Are the Dems really going to be so foolish as to put out a report titled “The Neo Con”? I just saw a crawl on cable indicating that they will.
Way to play to your nutty fringe base, and turn off the sensible electorate. I hope they do it.
[Update in the early afternoon]
Robert Goldberg, on the increasing (and increasingly hard to hide) anti-semitism of the left. And I think that, at this point, most of us know what “neocon” is code for.
“Hatewatch” over at Winds of Change has a nice roundup of links, including one called Idiotarian Seethings. Control-F twice on that phrase to get to the meat, though the whole thing is fun, as usual. I particularly liked this bit:
Early in July, NRO’s Jonah Goldberg did his part to entertain the right-wing blogosphere by tracking down this piece of comedy gold, wherein an ambitious DU denizen attempts to demonstrate that 9/11 was a conspiracy by failing to collapse steel rabbit fencing. The true entertainment only starts, as is often the case in these swamps, when other budding scientists attempt to explain why they too are moved by his demonstration. By all means, enjoy yourselves.
But there’s a serious point here for political discourse, one that often gets lost in the growing populism on both the left and the right: experts are good. Not everyone can do or know the things that they do. It’s not just that being an expert causes you to have the knowledge that you need to evaluate things within your field – it’s that immersion in a way of thinking that seems to be related to particular objects gets you in the habit of thinking a certain way. It’s why chess masters can ‘see’ a board and topologists can ‘see’ a knot. Not to be overly pedantic, but it seems like certain objects are easier to understand by thinking in certain ways. An expert has developed cognitive habits as well as broad knowledge. That why an amateur and an expert can know exactly the same amount of things and can be exactly as smart, and the expert might have insights that the amateur might never stumble into.
Of course, that’s beside the point in two ways. First, this guy isn’t an amateur in anything – he’s just an tool (click through if you want some entertainment). Second, however, this anti-expert populism (most often expressed in blog triumphalism) isn’t distributed evenly across the left and right of the political spectrum. To be more specific, when the right challenges ostensible experts, it seems that the people doing the challenging are actually better at the matter at hand than the people being challenged: Allahpundit and Dr. Shackleford are very, very good at Photoshop and that Reuters idiot is very, very not.
Meanwhile, on the left, we’ve got American Apparel checkout workers and Starbucks baristas going toe to toe with MIT architects on the weight that reinforced cross-sections can bear – a matchup hilarious but for the passion with which the checkout workers and baristas insist that they have an opinion that they’re entitled to. The urge to debunk the reasoning of experts is dangerous across the board, a seed that can blossom into full-blown anti-intellectualism. It just seems that when the right does it, they end up being right. And that’s a difference worth noting.
Of course, expect the usual idiotarian seethers in the comments section to seethe at this.
…how will we shoot the UN bureaucrats, who don’t believe in an individual right of self defense?
Will Franklin has some thoughts:
The report goes out of its way to clear up any silly confusion about self-defense for States, including totalitarian regimes, as somehow also applying to lowly individual human beings:
“Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations applies to the States acting in self-defence against armed attacks against their State sovereignty. It does not apply to situations of self-defence for individual persons.”
How ironic, that the preeminent human rights organization in the world, the UN, gives the full panoply of protections and immunities under international law to someone like Kim Jong-Il, whereas if you engage in self-defense you are ‘violating the rights of another.’ This goes to the heart of an entire belief system rampant in the world today that thinks that all violence is bad regardless of circumstances and context, and that the problems of violence are caused by weapons and not those that wield them.
Unemployment is down to 4.7%.
I blame George Bush. Having a robust economy is just an evil Rovian plot to retain Republican control of the Congress this fall.
The WaPo isn’t very impressed with the noble Joe Wilson:
…it now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame’s CIA career is Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming — falsely, as it turned out — that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials. He ought to have expected that both those officials and journalists such as Mr. Novak would ask why a retired ambassador would have been sent on such a mission and that the answer would point to his wife. He diverted responsibility from himself and his false charges by claiming that President Bush’s closest aides had engaged in an illegal conspiracy. It’s unfortunate that so many people took him seriously.
Indeed.
No doubt the fever swampers on the left will see this as more evidence of the right-wing agenda of the paper…
[Update in the afternoon]
To use an old phrase, I find the timing suspicious, as does a commenter over at Roger Simon’s place (and Roger’s post on the mental state of the left is worth reading, too):
I wish that the WaPo editorial would not have been published on a Friday before a long, holiday weekend. I hope it was not an intentional attempt to bury the message.
Intentional or otherwise, it could certainly have that effect.
Ted Stevens says that he was only (anonymously) holding up the bill until a cost/benefit analysis could be performed on it.
[Excuse me a minute]
[Sorry, give me another minute or so]
[Almost ready now…no, wait, another minute or two]
OK, sorry. Phew. Oh, gosh…man, my sides hurt.
I may have even moistened my pants.
Anyway, where was I?
Oh, right. So he wants a cost/benefit analysis? Here’s a cost/benefit analysis.
[Evening update]
Mark Tapscott has additional thoughts.
Ted Stevens says that he was only (anonymously) holding up the bill until a cost/benefit analysis could be performed on it.
[Excuse me a minute]
[Sorry, give me another minute or so]
[Almost ready now…no, wait, another minute or two]
OK, sorry. Phew. Oh, gosh…man, my sides hurt.
I may have even moistened my pants.
Anyway, where was I?
Oh, right. So he wants a cost/benefit analysis? Here’s a cost/benefit analysis.
[Evening update]
Mark Tapscott has additional thoughts.
Ted Stevens says that he was only (anonymously) holding up the bill until a cost/benefit analysis could be performed on it.
[Excuse me a minute]
[Sorry, give me another minute or so]
[Almost ready now…no, wait, another minute or two]
OK, sorry. Phew. Oh, gosh…man, my sides hurt.
I may have even moistened my pants.
Anyway, where was I?
Oh, right. So he wants a cost/benefit analysis? Here’s a cost/benefit analysis.
[Evening update]
Mark Tapscott has additional thoughts.
Idiotarian playwright Harold Pinter is “written out.” What a non loss to the stage.
In this post, a commenter says:
…it is apparent that you hardly ever criticise Bush for anything. You are primarily concerned with the nuttier fringe of Bush’s opposition and what they say. The end result is that although you claim that there is a lot to criticise about Bush, you never say what it is, nor spend much time on it.
What you don’t seem to acknowledge on your blog is that significant portions of the anti-Bush population is _not_ the nutcase moonbat fringe, but people who supported the president but changed their minds because of things that they found they did not like. But you seem to clearly divide the country into “us” and “them” and the only “them” that you acknowledge is the nutters.
A lot of people supported Bush up to the middle of last year, when several things happened. For one, it became clear that Iraq was not getting any better and Bush’s pronouncements about it seemed to indicate that he was the only person who did not recognize this. Then there was the Harriet Miers Supreme Court choice, which convinced a lot of conservatives that Bush was more interested in helping friends than in making decisions based upon sound conservative (and intellectual) core values. And then there was hurricane Katrina and the aftermath, where the entire response seemed muddled and confused. For me, I could substitute “terrorist bomb” for Katrina and conclude that this administration would do as bad a job responding to a terrorist attack as it did responding to a predictable hurricane. That caused me to lose all faith in the president. (And the continuing deterioration in Iraq has not helped change my mind.)
Sure, there are a lot of crazies saying crazy things about Bush. But a) they are not the majority of his non-supporters, and b) they are not the ones who hold political power in this country. So why be so concerned about them, when the problems are with the people in charge?
I am concerned with that because the “nuttier fringe” seems to have become the mainstream of the Democrats, and it gets a lot of air time.
I have criticized the administration, and linked to others’ criticisms with approval often–I suspect you just haven’t noticed. I thought that the Harriet Miers nomination was one of the biggest blunders of his presidency, and I’m livid that amid all the out-of-control spending that he’s actually encouraged, the first thing that he could find his veto pen for in five years was stem cells (not that I think that this should necessarily be federally funded). I think that it was a travesty and in fact a dereliction of duty and violation of his oath of office that he signed McCain-Feingold when he said himself that it was unconstitutional.
I remain furious that Bush didn’t can George Tenent when he came into office, that he allowed Norm Mineta to remain in charge of Transportation for so long after he refused to profile, that he allowed the TSA to drag its feet for so long on arming pilots, that he allowed that idiot who insisted on dress codes for air marshals to remain in place for so long, only recently ending that inspired idiocy.
I think that the Department of Homeland Security was a disastrous mistake (and the reorganization that it entailed was one of the reasons that the federal Katrina response was laggard, though I never have high expectations of federal bureaucracies). Will it respond well to a terrorist attack? Probably not, but I don’t blame George Bush for that. As I said, I have low expectations for big government, regardless of who’s president, and losing faith in a president because a bureaucracy acts like a bureaucracy is silly, though people tend to do it anyway (it was one of the reasons that Bush’s father lost to Bill Clinton). I wish that the administration had used 9/11 as a justification to refocus the federal government on the things that it’s really responsible for and good at, and cleared the underbrush of a lot of the nonsensical things that have accumulated over the decades. Instead with the connivance of the Chuck Schumers of the world, it became an excuse to continue nonsensical things like the Drug War, and grow the government.
There are many other things for which I could criticize the administration, if I had time, and if there was a point. I have said these things, many times, over the years. As I said, for some reason people only notice when I bash the mindless Bush critics.
But my problem is that we are war, and much (even most) of the criticism coming from the left is purely partisan and unserious (if it were a Democrat doing many of the things that Bush, along with his “compassionate conservatism,” has done they’d be praising him as a tough president, instead of vilifying him). I shoot down these spurious critiques in order to clear the field for rational criticism, of which he’s quite worthy. I’m not a Democrat (though I was one once), but I’m not a Republican either (and never have been), and I can certainly understand why Orson Scott Card is upset with his party.