Rally To Censor The Iraq War

I saw this flyer posted on a bulletin board at the Universtity of Tennessee. I think there is at least a slight possibility that it is a hoax since it asks for volunteers, but leaves no phone number or email address; and it doesn't give a time for the demonstration. On the other hand his office is right across the street:

Rally To Censor The Iraq War

TIRED OF TV NETWORKS LIKE NBC,CBS ABC and CNN REPORTING UNFAIR, DISTORTED AND NEGATIVE NEWS? THE NETWORKS SAY OUR COUNTRY IS LOOSING IN IRAQ, AND THAT WE ARE TORTURING AND MISTREATING "THOSE POOR OLD TERRORISTS", WHO BY THE WAY WOULD LOVE TO KILL US AMERICANS AND OUR FAMILIES. IF YOU ARE FED UP WITH THIS LUNACY AND FOLLY,
JOIN US AT:

BROADWAY-KMART SHOPPING CNTR
SATURDAY, MAY 13, 2006

PATRIOTIC MUSIC AND SPEECHES OVER OUR P.A. SYSTEM. WE PLAN TO HAVE EVERY ONE SIGN A PETITION THAT WILL BE SENT TO PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH REGARDING CENSORSHIP ON THE WAR IN IRAQ. THE LIBERAL NEWS MEDIA, CERTAIN SENATORS AND GENERALS ARE DETERMINED TO UNDERMINE, BELITTLE AND DESTROY OUR WAR EFFORTS IN IRAQ, AS THEY DID IN THE VIETNAM WAR. SPEAKERS AT THE RALLY WILL EXPLAIN HOW IF WE LOSE IN IRAQ, WE WILL LOSE THE ENTIRE MIDDLE EAST AND 80% OF THE WORLD'S OIL!! YOU WILL SEE GAS PRICES SOAR TO $18 TO 20$ PER GALLON. THIS COULD HAPPEN WITHIN 1 YEAR TO 18 MONTHS AFTER AMERICAN TROOPS WITHDRAW. IF YOU LOVE YOUR COUNTRY AND WANT TO CONFRONT THE LIBERAL HATE AMERICA GROUPS, THE ACLU, THE NEWS MEDIA, HOLLYWOOD, SOME LUNATIC CONGRESSMEN AND SENATORS . . . THEN THIS IS YOUR OPPORTUNITY!!

The Only Thing

Politics is the only thing in the current administration:

After discussing the huge strides the agency has made in doing business with minority-owned companies, Jackson closed with a cautionary tale, relaying a conversation he had with a prospective advertising contractor.

"He had made every effort to get a contract with HUD for 10 years," Jackson said of the prospective contractor. "He made a heck of a proposal and was on the (General Services Administration) list, so we selected him. He came to see me and thank me for selecting him. Then he said something ... he said, 'I have a problem with your president.'

"I said, 'What do you mean?' He said, 'I don't like President Bush.' I thought to myself, 'Brother, you have a disconnect -- the president is elected, I was selected. You wouldn't be getting the contract unless I was sitting here. If you have a problem with the president, don't tell the secretary.'

"He didn't get the contract," Jackson continued. "Why should I reward someone who doesn't like the president, so they can use funds to try to campaign against the president? Logic says they don't get the contract. That's the way I believe."

Government contracts are now subject to a political litmus test(as is participation in scientific advisory panels, as Chris Mooney notes in The Republican War on Science). Rod Dreher notes that this is yet another example of the "rank cronyism" of the Bush administration.

Rummy's Lapdog

Hugh Hewitt interviews Donald Rumsfeld and Austin Bay and it is clear that the only problem that any of them see is with media coverage of the war:

HH: Is the American media doing a good job of covering the war in all of its facets?

DR: Oh, goodness gracious. You know, I'm not a judge and a jury. That's up for the American people to decide, and you know where they rank the media.

Hewitt didn't go into any possible problems with the way that Rummy has fought the war, or bring up the generals. Charlie McCarthy would have asked tougher questions of Edgar Bergen.

Winning

I agree that we are winning in Iraq. We have been winning for more than three years now and will be winning three years from now. The only problem is that our various enemies in Iraq don't have to win, they only have to not lose.

New TAC

The May 22 issue of The American Conservative is out with my review of Harvey C. Mansfield's book Manliness, along with an excerpt of Bill Kauffman's Look Homeward America : In Search of Reactionary Radicals. You should pick up a copy, or better yet, subscribe.

Fame & Fortune . . .

It's good to know that you are accomplishing something and I appreciate the kind words from A.C. Kleinheider, a Middle Tennessee blogger who now has a professional gig. Little did I know that when I linked to his original blog a year or so ago that it encourage him to continue blogging until he was discovered and launched on the path to fame and fortune.

Falling Up

The Right Side of the web is in a tizzy over Patrick Kennedy getting in a wreck, or something. And who can blame them? We all cheer when the other team fumbles. But leave it to one of the Power Line guys, John Hindraker in this case, to tread upon the thin ice:

Perversely, perhaps, I want to make a serious comment. Which begins with a quote from a dentist who lived in my home town in South Dakota: "Voting for Democrats is like picking your nose. You like to do it, but you're not proud of it."

Crude, but apt. Why on earth is a lost, pathetic nonentity like Patrick Kennedy a member of Congress? . . . Can the people of Rhode Island possibly be proud of being represented by a slow-witted, uninformed young man with admitted psychiatric and drug problems? I assume not.

. . .

Obviously, Kennedy is a Congressman because of his last name . . .

Actually, the dentist quote is stupidly inapt. What the heck does it mean? But the more important issue concerns a loyal Bushie criticizing Rhode Island voters for supporting a dullard with a famous name. Yeah, I can't imagine why people would vote for Patrick Kennedy, but he hasn't got nearly as much mileage from his name and family connections as George W. Bush. Read Kevin Phillips on the subject. Bush is a man who can only fall up, and he kept falling til he made the Whitehouse.

Self Made Candidate

Bob Corker is presumably Tennessee's best funded senate candidate this year since I have seen his ads enough to be sick of them. One has the wannabe senator telling an audience about his hardscrabble upbringing. You know the drill: born in a log cabin he built with his own hands . . . sold pencils on a street corner . . . Or something like that, it's the sort of boilerplate claptrap that I tune out.

It builds up to Corker desire to go to the Senate to get spending under control. Now I would like to get spending under control as well, but I am far more concerned about the war in Iraq, the looming war against Iran, immigration, etc. He does address these issues in a superfical manner:

We must complete our mission in Iraq, supporting the new emerging democratic government until Iraqi forces are prepared to defend their country.

Iran and North Korea pose exceptional dangers because of their possession of nuclear materials and our relations with these nations should be a top foreign policy priority. We must be firm in our insistence that Iran and North Korea renounce any nuclear weapons programs and we should stay focused on solving this problem in the near term.

Okay Sen. Corker, what if it takes another five or ten years to "complete our mission in Iraq"? Are you still game? Suppose Iran tells us to take our concerns about their nuclear program and stick them where the sun don't shine; do we bomb, invade, what? What do you have to offer other than platitudes?

And how can any Republican candidate talk about controlling spending with a straight face? If Republican control of the government for the last six years have led to exploding debt, I don't see Corker making much of a difference.

Indeed

Glenn Reynolds:

Of course, if we seized the Saudi and Iranian oil fields and ran the pumps full speed, oil prices would plummet, dictators would be broke, and poor nations would benefit from cheap energy. But we'd be called imperialist oppressors, then.
UPDATE: Various people (with various degrees of enthusiasm) see the above as a call for invasion. It was, rather, a comment on the vacuity of the "imperialist oppressors" language. Though I was probably wrong there anyway: If we really were imperialist oppressors, the critics would be sucking up.

Me (or anyone not insane): Well, yeah, invading a country to steal its resources does seem kind of "imperialist" and a little "oppressive." But if those terms are too leftwing, how about "Saddam like" or perhaps, "not unlike the actions of Imperial Japan circa 1941." What is really disturbing is Reynolds' mindset. He thinks that opposing aggression is a morally suspect position.

And note that Reynolds is deciding how his political opponents would respond to a theoretical position and then he labels it vacuous. Harsh words coming from someone whose greatest contribution to public debate is "heh."

Responsible Rummy

Even if Mackubin Owens is correct in asserting that the problems in Iraq are due to Don Rumsfeld deferring too much to the military brass(and I have my doubts), he is still in charge and responsible for the failures of that occupation.

Crunchy Post

The Washington Post Style Section goes Crunchy. The most startling revelation is that a youthful Rod Dreher served as a tour guide for the late 60's radical, Abbie Hoffman in Baton Rouge.

Yippie activist Abbie Hoffman came to campus, and Dreher volunteered to escort him around town. A wigged-out Hoffman demanded to be driven to Jimmy Swaggart Bible College so he could yell obscenities out the car window and maybe pick a fight. There was an arrogance to it. It was a small moment in a Dreher's journey rightward, toward something that seemed more sensible, upstanding.

On Pins & Needles

Set aside plenty of time for reading, Stephen Green is working on an “essay.” Make that two.

Close Call

Another Memo-of-Mass Destruction. "Saddam Regime Document CMPC-2003-016083 dated in 2001 contains a series of Top Secret memos that address the production of Nerve Gas Detectors which was prohibited by the United Nations resolutions concerning Iraq according to the document itself."

They loaded these banned detectors onto unmanned aerial vehicles and dropped them on our cities and killed millions.

Writers in the South

Rod Dreher thinks he knows why the South produces good writers:

Think of all the material! I just got this from my old pal Thomas, a fellow Louisiana native:

My father’s dachshund (Huey, named after Huey Long) was going to turn 16 in June. My folks had to put him down on Friday for a number of health reasons but there is such a nugget of humor in this that I had to share. Mother informed me that they buried Huey with a can of Miller Lite (his preferred beer) and positioned him facing East. Do you suspect other families have “flavor” such as this?

Well, my late Uncle Murphy once won a tombstone off an undertaker in a bourre' game. Guy couldn't pay him, so he gave Murphy a tombstone made to order. It had Murphy's name, date of birth, and the epitaph Murphy selected for himself. Murphy put it on his front doorstep, where it sat for over 20 years. When he finally expired, his kids had the date of death carved into the stone, and as he requested, put it at the head of his grave. The epitaph reads: "This ain't bad, once you get used to it."

The late Walker Percy begs to differ (from his self interview reprinted in Signposts in a Strange Land:

But what about those unique characteristics of the South? Don't they tend to make the South a more hospitable place for writers?
Well, I've heard about that, the storytelling tradition, sense of identity, tragic dimension, community, history, and so forth. But I was never quite sure what it meant. In fact, I'm not sure that the opposite is not the case. People don't read much in the South and don't take writers very seriously, which is probably as it should be. . .

I have a theory of why Faulkner became a great writer. It was not the presence of a tradition and all that, as one generally hears, but the absence. Everybody in Oxford, Mississippi, knew who faulkner was, not because he was a great writer, but because he was a local character, a little-bitty fellow who put on airs . . .

The Stud

It is instructive to remember what the people were saying when caught up in the moment three years ago today. Their comments have aged well, like fine wine . . .
K-Lo:

Presidential Stud, Continued [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

That looked to me like a pefect landing, to cap off a combat war won in under a month. If the likes of Fox News Channel and NR chose the pictures that would best characterize his presidency: bullhorn at Ground Zero, in a flight suit on the deck of the Lincoln, hanging with his men . . . This is one cool presidential moment. If this were a private corporation, whoever thought of it would be getting a nice raise.(emphasis addded)

More K-Lo:

This is different, guys. And it's not just because he is a Republican and I like him. It's different because he is a leader of a nation that is winning a historically significant war. He is using the props of commander in chief to show the nation and the world--the day after the State Department announced that terrorism is at its lowest point in decades in the U.S.--to demonstrate that we are winning this long war on terrorism, even if we still have miles to go, to show that we support these guys who fought and those who died for our freedom and for the freedom of Iraqis, Afghans, and hopefully in the future, others in that part of the world . . . Again, this is not some stunt photo op.

John Hindraker: "Yeah, we've had better leaders. Their names were Washington and Lincoln. And maybe Roosevelt."

Glenn Reynolds was more skeptical, but caught a lot of flak. "The jet-pilot arrival, on the other hand, rang false."

Actually, I'm a Radical Reactionary

I received my long awaited copy of Bill Kauffman's latest book, Look Homeward America : In Search of Reactionary Radicals and Front-Porch Anarchists. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute will be hosting a blog, starting in a couple of weeks, to discuss the themes presented by Kauffman; and I have been invited by the author to participate.

Unsinkable

Fox News anchor and talk radio host Tony Snow is going to be the new press secretary to President Bush. Apparently, the position of Titanic cruise director is taken.

Fill'er Up

A.C. Kleinheider has a good post about the whole gas price business that contains many links to other sites although his own comments are the best:

We now work, live, worship within a much larger radius than we used to. Cheap gas allowed to set up our society like we have. We can complain about gas prices but if push comes to shove we either have to pay them or drastically adapt our lifestyle.

I'm not talking about riding your bike to the grocery store, driving less, not taking road trips change of lifestyle. I'm talking about changing jobs and having to move kinda change of lifestyle.

How many people say out in Franklin are mortgaged to the hilt working their fingers to the bone in Nashville trying to make their house payment? Gas prices continue to rise and those people will have to start making uncomfortable choices. Get a job closer to home or move closer to work.

We can bitch and moan and talk about quick fixes and maybe the market or the government will find an affordable renewable alternative to gas sometime soon -- but what if they don't. Our society is not set up, we are not equipped, to handle $7.00/gallon gas prices.

I couldn't have said it better myself. Almost every night on the news I see some joker complaining about how much it costs to fill up his Explorer or Excursion or Egregious and then bitch and whine about how greedy oil companies are. But none of these people are forced to live the way that they do. They are the perfect suckers for the oil companies, who are no more greedy today than they were back in the early 80s when the price of gas collapsed their profits suffered.

Good News . . .

Crunchy Cons lives!

Rough Rider

Andrew Bacevich, the author of The New American Militarism and American Empire and a good article in the current London Review of Books that is not online, so I will post a couple of passages. It is a review of Leonard Wood: Rough Rider, Surgeon, Architect of American Imperialism. I should warn you that since he implicitly criticizes the current administration and is a retired military officer, reading his words puts us on a fast track towards military dictatorship:

With Colonel Wood in command and Roosevelt as his deputy, the motley regiment set sail to liberate Cuba. Within days of landing, Wood was promoted to brigade command, handing the Rough Riders over to Roosevelt in time for the celebrated charge up San Juan Hill. The Santiago campaign ended soon after. Through luck more than skill, the Americans had achieved an approximation of victory, the nation thereby acquiring a roster of dashing new heroes, with Brigadier-General Wood (and Roosevelt) chief among them.

. . .Wood was not, as the subtitle of this book suggests, the architect of the first American empire. Rather, for more than two decades, he served as its chief engineer. His job was not to design the empire, but to make it work, first by getting the 'wogs' to behave and then by bringing them to comply with American values. In that regard, despite all his efforts, he failed abysmally. The architects and engineers of the present-day American empire should ask themselves why.

Indeed?

Here's a particularly egregious post by Glenn Reynolds (in support of an egregious column by Charles Krauthammer). According to Reynolds, the "left," who by granting a hearing to the complaints of some retired generals are thereby "pushing the idea that generals should run things." I actually emailed him asking who made that argument, but no response. He then updated his column with a email from a reader:

UPDATE: Reader Rachel Walker emails:

I understand the right to dissent. Heck, it's been my side's rallying cry since it lost to Bush in the Supreme Court in 2000. But the logic of this dissent puts their train of thought far into the (dare I say it) fascist line of behavior, since they are basically calling for the military to control all things.

This is what contrarian arguing can end up doing - leading one into exactly what they did not intend to be. I had to learn the lesson that not every action equals a proper reaction.

Indeed.

How did we get to fascism, and is listening to military complaints the same as giving the military "control" of " all things"?

I humbly submit that it is a huge leap from Anthony Zinni or John Batiste giving an interview to the New York Times airing their complaints about the performance of Rumsfeld . . . to Zinni and Batiste marching into the Pentagon with an army of antiwar hippies and seizing control of the government.

Memos of Mass Destruction

In case you haven't been paying attention; the vaunted WMD, the unmanned aerial vehicles that were supposed to rain death on American cities, the smoking guns that would soon come as mushroom clouds, have now been replaced by an even graver reality: Memos of Mass Destruction.

Insubordinate, Seditious, Revolting

It is getting harder to defend Don Rumsfeld's term in office, so supporters must come up with arguments that don't touch on his fitness for the job. Tony Blankley, in two colums (1, 2) argues in favor of a witch hunt of generals who may be planning to retire and then criticize the war effort:

Because, if The Washington Post thinks -- as I do -- that we are seeing before our eyes a coordinated act of multiple insubordination by a group of generals, then such action should not go unsanctioned. The dangerous precedent must not be permitted to stand -- whether or not one agrees with their substantive criticism of their civilian superiors.

. . .

Politically unpleasant as it may be, they should promptly order a court of inquiry pursuant to Article 135 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice to determine if, as is widely suspected, or if not, the current military clamor for Secretary Rumsfeld to be fired involves any acts of insubordination.

This is ridiculous. Blankley clearly doesn't understand the concepts of "insubordination" and "sedition." The former being the refusal to submit to authority and the latter being an incite a rebellion against the government. He also misunderstands that people are speaking metaphorically when the speak of a "revolt" among generals.

High-ranking officers have three choices when they disapprove of the policy set by their political bosses.

1 They can refuse to obey orders and suffer the consequences.
2 They can ignore their feelings and follow orders.
3 They can resign their positions so they no longer have to obey. If they feel strongly enough, they can speak out about it.

The third is becoming more popular; with John Batiste who turned down a third star rather than contiue to take orders from Rummy.

There is no question that the Secdef has a right to have subordinates obey lawful orders. However, he must earn their respect.

Hungry For Oil

This is rich. According to today's Times, the Bush administration plans to scold China for its oil consumption, attempts to "lock up" supplies and its dealings with unsavory regimes:

"They are buying long-term supplies wherever they find them, including in unsavory places like Sudan, Iran and Burma, where we won't buy," said Michael J. Green, a Georgetown University professor who directed policy on China at the National Security Council until late last year. "They say it is benign, because they don't interfere with the internal affairs of other nations. And we say it is anything but benign, because it finances these regimes' bad behavior."

China, with more than a billion people uses 6.5 million barrels of oil a day while the United States with around 300 million uses more than three times as much, but they are causing a problem. And even if we don't buy directly from places like Iran and Burma, our ravenous consumption keeps the prices high and helps fund those regimes.

Error Message

Here is a great bit of unintentional humor from the folks at National Review Online: "As a political matter, Rumsfeld’s leaving at this moment, under this kind of fire, would play as an admission that the critics who say the Iraq war was fundamentally botched have been right all along." We wouldn't want to admit that now would we?

Where Have You Gone, Lord Carrington?

Lord Carrington

How the mighty have fallen! It seems like only yesterday that Donald Rumsfeld was a media darling. In the Fall of 2001, National Review put Rummy on its cover and called him "The Stud." Inside, Jay Nordlinger effused;

Evidencce of Rumsfeld mania is everywhere, and it's mounting. Consider a few facts:
*Reports have it that people gather round to watch Rumsfeld press conferences the way the do Oprah.
*One Hollywood grande dame, hostess of a prized post-Oscar party, says to another Hollywood grande dame, "I'll call you in the morning." The second dame replies, "Okay, but be careful: Rumsfeld's on at 9:45."

And so forth. Those days have long passed. Today, only true believers, like those who leave comments at Polipundit and of course the Freepers, still support Rummy. Part of the essential narrative in support of Rumsfeld is that his critics among retired generals are all Clintonites. Rush Limbaugh dismisses Anthony Zinni, who was almost fifty when Bill Clinton took office as "an old Clinton guy." Some of the Freepers claim that the generals are upset because of missed promotions, but at least one --John Batiste -- turned down a third star.

By clinging to power at all costs, Donald Rumsfeld only is acting in the proper American Way. His tenure gives me a new appreciation of Lord Carrington, who was Margaret Thatcher's Foreign Secretary when Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands. Acting on the principal of ministerial responsibility, Carrington resigned. That rarely happens in this country. Public officials usually hang around for as long as possible no matter how badly they mess things up.

The time for Rumsfeld to go was nearly three years ago when it became clear that he had been wrong and General Shinseki right, about the size of an occupying force needed for Iraq; and when he was practically the only person in the world unaware that the U.S. military was involved in a guerilla war in Mesopotamia. At this late date, he might as well stay on. I doubt that the Republicans have anyone willing to be this war's Clark Clifford.

Seen in the Times

Several things lept out at me in today's New York Times:
1 Have you noticed how more and more retired generals hate America?

The three-star Marine Corps general who was the military's top operations officer before the invasion of Iraq expressed regret, in an essay published Sunday, that he did not more energetically question those who had ordered the nation to war. He also urged active-duty officers to speak out now if they had doubts about the war.
Lt. Gen. Gregory Newbold, who retired in late 2002, also called for replacing Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and "many others unwilling to fundamentally change their approach." He is the third retired senior officer in recent weeks to demand that Mr. Rumsfeld step down.

2 Illegal immigrants finally stand up for themselves.

"For years, we never say nothing," said Mr. Martinez, who crossed the Rio Grande illegally 22 years ago and eventually became an American citizen. "We just work hard, follow the rules and pay taxes. And they try to make these laws. It's time people knew how we felt."

They follow the rules except for one about sneaking across international borders.

3 How the 'free market' in executive pay really works:

For Ivan G. Seidenberg, chief executive of Verizon Communications, 2005 was a very good year. As head of the telecommunications giant, Mr. Seidenberg received $19.4 million in salary, bonus, restricted stock and other compensation, 48 percent more than in the previous year.

Others with a stake in Verizon did not fare so well. Shareholders watched their stock fall 26 percent, bondholders lost value as credit agencies downgraded the company's debt and pensions for 50,000 managers were frozen at year-end. When Verizon closed the books last year, it reported an earnings decline of 5.5 percent.

And yet, according to the committee of Verizon's board that determines his compensation, Mr. Seidenberg earned his pay last year as the company exceeded "challenging" performance benchmarks. Mr. Seidenberg's package was competitive with that of other companies in Verizon's industry, shareholders were told, and was devised with the help of an "outside consultant" who reports to the committee.

The independence of this "outside consultant" is open to question. Although neither Verizon officials nor its directors identify its compensation consultant, people briefed on the relationship say it is Hewitt Associates of Lincolnshire, Ill., a provider of employee benefits management and consulting services with $2.8 billion in revenue last year.

Hewitt does much more for Verizon than advise it on compensation matters. Verizon is one of Hewitt's biggest customers in the far more profitable businesses of running the company's employee benefit plans, providing actuarial services to its pension plans and advising it on human resources management. According to a former executive of the firm who declined to be identified out of concern about affecting his business, Hewitt has received more than half a billion dollars in revenue from Verizon and its predecessor companies since 1997.

J'Accuse?

So, is it anti-semitic? I refer to the Mearsheimer and Walt(M&W) study of the powerful Israel lobby in the U.S. Eliot Cohen says yes and Glenn, as usual agrees without really saying anything. I don't know for sure, but some of Cohen's claims don't hold up. For example, he says "Israeli citizenship rests 'on the principle of blood kinship,' it says, and yet the country has a million non-Jewish citizens who vote." But M & W say:

Some aspects of Israeli democracy are at odds with core American values. Unlike the US, where people are supposed to enjoy equal rights irrespective of race, religion or ethnicity, Israel was explicitly founded as a Jewish state and citizenship is based on the principle of blood kinship. Given this, it is not surprising that its 1.3 million Arabs are treated as second-class citizens, or that a recent Israeli government commission found that Israel behaves in a ‘neglectful and discriminatory’ manner towards them. Its democratic status is also undermined by its refusal to grant the Palestinians a viable state of their own or full political rights.

They might be wrong, but what they are saying is considerably more nuanced than what Cohen says that they are saying.

Cohen also claims that "Osama bin Laden's grievance with the United States begins with Israel, it says." What M&W actually say is:

More important, saying that Israel and the US are united by a shared terrorist threat has the causal relationship backwards: the US has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel, not the other way around. Support for Israel is not the only source of anti-American terrorism, but it is an important one, and it makes winning the war on terror more difficult. There is no question that many al-Qaida leaders, including Osama bin Laden, are motivated by Israel’s presence in Jerusalem and the plight of the Palestinians. Unconditional support for Israel makes it easier for extremists to rally popular support and to attract recruits. (emphasis added)

Tapes of Osama bear this out: "We swore that America wouldn't live in security until we live it truly in Palestine. This showed the reality of America, which puts Israel's interest above its own people's interest. America won't get out of this crisis until it gets out of the Arabian Peninsula, and until it stops its support of Israel." -Osama bin Laden, October 2001

I don't know enough about the issue to definitively support or oppose the study by M&W, however I can spot a shoddy hit job when I see one. My first clue was that Cohen led off by mentioning David Duke

Housekeeping

A few items I wish to mention before I forget:

1 Congratulations to A.C. Kleinheider for somehow turning blogging into a real job.

2 I waited until the last day, before getting my mention on the Crunchy Cons Blog, plugging Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette.

3 Scott McConnell read Rebel-in-Chief by Fred Barnes so you and I don't have to:

But for readers who might wonder what it is like to be North Korean and required to read formulaic biographies of great helmsman Kim Il Sung and his son, an afternoon spent with Rebel-in-Chief should provide a proximate answer.

In Barnes’s defense, the book is a representative product of a large neo-Republican publishing industry that has sprung up in the past five years to tap the market for conservative books aimed just below the middle of the brow--gifts to give the friend or parent who is an avid Hannity and O'Reilly watcher, to be thumbed through perhaps more than read. This is a large market, previously underserved.

In his acknowledgments, Barnes tells of writing an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal on George W. Bush as an "insurgent" president. Many would find this an unlikely designation for a man who was essentially anointed as heir apparent by Republican elites, a very fortunate son who floated from business partnerships where he did no real work into the Texas governor's mansion, a man who unlike anyone else you've ever known suffered no adverse professional consequences for being an alcoholic with no real accomplishments at age 40. But for Barnes, this experience was the perfect training for the president "as rebel," enabling him to disregard conventional Beltway knowledge, the tiresome stuff of diplomats, science advisors, and other "experts."

Atlas Flipped

If they gave out Oscars for non sequiturs, this nutjob would win in a walk:

This story speaks for itself. The mainstream media will paint Israel in the most impossible, almost demonic light while tenderly, gingerly making love to killers and savages. But the following story really says it all;

On Thursday evening, an Israeli couple gave rides to three hitchhikers. One, disguised as a religious Jew, was a suicide bomber, who blew himself up in the car at the entrance to the community of Kedumim. Body parts were hurled dozens of feet. The car burned for an hour.

Unbowed, the International Herald Tribune cites a completely discredited, Jew hating study to prop up its antisemitic ravings here.

What is really at play here? A struggle as old as time. The struggle between good and evil. My dear, brilliant friend and soul mate, Dr. Helen, points to the "involvement in antisemitism involves probably every person through his/her family at one point or another.

The suicide bombing has nothing to do with the study of the powerful Israel lobby by Mearsheimer and Walt. But hey, what does it matter? We might just as well stipulate that anybody who hasn't donated to the Likud party in, say, the last week or so is a Nazi. It sure beats making arguments. You don't need those when you are a Pajamas blogger who knows how to use the color and bold function.

P.S. I almost forgot to throw in the fact that the study has the support of David Duke. Wouldn't want to forget that.

Trifkovic on Islam

Jamie Glazov, of Frontpage Magazine interviews Serge (or Srdja) Trifkovic the Foreign-Affairs Editor of Chronicles and the author of the forthcoming Defeating Jihad. Trifkovic says we must learn the true nature of Islam and in the most important part of his argument he says: "The victory will come not by conquering Mecca for America, but by disengaging America from Mecca (energy independence is a must!) and by excluding Mecca from America with a new immigration policy, soberly defined and rigorously enforced. The risk can, and must, be managed wisely, resolutely, and permanently."

An Undecided Voter

My only problem is deciding which party that I hate the most.

Remembering

Now that the Iraq war is about to turn three, FAIR has a list of some of the rosy statements from conservatives and even a few from the "Liberal Media" about how easy was and how wrong the pessimists and defeatists were (via Tom Tomorrow). My favorite:

The only people who think this wasn't a victory are Upper Westside liberals, and a few people here in Washington.
(Charles Krauthammer, Inside Washington, WUSA-TV, 4/19/03)

Henry Who?

Why does National Review embarrass itself by giving platforms to people like Mark Levin? His post about Russ Feingold's Censure resolution contains the usual treason charge: "He has now officially joined the pack of shrill leftists who -- during the course of a war -- embrace the tactics of Tokyo Rose and Jane Fonda." Yeah, wanting to have the president go to an extremely deferential FISA court before listening in on the phonecalls of Americans is exactly like Tokyo Rose.

Levin then engages in a mini "history" lesson:

The censure of a president was employed once in our history. In 1834, The Whig-controlled Senate voted to censure President Andrew Jackson, a Democrat, for vetoing an extension of the charter of the Bank of the United States. While legally meaningless, Jackson was deeply offended by it. And when his party regained control of the Senate in 1836, he insisted that the record be expunged -- and it was. The primary proponent of Jackson's censure is largely unknown to history, as Feingold will be.(emphasis added)

It took about five seconds to find out how little Levin knows. The "unknown to history" proponent of censure was Henry Clay, one of the more prominent Americans from the first half of the 19th century.

Barnes v. Buchanan

This silly Fred Barnes article cries out for the Sailer treatment for its absurd statements about the value of the Hispanic vote to the Republican party. Barnes is concerned that an outbreak of paleoconservatism is endangering Republican rule. His evidence is the failed Dubai ports deal and the belated attempts of congressional Republicans to control illegal immigration. But these issues have far broader appeal than the mailing lists of Chronicles and The American Conservative.

What really upsets Barnes is criticism of his heartthrob. Paleos:

Attack Bush on issue after issue. This weakens the Republican base and, potentially at least, reduces voter turnout. Republican voters dismiss criticism by Democrats or the media, but they pay attention when other Republicans zing Bush, or when they attack congressional Republicans, for that matter.

What delusional drivel. Republican rule isn't threatened by the years of cynicism, corruption and incompetence. It's Pat Buchanan's Fault.

Lowered Bar

The Professor (oops, I am violating his Terms of Use) demonstrates the lowered bar for success in Iraq -- it only went to the brink of civil war. He also engages in a little bet-hedging. "The press had better hope we win this war, because if we don't, a lot of people will blame the media."(empasis in original).

If I had both bought and sold this war with the gusto that Reynolds did, I would be looking for someone else to blame as well.

Crunchy Wars

I will in time have a review of Rod Dreher's Crunchy Cons. Let me just point out now, the it really seems to be making some people, particuarly Jonah Golberg, mad:

Moreover, Rod, I really think you need to practice what you preach a bit more. How you can tell me that I shouldn't dismiss Marxists out of hand when they have something useful to say, while your book serves as one long ad hominem against two dimensional, greedy, "mainstream conservatives" is really quite beyond me.

This is somewhat unfair. Dreher is critical of conservatives, but he makes arguments(not ad hominems) and much of his criticism includes himself.

Crunchy, Non-Crunchy

Crunchy.
Non-Crunchy:

Red State TV
by Mary Katharine Ham

Country Music Television is going through that inevitable adolescent stage in a music station's development in which it gets all rebellious and decides it's not a music station anymore. Instead, CMT now shows videos and original shows.
This is the point in the relationship in which you just have to step back and pray that you've raised your music television station well enough that it makes the right decisions on its own. It just wants to express itself, make its mark on the world, and you can only hope you've given it the values to do so without devolving into programming featuring any combination of whip cream, 7 strangers in one house, and Carson Daly.
I'll admit, I worried about my little CMT, but it's showing promise and maturity. First, it knows the wisdom of sticking with a classic. Hence, the "Dukes of Hazzard" on regular rotation . . .

Mission To Moscow

The war party is constantly lamenting the failure of the media and Hollywood to get on board to support the war in Iraq. Some, like Thomas Sowell, wax nostalgic over conformity disguised as patriotism from the 1940s. I have seen such conformity taken to the extreme in the form of the 1943 Warner Brothers film, Mission to Moscow. It is a movie based on the experiences of Ambassador Joseph Davies. In the film, Davies (played by Walter Huston) comes to the USSR after a brief stay in Germany. During the brief stopover in Berlin, The ambassador talks to numerous Germans practically licking their chops at their coming feast of the European continent. Mrs. Davies remarks on the goose-stepping conformity of the Hitler Youth.

Davies tours the Soviet Union and sees heroic and productive factories and collective farms where workers are allowed to divide up the profits(!) after the state gets its cut. The only problems came from the traitorous saboteurs who were almost heroic in guilt at the trial where most of them eagerly confessed -- so great was their shame.

Only at the very end of his mission does Davies meet a kindly, avuncular Joe Stalin. Uncle Joe tells Davies that "reactionary elements" in France and England wish for a war between Germany and the USSR. Later, on his way back to America, Davies stops in England and tells Winston Churchill -- still a private citizen -- that if the democratic powers "continue to look down their noses" at Russia, they going to force Stalin into Hitler's arms.

The final segment of the movie shows Davies making rousing speeches denouncing "isolationists and defeatists" and calling America to the aid of Russia between shots of unctuous business and political leaders almost drooling at the prospect of profiting off of relations with Hitler's Europe claiming that war is none of our business.

Not surprisingly, the value of such propaganda was short-lived. Howard Koch, who wrote the screenplay (and also co-wrote Casablanca), was later blacklisted for his leftwing views; although at the time he was just doing his part to aid the war effort.

Faith-Based Dictator

Is Jay Nordlinger for real? He feebly attempts to make Saddam into some sort of religious extremist, and thus more likely an ally of al Qaeda:

Incidentally, when Saddam was acting up in court, he was clutching -- and waving -- a Koran. He also keeps raving about the "ummah" (the broad Muslim world).
But the good Bush critics are always telling us that Saddam is a mere secularist annoyance -- what truck could he possibly have with extremist Islam, al Qaeda, our real enemies?
Yeah, yeah: Before he was toppled, Saddam put an inscription from the Koran on the Iraqi flag; he claimed to have had a Koran written out in his own blood; etc., etc.
Dictators use what they can, and we should be spared more talk about how Saddam was just a standard secularist, not to be confused with the cancer now attacking our world.

I'm not even sure what he is trying to say. His last sentence muddles his point. If Saddam is some sort of religious extremist, then he isn't simply "using what he can" to hold power. The evidence is that he is not an extremist. Christians were allowed to sell alcohol when he was in power, something that has become more problematic since he was toppled. I have no idea what his going on in Saddam's head, but I suspect that his religious displays serve his personal and political agenda.

But even if Nordlinger and the neocons were right about Saddam and the threat he posed, the invasion of Iraq has been a disaster and has made us less secure than if the dictator had remained in power.

Exactly

As I know from personal experience, this post from Antiwar.com is right on the money:

An ex-Marine wrote me with his opinion of the Marine Corps:

"The Marine Corps is like a frat party in between the hard work. For the most part, they are irresponsible, alcoholic, sex addicts. The married Marines that I served with didn't think twice about cheating on their spouses during deployments. And speaking of deployments, if the U.S. military ever gets disbanded, the worldwide brothel industry would shut down overnight. The behavior of my fellow Marines in Thailand I found to be utterly repulsive. What a shame it is to have de facto ambassadors of the United States--i.e., the people whom 'represent' America to foreigners--behaving in such a way. Hedonists with guns. That's the Marine Corps."

Where Have All The Flowers Gone?

I have been hung up on Mark Steyn lately, but check out this exchange with Hugh Hewitt:

HH: Well, this raises a delicate question. Before there was Mark Steyn, there was and remains George Will. And I think many of us in the business of opinion journalism respect his work over a long period of time. But I'm beginning to worry if he's going Pat Buchanan on us, Mark Steyn. Today he wrote a column blasting the idea that the authorization for the use of military force somehow authorized the president to conduct surveillance on al Qaeda. And Andrew McCarthy answered this at National Review. But it's an absurd column by one of the elder statesmen of conservatism. What's going on?

MS: Well, I think George Will is like a lot of conservatives. I like George Will enormously, but, and he's got a very sharp mind. But he doesn't basically accept the premise of the Bush doctrine, which is that you can somehow change the culture of our enemies' states, in other words, the Middle Eastern states, Afghanistan, Pakistan, that you can somehow change them, and make them more like us. And you're right . . . he's right to an extent that you can't give liberty to people. They have to want it. But on the other hand, it's a hard job, but there's actually not much alternative to it. You have to somehow say to these people you have to find a way to reach an accommodation between your religion and the modern world, because just saying it can't be done is no answer to anything. That condemns us all, essentially, to a majority Muslim planet in which American will be isolated and very short of friends. And the Bush doctrine is a long shot, but it's better than just consigning ourselves to hopelessness. And I respectfully disagree with George Will, and I wish he could see that.

He doesn't even address the issue of executive power that was the subject of the Will column. Instead, he launches into a diatribe about Will not believing that the U.S. government can plant liberal democracy in the Fertile Crescent like one plants one of those little packets of Zinnia seeds.

Newt Churchill

Why should anybody listen to Pat Buchanan? He predicted that the Iraq war would be a bloody mess of a quagmire:

My own sense of this astonishing interview is that Newt is trying to get to the right of John McCain on Iran and cast himself -- drum roll, please -- as the Churchill of our generation.

But are the comparisons of Ahmadinejad with Hitler and Iran with the Third Reich, let alone Newt with Churchill, instructive? Or are they ludicrous? Again, a few facts.

In 1942, Hitler's armies dominated Europe from the Pyrenees to the Urals. Ahmadinejad is the president of a nation whose air and naval forces would be toasted in hours by the United States. Iran has missiles that can hit Israel, but no nuclear warheads. Israel could put scores of atom bombs on Iran. The United States, without losing a plane, could make the country uninhabitable with one B-2 flyover and a few MX and Trident missiles.

Real Men Pose With A Football!

What is it about rightwing magazines and their he-man presidential contenders? First National Review last year and now Newsmax have Virginia Sen. George Allen (son of the late NFL coach) posing with a football. I guess nobody is going to accuse him of looking French.

Clean For Gene

Nobody in the punditry world perplexes me more than Mark Steyn. The ususal rightwing suspects fawn over him as if he were a cross between Aristotle and Jefferson. His writing turns up everywhere, most bizarrely in his obituary column in the Atlantic Monthly. The valuable two pages ought to be used for a column by their excellent book critic, Benjamin Schwarz; or almost anybody else.

The subject of his obit in the March issue is Eugene McCarthy, who died in December. Steyn makes one of the more interesting political figures of the last half century boring by forcing him into his political mold:

There's something to be said for taking the view that, regardless of the merits of this or that foreign war, once you're in it you might as well win it. Alternatively, there's something to be said for the position that, if you're going to cut and run, do it quick and get over it, as the British did when they abandoned Aden, on the Arabian coast, the day before McCarthy launched his presidential campaign. . .

But to cut your losses and then mire yourself in an interminable psychological quagmire of your own has little to recommend it. "Vietnam casts long shadows," we're told, but not so much across the nation at large as over the Democratic Party. Forty years after McCarthy's swift, brutal destruction of the most powerful Democrat in the second half of the twentieth century, it remains unclear whether his party will ever again support a political figure committed to waging serious war, any war: Clinton bombed more countries in a little over six months than the supposed warmonger Bush has hit in six years, but, unless you happened to be in that Sudanese aspirin factory or Belgrade embassy, it was always desultory and uncommitted . . . Gene McCarthy's brief moment in the spotlight redefined the party's relationship with the projection of military force. That's quite an accomplishment. Whether it was in the long-term strategic interests of either the party or American liberalism is another question.

. . . In 1968, he was the indispensable man whose charm was that he didn’t regard himself as such. Having been dispensed with by his party, he spent the next quarter- century insisting on his relevance . . .

I defy any rational person -- which leaves out Steyn -- to make Bill Clinton's 1998 Sudan bombing relevant to the life of Gene McCarthy. Steyn neglected to mention that McCarthy had endorsed Ronald Reagan in 1980, or been supported by Russell Kirk in 1976 ("McCarthy was a conservative . . . He read seriously and wrote intelligently In the White Houses -- per impossible -- he might have turned the most imaginatively conservative of presidents."--The Sword of Imagination). McCarthy's opposition to our open-border immigration policy goes unmentioned by Steyn as well. Scott McConnell's far better obit in the American Conservative says twice as much of value about McCarthy in half the words.

Crunchy Cons

Dreher's forthcoming book sounds pretty good:

How long do you think we can keep living as we do, destroying the countryside to produce mountains of processed food that makes us less healthy? Care for this trust obliges all of us, but conservatives, because we prefess a particular commitment to upholding tradition, are especially responsible for stewardship of the land and its cultural legacy. If we live as if we have no duty to the land and the agrarian traditions of the people who live there, then we ought to be ashamed to call ourselves conservatives. We are no more than market-mad consumers who vote Republican and whose commmitment to conservative ideals ends the moment it costs something

-- Rod Dreher, from Crunchy Cons, excerpted in the Feb. 27, 2006 issue of the American Conservative.

UPDATE: I assume that Lorie Byrd is more representative of self-styled "conservatives":

What is more representative of the American way of life than a fast food restaurant? That is why, when I saw pictures of a burning KFC, and read about an attack on a Pizza Hut and saw a picture of Ronald McDonald in flames, I couldn't help but think, "Uh oh. They have done it now. Mess with an American's Big Mac or Whopper and you are going to have public opinion firmly behind the most extreme measures of anti-terrorist policy." I wonder if the terrorists realize that.

All Wet

By far the silliest commentary on the Cheney shooting that I have seen so far, comes from Mark Steyn in the Corner:

From an anecdotal survey of my part of the North Country, most guys see the Cheney business as an excuse to tell their own hunting stories, mostly of the been-there-done-(or-nearly-done)-that variety. I'm not saying I'm entirely on board with the line that real men shoot each other all the time without whining like a bunch of ninnies about what's no more than a healthy American male bonding experience. But on balance this is one of those no-scandal scandals where Democrat/media hysteria only underlines their estrangement from the average red-state male.

I have spent most of my life in East Tennessee. I have been in the Marine Corps. I have spent time in gun stores and gun shows. I have never heard of this kind of incident, though I am sure it happens sometimes. It gives me an idea of how the opposition could make political hay out of the shooting. If I were Howard Dean, or somesuch, I would suggest, ever so subtly, that Cheney is a pansy who can't be trusted with a weapon, or the country's national security. I would remind people that even Bill Clinton and the French looking John Kerry went hunting and didn't shoot their friends.

I remember something that A.J. Foyt said many years ago about a wreck that occurred before the first lap of the Indianapolis 500 (this is a paraphrase) -- One wouldn't want to follow [the young driver responsible for the crash] into a men's roon -- one could get wet.

Hmmm?

This is interesting. James Webb, a former Secretary of the Navy under President Reagan, as well as an author; is planning to challenge George Allen for his Senate seat in Virginia as a Democrat. The Usual Suspects have already started on him:

To: SDGOP; rowhey; DM1
He masquaraded as a "conservative" in the Reagan Admin fooling many back then well before being appointed SecNav. Nobody seemed to notice his liberal leanings, a shallowly veiled contempt for the Reaganites, and instead all were treated to his self aggrandizement on how much of a hero he was, echoes of Murtha and Kerry. At the time, how could anyone accuse such a hero of being anything but a conservative? He fooled them and they were well placed and ranking people he took in. He never was "on the reservation", simply a legend in his own mind. When I would see the real Marines, humble heros for sure, I would wince at the sight of this pretender.

But let me be the first to bring up the real issue. How did you get those Purple Hearts, Mr. Webb? When are you going to release your records? Hmmm?

Civility

One could devote one's whole life to pointing out that Poddy is a stupid jerk:

BOOING TAMAR JACOBY AT CPAC [John Podhoretz]

I tell you, there's nothing like the open-mindedness in the debate over immigration. What decorum! What civility! What thoughtful discourse! How proud you restrictionists must be!

Pork Busters

Glenn Reynolds suggests that leading Porkbusters Ted Stevens and Robert Byrd be retired for their big spending ways. However, this gallant watchdog of the public purse can't be bothered to mention the billions that have gone missing from Iraq reconstruction projects, which would seem to be far more scandalous than a few federal buildings in West Virginia:

The American-dominated Coalition Provisional Authority could well prove to be the most corrupt administration in history, almost certainly surpassing the widespread fraud of the much-maligned UN Oil for Food Program. At least $20 billion that belonged to the Iraqi people has been wasted, together with hundreds of millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars. Exactly how many billions of additional dollars were squandered, stolen, given away, or simply lost will never be known because the deliberate decision by the CPA not to meter oil exports means that no one will ever know how much revenue was generated during 2003 and 2004.

Byrd is the only senator to have appeared on Hee Haw; and as far as I can tell, he is the only one to have actually read the constitution. I, for one, hope he sticks around for a while longer even if it means naming the entire state of West Virginia after him and causes Ann Coulter to have several cows.

Presidential Power

How can any self-respecting rightwinger make an arguement like this:

"The President has enhanced responsibility to resist unconstitutional provisions that encroach upon the constitutional powers of the Presidency."

. . .or this clear statement of principle, we have the Clinton administration to thank. Specifically, then-Attorney General Janet Reno's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) -- the Justice Department's elite unit of lawyers for the lawyers. It was chiseled into a formal 1994 OLC opinion, aptly entitled "The President's Authority to Decline to Execute Unconstitutional Statutes," by then-Assistant Attorney General Walter Dellinger, OLC's top gun.

As a general rule, it is not a good idea to spend more than a decade demonizing a man and then set his administration up as an example of good behavior. I used to think of Clinton as a dangerous president with an exapansive view of executive power, but these days I can hardly remember why without the aid of James Bovard.

P.S. On a related matter, Hugh Hewitt suggests and Prof. Reynolds seems to agree (did you ever notice how rarely Reynolds actually says anything, rather than just giving the implied endorsement of a link) the that Sen. Frist schedule a sense of the Senate vote on whether to keep the NSA eavesdropping program or to kill it, even though that would be a false choice. The real choice would be among the following:
1 Keep the program as is.
2 Abolish it.
3 Or keep it subject to the oversight of the FISA Court and/or the Congress.

I think that most reasonable people would be in favor of the third option.

Piffle!

Is this the best that the war party can do after three years of war in Iraq? Being, R. Emmett Tyrrell of the American Spectator it probably isn't. The current Tyrrellian justification for the Iraq Quagmire is that:

America had suffered 3,000 casualties at home, not one of whom had been engaged in warfare against anyone. The tyrant we took down had taunted us, boasted of his danger to us and hosted terrorists in his capital. There was no debate about this. The United States had attacked a modern-day Hitler who was not as clever as the original and was encouraging enemies of our country. The brute Saddam was actually sending rewards to the families of terrorists.

What kind of zanies would join a peace movement against this military effort to do about what Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill did in the early 1940s?
President Roosevelt did what he did despite the Neutrality Acts against military assistance to foreign powers, even foreign powers defending themselves against the Nazis. Very boldly Roosevelt broke the law, and he did so repeatedly.

Ignore for a moment the casual way that Tyrrell conflates the actions of Bush and Blair with those of Churchill and Roosevelt who, no matter what criticisms one might make of them, were fighting against the real Axis. You know, the one that had invaded Poland, bombed London and attacked Pearl Harbor. Missing from Tyrrell's bill of particulars against Saddam is any claim that he attacked and murdered the three thousand Americans that he refers to in the first sentence.

The whole point of this most recent after-the-fact justification for the disasterous Iraq invasion -- I seem to remember a lot of loose talk about "mushroom clouds" before -- is to give Tyrrell a chance to fling poo upon Cindy Sheehan. Now, I don't particulary care for Sheehan. I feel for the loss of her son, but her contribution to the public debate is to make it easier for nitwits like Tyrrell to avoid addressing the arguements of people such as Andrew Bacevich, who manages to make devastating criticisms of the Iraq invasion without cuddling with the thuggish Hugo Chavez.

P.S. Since this is about Emmett Tyrrell, who idolizes the late H.L. Mencken; feel free the to insert the following Menckenisms into the text at random the way that Tyrrell often does: Piffle! Mountebank!, Poltroon!, etc.

Crocodile Tears

If you could harness the energy of mock outrage, perhaps by refining crocodile tears into gasoline; the web and especially the blogosphere could put OPEC out of business. A good recent example is the hysteria over a Tom Toles cartoon in the Washington Post. The toon depicts a man in a hospital bed with a bandage on his head and the stumps of his arms and legs in bandages. He clearly represents the Army. Dr. Rumsfeld pronounces the man's condition to be "battle hardened."

No reasonable person could construe the cartoon to be anything other than an attack the arrogant stupidity of Don Rusmfeld, who had recently contradicted two reports, one sponsored by the Pentagon, that said the military is being stretched by the occupation of Iraq.

Pronouncing it to be "disgraceful," professor Reyonolds linked to a contest to recaption the toon at Instapunk. Punk makes it clear that he is outraged on behalf of wounded Republicans, as opposed to wounded soldier, by stating that "You can Bush-bash if you want, but we'll throw your stuff away." That doesn't seem to be much of a problem for the entries, many of which are generic smears of liberals and Democrats and have nothing to do with the issue at hand. I copied a few below (I respect Toles' and the Post's copyright, but these are stolen goods). The one at the top would at least make sense if the patient was labeled "Washington Post" and the chart read "credibility," instead of the other way around. It took me a while to figure out that "P. Snick" on the second entry means "peacenik." Oooh, clever! The next two are cretinously stupid. What do Ted Kennedy or the Alito hearing have to do with the issue at hand?
.

Fruit Flavored G3, RIP

My very old (in computer terms) lime green iMac finally gave out the other day and I bought a new, pre-Intel iMac G5. I assume that I am the last blogger in the world to have been using equipment from the last millenium. No more.

Question

Can you imagine how outraged these people would be if this could be blamed on Bill Clinton or Al Gore?:

AN AUDIT of US reconstruction spending in Iraq has uncovered spectacular misuse of tens of millions of dollars in cash, including bundles of money stashed in filing cabinets, a US soldier who gambled away thousands and stacks of newly minted notes distributed without receipts.

The audit, released yesterday by the US Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, describes a country in the months after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein awash with dollars, and a Wild West atmosphere where even multimillion-dollar contracts were paid for in cash.

Mean People Suck

Which party is "meaner"-- the Democrats or Republicans? If you said that is a stupid question then you have successfully completed the sixth grade, but you would be wrong according to Patrick Hynes. Hynes, of the website formerly known as "Crush Kerry" thinks that Democrats are mean. Mean for a lot of reasons, but consider just this one:

AND LET'S NOT DISREGARD the looming (and increasingly inevitable) financial disaster that will strike when swarms of baby boomers storm the pay window to collect what they've been promised. The politicians in Washington and American interest groups spent the first half of 2005 debating the creeping crisis as it relates to Social Security and whether we can or should do anything about it. President Bush and some Republicans wanted to introduce personal retirement accounts. Democrats (sadly with the help of more than a few RINO's) demonized the plan. But what is most notable about the debate is that the Democrats' official position was that we had nothing to worry about. Don't be fooled by Republican tricks, they told Americans. Everything is going to be just fine.

This false sense of, ahem, security, over the years has resulted in millions of soon-to-be-on-the-dole Boomers making the disastrous decision to not put money away for themselves. And so now we have the most prosperous generation in human history prepared to retire without a penny to their names, fully convinced that the government checks are on their way; "guaranteed" in a "lock box," as the liberal parlance goes.

So the mean Dems, who opposed the President's plans to "reform" Social Security in 2005 are responsible for boomers who failed to plan for retirement over the last forty years. I could ask how anyone could possibly trust the Bush administration to reform Social Security after their disasterous prescription drug plan, but that would be mean.

Corrupt Care

Jonathan Chait recommends that the Democrats use the awful new prescription drug program against the Republicans in the forthcoming elections:

FOR THE LAST few weeks, Democrats in Washington have been thrashing about in search of some way to make the Republican corruption scandals relevant to the broader public. Meanwhile, the public seems much more concerned about the Medicare prescription drug plan, which, with its horror stories of bureaucratic bungling, has turned out to be the Hurricane Katrina of entitlement programs.

It's the corruption! It's the Medicare drug plan! Wait a second -- is it me, or did the answer to the Democrats' dilemma just fall right into their lap?

The Medicare drug plan is the perfect issue for Democrats to run on. It perfectly encapsulates the corruption of Republican Washington, and it's a concrete thing that voters can relate to. Running on this issue makes so much sense that naturally the Democrats won't do it.

I don't really have a dog in this fight. I don't care much for Dean, Clinton and Pelosi; although I can't see how they could be more corrupt or dishonest or incompetent the Bush, Cheney, Delay, Rumsfeld . . .

Conservatives for Breathing

A sneerfest erupted in NRO's The Corner because their house Crunchy Con, Rod Dreher came out in favor of breathing. Perhaps I exaggerate, but the tussle erupted after some fairly innocuous comments:

Yesterday here at the Dallas Morning News, we met with a group of local folks that included Margaret Keliher, the Dallas County Judge . . .. Keliher is a Republican, and she's also taken the lead in fighting for cleaner air in north Texas. Dallas has filthy air, in part because of cement plants just south of the city, and we're under federal government sanction to clean it up. In north Texas, the environment is not really a liberal vs. conservative issue, but a civic issue
. . . If I were sitting at the RNC in Washington right now, thinking about this fall's election, I'd spend a half hour on the phone with Judge Keliher and talk about this stuff. It's foolish to let the Democrats have this issue all to themselves--and by the way, enlightened environmentalists are starting to realize how foolish they've been to put all their hopes on the Democratic Party, and are now reaching out to conservatives. All to the good, say I.

This led to a series of snarky comments by Ramesh Ponnuru (who eventually made a peace offering) and others; along with rejoinders from Dreher. Perhaps the most obtuse comment came from (who else?) John Podheretz. The Birthright Pundit sneered, "In fact, I believe the rise in diagnosed asthma cases is a nationwide phenomenon of the past three or four decades, and nobody knows the cause. Except, it appears, a few judges in Texas, who got it all figgered out. I wasn't aware that degrees in epidemiology, cardiology, and pulmonology accompanied election to judgeships around Dallas, but now that I know, I'll be sure to consult your new friends about these matters."

That this mild suggestion that Republicans work on being less beholden to the interests of polluters and more to the interests of breathers is so controversial shows how screwed up the right is these days. Dreher is one of the few people involved with NR who is actually worth reading. I have a feeling he the he will not last there much longer and in a few years the onetime serious publication will become the exclusive preserve of mediocrities such as Podheretz.

Tract Society

Thomas Frank, the author of What's the Matter with Kansas? and editor of The Baffler has a review in the February issue of Harpers of 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America (And Al Franken Is #37), by Bernard Goldberg. 100 People is the kind of book that I would only read under the circumstances that Frank did -- for pay and with the opportunity to mock in print. It is essentially a tract for the converted. The production of such tracts, from both the left and right, has exploded in the Bush years and I have reviewed three of them and briefly looked at several more. Most of them are awful. Those on the right seem worse and I'm not sure if it is because liberals are at least attacking the party in power or because this kind of thing has a larger audience on the Right and thus casts a wider net.

Whatever the reason, most authors of these political tracts lack the wit and subtlety of Jack T. Chick. They all make valid points. I agree with Ann Coulter that some of the mockery of Dan Quayle was unfair though I am not nearly upset about it as she is. And I'm sure that many on the left are as Unhinged as Michelle Malkin believes them to be, though I would take her more seriously is she didn't seem so unhinged herself and didn't link to patently looney rightwing nutcases such as the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler.

This description by Frank probably applies to them all:

This is a book that scarcely requires an author. You could have assembled it yourself, with an afternoon's browsing of the major right-wing websites and a copy of the collected speeches of Spiro Agnew for stylistic guidance. And yet it stubbornly remained on the bestseller list for weeks. Why?
Perhaps it is the literary equivalent of one of those K-Tel albums from the Seventies: the greatest, most irritating hits of the decade.

The Littlest Poddy

Gosh! Is it even remotely possible that John Podheretz, who Steve Sailer correctly tagged as a "birthright pundit" has the gall to call anyone else a "finger wagger?" The man's finger never stops wagging.

Good News . . .

Bill Kauffman's Look Homeward America : In Search of Reactionary Radicals is listed on Amazon.com. Here is the book description:

In Look Homeward, America, Bill Kauffman introduces us to the reactionary radicals, front-porch anarchists, and traditionalist rebels who give American culture and politics its pith, vim, and life. Blending history, memoir, digressive literariness, and polemic, Kauffman provides fresh portaiture of such American originals as Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day, regionalist painter Grant Wood, farmer-writer Wendell Berry, publisher Henry Regnery, maverick U.S. senators Eugene McCarthy and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and other Americans who can't-- or shouldn't -- be filed away in the usual boxes labeled "liberal" and "conservative." Ranging from Millard Fillmore to Easy Rider, from Robert Frost to Mother Jones, Kauffman limns an alternative America that draws its breath from local cultures, traditional liberties, small-scale institutions, and neighborliness. There is an America left that is worth saving: these are its paragons, its poets, its pantheon.

I can't wait.

P.S. Here is my review of his last book.