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.

The High Road?

Look for more articles like the one by Jed Babbin in the bandwith of the American Spectator. Babbin laughibly argues that it is time to "take the gloves off" against the left and cease taking the "high road" against them. Anyone familiar with the American Spectator knows that they have had the gloves off for the last fifteen or so years.

I think we will be seeing more screeds like Babbins because the right will become more and more desparate. They have dragged the country into an unnecessary and unwinnable war in Iraq, and now the Abramoff/DeLay scandal is exposing the seamy underside of the party that was supposed to "reform" Washington when it came to power in 1994. In order to maintain their hold on power, or in Babbin's case, their proximity to it; the Right must shift the blame for their domestic and foreign scandals onto others.

UPDATE: One of the letters in response to Babbin hits upon an issue that the Liberal Media refuses to cover. Perhaps Pajamas will take up the slack:

A good place to start in pushing back might be for someone to suggest that John Murtha release his military medical records so we can all see what got him his two Purple Hearts. (Another Hero Mystery.) I have read in only one place that Mr. Murtha shares the military modesty of John Kerry in this regard. Do we need a group comparable to the Swifties to ask this reasonable question? After all, Mr. Murtha has enjoyed wounded hero status for some years.

Priorities

While the MSM focuses on the ho-hum Jack Abramoff story, look to Pajamas Media, which as been on top of the far more important Google PC's story all day.

Be Prepared

President Bush: "I'm going to continue to work as hard as I can to lay that foundation for peace." I suppose that means we will invade Syria and/or Iran in the next few months.

Dr. Percy's South

I have been reading some of the comments on Jeffrey Hart's essay in the Wall Street Journal about conservatism. A line about how the shift in the base of strengh to the Sun Belt South and West has had a negative effect "with respect to prudence, education, intellect and high culture." has generated controversy in National Review's The Corner and other places. Matt Yglesias would seem to have a point arguing:

Can anyone seriously dispute that the vast majority of America's premiere institutions of education and high culture are located in the "blue" areas? That's not to say the South is some kind of total wasteland -- I visited the Fort Worth Modern Art Museum earlier this year and it's first-rate, albeit a bit small -- but on the whole this stuff is primarily in the Northeast and to a lesser extent on the Pacific coast. At the same time, these institutions used to be bastions of conservatism and now -- as conservatives are wont to complain -- go the other way politically.

But there is another way of looking at it. Which state has made the greater contribution to American culture in the last one hundred years -- Mississippi or Connecticut? I would imagine that most people would conclude that poor, benighted, Yaleless, Mississippi would win the contest. What is the Nutmeg state's answer to Faulkner, Eudora Welty or Marty Stuart?

Walker Percy addressed this apparant contradiction -- at least as itconcerns writers -- in his "Self Interview" pubished in Esquire and reprinted in Signposts in a Strange Land:

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 that 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've managed to live [in Covington, La.] for thirty years and am less well known than the Budweiser distributor. The only famous person in this town is Isiah Robertson, Linebacker for the Rams, and that is probably as it should be too. . .

I have a theory of why Faulkner became such 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, wore a handkerchief up his sleeve, a ne'er-do-well . . . One of the nice things about living an obscure life in the South is that people don't come up to you, press your hand and give you soulful looks.

Ten years ago, when I was living outside of the South, I would probably have been offended by Hart's and Yglesias' assertions about my native region. These days I'm not so sure that they are wrong -- Jeff Foxworthy has made a mint spoofing Southern redneck culture -- but I still prefer to live here. I spent seven years in Port Townsend, Washington. It is a wonderful place and I miss living there sometimes, but it was the opposite of the type of community that Percy describes. It is larded with creative types -- I was once the only person at a party who didn't at least claim to be an "artist" or "poet." Some of them actually create.

You Could Look It Up In Toynbee . . .

Roger Kahn remembers Gene McCarthy's presidential announcement in 1967.

Sign of the Times . . .

The latest issues of The American Conservative and Mother Jones are out with cover articles by the sam person. In TAC Robert Dreyfuss reports on neocon plans for Syria. In MJ he profiles North Carolina Congressman Walter B. Jones of "Freedom Fries" fame who has now turned against the war. That latter article has high praise for Jones in the form of a quote by the cretinous Christopher Hitchens that Jones is a "moral and political cretin."

Politics, and George W. Bush, makes strange bedfellows.

An Army of Slackers

You don't need incredibly high standards to be a right-wing media critic. Note this post endorsed by the Eisenhower in the Army of Davids. The poster, identified only by a photo of an unshaven slacker (not that there's anything wrong with that) and the cutesie name "The Only Republican in San Francisco." Our slacker/journalist reports:

If you read my site, well, you are in a very small minority but you also are aware of how little regard I had for mainstream media reports of Katrina. Among the many outrages were the reports of crimes and deaths that simply didn't happen.

The LA Times now reports that the deaths in NO were not disproportionately among the poor. The storm, and the response, did not discriminate.

Add this to the fact that black folks died in proportionally smaller numbers than whites. Quick stats are that black folks comprised 67% of the population but represented 59% of those who passed. White folks comprised 28% of the population but represented 36% of the deaths.

Everything you read about Katrina was wrong, and was, sorry, racist. An enormous amount of PR damage was done to the US, and race tensions were fanned without any factual basis. Will the MSM address this?

Note what his post doesn't say. He implies that the "MSM" reported that blacks died disproportionately when New Orleans was flooded, but he doesn't cite, or link to, any inaccurate report from a media source making that claim. In fact, he cites Los Angeles Times reporting to help his case. Note his closing question. If he had bothered to read his own post, he would see that the "MSM" is addressing it.

This "Pajamas Media"post makes a similar claim with the same failing. It links to several blog posts that say little or nothing of substance and two "MSM" stories based on actual reporting.

I have been skeptical of the media all of my adult life but I have gained new respect for them in the last few years. I am glad we have alternative sources of information both in print and on the web, but this will never replace this.

UPDATE: San Fran's lone Republican replies to my criticism of his vagueness with a vague reference to the Economist's "Shaming of America" cover. But cover relates to their Leader (Britspeak for editorial). I didn't see any wild claims, now debunked, in one Katrina related article on the web from that issue.

Good News . . .

I came in 15th!

Free Vermont!

I tried to imagine the pro-torture, war-worshipping neocons at National Review running an article like Bill Kauffman's Free Vermont in The American Conservative, but I just couldn't:

Organizers billed the Vermont Independence Convention of Oct. 28 as "the first statewide convention on secession in the United States since North Carolina voted to secede from the Union on May 20, 1861." North Carolina, the final state to join the Confederacy, overcame its unionist scruples with some reluctance; by contrast, the 250 or so Vermonters gathered in Montpelier, that coziest of state capitals, gloried in the prospect of disunion.

Montpelier is the only McDonald's-less state capital in the land, and from its late October splendor issued a Jeffersonian firebell in the night, ringing a warning to the national capital: the United States deserve a break(up) today.

Only in Vermont, with its town-meeting tradition and tolerance of radical dissent, would the golden-domed State Capitol be given over to a convention exploring the whys and wherefores of splitting from the United States. And all for a rental fee of $35! (It would have been free if the disunionists had knocked off by 4 p.m.)

Tis the Season . . .

It's Christmastime and you know what that means: celebrating the birth of Jesus, greedy children and crowded malls. Oh, and the newly traditional "War on Christmas" battles. I think I will sit out the fight this year. I am still disgusted by Orwellian Newspeak terms such as "holiday tree" used by corporate and government bureaucrats horrified at the possibility of giving offense to anyone outside of the majority culture.
However, I grow weary of using war metaphors when the country is still fighting a real war. And when Christmas becomes just another front in the Culture Wars, I want nothing to do with it.
The best response to people such as Ruth Marcus, who wrote in the Washington Post that "this is the time of year, though, when those of us who aren't Christian, or who don't celebrate Christmas, most feel our minority status" (other than to point out that no law constrains her from putting up a tree, wrapping some presents and watching A Christmas Story); came from Michael Kinsley, commenting on the ACLU's anti-creche fundamentalism in the eighties:

"On a practical level," the ACLU writes, "a child whose family does not believe in the Divinity of Christ must view the public creche as a symbolic representation of his or her status as an outsider. The child will question . . . his identification with the American culture."

I think that's right. But I also think this child had better learn early on to question his identification with the American culture, because it's a tough question that will follow him all his life no matter how successful the ACLU is in banning nativity scenes. There is a majority culture in this country. It is Christian, white, middle-class. Jews and nonbelievers (I am both) are outsiders to some extent in that culture. So are blacks, homosexuals, Orientials, and so on. This is so even though we are a society that is constantly remaking itself, and a society committed to protecting civil rights and economic opportunities for minorities. The battle for minority rights goes on, of course, but does final victory require the eradication of the majority culture? And is every manifestation of that culture an insult to those who aren't fully a part of it?

People who want to go through life with nothing to remind them of their minority status ask too much. They will not get it, and full civil equality does not require it. Furthermore, in the name of ethnic or religious or racial or sexual awareness, they would impose a vast unawareness of national life in which, for official purposes, most Americans are of no particular race or religion(or equally divided among all) . . .

Far from being a handicap, a sense of "outsideness" can be a great asset in a society that does, in the end, try to protect the rights of cultural outsiders. It energizes, promotes skepticism, gives perspective. . . I am happy to be a bit of an outsider in my own country. I am no less American for it, and may even hope to be a better one as a result.

RWB RIP

Numerous websites that I link to have already noted the passing of Liberty magazine's founding editor, RW (Bill) Bradford. Like Brian Doherty and Jesse Walker, Bradford gave me my first job in journalism. He encouraged and was a genuine fan of my writing. I discovered his magazine in 1989 and I have been involved with it since 1993. It has never had a party line and it is open enough to have published Murray Rothbard, Michelle Malkin(!), Bill Kauffman (even praising Robert Byrd once), Peter McWilliams and Ron Paul.

Some of the comments on Jesse's post indicate that Bradford provokes strong reactions both negative and positive, which is not surprising. He was brilliant and demanding, and he was often difficult to work for. He had a hard time dealing with a staff of more than two or three people at a time. As a result, several people left on bad terms with Bill. However, those I have been in contact with recently have many postive memories, amidst those of conflict, of their time at Liberty. I know I learned a great deal and had a lot of fun while I was there. And I wouldn't trade the experience for anything.

God Only Knows . . .

If I understand Roger Simon correctly (and God only knows what is going home in his head) the reporting of the American "reactionary media" of the almost daily terrorist attacks in Iraq does more to harm attitudes in that country than the terrorist attacks themselves.

P.S.: One doesn't have to wait very long for the inane comments from Simon's readers like this one from David Thomson. "There are about twenty seven million people living in Iraq. The terrorists are able to murder far less than one percent of the general population. Obviously, these thugs are slowing down the rebuilding project---but still life goes on." Wow, only one per cent. Of course, one per cent of the United States is about three million people.

In Defense of Dubya

No, he is not the worst president ever, but he still has three years.

The Arc

Michael Kinsley on the arc of Conservative Washington:

On the other hand, you can now trace the traditional moral arc in the life of conservative-dominated Washington itself, which began with Ronald Reagan's inauguration and marks its 25^th anniversary in January. Reagan and company arrived to tear down the government and make Washington irrelevant. Now the airport and a giant warehouse of bureaucrats are named after him. By the 20^th anniversary of their arrival, when an intellectually corrupt Supreme Court ruling gave them complete control of the government at last, the conservatives had lost any stomach for tearing down the government. George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism" was more like an apology than an ideology. Meanwhile Tom DeLay--the real boss in Congress--openly warned K Street that unless all the choice lobbying jobs went to Republicans, lobbyists could not expect to have any influence with the Republican Congress.

Slander

Liberty has put my review of Ann Coulter's Slander on the web:

In her zeal to display the flaws of Al Gore, Coulter ridicules his performance in the 2000 debates.

"In the first debate, he was his natural self -- little Miss-Know-It-All . . . In the second debate he overcompensated and became Norman Bates in the last scene of Psycho . . . Naturally, therefore, the entire nation was on tenterhooks waiting to see what new weirdness Gore would unleash in the third debate. . . Even the audience was laughing at Gore for his ridiculous pomposity. Bush was in on the joke, laughing and winking at audience members as Gore grew increasingly insufferable. "

All of which accords, roughly at least, with my memory of the debates, but begs a question that doesn't occur to Coulter: if Al Gore was such a complete laughingstock -- a universally mocked buffoon -- how did he manage to win the popular vote in the 2000 election? Without the timely intercession of Ralph Nader, Al Gore would have won a solid victory. The debates gave voters an unfiltered opportunity to view the candidates. One would assume from Coulter's analysis that Gore would have received only the votes of New York Times editors and of Barbara Streisand's sewing circle, instead of finishing ahead of her champion.

Time to Go

Michael Kinsley takes apart the arguments of Dick Cheney:

We are now very close to that point of general agreement in the Iraq war. Do you believe that if Bush,Cheney, and company could turn back the clock, they would do this again? And now, thanks to Rep. John Murtha, it is permissible to say, or at least to ask, "Why not just get out now? Or at least soon, on a fixed schedule?" There are arguments against this--some good, some bad--but the worst is the one delivered by Cheney and others with their most withering scorn. It is the argument that it is wrong to tell American soldiers risking their lives in a foreign desert that they are fighting for a mistake.

One strength of this argument is that it doesn't require defending the war itself. The logic applies equally whether the war is justified or not. Another strength is that the argument is true, in a way: It is a terrible thing to tell someone he or she is risking death in a mistaken cause. But it is more terrible actually to die in that mistaken cause.

On a related matter, Glenn Reynolds is flogging the notion that the Iraq War is a "reverse Vietnam" in the sense that we are getting more positive reports from troops on the ground than we are from the media. Ironically he buttresses his argument with a link to a Christian Science Monitor article. The Monitor report has lots of heartwarming stories involving cute little girls and kindly old gentlemen in Iraq. What the positive reports from the troops fail to do is counter the notion that Iraq is a country coming apart at the seams due to terrorism, and religious and ethnic strife; or that the US occupation is pouring fuel on the fire instead of putting it out.

A Good Word For Hate

"After the lunch conference I run into my cousin Nell Lovell on the steps of the Library -- where I go occasionally to read liberal and conservative periodicals. Whenever I feel bad, I go to the library to read controversial periodicals. Though I do not know whether I am a liberal or a conservative, I am nevertheless enlivened by the hatred which one bears the other. In fact, this hatred strikes me as one of the few signs of life remaining in the world. This is another thing about the world which is upsidedown: all the friendly and likable people seem dead to me; only the haters seem alive."
-- Binx Bolling, The Moviegoer

Cretinous Republic

In case anybody has any questions, the Free Republic is still populated by cretinous half-wits, including several who think that Congressman John Murtha is in the Senate, or "Seante."

To: Gargantua

There's old pilots and bold pilots, but no old, bold pilots. The Seante needs to be outsourced.

3 posted on 11/20/2005 4:10:35 AM PST by Paladin2 (If the political indictment's from Fitz, the jury always acquits.) . . .

. . . I do appreciate Murtha's service to his country, but that gives no one the right to speak against our Commander and Chief.

6 posted on 11/20/2005 4:26:00 AM PST by parthian shot . . .

To: Gargantua

Divide and conquer , The only weapon the commies have found that works for them . The radical left and the aclu are driving the wedge , Murtha is just another one of the pawns , it has nothing to do with losing his nerve . His children and grandchildren would look good in berkas , just ask him .

34 posted on 11/20/2005 6:11:58 AM PST by lionheart 247365 (( I.S.L.A.M. stands for - Islams Spiritual Leaders Advocate Murder .. .. .. )) . . .

And so forth.

Caviar Consumption Through The Roof!

Supply Side High Priest, Larry Kudlow sees a positive economic trend in the continued support of the yacht industry by the rich. No need to worry about those problems at GM and Delphi when Biff just bought a new Bertram. I eagerly await Kudlow's report on the growth in caviar sales.

In the same column, Kudlow predicts a rise in G.W. Bush's stock, in part because "after another successful election in Iraq next month, at least 35,000 U.S. troops will be withdrawn in 2006." Right. The Next Election is always the one that will make all the difference.

Prediction

Jonah "lying is groovy" Goldberg sees one line of defense crumbling, so he is laying the ground to retreat. "What if Bush did lie, big time? What, exactly, would that mean? If you listen to Bush's critics, serious and moonbat alike, the answer is obvious: He'd be a criminal warmonger, a failed president and -- most certainly -- impeachment fodder."

He is planning this retreat presumably because the argument that the Democrats bought into the lie as well doesn't have sufficient resonance. I predict that the next line of defense will be "I hardly even knew that Bush guy."

Baloney!

Andrew Leigh on the forthcoming "Pajamas Media" in NRO: "More than that, however, Johnson and Simon consider the entire blogosphere their fact-checkers. This is a sacred tenet among many bloggers. If a blogger makes a mistake, readers will call him on it right away, either via comment or email. And the blogger is honor-bound to correct it immediately and clearly."

My response: Baloney!

Top Ten List

I added my top ten film list here. The Godfather made the top spot. You will have to click to see the other 19 since I cheated and added ten more after my top ten. Even after that, I still thought of other movies that I might have added.

Success Magazine

Scott McConnell in the latest issue of the American Conservative, suggests that the Weekly Standard is the most successful political magazine ever because of its role in getting the country into a war in Iraq. The article put the question in my head of the equivalent of success for the American Conservative when it is ten years old.

Perhaps it would be Republican nominee Jimmy Duncan crossing party lines to select New York Senator, Bill Kauffman as his running mate in 2012 . . .

Switchers

Jonathan Chait explores(registration) the pitfalls of being a political switcher. The best part is about Christopher Hitchens:

Anticipating these shifts in the zeitgeist is not so easy. After 9/11, writer Christopher Hitchens, the left-wing demagogue turned right-wing demagogue, transferred his allegiance to the GOP. In those heady days of moral clarity, Hitchens' old allies were on the defensive, and Bush allies were riding high. He seemed to be having a grand time excoriating Islamo-fascists and waxing eloquent about the plight of the Kurds.

Yet, in retrospect, Hitchens made the mistake of buying into the GOP not when it was at low tide, as the neoconservatives had done, but at the peak of its popularity. Things have not gone so well recently, and now he's stuck with less romantic assignments: defending the innocence of Karl Rove, insisting the invasion of Iraq was not really bungled beyond repair and gamely pointing out that we're torturing far fewer people than Saddam Hussein ever did. Hitchens seems to be having less fun these days. On the plus side, at least he still has a job.

Radioactive

Stephen Green, the "Winecooler Pundit" suggests googlenewsing the words "Radioactive+Iraq" to see how big a threat Saddam was, but the first story to come up is about American soldiers getting sick from depleted uranium shells. Ours:

Wearing buttons that say "no depleted uranium weapons," veterans and their supporters gathered in front of the Department of Veterans Affairs Thursday to say not enough is being done to treat soldiers who have depleted uranium, or DU, in their bodies.

"It just feels like my bones are hurting all the time," said Iraq War veteran Herbert Reed. "I am constantly fatigued. I still have the blood in my urine and my stool."

DU is a slightly radioactive heavy metal left over in the process of creating nuclear fuel. The military uses it in missiles and tanks to make them stronger. But when it's hit or explodes, soldiers can get wounded by radioactive shrapnel or breathe in radioactive particles.

Ten Good Movies

In the spirit of this collection of ten best film lists that I was inexplicably not invited to contribute to; here is a list of films. They are not neccessarily my choices for the ten best or even my ten favorites. Just ten good movies. They are presented in reverse chronological order:

1. Hell's Angels (Howard Hughes, 1930) has a conventional, but well done story line about two brothers -- one courageous and honorable, the other not so much -- who join the RAF to fight in the Great War. What sets the film apart are the stunning visual effects. There are no strings on the airplanes in this movie. Everything looks real. Jean Harlow utters a line so famous that few even know that it came rom a movie. "Would you be shocked if I slipped into something more comfortable.
2. Dinner at Eight (George Cukor, 1933) features a great ensemble cast including John & Lionel Barrymore, Wallace Beery, Marie Dressler and Harlow. Invited guests to a fancy dinner party are variously going broke, dying (and worse), cheating on their spouses and involved in crooked business deals.
3. Libeled Lady(Jack Conway, 1936). This may be the best film to star William Powell and Myrna Loy. Powell plays a caddish newspaperman sent out to capture Loy in a comprimising position and deflate her lawsuit against his newspaper. A good film is made great by the electricity between the two stars.
4. The Women(George Cukor, 1939) depicts the fairer sex as scheming, conniving, backbiting, catty and vicious. In other words, it tells the truth. Just kidding.
5. I Love You Again (W.S. Van Dyke, 1940). This is another great Powell/Loy vehicle. The totally plausible storyline is that Powell is a wise-cracking, hard drinking con man who becomes a nerd after a blow to his head gives him amnesia. Another blow causes him to snap out of it and he hatches a scheme to back to the hick town where he has lived as a nerd and bleed it dry. His plans change when he falls for the nerd's wife, played by Loy, who was planning to divorce the nerd, but falls for the con man. It is very confusing to describe, but makes perfect sense on film.
6. To Have and Have Not(Howard Hawks, 1944) has a plot similar to Casablanca. My theory is that Bogie let Ingrid Bergman go at the end of Casablanca is that he knew that Lauren Bacall would be coming along in a couple of years. Smart Move.
7. Lolita (Stanley Kubrick, 1962) isn't particularly faithful to the novel of the same name, but it is still a great film. The acting by all of the main characters is great. Shelley Winters gives one of the all time great performances as "the Haze woman . . . the fat cow. . . the obnoxious mama . . ."
8. The Godfather, Part III(Francis Ford Coppola, 1990). This one gets a bad rap, but Andy Garcia is great and I love the weaseley and corrupt archbishop. The best visual image from the Godfather Trilogy might just be the sight of his body falling down the center of a spiral staircase in the Vatican after Al Neri whacks him.
   
9. Donnie Brasco (Mike Newell, 1997). Al Pacino was great as Michael Coreleone but he shines as a wiseguy with self esteem issues in this picture. It is hard to believe that the Johnny Depp in this film is the same as the one from Edward Scissorhands or Pirates of the Carribean, but he is.
   
10. Lost In Translation (Sophia Coppola, 2003). Great pairing of Bill Murray as a perpetually exhausted actor in Tokyo to film a commercial and Scarlett Johansson as the neglected wife of a chinless, whiny photographer.
    

Hail, Hail Fredonia!

Jesse Walker grievously insults the fictional character, Rufus T. Firefly by comparing his sober and mature war leadership to the clowns currently occupying the Whitehouse. For those out of the loop; Firefly -- played by Groucho Marx in Duck Soup -- was the president of Fredonia who invaded neighboring Sylvania when that country's ambassador refered to Firefly as an "upstart." Not only did he have a sounder basis for taking the country to war, but he found a better defense minister than Rumsfeld by hiring a peanut vendor outside of his window.

You decide who makes the best leader:

Special Counsel

I saw this column by Cal Thomas in today's Knoxville News Sentinel (their version not on the web). He makes a novel argument against Patrick Fitzgerald:

Now comes a different independent counsel, Patrick Fitzgerald. In the run-up to Friday's announcement of a five-count indictment against Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, for obstruction of justice, perjury and false statements, we get from the big media that Fitzgerald is an apolitical straight-shooter who is the definition of integrity. Translation: Everything he alleges about Libby must be true.
Since the Independent Counsel Law was birthed in 1978 in response to the Watergate scandal, there have been scores of investigations, but few convictions of those indicted. It has cost taxpayers millions of dollars. Most of those indicted were either acquitted, won appeals judgments, plea-bargained to lesser charges, or were pardoned by the presidents they served . . .

Enough Democrats and Republicans have been forced to run this gauntlet that perhaps a truly bipartisan solution can be found to end it. That Libby's indictments are not about policy, but about who remembers what and when, ought to be the final straw in this ridiculous process.

Perhaps Thomas has been in a coma for several years -- that would explain alot -- but the Independent counsel law actually expired in 1999. He also is in error in claiming that Ken Starr was appointed by Janet Reno. Such counsels were appointed by a panel of judges. On the other hand, Patrick Fitzgerald is a special counsel appointed by the Justice Department.

Cal Thomas gets one thing right -- it is all a matter of who's ox is being gored. "During the Clinton presidency, Democrat partisans James Carville and Paul Begala slandered Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr as a sex maniac with a political agenda . . ." I'm sure that anyone willing to do the tedious research will discover that Thomas and others on the right denounced the investigations of the Reagan administration while they generally cheered those of the Clintons; and that the Democrats did the reverse.

Effective Servants

Glenn Reynolds linked to an editorial from Investor's Business Daily that listed Tom Delay as one of the Republicans "who are guilty of nothing more than being loyal and effective servants of their party and president" I wonder if this general in the Army of Davids will link to an article in Friday's New York Times detailing some of DeLay's methods of being an "effective servant:"

Representative Tom DeLay asked the lobbyist Jack Abramoff to raise money for him through a private charity controlled by Mr. Abramoff, an unusual request that led the lobbyist to try to gather at least $150,000 from his Indian tribe clients and their gambling operations, according to newly disclosed e-mail from the lobbyist's files.

The electronic messages from 2002, which refer to "Tom" and "Tom's requests," appear to be the clearest evidence to date of an effort by Mr. DeLay, a Texas Republican, to pressure Mr. Abramoff and his lobbying partners to raise money for him. The e-mail messages do not specify why Mr. DeLay wanted the money, how it was to be used or why he would want money raised through the auspices of a private charity.

"Did you get the message from the guys that Tom wants us to raise some bucks from Capital Athletic Foundation?" Mr. Abramoff asked a colleague in a message on June 6, 2002, referring to the charity. "I have six clients in for $25K. I recommend we hit everyone who cares about Tom's requests. I have another few to hit still."

The Marlboro Senator

The November 7 issue of National Review, the right's answer to Us Weekly, is out with a fawning profile of Virginia senator George Allen Jr. Lowry cloaks Allen (the son the late NFL coach) with the macho garb necessary for Republicans to compete in the age of Dubya:

Allen is the Senate's foremost expert in a certain kind of guyness. He will pour good-natured scorn on any softness. "with cream in it?" he asks incredulously in a CNN green room. "That's not real coffee." His brother Gregory is a psychologist, and recently made a reference to the TV show 24, which Allen says was lost on him. As is any other program "not of Fox, CNN, or ESPN." . . .

Allen has benchmarks for whether he will instantly find someone compatible or not. If he likes NASCAR is one, and "if his driver is Earnhardt Jr., that's someone I agree with." . . . If he is a rough-and-tumble Oakland Raiders fan, that's another good indicator. If he is a Harley-Davidson rider, that's still another. These are all signs, as Allen puts it, of, "good, individualistic, non-conformist minds."

I hate "guyness," a sort of vicarious masculinity derived from passive activities such as viewing professional sports. Rich Lowry, on the other hand, has such low standards that he swoons over a Republican politican man enough to take his coffee black. Allen's other announced tastes have the feel of focus group testing. Sure, Harleys are cool, but riding one is no more indicative of a "non-conformist" mind than riding the bus. I would give Allen credit if he chose as his favorite NASCAR driver a Virginian such as Elliot Sadler or Ricky Rudd. Choosing Dale Earnhardt Jr. makes it look as if an aide suggested him after a few minutes of research.

One would think that after five years of President Bush -- who at least has to occasionally clear some brush to look macho -- that even the guys at NR would be looking for a change. Does George Allen consider evidence, or just rely on his "gut." Does he ever read sissy newspapers or magazines? We don't find out from Lowry, who is too taken by George Allen's love of chewing tobacco to ask.

Lion of Hollywood

The November 7 issue of The American Conservative is out on newsstands with my review of Lion of Hollywood : The Life and Legend of Louis B. Mayer by Scott Eyman. It isn't likely to be posted on the web so I will post a brief sample:

For its first two decades, MGM was the dominant studio, consistently making money and earning Oscar nominations. Eyman notes “in the 1930s, MGM came to symbolize an alternate reality from the drabness and squalor of the worldwide Depression, an escape into a dreamworld of Park Avenue swells . . . For audiences at home and abroad, MGM was Hollywood at its most Hollywood in the best sense of the word.” Grand Hotel(1932) and Dinner at Eight (1933) are quintessential MGM films. Both feature John and Lionel Barrymore and Wallace Beery. The former includes Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford; to the latter add Jean Harlow and Marie Dressler. Both feature numerous interlocking stories involving rich and beautiful people. It was on the basis of such films that Mayer built his studio. He didn’t get directly involved in the creative process, but he did make sure to preserve the proper appearance of his films.If a script called for a woman to be rising from bed, Mayer still wanted her to look fabulous. Glamour trumped reality. Jean Harlow first appears in Dinner at Eight sitting up in bed wearing a gown that she might have worn to the Oscars.

Not A Parody

The little coupon that came with a fundraising letter from the Cato Institute has a circle to fill in which reads "I have contributed $100 or more. Please send me "Voices of Liberty," a CD of inspiring Cato speeches, including presentations by today's great champions of liberty -- Milton Friedman, Catherine Crier, P.J. O'Rourke and Dinesh D'Souza."

Dinesh D'Souza? They might have at least included Gene Healy.

Harriet's Homework

Is it to late to get Bernie Kerik? The New York Times: "The Supreme Court nomination of Harriet E. Miers suffered another setback on Wednesday when the Republican and Democratic leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee asked her to resubmit parts of her judicial questionnaire, saying various members had found her responses 'inadequate,' 'insufficient' and 'insulting.'"

Calling Dr. Phil . . .

I rarely bother to read Larry Elder (forgive my cultural elitism, but he's a day time talk show host for crying out loud) but a passage in this column about the rise in rudeness, which is apparently purely a matter of liberals and Democrats saying mean things about George Bush, stands out. Elder writes, " . . . A couple of anti-war Democrats and I began talking politics. While I disagreed with their positions, they made sensible, if unpersuasive, arguments. You know the drill: Bush built a case for war on bad intelligence; the cultural complexity of Iraq makes America's "imposition" of a democracy unlikely; the Iraq War now serves as a breeding ground for terrorists . . ."

I can't think of any weaker arguments. Obviously, the administration had rock solid intelligence; Iraq's cohesive civic culture will make it another Switzerland and the dearth of terrorism in that country is a blessing. Now, I wonder if Dr. Phil has any thoughts on the issue.

Poddy is NUTS

John Podheretz shows is what happens when higher brain functions shut down:

Yes, he signed No Child Left Behind. Yes, he signed campaign-finance reform. Yes, he supports an immigration-reform proposal that some say features amnesty. But let's not miss the major fact. Anyone who cuts taxes by nearly $2 trillion is a CONSERVATIVE. Anyone who is willing to pursue an aggressive foreign policy without the support of the liberal elite is a CONSERVATIVE. And anyone who has appointed as many conservative jurists as Bush is a CONSERVATIVE.

You can fling open the borders and take over the public schools so long as you cut taxes and put perpetual war on a credit card. Now I get it.

Crybabies

Republicans run the show in Washington these days, but they still aren't happy. William Kristol and Jeffrey Bell whine in the Weakly, Standard that conservatives are being "criminalized." "THE MOST EFFECTIVE CONSERVATIVE LEGISLATOR of--oh--the last century or so, Congressman Tom DeLay, was indicted last month for allegedly violating Texas campaign finance laws, . . . Bill Frist, is under investigation by the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission for his sale of stock in the medical company his family started. White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove and vice presidential chief of staff Scooter Libby have been under investigation by a special federal prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, for more than two years . . . It now seems clear that Rove and Libby are the main targets of the prosecutor, and that both are in imminent danger of indictment."

They are all under investigation according to Kristol and Bell because of their effectiveness as conservative leaders. "Since 2001, they have been among the most prominent promoters of the conservative agenda of the Bush administration." This is plausible in the Delay case, since his case grows out his scheme to redistrict Texas for the benefit of Republicans. But Frist? If there is any conspiracy involving his investigation, wouldn't it be of conservatives trying to get rid of an incompetent hack?

Rove and Libby are being investigated for illegally leaking so Kristol/Bell complain about the leaking of others at CIA and the State Dept. without making a specific charges. If K/B know of any crimes they should alert the proper authorities. But they are just engaging in partisan special pleading.

The article is notable for the name that it doesn't mention -- Jack Abramoff. Abramoff is a prominent conservative under indictment and facing more investigations. An article by Michael Crowley in the Oct. 17 issue of The New Republic argues that it will be the Abramoff connection that does Delay in. "Unfortunately for DeLay and loyal optimists around him, the real threat to his career doesn't lie with the Earle indictment. It lies with the ongoing Justice Department and House ethics committee investigations of DeLay's super-lobbyist buddy Jack Abramoff . . . [the] Justice Department investigators are keenly interested in DeLay's personal role in the Abramoff Saga . . ."

Apparently the notion that Republicans and conservatives, who came to power in congress promising reform, have simply become corrupted by both their power and their desire to hold on to it is unthinkable. Instead Kristol and Bell suggest that "it's a reasonable bet that the fall of 2005 will be remembered as a time when it became clear that a comprehensive strategy of criminalization had been implemented to inflict defeat on conservatives who seek to govern as conservatives. And it is clear that thinking through a response to this challenge is a task conservatives can no longer postpone."

I think that it's a reasonable bet that the fall of '05 will be rembered as the time when the chickens of Republican sleaze came home to roost just the way it did for the Democrats in the early 1990s.

Reverse Snobbery

I haven't seen Michael Kinsley weigh in on the "elitism" angle of the cat fight amongst conservatives over the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, but I hope that he does. It reached a new high, or perhaps low, yesterday when Jonah Goldberg posted the credentials of Hugh Hewitt:

Hewitt graduated from Harvard College cum laude with a degree in Government in 1978. He was Order of the Coif at the University of Michigan Law School and received his Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree in 1983, magna cum laude. Hewitt clerked for Judges Roger Robb and George MacKinnon on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from 1983-84, and then went on to serve as Special Assistant to Attorneys General William French Smith and Edwin Meese, Assistant Counsel in the White House Counsel's Office, General Counsel for the National Endowment for the Humanities and the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, where he finished his career in the Reagan Administration as Deputy Director of the agency, having been confirmed by a voice vote in the Senate . . .

Goldberg added, "Ah yes, those Harvard alum, Coif-ordered, presidential library-building, appeals court clerking, Justice Department working, . . . men of the people really have us National Review aristocrats dead to rights." Hewitt replied saying that "an Ohio-born and raised Cleveland Indians and Browns fan cannot be an elitist. Further, my argument has been with the Bos-Wash Axis of Elitism, and not an argument about snobbery."

Actually, Hewitt is engaging in reverse snobbery. He's just a regular guy, working stiff from Cleveland -- a Browns fan. Ignore Harvard etc. Republicans and conservatives have been engaging in this with a great deal of political success in recent years. Remember all that stuff from last year about how the other guy windsurfed and spoke French -- heck he even looked French; while our guy (never mind Andover Prep, Yale, Harvard, and scads of help from daddy's rich friends) is a regular guy who clears brush and is barely coherent in English. Kinsley wrote about this in Harpers several years ago:

A journalist moving in generally meritocratic circles makes friends and has associates from widely different social backgrounds. No WASP aristocrat has ever pulled rank on me without seeming ridiculous, and none has put me on the defensive for being who I am. On the other hand, even very good friends from working-class backgrounds often manage to make me squirm. I've never been made to wish I'd gone to Groton, but I'm often made to wish I hadn't gone to Harvard. That's reverse snobbery.

Pay No Attention

Rightwing bloggers such as Michelle Malkin and the AnkleBitingNutcases are in a tizzy over reports that the Whitehouse stagemanaged yet another phony event, allowing the rapidly fading president to bask in the warm feelings most people have for the military. The Associated Press reported the dialog between Allison Barber (a deputy assistant defense secretary, no doubt short-listed for the Supreme Court) and several soldiers via a video link:

"OK, so let's just walk through this," Barber said. "Captain Kennedy, you answer the first question and you hand the mike to whom?"

"Captain Smith," Kennedy said.

"Captain. Smith? You take the mike and you hand it to whom?" she asked.

"Captain Kennedy," the soldier replied.

And so it went.

"If the question comes up about partnering -- how often do we train with the Iraqi military -- who does he go to?" Barber asked.

"That's going to go to Captain Pratt," one of the soldiers said.

"And then if we're going to talk a little bit about the folks in Tikrit -- the hometown -- and how they're handling the political process, who are we going to give that to?" she asked.

Before he took questions, Bush thanked the soldiers for serving and reassured them that the U.S. would not pull out of Iraq until the mission was complete.

"So long as I'm the president, we're never going to back down, we're never going to give in, we'll never accept anything less than total victory," Bush said.

So who do Malkin, et al. turn to try and debunk the story? Why a rightwing milblogger, Ron Long, who just happened to be one of the 10 soldiers who were chosen to appear with the president. Imagine the odds!

However, Long doesn't debunk the charge, he confirms it, using lots of bold print to make sure he gets his point across. "First of all, we were told that we would be speaking with the President of the United States, our Commander-in-Chief, President Bush, so I believe that it would have been totally irresponsible for us NOT to prepare some ideas, facts or comments that we wanted to share with the President." Long then channels Merle Haggard, circa 1970:

It makes my stomach ache to think that we are helping to preserve free speech in the US, while the media uses that freedom to try to RIP DOWN the President and our morale, as US Soldiers. They seem to be enjoying the fact that they are tearing the country apart. Worthless!

This latest attempt to stage manage reality by the Bush administration is very much a venial sin. After five years of buying columnists, creating and distributing fake news reports and never missing an opportunity to use the military as a backdropfor the president, I could only laugh when I saw it on the news. The Bush administration's attempts to manage reality aren't working anymore. It is a cliche, but an apt one. The curtain has been pulled and the Wizard exposed as a fraud.

The Greatest Generalization

The November issue of Liberty magazine is now out with my article, "The Greatest Generalization," about the tendency of some in the War Party -- I pick on Thomas Sowell and Victor Davis Hanson -- to compare the Iraq War to World War II. It is not available on the web so here is a sample:

It is easy to see why Thomas Sowell, Victor Davis Hanson and others (a few minutes with Google will turn up plenty) force the Iraq War into an ill-fitting WWII template. For all the death, destruction and dubious results, the allies vanquished two of the most dangerous regimes of modern times and midwifed prosperous and peaceful countries in Germany and Japan.
Adolf Hitler particularly stands out, both as a figure of pure evil and as a menace on an epic scale. the Fuhrer's armies swept Europe from the Paris to Moscow and from the Norwegian Tundra to the North African Desert. His U-boats and pocket battleships menaced allied shipping from the North Sea to the Indian Ocean.
But Saddam Hussein was no Hitler and the Republican Guard and Fedayeen Saddam were not the SS. If the emptiness of Saddam's "threat" wasn't obvious when his armies caved almost instantly in two wars with the United States, it should have been by the time he chose a humiliating capture and an almost certain execution instead of putting a Lugar in his mouth.

Fishing for Excuses

How sad it is, after almost three years, that supporters of the invasion of Iraq must fish for justifications for the war; but it happens. The American Spectator (admittedly, not the brightest star in the neocon firmament) has an attempted justification today. The article, by Christopher Orlet anticipates the upcoming war crimes trial of Saddam Hussein. "Depending on whom you ask, Saddam was responsible for the murder of between 300,000 (U.S. government figures) and one million Iraqi civilians (Iraqi politicians' figures), in other words, for the extermination of as much as 10 percent of the Iraqi population, according to the Iraqi Forum for Democracy."

I have problems with Orlet's article, other than his math -- obviously, one million is far short of ten per cent of Iraq's approximately 25 million people. As I have pointed out before, we invaded Iraq in order to dispatch a "grave" and "gathering" threat from Iraq that was so severe that the Bush Administration dared not fritter away its time worrying about how things might go after we "won" the war. Sure, the president mentioned human rights concerns when building a case against Saddam. Who wouldn't against such a monster? But it is obvious that the animating reason for going to war was an alleged "threat" against the US by Saddam.

Orlet has a bizarre quantitative obsession. ". . . the former Iraqi president still ranks with the most savage of mass murderers of the 20th century, the bloodiest of all periods. If Saddam failed to keep pace with Stalin and Lenin (62 million killed), Mao (32 million), or Hitler (20 million), it was not for lack of trying. In fact, if the antiwar gang had gotten their way, Saddam would still be piling up bodies, well on his way to surpassing the totals seen in the Armenian genocide of 1909-18." As if his level of evil is measured purely in numbers. Once he is evil, he is evil-- he doesn't get another stripe for every 100,000 killed. Orlet may not have noticed that, though the killing is much more decentralized, the bodies are still piling up in Iraq.

The biggest omission from Orlet's article is the name, "Reagan." For Republican/conservative war supporters, this is always a problem. During Saddam's murderous peak the Right's patron saint was in the Whitehouse, "tilting" towards Iraq in its aggression against Iran -- one of Saddam's more Hitlerian moments. He even infamously sent Don Rumsfeld to Baghdad to play kissyface with Saddam. It is fair to ask, If Saddam was Hitler, what role did Reagan play? Orlet doesn't say, although he does make a disparaging reference to a president distracted by an "intern's plump thighs." This being the American Spectator, everything always comes back to Bill Clinton.

Run For The Border

George Will takes notice of immigration control leader, Tom Tancredo, who will possibly mount a quixotic presidential campaign in the next election to highlight the issue. Will, however, mistates the problem:

The basic problem is that the nation's economy is ravenous for more immigrant labor than the system of legal immigration can currently provide. Furthermore, about 11 million illegal immigrants are in America. It would take a lot of buses -- 200,000 of them, bumper-to-bumper in a convoy 1,700 miles long -- to carry them back to America's border. America will not do that -- will not round up and deport the equivalent of the population of Ohio.

No, part of the problem is that Americans are consumers first and citizens second. Our bacon, lettuce and tomatoes must be cheap, no matter what the cost. Our political culture is also decayed and corrupt. As far as I could tell, no attention was paid to this critically important issue in the 2004 presidential campaign.

Note also, the patently phony choice Will presents to the reader. Apparently, we can either round up 11 million illegals in a mass deportation, or capitulate.

Always Low Prices

The Progressive reports on a local Wal-Mart's spying on its customers:

Jarvis had assigned her senior civics and economics class "to take photographs to illustrate their rights in the Bill of Rights," she says. One student "had taken a photo of George Bush out of a magazine and tacked the picture to a wall with a red thumb tack through his head. Then he made a thumb's down sign with his own hand next to the President's picture, and he had a photo taken of that, and he pasted it on a poster." According to Jarvis, the student, who remains anonymous, was just doing his assignment, illustrating the right to dissent.
But over at the Kitty Hawk Wal-Mart, where the student took his film to be developed, this right is evidently suspect. An employee in that Wal-Mart photo department called the Kitty Hawk police on the student. And the Kitty Hawk police turned the matter over to the Secret Service.

Hopeless

My only complaint with this Pat Buchanan column ("In a decision deeply disheartening to those who invested such hopes in him . . .") is this: surely nobody actually still has any "hopes" that George Bush will do anything but fill important jobs with semi-qualified cronies.

Behind the Wheel

One indicator of social decline that doesn't get enough attention is the way that people drive these days. It is depressingly common to see vehicles run red lights in Knoxville, Tennessee. In recent days, I have twice had an SUV tailgate me for lengthy periods of time on two lane roads while I drove at or slightly above the speed limit. I may be in the thrall of the Liberal Media, but it sure seems that people are more likely to drive like a jerk in an Excursion than in an Accord.

Just the other day, while driving in the left lane of a five lane street, I had a pickup shoot around me in the center turn lane while going about 10 miles above the speed limit. If the driver pulled that stunt just a couple of seconds later the results would have been disastrous as I was preparing to make a left turn. Today, I witnessed a similar incident as a pedestrian. While two cars stopped as I entered the crosswalk, a third quickly shot around them by driving into the other lane, while the driver yakked away on a cell phone.

I don't really know what to make out of this, but it's not a good thing that people are so careless while hurtling around in deadly two ton projectiles. It is even more disturbing that so few people seem to care.