But nowthe Red State guys want to nuke Iceland.
Not really, but it is pretty funny.
by John Cole| 26 Comments
This post is in: Humorous
But nowthe Red State guys want to nuke Iceland.
Not really, but it is pretty funny.
by John Cole| 49 Comments
This post is in: Blogospheric Navel-Gazing, General Stupidity
It has been almost 24 hours since I have received notice that I am a C*** S******, and I have also recently been informed that I am a Democrat, and I have just one question:
Where the hell is my check from George Soros?
This post is in: Republican Stupidity, Blogospheric Navel-Gazing
And telling me it is wrong to out people. I am aware of that. I think it is wrong too- I just think that it is rich that the party that has spent decades demonizing gays, using people’s private sexual affairs for political gain, and insisting privacy is over-rated, is now all up in arms about ‘sexual McCarthyism.’
Is it wrong- sure. But you guys brought it on yourselves.
It wasn’t me who was using gay-bashing as an electoral strategy for 30 years- I have consistently pointed out the GOP was wrong, so listening to all this faux outrage (particularly from off key and unbalanced back-up singers in the wingnut chorus) is a little amusing. Apparently a lot of people, myself included, just didn’t realize the GOP had such a nuanced view, which I will summarize:
“Homosexuality is wrong and the root of all evil and homosexual marriage will be the downfall of Western Society so we must amend the Constitution to ban it and we will use homosexuals as campaign props every two years, but oh, by the way, we hate the sin and not the sinner, and even then the sin doesn’t bother us that much as long as you stay in the closet and do whatever you want as long as we don’ know about it and we are fine with that but recognize we will still call you out in public as evil and scream about gay adoptions so we can get elected but if any of us are gay we should be allowed to keep that private and oh, by the way, you are not normal because the bible says so.”
Confused? Yeah, me too. When you look at all the bullshit coming from the right wing on this issue (*), you might just conclude that they are full of shit, and that what really concerns them is not gay rights or rights to privacy or ‘sexual McCarthyism,’ but what really has their knickers in a twist is losing the election and how the revelations about Larry Craig’s *alleged* sexuality might impact that election.
But let’s assume that the GOP has a much more enlightened view about homosexuality than I previously thought, in which case I will make a deal. I will get all hysterical about ‘sexual McCarthyism’ when you disassociate yourselves from all of the bigots in the party who gay-bash from the pulpit, when you stop opposing gays entering civil unions/marriage, when you stop screaming about he ‘homosexual agenda,’ when you stop putting up amendments designed to single a certain segment of the population out as ‘unworthy’ of deserving all the benefits of society, and so on.
In short, you stop using gays an election year prop, stop using the same rhetoric against gays that you used against blacks, and I will be right here with you when someone outs a Republican who otherwise was closeted. Until then, I am gonna keep the same stance- outing people is wrong, but I hardly think it is surprising given the behavior of the Republican party the last few decades.
*** Update ***
– * Patterico feels he was unfairly lumped in with Glenn’s list of those who have no right to be outraged about Craig’s outing. I think he is right.
by Tim F| 37 Comments
This post is in: General Stupidity
I know that I said I was done blogging for the day but this deserves a quick post. NBC and the Wall Street Journal recently ran a poll which turned up the usual heinous picture for Republicans. Sweet music no matter how many times I hear it, but something in their internals caught my eye:
Also rather problematic for Republicans: Foley is recognized by a remarkable 83% of the electorate; 69% view him negatively. House Majority Leader John Boehner and former House Clerk Jeff Trandahl are scheduled to testify before the Ethics Committee today about their knowledge of Foley’s inappropriate behavior toward pages.
Let me get this straight. Assuming that everybody who hasn’t heard of Foley views him positively out of some general sense of charity, that leaves fourteen percent of people who are aware of the scandal and who apparently view a serial child predator in a positive light. That seems somehow improbable, so feel free to correct me in the comments.
If accurate this underlines one of the quirks of the polling science that has always stumped me. Knowledgable folk often say that veneral disease would poll in the low tens. In that case I guess the idea is that it keeps people from having sex so when it isn’t rotting one’s own insides maybe the clap is a good thing. But in general no matter how heinous something is you can apparently find a significant number of people who support it.
Now consider that approval of the Republican Congress has sunk to sixteen percent. How bad is that? Only three more points and Congress will poll worse than Mark Foley and, if rumors hold up, smallpox.
by Tim F| 30 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
This is all the blogging that you will get out of me today. Discuss my lameness in the space provided.
by Tim F| 95 Comments
This post is in: War, Blogospheric Navel-Gazing
Before the Iraq war began I knew many boosters on the right who didn’t care that much about the obviously weak WMD evidence and at least appeared to genuinely care about the suffering under Saddam Hussein. While that hardly constitutes a case for war (why not invade Sudan?) at least it appeared genuine. You could hardly escape agonized references to rape rooms, torture and mass graves.
Well, now we have rape rooms, torture and mass graves. A conservative estimate of the surplus dead suggests that our war has taken three years to at least reach the body count that Saddam accomplished in twenty-four, and unlike Saddam there is no line under our tally. When I turn back to those same people the concern seems gone or subsumed under layers of denial. Some dismiss the postwar dead as the “birth pangs of democracy,” as if a dead man cares whether he was killed by Saddam, an insurgent or a 500-pound bomb. Others have shielded their intense concern passively, by tuning out the news, or actively by viciously attacking those who make an effort to tally the dead. Hair-shirt humanitarianism seems much more appealing when it is the other donkey being gored.
Maybe I am guilty of the same thing. It seems rational to me to weigh a death caused by our own action much more gravely than a death that occurs outside of our control. You could argue that we “caused” Saddam’s body count by failing to act, but how does that attitude not repudiate every conservative foreign policy principle since World War II? The Republicans bitterly opposed US efforts to intervene in purely humanitarian crises, to become the “world police,” or at least they used to. When Kim Jong Il or Saddam or the military dictators in Burma execute a prisoner in the end it seems like nobody’s fault but theirs. But when somebody dies from an American bomb or from a sectarian death squad that the American war allowed to flourish then the reputation that it marks is ours. Maybe the elephant being gored contributes, but I fail to see how that is not a rational position.
In that vein, read Billmon’s comments on the latest post from Riverbend on the casualty count in the Lancet.
Riverbend’s topic is the Lancet study on war deaths in Iraq, and she curtly eviscerates the conservative Holocaust deniers:
We literally do not know a single Iraqi family that has not seen the violent death of a first or second-degree relative these last three years. Abductions, militias, sectarian violence, revenge killings, assassinations, car-bombs, suicide bombers, American military strikes, Iraqi military raids, death squads, extremists, armed robberies, executions, detentions, secret prisons, torture, mysterious weapons — with so many different ways to die, is the number so far fetched?
Nor does she have any kind words for any of the rest of us here in God Bless America, whether on the left or the right, who posture and bloviate while her country dies a slow, agonizing death:
They write about and discuss Iraq as I might write about the Ivory Coast or Cambodia — with a detachment and lack of sentiment that, I suppose, is meant to be impartial. Hearing American politicians is even worse: They fall between idiots like Bush — constantly and totally in denial, and opportunists who want to use the war and ensuing chaos to promote themselves.
That last one hits too close to home. A bulls eye, in fact. I’ve probably been as guilty as anyone of thinking of the war as some sort of strategy game, or a domestic political issue or a fascinating, if bloody, story — a news junkie’s next fix. When you’re 8,000 miles and an existential light year away from the war, it’s easy to distance yourself, intellectually and emotionally, from the stench of blood and the bloated corpses.
There’s also a natural tendency, which I touched on yesterday, to make it all about us — to consciously or unconsciously treat the Iraqis like extras (or worse, bloody mannequins) in a Mad Max remake produced and directed by Americans.
Read the whole thing, particularly his vignette about Emerson and Thoreau. Billmon largely focuses on the past – did we do enough? Most of us who opposed the war gave money, argued, marched, voted and then more or less threw up our hands and accepted the inevitable. In a democratic state there is only so much more that you can do without trading our comfortable lives for prison. In retrospect, given what we know now, maybe we should have. But as much as history will sneer at milquetoast opponents of the Iraq war the real judgment will be reserved for the hateful, usually dishonest way that the was was sold, the way that the very concept of dialogue was rendered unacceptable, practically the same as loving Saddam and supporting the terrrorists.
…
Rehashing the past has its uses. For one thing, I wouldn’t want to repeat it. For another it helps to calibrate which pundits have real credibility and which spend their time speaking through a practically impenetrable veil of ignorance. But useful as that may be rehashing who ran the car into a tree should take a backdseat to figuring out how to stop the bleeding.
My feeling about Iraq has always been clear. We lack the manpower to do any further good in that country and “stay the course” is just a synonym for a delayed pullout; personnel and manpower limitations will push us out soon enough anyway. “Stay the course” just means cut & run with a higher body count. A dozen Democrats have two dozen good proposals (they are Democrats…) and any one of them would make a fine plan. Apparently this idea has the support of practically every retired General officer as well as the sitting chief of the British Army and a good fraction of our enlisted personnel.
Maybe there are better ideas out there. Conrad Burns has a secret plan that undoubtedly involves divisions of all-terrain ponies and armor-piercing leprechauns. Maybe Burns can mock up a tabletop miniature of his “plan” after he loses his seat. Back in the real world Gregory Djerejian has some thoughts about using aggressive diplomacy (diplomacy? somebody check his voter card…) to mediate the Sunni-Shiite rift.
So what is needed now, amidst this veritable maelstrom of competing historical interests vying for supremacy in Iraq? I’d argue that the time may have come for something akin to the diplomatic effort that Richard Holbrooke undertook with the Dayton Accords that ended the fighting in Bosnia-Herzegovina in November 1995—only this effort, necessarily, would have to be more massive and ambitious. Historical analogies are always imperfect, and this one most certainly is, but let me perhaps sketch out why I believe it may serve as helpful precedent.
[…] [W]e need a new approach, and it has to be a dramatic one. First, let us begin by admitting our strategy has been a failure (getting rid of Rumsfeld would at least constitute the beginnings of acknowledgement of same). Second, we must convene a major Iraq Contact Group consisting of the U.S., British, Germans, French, Russians and Chinese—with full participation too by each of Iraq’s neighbors (Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, Jordan, Turkey, Kuwait), as well as other critical Arab and/or Islamic countries as observers to the Contact Group (Egypt and Morocco, for instance). To represent the U.S. at the Six-Plus-Six Contact Group we should appoint two seasoned envoys with proven track-records, who will work well together in lockstep. In a bid for bipartisan consensus, there should be one from each party (George Mitchell and James Baker III, say, only by way of example).
One critical priority must be addressing directly the wider regional tensions Iraq has exacerbated so that the conflict does not spill over and spread to other countries. There might well be surprising areas of common interest among many of the regional Contact Group members on this score.
[…] Within Iraq itself, we must most likely bow to reality—which is to say we must entertain how to more smoothly manage a separation of the Sunni, Shi’a and Kurdish zones into three relatively autonomous zones (this is happening whether we like it or not, recent developments increasingly suggest).
[…] In the capital itself, the international community will need to make a stand that will likely last many years, first militarily, later in terms of governmental and military capacity-building. After first establishing rough order in that city (and the entire will and might of the international community might be more effective than General Casey free-lancing without any qualified civilian back-up), attention must then turn to a variety of long-term challenges[.]
Read the whole thing and no bitching because it’s long. Then go over there and weigh in.
by John Cole| 30 Comments
This post is in: Previous Site Maintenance
Since I have been ‘outed’ as a C*** S****** by compassionate conservative, excuse me, carniverous conservative, Dan Riehl, I might as well come all the way ‘out.’ Thus, the new Balloon Juice theme song, suggested by commenters:
Let’s all do our best to keep it gay.