Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
There have been rumblings about Dubya’s lack of conservative bona fides, but Byron York has made it official:
How long til they start describing Bush as “liberal”?
Better yet, how long til Fox starts putting a “D” under his name when they show his picture?
It’s official — Bush wasn’t a conservative!Post + Comments (96)
Brian Doherty of Reason has a fairly reasonable reply to Jon Chait’s review of Ayn Rand biographies:
Chait might be aware that he isn’t really jousting with Rand per se with all this material–he’s explicitly arguing with the likes of Stuart Varney, Greg Mankiw, unnamed stereotypical arrogant “rich people,” and Irving Kristol. But by spending so much of an essay ostensibly about Rand on these points, he’s misleading his readers about what Rand thought and why.
As much I hate to admit it, this is not such a bad point. Whatever one thinks of Rand — and I don’t think much of her work — it probably isn’t fair to condemn her on the basis of today’s glibertarian foolishness. I never like it when people link Nietzsche with Nazism, and that’s not so different.
I never thought I’d read this in a libertarian magazine, though:
All that has little to do with what Rand had to say and why she said it. She believed that it was morally wrong to take from people their just property at the point of a gun. “Gentlemen, leave your guns outside!” was one of her summations of her political philosophy…
I just hope she wasn’t talking about town halls!
Update. On further reflection, I agree that Doherty is not all that accurate in his assessment of Chait’s piece. I also agree that Rand’s actual philosophy is even more terrifying than what today’s glibertarians spout. Nevertheless, I don’t think we should blame Ayn Rand for Glenn Reynolds and Nick Gillespie.
Politifact is on the job:
In the competitive world of Washington protests, crowd size is often a matter of dispute. Organizers usually boast of huge crowds, while police and the news media offer much smaller estimates.
So supporters of Saturday’s “tea party” protests against President Barack Obama were quick to highlight their big turnout. To bolster countless claims on blogs and Facebook, many posted a photograph that showed a gargantuan crowd sprawling from Capitol Hill down the National Mall to the Washington Monument.
But it turns out the photo is more than 10 years old, apparently taken during a 1997 Promise Keepers rally.
On Saturday, estimates about the crowd spread quickly through the conservative blogosphere. Many writers, including author Michelle Malkin, pegged the number of people between 1 million and 2 million. Those reports were largely based on information from people in the crowd.
***Pete Piringer, public affairs officer for the D.C. Fire and Emergency Department, said the local government no longer provides official crowd estimates because they can become politicized. But the day of the rally, Piringer unofficially told one reporter that he thought between 60,000 and 75,000 people had shown up.
I’m sure this will be filed away in wingnut lore forever, along with the WMD in Iraq, that Terri Schiavo said “I want to live,” and that Obama is actually Kenyan.
Leafing through a review of a biography of Ayn Rand, I came across this:
She wrote of one of the protagonists of her stories that “he does not understand, because he has no organ for understanding, the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people”; and she meant this as praise.
It reminded me of something JK quoted in the comments:
“Those who have known him [Cheney] over the years remain astounded by what they describe as his almost autistic indifference to the thoughts and feelings of others. ‘He has the least interest in human beings of anyone I have ever met,’ says John Perry Barlow, his former supporter. Cheney’s freshman-year roommate, Steve Billings, agrees: ‘If I could ask Dick one question, I’d ask him how he could be so unempathetic.’”
It makes me wonder if this is part of why the word “empathy” was such a red flag for wingnuts during the Sotomayor confirmation. It also makes me wonder if “RULE OF LAW!” is less about respect for the law than about lack of sympathy. Likewise, with torture: it doesn’t matter if it yields results or not, what matters is that it shows a commendably conservative lack of empathy and compassion for other human beings.
Is that, in the end, what defines modern conservativism? An almost autistic sociopathic indifference to the thoughts and feelings of others?
I’m being serious here and I’d be curious to know if conservatives would object to this characterization. I’ll bet that many wouldn’t, if this were described more charitably.
Go Bills!
*** Update ***
I’ll just go ahead and get this out of the way, since the Poorman and the Bradrocket will be insufferable anyway:
Also, rumors of Tunch’s demise are overstated:
The oddest thing about the debate over the “public option” is not that the centrists and the moderates immediately seized on it to attack the dirty hippies to earn some street cred with the beltway media, but that every time the public is polled, they support it by a good margin. Same too, for doctors:
A RWJF survey summarized in the September 14, 2009 edition of the New England Journal of Medicine shows that 62.9 percent of physicians nationwide support proposals to expand health care coverage that include both public and private insurance options—where people under the age of 65 would have the choice of enrolling in a new public health insurance plan (like Medicare) or in private plans. The survey shows that just 27.3 percent of physicians support a new program that does not include a public option and instead provides subsidies for low-income people to purchase private insurance. Only 9.6 percent of doctors nationwide support a system where a Medicare-like public program is created in lieu of any private insurance. A majority of physicians (58%) also support expanding Medicare eligibility to those between the ages of 55 and 64.
In every region of the country, a majority of physicians supported a combination of public and private options, as did physicians who identified themselves as primary care providers, surgeons, or other medical subspecialists. Among those who identified themselves as members of the American Medical Association, 62.2 percent favored both the public and private options.
It even has support among the AMA members, and the AMA isn’t so much about medicine as it is about making sure doctors fees never go down. You’d think the media would notice this, but they are probably too busy interviewing Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey to tell us how real Americans think.
Full report here (.pdf). And it is duly noted that statistics have a left wing bias. Also, too.
*** Update ***
More here.
Science to English: pot smokers are slightly worse at detecting when they made a mistake. Ah, college.