That’s the difference between God and me.
You’ve seen Steve Benen’s timeline, and calimac’s use of Dunsany is impeccable, and Phil Nugent’s perspective is as close to a last word as any of us will need, but I ended up smiling the most at this. —It’s the little things, y’know?
It depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is—along with “truth,” “Bush,” “administration,” “extraordinary,” “scandal,” “free,” “single,” “instance,” “corruption,” “unearthed,” “the,” “that,” and “of.”
Those brave truth-eaters are at it again:
The truth is that the Bush administration has been extraordinarily scandal-free. Not a single instance of corruption has been unearthed. Only one significant member of the executive branch, Scooter Libby, has been convicted of anything. Whether the jury’s verdict was right or wrong, that case was an individual tragedy unrelated to any underlying wrongdoing by Libby or anyone else.
That’s one of the boys at Minnesota’s most popular blog, Power Line, written yesterday, Saturday, April 28th, 2007. —David Kurtz wants to know when the piper’s gonna get paid:
If you’re a hard-core conservative reading Powerline, does this sort of nonsense make you feel better about yourself or about your beliefs? For the uninformed, maybe it offers the assurance that things are okay. For the semi-informed, maybe it comforts them that things aren’t as bad as they may seem. At what point does the internal dissonance of those who read and write such garbage exact a personal toll—morally, emotionally, spiritually?
Kurtz is looking at it the wrong way. The piper’s already been paid and done packed up and left the building; that post at Power Line isn’t so much a strategy or a tactic as it is a symptom. —“I realize,” said John Holbo (some time ago), “it is really a quite serious matter that the right-wingers have gone around the bend and apparently aren’t coming back.” Yup; once again, yup.
“Apparently,” then, but: are they really not coming back? Is it possible to reach someone who’s so far around the bend? So removed from the world as it indisputably is? —I’d like to think I’m as open to dialogue as Detritus, who’d rather try teaching a young Hitler English than just shooting the little fuck; I’d like to think I could have a civil conversation with John Hinderaker, should I bump into him between planes at O’Hare, say, and not just punch him in the nose. But he has accused you and me and everyone we know of betraying America. And I’m only human.
But forget the punching, and leave aside for a moment the rather large question of whether such a conversation civil or otherwise could even begin to reach someone so far around the bend. What we’re talking about here isn’t a conversation. It’s a blog post, yes, and so it looks like it’s part of our great political multilogue, our give and take of political argument and debate, but it’s a truth-eating post. It’s no more an argument than David Broder’s columns are political journalism, or the Attorney General’s appearance before Congress was testimony. —This is cargo-cult stuff, hieratic gestures that mimic argument and journalism and testimony, incantations no more meaningful than a magic spell, attempts not to engage the world as it is but take it and through sheer force of will bend it to what it damn well ought to be.
Put it that way, and I think our responsibility is clear: engage them in conversation, yes; try to reach around that bend when you can, when reaching is possible. But don’t return those gestures. Don’t respond to the call of their spells. (We were supposed to be outraged when Giuliani promised another 9/11 if he weren’t elected president. Better instead to point and laugh. —Perhaps it seems unfair to sweep an entire wing of our national discourse beyond the pale? Very well, it is unfair. But all our arms are too short to box with a whole damn world of straw. Why should we bother?) —When they put on their robes and gin up another solemn ritual to mimic the fillips of civil discourse, do what you can to minimize the infection by discrediting their authority. Point and laugh. Point and laugh.
It’s a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it.
No controlling authority.
Ladies and gentlemen, your Attorney General and mine:
During those conversations, to my knowledge, I did not make decisions about who should or should not be asked to resign.
And it’s not that the guy who’s, y’know, in charge of the Department of Justice thinks he just dodged the bullet of a bad decision by saying, hey, look, I didn’t make the bad decision. It’s that he can’t even weasel without weaseling. “To my knowledge”? How on earth do you not know that you might have just made a decision? How can you be in doubt as to whether a decision had been made by you? —No, seriously. How?
All it takes is one bad apple.
Remember how mega-agribusiness Dole had a little problem with E. coli-infested bags of factory-farmed spinach last summer, so that all over the country restaurants and supermarkets went through a spinach dry-spell? How on earth will we protect Oregonians from ever-increasing outbreaks of food contamination? —By slapping draconian regulations on small farmers, of course, driving local farmers’ markets out of business.
Goose and gander?
I’m not so sure about the wisdom of the sauce prescribed, and far be it from me to jump in a bigblog pie-fight, and it’s not like I even have the knowledge to say for myself whether this is the stupidest thing Markos Moulitsas has ever written, but I hope to God it is, because it’s staggeringly, mind-bogglingly stupid. —Lisa Spangenberg rounded up some links to actual, intelligent grappling with the vital topics squirming under the hateful things that were done to Kathy Sierra, and follows up by unpacking a joint statement from Sierra and someone who might could help Kos realize how smart it would be to own up, publicly, to the implications of his admitted ignorance of what happened, and stop playing stupid.
Defending the republic from the likes of Kimberly Prude.
On Election Day, I remember, in the city of Portland, Multnomah County—I’m going to mispronounce the name—but there were four of voting places in the city, for those of you who don’t get the ballots, well, we had to put out 100 lawyers that day in Portland, because we had people showing up with library cards, voting at multiple places.
I mean, why was it that those young people showed up at all four places, showing their library card from one library in the Portland area? I mean, there’s a problem with this.
“There were no voting locations in the county in 2000,” he explains. “It was all strictly by mail. This was the first election after vote-by-mail passed, and everything was mailed in. People could go into the county elections office to pick up their ballot if they didn’t receive one, but there weren’t other locations to drop them off.”
As for the bizarre library card claim, “I have no idea what he’s talking about. A library card has nothing to do with people being able to vote.”
—Scott Moore, quoting Multnomah County Elections Director John Kauffman
It bears repeating: Republicans depend on preventing as many people as possible from voting. —The New York Times details some of the collateral damage in this foul, anti-American quest for permanent hegemony: folks deported and rotting in jail for filling out the wrong form at the wrong time. Josh Marshall puts the damage in perspective.
“This could very well be the stupidest person on the face of the earth.”
Yeah, I know, Douglas Feith, but in looking for a hook for the previous I stumbled over this toxic gem of weapons-grade stupidity from Daniel Pipes and just had to share:
Karl Marx famously did much of his research in the 1850s into socialism—work that would culminate in the creation of the Soviet Union, Communist China, and other political monstrosities challenging the United Kingdom to its core—in the reading room of the British Library, the elegant public space of the country’s vast national library.
And now, we learn, Zacarias Moussaoui, who is serving a life sentence in a US maximum security prison for (among other charges) conspiracy to commit acts of terrorism, spent time plotting the downfall of the West in the 1990s also in the British Library. Newly released court papers from Moussaoui’s trial in Alexandria, Virginia, includes photographs of his five-year British Library reading pass, which he received 1994 after enrolling in a master’s degree course in international business at South Bank University.
Comment: Both these men were immigrants. The British don’t seem to learn. (August 6, 2006)
Two great hostile camps,
or, The increasing us and the decreasing them.
“The middle classes could become a revolutionary class, taking the role envisaged for the proletariat by Marx,” says the report. The thesis is based on a growing gap between the middle classes and the super-rich on one hand and an urban under-class threatening social order: “The world’s middle classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest.” Marxism could also be revived, it says, because of global inequality. An increased trend towards moral relativism and pragmatic values will encourage people to seek the “sanctuary provided by more rigid belief systems, including religious orthodoxy and doctrinaire political ideologies, such as popularism and Marxism.”
The British Ministry of Defense is prognosticating, trying to part the mists of time for a glimpse of the year 2035: criminal flashmobs, city-killing EMPs, ethnic cleansing with neutron bombs, and still that dam’ specter haunts Europe. —Momus has a good question:
Isn’t “the world’s middle classes uniting, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest” pretty much a definition of the normal workings of any republic?
Forget evidence—is there a shred of dignity?
Glenn Greenwald wants to know if the folks at the National Review will bother to correct Clifford D. May’s latest egregiously false statement. It’d be nice if they did, but they still haven’t corrected this Cliff May whopper, which’ll be three years old on Sunday.
That’s not what they mean by the Green Lantern Theory.
The latest from two of the Three Little Princes:
Crane asked if Romney believed the president should have the authority to arrest US citizens with no review. Romney said he would want to hear the pros and cons from smart lawyers before he made up his mind.
[...]
Crane said that he had asked Giuliani the same question a few weeks ago. The mayor said that he would want to use this authority infrequently.
Superheroes react:
—art via Living Between Wednesdays
God pity them both! and pity us all,
Who vainly the dreams of youth recall;
For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: “It might have been!”
It’s all, all of it, been one long prank, hasn’t it. “Sandra Day O’Connor has a horrifically vivid dream of how the ascension of George W. Bush to the Oval Office would mean the destruction of the American economy, the senseless deaths of hundreds of thousands of people worldwide, the loss of American prestige both at home and abroad, and—worst of all—the utter dissolution of her beloved Republican Party as, upon being deserted by even the corporate media, it suffers a series of definitive electoral ass-kickings in 2006, 2008, and 2010 before giving up the ghost. She goes on to provide the swing vote that allows the Florida count to continue, thus guaranteeing that Al Gore’s election is confirmed…” —Go and sin no more.
And this also has been one of the dark places of the earth.
“Tragic futility, though, has a hard time lodging in the imagination of boys in short trousers.” —Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory
Dirty fucking motorcycle cops.
Fellow Obie Michelle Malkin wants you to know the crimes of the few outweigh the needs of the many, or some such crap:
It wasn’t enough that Portland anti-war thugs burned a US soldier in effigy, and tore and burned the American flag. According to the Portland Tribune, they also knocked a Portland police officer off his bicycle and committed yet another disgusting act:
This splinter group of protesters showed its support for “peace” by burning a U.S. soldier in effigy. It exhibited its supposedly pacifist nature by knocking a police officer off his bike—an action that brought out the police riot squad.Perhaps the most disturbing scene of the afternoon, however, involved the man who pulled down his pants in front of women and children and defecated on a burning U.S. flag. This disgusting act actually elicited cheers from some members of the crowd, but we hope that the emotion it produces in the community is one of revulsion…...The anti-war demonstrators who behaved responsibly this past weekend have an obligation to denounce—and distance themselves from—those protesters who purposefully offend others and consequently destroy the intended message of peace.
Still waiting.
A few fringe actors? Not.
—Meanwhile, out in the real world, here’s what a few “fringe actors” think of the last throes of the whole goddamn dead-ender cause:
Larry says all the cops on motorbikes gave the peace sign to the marchers, but he was only able to capture the image of this one. It stands to reason the hearts of many Portland Police officers must have supported the rally for peace on Sunday. Their counterparts in Iraq are frequent targets of insurgent attacks. Their brothers and sisters, sons and daughters in the military are dying alongside the loved ones of peace activists. Keeping the peace is hard. Our police officers know better than many, that creating peace out of chaos often takes small gestures of friendship as a first step.
Small gestures of friendship. —Greg Sargent quite correctly highlights the small gesture of friendship in the Tribune’s editorial, the one so conveniently left on the cutting-room floor by Malkin’s callous elipses:
The vast majority of the estimated 15,000 protesters who took part in a peace march Sunday in downtown Portland did just that. They were well-behaved, well-intentioned and serious about their cause.
[...]
Most of the people who marched on Sunday fully understand [that violence harms their cause]. And by singling out the few who didn’t, we don’t intend to place thousands of demonstrators under one label.
But it’s too small a gesture. The Tribune went on, like Malkin, like Hannity, to demand that someone—anti-war demonstrators, peace protestors, the Left, Fox Democrats, motorcycle cops, the growing majority of all of us Americans—make a show of denouncing the actions of less than a tenth of one per cent of their number. Fuck that. Wake me when someone—Wolf Blitzer, my senators, the last principled conservative, the Washington Post, the Tribune its own goddamn self—denounces the moral monsters who dragged us into this mess in the first place. Between Dick Cheney and some overly enthusiastic trustafarian shit-head who’s drawn all the wrong lessons from direct action, I know which has done more damage to our flag, and our country, and us. —I know who I’d rather have on my side.
SWM ISO DFK, GFE.
I realize it’s terribly judgmental and tools-and-house of me, but I can’t help pointing to this lithe little anecdote as a neat summation of why it is at the end of the day I shake my head at the very idea of “difference feminism.” (—“Deep French kissing,” by the way.)
That’s one! One Galbraith! Ha ha ha!
When I heard our “torture guy” Attorney General was giving a press conference, I immediately tried to remember what those things were called, and wondered whether Gonzales would start racking them up. —I agree with Henry; this:
Let me just say one thing. I’ve overcome a lot of obstacles in my life to become attorney-general. I am here not because I [pause] give up. I am here because I learn from my mistakes, I accept responsibility, and because I’m committed to doing my job. And that is what I intend to do for the American people.
is indeed just that: a Galbraith Score of one.
Anatomy of a slur.
Astoundingly enough, Ann Coulter appears to have been a mite too subtle with the English on her invective.
Here’s what the noted bigot and plagiarist said, this weekend over at the CPAC:
I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate, John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word “faggot,” so…
The ellipsis, of course, placeholding for the enormous roar of approval from the punters. —And a number of people here at the sinistral end of the Islets of Bloggerhans have said any of a number of insightful things about the remark and its fallout, among them the irreplaceable David Neiwert:
Coulter’s mockery in this case is aimed, of course, at the “political correctness” that conservatives love to inflate as a sign of liberal hypocrisy and stupidity, and perhaps overweening authoritarianism. In Coulter’s world, calling someone a “faggot” requires rehabilitation or “reeducation.” Pity the poor schlubs, she’s telling us, who just want to call a faggot a faggot.
In the real world, of course, calling someone a faggot isn’t cause for forced rehab—though it is the kind of ugly, hateful remark that may indicate a deeper problem (such as, say, substance abuse) that does require rehab. Coulter herself may want to look into this. She can ask her pal Rush for pointers, though I don’t think he’ll be much help.
David obviously doesn’t have a boss enamored of Grey’s Anatomy, or he’d know what it was Coulter had in mind:
Grey’s Anatomy star Isaiah Washington has entered a residential treatment facility in an effort to quell the controversy surrounding his anti-gay remarks—and save his job, Life & Style has learned exclusively.
According to an insider, Isaiah, who issued an apology for his statements on Jan. 18, agreed to undergo a psychological assessment after talks with ABC executives.
[...]
“ABC has told him he must enter a program to examine why he would say such hateful words,” the insider says.
So while there’s something so-last-month declassé about Coulter’s remarks, it’s not (just) a fevre-dream of reëducation camps pulled from her festering imagination. —Now, the various nuances of apologetics and instarehab culture in a creative community running on a speed-of-light spin cycle are beyond the scope of my current level of interest, but the context is something you’ll have to keep in mind when you’re mindful of this latest low-water mark in conservative rhetoric. (A back-of-the-envelope Google comparison would seem to indicate maybe one in ten are making the link.)
Of course, it doesn’t take an appreciation of nuance or even more than the average helping of insight to figure out what’s coming next: a chorus of straight conservatives wailing how they all call each other faggot, so why can’t we, I mean what’s the deal, it’s just a word, capped by Jonah Goldberg pretending to be bewildered by how pissed off people get when he cops an old Andrew Sullivan routine: “The faggots have got to go. I love gay people but I hate faggots. I am tired of faggots. Tired, tired, tired.” —Can’t you take a fucking joke?
“And as for you, well, you will always have a resort when you are at your wit’s end.”
That’s the thing about Pyrrhic victories: it’s hard to tell right off the bat who’s won.
