I scored a 47 on the Libertarian Purity test, which means:
Your libertarian credentials are obvious. Doubtlessly you will become more extreme as time goes on.
Take that, you statist swine.
Archives for 2004
Clinton’s Doha Speech
I referred to this speech last month, and Yglesias is right– it is a must read (.pdf).
Loose Lips Sink Campaigns
If anything is going to prove that the coronation of John Kerry in the recent (and ongoing) Democratic primaries will serve the Democrats poorly, it is the string of recent vocal gaffe’s committed by the eminently electable John Kerry. In recent weeks, we have the following:
In the past six months, we have the following gems from Sen. Kerry, who, btw, is not dumb like President Bush:
“The obligation of the United States government is to rapidly internationalize the effort in Iraq, get the target off of American troops, bring other people, particularly Muslim-speaking and Arab-speaking Muslim troops, into the region,” Kerry said.
Front-running Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry told a Free Press reporter Tuesday that Great Lakes water diversion issues require a “delicate balancing act” to provide for “national needs.”
Twenty-four hours later, his Michigan campaign spokesman, Mark Kornblau, said the Massachusetts senator’s position on shipping water out of the Great Lakes is “unequivocal.”
“He is absolutely opposed to diversion of Great Lakes water. Period.”
During a town hall meeting on the Dartmouth campus, Kerry noted that former Vice President Al Gore would be president if he’d won any number of other non-Southern states in 2000, including New Hampshire, West Virginia, and Ohio.
“Everybody always makes the mistake of looking South,” Kerry said, in response to a question about winning the region. “Al Gore proved he could have been president of the United States without winning one Southern state, including his own.”
Kerry on Sunday compared James Byrd Jr., a black man who was dragged to death in Texas, to the gay college student Matthew Shepard, who died after he was pistol-whipped and tied to a fence in Wyoming.
“Let me tell you something, when Matthew Shepard gets crucified on a fence in Wyoming only because he was gay … I think that’s a matter of rights in the United States of America,” said Kerry, stressing that the U.S. Constitution contains an equal-protection clause.
“My point is homosexuality is an idea,” White retorted, as the crowd moaned. “You have never heard a doctor say, ‘Mr. and Mrs. John Doe, you have a bouncing baby homosexual.'”
Kerry’s Thoughts on Which Dictators Must Go–
“What we need now is not just a regime change in Saddam Hussein and Iraq, but we need a regime change in the United States,” Kerry said Wednesday in a speech to New Hampshire Democrats at the Peterborough, N.H., Town Library.
Well, not blindsided. I mean, when I voted for the war, I voted for what I thought was best for the country. Did I expect Howard Dean to go off to the left and say, “I’m against everything”? Sure. Did I expect George Bush to fuck it up as badly as he did? I don’t think anybody did.
Sen. John Kerry’s official election website is riddled with obscenities, the DRUDGE REPORT can reveal.
The Democrat nominee-in-waiting recently said radio stations are within their right to pull Howard Stern off the air if they object to the shock jock’s racy show.
But an investigation reveals Kerry’s own website is filled expletives, setting the standard for a new wave of 21st Century campaigning!
Though he always has opposed the death penalty, Sen. John Kerry said Tuesday that the Sept. 11 attacks made him realize that he would want to “blow Osama bin Laden’s brains out.”
“We’re going to keep pounding, let me tell you. We’re just beginning to fight here,” Kerry said. “These guys are the most crooked, you know, lying group I’ve ever seen. It’s scary.”
I would hate to see what kind of things a stupid candidate might say. At any rate- Kerry has been untested in the primary, and if the press paid any attention, it would be clear that heis damaging himself more than Bush and Rove could ever hope. Maybe he will regaijn the form he had during the great Kerry/Weld Senate debates, but he is a long way off from that point.
Like I Said
As I have stated repeatedly, the Democrat response to the Bush campaign commercials and the faux outrage about including 9/11 imagery was preposterous and hypocritical. So preposterous and hypocritical that the Democrats have stopped mentioning it. Unfortunately, the mainstream press is now on the story, and they show that if anything, Bush is out of his league when it comes to ‘exploiting’ tragedy:
But is it, as supporters of John Kerry and other critics suggest, wrong for Republicans to convert the emotions of that national tragedy into grist for a political campaign?
To answer that question, I went back, with help from Washington Post researcher Brian Faler, to 1944, when Franklin D. Roosevelt, almost three years after Pearl Harbor, was running for reelection. What you learn from such an exercise is that Bush is a piker compared with FDR when it comes to wrapping himself in the mantle of commander in chief.
Item: FDR did not go to the Democratic convention in Chicago where he was nominated for a fourth term. A few days before it opened, he sent a letter to the chairman of the Democratic Party explaining his availability for the nomination. And what an explanation!
“All that is within me cries out to go back to my home on the Hudson River, to avoid public responsibilities and to avoid also the publicity which in our democracy follows every step of the nation’s chief executive.”
But, he wrote, “every one of our sons serving in this war has officers from whom he takes his orders. Such officers have superior officers. The President is the Commander in Chief, and he, too, has his superior officer — the people of the United States. . . . If the people command me to continue in this office and in this war, I have as little right to withdraw as the soldier has to leave his post in the line.”
Item: Roosevelt delivered his acceptance speech to the convention by radio from where? From the San Diego Naval Station, because, he said, “The war waits for no elections. Decisions must be made, plans must be laid, strategy must be carried out.”
Item: If FDR’s politicizing of his wartime role seems blatant, what does one say of the main speakers at the convention? Keynoter Robert Kerr, then governor of Oklahoma, declared that “the Republican Party . . . had no program, in the dangerous years preceding Pearl Harbor, to prevent war or to meet it if it came. Most of the Republican members of the national Congress fought every constructive move designed to prepare our country in case of war.”
Read the whole thing.
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Where Ted Kennedy Gets His ‘Intel’
Ever wonder where Ted Kennedy gets the information for his increasingly stupid and increasingly ill-informed charges? Max Boot tells all:
Ted Kennedy delivered another stemwinder last week, accusing the Bush administration of lying its way into Iraq for political gain. Ho-hum. Nothing new there. But one paragraph caught my attention.
In trying to buttress his charge that the president twisted intelligence about Saddam Hussein, Kennedy cited “Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, a recently retired Air Force intelligence officer who served in the Pentagon during the buildup to the war.” He quoted her as follows: “It wasn’t intelligence – it was propaganda … they’d take a little bit of intelligence, cherry-pick it, make it sound much more exciting, usually by taking it out of context, usually by juxtaposition of two pieces of information that don’t belong together.”
Sounds pretty damning, doesn’t it? Those aren’t the words of a political opponent; that’s the judgment of a presumably disinterested military professional. Except that Kwiatkowski’s judgment doesn’t look so disinterested when you examine her views more closely.
Since her retirement in March 2003, she has become a prolific contributor to isolationist publications like the American Conservative, Pat Buchanan’s magazine, and lewrockwell.com, an ultra-libertarian website. Pretty much all her work is devoted to uncovering “neoconservative warmongers” who have supposedly taken over U.S. foreign policy.
She is not subtle in denouncing “Dickie Cheney, Richie Perle and Dougie Feith” (as well as, occasionally, “my pal, Max Boot”), whose “neoconservative philosophy is hateful to humanity, anti-American, statist and anti-free trade.” (Anti-free trade?) She thinks the United States is a “maturing fascist state.” And she predicts a dire fate for those who led us into the Iraq war: “Some folks on the Pentagon’s E-ring may be sitting beside Hussein in the war crimes tribunals.”
Who else?
Equally biased are the former CIA officers who call themselves Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity – a name that implies the administration, which they oppose, is insane. Ray Close, David MacMichael and Ray McGovern, who make up VIPS’ steering committee, have many decades of intelligence experience among them, which is why they are often cited as sources by news organizations like the New York Times when they write stories about how the Bush team has run roughshod over “objective” CIA analysts.
What is seldom mentioned is where the VIPS-ters publish most of their anti-Bush screeds: on Counterpunch.org, a conspiracy-mongering website run by Nation columnist Alexander Cockburn. VIPS even has an e-mail address at Counterpunch, which is so extreme that it has run an article suggesting that the only major difference between George W. Bush and Adolf Hitler is that “Bush simply is not the orator that Hitler was.” But then, that wouldn’t bother someone like VIPS’ McGovern, who in an interview equated the administration’s selling of the Iraq war with the techniques employed by “Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels [who] said, if you repeat something often enough, the people will believe it.”
I guess he just doesn’t know Justin Raimondo’s phone number.
Stupid Is As Stupid Does
Maureen Dowd’s rambling column about John Kerry and Botox prove once again that while she may be an idiot with nothing to say, she at least a6ttempts to appear bi-partisan. All through the 90’s, she did nothing but take cheap shots at Clinton, Gore, and since 2000, it has been Bush and Cheney taking most of the hits. She has been so mean and vicious to the current administration that many people forget how obnoxious she was to the previous administration.
While I like neutral sources of news and opinion, or at least sources who pretend to shoot straight, I have no use for the mindless drivel and endless psychobabble that seems to flow forever from MoDo’s pen.
Who cares whether Kerry used Botox? A better question is why does middle-age Manhattan cheerleader have some of the world’s most valuable newspaper real estate? Maureen Dowd adds absolutely nothying to the public debate, and she is as over as Sex in the City.