If you have the time, this long piece by Jeffrey Toobin on Clarence Thomas is well worth a read.
Open Thread: Strange Monday
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Well, it’s a bit more IRL than the last thread… Just seemed appropriate for a Monday morning. Hat tip, commentor Kane.
Another Open Thread – Hot Japanese Girls!
I can’t stop watching. It’s like eating marshmallow while bathing in fairy floss inside a sugar house that David Lynch built inside John Waters brain.
h/t Paul Ryan’s Dirty Sockpuppet
ETA: With script by William Gibson. Does anyone know if this girl is even real?
EATA: I offer this for our electronica minded bretheren, to counteract the sugar.
EOATA: Crikey.
h/t Comrade Mary
Another Open Thread – Hot Japanese Girls!Post + Comments (79)
Open thread
Dibs on Murzuq!
Do we have any idea who will run Libya and how they plan to run it? Just asking.
Chat about whatever.
Send in the Clowns
It’s the end game in Tripoli.
From the Guardian’s live feed on events there:
10.45pm: Libyan rebels are now within two miles of the centre of Tripoli, AP reports…
…and this:
11.04pm: Al Jazeera is reporting that two of Gaddafi’s sons, Saif al-Islam and Al-Saadi, have been arrested and another son, Muhammad, has surrendered.
And so on. All, as commenter Jenny points out in the last thread, without a single US casualty.
Which means that there are some folks who have some ‘splainin’ to do. Republican folks. Would-be presidents. E.g:
Romney (to Hugh Hewitt, March 21, 2011):
America has been feared sometimes, has been respected, but today, that America is seen as being weak.
We’re following the French into Libya.
I appreciate the fact that others are participating in this effort, but I think we look to America to be the leader of the world. You know, the cause of liberty can endure the mistakes that are inevitable consequences of human fallibility. But liberty’s standard can’t prevail if it’s not proudly, decisively and consistently held aloft.
Bachmann, March 30, 2011:
The Minnesota Republican, who’s weighing a run for president in 2012, said had she been in the Oval Office and faced with the choice of intervening militarily in Libya, “I would not have gone in.”
Bachmann, April 16, 2011 (warning: Politico link):
Michele Bachmann laced into President Barack Obama at a South Carolina tea party rally Saturday, saying his decision to take military action in Libya was “foolish” and that he’s “not on our side anymore.”
Pawlenty, March 29, 2011:
President Obama’s “timid” response to the crisis in Libya made it more difficult to remove Moammar Kadafi from power, former Minnesota Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty charged Tuesday.
Pawlenty, who became the first top-flight Republican to form a presidential exploratory committee last week, said that he supported the U.S. airstrikes against the Libyan dictator, but would have acted sooner when rebel forces had “substantial momentum.”
“Now we’re in this position of having the president of the United States saying Kadafi must go, but we’re not going to necessarily make him go. And that’s untenable,” he said.
(I know that he’s out now — but Pawlenty was still a semi-seriously-taken candidate at the time.)
Rick Santorum (I know, I know…but just for giggles) winning the flip-flop award on March 20, 2011 (warning, another Politico link):
Flip: Santorum led the way among GOP presidential hopefuls in calling for airstrikes on Libya. He invoked Ronald Reagan’s 1986 bombing campaign against military targets in Libya, ordered as retaliation for an attack on a West Berlin nightclub that killed two American servicemen masterminded by the Libyan secret service.
“If you want to be Reaganesque, it seems the path is pretty clear,” he told an Iowa radio station earlier this month.
Flop: But in a Sunday phone interview from his backyard in Pennsylvania, Santorum said that action made more sense 12 days ago because it looked like “a little nudge and a push” from the United States could tip the scale for the rebels. He’s upset that the U.S. has not been insistent on regime change and faulted the administration for making the comment that it was time for Qadhafi to give up power without continuing to insist on that over the weekend….
The former senator speculated that Obama might have only agreed to go along with the military option under pressure from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
“He’s not decisive,” Santorum said of Obama. “He’s being the military for the [United Nations]. The French were the first ones out there. He’s following the lead.”
Backflip: He expressed fear that rebels inside Libya may not be friendly to the United States.
“Maybe folks have better intel, but I’m not confident I know what the makeup of the rebels are,” he said. “From everything I’ve seen reported, we don’t know that.”
Ooops: And he raised the specter that Qadhafi could survive because of Obama’s early indecisiveness, which would mean potential retaliation against the U.S.
“Under any score, I don’t know how you could play this worse than this president has,” he said…
Except, just to reprise the thought with which we began:
TRIPOLI, Libya — Rebels surged into the Libyan capital Sunday night, meeting little resistance from troops loyal to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi and setting off raucous street celebrations by residents hailing the end of his 42 years in power.
And so on. All, as commenter Jenny points out in the last thread, without a single US casualty.
You can, and many have and will, argue hard about the merits of US action in Libya, or inaction in Syria.* But if you are a Republican — or an actually sane American, for that matter — who believes in both a robust and effective foreign policy, there is not a single clown seeking your vote on the GOP side who would seem to merit your trust.
That community organizer in the White House, though? Unlike the all-hat-no-cattle types we are increasingly seeing over there, he may take his time, but he does seem to get his man.
Should make for interesting cognitive dissonance over on the dark side. Recall that Qaddafi outlasted Reagan and both Bushes. Then consider that the chief alternative to crediting Obama’s administration for the crucial support that has enabled the Libyans to come to the point of ending that miserable reign is to praise — wait for it — the French…
…and you have what some might call a jalapeño suppository up your philosophical fundament.
Wouldn’t you say?
*That said, I’m betting Assad is getting a little nervous, just now. Obama has finally called for his exit, and, as has been demonstrated again, this President may grind slowly, but he seems to do so with a certain…how to say it?…emphasis.
Image: Ernst Ludwig Kirshner, Two acrobats – sculpture, 1932-33.
What I learned on my summer vacation — thanks to an 11 YO boy…
…obsessed with Top Gear:
This factoid, for one thing, retailed somewhere on the long journey north and east of Mt. Diablo into the uninhabited quadrant of California:
“Daddy: did you know that the Zonda R has got a V-12 engine and weighs less than a Ford Fiesta?”
“Why no, son. I did not.”
But, good father that I hope to be, come the return to sporadic internet service, I did a little research and came up with something to show my son. Sadly, though, it may be the most perfect expression of the pron aesthetic I’ve ever seen, all desire, all objects, and that driving, relentless beat:
<div align=”center”><iframe width=”560″ height=”349″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/JYOundkNxGE” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe></div>
And yes, I know that gazillion dollar non-or-barely-street-legal-cars are mere distractions from the chaos of our times — but as a bonus, check out the single craziest bit of flying I can recall seeing.* The pilot here seems to be someone for whom juggling six knives while balancing a cyanide tablet on clenched teeth does not sufficiently engage:
<div align=”center”><iframe width=”560″ height=”345″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/Fcfi-ji8S7I” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe></div>
How about that dipsy-doo over the runway? Pray to FSM that this flyer never chooses a second career in an Alitalia cockpit. I don’t want to be approaching Rome when the boredom gets to him…
More serious (aka depressing) blogging to come. But for now, consider this a wretched excess open thread.
*And I saw the head test pilot for British Aerospace show off the Harrier at the Farnborough Airshow right after the Falklands War. He could make that little plane do all kinds of tricks — but this Italian guy so far out-crazies him that it just ain’t funny. (For an example of just how weird the Harrier could be, check out this clip from a later Farnborough display.)
What I learned on my summer vacation — thanks to an 11 YO boy…Post + Comments (44)
The Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations
We can’t expect ill-educated, poorly-parented teahadists in their insular gated communities to achieve their full human potential as long as well-paid professional propagandists are willing to make excuses for their bad behavior. Isaac Chotiner at TNR calls out one such apologist:
Reihan Salam, in a column today:
One thing that is undeniably true is that American conservatives are overwhelmingly white in a country that is increasingly less so. As the number of Latinos and Asian-Americans has increased in coastal states like California, New York and New Jersey, many white Americans from these regions have moved inland or to the South. For at least some whites, particularly those over the age of 50, there is a sense that the country they grew up in is fading away, and that Americans with ancestors from Mexico or, as in my case, Bangladesh don’t share their religious, cultural and economic values. These white voters are looking for champions, for people who are unafraid to fight for the America they remember and love. It’s unfair to call this sentiment racist. But it does help explain at least some of our political divide. [Emphasis Mine]
… My question for Salam is this: how racially insensitive does one have to be to prefer an America with segregation because he or she saw other advantages to 1950s society? What possibly could outweigh the disgusting racial status quo of the 1950s (I am leaving out the status of women and gays)? To wish for a return to that America, I would argue, one has to be so racially insensitive that bigoted seems like an apt descriptor. The alternative answer, of course, is complete solipsism.
Well spoken, Mr. Chotiner. And that reminded me that I had yet not gotten around to linking to New York Magazines’s feature article on “God in the Basement of the Empire State Building“:
Each spring, the King’s College, a Christian school occupying two floors in the Empire State Building, hosts a series of lectures and debates on a single theme. This year’s theme is villainy. In a windowless basement room, Dinesh D’Souza, the college’s newly installed president, is delivering his remarks to a student camera crew, two potential donors, and about 30 undergraduates. In keeping with the college’s dress code, the students wear business suits.
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“I want to talk a little bit about what I call the unique villainy of Barack Obama,” D’Souza, 50, says with a grin. “In my view, it’s the villainy of nondisclosure.” Obama campaigned as a standard liberal, D’Souza says, but actually is a vehement anti-colonialist. “For Obama, the radical Muslims are on the right side of history—that’s why he is so unnaturally solicitous toward them.”…
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An austere young man asks, “Doesn’t the villainy of deception sort of pale in comparison to Obama’s moral villainies, such as supporting the abortion agenda or even the redistribution of wealth, stealing from the rich to give to the poor?”
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“In a sense, yes,” D’Souza concedes, and later says, “Frankly, I don’t think Obama cares that much about the poor. What he cares about is bringing down the people at the top … In my opinion, Obama’s animating energies are negative.” By now the two potential donors have left the room looking ashen. Chris Ross, an employee of the college who is “facilitating” my visit by never leaving my side, winces slightly every time I write something down. As he escorts me out of the building, he says, “Remember that President D’Souza speaks for himself, not for the school.” …