Administrative

Unhappy Customer

A “George” comments:

I’ve been reading your blog for about five years now, and it is clear that mine is not a ‘silly and innumerate comment.’ What is also clear is that that you do not have even the slightest of respect for people who read your blog, which is why I will not be reading this blog any longer.

For the record, disagreeing with the Bush Administration on a few token issues (stem cell research and gay marriage were a couple of yours, I believe) does not obscure the fact that you are an ideological lickspittle. What if, day in and day out, I defended everything the Clinton Administration did, including rudely and intemperately insulting people who dissented in any way, and then said, “Oh, but I’m no shill — look, I disagree with them on some details of tort reform!”

In any case, the bottom line is that you’ve revealed yourself to be quite a jerk, and lost a long time reader. So long.

Sorry to see you go, George. I guess.

So, apparently it’s just fine to come to my web site and call me a “shill” and a “lickspittle,” but when a commenter says that “…4/5ths of your posts are just snarky, content-free bashing of anyone who disagrees with the Bush Administration,” I’m not allowed to call it out as the nonsense that it is?

There are forty recent posts on the right sidebar there. By Bill’s light, over thirty of them should be “just snarky, content-free bashing of anyone who disagrees with the Bush administration.” Anyone can go through those posts individually. I defy them to find one that meets that description. Most of them have nothing to do with the Bush administration, or its bashers.

My disagreements with the Bush administration are many and profound, not just on a “few token issues.” I disagree with them on their previous disinterest in controlling spending, on the prescription drugs benefit, on airport security, on the drug war, on their education policy, on their inability or unwillingness to follow through on Iraq, on their unwillingness to defend the Second Amendment in the courts, on their cronyism as exemplified by the Harriett Miers fiasco, on their schizophrenia about how to deal with groups like CAIR, on their agricultural policies, on ethanol, on their coopting much of the New Deal and the Great Society, instead of repudiating it, on…too many things to list off the top of my head. I dare say that I probably disagree with the administration on more, probably many more issues than I agree with it. I doubt if there are very many administration policies that, were I in charge, I wouldn’t change, some of them drastically.

And guess what? I’ve expressed this disagreement, many times, right here on this “lickspittle” blog. If it seems like I “defend everything they do” (for the record, I don’t), maybe it’s because I see so many nutty attacks on them (including here), which to me simply distract from legitimate criticism, that I feel compelled to defend some of the things they do. Or at least I defend them from the hyperbole.

Bill wanted to talk about what it “seemed like” to him. Well, what it seems like to me is that if I don’t agree that George Bush and Dick Cheney are corrupt and evil, and make Hitler look like Mother Theresa, then I am called a “lickspittle,” and a “shill.”

As I’ve said in the past, I don’t “love” George Bush. Nor do I or did I “hate” Bill Clinton. I don’t generally find politicians worth expending that much emotion on. I (unlike, apparently, many) try to simply evaluate them rationally.

I think that George Bush is a decent man, trying to do his best, but who is often misguided. I also think that Bill Clinton is a corrupt narcissist, to the point of sociopathy, some of whose policies I agreed with, most of whose I didn’t. I don’t say these things because of any preconceptions I have about either man. They’re simply observations based on my…observations. In Mr. Clinton’s case, it’s in fact a clinical, dispassionate observation. I don’t say it because I “hate” Mr. Clinton (even if I did “hate” him, this would be a confusion of cause and effect).

But when I point these things out, those who truly do hate George Bush seem to think that anyone who doesn’t “feel” (and isn’t that the key word with these people?) as they do must love him, and be a fan or, a “lackey.” And those who do (for who knows what reason? Not me…) love and defend Bill Clinton thinks that anyone who doesn’t must hate him.

I simply call them as I see them, and if some commenters or readers don’t like that, there are in fact a lot of other blogs out there. Here’s your money back…

Go forth and read them instead.

[Update a few minutes later]

Here’s a piece by Jim Garaghty defending himself from charges by Hugh Hewitt that he’s Romney bashing.

What does it have to do with this post? Not much, really. Except for this one little bit:

Look, it

Political Commentary

A Risky Gambit

Elaine McArdle has an article at the Harvard Law Bulletin about the prospects for the Supreme Court overturning Parker, or upholding the Second Amendment as an individual right. I do think they’re likely to uphold, but it’s by no means a sure thing, and I do think that gun-rights advocates are taking a gamble.

It would have been nice if the framers could have foregone that purpose clause, because it certainly allows gun opponents to throw a lot of obfuscatory mud around the issue. I wonder how the prospects would be for an amendment to remove it? That might be the only relief if the court rules the wrong way.

War Commentary

First It Was Doctors

And now it’s the police:

Up to eight police officers and civilian staff are suspected of links to extremist groups including Al Qaeda.

Some are even believed to have attended terror training camps in Pakistan or Afghanistan.

Their names feature on a secret list of alleged radicals said to be working in the Metropolitan and other forces…

…Astonishingly, many of the alleged jihadists have not been sacked because – it is claimed – police do not have the “legal power” to dismiss them.

We can also reveal that one suspected jihadist officer working in the South East has been allowed to keep his job despite being caught circulating Internet images of beheadings and roadside bombings in Iraq.

He is said to have argued that he was trying to “enhance” debate about the war.

Classified intelligence reports raising concerns about police staff’s background cannot be used to justify their dismissal, sources said.

This is almost like something out of Monty Python. It reminds me of the skit with Graham Chapman as the British Navy officer who lectures the audience on how the cannibalism problem in the Royal Navy is completely under control, as a sailor walks behind him munching on a leg. Well, almost like it, except it’s not funny. One could do a World War II parody on how MI5 has very few Nazis in it, and most of them are fine chaps, except for their support of gassing Jews, and providing bombing targets to Germany.

One fears that the entire British government bureaucracy is rotted with these termites. When will the British people recognize that they are at war, muster up the will to fight, and reclaim their nation? This is what a people unconfident in their own values looks like.

War Commentary

Trouble Brewing In Lebanon?

Looks like the axis of evil may be about to stir up the pot:

A series of op-eds in the Lebanese daily Al-Mustabal, by Nusair Al-As’ad, warned of a planned Syrian-Iranian coup in Lebanon. [9] According to these articles, Hizbullah was planning to launch, in the near future, a new stage in the coup being led by Syria and Iran in Lebanon, during which it would use its weapons on the domestic Lebanese front. The threats by the Lebanese opposition to establish a second government in Lebanon were part of this planned coup, and the coup was to be carried out under the banner of establishing a second government.

The articles stated that the threat voiced by Syrian President Bashar Assad during his April 2007 meeting with U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, namely, that the situation in Lebanon would “reach the point of civil war,” was actually “an official declaration of the coup he is now staging in Lebanon.”

That would be the end (at least temporarily) of the Cedar Revolution. The State Department is supposedly gung-ho on democracy in the Middle East. Do they have a plan? I’d like to think so, but only because, like a second marriage, it would be a triumph of hope over experience.

Many have been expecting, and Israel has been prudently preparing for, another war this summer. This may be the precipitating event. Let’s hope that they learned from their mistakes from last summer.

[Early afternoon update]

And then there’s this:

The London based Al-Hayat reported Saturday that Israel was “concerned” that Syria’s decision to remove military checkpoints on the road to Kuneitra on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights could be a preparation for war.

According to the report, the checkpoints in question had been in place for 40 years, ever since the Six Day War.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!