John Hawkins has two great interviews up that you should read. The first is with Bernard Goldberg, the second with Michael Medved. Go check them both out.
Archives for November 2003
Primary Concerns
I am of the opinion that the primary process is broken. How do we fix it?
The Real Enemy
David Brooks, in a moment of real clarity, points out who the enemy is in Iraq:
Um Haydar was a 25-year-old Iraqi woman whose husband displeased Saddam Hussein’s government. After he fled the country in 2000, some members of the Fedayeen Saddam grabbed her from her home and brought her out on the street. There, in front of her children and mother-in-law, two men grabbed her arms while another pulled her head back and beheaded her. Baath Party officials watched the murder, put her head in a plastic bag and took away her children.
Try to put yourself in the mind of the killer, or of the guy with the plastic bag. You are part of Saddam’s vast apparatus of rape squads, torture teams and mass-grave fillers. Every time you walk down the street, people tremble in fear. Everything else in society is arbitrary, but you are absolute. When you kill, your craving for power and significance is sated. You are infused with the joy of domination.
These are the people we are still fighting in Iraq. These are the people who blow up Red Cross headquarters and U.N. buildings and fight against democracy and freedom. They are the scum of the earth. And they are being joined in their lairs by the flotsam and jetsam of the terrorist world.
Their scumminess is our great advantage. People like this will never lead a popular insurgency. They have nothing positive to offer normal, decent people. They survive only by cruelty and the power of intimidation.
Meanwhile, in a display of the shallow fecklessness typical of those on the far left or those whose only concern is attacking this administration so that Democrats may have electoral success in 2004, Josh Marshall is concerned only with the language used to describe the enemy:
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Censorship Hysteria
Expect a wave of censorship hysteria from the left wing of the blogosphere today because CBS is cancelling the miniseries the Reagans.
Under pressure from Republican and conservative groups, CBS is expected to announce as early as today that it is canceling its plans to run a two-part mini-series in November deconstructing the Ronald Reagan presidency, two people close to the decision said last night.
They said the film would most likely instead be handed over to CBS’s pay-cable sibling, Showtime.
The announcement would perhaps the first time a major broadcast network has ever removed a completed project from its schedule because of political pressure and under the threat of an advertising boycott.
Not sure how this is censorship or any different to the successful attempts to get rid of Dr. Laura and that other idiot (whose name escapes me at the moment).
At any rate, everything I read about it seemed like they were just flat out making shit up about the Reagans, so I am not sure what the point was. Of course it was a fictionalized portrayal of the Reagans, but you would think there would be enough actual stuff to fill the miniseries without just creating stuff. And besides, having Streisand’s husband play Reagan was just idiotic. How would Democrats feel if Grover Norquist’s wife was portraying Hillary Clinton in a miniseries rife with factual error and derisive innuendo. I daresay they might object.
*** Update ***
The idiot I was thinking of was Michael Savage.
*** Update #2 ***
Patti Davis discusses some of the lies and outright fabrications.
Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them
Bill Hobbs takes on the DNC talking points about the economy:
Democrats can’t win the White House by telling the truth about the economy, so they will lie and talk about “one quarter of growth.”
USA Today had some good coverage of the economic growth news today, including this story. The New York Times offers this analysis of the politics.
Also, I went hunting for stats and found that there are more people working today than when George W. Bush took office back in January 2001. That’s right
Cat Update
The cat urination problem has been solved temporarily, although not the way I wanted to resolve it. Oliver and Tunch got out a window last night at 7, and while Tunch came back at ten, Oliver has not been seen for a day now. He always was the wild one and always trying to get outside, so if he eventually does come back, I may find a good farm for him.
At any rate, the most depressing part is that I was always suspicious that my cats did not like me and just tolerated me, and then Oliver pissed all over my house for two weeks and ran away. What message am I supposed to take from this other than confirmation that he hated me?
Dean the Dry Drunk
Matt Stinson wonders if the left is going to savage Dean for having become a teetotaler in his mid-30’s, just like our current President. This raises some questions:
– As Matt noted, will Martin Sheen call Dean a “white-knuckle drunk?”
– Will Katherine van Wormer, Professor of Social Work at the University of Northern Iowa, write a lengthy bit of babble calling Dean a dry drunk?
– Will Michael O’Mcarthy state that Dean “shows every sign of a mental obsession that is rendering him dysfunctional” and that “this obsession that he alone is right in his view of the world is driven by the complex ingredients of egomania and inferiority symptomatic to that found in the medical diagnostic description of the illness of alcoholism.”
– Will Alan Bisbort state that Gov. Dean needs an intervention from the sober voices on the left?
– Will Salon have Joan Walsh write a lengthy essay on the Dean family alcohol problems like the hit piece she wrote about Barbara and Jenna Bush? Surely breaking into and robbing a Country Club is as serious as a couple of college kids trying to pass a fake id.
Just curious, you know.
*** Update ***
Fritz Schranck shows how careless rhetoric can destroy an entire argument.