Conor Friedersdorf just devoted twenty-two paragraphs to a discussion of Mark Levin’s “intellectual oeuvre”.
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[…] Sully stand-in shark watch 29 Aug Stupid and Proud of It […]
Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.
They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.
Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.
Optimism opens the door to great things.
Let’s finish the job.
Battle won, war still ongoing.
Second rate reporter says what?
Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity
Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.
I’m sure you banged some questionable people yourself.
How can republicans represent us when they don’t trust women?
Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.
Conservatism: there are some people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.
Prediction: the GOP will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.
When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.
A last alliance of elves and men. also pet photos.
Republicans choose power over democracy, every day.
New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.
Nothing worth doing is easy.
White supremacy is terrorism.
Republicans can’t even be trusted with their own money.
You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.
“And when the Committee says to “report your income,” that could mean anything!
Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.
You are here: Home / Sully stand-in shark watch
Faux News
I have been reading Sully for a long time. Usually his stand ins are fairly innocuous. This time they are a bunch of insufferable douchebags. Might as well have had BOB take over.
ppcli
To be fair, the rest of the review makes the obvious criticisms – that Levin attacks a straw man, that his book is just the usual gasbaggery, etc. So what if he misspelled “ineffectual oeuf”.
arguingwithsignposts
I don’t think that word means what he thinks it means.
Seriously, I’m curious to see what he said, in the same sense that I’m curious when I drive by a traffic accident. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to click that link and give Sullivan any traffic.
Montysano
Levin is on during my drive home, so let me give Conor some assistance: among Levin’s basic memes is that Barack Obama despises America. When someone spouts that type of shit, their whole “intellectual oeuvre” is suspect, and hence they don’t deserve even one paragraph on The Daily Dish. In a rightwing echo chamber full of intellectual dishonesty, Levin, because he is highly intelligent and well educated, is among the worst offenders.
Political Pragmatist
“The Modern Liberal believes in the supremacy of the state”
With those words, I quit reading for the rest would be fallacy based upon a false belief. The “Modern Liberal” believes in the supremacy of man. The belief that liberals believe in the supremacy of the state is a holdover from Reagan. It’s an old meme that has usefulness only to hold on to the Villagers.
The biggest obstacle to progress is Fox News, which I wrote about yesterday:
http://blogs.reviewjournal.com/community/politics/fox-news-is-the-problem
As long as Republicans keep listening to the Pravda of the Right, they will be misinformed, and this is where tyranny is being fomented.
If there is civil war, then Fox News will be the official network of the secessionists. As far as I can tell, there is no way to stop the lying.
NobodySpecial
If we lived our society’s history by glibertarian rules, we’d have died out before Lucy’s body got cold.
RSA
He should have gone with Levin’s hors d’ instead.
gnomedad
I don’t quite get your contempt for this. I can imagine a borderline sane Levin reader seeing this and actually getting the point that Levin is attacking straw men. Where’s the harm?
JK
Excerpt from Dahlia Lithwick’s takedown of Levin’s book Men in Black
“Men in Black is 208 large-print pages of mostly block quotes (from court decisions or other legal thinkers) padded with a foreword by the eminent legal scholar Rush Limbaugh, and a blurry 10-page “Appendix” of internal memos to and from congressional Democrats—stolen during Memogate. The reason it may take you only slightly longer to read Men in Black than it took Levin to write it is that you’ll experience an overwhelming urge to shower between chapters.”.
h/t http://slate.msn.com/id/2116087
Ann B. Nonymous
I forget on which of the 120 Days of Sodom de Sade’s libertines joyfully inhaled each other’s flatus.
whiskey
shorter that post:
10 pounds of shit in a 5 pound bag
DougJ
In a rightwing echo chamber full of intellectual dishonesty, Levin, because he is highly intelligent and well educated, is among the worst offenders.
You know, it doesn’t surprise me at all that someone who is highly intelligent and well educated can be a total douchebag.
MikeJ
@JK: Dahlia LIthwick is a national treasure and should be seriously considered for the next USSC seat.
Leelee for Obama
@JK: Lithwick is as pithy as anyone could be, I think. What an absolutely fabulous review! All I know, all I need to know, about Levin, is that Michele Bachmann thinks he’s teh awesome.
arguingwithsignposts
@Montysano:
See, I do not see these two things as compatible in any way, shape, or form. He’s either highly intelligent and well educated (note the term “well”) or he believes BO hates America.
There’s no Venn diagram that works on those two spheres.
John Cole
Ok. I tried to read that. I made it two paragraphs. That was the political equivalent of two girls one cup.
geg6
DougJ: I don’t know about you, but pretty much everyone I work with is highly intellegent and very well educated. But that doesn’t stop a large percentage of them from being gigantic douches. Academia proves that intelligence and education do not innoculate against the stoopid.
Nate
Yes, Conor is trying to engage honestly on an intellectual level with the author of a national bestseller that conservatives are buying by the crate. He should just write snarky one-liners and post cat pictures. Much more productive.
Dave L
Oh, cut the guy some slack. It’s the last weekend in August. You should see the view from HIS office window…
arguingwithsignposts
@Political Pragmatist:
This is sort of like the meme I used to hear in church, that liberals believe men are basically good (an oversimplification of theological thought). Conservatives believe that men are marred by original sin and their hearts are evil.
But from all the right-wing/glibertarianist talking points, it appears the opposite is true. Cons believe man’s “free markets” are basically good and noble and bear no ill will. Corporations are inherently good.
Libs believe man’s “free markets” allow corruption to grow and seek to regulate said markets. Corporations are inherently bad because they seek short-term profit to the detriment of society and the individual.
I could be wrong, but it seems like up is down to these folks.
Montysano
@arguingwithsignposts:
And yet….. here we are.
@Political Pragmatist:
When people will not accept being lied to. Until then, we’re fucked. To again quote the best post title I’ve seen recently, “Bring on the Brawndo!”
gnomedad
@arguingwithsignposts:
Rather an absurd thesis, since “men” run corporations.
IMO, this kind of rhetoric reinforces winger lies about what liberals stand for. Corporations are inherently selfish and need checks on their power just as governments do. And no, “competition” alone is not a sufficient check on the accumulation of corporate power.
asiangrrlMN
DougJ, I hate you for posting that link. I hate myself more for clicking on it and struggling through four or five paragraphs. I need a shower now.
Jason
Hey look, the Communist Manifesto. Just think I’ll skip ahead to the end and offer a few thoughts. Guy is just nutz on the radio but I can dig his objective take on the remnants of German feudalism.
Chad N Freude
@arguingwithsignposts:
“[H]ighly intelligent and well educated” people can propagate memes without blieving in them. Such people are called highly intelligent and well educated hypocrites.
Chad N Freude
@Chad N Freude:
And highly intelligent and well educated people can make stupid typographic errors.
gnomedad
@Chad N Freude:
Fixed. No other word for someone who deliberately pollutes the memeosphere for a buck.
Political Pragmatist
@DougJ: “You know, it doesn’t surprise me at all that someone who is highly intelligent and well educated can be a total douchebag.”
Doug, this only works because (a) they have no soul and (b) the audience has no brain. That’s the reason for the success of Fox News. They only listen to those who agree with them, and if something comes from a source known to disagree, then it cannot be the truth.
@arguingwithsignposts:
Yes, that’s the way I read it.
@Montysano:
They accept it because it conforms with their perception of The Truth. It will only end when they continue to lose election after election and the right grows small enough to drown in its own bathtub. (Which might be sooner than later.)
ClusterFux is getting record ratings, which means they are winning the argument, right? No, they are getting all of a fraction of Americans who are desperately holding on to the grip on their irrational reality.
Wayne
Political Pragmatist
I thought the Conservative Manifesto–aka “Proud to be a Right Wing Terrorist Book”–would be 3 pages long, written in crayon, and IN CAPS.
kth
Friedorsdorf is engaging Levin’s dreck only to discredit it. I agree with y’all that reasoning with teabaggers, as Conor is trying to do, is a fool’s errand. But it doesn’t for a moment mean that he is one of them, or that he is lending them legitimacy.
EnderWiggin
@arguingwithsignposts:
How about he is highly intelligent and well educated, and knows how to easily make a lot of money lying to stupid people? I think most of them are highly intelligent and well educated, and act like they believe this crap for money, because they lack morals.
Except Hannity, he seems factory made by Fox, and just truly dumb enough to believe his nonsense.
DougJ
Yes, Conor is trying to engage honestly on an intellectual level with the author of a national bestseller that conservatives are buying by the crate. He should just write snarky one-liners and post cat pictures. Much more productive.
You’re preaching to the choir.
arguingwithsignposts
@gnomedad:
Well, i tend to believe selfishness to be a bad thing in general. Enlightened self-interest not so, but pure selfishness, yes (see libertarianism). Selfishness is pretty much greed.
Montysano
@Chad N Freude:
Another possibility.
I’m just in a foul mood. From my morning newspaper, reporting about Rep. Parker Griffith’s Athens, Alabama town hall:
Jesus smiled and nodded approval? I think not.
arguingwithsignposts
@EnderWiggin:
Well, that’s another explanation. I suppose it fits better than mine. So they are evil.
asiangrrlMN
I actually believe it’s easier to be a total jerkwad if one is intelligent and educated because then one can build elaborate rationalizations that sound creditable until the words are critically analyzed. In other words, it’s easier to make up believable shit if you have a brain. Plus, there are people who are so good in debating that even if they are 97% incorrect in their way of thinking, they can box other people into a corner with mere rhetoric.
MikeJ
This posted just moments after the reading in Teddy’s funeral where JC is telling people, “you people suck because you didn’t feed the poor or visit people in prison. ” While I don’t buy into the whole hoodoo around it, it’s always amazed me how much the people who claim to believe hate what their big guy had to say.
arguingwithsignposts
Re: TMK’s funeral (live on msnbc.com), the Catholics sure can bring the pomp and circumstance!
ppcli
@Montysano:
Right you are. John 11:35 is more appropriate.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Political Pragmatist:
What do you mean “if” ? There is civil war, and has been ever since the first cavaliers and parliamentarians stepped off their respective boats from England and brought their quarrel with them, and it hasn’t stopped since then. We just don’t fight it with grapeshot and bayonets most of the time, at least not on a large enough scale to call it a war, which is why hardly anybody notices how continuous it is from one flare up to the next.
That is why you can’t win over the folks on the other side with logical arguments, facts & stuff. People don’t change which side they are on because of little things like facts, except for the folks caught in the noman’s land in the middle, who given their druthers would just as soon opt out of the whole nasty fracas but get dragged in anyway.
And yes, the lying will never, ever stop. Bet on it.
r€nato
O Noes! Ted Kennedy’s grandson just politicized the funeral! Quick! Fire up the Stalkin’ Malkin Brigade! He’s fair game!
r€nato
(his intercession was for ‘national health care as a fundamental right’)
gnomedad
@EnderWiggin:
Exactly. Well put. Bravo.
arguingwithsignposts
Is that yo-yo ma?
arguingwithsignposts
@arguingwithsignposts:
Of course that really doesn’t negate my original thesis, which was that it was impossible to be both highly intelligent and well-educated and also believe that BO hates America.
What you are saying is that they don’t believe it and are lying to make money. I’m willing to believe that explanation, but I can’t believe that such a person would actually operate under the belief that BO hates America. Such a person is lacking in intelligence, IMHO.
asiangrrlMN
@arguingwithsignposts: I love me some Yo-Yo Ma. I used to play cello. What a great instrument.
arguingwithsignposts
@EnderWiggin:
That last comment was directed to EnderWiggen’s comment, (oh, for the edit function!)
Political Pragmatist
The people who believe the lies are the kind of people who absolutely hate liars. After a decade, they still have a mortal hate for Clinton’s lie, yet they allow their own to continuously lie, lie and lie ever more obviously.
It’s bizarre.
gnomedad
@arguingwithsignposts:
Unfortunately (and occasionally fortunately), intelligence can be compartmentalized.
asiangrrlMN
@arguingwithsignposts: Ok, but look at it this way. If someone is highly intelligent, that person can pick and choose data that will support his/her theory. If someone wants to believe that Obama hates America, there are plenty of things that one can twist to confirm that point of view. I’m stressing that someone has to truly believe the theory in order to twist facts to fit the theory. So, the fact that Obama is willing to talk with Iran without preconsisting conditions–oops, wrong argument–precondititons can be read as, “Obama wants to weaken America’s power in the world standing.” It has been shown that people tend to filter info in a way that will support their political leanings, especially conservatives.
If a person wants to believe something desperately enough, s/he will–regardless of brain intelligence.
Political Pragmatist
Blogging for a radically-right Libertarian newspaper is a bitch, but the comments are fabulous. From foaming at the mouth to incoherent mumblings to completely fallacious logic, I have not seen a single new or good idea attempted in eight months of reading comments. Not one. Not anything which would solve even the most simple problem.
If the right ever had a good idea, it died of loneliness.
asiangrrlMN
@gnomedad: Damn you for putting it much more succinctly than I could.
Demo Woman
@asiangrrlMN: Yo-Yo Ma appeared to be very moved. Towards the end of his piece, he seemed to be holding back tears.
arguingwithsignposts
@gnomedad:
This is true. Perhaps “intelligence” isn’t the right word. What would be better? “Realligence”? “intellectual honesty”? “political discernment”?
I’m at a loss.
geg6
I am watching Teddy’s funeral mass and, as an atheist who was brought up in a large Catholic family, it astounds me how comforting and beautiful I still find the ritual. It’s all a load of hooey, but what lovely hooey. No other religion’s rituals, IMHO, are quite so magnificent.
arguingwithsignposts
@asiangrrlMN:
I guess this is so. I know some “intelligent” people who believe the world was created 6,000 years ago. Sad, really.
steve s
sanity.
Montysano
@geg6:
Yeah….. A few years ago, a friend died of cancer. The funeral was in an Episcopal church, and I was moved to tears by the lovely hooey. Go figger.
r€nato
@geg6:
i feel exactly the same way. Humans have a psychological need for ritual and the Catholic Church has been perfecting this for 2,000 years…
gnomedad
@arguingwithsignposts:
Integrity, perhaps? But I certainly agree with your intuition that well-rounded intelligence is antithetical to this sort of wankery.
bayville
But that’s the whole point of this book – and his previous tomb – to pass his daily radio bloviations off as legal scholarship. It isn’t.
Levin is a political hatchet man – plain and simple. A smart but pathelogically dishonest man on a Nixonian level. He plays his listeners for rubes nightly on behalf of the common good of insurance companies, militiamen, CEOs and Christian fundamentalists (i.e. Randall Terry). He’s a gangsta with a microphone.
arguingwithsignposts
@geg6:
I’ve never been to a greek orthodox service, but they could probably compete. They have the iconography and the costumes.
As for the other Christian flavors, you’re right. The high church ones are watered down Catholic, and the low church ones (like baptists) shun the spectacle.
arguingwithsignposts
@bayville:
I do have to confess that I’ve never listened to levin. I saw a guy on an airplane sitting next to me who was carrying that book, and I went to his web site. Meh. I have a rule about anyone political who puts the American flag on the cover of their book: they’re probably full of shit, and using the flag to cover for that fact.
kay
Can you write a book on federalism and respective powers of the state and federal government without mentioning the Big Intractable Problem we ran into?
That led to the Civil War?
Yes, I guess you can, if you’re a conservative.
It looks like a glorified state’s right’s manifesto that skips history. I guess that makes it SHORTER, and CATCHIER, but it’s not really helpful or practical to ignore everything that actually happened, in favor of discussing what might have been, now is it?
I think conservative ire is better directed at Lincoln than Kennedy. Lincoln seems to have started all the trouble for The Movement. They gotta go waaaay back.
geg6
Montysano: For me, it’s so much a part of my childhood. I haven’t practiced religion for almost 35 years, but I can still recite every word the mass from memory. And Episcopalians are just copy cats. The Church of Rome perfected this stuff.
Bill H
I always quit reading Sully as soon as he advises that he is taking a hiatus. His borg posts consist mostly of cutting and pasting from the posts of other sources, and I assumed it was because they were incapable of original thought. You people caused me to go read a few posts where they actually wrote something, which proved my assumption to be correct.
gnomedad
@geg6:
Fortunately, he is too important to be denied the rituals because of his divorce (“annulment”?) and re-marriage. (N.B., directed at church, not EMK.)
lamh31
For those who can’t wait, here’s a copy of President Obama’s eulogy of Senator Kennedy:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/8/29/773986/-President-Obamas-eulogy-for-Ted-Kennedy
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@geg6:
A perceptive comment. There is a lot on offer in religion – ritual, orthopraxy, orthodoxy. I don’t take orthodoxy very seriously – at best it does no harm and at worst, well let’s not go there on this occasion. Orthopraxy has the capacity to help bring out what’s best in people, and ritual helps to steady and support us at the moments when we most need help.
Warren Terra
I’ve never trusted Sully – his track record speaks for itself – and his flirtation with birtherism disgusted me. I haven’t been back to his blog since I heard Peter “Astroturf” Suderman was guesting.
Comrade Jake
@geg6:
Seconded. Academics tend to have at least one fundamental character flaw that prevents them from working anywhere else.
Montysano
@kay:
That’s the whole conservative argument, isn’t it? Conservatism has never failed, it’s just that it’s never been properly executed. Not failed, but been failed. The world has always been too imperfect and human beings have always been fallible; otherwise, it would have been a home run. Could have been a contenda.
geg6
arguingwithsignposts: I’ve been to Orthodox services. They are, like Anglican/Episcopalian services, a copy of the Roman ritual. Which makes sense since both got their start as religions by breaking off from Rome. There are slight differences (like how Orthodox cross themselves), but any Catholic can see the Roman mass’ roots in their ritials.
arguingwithsignposts
@geg6:
I’m not going to get into a debate over papal primacy here. :) But I would dispute the fact that the orthodox churches “broke off” from Rome where their rituals came from. The early church was not the “Roman” church.
Suffice to say that the Roman Catholic and Orthodox forks of the tree share the same trunk, from whence these rituals flow.
Political Pragmatist
@Montysano:
“That’s the whole conservative argument, isn’t it? Conservatism has never failed, it’s just that it’s never been properly executed. Not failed, but been failed. The world has always been too imperfect and human beings have always been fallible; otherwise, it would have been a home run. Could have been a contenda.”
Funny, a communist would say exactly the same thing. And be right. If not for human nature, communism would be the perfect and least worthwhile human endeavor.
Where would be the fun?
kay
@Montysano:
I have this argument with a conservative I work with and know and like. He said once “if you knew how this country was supposed to work you would be outraged”. It was completely heart-felt.
I’m not at all abstract, so a lot of our arguments are like that. He keeps quoting the Federalist Papers, I keep bringing up what actually happened. I want them to APPLY the Federalist Papers :) They won’t even do that.
r€nato
@arguingwithsignposts:
so you’re saying the Roman and Orthodox churches evolved from a common ancestor? ;-)
arguingwithsignposts
@arguingwithsignposts:
However, the episcopal (anglican) church clearly was a fork off of the RCC.
arguingwithsignposts
@r€nato:
LOL. thanks for that.
SGEW
@geg6:
Shinto Buddhist memorial services probably rank up there. Or go to a traditional Hindu wedding sometime. Talk about spectacular!
DougJ
@gnomedad and others
I’ll try to explain what bothers me so much about this later. It’s one of those things that’s hard to describe if not seen immediately.
SGEW
@DougJ: I have a suspicion that I know exactly what is so bothersome to you, Doug. But, yeah . . . it’s hard to describe all right. And, honestly, I can’t bring myself to giving it any more thought: too much agita.
MikeJ
You want spectacle? Backwoods snakehandler.
DougJ
Okay, gnomedad and others, John explains what’s so aggravating about what Sully’s stand-in said:
Tom Levenson
@geg6: Speaking as a Jew who has witnessed religious ceremonies ranging from afternoon prayers in the Suleimanye Mosque to Pope John Paul II celebrating Mass in Liverpool Cathedral during the Falklands (Malvinas) War, to a Zen Buddhist wedding in a neighborhood temple in Japan to my own time under the chuppa, let me be if not the first then the next to say that you are in error. (Not my first choice of words, but then I reconsidered on the thought of the occasion.)
I would say that religious ceremonies create emotional response in at least partial proportion to exposure to their power as children. But still, yours is a (literally) parochial view.
Steven Taylor
In fairness, he is ultimately quite critical of Levin. Indeed, I think the way to read the piece is an attempt by a conservative to point out to other conservatives what is wrong with Levin’s logic/approach.
Corinne
Interesting thread.
Mark Levin’s book, should any of you actually bother to read it, describes the philosophers who influenced the founders of this country. Why?
Because starting with Cicero, Montescue (sp?), Burke, Locke, Smith and others, the framers (Madison, Jay and many others) carefully constructed a constitution that would balance the powers not only between the three branches but also between the states and the federal government.
It is easy to forget that the states created the federal government — not the other way around. And the founders had just revolted against (and defeated) an unchecked, authoritarian and unaccountable centralized government.
The framers’ central task was simple: protect the God-given rights of the individual to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — from a government similar to the one they had warred against.
Consider what James Madison might say today, having observed the liberals’ casual attempts to control virtually every aspect of our lives at the federal level: your health care; your toilet’s water tank; your car; your home heating bill; your light bulbs; …
The framers and today’s conservatives are ideologically aligned.
The framers and today’s liberals are ideologically opposed.
And it takes a great deal of hubris to discard Levin’s argument without a whit of analysis. But that’s what passes for intellectual honesty around these parts, I suppose.
Chad N Freude
@Tom Levenson: I agree with what you said, but there is a Bollywood, Radio City Music Hall, Hollywood Bowl fireworks quality to a lot of ritual displays that makes them watchable as a type of spectacle.
Steve J.
Mark Levin’s “intellectual oeuvre”
This is also known as “spittle”
Svensker
@arguingwithsignposts:
I’ve never been to a greek orthodox service, but they could probably compete. They have the iconography and the costumes.
The Greeks do a magnificent funeral, but it is quite different from the Catholic ritual. They still have only medieval Byzantine music and chant, no instruments or organ. But still quite elaborate and showy. Very moving.
The Quakers are at the opposite extreme, no show, no pomp, just quiet with people speaking as they feel moved. That is also a very moving funeral, but it doesn’t play well on TV.
Svensker
@geg6:
I’ve been to Orthodox services. They are, like Anglican/Episcopalian services, a copy of the Roman ritual. Which makes sense since both got their start as religions by breaking off from Rome. There are slight differences (like how Orthodox cross themselves), but any Catholic can see the Roman mass’ roots in their ritials.
Do NOT let my Greek husband hear you say that. The Orthodox did NOT get their start breaking off from Rome and did NOT copy the Roman ritual. The churches were originally one, then separated into the eastern and western branches before breaking into two.
Protestant services tend to be similar to Catholic since they are reformed variants on their Catholic roots. Orthodox services have much in common with the Catholic because they are two branches of the same tree, but they diverged long ago and their emphasis is quite different. Catholics tend toward the intellectual, while Orthodox toward the mystical.
Allan
I sent Andrew an email letting him know that I was deleting his site from my “favorites” and that even after he returned from vacation I would not be back. I told him I judged him by the company he keeps and the writers whose work he chooses to promote.
I also asked him to let Hannah Rosin know that I looked forward to her death so that I could take a long, juicy shit on her coffin to pay her back for the deuce she dropped on Teddy Kennedy.
Elia
@Allan:
I’m tempted to send Sully a similar email. I’m a pretty devout reader of his blog (despite my qualms with his past work), but most of the people he’s had fill in for his summer breaks have just been awful. With such a high-profile blog, he could’ve assisted countless thoughtful writers – instead I’m treated to a daily dose of braindead “serious” glibertarian nonsense. Does he honestly think that if we read him we’ll enjoy these empty suits? I may have underestimated how pathologically important it is to him to be conservative, despite whatever I’ve been reading by him for the past, y’know, 3 years.
John Cole
@Corinne: Actually, I have looked at Levin’s book, and it is little more than a bunch of name-calling (the Modern Liberal is not actual Liberal but a Statist) and then goes on to apply Rush Limbaugh’s worldview on every major topic of political discussion and “show” how Liberals are not only wrong, but a threat to freedom and liberty.
Get out of here with that BS. Levin’s book is to scholarly as Juggs magazine is to research.
liberal
@Corinne:
LOL! Right-wingers are for devolving powers to the states, except when they’re not.
Sly
Any piece of writing that uses the word “statist” at least once is not worth reading.
A commonly superficial reading of the Revolutionary Era. In actuality, the feud between the colonies and Parliament (not the King… Parliament) arose because the colonists wanted to control their own taxation and the British considered such methods ripe for corruption. Particularly since such a system would give the Crown, which owned several colonies, to have an independent revenue system that would allow him to raise an army without Parliamentary consent. The last British King who did that had his head removed.
The Framers’ central task was to create a governing document that worked better than the Articles of Confederation, which devolved significant powers to the states and created a Federal government that could only wage war and establish uniform weights and measures, and the Confederation couldn’t even do those things effectively.
Even the gloriously Anti-Federalist Jefferson hated the document. “It will be said there is no money in the treasury. There never will be money in the treasury till the confederacy shows its teeth. The states must see the rod.”
James Madison would probably gasp in awe at flying machines and negroes talking back to white people before he made any comment about the fucking water level in peoples’ toilets. Aside from that, he’d probably lament that fact that the protections he instituted against interstate divisiveness didn’t stop the Civil War, but he’d absolutely love the factionalism that has intensified since his time.
Some Framers had a love affair with monarchism, while others didn’t want any central government structure at all. To treat a group of men with such ideological diversity as being of one mind on any momentous subject is a virtue of the ignorant.
Scottofny
@EnderWiggin:
P.T. Barnum was highly intelligent and probably well educated.
Also, the Sullivan wanna be is just tedious in chasing his tail. Sets up his own straw persons, is enamored by his own verbiage and offers little of value per column inch. He could have said it all in a third of the space. The sooner Sullivan comes back to exercise some adult supervision, the sooner I’ll have a somewhat reasoned source of conservative ideas….
His choice of stand ins makes visiting the Dish less of a requirement every day.
Lastly, someone already made the point but it needs to be said again…
Corporations are not inanimate entities. There are humans with all their inherent failings at the helm. So one can expect corporations to practice all the deadly sins; just on a much grander scale.
Cheers,
S
BTW, Pitt coulda stayed home and still won the game tonight.
Scottofny
@John Cole:
Hmmm,
Depends on what your researchin’.
Scottofny
@Elia:
Please add my name to your e-mail.
I share your sentiments.
Cheers,
S
Nellcote
>The framers and today’s conservatives are ideologically aligned.
Pro slavery and anti women’s sufferage?
A. Hamilton
“Montescue (sp?),” said the defender of the intellectual giant, Mark Levin.