the strongly authoritarian. That some would desire that in a new leader tracks with the governing history of the nation and of the region. The question (again) becomes - what do we support in terms of a new Iraqi government? Are the fruits of democracy going to be worth its costs if a theocratic strongman is elected to office?

In Case You Haven't Seen It

AbortionFacts.com.

I never knew facts could be so slanted! Color me surprised!

(In case you're wondering, the color of "surprised" is burnt sienna.)

The Power Of Christ Compels Me

...To break it off with you and hope that we can still be friends.

Yesterday, on my way down to Oxford (which is where I am now), I was listening to Focus on the Family radio, which was a...special experience. Being as it was Father's Day, the show was fundamentally concerned with fathers, namely the un-Christian epidemic of fatherlessness, and also how to be a "Godly" parent. One of the callers was "Steve", a man who grew up fatherless and now appeared to be in a remarkably craptastic marriage. His wife berated him all the time for not being a "real man", and his kids apparently hated him, even though they were two years old and two months old, respectively (Christ makes parent-hate mature!).

Assuming the story is for real - always a question when dealing with groups like Focus on the Family - the host's recommendation of Christian counseling seemed rather unfitting for the situation. The guy is either lacking in basic parenting and spousal skills that showed he wasn't ready to get married, or his wife is a domineering ass who has serious problems of her own, and shouldn't be in a marriage. But it belies a couple of attitudes that really don't facilitate good marriage.

First, these two people seem unfit to raise children together. They have them now, and can't shirk that responsibility, but a misplaced devotion to maintaining the relationship to satisfy a religious edict isn't going to solve the problem, as much as it's likely going to cause them to subsume the problems in their relationship in an effort to acheive the unattainable ideal of a perfect Christian family.

Second, there is additional pressure involved in trying to maintain a marriage for fundamentalist strictures - in a marriage that's already malfunctioning due to a partner placing pressure on another, does it really help to place any failure of the relationship in the light of a religious/theological failing? This isn't to say that religion can't bolster relationships, but in the sense of this conservative religiosity, is it an additional stressor on the relationship?

The entire thing is also a cautionary tale - misplaced faith in your own moral superiority generally clouds the reality of any situation. Chances are a lot of these couples thought their faith was strong enough to make up for whatever deficiencies they had as spouses...and are finding out it's not true.

Waitaminnit

You mean Amir didn't know the location of the Prime Matrix?

"We never said they were...hold on, what's a phrase we never used? Okay - we never said they were 'badder than Shaft and Dolemite combined (or Shaftemite, as we'd call him) up against a room full of apartheid-loving pimps'. Really? We never said that? That's good - put it in the AEI speech."

The Gravest Threat Of All Times

In a column published on the 18th, Bill Kristol talks about Kerry's anti-anti-Saddamism (we talked about it yesterday). The column's firmest convictions came in the realm of erroneously assuming that the War on Terror was simply a one-way street, with stops at Afghanistan Burgers and Saddam's Homemade Ice Cream on the way to Terror-Free Gardens, the new luxury apartment complex our whole happy American Patriot family just moved into - minus all the undesirable elements, of course.

So, when you read this LA Times article on our allies in the war on terrorism (Pakistan and Saudi Arabia) paying off the Taliban to avoid terrorist attacks both prior to September 11th, with carryover benefits well past the attack, you sort of have to wonder where the idea that there was nothing to do in the war on terrorism other than invade Iraq comes from. (Or, to be more accurate, the idea that invading Iraq was the most pressing anti-terror activity available, and that anyone who didn't would either have been so hamstrung or lost on terrorism that they wouldn't have done anything else.)

Unrealistic propositions are one of the backbones of pro-invasion rhetoric - it's just the way it's been ever since this perfect storm started falling apart (oh, about twenty seconds after it was seriously and realistically proposed as security policy). But it's telling (and deceptive) that the debate so often centers around the idea that Iraq was not only the most important facet in fighting terrorism - debatable, at best - and that this voluntary war was so pressing that it was unavoidable. History's being rewritten, rather predictably, but it's also being rewritten clumsily and counterintuitive to its own purposes. Does it really serve Kristol or hawks like him to pretend that there isn't an active debate over who (or what) constitutes a serious threat to national security unless we accept Iraq in that list?

Next Up On The News: Why I Am Good

I don't see what's wrong with this.

Big Russ and Me is a great, thoroughly grammatical book with an enormous penis that knows how to treat a lady.

Hold on, I think that next part was supposed to be directed at Little Russ. Damnation!

Anyway, yes, it's fantastic reading. And I'll be on Meet the Press next week to sell my book, J-Tay And His Fantastic Political Adventures Of Awesomeness. That's the working title - turns out The Greatest Story Ever Told was already used by some movie or something.

I'm Anti Anti-Anti-Anti, Auntie

Bill Kristol tries to come up with a new, more "moderate" label for John Kerry, and lands on anti-anti-Saddam (I think it's all just a ploy so that hawks can label themselves AAA - anti-anti-anti Saddam). The new spin is that Kerry was measured and responsible in his rhetoric, but now he's gone over the line. Kristol, responsible, fair and balanced as always, takes the middle road - Kerry isn't pro-Saddam, he's just against anyone who's against Saddam.

How that's different, you got me. But it does make Kristol seem like he thought about this, rather than just decided to make the same old-ass Instapoint that the line between disagreement and active support of America's enemies lies only in the fevered hawk imagination.

Fred Kaplan, on the other hand, points out the intensely "Clintonian" nature of the Bush/Cheney stance. "Clintonian" as an adjective always got me, because Clinton tried to legalese his way out of a case that was, in any substantive way, immaterial to his presidency. What Bush and Cheney did was craft a case that, taken as separate and contextually blank statements, are accurate. It's like an isotope that can only exist in zero gravity, though - in real-life, practical applications, it's virtually useless.

It's boldness through vaguery. As a AAA Saddamite, Bush has an obligation to be as technically true as is humanly possible.

Of course, if the President's defenders are to be believed, he's not responsible for how others interpret his words. In the literalism-as-king world of ass-covering there is no such thing as implication, connections, or interpretation. You could come up with a series of examples that point out just how dishonest this whole exercise is on Bush's part, but anyone convinced that he's right will simply ignore them and blame liberals for deceiving America about the true meaning of Bush's words.

The biggest problem is that the true audacity of this is so commonplace that it won't even matter. The Woodruffization of this is already under way, and it doesn't really matter what Bush said, as any contention will fail to be evaluated for factual veracity, instead portrayed as a slightly-less valid interpretation of the words. (Originalism is always the key in these cases. Whoever can portray themselves as "first" takes advantage of the debate, as any response is almost always spun away as just that - a response, expected because the other side made a contention.)

Did Bush lie? Not technically. Is he an honest, forthright communicator. Yes, just like I own the deed for the Empire State Building.

I Know I Shouldn't, But...

I think the strain of parodying a far-gone conservative has finally gotten to < href="http://slate.msn.com/id/2102469/">Mickey Kaus. That's the only explanation I can see for something this insanely stupid - the schtick is breaking down, and he's left to grasp for more and more desperately idiotic things to say until the entire facade comes crashing down around him, and he's left holding his last MSN check in the gutter, sobbing into his tattered boxes of car magazines and softcore porno.

Mickey's current thesis is that some terrorists might want Bush in office, some might want him out. (May I add, in the words of the immortal bard, "No fucking duh, shitcan.") But how to understand this motivation?

Either he's saying that al-Qaeda and Clinton were/are motived by the same ideals - which is immensely offensive - or...or what, I don't know. I honestly can't see any valid reason to link Clinton to terrorism in this light. (And it's hard to "prey" on an adult who completely consents to a sexual activity, but maybe it's all a part of the act?)

Could any of our conservative anti-Clinton readers try to defend this? Please - it would really help. Otherwise, we have to stop Clinton in case his next blowjob finally creates that Muslim theocracy he's always going on about.

Even The Liberal...Yadda Yadda

The New York Times doesn't like Bill Clinton's book, even going so far as to cite Dick Morris credulously and to, ah, lie about Clinton.

The only substantive charge in the summary (Whitewater) actually isn't what an impartial observer would call "true". The reviewer also seems to think that Clinton should have written the version of his biography that, say, Dick Morris would have written (with an assist from every conservative pundit in the Western Hemisphere).

Ah, well. At least he didn't limn anything.

Not Killing With Kindness

David Adesnik gets it:

In other OxBlog news, Josh Chafetz has an EXCELLENT essay in the Times Book Review on why poor white males don't vote Democrat. I'll have more to say on it later; for now, read it.

Update: Daniel Stein has a different take. And he's got more on Frank here.

The Clinton Counterattack

Various polls are proving Bush the recipient of a "Reagan bounce". While the Harris sample seems like an outlier (10 points up isn't shown by any other polls), it's hardly surprising that the Gipper's death helped Republicans. Democrats, however, have been fretting for months over our two-termer's return to the spotlight, the idea being that Clinton's charisma and star-power will takeattention from Kerry and, somehow, hurt our nominee's chances.

Not so. Clinton's tour is perfectly timed to help Kerry. Bush benefitted from nostalgia for a successful (at least in perception) Republican President, he's going to be harmed by nostalgia for an extraordinarily successful Democratic one. Training the cameras on Clinton allows our most articulate spokesman endless time to make the case for Democratic leadership and remind the country how much better things were under his steady hand. Post-Reagan, that refocuses the attention on the Democratic Party and Kerry will naturally profit from the association, not to mention the Big Dawg's kind words and frequent endorsements.

I can't wait for Sunday.

Learning From Evil

The President and the right-wing blogs seem to have found an anthem for Paul Johnson's death. Now, there's no doubt that his beheading is a senseless tragedy perpetrated by scum, but the refrain chosen goes no farther than presenting the obvious. Drink This has a particularly good summation when she says:

This underscoring of their eviltude is coupled with a swat at any and all imaginary leftists driven to cowardice by the beheading. It's present in the above quote when she notes that ignorance doesn't negate existence, and it's similarly alive in the President's reaction:

Of course, the point is being missed totally. If these people don't value human life, and we know they do not, threatening them with death is probably not the way to go. Nonetheless, that's what our resolve amounts to; a willingness to use unimaginable force to eliminate terrorists. So long as they look like normal people and don't much care if civilians die, that's not going to work (see War, Iraq). Maybe Johnson's death should serve to remind us that we do indeed value life, and such ideals might be more powerful against terror than, well, terrifying arms. No one's arguing that we shouldn't cut down terrorists where they stand, but their propensity to move around and run away makes that strategy slow and exceedingly inefficient. Were we to tweak other parts of our War on Terror so as to, say, stop pissing off the Arab world, begin presenting ourselves in concert with our ideals, and present the money and resources necessary to put the Madrassa schools that grow endless supplies of terrorists out of business, we might win this thing. Maybe the lesson here shouldn't be that terrorists are evil and don't value human life, but that we're good and do value it? Isn't that a more fitting legacy for Paul Johnson?

As Far As I Understand

The Bush team's response to the 9/11 Commission's report, so far, seems to be this:

"The stuff we said isn't the stuff we didn't say, so we're right."

Ain't No Lie Like an Administration Lie Cause an Administration Lie Don't Stop

Ricky asks why I say the Bushies are muddling the issue by disagreeing with the 9/11 Commission, when the Commission itself said:

For more on this tactic, we go to Cheney:

Update: From Altoid in comments:

Interpreting

Remember when Bush said that every attack by insurgents showed we were doing better in Iraq and they were getting more desperate? Beheading must mean we're doing absolutely excellent.

Huh? What's that?

I'm sorry folks, I had that wrong. Beheadings mean our enemies are evil and, even if Saddam wasn't part of Al-Qaeda, the war was righteous. They want to initimidate us, scare us by hurting Americans. This is bloody knuckles to the extreme, so let the call go forth, America's knucles will never be so bloodied nor reddened that we will quit. We will slap back, spine stiffened, until you melt to jelly before the might of our flicking.

God bless Paul Johnson, God bless you all.

Insert Ironic Liberal Media Reference Here

Media Matters has a cause worthy of some outrage:

One Of Those Things That Just Makes Your Ass Hurt

Oh, in case you were wondering, John Cole manages to waste a lot of his time managing not to read English today. Where's the link, you might ask? Does it really matter?

All you need to know is that saying Bush is the worst leader since Hitler is a-okay in John Cole's book. :) Oh, and maintaining the exact same position as the 9/11 Commission (on my part) for the past several months is a contradiction. Or, uh, something.

Look! George Soros is eating babies!

Invisible Sources

I have never seen an article on such deep background be so wishy-washy. And for the record, senior official, a second term is 4 years, not 18 months. If it was only a year to a year and a half, it would not be a second term, but a fourth one. Also, "senior official" clearly lost an argument or two with the reporter. If I didn't know better, I'd say this was Bush himself speaking...

Sez Putin

Now far be it for me to question some as virtuous as Putin, but this is going to get overblown for no good reason:

Admit It!

The Commission finds that Iraq and Al-Qaeda had no significant ties, thus strengthening what every serious analyst on the subject thought. The President and Vice-president reaffirm their lies, now proven wrong, and do so without any apparent sense of shame:

In another, it shows their character flaws. This group is simply unable to admit when they're wrong. Rather than lay low for a day or two, they come back with a vocal protestation of innocence, prolonging the story and pissing off the Commission. They can't admit mistakes and are generally unable to stay silent when one is alleged. Whether they genuinely believe they're eternally correct or simply see this as a cynical strategy for pushing back on issues, it's not politically smart and makes them look less and less connected to the reality of their actions.

Mo' Money And Its Problems

I'm all for this:

Now, this is going to assure business, both big and small, lines up behind Bush. To prevent that, Kerry should sell this as a package with both his corporate tax cuts and his health care plan. The message should be that we'll leave you free to operate, but you have to pay your workers fairly.

Lastly, and this is something I don't know much about, a weak job market racked by outsourcing where the recovery is primarily in low wage jobs -- hiking the minimum wage could send more companies overseas. The best fix I can see is to begin a Reich-like investment budget aimed at making our workers more valuable, not just more expensive.

Update: James Devitt has more on how bad Bush has been to small businesses.

This Is What It Sounds Like When Idiots Squeal

A reporter goes to cover a story about people signing a memorial book for Ronald Reagan in Illinois. She decides to sign the book to profess her love of Ronald Reagan. (Another liberal media sycophant, presumably.) She notes that a Rick Garcia signed the book prior to her, assailing Reagan for his lack of attention to AIDS.

Idiocy ensues.

She contends that the camera was off, and although she'd just finished reporting, she was there as a private citizen. I'm just surprised that a reporter would run to a police officer and tattle on him, screaming in a public place about a person expressing his opinion in a public place, no matter how distasteful the pro-Reagan reporter might find it.

And, ah...considering that she'd just been there as a reporter, shouldn't she still be a bit careful about how she represents herself? What are the rules of journalistic propriety, especially on a story you just finished covering minutes earlier?

A Riddle Wrapped In A Mystery

I really don't get Tucker Carlson. He has this pathetic character he lapses into whenever he's doing the conservative thing, but then sometimes rises above it to become a rather canny observer of how Washington works. But he spends so much time veering between the two that it's hard to tell how he reconciles them.

In a Washington Post chat session, Carlson spends a lot of time talking about how he doesn't support Iraq, how he disagrees with Bush on some issues of leadership, etc. But then, we get these two sentiments:

Here's MoveOn for ya. Somehow, I think Tucker hasn't really checked out the site at all.

Okay, but, you know, hate coming from the left and all. That's where it is. The hatred simply emanates in larger quantities from the left, what with the hatred in all. (Arguing in circles - who knew that it completely destroyed any need for evidence?) Over at Poynter, someone asks if Carlson's ever listened to talk radio.

I don't know - maybe he listens to them like he reads MoveOn.org? (Or like he saw the Wellstone funeral? See Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them for that lovely story.) Carlson, for all his conservative bravado, seems to have a serious problem with actually knowing what he's talking about. Curious, that.

Parables

There once was a Republican who told a stupid story. It was real dumb.

Then I went to go see Dodgeball.

The End.

Linkage

I'm not calling Mitt Romney a racist. So far as I know, he doesn't have a racist bone in his body. But there's something that's just wrong about this:

As a miscegenated fella, I would hope that Romney thought long and hard about using a bill designed to prevent relationships like the one that produced me in order to prevent same-sex marriages. The historical linkage of that law, what it stood for when it was passed, would - I hope - give most people pause.

But it stops same-sex marriage, so I suppose we can gloss over that.

So Many Nazis, So Little Time

Michael Moore doesn't quite have the firmest grasp on truth, which I'll readily admit. But there's a new book in response to him (creatively titled "Michael Moore Is a Big Fat Stupid White Man") that comes with the following description:

Yep. Moore's a Nazi. Again. Regardless of what you think of his relationship to the truth, the most he's calling for is electoral change through the avenues of constitutional democracy - not genocide. Correct his facts, please! If he gets something wrong, let us know what's right. But he's not a Nazi.

Can we indict the entire right yet? Please? I've got my indictin' shoes on!

Michelin Men

Cliff May (who, I'm sorry, makes me want to put on a flannel shirt and extol the virtues of home improvement every time I see him) talks about the group of former diplomats and military commanders/advisors who have come out against Bush. He makes a very...odd criticism, though.

He goes on to make clear that terrorism apparently stopped from 1981 to 1993 (despite there being numerous terrorist acts during that time, and numerous people from the Reagan/Bush administrations being a part of this group), as if previous failure, real or imagined, prevents you from current dissatisfaction with the course of our foreign policy.

Which is, of course, why we have a group of foreign policy retreads in the White House. People from old administrations that made mistakes can't criticize the conduct of the war on terror...by people from old administrations that made mistakes, are still making mistakes, and will barely admit any but the most minor of them.

When the architects of a great deal of the anti-terror policies from 1981-1993 aren't currently in charge of our anti-terror policies...well, maybe then May would have a point. But right now, May's just peddling nonsense. He does have a nice method for adding veneer to your deck patio, though.

Totally Counterproductive Spam

The e-mail of a spam I just got:

Does he/she think I'm cute? Which way do they swing? Why'd they have to tell me through an e-gold advertisement?

Why can't creepy anonymous people just be open about how they feel?

Breaking Kayfabe

Fox News, and then CNBC hired a professional wrestler named John "Bradshaw" Layfield to be a financial analyst. A rather untalented performer in the ring, he apparently has a knack for conservative financial opinioneering, and got paid for it.

Right now, he's on my TV screen, ranting about getting fired from CNBC for making Nazi gestures during a show in Germany (a crime there, by the way). He's blaming the "liberal media", going on about Sean Penn hating America, and generally sounding like a conservative talk radio clone.

There's a thing in pro wrestling called "kayfabe". It's your character, your persona - when it's broken, you're no longer acting, but instead using real-life occurences to promote your match/character/angle. Usually, kayfabe is pretty clear - Hulk Hogan is a character. Terry Bollea (the guy's real name) is not. Ric Flair - character. Richard Fleihr - not. Shawn Michaels - character. Michael Shawn Hickenbottom - not.

More and more recently, though, real-life stories have intruded in on characters, and quite a few wrestlers are "playing" hyperbolic versions of themselves. Eddie Guerrero, the SmackDown champion (in a feud with Layfield), suffered with alcoholism - and a part of his character now is his championship serving as redemption for the struggle he went through with substance abuse. And the problem becomes as you watch these wrestlers use personal struggles and narratives to springboard characters who are essentially tableaus of themselves - what is it that's real in terms of the character, and what is it that's an act?

Layfield refers to the job he has/had with CNBC and Fox in his promos. His personal political beliefs, which he has verbalized loudly in the past, don't fall too far from the hyperbolic Layfield we see on TV. At some point, you stop representing a character who has lived your entire life and you are representing yourself. When Layfield stepped into the ring and premised his appeal on being with real-life, legitimate media organizations and used his credentials as a legitimate financial analyst to further his character, he linked the two. His credibility with regards to each is premised on the other, and he can't simply step back and draw the line wherever it's convenient.

You're Not Speaking To Me

Young America's Foundation has put up its yearly bitching about the liberal tint of the nation's commencement speakers (apparently, these colleges are getting in that one last little bit of indoctrination before the kids get kicked out of their rooms the next day).

Besides the questionable affiliation of many of the people (Chris Matthews, Tim Russert, Judy Woodruff and Tom Friedman as liberals?), the complaint you knew was coming but you still couldn't get away from arrives:

Out of pure pragmatic principles - who in the blue hell is going to invite a bunch of speakers that are going to insult the institution, the students, the professors, the administration, the trees...? In general, people who don't believe in education aren't going to get invited to speak to graduates from an educational organization. I don't understand why this is so difficult. The NRA isn't going to invite gun-control advocates to speak at its yearly conference, and a university isn't going to invite someone who hates the entire enterprise to speak to its graduates.

Of course, this is moot, because the study itself is irretreviably jacked up.

What's also kind of amazing about the outrage is that many of the speakers have a far stronger connection to their respective institutions than their liberalism. Joe Biden, the Senator from Delaware (quick - tell me the state's other Senator without looking it up!) speaks...at the University of Delaware. Ed Rendell, Governor of Pennsylvania, speaks at a Pennsylvania college.

It's also kind of telling that the place only surveys 200 colleges...especially considering that, according to U.S. News and World Report, there are about 1362 general colleges and universities in the country. When you only survey 14.7% of the schools in the country, the term "cherry-picking" comes to mind. Actually, screw cherry-picking. Cherry-picking implies that you're at least looking for something on its own merits. This is just getting a grab bag of mixed fruit, calling it cherries, and then going to the store owner and asking why cherries are all they sell. The three steps to proving liberal bias:

1.) Decide that something's liberal.

2.) Decide that everything involved with it is likewise liberal.

3.) I think we all know what to do here - it's just a matter of how much Scaife/Olin/Bradley funding you get.

It's a study on the leftist bias of commencement addresses at colleges and universities that wouldn't stand up to ten seconds of actual scrutiny at any of them. And you can bet Hannity, Limbaugh and O'Reilly will be all over this, like the scholars they are. And Tom Sowell will be pulling up behind them, asking if anyone wants to give him their kidney.

Throw The Bums Out

Jonah Goldberg's position that we should not follow the Geneva Conventions because al-Qaeda doesn't is, well...bullshit.

It's a line of logic that leads us down a singularly uncomfortable and disturbing road. Al-Qaeda follows few, if any of the traditional rules of warfare. Do we start training suicide bombers? Do we start purposefully targeting civilians at times where we can cause peak casualties?

If we drop one set of standards because the enemy doesn't follow them, what's the excuse for not dropping all of our standards because the enemy doesn't follow them? Do we let the enemy dictate the grounds on which we fight the conflict? Goldberg says that al-Qaeda "gets the benefits" of the Geneva Convention without signing it. Well, they also should (theoretically) get the benefit of a lot of things that they themselves would never do. It's what makes us right and them wrong.

Unless that entire equation's been turned into a simple fiat by superpower, we can't afford to use this rationale in the prosecution of the War on Terror.

The American Way

Matthew Yglesias argues that in wondering why men are so ugly, Sullivan and Volokh are missing a perfect situation for government intervention. If legislation demanded women only date hot guys for 5 years, the problem would be solved. Unfortunately, this is something the free market is much better at handling. After all, what defines hot? A commission would have to be convened and a report issued setting down the guidelines for attractiveness. After that, men believing they cleared the bar would be forced to fill out endless forms, not to mention the paperwork taken on by those who wish to appeal their status or beg for an exemption. Women, of course, would be unable to innovate regarding what is and is not hot, leaving no hope of increased efficiency in male appearance.

Compare this to the free market's working which, with the invention of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and the much heralded "metrosexual", have begun creating incentives for males to willingly increase their attractiveness. In fact, there's a perfectly good template in the success fashion magazines and the entertainment industry's impossible standard of beauty have had in destroying female self-esteem and prodding them towards ever-increasing standards of hotness. Had all this been legislated 30 years ago, they'd still have armpit hair, hand-me-down clothing and bobs. 20 years and they'd be in legwarmers. Thanks to the free market, they're in UG Boots and those annoying drama-kid skirts that are sweeping the nation. It's the American way.

Kerry/Sebelius 04

Political Wire is reporting that MSNBC said Karry's list is down to three: Gephardt, Vilsack and Kathleen Sebelius. As some of you may remember, I've been supporting her for awhile and still believe she'd be an excellent choice. As always, these short-list things need to be taken with a grain of salt, but it's good to know her name is still floating around.

Stupid Stenography

The current furor over the 9/11 Commission's Report is sad commentary on where the media is. No one save Lauren Mylroie and a few wishful Neocons seriously believed Saddam Hussein was substantively connected to Al-Qaeda. Nonetheless, the Administration's steady hints and allusions to the contrary led more than half the country to believe the two were strong allies. Now, with the report, journalists who surely knew what a crock of shit this was can -- months too late -- report that fact.

The problem is journalists aren't supposed to be interpreters of the news, even when that interpretation is simply contextual. Instead, they are charged with stenography, locked into rules that demand coverage ONLY when there's some sort of event, report, object or change that can be used as an excuse for the story. Yesterday, the Commission's findings allowed them to inform the public about something reporters -- but not most Americans -- were well aware of. That the report came a year-and-a-half after the invasion and not during the run-up to war illustrates exactly why this protocol is flawed: voters need information when it's relevant, not when it finally appears in tangible form. The need for events that drive the agenda, coupled with the stenographer's duty to report spoken lies alongside truth, allows vicious mendacity to exist uncorrected until far after the prevaricator's purpose has been achieved.

Unfortunately, I can't claim to be chock-full of solutions. So long as the media insists on stenography, Democrats would be well served to start turning attention towards document-based rebuttal, putting together commissions and releasing reports may be better suited to this media climate than press conferences. Journalists themselves could help improve things by offering up tagged analysis of events as they happen. Instead of letting experts in for a line or two during a story, create a regular and recognizable space for them next to the stenography where they can offer substantive opinions on what's being said. Does this open up the news to bias? Certainly. But the current bias towards object-driven journalism is far more obstructive for an informed citizenry than recurring partisan biases would be.

New Top Ten

Top Ten's up at eVote.

Talking About The Lie Is Worse Than The Lie!

Matt, as he is wont to do, raises the point that I was going to make, the bastard.

The Washington Post wrote this morning on the September 11th Commission's report that Iraq and al-Qaeda didn't have operational ties. What's strange is that it blasts people who criticize Cheney for making misleading/dishonest statements, while scooting Cheney's culpability out the door.

No, he's been insanely careful. As Matt points out, everything he's been saying is technically true, although vastly misleading. It's like this exchange:

"Did you work on the report today?"

"I spent all day in front of the computer."

Unfortunately, all that time was spent playing Freecell and surfing porn sites, but hey. The statement is 100% true.

Cheney and the 9/11 Commission directly contradict each other in terms of their plain meaning. Cheney wants you to think that Iraq and al-Qaeda worked together. The Commission says they didn't. Cheney is wrong, and the debate over the nature of his wrongness is nowhere near the level of disingenuousness and, yes, dishonesty inherent in the argument that nonproductive and noncollaborative Iraq/al-Qaeda contacts constitute a war-level reaction.

There's no sensical way to say the debate over how someone's being out of accord with reality is as much of a problem as the people being out of accord with reality themselves. The Commission says the contacts were there, but point out, factually, that they went no further. Cheney is using the exact same information to make the exact opposite (and dishonest) point. But, you see, the problem's not there.

Did the Wall Street Journal buy out the Post?

So...How's Life?

McCain and Bush begin to mend ties.

Just a bit of advice to George: don't ask McCain how his kids are doing.

Daschle's Obstructionism

Notice how you haven't heard much about Tom Daschle's supposed obstructionism in the Senate lately? Remember how he was "holding the Senate hostage". was preventing the nomination of qualified judges, etc.?

Well, it turns out Frist got off his ass, and judges are being confirmed. I don't know much about the nominees on the list, but as far as I know, none of them are the objectionable nominees.

Isn't it funny how the Senate seems to have spent so much time debating a few amendments on a few bills, but when the fire is under the FristAss, they can start getting stuff done? I'm interested to see exactly why this happened - and also to see what happens with the highway bill and another of the appropriations bills, which is turning into a monster. But does it strike anyone else how little work the Senate is actually getting done?

I, Robot

I'm a fairly big Isaac Asimov fan, yet as I watch the trailers for the upcoming Will Smith vehicle I, Robot, I can't help but shake the feeling that it has nothing whatsoever to do with the book, mainly because it doesn't.

My only question is: will this be another Wild, Wild West? Although we've had some bad movies this summer (Garfield, Van Helsing), there's been nothing legendarily bad on the level of From Justin To Kelly or Battlefield Earth.

Can I, Robot be that movie? It will, after all, likely piss off a legion of sci-fi geeks (myself included), which is the surest way to get on the fast track towards movie crapdom.

Synthesizer

This story doesn't really surprise me. Liposuction doesn't increase health? Really?

Besides the scientific difference between various types of fat cells outlined in the article - lipo doesn't target the more dangerous and health-impacting fat cells that remain after the subcutaneous layer of fat is removed - the procedure doesn't change the way your body metabolizes food or uses energy. It changes how much you weigh, but it doesn't change the way your body deals with weight. It can help you on your path towards an effective health program (having been 25-30 pounds overweight myself at one point, I know how hard it is to just start exercising and change the way you eat when you've ingrained other behaviors over the course of your life), but it isn't an effective health program in and of itself.

You want to lose weight and gain health benefits from it? Eat less and exercise.

Just Say No!

Matt Yglesias lays out exactly why Gephardt would be a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad VP choice. Check it out.

Update: I like this graf so much, I've got to quote it:

Everybody Needs a Hobby

So what do you do when you take on the throne and lose? Well some, like Lucifer, found a realm of eternal damnation and torture others for eternity. Others read a lot of spy novels and review so obsessively they crack Amazon's Top 500. Newt Gingrich is the latter.

As an addendum on Gingrich, he's an interesting case in the discussion Matt Stoller and I have been having. As radical and poisonous as anyone our polity has ever seen, he also presided over a GOP obsessed with policy. While the current group (DeLay, et al) have his bile they possess none of his wonkishness nor relative honesty about their agenda. To say this shows how far we've fallen, but Newt was the sort of wingnut I could live with. At least he stood for something beyond partisan politics and attempted to engage legislation in a meaningful way.

Um...Okay.

Bill O'Reilly on Michael Moore:

Rollin Down K Street

Woooooooooooooo!

More on Moderates

Matt Stoller responds to my response to his post on moderates. Below is my response to his response to my response on his post. Got that?

Matt's point here seems to be that:

The next point I'd make is that wonkery isn't dead, it's just dormant. I'm continually stunned at the difference of a few votes. Had McCain won the primary -- and make no mistake, he very well could have -- the Republican Party of today would contain many of the same people but be an entirely different beast. Parties are malleable, they can change character quickly. Had he won, you would have seen a right that actually did talk about policy and play politics with a sense of idealism (I might add that I think they would've been much harder to beat than this band of incompetents, but that's a separate point). So long as wonkery can come back that quickly, I'm uncomfortable with calling it "moot".

As I said in my last post on the subject, advocating this mentality is useless until you've got a plan for making it a political reality. I believe that a smart campaign, a good candidate and a progressive message can obliterate these idiots without sacrificing our soul nor rending apart our polity. If you don't -- and you're certainly allowed to disagree -- it's up to you to step beyond pointing out problems, you have to detail the strategy that'll let us enter balls-out partisanship without seeing it backfire or losing our soul. Saying they're bad and we're not ruthless enough is not an inherently more helpful construct with which to evaluate our political universe. The question is how to fix it without destroying everyone, not how much madder should we get.

Enraging the Reagans

Here we go. This is good, let's start pissing off of the Reagans before Ronald's body is even cold:

Thinking About Zombies

The Straight Dope answers a question that had actually been on my mind ever since I saw 28 Days Later - if the world turned to zombies, how long would power last?

There are a couple of other, more pressing things to me, though. In zombie movies, there's always some government installation or base with a generator. However, water is a big thing - zombies are usually generated by some viral factor in the blood that causes the rapid mutation/degeneration. Now, I don't know how water treatment plants work in times of crisis, but even if they could function without human involvement, could they treat the zombie factor out of potentially contaminated water? (We're assuming that a zombie virus would work the way it does it the movies, which is that you need only a scintilla of it to become a zombie.)

In that case, you'd likely run out of running water within days, the first time a zombie falls into the water supply while playing zombie games. (Rudolph the Red-Nosed Zombie?) In that case, any survivors would prefer a quick-zombie transition to the apocalypse. In any drawn-out scenario, there would be runs on vital supplies, and pure probability would have it that some of the people with stockpiles would get zombified, making their stocks much more perilous to get. In a quick scenario, the plague happens too quickly for large-scale runs to be made. But, since nobody's actually making new bottled water, you're limited to whatever finite resources you can get from your reachable geographic area.

Don't even get me started on gasoline and car maintenance.

Brave New Economy

Now that's interesting:

This is also bad news for Bush. Since immigrants vote in lower numbers, and generally not for Republicans, the impact of these jobs will be electorally blunted. Further, if the trend of lower paying, less skilled positions holds within the natural populace, you're going to see increased worker anger as their return to the economy is on worse terms than their exit. They might agree that things are better than they were a year ago, but a low-wage job they feel overqualified for won't beat four years ago.

Like A Bad Date, No Connections

Via Atrios, the September 11th Commission has found '"no credible evidence" of a link between Iraq and al Qaeda in attacks against the United States.'

We've all known for the better part of a year, ever since the WMD justification fell by the wayside, that we're playing Calvinball with suicide bombers with regards to why we went to war. The sheer number of self-serving "this isn't why I wanted to go to war" articles, blog posts, and pure rants are numerous enough to fill a book, as if it doesn't really matter why the U.S. government went to war, so long as the individual believers in it could rationalize it away.

And I'm also not surprised that the bogus "decade of contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda" line is making a comeback - if the Bush folks say it loudly and often enough, the report fits into the he said/she said narrative that characterizes so much political coverage. "The Commission says there weren't, the Bush Administration says there were. It's a debate we'll certainly follow over the coming weeks and months ahead. Next up, Bill Schneider and Jeff Greenfield with a report on how your pizza toppings may determine your vote."

I Feel So Godless Tonight, So Godless Tonight!

I've always had problems with Samuel P. Huntington, but now's not the time to go into why his overarching theories of world cultures rub me the wrong way. Instead, just a short comment on a line in his Opinion Journal piece today.

Here's what he says:

Only problem? Nobody's imposing atheism.

He's asking the court to impose secularism/religious neutrality, which I don't think should be a problem, considering that we were founded as a secular nation. Even beyond that debate, however - how misleading is it to refer to what Newdow is doing as "imposing atheism"?

Here is the Pledge Newdow wanted (incidentally, also the original pledge):

No mention of God one way or the other. If this is an atheist pledge, then every utterance we make that doesn't refer to God reinforces atheism - it's nonsense. This would be an atheist pledge:

Atheism requires an affirmation of the idea that no deity actually exists. The instructions on Minute Rice aren't atheistic because they don't mention God, and the Pledge wouldn't be atheistic simply because it didn't mention God. Huntington can fabricate a governmental Christian identity all he wants, but it would serve his purposes far better if he could be honest about the alternative.

Down On One Hand, Not Up On The Other

The NRA has a novel argument.

It's an advocacy group...running advocacy programming. But it doesn't count, because the advocacy comes in the form of news and commentary. News and commentary that advocates a position. Coming from an advocacy group. But it doesn't count.

While Limbaugh and Franken are primarily ideological commentators...neither of their broadcasting companies are set up as political advocacy or lobbying groups. The NRA is.

I think that Bob Bauer is right, though:

I can see this being a big-ticket gambit to try to get CFR laws ruled unconstitutional, in whole or in part...and if it goes far enough, it might work. So, the issue is - oppose the station and potentially get CFR overturned (a situation which might not be so bad, except that no better law will arise in its place for years, if at all), or let advocacy news go unchallenged and break CFR by having every advocacy group under the sun get a radio or TV show and call themselves a media group?

Decisions, decisions.

Quitters

The Southern Baptist Convention quit the Baptist World Alliance.

I keep hearing this "anti-American" idea ping-ponging around among Southern Baptists...but I have no idea what it actually means. The Houston Chronicle has a story on the SBC's grievances with the Alliance - but the "anti-American" idea is simply repeated.

It's anti-American...but none of the cited complaints appear to violate American laws or principles, unless you accept the seeming gloss of Southern Baptist values as American values - which is simply fundamentalist absolutism.

What's unshakeable in this entire controversy/split is the fact that the Baptists are trending towards being an overtly political organization. In every story I read, the language of criticism was vaguely theological, but was much more clearly political, focusing on sociopolitical touchstone issues and critizing liberal/leftward drifts in the Alliance. (Unsurprisingly, since almost everything is a leftward drift from the SBC.)

It wavers between debating over theological truth and debating over political truth. If the SBC wants to become a political organization...well, wait, they already are. What was I thinking?

Anyone Can Be A Professor

Cori Dauber asks why the media is showing the Paul Johnson video and not the Nick Berg video. Ignoring that they all did show the Nick Berg video, just not on the 24-hour repeat loop that many conservatives would have preferred, she goes on to declare that it's because they don't want to make us angry, they want to make us sympathetic.

Apparently a professor in the UNC system, this line of logic feels a little bit too close to Mike Adams' for it to be a coincidence. Besides whitewashing recent history, I don't see why terrorists holding a hostage isn't a story that should be covered actively. When the Berg video was released, there wasn't a whole lot more to the story - Johnson's captors are making active demands with his life in the balance. It's simply a different story.

When things happen that don't fit in one of the predetermined conservative categories, they have to shoehorned in to one or a combination thereof. ABC, CBS and NBC are apparently covering the Johnson video because they want America to cry like feminized postmodernites, but wouldn't show the Berg video (which, in case you were wondering, involved a gruesome beheading, and yet was shown in part, contradictory to Dauber's assertion) because heaven forbid America be angry. Or something. It's a stretch.

Of course, what would commentary about hostages, hoods, and prisoners be without the Morally Bankrupt Abu Ghraib Reference of the day?

It's funny, because like the Nick Berg thing, it's a complete misrepresentation of history! They could sexually abuse and rape him, beat him - oh, yeah, and murder him.

What, you might ask, is her area of academic specialty?

The only explanation I can give is that she's been on sabbatical since Bush got elected. Otherwise, she's just very, very godawful at her job. Of course, I also get the feeling that the UNC system isn't quite the haven of liberal bias that it's supposed to be to forward Mike Adams' career, either.

Polls Looking Good

Reading this op-ed by James Mann made me realize that Bush's poll numbers are really quite bad. We get caught up in the horserace aspect of them, but its the general trend that's interesting.

First, take a look at Bush's trend. He peaked around 9/11 and, save for a boost around the beginning of the Iraq War, his numbers have been steadily sliding downward. Conversly, look at Reagan and Clinton, our most recent two-term Presidents. They hit their nadirs around the same time Bush hit his peak, and they continued upward forever after (make sure you're looking at their first term). Where Bush trends downward going into the election, they had been on a long upward swing. Now glance at the other two on the chart. Bush Jr.'s track looks quite similar to Carter's and nearly identical to his Father's. You will, I trust, remember how they ended up. Anyway, that's my positive thinking for the morning:

Yeah, Uh, Sorry Mom...

Gotta love it:

Hearts and Minds

Why won't that liberal media talk about the schools opening, the garbage disposal, the sewage treatment, the wonders we've wrought? These markers of success are, after all, far more important than the attitudes of a few pesky Iraqis:

Being Reagan

Looks like Bush is going to have some trouble if he tries to claim Reagan's mantle. As with any invocation of the dead, a massive backfire is a distinct possibility. Since Reagan's family clearly doesn't like him and he's turned a deaf ear towards their entreaties on stem-cell research, attempts to model himself into Gipper 2.0 might be publicly shot down by an enormously sympathetic group of mourners. We'll see.

Lives Like Ours

The Times' slightly snarky article noting that all the Senators Kerry is considering for VP is badly misguided. It implicitly spanks the sometimes populist Democrat for surrounding himself with the rich while forgetting that the point of Democratic populism isn't asceticism but meritocracy. It should be no surprise that those who make it to the upper echelons of government will have generally succeeded financially as well, often times, that's how they got there (see Edwards, John). What Democrats are fighting against isn't the ability to get rich, it's the inability to get there. Widening inequality, policies that favors the wealthy, tax breaks for the haves and a legislative attitude that ignores the have-nots are the evils we mark for destruction. We want everyone to be able to make it in this economy, the difference between Kerry and Bush is that the latter inherited money and opportunity and sees it as his due, the former took his privileges and decided everyone should have them.

That's how Kerry should frame this election. The message is Edwards's, tweaked to accommodate an aristocratic speaker. There's nothing wrong with being a millionaire, the lives of the wealthy are what's right. In fact, the opportunities and security that children of the rich enjoy should be lavished on every American youth -- health care, education, the fulfillment of basic needs, they're what we fight for. Having millionaires on the ticket is not only expected, but completely in line with our message.

My Totally Arbitrary Rankings Of The Week

I was out buying extra controllers for my new XBox, and I decided to sit down and come up with the Five Best Console Controllers of All Time.

A few caveats: first, the controller must be first-party (built by the company who manufactures the console). Second, different iterations of controllers are counted separately - so the Genesis three-button is a different controller from the six-button, the Wavebird is a different controller from the stock GameCube controller. That having been said, let the ranking begin:

5.) Nintendo 64 Controller

Quite possibly the most unique controller design ever, its only real problem was the utterly useless L-trigger and bad D-pad. It was the first standard analog controller, and when games were built around it, it played like a dream. Unfortunately, the oddness of the setup (three handles, which ensured only two-thirds of the controller was accessible at once) and the fact that you needed to add a Rumble Pak to make it vibrate push it down the list.

4.) Nintendo GameCube Wavebird

The first standard first-party wireless controller, it is the best thing ever made for four-person play. Sit anywhere you want, play anywhere you want, take your controller with you so that nobody else can unpause the game...the ultimate frat-house pad. The shoulder buttons are wonky, the Z button is almost superfluous, and the button layout on the face can make for weirdly altered experiences in games that require multiple button presses. But it's wireless!

3.) NES Controller

It had a d-pad. And multiple controller buttons. And this "select" button thingee. It earns props mainly for being indestructable and for being the first major controller built for console games, rather than either being a joystick or some weird amalgam of a stick and a keypad. Plus, it came with a light gun. Why don't systems have included light guns anymore?

2.) Playstation 2 DualShock

Probably the epitome of the design started by Nintendo with the NES and SNES controllers, it's an incredibly well-balanced "traditional" controller. The analog sticks are incredibly well-placed - my only beef is the X-crossed D-pad, which isn't always as responsive on the diagonals as it should be. Also, the fact that you have to power on the analog sticks with many games is annoying.

1.) SNES "Dogbone"

Shoulder buttons. I knew I'd never like them. Now, index fingers at the ready is just *the* way to hold a controller. There were really no flaws with this one - it's the only controller I can do a Dragon Punch on to this day.

So, yeah, the list is Nintendo-dominated...but for a reason. They've always been on the cutting edge of controller design - the PS2 controller is the evolution of Nintendo's SNES design (which makes sense, considering the PS1 was supposed to be a Nintendo product), the XBox controller is the Dreamcast controller with a second analog stick and the annoying black and white buttons.

Worst?

5. Sega Saturn Original

They took the Genesis six-button controller, added shoulder buttons...and filed all the edges to points. It was disappointing because it wasn't anything new, but also because it physically hurt to hold.

4. Virtual Boy

Having to hold an entire pack of batteries while you played kind of sucked. And it was a mirror-image controller, so you had a D-Pad and two buttons on each side, which wasn't so bad, except that it didn't "feel" like a Nintendo controller. Plus, the whole thing kind of sucked in a pragmatic sense.

3. Phillips CD-i

Do you like playing video games with your TV remote? Do you like it when your remote doesn't have enough buttons to make playing any game worth it? The ultimate example of bad input design ensuring bad gameplay design - it was designed for those Full Motion Video games that were in vogue in the early 90s. Make a decision, watch some film, at a pre-ordained time hit the button to make another decision, sometimes you'll have to time it with the clip. Games made for people who want to watch movies, but feel guilty not performing any activity whatsoever.

2. Atari 5200

If you know why this controller sucked before I say anything, you are truly 1337. This sucked for one reason, and one reason only: the controller didn't center. When you use most physical input devices, they will reset to a "neutral" position when they aren't in use. For instance, your keyboard doesn't just keep typing "K" because it was the last letter you hit. The Atari 5200 didn't do this. Instead, it remained whereever you pushed it, and you had to drag it back to the center - which wouldn't have been so much of a problem if the things stayed sturdy, which they didn't after a while.

1. Atari Jaguar

It was a phone pad...with a Genesis controller smacked on top. I actually did own a Jaguar, and it was just a melding of every outdated concept possible. Actually, it was just every outdated concept by Sega possible. Awful, clunky, and plain silly.

Flames and disagreements welcome.

Yes, I'm tired of politics for the time being. Bite my shiny metal ass.

Hart Attack

Republicans are more trusted on foreign policy because, though they have little in the way of a coherent strategy, they have a predictable attitude. Democrats, unfortunately, do not, which is why I thought Clark or Kerry were the best choices for President. While we have a clear economic message, we now need a leader who'll leave us with a foreign policy doctrine understandable to most Americans. But they weren't the best choices for that. Gary Hart was. Without doubt, he's our Party's biggest thinker on the subject, predicting the terrorist attacks and the fall of the Soviet Union far before anyone else was sounding the alarm. He almost ran for President in this cycle and, before deciding against it, had me slaving away in his nascent organization. Now he's written a book outlining a "Grand Strategy" that the Party -- and the country -- would be well served to adopt. But books take time to order and buy, so check out the American Prospect's interview with him in the meantime:

The Real Deal

Matt says:

If Kerry's campaign started up an E-Mail list called The Real Deal, aimed reporters and interested policy wonks, and used it to respond to the day's issues, it might be pretty effective. As I envision it, the dispatches would start with with an explanation of whatever crisis or problem is hitting the news, illustrate how Bush got us into the mess and why his solution is inadequate or unlikely, and end with how Kerry would handle the issue. This could combine references to his larger plans with smaller maneuvers demonstrating his ability to handle the minor catastrophes dominating the news cycle. By sending it out each morning to the press, they'd have a quotable document they could use to illustrate Kerry's way forward and he could thus be entered into new stories in a constructive, rather than solely critical, fashion.

This Way to Hell...

As always with Limbaugh, I'm rendered speechless by the depths of his insanity and bile. The man lives in a world of his own creation, populated entirely by conservatives and one-dimensional projections of his imagination. He is all that is wrong with American discourse.

Update: Just to be factual where Limbaugh is -- what's the word? -- a liar, a quick glance at statistics shows over 100,000 heterosexuals have contracted AIDS and, in a topic closer to Limbaugh's heart, 200,000 IV drug users have acquired it. Oh, and AIDS either is spread by heterosexuals or it isn't. If promiscuity is what's got it moving in Africa, than a decrease in promiscuity and increase in education is what stopped it in America. This is EXACTLY what Reagan is accused of having slowed down.

I Am The Winner!

I got second place in MaxSpeak's Vicious Instapundit Blogroll Contest.

I think that money will be going to a worthy Democratic candidate - probably Jane Mitakides.

I Get $182,000 In Positive Coverage...

The Fake Figure is one of the greatest tools of politics. Perhaps its greatest use is McCarthy's list of Communists in the State Department - a completely made-up but "real-sounding" number that lends supposed facts and evidence to a debate with otherwise no merit.

The LMB crusade is rife with them - 98% of all mentions of George W. Bush are negative! 14.3% of all Democrats mentioned by Dan Rather have ever been criticized!

It doesn't surprise me, then, that the Scaife-funded, Ruddy-headed NewsMax Magazine is starting up a new push to prove that John Kerry is getting billions in free media coverage from major media.

I can already say with 100% certainty that this "study" is flawed - I really don't see how you can calculate the value of coverage that hasn't happened yet. More importantly, the standard which they've set up (which seems to be that anyone who criticizes Bush or praises Kerry is free advertising for Kerry), doesn't it seem as if Bush gets billions in free advertising? Three hours of Rush Limbaugh a day, times five days a week, times about 20 weeks left until the election...that's a lot of ad space.

Of course, since the metric is itself ridiculous, it's pointless to compare stats arrived at by it. But you can bet that if this "$2 billion" figure has any traction, it will be beaten like a government mule until it can't be beat no more.

The Green Monster

Ezra angry! Ezra SMASH!

Don't Pay Attention To Anything We're Talking About

The campaign to make sure everyone sees Michael Moore's film continues unabated.

Yep. Give a guy who already started the PR tour for the film with cries of censorship more grist for the mill, get more people interested in seeing a potentially controversial movie, and make them sympathetic to Moore, who's one man against Disney, the Republican Party, and conservative groups like this (at least, that's how he'll portray it).

Apparently, they want this film to become the most successful documentary ever.

The Constitution, Simplified

Slate's Kerryism feature is ridiculous. Will Saletan is a far better writer and commentator than that, and as Spinsanity points out, part of what the feature does is to abridge Kerry's actual positions as superfluous.

To showcase the ridiculosity, I present you with the Kerryism Bill of Rights.

1. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion [1]; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people [2] to assemble, and to petition [3] for [4] grievances.
2. [5] [T]he right [6] to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.
3. No soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without [7] consent [8], nor in time of war, but [9] by law.
4. The right of the people to be secure in their persons, [10] shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, [11] and [12] describing the place [13] searched, and the persons or things [14] seized.
5. No person shall [15] answer for a capital [16] crime, [17] [18]; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy [19]; nor shall [20] any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law [21].
6. [22] [T]he accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury [23], [24] and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have [25] [26] the assistance of counsel for his defense.
7. [27]
8. Excessive bail shall not be [28] inflicted.
9. [29] [C]ertain rights, shall not be construed to deny [30] others [31].
10. The powers not delegated [32] by the Constitution, nor prohibited [33], are reserved to the states [34] or to the people.

See how much clearer that is?

[1] or prohibiting the free exercise thereof
[2] peaceably
[3] the government
[4] a redress of

[5] A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state,
[6] of the people

[7] the
[8] of the owner
[9] in a manner to be prescribed

[10] houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures,
[11] supported by oath or affirmation,
[12] particularly
[13] to be
[14] to be

[15] be held to
[16] , or otherwise infamous
[17] unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury,
[18] except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger
[19] of life or limb
[20] be compelled in
[21] ; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation

[22] In all criminal prosecutions,
[23] of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed
[24] which district shall have been previously ascertained by law,
[25] compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor,
[26] and to have

[27] In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise reexamined in any court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.

[28] required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments

[29] The enumeration in the Constitution, of

[30] or disparage
[31] retained by the people

[32] to the United States
[33] by it to the states
[34] respectively,

I Wanna Borrow The Car

Apparently, Ezra and I are Reagan's children.

He owes a hell of a lot of back child support, then...

Bout To Peel Yo Cap

The medical malpractice debate is one of the most fucked-up debates in a nation that revolves around fucked-up debates. Medmal insurance rates don't drop in states where caps are put on punitive damages, yet there's a continual push for them, as if maybe they'll work this time. Costs from medical malpractice suits haven't increased outsize to medical inflation in years, yet there's an apparent explosion of payouts that no facts back up. Insurance companies keep pushing up rates to cover losses in other insurance areas and in investments, yet they're almost invisible in the debate, except from us whacko lefties - and nobody listens to us, because we just Hate America And Capitalism. (We're the HAACs!)

So, when a doctor stands up at an AMA meeting and proposes that doctors refuse treatment to lawyers involved in medical malpractice suits, what's my response? Someone should stand up at the next American Bar Association meeting and propose that lawyers not represent doctors involved in medical malpractice cases.

That shouldn't ruffle any feathers, right?

Oh, and this bit is just classy:

I'm really not sure why a group of people who have apparently gone through a great deal of education are so clueless about why they're paying such high insurance rates. There are states where caps have been passed and rates haven't gone down at all - why aren't those doctors speaking up?

UPDATE: To be accurate, the proposal was shouted down by the other doctors at the meeting, to their great credit.

We Don't Need No Steenkin'...What Is It We Don't Need Again?

When did Cheney's ass become vice-president?

Taking away the Mylroie/Hayes/Feith Series of Unverified Connections, what is the evidence for this?

At this point, we're going to find out that one of Osama's lieutenant's nephews once fixed a flat tire in Iraq on a truck that could have been retrofitted to carry up to a ton of VX nerve agent. And there, ladies and gentlemen, will be your reason to go to war.

The Axle of Evil.

Duck And Weave

I wasn't really sure which category to put this in, since Star Parker manages to half-assedly blame the ACLU's suit against LA County for destroying...everything good with America, I think.

Here's the story, so far as I can piece it together. The ACLU sues LA County. Star Parker runs the Coalition for Urban Renewal and Education which, according to the "about us" page, reinforces the need for individuals to improve their own lives through faith and the free market by running to the government and getting on lots of opinion shows.

You get the connection yet? You see, CURE is based in LA. And, uh, the ACLU wants a tiny cross taken out of the county's seal. Therefore, the ACLU's mission is to undermine CURE and consign poor blacks to generations of poverty, because they don't want prayer in public schools, and we all know how prayer solves all problems.

See, the problem here is that the ACLU's quoted mission is to ensure that those groups have the rights afforded them, personal choice or no. You have certain civil rights afforded you in all of those situations that you may not be afforded, because discrimination happens among those groups, both personally and institutionally.

The ACLU doesn't stop protecting rights based on the class of people who need them. That's the whole point. The ACLU's job isn't to counsel/hector people, it's to make sure that civil rights laws are enforced. For some reason, this seems to be perceived as a "liberal" cause.

Parker then goes off on the typical "ACLU wants to destroy God and drag his carcass down the street, blaring the Soviet National Anthem - techno remix!" rant. Although what I find is that the examples Parker uses, including her own, were private organizations motivated by religion - and the civil rights movement resulted in a secular law. From everything I know about Martin Luther King, Jr., his faith pushed him to want to change the law, but he did not need the law to be a tacit endorsement of his faith.

That, in a nutshell, is the problem with people like Parker. It's not enough for them to realize that they can be motivated through their faith to change a secular institution - they have to make the secular institution a religious one. The government's role is not to be a religious institution, particularly considering that one of its charges is to ensure equal treatment for all citizens, regardless of religious affiliation.

But, you know, it's better to blame the ACLU for destroying America and whine that if you only had your way, everything would be so much better - like it was in the 50s, when we had prayer in schools and segregation!

You Apparently Only Know Dick

Dick Morris is something of a fascination, in the same way a slimy coating over food left in the sun might be. It's enthralling to watch it form over something rotten, that disgusting product of a series of chemical reactions that, in ideal circumstances, would never happen. But they do.

Bill Clinton is releasing his memoirs. Millions of people apparently want to read them (I've reserved my copy). He is a former president of the United States, a newsmaker extraordinaire. What's Morris' take on this?

Left out of the article was the rather embarassing way this quote came about. The author was actually interviewing Former White House Chief of Staff John Podesta, and Dick Morris was three rooms over. When the word "Clinton" was uttered, Morris physically burst through three walls and tossed Podesta out of a second-story window, at which point he launched into the above, verbatim, followed by his all-new top-secret account of Hillary's lesbonic takeover of the White House.

The Lincoln Bedroom will be renamed the k.d. lang sexatorium, according to Morris.

This Monday In Religion

One of the Catholic Church's preeminent theologians wants the Church to reconsider its zero-tolerance anti-pedophila stance.

The theologian actually raises valid points, but the problem is that the Church simply doesn't have much (if any) credibility in terms of policing itself in this regard. Any step that moderates the response to the child sex abuse scandals only plays into the narrative the Church created for itself in this regard - that it's not as serious to stop the abuse as it is to make sure the church doesn't look bad. The steps may or may not be necessary, but the Church has wrangled itself out of the credibility to moderate anything with respect to this.

Also, Southern Fried Baptists (We Make Fundamentalism Tasty!) want to break with the Baptist World Alliance.

They're religious fundamentalists. Their belief system denies alliance, coalitions, compromise between them and anyone who's not already in agreement with them. I think it's probably better for more moderate Baptists at large that the SBC is on the verge of leaving them (particularly since it seems to have become so political in its criticism of other branches of Baptist thought), although it's more disappointing than anything else that the Southern Baptists are so far gone to the fundamentalist right that even modest reforms or differences between them and other groups are unacceptable and theologically treasonous.

But, then again, we are dealing with Southern Baptists. I suppose creating a schism in the alliance is probably the least destructive thing they want to do to divergent religions. Take what you can get.

Sitemeter?

Is anyone else having problems with their Sitemeter like we are? Ours just stops counting hits and visits for hours at a time.

Snidely Whiplash Turns Legit

Okay - raise your hand if you weren't fucked over by Enron.

Enron may have been the only purchasers of mustache wax in the Western Hemisphere. You know, all the better to twirl them in a cartoonishly evil fashion.

Oh, and if your sweetheart is missing, you may want to check the train tracks near the Enron headquarters, as she may be tied up there.

Garfield

In case you missed it, Chris Suellentrop has a great article on the hollow, crassly commercial empire that is Garfield. Having liked the fat little kitty when I was a kid (down to ordering lasagna more due to Garfield's romanticization of the foodstuff) it's kinda sad to know I was just marching to an advertising exec's orders who was drawing (read: commissioning) the strip I loved without any of the warm fuzzies it gave me. Ah well.

Also, did anyone see Jon Stewart interviewing Jennifer Love Hewitt on the Garfield movie the other night? Despite her hurt looks and slightly stunned rejoinders, he could not stop bashing the movie. I guess when you're used to interviewing Senators, plugging for a cartoon cat in a terrible flick doesn't feel that good. Twas funny, though.

Losing Friends

This report from Daniel Drezner on the Council of Foreign Relations meeting is pretty heartening:

VP Round-Up

Wondering who this Tom Vilsack cat is? The LA Times has got you covered. But let's be honest, some no-name Iowan isn't taking the slot, it's going to be one of Labor's guys, or so they think. If they're right, Southern Senators are going to be some unhappy campers, wondering why their chosen one wasn't good enough. Guess it doesn't much matter, all these kids and more are already gearing up for 2012.

As my own comment, if the the short list really is limited to Vilsack, Gephardt and Edwards (a mighty big if), Kerry had best pick the glib-tongued Southernor, none of those others will bring the ticket any substantial lift or excitement.

Cleared That Right Up

The Cowardly Court has ruled:

Update: The Gamut has more from a Father's rights perspective. I'm with him, that area of this case merits some concern. Why couldn't the biological father sue on behalf of the daughter?

Update 2: The Corners' got a legal analysis worth reading.

Restraint

TIME does a piece on bloggers (the sites are free, fast, funny, and smell like peppermint!), but I have to wonder how long Andrew "Bell Curve" Sullivan can get away with statements like this:

Sullivan was pretty free to assail as he saw fit while he was running the New Republic...

Anyway, it's another piece on blogs that misses the forest for the trees, at least in my opinion. More accurately, it misses me. I'm part of the youth movement! I've been doing Pandagon as a political site since I was 19! I built this fucking house, I'm not gonna take it any more, and the shareef don't like it! My bling-bling goes bling-blow, gonna get Punk'd with your final answer!

Oh, man, I think I just broke my pop-culture apparatus. Thanks a lot, TIME.

When Worlds Collide

George W. Bush is effusively praising Bill Clinton.

I think the space-time continuum just wept.

So Easy, Breezy, Beautiful...

V.D. Hanson is the kind of person who can give you a thousand words where a hundred would have sufficed and where zero would have been optimal. After far too much time spent pretending that detailing exactly why bin Laden is evil is a substitute for explaining how to fight him, Hanson blows off the entirety of the fight against terrorism with this line:

If you can guess who he blames this on without looking at the article...well, you've been paying attention the past few decades. (It's Democrats, in case anyone was racking their brain.)

But really - we can "easily win" the war on terror? In what universe? It's a worldwide fight against a series of shadowy, stateless terror cells who can move and recruit under the radar of even the best intelligence, who can reshape and reform, and strike in unpredictable ways. How easy is "easy"?

Can gross incompetence get you kicked out of the punditariat?

Dear Arabs

I apologize to the Arab world on behalf of all people with the sanity and decency to think that this stream of intellectual diarrhea is completely counterproductive.

Particularly since this college professor appears to conflate all Arabs with Muslim extremists, along with this message - to ARABS:

Yes. Dumbass with the inability to differentiate between Arabs (one of whom is our Secretary of Energy) and al-Qaeda deigns to speak for the rest of America. Or maybe it's just that wacky part of America that wants to take over South Carolina and secede so that white Christians, the only truly civilized people, can run a country unto themselves.

Congratulations, Mike, you just became the Douche of the Week.

There's Burning In My Pants

Can we just schedule a ceremonial proposal and failure of a flag-burning amendment each August? (Hey, it would give the month some sort of official tradition besides the entire country either going on vacation or sweating its ass off.)

Congress is bringing the flag burning amendment up, again, and I really do think Russ Feingold has it right:

The proposed language of the amendment also makes me wonder what all it covers and how, exactly, it can be applied.

What constitutes "physical desecration"? Sure, we all know about flag-burning, etc. - but look at the flag code.

Is this going to constitute "physical desecration" of the flag? And if so...this is going to ream the hell out of a lot of "patriotic" advertisements. It's a hard amendment to debate, because besides flag-burning, most people seem to have no idea exactly what this will cover in terms of flag treatment.

On The Teevee

Small question: every time Bill Clinton does anything meriting news coverage, I see numerous opinioneers on television, in print and on the internet moan and piss and whine about how Bill Clinton always wants attention.

For instance, on American Morning, Jack Crotchety...err, Cafferty, is running a viewer-response series on Clinton's impending book and tour. Now, here's the thing - they already covered the story. It featured no speech or announcement by Bill Clinton, no major event. It was simply a routine press release, reported in 30 seconds or less, and they could move on from it. Instead, viewer after viewer writes in complaining about all the attention Bill Clinton wants, how the Democratic party will have to "bow down and kiss his ring", and Cafferty's "everyman" disgust at how much coverage the book will merit (somehow missing the overkill Reagasm from last week in his criticism of the book's release).

In short - yes, Bill Clinton will steal the spotlight if you keep running hours of freaking coverage about how he's going to steal the spotlight.

Next up on MSNBC: Does the media do too much navel gazing? Three hours of insider debate, coming up!

The Idjit Brigade Is Tuning Up The War Machine

The Red Cross has issued an ultimatum against the U.S. - either charge Saddam by June 30th, or free him.

The People Not Worth Listening To will, of course, call this "pro-dictator", note that the Red Cross was the organization that originally filed many of the independent torture investigations at Abu Ghraib (along with the revelation that many of the prisoners held there were innocent), declare them pro-Saddam and move on.

They have coping issues. If we just let them rant in the corner, eventually they'll just burn themselves out, and the rest of us can deal with issues like civilized people.

Long story short, the Red Cross is right. First, it shouldn't be difficult to find something to hold Saddam on right now, so I don't expect that task will tax us too much. More importantly, though, we're America. We do give criminals rights. It doesn't matter if it's Joe Bumbler from Peoria who held up a Stop N' Shop or Saddam - we're a nation of set, determined laws that afford those charged with crimes certain rights and expectations, regardless of what they've done.

Saddam's bad, Saddam's evil, yes - but we don't throw the law to the side because someone's really, really bad. It's that law, that system of rules and regulations, that makes us justified and right in prosecuting and punishing those people who do evil things. (Why do I predict any number of trolling responses asking me if I believe we're as bad as Saddam if we don't charge him by June 30th?)

We still have some time left to pretend as if the mores of international law actually matter when George W. Bush is in charge, at least until someone who does respect it is in charge.

Blogging as Regurgitation

Kevin's got a confession:

Why Geneva

Unlearned hand has a great post on why the Geneva Convention is so important.

Hint -- Following it helps us.

Second Hint -- By breaking it, the Bush Government has probably sacrificed quite a few American lives.

Comforting

John Kerry's not a bad Catholic. JFK would take orders from the Pope. Combine the two and who do you get?

Actual Experts Against Bush

Unfortunately, since every single one of these guys is a partisan Democratic plant secretly working for Kerry, we can't trust them. Where's Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, now that we're on that topic...?

Although I'm happy these guys are doing this so far in advance of the election (five months out, it's hard to say they're jumping on a bandwagon, even if Kerry has a bit of steam), I find my estimation of the press's inability to cover anything non-conservative superceded on a daily basis. Besides the obvious partisan attack that's going to come out as referenced above, it's simply going to be put in a false dialogue with folks like Ted Sampley and SBVFT.

That is, of course, if it's even recognized at all. The critique is a wee bit past its sell-by date in terms of maximum effectiveness, and I'm more interested to see if anyone involved in this has the PR savvy to make anyone involved a political household name without seeming like a Kerry shill.

To be fair, even the impact of the anti-Kerry groups has been rather muted, limited (for now) mainly to right-wing organelles and blogs. But, unlike those groups, these are actual people with credibility on their issue. I'd hate to see them covered with the anti-Kerry groups, but worse yet, I'd hate to see them dismissed with the anti-Kerry groups.

McCain Sayeth Nay

That Kerry offered McCain the Vice-Presidency and McCain refused must be the most well-leaked secret of all time. It'd make sense if only McCain aides were doing the leaking as the tale embarrasses Kerry somewhat (or could be seen to), but Democratic officials and Kerry aides have both been identified as sources. So what's going on?

My feeling is that Kerry's side made the leak for two reasons. First to show that Kerry had reached out across the aisle and made the overture everyone was hoping he would and second to tell the world that McCain had firmly and totally rejected it. The pitfall for Kerry was McCain speculation rising before his VP pick and making whomever he chose seem a formulaic letdown in comparison. With a press hungry for McCain stories, you can envision Chris Matthews bloviating on why he didn't make the bipartisan pick, why McCain would have been better, etc on the very night Kerry's VP was unveiled. Such a media response would blunt both the impact and the lift of Kerry's choice and destroy whatever message the campaign wants to send. Puncturing the balloon now should inoculate the chattering class from continued speculation and thus from public disappointment when the pick is unveiled to be someone other than McCain.

Vote Number 6?

Who was "Triple X"?

As we all know, this story isn't going anywhere, as it was just six independent soldiers...or, uh, seven.

Nader's Folly

It looks like Ralph Nader may be steering the ship U.S.S. Bush's Election into dangerous waters:

I do eagely anticipate this getting picked up by the LMB crowd as evidence that some perfidious pro-Kerry sentiment at the Post is ruining Nader's campaign.

Teehee

Heh...heh, heh...

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

(Via Sadly, No.)

Whimper...

Matthew Yglesias misses a pretty big portion of the estate tax debate in this post.

While a more honest version of the debate, it's not the one that the estate tax/"death tax" is focused on. Proponents of its repeal focus on the supposed unfairness of the tax - sure, it doesn't affect a lot of people, but those it does affect are poor, ailing Farmer Jones and his kids, Missy-Ellen, Sue and Bobby. It's an extension of babies-and-puppies campaigning, declaring that whatever you're railing against will hurt these most blameless of agents.

We're supposed to look at the doe-eyed children of Midwestern farmers and cry, gently, on the inside (never on the outside, because we're men, except for the women)...and then repeal this unfair "death tax", lest these kids lose everything their parents worked for. As long as we define "everything" as everything over $1.5 million. It only works as a debate because it's totally fictionalized.

(And because someone totally misread this in comments - there's no way to interpret this as an attack on Midwestern farmers. It's an attack on those who use these fictional heartland families driven to the poorhouse by the estate tax to justify its repeal, despite the fact they don't exist.)

The Problem Isn't Media Bias

The problem is dumbass articles like this.

Guess what? John Kerry's a guy running for President! He goes places! He does stuff! He makes sometimes awkward references to local people and events! He does a lot of different things depending on what his schedule and campaign requires.

This article wouldn't even meet the journalistic standards of Teen People, for God's sake.

CLASHPOINT!

I was tempted when I started reading Doug Giles to scream out "Clashpoint" everytime someone made a tortured pop-culture analogy that went nowhere, but nobody else got it, and I started to feel like Giles, unintentionally - insane and irrelevant.

Today's column reaches a level of specialness that the special themselves rarely attain - special nirvana, as it were.

Kids, that entire paragraph is an example of when vocabulary is not your friend. Besides the utterly terrible prose stylings, note that Giles insults this hypothetical person's weight as a part of his critique. This week's CLASHPOINT?

Apparently, anyone can get ordained these days.

Coinage

In order for this analogy to work, well, first anything involved in it would have to be true.

But, more importantly, the above is only true if one notes that the impurities int the coins were actually fabricated by people upset with the kingdom. In fact the "impurities" people are told to look for are actually so irrelevant to the actual value of the information that any "fix" would only serve to cement its devaluing.

I'm reading The Republican Noise Machine now. The people who believe in "liberal media bias" are, themselves, doing more to corrupt the sanctity of the information we receive than any putative liberals running around the media, making sure we always see George W. Bush followed by an image of a rotting goat carcass.

It's gotten to the point where what we're supposed to expect our media to do is to tell us what people are saying about what's going on, rather than what's going on. Pervasive liberal bias is everywhere pervasive conservative bias isn't (the true roots of the idea), and instead of asking for a media that provides us a fuller and more accurate idea of the events of the day...we're being pushed towards a media that provides us a more limited and more conservative idea of how to perceive the events of the day.

They're getting very good at making people think there are impurities everywhere - the problem is, the more successful they are, the less likely it is that anyone will trust any coin again. There are times where I just want to give the whole LMB movement the sardonic slow clap until they walk away in shame.

Oh, wait, they have none of that. Bastards.

Welcoming the Faithful

Via Political Wire, we get this WaPo article chronicling the Religious Left's efforts to reenter the debate and gain some prominence.

The ridiculous comment post-South Dakota that Republicans would have won if Native Americans didn't exist (something we did our best to make true a couple centuries ago) was made all the more laughable by the fact that Republicans rely on evangelicals -- of every group, they are the largest with rock-hard party allegiance, breaking 77% for Bush. As Lexington pointed out in this weeks Economist (subscription only), Democrats enjoy similarly ardent support among self-proclaimed secularists; the problem is that atheists and agnostics make up a comparably small percentage of the country and they're pretty reviled by most Americans (40% say they'd never vote for an atheist, making the godless place first among politically rejected groups), support from them means little electorally and less symbolically.

The trends, however, are against the Republicans. As you move down the scale from frequent churchgoers to atheists, you encounter a pretty linear trend away from the right and towards Democrats, ending with our buddies the secularists. As religion in America is, in fits and starts, progressing towards greater diversity and weaker identification (the current evangelical revival notwithstanding, I think it's the pendulum-swinging exception that proves the rule. Decades ago, such church numbers would have been expected, now they're amazing), Republicans will have to evolve or lose support. That's what makes the resurgence of the Religious Left so critical; groups in flux need structures to enter.

It's a lesson that Dean's movement should have taught us. While Nader's voters went with the Greens in 2000, Dean created a structure within the "hated" Democratic Party that sucked the wind out of Ralph's sails and attracted a huge number of his former followers. Kucinich's campaign had a similar affect, garnering support from many former Green's aware that their party wasn't worth spit any longer. It was Nader's disappointing affect in 2000 that loosened his base, but it was the prominence of progressives in our Party that allowed them to come here. Similarly, we must have a visible religious element to our side if we expect the faithful to make their home here.

That's why the ideas and tone of The Right Christians and Amy Sullivan are so important -- if we're ever to make up our deficit with church-going voters, we're going to have to give them a space in which to belong; raising the profile of our religious allies, even if they're not a major part of our electoral calculus, does exactly that.

Now, back to my regularly scheduled packing.

Squash The Liberalism

I'm really not sure if this is intentional, but this Opinion Journal piece seems to break down American politics into a battle between the Great Society and Reaganism - but does so by portraying one as a series of reforms and progress, and the other as an essentially negative response to those reforms.

It's not that it's not true, but instead that conservatives rarely admit that the crux of modern conservatism, the "idea mojo", as it were, is basically a response to someone else's ideas. Reagan's sunny optimism was the optimism of the destroyer. He wanted to end things, and was incredibly positive in that regard...but the idea themselves weren't particularly new. Liberals wanted to do things. Reagan wanted to stop liberals. That's the political battle that continues today, all spinning aside.

Just strange that it would be so openly admitted as a positive.

Pistons Win, You, You...Lakers Fan

Pistons 88, Lakers 68.

I hereby revise my Lakers victory prediction to a Pistons victory prediction, fearlessly revising where no man has revised before, except for all the other people who have done so.

Come On, Ride The Train

I've had a morbid fascination with reading The End of Racism by Dinesh D'Souza for a while, mainly because I'm a masochist for shit like this, and also because it's one of those conservative "studies" that says a lot more about how many conservatives relate to race than George Bush hugging every minority in the lower 48.

Reading this Michael Bérubé entry, I realize - this is the Grand Funk Railroad of bullshit. The Aryan Bootsy Collins follows this book around, telling you how funktabularly racist the whole thing is, that in the annals of funky racism, this is the funkiest and the most racist.

The parts I found most appalling:

And he's now employed by the liberal CNN. Bérubé raises a point that was also discussed here yesterday - for all the talk of how conservative ideas are silenced and squashed at liberal universities, folks like D'Souza and Shapiro not only came out of those institutions on the far right, they honed that conservatism noisily (and profitably) while at their schools. Apparently, they only quash the sensible conservatives - the ignorant, paranoid extremists make it through just fine.

48-2 Or Bust!

I like reading the New York Post, because it's like one of those newspapers in a poorly written alternate history story. The author is valiantly trying to portray what you're reading as someone else's factual account of an in-universe story, but instead it just reads like the author trying to use an in-context device to further the narrative.

Case in point, Deborah Orin's piece predicting a Bush landslide (that's one we haven't heard since Dean's ascendancy). Now, besides there not really being any indication that things are, you know, actually turning Bush's way, she unleashes this whopper on us:

I would think he'd be able to keep a face set in stone, because he's perfectly accurate in his assessment. Kerry's been saying this for months, Bush finally did it - and it worked!

Alas, in any half-cocked theory, there must be a grain of evidence...and what better than an internet political stock market?

Luckily, it's never been wrong.

Well, just wait until Kerry gets his al-Canvassers out on the streets, along with his new grassroots coordinator, Osama bin Votin. Then, the Bush landslide will open up.

Smartier Than Thou

Salon does a story about Nader's support from Republicans today. Now, the author really can't find any Nader Republicans (which doesn't surprise me - Nader's most energetic and therefore visible support is likely to come from the left, although Nader Republicans probably do exist). But one Nader supporter seems to have a view of John Kerry - who most of the campaign seems to be about - that just makes no sense.

Uh...Kerry went to Boston College Law. He was a prosecutor in Middlesex Country. He's been a Senator for 20 years. I'd imagine that his knowledge of American government history is none too shabby, and chances are he at least knows a little about corporations, being on committees for Small Business and Entrepreneurship, Commerce, Science and Transportation, and sub-committees for Oceans, Fisheries, the Environment, Communications, Transportation, Finance, Health Care, and International Trade, as well as Foreign Relations.

Does Mr. DiCara actually know anything about John Kerry? Why would anyone in their right mind say that a man who's never been elected to public office knows more about Washington than a person who's been a senator for two decades?

There's also an interesting bit on the fourth page about how Nader, who seems to believe that Republicans will support him in substantial numbers, refuses to admit that Republicans are bankrolling him in substantial numbers. Wouldn't that be expected if he has such a strong Republican appeal?

The thing about Nader is that his relative position to the other candidates allows him to make an exceptionalist appeal, but he's running a campaign just like Kerry and Bush are. He has inconsistencies, he advocates a stronger message than he has any real hope of getting accomplished even if he were to take office, and he is a political creature driven by political motivation.

I'd be able to believe Nader is promoting "the truth" about American politics moreso if he were able to face the truth about his campaign and the realities surrounding it. As it is, he's probably also going to claim that he knows more about piloting a swiftboat than Kerry does, too.

Learndeded

Ben Shapiro, on education:

Shapiro went to UCLA. Ann Coulter went to Cornell. Dinesh D'Souza went to Dartmouth. If they are what happens after the assault of the liberal campus, either they weren't assaulted with that much liberalism, or they're complete fucking incompetents who consider having to walk past a newsstand that contains The Nation or Cosmo to be a liberal assault.

If we are to judge the depth of the college campus's pervasive liberal bias by the honed and refined ideologies of those crusaders against them, it doesn't really reflect well on most of them, one way or the other. Shapiro's conservatism seems like almost a comical parody of campus liberalism, substituting Ann Coulter for Huey Long or William F. Buckley for Howard Zinn. I could understand if he were being held up by someone else as a satirical example of what would happen if the university system were as conservative as they think it is liberal, but as a credible response himself to campus liberalism? Fat chance.

You Sunk My Battleship...

Hugh Hewitt: Democrats are attacking John Ashcroft over the Bush Administration's "Torture's Okay If We Do It" memo because Reagan was great, and therefore right. Also, Reagan's legacy has but one simple rule: if Republicans don't like it, it doesn't matter.

One has to wonder how tripling the national deficit and committing a series of crimes that resulted in 32 separate criminal convictions are "pebbles against the battleship" of a legacy. By the way, I know a Latvian who doesn't like Ronald Reagan (seriously). Would that be throwing a Latvian at the battleship, then? How are Latvians as projectiles? He seems like he'd be a bit squooshy.

No Bills Posted

Carpeicthus points out that we do have several incompetent and just plain bad Presidents on our money.

Grant and Jackson are pretty bad choices for the bills, but it's always hard to think of who should be on them in their stead. I'd volunteer the Roosevelts, myself.

Looking back at the history of bill designs and how presidents were chosen for them, it seems as if Reagan's best chance to get on a bill would be if there were a new denomination drawn up in the very near future. Next up: Reagan on the three?

No Elevators

Neoconservatives (they exist!) are going through some tough times, the L.A. Times reports.

Interestingly, the picture the group paints of itself is a movement with a broad-based idea for reform that could only get a couple of facets of the idea through. In appealing to traditional conservatives (and even attaining several seats at the table), only part of the message got through, the rest filled in either by blatant political considerations or else the idea that one radical new step deserved another, even if it worked against the actual neocon plan.

There was an idea that this could be a perfect, utopian war (as oxymoronic as that might seem). The idea is that this wasn't a purely neoconservative plan, but instead neoconservatism as pushed through the lens of Bush conservatism - which isn't actually so much conservatism as it is a series of really bad political ideas Bush is trying to shoehorn into a conservative tradition - and the resulting policy was the mess we got in Iraq.

Would a "pure" neoconservative plan have been better? Possibly, possibly not. I lean towards not, if only because so many of the errors in this misadventure had to do with an overwhelming desire to be right, and impressively so. It was a display of our exceptional might to the Middle East, and I'm not confident that the neoconservative minds behind this plan would have been any less hubristic and any less foolhardy than the Bush folks were.

Of course, I also get the distinct feeling that much of the above is so much spin, the architects blaming the construction crew because the blueprint called for a skyscraper without elevators.

The usual Chalabi-defending and anti-semitism charges pop up towards the end of the piece, but it's very interesting watching the rift and the blame develop, particularly as the Bush conservatives are now in charge of seeing the neoconservative plan through to the end, with the distaste for the ideology still apparently bitter in their mouths. We weren't equipped to remake the world through force, but they tried, and it's a lot harder than any of them thought it would be. And now, the neocons are bringing out the big guns - the C-word.

One can only hope.

Zell Watch

Republicans want Zell Miller to speak at the Republican National Convention.

If he does, I ask all media outlets to refer to him as Republican Senator Zell Miller. How little can you do for a political party and still be considered a part of it? The man votes Republican. He campaigns for Republicans. Republicans want him to speak at their defining Republican event.

You can't establish bipartisan credentials when there's only one party.

Moving

I apologize for the infrequency of my posts over the past few days, finals have called. Unfortunately, the next few will be even worse. I'm helping my girlfriend move today and moving myself tomorrow. Normal posting will resume for me this weekend/Monday. Until then, Jesse's got lots of pop-culture references for ya.

Failure In Success's Clothing

Hey. Remember how Muammar el-Qaddafi had his big epiphany recently, swearing off terrorism (scouts' honor!), it being the perfect example of how the Iraq War was serving to change attitudes in the Middle East and turn former supporters of terrorism towards the light. Except that Qaddafi's government was coming up with a plan to assassinate the ruler of Saudi Arabia and destabilize the country even as he was negotiating with us.

I'm no fan of Saudi Arabia, a kingdom that itself has far too many non-incidental ties to terrorism, but there's an incredible danger in declaring victory over terrorism too quickly, as seems to have happened with Libya. They made overtures towards being all freedom-and-lighty, and it was taken as an example by some of how the Iraq war was the Big Democracy Party (look, bear is dancing!), and Libya was just going to be the first to the table.

To his credit, Qaddafi remarked, "What do you think this is, a dictatorship? Sometimes people do things I don't know about! What can I do? I don't want to be the bad guy here."

Kerry Up?

Kerry's opened up a solid lead on President Bush.

This is the first time since immediately after Super Tuesday that I can remember Kerry having this large of a lead, to the point where in a two-person race he actually has the majority of the votes. I'm really not sure what's bringing him up and Bush down, especially considering that recent events should have at the very least either maintained a margin of error status quo or pushed Bush up a little bit.

It's a hard week to determine how current events are effecting the race for the presidency, considering that Reagan's dominating every other event in the news. I'm going to wait until next week to see if this is the beginning or middle of a trend for Kerry, or simply a poll taken with people moving to Kerry as Bush is removed from the spotlight.

(Oh, and Nader got four points in the three-way race.)

F--k 'Em, Right!

Ah, Enron. Remember the simpler days, when we thought they were just a big crooked corporation trying to destroy California instead of a big crooked corporation trying to destroy the entire system of capitalism?

Well, you can relive all of Enron's greatest hits with the Monsters of Fake Money compilation set, including the brand-new hit, "This Is Where California Breaks"!

I may be remembering incorrectly, but wasn't Gray Davis maligned by Republicans for saying that energy companies gouged the hell out of the state?

I Want This Book

Take Them At Their Words, a compendium of the best of the worst over the past ten years from the right wing.

My favorite quote of those excerpted?

Actually, hell, they're all my favorite. Buy it here.

I'm Special, Too

I've been thinking about "special rights" recently, particularly in light of a recent conversation/argument I had with an opponent of same-sex marriage. The fallback position was always that the government should stay out of granting "special rights" and instead try to enforce equality for all - everyone should have the same rights.

Besides the obvious point that we do grant and restrict certain rights in any number of ways based on simple pragmatic rationales, I was struck by something. The dichotomy between heterosexual and homosexual marriages was that the former was a "universal" right, and the latter was a "special" right. In a side-by-side comparison, same-sex marriage is exactly as restrictive as heterosexual marriage. More importantly, under proposed rules for same-sex marriage, anyone can get one.

The entire point of a "special right" is that it's purposefully constrained to one or more groups separate from Americans as a whole. Black people, Native Americans, the elderly, women, etc. If we take the presupposition that heterosexual marriage isn't a "special right" because it is available to all people to its logical end, same-sex marriage isn't a "special right" either, as it's available to anyone to anyone who meets the exact same criteria as heterosexual marriage, with one person's gender reversed. Will any heterosexual person get married to someone of their same gender? Very likely not. But that doesn't mean it's not open to everyone should they desire it. There's no gay test, just as there's no straight test for hetero marriage.

Also, we had a rather humorous interaction where she said studies conclusively showed same-sex marriages were bad for kids, and when I asked for an example of a study, I was given the nouveau-classic answer, "It was during my twelve years of education that I learned it." No actual study, despite their having seen apparently many. (I'm not saying such studies don't exist - politically motivated science comes in all flavors. But if you cite factual evidence, you should be able to provide it.)

I just needed to live out her entire life, and apparently the light at the end of the tunnel was the Book of Anti-Gay Studies, invisible to all but her, John Derbyshire, and Rick Santorum.

Killing the Middle

My friend Matt Stoller has a brilliant post simply eviscerating moderate Democrats (the Yglesias, Drum, Marshall and Kleiman group) and, moments thereafter, another taking down Daniel Drezner. I neither agree nor disagree with all the points he makes, but I'm repelled by the overall sentiment.

It's important to note that brilliance alone doesn't confer accuracy. The smartest among us have fallen on every side of every idea, frequently ruining lands through the promotion of terrible forms of government and occasionally finding genocide the fruit of their idealism. The problem, generally speaking, is that these minds become isolated, be it in circles of sycophants and comrades or small rooms with lots of books. What Matt attacks moderate Democrats (of which I consider myself one) for is twofold -- first and foremost, the extension of good faith towards the other side. As he puts it, "a belief in the legitimacy of the last ten years of governance" and the assumption that "this struggle is between two legitimate political parties mediated by well-functioning institutions". Secondly, fraternizing with the enemy ("they have lots of Republican sources and frequently share the confidence of 'Republican friends'") is another habit of these traitors.

The first point, referring to the reprehensible hardball employed by Gingrich to hamstring Clinton and the take-no-prisoners attitude the Bush Campaign held towards Florida, seems hypocritical to me. After all, what else is Matt suggesting then for us to play harder? His fire is aimed at the most civil of our side and -- with Drezner -- the most reasonable of theirs. Matt is effectively arguing for us to become even less legitimate than they -- to launch the same investigations, to apply the same pressure, to be similarly ruthless. The only difference is that we are the Left, ipso facto our hardball is good, our investigations warranted, our pressure deserved.

Strangely, the moderates Stoller concentrates on are three writers at unabashedly progressive publications and two academics heavily involved in policy. Five people who're actively, strongly working to actualize their visions of society. Their crime doesn't seem ideological so much as associational -- it's not their policies he finds odious, but the fact that they believe the fight over politics exists in a depersonalized realm. Their opponents aren't monsters despite the vicious and varied opposition they provide; come day's end, everyone can kick back a beer. For Matt, that's antithetical. Beer is for believers, enemies deserve the sword.

I don't think Matt actually understands the world he's proposing here. There's a nonpartisan good in respecting your opponents no matter how much you despise their views, it's the same argument undergirding the First Amendment. Righteousness is always in the eye of the beholder, once you believe that it's tangibly possessed in your pocket and all means are justified in protecting it, you've stepped into the same room that history's greatest monsters have inhabited. Once you destroy the middle, all you're left with are the self-appointed guardians of righteousness -- the leftists, the conservatives, the fascists, the communists, the racists, the traditionalists, the theocrats, the monarchs, the oligarchs.

If the plan is to play rougher, if Matt really wishes that the Drums and Drezners of the world would simply recede from the scene he better be damn sure he's going to win, because if he doesn't the only people left to pick up the pieces will be his radical counterparts. Such situations are never pleasant for the losers. Further, Matt better be damn sure he's right, because if he's wrong there'll be no one around to tell him.

Despite acknowledging this at the beginning of his polemic, Matt ignores it for the rest. His reasoning appears to be that moderates make us lose. The idea that we need to play "harder" than they do to win is shit. Plain and simple. Clinton was integral to his destruction -- whenever the match has high stakes you need to be careful. We can win by being better than they are (Gore just about did it) and exposing their side as the ideologues Stoller wants to populate the left with. Republicans hold a handful of seats in the House, two Senators and a flailing presidency over us. Where Matt paints the apocalypse, the facts show us on the upswing of a mild power change. I don't like the tax cuts and I don't like who's fighting the war -- but damned if I can't believe that others do, and strike me down if I claim to have all the answers or am so confident in my truth that I brook no internal debate, condemn all attempts at compromise and work solely towards my enemy's destruction. The world I would build would be just as one-sided as the one I hated, and I would have turned into the mirror image of my enemy.

More from Matt Yglesias, Daniel Drezner and Seeing the Forest.

Space Case

Lying Congressmen, monarchs, self-appointed messiahs, money, deceit, politicians and Stalin. The only time this many good ingredients come together are when someone takes on Moonie. Lucky for us, John Gorenfeld has done just that in an article explaining how Moon is consolidating his power and the ridiculous role our elected officials are playing to help him.

Also, don't miss this Moonie-produced movie -- it's the year's best surrealist art. Scroll over to 12:44 and -- wait! What's that? -- our congressmen give the megalomaniac a crown.

Sudan

Gary Farber's been all over Sudan recently, with posts here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Read, and you can also donate to Oxfam to help, one of those liberal relief organizations that only criticizes America and never pays attention to things like Sudan.

No Terror Here, No Sir

Via Political Wire, the State Department is revising its 2003 report on terror attacks.

But, you know, it's probably not all that big, right?

Now, the question might be, how was this error arrived at? In part, it cited a 90% drop in "minor" terror attacks - usually ones where nobody dies - but it also did something very strange, considering the way the adminstration defines the War on Terror. If you were ask anybody at the White House or the Pentagon where the central front in the War on Terror is, many, if not most, would say Iraq. Yet, for some reason, no acts of terrorism in Iraq are being counted.

Yep. When terrorists attack,it's not actually a terrorist attack. If we need to manipulate our assessment of and response to terror to make Bush look successful, well, those are just the sacrifices of war.

UPDATE: Robert Garcia Tagorda is right, but there's still a problem with the idea that terrorists are committing attacks, and it's not reflected in the report. If the metric itself can't measure certain terrorist activities, then there's a problem with the metric. I understand that the metric doesn't cover many of the attacks on coalition forces, it doesn't accurately reflect the activities and efforts of terrorist organizations. They may not measure certain types of attacks, but that's a problem with the tool and as such, it's disingenuous to portray it as an accurate, full measure of terrorism.

It's good to maintain a consistent comparitive measure across the years - if the measure still retains its usefulness. The switchover in terrorist activities to things not covered by the definition of terrorism doesn't absolve them of not measuring the attacks. If the measure doesn't work, maybe it's time to redefine the measure so that it does.

Oh, Ann Coulter Said Something

Bill O'Reilly interviews Ann Coulter. Complete detachment from reality ensues.

O'Reilly actually does a surprisingly non-completely awful job, although she still doesn't get the patented O'Reilly "pinhead" treatment that she deserves. It's amazing how irrelevant she seems when she isn't pushing a supposedly factual tome.

That Liberal C-SPAN

Campaign Desk raises a good point - how is it that CSPAN is found credible by only 23% of Republicans? (Less than CNN!) Other than Washington Journal, pretty much all the channel does of note is transmit footage of various government functions. The network's also so rigorously tit-for-tat in its commentary that it's difficult to even fault it on the idea of partisan balance. It might just be that a lot of people registered "no opinion", which would make sense. But if it actually stands up to other relative credibility ratings...why?

Like A Bank That Just Got Robbed - No Change

Will Ronald Reagan's death from Alzheimer's sway anti-stem cell Republicans?

Not if Laura Bush is any indication.

I'm not even sure why the question was asked - Reagan's suffering in life didn't sway them, why would his death?

Already Drawn Once

Colorado Republicans' redistricting plan was rejected by the Supreme Court yesterday.

Good job, Supremos. There's a second court case on the same issue, however, that Republicans are hoping will yield a different result. Off-year redistricting and gerrymandering are bad if our guys or their guys are doing it. Imagine if state legistlatures could simply redraw maps whenever things weren't going their way based on electoral results and population shifts to make sure that the makeup of the House never changes. It would not only be anti-democratic, but it would make the job of our elected representatives ensuring that our voices are never truly heard.

Boo on Colorado's legislature. And Texas'. And Ohio's.

Mean Ol' Mr. Bush

The sources are all anonymous so it should be taken with a grain of salt, but this article on internal dissatisfaction with Bush is really, really worth reading:

Digging Til The Fingers Break Off

And following up my previous post, Brent Bozell decides that since he can't find anything to complain about in the coverage of Reagan's death now, he has to go back to the 1980s to dig up them saying bad things about him.

Amazingly, during the entire period from 1980 to 1992, negative things were said about Ronald Reagan's time in office. Also, Brent was apparently practicing for his MRC job well before he ever founded the group in 1987.

There is no common ground on which to correct this. Bozell has already decided to just lie his way through the past decade-plus, so correcting him has virtually no point. Instead, let us point his unrelenting, un-Reaganlike negativity in the face of the great optimist's death and ask - What Would Ronnie Think?

Even In Victory, Defeat

The Pew Center's latest survey on media perception and partisan consumption is out, and I predict a lot of weirdly blinkered reaction to it on the "librul media bias" side. (Case in point, here.)

The most striking thing about the report is how the liberal media bias push has reduced confidence in all media. If nothing else, it's been the most successful victimization campaign of the past couple of decades, and also the most inconsequential - looking at most complaints about liberal media bias, the ones that don't boil down to utterly useless word counts generally tend to ask not for actual "fair and balanced" news, but instead an overt conservative news bias.

The cited post above says one thing that just can't go without comment.

Um...no. For Pete's sake - Dick Cheney has said Fox News is his primary news source. The liberal media bias campaign extends far beyond Limbaugh and O'Reilly and the Internet - the Times has been assailed for years as a liberal network, as has CNN, CBS, ABC, NBC, etc. One of the utterly dishonest backbones of the LMB idea is that conservative ideas are somehow shut out of mainstream discussion. So entrenched is this idea that many conservatives complain about this in the course of mainstream discussion.

Anybody remember when Ann Coulter wrote about how the mainstream media shuts out conservatives and conservative ideas, and promoted the book in several hundred mainstream media outlets?

Or how Bernie Goldberg's anti-Dan Rather rant got a lot more play than the inconvenient fact that the same liberal-by-anecdote CBS News operation that shuts out conservatives gave Goldberg a rather cushy retirement package after he broke his contract by criticizing them?

How many more people know about Jayson Blair because he fit the narrative of liberal media bias than know about Jack Kelley or Judy Miller, despite their journalistic misdeeds influencing the course of media coverage and world events in a conservative-friendly direction?

What conservatives don't seem able or willing to realize is that the idea of "liberal media bias" is a fundamentally promoted and rarely investigated aspect of all news perception, thanks to a willfull and conscious effort on the part of virtually every conservative with a forum. If you haven't run into someone promoting the idea of liberal media bias, chances are you just aren't a media consumer.

But this victory can never be acknowledged. The entire point of the idea is that it's something that only a few enlightened people (relatively speaking) know about. You're not ever supposed to beat the liberal media, because the fundamental premise of your ideas is that you're a revolutionary against a controlling power. It's why Rush Limbaugh is an "entertainer". If he acknowledged that he was an influential media voice, he'd have to hold himself to the same standards that he holds the modern conservative version of "the man". They've succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, to the point where distrust in all media is higher, and the surrogates that have popped up to counter the bias simply extend it further in the opposite direction.

People distrust the media for being liberal when it's not, and extend the invitation for it to be as conservative as it allegedly was liberal. And people actually trust the new conservative media less than they do the "liberal" media - but due to the false dichotomy, they're both seen as necessary and/or countervailing pieces of a complete media puzzle. And they're simply not.

Way to build up faith in traditional institutions. That conservative ideology is serving...who well, again?

Legislator 7:15

Can somebody remind me which Gospel counseled achieving by deceit what you couldn't pass with transparency? I keep trying to remember, but I just get stuck on the spirit of that whole bearing false witness thing:

Pictorial Representation Of The Self

In case you were wondering how I spent most of the downtime last week, here's a picture of me engaged in my favorite activity - being on hold.

NBA Finals, Game 2

Okay, so the Tampa Bay Lightning won the Stanley Cup over the Calgary Flames. Now I know how basketball fans must have felt when the Bullets and the Sonics were the NBA's premier matchup two years in row. Not really a knock against Calgary - but hockey champions from Tampa Bay? Wha?

Since that's about the extent of my hockey knowledge, on to Pistons/Lakers Game 2. It's in LA, which means that most of the people who can afford tickets to the game won't start cheering until the fourth quarter when it looks good for the camera.

Sunday's game stood out because it almost seemed like an 80s game plan (minus the scoring) on the part of Detroit. Let a couple of stars score all they want, and shut down the rest of the team. Detroit also brings a guy who can be nastier than Karl Malone (Rasheed Wallace) and a guy who will stand up to Shaq without fouling him every fifteen seconds (Ben Wallace).

I still can't shake the feeling that the Lakers will win, though, if only because it fits the Lakers narrative (and as much as sports fans wrangle over statistics and matchups, we like stories more than the worst soap opera addict). Lakers will probably win tonight, unless they don't, in which case they may or may not win in the next game. That's my bold prediction, and I'm sticking to it no matter what anyone might say.

Right Turn, Wrong Turn?

There's been a lot of debate over whether or not George Bush will profit from Reagan's death (that's what it is, in a nutshell). The idea would be germane, except for one small problem.

These guys.

They have a lot more practice, and go much farther out than Bush will go, or will get attention for even with the podium of the presidency. Bush may invoke Reagan in campaign speeches, but these guys are the ones who will be pushing the big-ticket news items like putting Reagan on Mount Rushmore, or the dime, the ten, the twenty, probably any new federal building that comes down the pike (ironically enough), as well as a bevy of other proposals, serious and ludicrous. In attempting to capture Reagan's legacy, Bush will be in competition with many of the people who should be his natural supporters.

Bush probably will make a decidedly Reaganesque turn (and fail, as he's really not Ronald Reagan as a politician or as an ideologue). Perhaps even more interesting than the debate over who gets the Reagan mojo is trying to figure out how Bush will adopt Reagan's mythology without reminding everyone that in most substantive ways, he doesn't measure up. He's got the tax cuts, but that's about it. In terms of Reagan's major themes, he's already written off the small-government theme, on national security he's up-and-down - yay, democracy through force, boo, the sucking at it - and his bond with the American people has more to do with being in the right place at the right time and aggressively reminding people of it.

I'm not even sure Bush can make a credible first step in this direction, let alone make it succeed.

And I Destroyed It

Day by Day tries to come up with pithy shit, most others tend to flush theirs.

Can someone sit down and tell us what is and isn't acceptable political discourse around Reagan's death? At this point, I think I'm allowed to call someone a donkey-raping assmaster as long as Reagan didn't like them, but I can't point out that he used too much Brylcreem sometimes.

(Note: I'm not saying this is what Day by Day is doing. I am, however, pointing out that it seems to be in vogue to raise Reagan up in death by insulting everyone opposed to him.)

Seize The Land

It's when things like this happen in Zimbabwe that I get pissed about both attacks on Democrats who are, by any standard, remarkably capitalist-friendly and the attendant devaluing of actual totalitarian grabs in other countries.

The government, which purported to be on the side of native black Africans, seized land from white farmers without justification, and now they're seizing that same land from the black farmers it was supposed to go to. Neither was a good thing; this is just doubly bad. And if you oppose this? Read the story of David Mpala.

Politicizing Death

Both Bushes are speaking. Margaret Thatcher will get a moment. Clinton and Carter have both been barred from the podium. And your tax dollars are paying for the funeral.

The outrage over Wellstone's memorial service left conservatives positively quivering with anger, but fashioning Reagan's death into a campaign moment for President Bush provokes no such reaction. Keeping Democrats from speaking at the Reagan memorial is a sad display -- on a day set aside for Americans to mourn, only Republicans will comfort. During an event aimed at honoring a President, only the right will be able to offer respect. A State Funeral should be from America, not from a Party.

I also can't let John Cole's surreal analogy pass without comment:

Update: Don't make it this easy, John. Clinton, Carter, or some other Democrat should speak because Reagan won. The moment he went from candidate to President, he went from representing Republicans to Americans. Thus, any taxpayer funded event honoring the man's life should be a nonpartisan, two-party affair. We're in an election year. Handing the podium to a current Republican candidate/president and a former Republican president makes this -- like it or not -- a campaign event. That's reality and it must be accounted for. If you don't believe me, ask yourself how Rove feels about Bush giving Reagan's eulogy; I guarantee he's sees it as manna from heaven. That's why we have equal time laws.

Update 2: Here's Clinton dedicating the Ronald Reagan building. "As I stand within the Reagan Building I am confident that we will again make the right choices for America, that we will take up where President Reagan left off -- to lead freedom's march boldly into the 21st century."

Idiotic? Hardly.

John Cole calls me idiotic for repeating Rumsfeld's statement "It's quite clear to me that we do not have a coherent approach to [terror]."

Cole's inability to argue civilly aside, context doesn't invalidate the criticism, it simply complicates it. The entire quote is:

The US (and our "coalition") has NO comprehensive plan to change the conditions leading to terrorism. We have plans for attacking terrorists, but social conditions lie utterly ignored and unhelpful ideological currents are rendered worse daily as we detonate weddings and torture prisoners. It's not that there are no coherent plans for dealing with the problems, it's that Rumsfeld has consciously ignored them. While he laments the meager funds aimed at starting non-demagogic schools, he runs a policy spending $200 billion to unpopularly occupy a country that didn't birth a single one of the 9/11 terrorists. Instead of changing the schools, he's giving them lesson plans on US Imperialism and Western overreach. That he knows what needs to be done yet doesn't do it makes him either incompetent or counterproductive -- either way, the guy's not doing his job. Criticism of such myopic policy-making isn't "idiotic", blind support of it is.

Update: Hah! Now that's dodging a criticism! Resort to ad hominem's, complaints over misinterpretation and psychological analysis. Refrain from mentioning that what Rumsfeld is begging the world to do he himself is not doing. Ignore that this makes his department an obstacle on the road to global coherence. Forget what hypocrisy means. Get hung up on semantics. Get really angry. Demand that others read what Tagorba says. Forget that Tagorba is simply saying that Rumsfeld is criticizing a global approach. Don't mention that America is part of the globe, thus we are part of a global approach. Be John Cole.

Morals For Ye, None For Me

Larry over at Whoviating points out that the White House's latest defense for torture actually isn't a defense at all. (Ezra posts on this two entries below, as well.)

What really makes me wonder is that Ashcroft, even though he's the Attorney General, is a person who believes that things are wrong even if they're not against the law. Similarly, his party is, in large part, driven by similar ethics. Why would a man coming from his very strict moral and ethical background parse words like this? What he says is technically true - they sought to torture legally, and I'm pretty sure they now reject torture like it was a rat poison margarita.

But isn't it something how a man who finds himself and his ideological movement inordinately capable of condemning any number of legal things is so readily capable of parsing this out of existence?

Politicizing Everything

Omigod. John Kerry is going to be at Reagan's funeral, according to CNN. Why does he have to politicize everything, and be such a showboat about it?

By the way, Bush plans on bringing the entire Harlem Boys Choir to sing "God Bless America" while he dresses up like Uncle Sam and walks around on stilts. It's universally accepted as a classy, understated move.

What Would Ya Say You Do Here?

I am so over this Administration. So Attorney General John Ashcroft knows nothing about the legal memo freeing President Bush from restrictions on torture. Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld laments the fact that we don't have a coherent approach to terrorism.

Exactly what, may I ask, are these people doing all day?

Ain't No Party Like A Denial Party, Cause A Denial Party Don't Stop...

...But if the beat stops poppin', and the discs ain't droppin, then somebody called the cops.

Reader mail from the Corner is like manna from heaven for a partisan fellow such as myself. First, the readers do most of the actual work in terms of content and research for the blog (and the books its figureheads churn out), and the readers also tend to veer towards the side of not actually knowing what they're talking about. Today's discussion is Reagan's popularity. By any consistent measure, Clinton was a more popular president than Reagan. However, the readers at the Corner can't possibly let this travesty against Republicanism stand.

First letter:

So...despite more people liking Clinton than Reagan, Reagan was more popular than Clinton because he won more of the popular vote (keep in mind that by this standard, Al Gore is more popular than George Bush). Also, that three-candidate race in 1980 wasn't anything like the races in 1992 or 1996. The third-party candidate in 1980 got 6.6% of the vote, while in 1992 Perot got 19.0%. Against Reagan's vice president, nonetheless. In 1996, Perot still got more votes than John Anderson did in 1980. Except for all the differences, exactly the same. And you can't even compare congressional Democrats in the 80s to congressional Republicans in the 90s.

The second one, however, is perhaps the best thing ever published on the Corner:

hi al gore wasnt a great campaner and made a lot of mistakes and still got more votes than anyone in any other electione except for reagan in 1984 but when you dont use any punctuation except a misplaced comma it is hard to understand you

i am going to go put down my money for my bede now but when i get back i will post more and show conservatives they are wrong

Reminder

Videogames for sale!

Just Let It Be Run By Voltron

Hamid Karzai, current president of Afghanistan, is casting his lot with the nation's warlords in his bid for a five-year term as Afghanistan's president.

The warlord system seems to have been reinforced by Karzai in a bid to assure stability over progress - he avoids political strife, ensuring his election, while simultaneously assuring that that political strife is avoided throughout his term by not pissing off the people with the guns and the armies by provoking too much reform. And by too much, that seems to be "any".

Now, the promise of the neoconservative plan seemed to be that it bundled hawkery with a commitment to liberal reforms in these countries to stem off the tide of totalitarianism that had made then into such dangerous states in the first place. In Afghanistan, it seems to just be putting a psuedo-democratic statehead in charge of a slightly altered corrupt system. Is that what we went there to do?

Rallyban For The Taliban

Although I don't agree with the ACLU's push to take the cross off of the L.A. County seal, isn't calling them the Taliban that "political hate speech" we hear so much about? Particularly since the ACLU has done more to protect constitutional liberties than almost any other non-governmental entity in America's history?

We're apparently going to be run by the Taliban and turned into the Soviet Union, a weird melding countervailing historical entities, but that doesn't really matter, as the ACLU and L.A. County hate America. Hey, at least they're wearing suits and ties, eh?

The "Left's" Depravity, Take 107-A

Chris Hitchens isn't a useful idiot - he's a useful asshole. He fills a slightly brainier niche than Dennis Miller does, although he's featured the same precipitous dropoff in relevance that Miller has since switching sides. The thing about Hitchens, though, is that for a very long time, he has fervently hated a lot of people, Ronald Reagan among them. (Amazingly, he finishes this backhanded screed with an assault on John Kerry, something unnoticed by most of the conservative critics of the piece in their rush to smack Hitchens back on the left, a position that the past several years in no way support.)

There are people on all sides of the political debate who are going to truly dislike any and every president we have. And my issue with the discussion of Reagan's legacy in the days following his death is that the debate itself has been opened by eulogizing conservatives, but critics of Reagan aren't allowed to participate in it. (I'm talking serious criticism here, not Hitchens' typical "I'm a contrarian, and poop butt smelly on you if you don't believe it - where's the Courvoisier?")

There's a difference between gratuitous personal bashing of the man - Hitchens' piece, or, what I hate most of all, any commentary on his Alzheimer's as somehow deserved or fitting - and actual discussion of what the man did in life and how he left the world after his eight years in office. And yes, there are going to be passionate, negative takes on what he's done, but if we're going to be discussing and debating his legacy, as a politician, there's a difference between the respect due him and his family as people, and the way in which we interpret his life's work.

Personally, I don't consider actual substantive discussion of his political legacy out of bounds during this period, particularly considering the fact that many Republicans are embracing their interpretation of the man's legacy and promoting it for political gain, Bush chief among them. The man was a politician. In fact, he was a consummate politician. In a week devoted to discussing a man's life and, more importantly, his work, why can't we discuss those things unless we approve of them?

And if you think that piece on Reagan was bad, if Hitchens is still around when Clinton goes, it'll make that bit look like it was written by Nancy.

Who's a Good Catholic?

Yes! Thank you Dick Durbin, for this wonderful PDF chart rating Catholic Senators based on the social demands emanating from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Kerry does better than any other Senator on domestic issues, in fact, he has the highest percentage adherence to Catholic teachings. I fully expect the liberal media to pick this up and run with it as far and fast as they can. Santorum, Sununu and Domenici should be expecting questions on their heresy any day now. Yup, any day now...

Via Nathan Newman.

Super-Size Dishonesty

I saw Super-Size Me this past weekend, and although I think that it's more stunt than debate, it did raise a few very good points about the power of the junk food industry in ensuring that the foods most easily and cheaply available to us are the worst for us. In fact, its strongest point is not with regards to McDonald's, but instead into the godawful lunches kids are offered in schools. It struck home with me - in high school, we had four choices if we didn't pack our own lunch. Cheeseburgers, pretzels with nacho cheese, Little Debbie cakes, and the "healthy" option, which were sad ass little turkey sandwiches with a leaf of iceberg lettuce, in case we had any hopes whatsoever that we might get nutrition at lunch. Top that off with the "fruit drinks", which were fruit in the way that Condoleeza Rice is competent, and you could be sure to go home with absolutely no nutrients in your tummy.

But what's interesting is the response from so-called "fact checkers" of the film. All you really need to know is that Tech Central Station is one of the groups leading the charge (yes, they're bankrolled by McDonald's), and that the rest of the press releases are interested in saving McDonald's bottom line, along with those of related industries. Every single group coming out against this film is an ideologically driven industry front who would oppose this movie if Jesus came down from Heaven (or Canada) and called it the Truth, the Light, and the Way.

I'm not reinforcing any of Spurlock's points - you should see the movie and judge for yourself. But it's also interesting that groups are selling themselves as concerned arbiters of fact when they might as well have their press releases stamped by the Hamburglar.

Where's Ours?

Paul Waldman asks why the left has no Ronald Reagan, chalking it up to our natural tendency towards criticism and the extremist’s proclivity towards deification. I certainly think – as he seems to say – that Dean could have been Reagan to the left; a mix of liberal language and pragmatic governance, but I don’t think that’s enough. He'd have had to be Reagan to the center too. It’s my opinion (and many, many disagree) that Dean had virtually no mainstream appeal. Unlike Reagan, whose quick wit and soaring optimism endeared him to much of America, Dean’s tone was one of attack and partisan division, he’d have never become the sort of politician that the uninvolved fondly remembered, though he might have been the sort of president the country needed.

There’s a larger point concerning rhetoric in here that the left needs to address. Much is made of Reagan’s intelligence, or lack thereof. What’s lost in the constant condescension is that simplicity can be a weapon and complexity a handicap. While we revel in politicians who can easily rattle off budgetary minutiae, that sort of speech turns off most listeners. So while our great orators let their rhetoric soar around the specific, hopscotching from fact to argument to evidence; his built up from the general, consciously converting oversimplifications into policy statements. While studies back us up on welfare, his invocation of the welfare queen with her Cadillac was a much stronger retort than our Brookings report. It’s less honest but more effective, a devil’s trade we rarely make.

Finding a candidate with the communicative ability and the brilliance we desire is tough; Clinton was such a man and it was that silver tongue that saved him from his wandering crotch. John Edwards was another, though he lacked the wonkish quality that comforts us. Kerry’s speech almost parodies the problem, if and when he wins, his victory will repudiate Bush more than glorify him. His inagauration will be a triumph over his talent on the podium, not a function of it.

The upside is that the right hasn’t recaptured the magic either. Neither Bush Sr. nor Dole could be considered powerful orators. Bush Jr. captures Reagan’s simplicity but can’t translate it into powerful rhetoric. As his string of failed speeches attests to, Americans are not turned on by reduced absolutism alone.

The point is that great communicators aren’t parties, they’re people. Anyone who’s seen Clinton speak understands that his failures would have destroyed a lesser communicator, as it is; they simply held him back from greatness. To use a Hollywood analogy rendered appropriate by our subject matter, Martin Sheen has been as inspiring reading cue cards as Reagan ever was, a connect we rarely make but one that we should look deeper into. What Reagan realized -- or at least exploited -- was that America’s president is divorced from America’s policy; the voters evaluate the man on screen differently than they judge the statistics in the papers. It’s to the left’s credit that we ask our leaders to be legislators, but it weakens us to scoff at them as actors.

Nothing More Than Feelings...

You know, I love watching Bush and Kerry respond to the same events - in this case, Reagan's death.

Kerry and Bush have done largely the same things - no ads on Friday, shying away from the campaign trail, etc. But Bush's response is to replace his overtly dishonest ad "Patriot Act" with "Pessimism", which is yet another attack ad on Kerry, but one that's ultimately so contentless that it can't be considered to have actually lied. Truly doing the classy thing - putting the gentler nasty foot forward during a time of national mourning.

Losing Time

I'm trying to figure out why the site appears to be going back an hour every so often - posts that were put up after the ones on top are going down below, and comments are getting all mixed up.

It is kind of interesting, though. Like Three-Card Monte, but with blog posts.

Pandagon Consumer Corner

Okay, so since the site apparently likes to go down any time we engage in anything resembling a transfer of money...let's try again, and see how many days we can knock the site down for this time!

My roommate and I are both videogame-lovers. And, as befits the stature of two such similarly dispositioned persons, we both own the same systems. Part of my "New Life, New Me" program, which is apparently designed in fits and starts as my budget demands it, is not having a television in my bedroom. This means that we'll have one television in the whole apartment, so it doesn't make sense for her to have a PS2 and a GameCube, and for me to have the exact same consoles.

Therefore, I announce my impending sale of said systems in special Pandagon Combo Packs. All systems come with boxes, full user documentation, and all original cords. No memory cards are included.

Pandagon Playstation Pack

One Sony PS2 Console
Stereo A/V Cables
Plug
Two controllers - one PS2 black, one blue, both Sony brand
One copy of Final Fantasy X-2
One Final Fantasy X-2 strategy guide

Pandagon Gamecube Pack

One Nintendo Gamecube, Black
Stereo A/V Cables
Plug
One Wavebird controller, Gray, batteries included
One copy of Beyond Good & Evil
One Naki G-Pak carrying case

If you're interested, e-mail me at left with an offer, and note which system you want. For those of you who are interested, this is basically going to fund buying more games, and perhaps a few partisan books - maybe an XBox Halo combo pack.

UPDATE: I'll be taking bids until tomorrow at 8 P.M. If there's anyone who bids and doesn't win, I'll try and help you find a good deal on the system of your choice, if you're interested.

Either Let Me Fly, Or Give Me Death

Iraqi Kurds threaten to pull out of the interim Iraqi government unless they're granted autonomy in the new governing setup.

I eagerly await seeing how the master diplomatic team in Iraq handles this.

Brilliant

Coming this Summer.

Ashcroft Fear. The Remix.

Clarifying Comments

So my earlier post on comments was badly written and carried connotations I didn't mean. I don't mean to say that everyone who touts their blogs is lame, nor does self-promotion imbue a website with any sense of lameness. God knows I'd have no audience without the whoring I engaged in last year. My comments were written out of annoyance with a lame Bill Clinton parody blog that wouldn't stop spamming discussions. Add that to my being pretty sick, and you have a recipe for offense.

As for actual policy, I agree with what Jesse said but with one caveat -- I don't think any posts, not even one, should be solely based on promoting a blog.

If what you want is a link, e-mail me with a good post and I'll try and help out. However, the comment section isn't there to drive traffic to your website -- it's there to foster discussion and debate. Now, being a member of this community and participating in the dialogue here certainly allows you to plug your blog, if only so others reading your insightful comments can see more of them. What Scorpio does (linking at the bottom of his post) or what I suggested (mentioning your blog and inviting others to click on your name) are both totally fine and, so far as I'm concerned, encouraged. Even a comment that's merely a link to an on-topic post is fine, so long as it's relevant.

I'm pretty sick today so if my original remark was ill-tempered and inconsiderate, I apologize. I do mean what I say about not letting the site become all about publicizing, but I certainly don't want to defame other's sites or appear to bar pointers to blogs. Self-promotion is necessary when trying to grow an audience, I just don't want it destroying the flow of discussions here.

Reagan's Legacy - Some Facts

If anyone's interested, the relevant facts and figures on Reagan's time in charge of the White House can be found here. Summary: Reagan increased government spending overall, increased the debt vastly, and Reaganomics didn't result in increased government revenues until he raised taxes.

I'll Kill You With A Stroke Of The Pen

Billmon, as always, ably address the White House's How-To Guide For Torture. Rumor has it that the White House was going to try to get it endorsed by Bob Vila, but he didn't get the offer until after the scandal erupted. (No offense actually meant to Bob Vila, who is a fine, non-torture approving American, I'm sure.)

The memo itself is...well, I was going to say "strange", but it fits perfectly. The soldiers at Abu Ghraib are both guilty of everything they did personally, but they are also scapegoats for the larger problem, which doesn't excuse their actions at all. For all the talk about torture, and how awful it was, it's even more disgusting in retrospect how quickly Rumsfeld and Bush went to hide behind the camo pants of the troops. "How dare you say that this problem extends further than just the soldiers in the pictures? Are you saying the armed forces are full of depraved torturers? Do you want us to lose this war?"

If you want to lose ground in the fight against terrorism, reward our "leaders" for first not having any idea how to lead the voluntary military operation they designed and promoted, then show the world that the height of democracy is associating any criticism of you with criticism of the people who follow your orders.

They actively sought legal justification for torture. One gets the feeling that this is yet another WSJ story that its editorial page will happily gloss over.

Blogger's Lament

Ever had one of those days where you're working on a really long, detailed, involved piece on an article you just found, and when you're almost done, you look at the dateline and realize it's a piece from last year that you already covered, which was why the points came so easily and rapidly to you?

My Way, Right Away

Much has been made already of Don Rumsfeld's admission that there is a such thing as a better terrorism policy than what's in place now, and that the continuation of this policy will serve poorly to fight terrorism in any long-term, long-view address of the topic.

For all the problems with Rumsfeld (and they are numerous), this is a far more clear-headed view of the situation than any other civilian commander in charge of this war seems to have. Terrorists aren't four-year-olds. They won't believe things because big scary guys in suits and ties sternly tell them to go sit in the anti-terror corner that their time is up and they've got to start behaving if they want the democracy and freedom ice cream.

It's not just that it's not enough to substitute teeth-gritting and tough talk for an actual policy. It's that all that toughness doesn't mean jack shit unless it actually stops terrorism, which it doesn't. I've known plenty of people who can talk great games. But unless you step on the court and play, all you are is a mouth. The language of fighting terrorism is where Bush excels. Problem is, he's that jackass over on the sidelines who will only come in when he can guard someone slower or smaller than he is, or else will swear up and down that he really can play, he just has on the wrong shoes or didn't expect it to be so hot.

We really need to stop pretending that terrorism can be fought exactly the way we want to fight it, and that by virtue of wanting to win over terrorism, we are. It's dangerous, delirious, and pointless.

My Comment Policy

My comment policy?

No personal attacks that go over the line from the normal stuff into construing something either so offensive to the community that it serves only to offend rather than to provoke discussion, or a realistic threat of any sort. You will be deleted and, if necessary, banned. I want us to be able to debate and discuss anything, even if it is offensive, but there is a point where it becomes egregious.

No spamming. I don't care if you advertise your blog once or twice, or if you put a link on the end of actual comments about your site, but if your only purpose on this site is to plug yours with no regard for actually furthering conversation, buy a Blogad. They're cheap! There's some leeway on this, but if you're on every entry plugging your site without regard for the conversation or any intent of adding to it, I'll ask you to stop. If you don't, then chances are gratuitous posts will get deleted. Or altered to amuse me as I see fit.

Oh, and comments constructed of entire articles or blog posts without attribution or links will probably be deleted, unless you add a link or attribution in a subsequent post. That's more CYA for all of us, because I've gotten e-mails in the past from people claiming "intellectual property theft" and whatnot. If you forget a link and post it later, no problem. But (and this is more for the trolls who think they can prove a point nobody's debating by posting a Sully or Opinion Journal post) if you just copy and paste something and don't tell anyone where it's from, chances are you're breaking someone's copyright.

That's about it - don't threaten and/or unduly harass anyone (see any LGF thread for examples), don't use the comments solely and repeatedly as free advertising, and don't violate copyright laws. Other than that, discuss freely and openly.

Plan B

This is why we must vote Winston for President:

Walmart

The Prospect has posted an excellent debate on the god and evil of WalMart. Though clearly from a leftist POV (it's not that I like Walmart, but...), the dialogue does a good job of showing that Walmart's not all bad, just really bad in certain places.

Reagan's Greatness

Huh?

It's also fun to point out that what the fuck?

I'd like to think that we respect and honor any President of the United States, and that most public figures ("liberals and leftists" included) would speak well of him at this point in time. But I haven't seen anything where the issue of Reagan's "greatness" is off the table or not under debate. Influential? Yes. "Great"? Very much up for argument.

Alas, taking this tack, I declare victory over all. You may go home now, for you are the loser.

I Know Tom Friedman

While I was, oddly enough, on the phone to an outsourced tech support center in the Phillipines, I was on hold long enough to watch Tom Friedman's recent globalization special. (I'm serious - I was on hold fora little over an hour.)

Not much to say on the special itself - it was typical Tom Friedman hope-with-a-dash-of-cliche stuff with a heavy focus on the nuts-and-bolts of the adapting economies and cultures in countries where outsourcers have built up jobs. But I did figure something out.

Have you ever seen a Tom Friedman column where someone in a very non-Western culture uses an idiom that they'd probably never use in real life? Like, Friedman will be talking to his Afghan friend, who feels that the American presence in Afghanistan is "off the hizzle, fo'shizzle".

Watching Friedman interview people, though, it's clear where it comes from - Friedman himself. The interviews were all in English with largely (if not totally) non-native English speakers. When someone would answer a question, Friedman would rephrase it using an American idiom, say it to them, and wait for them to repeat it back to him. Sometimes it would work, sometimes it wouldn't, but it strikes me as an apt enough explanation for why people in Friedman's columns seem to be using his words. It's because they are.

Still A Douche After All These Years

James Lileks, along with every person who's picked up the "I used to be on the left, but now I support Republicans because they are the only thing that stand between the fresh briefs of freedom and the embarassingly soiled draws of terrorism" schtick on Ronald Reagan:

"I didn't like Ronald Reagan when I was younger because I was an idiot, but I might as well get weak-kneed and giggly about it now, all of which gives me license to demean any one who disagrees with me."

Oh, and this attempt at pithy wisdom falls flat on its ass:

Either this is a really stupid way of saying, "If you haven't learned anything, you haven't learned anything," or else there's a clause, a phrase, perhaps an object missing. I know (from personal experience) that conservatives tend to take the elitist attitude that if you disagree with them, it's because you're either young or immature. Lileks, who spends more time worrying about how to connect Abu Ghraib to his daughter getting bubblegum in her hair than actually making sense, is what serves as the ultimate example of this run amok. Whatever political wisdom Lileks possesses is either held entirely too close to his vest, or is simply the phantom of an overactive imagination. Age doesn't necessarily impart wisdom, and wisdom doesn't equal conservatism.

And if you don't agree with me, fuck you. Yeah, you heard me - fuck you. Or else I'll wish for your death but not actually volunteer to kill you myself, because that would be the wrong lesson to send the kids.

Comment Policy

There's nothing I love more about this site than the dialogue it engenders. That's why those who try and disrupt it find little favor and less mercy in my eyes. Comments do not exist to plug your site, particularly if you're not pointing to a relevant article. Attempting to use discussion space for self-promotion will end in your comment's erasure. You can link to your site in the URL field of the comment box and, after an on topic post, "click on my name for more" is fine. Making a whole post a link to your lame blog, however, will not be tolerated.

Reagan's Boots

I admit to having little to add on Ronald Reagan. I've had a magnificently cynical fear that his death would come in an election year and lead to conservative resurgence -- or at least unification -- fueled by his spectral presence. That may be happening, showing that cynicism isn't always misplaced.

As for the man himself, I was born in 1984, so the Reagan revolution didn't impinge on my consciousness all that much. Josh Green has a terrific article on how unconservative Reagan was, but I'm really in no place to evaluate the tussle over his legacy. What I will say is that focusing on his approval ratings to debunk the myth of his popularity misses the point -- America decided retroactively that he was popular, probably for reasons connected to the era of good and evil more than anything else. To attempt to diminish a myth at the exact moment that man becomes martyr isn't very smart politically and misses a truth of human nature. People like legends and, when they attempt to create them, rarely look fondly upon those who stand in the way. They're not even supposed to be based on past's truth (MLK Jr. was quite the womanizer), they're made for the future.

If the aim is to stop Reagan from becoming a weapon for Bush, the smarter tack is diminishing Bush in comparison. The thing about legends is that they leave very large shoes to fill and Bush is attempting to step into the Gipper's at a moment when he's particularly small. When Reagan took on the Soviets, they began reducing their arms and losing their supporters. Bush's attack on Al-Qaeda may have possessed the same moral clarity but the results have been awful. I'm sure Reagan's got an aphorism for that.

Trailer

The trailer For Moore's upcoming Fahrenheit 9/11 is fantastic, take a look.

One-Dimensional, Please

I'm with Matt

Back

Servers have been restarted, knuckles have been cracked, webhosts have been drawn and quartered, keyboards are engaged.

So...wussup?

Back Up (Again)

So...anyone heard anything about some good web hosts lately?

NBA Finals

Lakers vs. Detroit. The Bad Boys versus the Pistons. (Seriously - between Karl Malone, Gary Payton and Kobe Bryant, how the hell do the Pistons get that moniker?)

I think this is going to be a more competetive series than most people give it credit for, but the Lakers' biggest fan is the NBA front office, which leads me to believe that more often than not, calls are going to go their way. It'll be a low-scoring, grinding series and Detroit will snatch a couple away from L.A., but in the end, the Lakers will pull it out, even though I'll hate every second of it. (They really have become the NBA's version of the Yankees, inasmuch as that's possible in the NBA.)

Lakers, 4-2. Bill Walton makes at least one comment so homoerotic about Shaq that he'll have to take a cold shower.

Not Quite The Great Communicator

Dick Morris pens a column with the understated title "Terrorists for Kerry". With the subtlety and aplomb that befits such a title, Morris argues that all the terrorism in Iraq hinges on Bush being in office - namely, its purpose is to get him out, and if he leaves, then the terrorists will feel they have won.

It's apparently an "obvious" fact, in much the same way Hillary's taking the Democratic nomination was an "obvious" fact or anything else that's come out of Morris' mouth has been "obvious". But the most curious thing about the argument are the historical examples that Morris musters. In each example, Morris points out how terrorists orchestrated attacks to get the government they wanted (generally, ones who would further their causes). We go through Vietnam, Israel, etc., and then we get to Carter and Reagan:

Now, keep in mind that the standard that Morris set up is that terror will stop after the terrorists get what they want. Is the case that Morris wants to make to Bush supporters and hawks in general that John Kerry will be the Democratic Reagan and Bush the Republican Carter?

Personally, I get the feeling that he didn't think that far ahead, thought he was bashing Carter, and by proxy was putting forth a strong new idea that a vote for Kerry is a vote for terrorism (which isn't all that new - google "terrorists for kerry" and you'll get a few dozen articles and blog posts already making it clear that this is the standard-bearer position for the far and not-so-far right).

Except that he appears to have made the opposite case and set Kerry up as the 21st Century's "Morning In America". Brilliant.

Peggy Watches TV

Rule Number One of the Internet: Peggy Noonan will say the dumbest possible things when you're not in a position to immediately respond.

Thursday's column was actually a fourfer. First, she went off on stupid college kids from Ivy League schools.

It sounds to me like she went to two particular groupings/schools at Cornell, uninvited, and talked to all the journalism and drama/acting/theater majors she could find. Of course, this is Peggy Noonan, so she might have also just stayed in her apartment watching Road Rules reruns and making up stories about anyone with a Cornell shirt on who happened to pass by her window. Who knows? Pointless and seemingly fabricated generalizations that serve to buoy an observation that otherwise makes no sense are protected speech, buddy.

Waiter? Sense, please.

The last sentence takes what was almost a logical (albeit stupid) point and turns it either into a wish for more people who would boldly put forth those points...or something. I'm not sure, as I don't hold Deeply Held Beliefs - i.e., I'm not conservative.

I see no sign Peggy Noonan is gonna stop looking to her own ass as her primary source of inspiration -- so instead, I'll just point out that she's engaging in rote rightist strawman-bashing with a healthy dollop of red herring on the side. It's her preroggative to believe that liberals can't be wise, and it's also her preroggative to have blinders as big as Iowa on to not be able to look at her own desperate adherence to conservative orthodoxy.

Peggy...what the fuck are they saying? This has to be the greatest recounting of a conversation of all time - one person telling you all the impressions they were left with of what another person or people (we aren't sure here, since we have no idea if she actually talked to anyone) said, combined with the assurance that they aren't worth listening to. In short, an interview and analysis minus the interview.

Maybe you will, too. Although you're fairly up there in age, and have been saying the same sycophantic shit for at least 25 years, with no self-critical thought whatsoever. But hey - at least you're incredibly sure you're right, with no room for doubt. That should be everyone's goal.

This leads to one of the best non-sequiturs in the history of sequiturs.

They're feminized, pussy-ass bitches because we don't bomb enough shit to keep them in science, math, and supply-side economics. AWESOME. And I love the idea - feminity equates to liberalism equates to loss of wisdom equates to inability to communicate. All because Peggy decided to stalk Cornellians one bright spring afternoon.

The second portion is on Europeans trying to pass a secular constitution (you know, like ours). They're pussy-ass bitches, but since they also don't have the pervasive godliness of America surrounding them, they're soulless pussy-ass bitches.

Well, it is a public area. Alas, Peggy must now retake her position as First Brigadier in the War on Straw.

Damn, baby, I loves me the non-sequiturs, but you're pushing even my massive irrelevance libido. I'm pretty sure that smokers in the 1940s smoked for reasons other than Hitler and D-Day, but, then again, I don't rely on World War II to buffet every argument from why we should eat Mexican food tonight to welfare reform.

If you profess a love of George W. Bush, you can be shot, have your children kidnapped, have your spouse sold into slavery, have your toenails ripped out with pliers, and be blacklisted from every job in America. If you bomb a bank in a blow for radical Islamist causes, you're given a free latte at Starbucks.

What has happened to America, I ask?

Actually, the idea isn't a person's freedom, but everyone else's personal freedom. I have no problem with anyone using a drug themselves, in their own home. But when you smoke in an enclosed space, other people have to smoke, too. Smoke in your home, your car, your own office, wherever. Drink there, smoke weed there, whatever. But if I'm in a restaurant, I don't have to drink your beer, so why should I have to smoke your cigarrette if I don't want to? Apparently, personal freedom only extends as far as the person who's doing the thing that impacts everyone else.

Oh, wait. I wasn't supposed to present an actual argument. I was supposed to go all crazy strawman lefty. Okay, um...

Cigarette smokers are evil Nazis! I hate them all! Uh...cigarettes are racist because they kill black people!

Is that good enough? I'm not really up on the crazy talking points.

At this point, we've just devolved into a severe case of you-need-to-shut-the-fuck-up. She doesn't hate anyone, but people who won't let you smoke your precious cigs in the face of any and every one who doesn't like are worthy of that hatred. She appears not to hate Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein, but she can hate people who don't want others to smoke in public places. Awe-inspiring insipidness.

Last part: John Kerry is well-spoken, but I don't like him, therefore he's a poor communicator. Like those college students. Feminized little fucker, he is.

This has been a journey through the utterly inept mind of Peggy Noonan. Tickets are nonrefundable, and the next ride is scheduled for the 10th, around 10AM. Hope to see you there!

It Was All Ezra's Fault

Actually, not really. But we're back up again.

Good thing nothing happened in the past few days, eh?

Long story short - webhost's server got fried, they had to replace the whole array, and we were down, but like the phoenix, we have risen again. We weren't withholding the site to get more money, or taking the money and running - blatant technical problems.

Blogging will resume in its normal course later today, now I have to go find someone to either berate or have babies with, depending.

Damn Liberal Ashcroft Justice Department

Question: how long do you give your favorite conservative outlet outlet until they start complaing of "prosecutorial overreach" and "impeding the Presidency" in the Plame case?

At this point, I'm beginning to think the leaker was Ahmed Chalabi, though. "Hey, Ahmed, can you just call these folks and tell them that this lady is a CIA agent? Yes, I'm drunk. Yes, it's Sunday. No, Laura's not going to find out."

Silly Rabbit, Paxil's Not For Kids

I'm not a fan of anti-depressants, because of experiences in and around my own life. It's not a judgement on people who use them - it's a judgement on the drugs themselves. I've known too many people who preferred the disease to the cure. Insomnia (and virtual narcolepsy), gastrointestinal and sexual dysfunction, and the additional psychological problems that come along with having a drug chemically alter the way you relate to the world. We overmedicate and we undertreat, to the point where we hope chemicals breed out the problems that therapy can't (or won't). The drugs can do wonderful things, but they don't work for everyone, and they aren't a magic bullet.

They have their place, and they work for many people - I begrudge nobody taking any sort of anti-depressant that works for them. But when I read something like this, the tut-tutter in me starts tut-tutting away.

It's quite possibly the most frustrating story I've read in a long time, if true, because I was a depressed teenager (and adult, but that's another story). I never wanted to take SSRIs, and it was in large part because I'd heard how other therapy sessions had gone once the drugs started. Time that might be otherwise used getting at your problems was spent talking about your medications; amounts, adjustments, and physiological reactions took the place of actual therapy. And in a more important sense, there are thousands, if not millions of kids who have been taking this drug, and may have experienced any number of side effects or worsening of their psychological conditions because of it.

Mental health is a far too fragile and important thing to endanger unnecessarily, and particularly not for someone else's profits. I wish I could speak more eloquently on this, but it's a bit too close to home for comfort.

I'm Gone Sue You!

Eugene Volokh discusses the likelihood of Swift Boat Veterans Against Kerry's (I know they're called something else, but this is a far more honest name) lawsuit against John Kerry for using their image in his ad "Lifetime". As Volokh points out, most of the laws pertaining to this don't bode well for the Not-Too-Swifties, and although I'm not sure of the legal relevance of it, I did love this bit from the Kerry campaign, which points out that in the group's political campaign, they used the exact same image:

I look forward to the Yale Hockey Team's eventual suit, as well.

Why Do People Find Ugly McNasty Ugly And Nasty?

Howell Raines spends a lot of time recycling Mickey Kaus' schtick into a broadside against John Kerry. Raines embodies something about a lot of journalists and reporters that's frustrating because it creates a cyclical expectation and disappointment with news coverage and political posturing. Every time someone ostensibly serious like Raines (who I honestly thing most Democrats dislike more than most Republicans) spends all of his time criticizing the supposed lack of policy ideas in Kerry's campaign by making fun of his appearance, making fun of his money, and then lambasting Kerry for not focusing on policy.

There's way too much focus on the "barbeque" question in covering campaign politics. (It comes from a recent survey which asked who you'd rather barbeque with - Kerry or Bush.) First, the setup for discussing the questions almost always serves to further the stereotypes, rather than discuss them. I don't want reporters to not discuss the personalities of candidates, but it often devolves into a Raines-esque competition to see who can crystallize the attitudes about a candidate into the pithiest turn of phrase. There's no analysis, just narration and repetition. Instead of answering the question of why people might find John Kerry unlikeable, they simply make sure people will find him unlikeable, and keep asking the question.

By the way, rewards for our fundraiser, since someone e-mailed and asked (National Review was giving out various items either autographed by or rubbed on the sweaty bodies of many writers on the site):

$250 gets you a pack of genuine Bicycle playing cards, each signed by either Ezra or myself.

$500 gets you a lifetime free membership to Pandagon's premium content, which includes everything you find on the site, and perhaps more if we get around to it, but probably not!

$750 gets you a free ticket to a Cincinnati Reds game this summer (airfare and lodging not included).

$1000 gets you a free DVD player and a copy of Don Juan De Marco, Trial and Error, or Weekend at Bernie's. Oh, and if they smell like pizza, or come with a subscription to People magazine, it's incidental.

Morning Reads

• Tom Schaller analyzes troop casualties in Iraq, finally figuring out whether this war is being fought by all NASCAR viewers or not. The state by state breakdown is definitely worth a look.

• Also at the Gadflyer, Paul Waldman thinks John Kerry's new slogan is vapid, to which I respond "Si, it's a slogan". I'm undecided myself -- My pick was always "An America Restored" -- hinting at future greatness and slapping our current leader. But what do I know?

• Media Matters has the skinny on Stephen Hayes, the discredited guy trying to make Al-Qaeda/Saddam connections cool again with the aid of a willing Press Corps.

Hooking Up

Matt weighs in with an analysis of hook-ups as the offspring of women having careers rather than Britney Spears. I agree with that so far as it goes, but I think the deeper cause is the breakdown of instant monogamy. Where the expectation previously was that your first partner would be your last, now lovers need to effectively "earn" the other's faithfulness, proving that the benefits of remaining with them outweigh those of casual dating. Dating has shifted from a cultural mandate complete with dictated rules to an economic analysis with complex cost-benefit calculations. Freed from the grip of biblical mandates, each successive generation is finding itself more able to design their own dating architecture -- ours has settled on a car dealership model, complete with test-drives and leases for those unwilling to settle on a purchase.

But I know what is a good buy. Pandagon! And until the fundraiser ends or you're all broke, I'm going to keep closing my posts with these corny little pointers.

Buried

Oh, yeah - the fundraiser link again - we kind of buried it.

Damn the prolific, intelligent output that defines us each and every day!

Amnesty From This Idea

Yesterday, Instapundit linked to this TNR piece (happily squirreled away in the for-pay archives, ensuring once again that most of what's interesting on the site is inaccessible) about Amnesty International. As is often the case, I get the feeling he didn't read past the opening paragraph that agreed with one of his long-running tropes (AI spends all its time criticizing America).

Now, I'm going to say here that I don't have a TNR account, so I can't read the rest of the article, either. But since that one paragraph was introduced as an argument, so be it.

I hereby request that anyone who criticizes Amnesty International provide a full accounting of whatever's on the organization's front page before lodging the "they criticize America too much" line of attack. On Amnesty's front page:

• The AI Report for 2004, which is a summation of all the human rights violations they covered in 2003, worldwide
• Call for release of a Russian prisoner pending retrial
• Turkey's violence against women
• Humanitarian crisis in Haiti
• Slave trafficking in Europe
• The deportation of Egyptians from Sweden
• A letter to all coalition states in Iraq
• Croatia becoming a party to an Anti-Torture Convention
• Eritrea's resistance to human rights investigations
• The crisis in Sudan
• Israel's destruction of homes
• Call to action for investigation of human rights abuses in Iraq prisons

The problem here (as it always is in the case of Amnesty criticism) is with the people who only discover the humanitarian organization when it's pointing out something wrong with what the United States is doing. Amnesty does loads of valuable work in places that even the "why isn't anyone talking about this" right doesn't talk about. However, that almost never gets noticed, despite the fact that it makes up the bulk of their work.

If AI gets criticized for disproportionality and ignoring human rights crises because its critics have created a false distribution of their work, the group has no real chance to change. It's already doing what its critics say it should do, but it keeps getting criticized as if it never changes. To make the Simpsons parallel, it's like when Mr. Burns, stacking the company softball team with Major League ringers, kept telling Don Mattingly to cut his sideburns, despite the fact Mattingly had none. Even when Mattingly had shaved a strip to the scalp from one side of his head to the other, Burns kept haranguing him to cut the phantom sideburns, to the point where Mattingly had to leave the team for the sideburns he didn't have.

Amnesty Internation could go totally bald, and they'd still have to leave the team. Message?

Don't Fuck With AI.

Love That Ignorant Leadership

Andrew Sullivan's argues that:

The moral of the story is don't force me to become a pursesnatcher, help us out with the fundraiser

Fundraiser, Like A Rumpshaker

Okay. Those of you who have been reading for a while know that I don't really like fundraisers. We've only done one for the site, and that's when our hosting company decided that Pandagon was bad for them and we needed to switch.

So, we're doing this for a reason. Ezra and I are both moving in the next month/month and a half. He's not getting paid, and I'll have a sum total of one monthly paycheck in my bank account when I move. In short, we're going to have a lot of expenses, and not a lot of money to cover them.

So, we're asking you all to help out. From now until Friday night, we'll have a Paypal button up on this entry and on the sidebar, just asking you to help us with moving costs this one time. Thanks in advance for your generosity and support!

Get Rid Of This Goddamn Subject

Much like David Brooks' insistence yesterday that he had "modulated" views on Bush's tax cuts when he spent most of his time misrepresenting the reality of the case for the tax cuts, William Safire's claim to contrarian status is severely hamstrung that he's not really being contrarian at all.

In college, I had the "abolish the penny" conversation at least once a month, every month, for my entire career. Sometimes it was the teller at the credit union, or someone who had too many pennies in their pocket and not enough quarters, and sometimes it was that deep thinker who sat in the corner of the coffee bar and managed to come to the same conclusions everyone else had, but with a lot more fanfare...and when people stopped caring.

I'm not sure which one of those categories Safire fits in, but you can be the judge of that.

The penny is the bastard currency of American economics. Wanting to get rid of the penny altogether is a natural outgrowth of our relationship to the copperhead (hey, it's a penny - it needs some coolness attached to it) - we encounter pennies in the same way we would lint or trash, little bits of extra flotsam that need to be gotten rid of, even though they're worth something, even if it's a negligible amount.

I'm going to save you the rest of the clever-yet-boring musings on our nation's one-cent piece, because other than Safire desperately clawing at irreverence and barely making a scratch, he only makes one interesting statement:

I'm not sure if he's being facetious or not, but it does correspond to the Reagan Legacy push to get FDR off the dime and Reagan on it. Perhaps more importantly - FDR, of all the people on all the currency, has probably the strongest ties to the one he's on. It's the March of Dimes. Why is FDR's coin the one always singled out for eviction and replacement? (Well, besides the obvious fact that many conservatives just don't like his legacy and would rather see him replaced with the most convenient conservative-friendly figure at the earliest possible date.)

Speaking of all of this, did you know the Mint is supposed to be modifying the nickel for special editions this year?

This Was S-M-R-T

Remember in the early days of Iraq's liberation, where Ahmed Chalabi was the Magical Transporting Man, appearing on multiple magazine covers hugging American soldiers? I miss that time. His thorough corruption was all in the future, merely the province of us Chicken Little lefties who were so far gone in our Saddam-love that we couldn't accept the future of Iraq...which was Chalabi.

Anyway, it's coming out that Chalabi leaked American knowledge of Iran's communications code to the Iranians. One assumes that since the White House is in a full-on Chalabi 180, trying to make him a bad person as quickly as they wanted to make him the savior of Iraq, this will actually be punished, at least up until it gets to the outskirts of Washington, D.C.

Perhaps the larger question is what this says about the war leadership as it relates to Chalabi, particularly in light of this line:

We apparently trusted this man so much we put people with sensitive national security knowledge around him, let them get intoxicated, and talk to him. Anyone who trusted Chalabi showed massively poor judgement - not just in retrospect, but at the time. Investigation at the time showed he was full of it, his past alone, combined with his actual lack of connection to modern-day Iraq should have been enough to disqualify him as a serious voice in reconstruction.

Chalabi didn't happen in a vacuum. And the White House mustn't be allowed a pass on this because they're "doing the right thing now". He didn't just dupe people - the Bush Administration wanted to be duped.

Incidentally, the Chalabi/New York Times connection goes further than just Judy Miller.

All Hail The Revolution

This column is what happens when someone tries to mix really lazy conservative tropes with so-called historical "analysis".

After dropping the stock French insinuations (I really do think the brief moment of overt French-phobia that actually mattered was over at least a year ago, but the vain reclamation of "happier" days is his preroggative) and the sporadic blog-culled anecdotes of anti-Americanism, I find the end of the piece to be that sort of carefully considered imprecision that always gets people in trouble.

The problem is, he's managed to include the "mainstream of the Democratic Party" along with his grab bag of examples (at least one entirely anecdotal) and the Iraqi insurgents. He's not saying that this incredibly disparate group of people are "crypto-Leninists", he's saying they're crypto-really like Leninists. Even when every group's motives are getting bled over onto the others, with no rhyme or reason.

This line of argument works us into a position that may not seem defeatist, but in many ways is a surer defeat than any of the "French" course changes. We failed to get significant international support either for the war or the rebuilding of Iraq. Any attempt to bring it in (incidentally, what Bush is himself doing) is a double failure - the recognition of the first failure (another failure in and of itself), and the failure to do this with the barebones coalition we went in with.

The problem is that we're going to have to admit some failures in order to succeed in Iraq, if that's still what we want. The war plan over the past year-plus has proved in equal parts inadequate, short-sighted, and too stubborn for its own good. But, by Goldberg's argument, this is "revolutionary defeatism", and it can only be chalked up to wishing for America to fail for your own political gain. It doesn't make sense, particularly given that it seeks to discredit what is in many instances a perfectly valid observation - many Iraqis don't like the actual American occupation of their country, and want to see us gone. I'm trying to argue this further, but the piece is so sloppily written that it's hard to generate a germane point without opening myself up to the charge that it's not what it was talking about.

But I think that's why he's wrong. Unless he meant something else entirely.

Deez Nuts

Nutso tabloid sez John Kerry did nutso thing to nusto political hack who's obsessed with Kerry.

Apparently, after he got done having sex with every female at the Vietnam Memorial in broad daylight (while having a vasectomy performed on him), he gathered up a group of schoolchildren and flipped off Ted Sampley, head of Vietnam Veterans Against John Kerry And Papa Smurf. He then proceeded to show the schoolchildren the joys of filing holes in the Holy Bible and sodomizing it, while screaming "Fuck the Pope" to a rapt audience.

Poor Ted Sampley.

Check It. Yo.

Tonight's must read: Dana Milbank on Bush's imaginary intellectual adversaries.

Also must-read quality: Brad DeLong's analysis of Kerry's health care plan.

Money Is Bad

Just so you all know, class warfare is back on, according to the RNC.

Included is John Kerry's (now apparently $1000) haircut, sourced to the Washington Times, his gas tax, sourced to absolutely nobody because it doesn't actually exist, the houses and plane that his wife actually owns, sourced to an article that actually tells you that, and a bunch of other stuff, all of which is evil because John Kerry has money.

Could the Republican Party find the one shred of consistency that still gets passed around like a dying weed roach and figure out whether or not it's okay to criticize rich people? I mean, Bush, Cheney, most of the Republican leadership, most of the Cabinet, most of the Republican Party's big public faces...all rich! Can we comment on Bush's fake cowboy ranch, his expensive pickup truck, his expensive bike (that he falls off of on ground rendered rough and uneven by rain that hadn't fallen in several days), his expensive cowboy boots...he's invested a lot of dumb money in the cowboy schtick, hasn't he? If he doesn't buy a horse before the election, I'll be very surprised.

Oh, and could the RNC also learn how to make an interesting partisan internet game? That would be awesome.

The Woman Who Would Destroy John Kerry

Alex Polier speaks out. You remember her, right? She was the "intern" who was supposed to have had a wild, torrid affair with John Kerry - while he was undergoing prostate cancer surgery - and then was spirited away to Africa.

With her fiancee.

Where she already had a job.

While John Kerry's indominitable libido was coming through the invasive crotch-centered surgery to overtake Ms. Polier, and perhaps the world.

My favorite reaction so far is Jonah Goldberg's:

Perhaps Jonah could himself step to the plate. You know, since he did comment on it himself, as did many of the people who wrote for the magazine he edits (one's even reference in Polier's article).

More importantly, though, the whole thing shows that Chris Lehane is a complete tool. Or, at least, he might be and probably is. It's a complex and sordid tale, made all the worse by the fact that there's a predetermined scandal complex that springs up around things like this, where the most factual and stringent of denials is nothing more than a rote dance, and the only changes that come in the story are people wondering how even in the face of contradictory evidence, it could still be true.

A young woman's life was dragged through hell for a story that had no fucking chance of being true. Way to go! Way to fucking go.

Update: Via Gordon, we see Mickey Kaus still playing the game. The main problem with the entire story...is Polier's account! Why didn't she act differently? Why did she use the words she did? What are her deep-seated character flaws?

Shoes: Now On The Other Foot

Remember when John Walker Lindh was captured and his treason blamed on hot-tubbin' hippiedom in Marin, California? Sure ya do, the potential equivocation of liberalism and treason was too good for the right to pass up on and so they took a traitor and used him to smear and demonize the left. Classic move. Now Adam Yahiye Gadahm, an American from my hometown of Orange County, is a wanted terrorist. Strange twist though -- Orange County isn't a bastion of progressivism, it's a conservative bulwark. As The Revealer notes:

Accepting Arnold

Aside from his puzzling and probably unsustainable reluctance to raise taxes, I've been one of those very impressed by Schwarzenegger's performance as governor. He really has gotten the legislature moving in a way they haven't done in decades and though our major budgetary challenges are still on the horizon, I feel pretty comfortable with him facing them. Why is that? Well, probably because Arnold isn't much of a Republican, he's more of a moderate Democrat. This interview with him is worth reading to get a feel for this fence straddling and RINO ideology:

Tough on Terra?

Winston speaks. You listen:

Overturned!

The "partial-birth abortion" ban has been declared unconstitutional in a District Court in San Francisco.

I predict far too many commentaries on the fact that the judge is from San Francisco and not nearly enough about the decision itself. What was really strange about the law is that normally, injunction against the procedure was shot down because it wouldn't provide exceptions for the health of the mother. So what did Congress do? Declare that there was no valid health exception for the mother!

It's a good response to a very poorly designed law.

You Missed The Forest So Badly You're In The Desert

Imagine this - John Derbyshire approves of something inane.

What the writer of that letter seems to fail to recognize is that Moore is only successful precisely because he taps into an attitude on the parts of many Americans that the government isn't doing enough. In fact, if Moore didn't ask for the government to do things, the man would have no career at all, and would in fact have no example whatsoever to follow.

Liberalism isn't incompatible with capitalism, and there are in fact numerous successful liberal capitalists who fight for a stronger and more responsive government with no contradiction whatsoever. Now, the question is: if all of these liberal capitalists (many of whom made money predominantly because of their liberalism) try to run those same businesses without referencing or using their liberalism...aren't they losing exactly what makes them models to be followed?

Moore succeeds in that vaunted yet fluid "marketplace of ideas" because of his ideas. If you tell people to follow Moore's example while ignoring everything that motivated him to do what he did, you're stripping out a huge part of the capitalist motivation.

I do get the feeling, however, that the entire point was to ensnare Moore in a snide catch-22, and I will give the writer credit for that. He was very, very snide.

A Debate For The Pandagon Community

Is it possible to break grasping conservatives of the delusion that we are in World War II all over again in Iraq?

My position: Yes, but only if we give them an even more desperately wrong narrative to cling to. For instance, this is the War of the Worlds...but real!

Stephanie Herseth's Distinguished Competition

I'll be happy if I'm a minor loser.

Now, he has a point - they're butting heads again in November, and he could pick up steam going in to the elections, particularly if the "we don't want an all-Democratic Congressional delegation" line picks up any steam.

However, that latter part (something that John Thune, Tom Daschle's opponent for his Senate seat is himself advancing in an effort to make Daschle suffer for Herseth's victory) is a strategy that's very iffy. Democrats have a great shot at taking the White House, and the Senate will be too close to call. If it's looking like there's going to be a split government with a Democratic executive, it becomes much less likely that a Democratic delegation will shut out South Dakota from Washington goings-on.

Anyway, congratulations to Ms. Herseth, who brings the Democratic Party one step closer to ending the Republican roadblock of the governing process.

Shorter Matt Towery

Army Hates America; Is Asked To Stop Demoralizing The Troops

The Army revealed today that it is investigating 91 serious allegations of misconduct and mistreatment in Iraq and Afghanistan's prisons.

Listen, guys. I know we're supposed to be supporting you and all, but you're verging on serious breach of vaguely defined contract here with a lot of conservatives. Y'see, the prisoner abuse and mistreatment at Abu Ghraib was supposed to be the isolated actions of a handful of soldiers, and it was supposed to go away after nothing new had been broken about the story. Which meant you weren't supposed to say anything new.

Jackasses.

Anyways, it's all there in the link. I just find it really disappointing that many of the people who said "let's deal with this and move on" about Abu Ghraib only meant one part of that statement, and will look at stories like this as the "liberal media" trying to prolong the story.

Let America Be America Again

I really don't like making historical comparisons between Kerry/Bush and any other presidential race, largely because people have been able to find comparisons between this race and every other one from Carter/Reagan to Gore/Bush. At some point, you have to realize that this can't be a microcosm of every presidential race since 1980, and it has to stand on its own two legs.

That having been said, I agree with Nathan Newman that John Kerry's new slogan, "Let America Be America Again", is a bit of a masterstroke. It evokes a historical liberal dissatisfaction with nationalistic conservatism without being a call for radical change, or at least radical change outside of the American mainstream. It does bring to mind Reagan's use of "Born in the USA", but with the caveat that Kerry can embrace the actual meaning of the poem without looking like a clueless doof.

The article says that the phrase has potential downsides, but George Bush's are either outright lies ("Safer. Stronger. 33% More Cream Filling.") or meaningless bullshit ("compassionate conservatism", which was Book One in the hot new children's series, Bush Hugs The Brownies). I'm glad the campaign chose this despite it potentially opening up Kerry to attacks - as I once remarked to Atrios over a pricey beer during the primaries, questioning whether or not Republicans will attack the Democratic candidate for what he does is a moot question. John Kerry would get assailed if he picked "This Land Is Your Land" by Woodie Guthrie, so there's no reason to be afraid of an outcome that is as certain as anything in the universe.

Let America be America again. I like that.