Why I hate libertarians

How 'Dallas' Won the Cold War

Yeah. Pulp television won the Cold War. All that diplomacy, military action, and economic pressure was just so unnecessary.

I’m glad that the real history is finally being written. It is about time that David Hasselhoff received credit for his triumphal return to Poland that signaled the death of the Communist Dream. Who can forget Fonzi rallying the workers at Gdansk as they demanded extra break-time so they could watch Charlie’s Angels?

I understand that the latest scholarly histories of the post-war period have dropped the Marshall Plan from their pages. Seems that they need more space to discuss the manifest contributions of Aaron Spelling to world peace and freedom.

Obama and me and the Democrats JALE problem

So, to Barak Obama, i'm just another stupid cracker. I'm one of those people who live in small-town Pennsylvania (actually outside a small town) and cling to my religion and my Second Amendment rights. I'm too stupid to see that Barry O wants to help me or maybe i'm just bitter and hung up on prejudice.

This is becoming a recurrent problem for Democrats. They keep trotting out new, exciting, candidates who are different, better than the losers they've backed before. And then, BAM. The New Next New Big Thing turns out to be Just Another Liberal Elitist.

Dukakis, Gore, Kerry. Now, Barak Obama. It's the JALE syndrome.

A couple of things i've posted in the past might help BHO get past his ego-stroking blindness. (Hint: We small towners know you and your party better than you know us.)

Truly asymmetrical information



Crimsonism

This made me see red

Ask JPMorgan's Dimon: Not Everyone Follows the Leader

So the people at Bear Stearns-- shareholders and employees alike-- want to fight against the takeover by JP Morgan. A bunch of lawyers stand ready to help them.

There is something wrong with this picture. How is it that a company can trigger a financial crisis through its folly, get saved by outsiders, and then, threaten to sue those who saved them (and us innocent bystanders)?

This is a recipe for disaster.

The way we live now

Yep, some kids today are reading Lord of the Flies as an instruction manual.

Girls Record Brutal Attack On Teen To Allegedly Post On YouTube

{HT and LotF reference from Scott Chaffin)

I'd like to see a tough old judge bring a video camera to court when he sentences a You-tube criminal. Have his bailiff film the perp's face when he (or she) hears that jail time is in the offing. Follow Mr. (or Ms) tough guy through his processing as his ass gets hauled off for a decent time in juvie. Catch every tear and whimper.

Then post the result on You-tube. Let others profit from the example.

Wow, some sort of trans-dimensional vortex has scrambled time


Pat Buchanan decides to attack this Richard Cohen op-ed column and party like its 1938 .

Buchanan wants us to believe that a war must be perfect in order to be labeled "good." This is a juvenile attitude that strikes me as deeply unconservative. Central to conservatism is its appreciation of limits, a recognition of life's tragic dimensions. A conservative statecraft recognizes that sometimes the only choices are between bad and less bad. It also understands the limits of power.

PJB's screed ignores all of this. He blames FDR and Churchill for events they had no power to prevent. WWII did not create Stalin. The allies did not order the Red Army to rape its way across Eastern Europe. It is absurd to suggest that the carnage east of the Elbe was avoidable if the West had sat on the sidelines and watched the Wermacht win in Russia.

Similarly, the war paved the way for Mao in China. That, however, was not Roosevelt's aim. Tojo who invaded China and crippled the Chiang government. The United States can hardly be blamed for Tokyo's expansionist fantasies or the consequences of their belligerence.

The bottom line is that the world faced three vicious, aggressive totalitarian regimes in 1938. FDR and Churchill eliminated two of them and partially contained the third. While that is not the best of all outcomes, it is close the best realistic result. Buchanan is keen to tote up the negatives, but he never tells us what course of action could have achieved more.

The metrocon philosophy in a nutshell

Brought to you courtesy of the Weekly Standard

"Be right, live left."

The whole post is a rather hateful attack on several conservative women bloggers.

Should i be concerned about Rev. Jeremiah Wright?

Fox News thinks i should be. HRC and her crew hope i will be. But somehow i just can't work up the energy to be indignant.

Part of it is the hypocrisy. Fox-niks like Bill O'Reilly and the insufferable Sean Hannity decry the "divisiveness" of Wright's sermons (or at least those snippets of the sermons they play over and over again.) Yet Fox routinely plays at racial polarization to build ratings. They seek out the most extreme voices because that makes for the kind of arguments their hosts love.

Same thing with the Clinton camp. Like most White democrats, they never worried about what was said in black churches when those churches were turning out their parishioners to vote for Bill, Hil, or their allies. It's a completely different story now that HRC is on the receiving end. For me, what was sauce for Dole makes good sauce for a Clinton.

So, i think i'll just sit this one out.

The Spitzer comeback begins

ELIOT’S SEXUAL HEALING

Former Gov. Eliot Spitzer has gone into therapy in the wake of the hooker scandal that swept him out of office, a Spitzer insider told The Post yesterday.

As part of the therapy, Spitzer will explore whether he has an addiction to sex, the source said.

How many months until he shows up on Oprah?

Today's must read

Snark does not equal wisdom

One of my criticisms of modern America is that we don't understand that sarcasm, wittiness or plain snarkiness don't equal wisdom or profundity. We mistake cleverness for thoughtfulness. This is nowhere more evident than in our political life, where politicians live and die, politically speaking, by the sound bite. Sound bites used to be up to 30 seconds, but nowadays they've shrunk to one or two sentences. Consultants get paid riches to come up with the right one-liner.

RTWT

Related:

Humor is over-rated

Sarcasm is corrosive

Its very purpose "is to dethrone the serious"

Warren Commission Redux

Bombshell!

Commission Confidential

In a revelation bound to cast a pall over the 9/11 Commission, Philip Shenon will report in a forthcoming book that the panel’s executive director, Philip Zelikow, engaged in “surreptitious” communications with presidential adviser Karl Rove and other Bush administration officials during the commission’s 20-month investigation into the 9/11 attacks.

Shenon, who led The New York Times’ coverage of the 9/11 panel, reveals the Zelikow-Rove connection in a new book entitled The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation, to be published next month by Twelve Books. The Commission is under an embargo until its February 5 publication, but Washington DeCoded managed to purchase a copy of the abridged audio version from a New York bookstore.

In what’s termed an “investigation of the investigation,” Shenon purports to tell the story of the commission from start to finish. The book’s critical revelations, however, revolve almost entirely around the figure of Philip Zelikow, a University of Virginia professor and director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs prior to his service as the commission’s executive director. Shenon delivers a blistering account of Zelikow’s role and leadership, and an implicit criticism of the commissioners for appointing Zelikow in the first place—and then allowing him to stay on after his myriad conflicts-of-interest were revealed under oath.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. How did Karl Rove ever get the genius tag anyway?

Portait of the artist as a cowardly clown

Grayson Perry serves as the ideal poster boy — or perhaps poster girl — for this discomfiting trend. A Turner Prize recipient and England’s most famous cross-dressing potter, Perry has been heralded for his controversial explorations of religious imagery, which include a vase entitled “Transvestite Brides of Christ” and a portrayal of the Virgin Mary that is best left to the imagination. Yet apparently there are some boundaries that even groundbreaking artists dare not cross.

“I’ve censored myself,” Perry told the Times, admitting that he treads lightly around radical Islam. “With other targets you’ve got a better idea of who they are but Islamism is very amorphous. You don’t know what the threshold is. Even what seems an innocuous image might trigger off a really violent reaction so I just play safe all the time.” Self-censorship thus boils down to self-preservation. “The reason I haven’t gone all out attacking Islamism in my art is because I feel real fear that someone will slit my throat.”

RTWT

Beldar is talking sense

and taking no prisoners.

The fat lady has barely begun her warm-ups

Most of the mainstream media, and large chunks of the blogosphere, are behaving like children — more specifically, like children who have not yet completed third-grade arithmetic.

Network anchors, national columnists, and prominent bloggers (left and right) have pronounced both the Fred Thompson and Rudy Giuliani campaigns either dead outright or else on life-support (with Do Not Resuscitate toe-tags).

But only three of fifty states have determined their delegates — three very small states, at least two of which (the ones everyone has paid attention to) are arguably pretty unrepresentative of the Republican Party nationally.

The Huckabee beat down

I don't know what to make of the Wayne Dumond story. Maybe it is Willie Horton redux. Or, perhaps, it is a Duke lacrosse case with a tragic ending.

A couple of stories are important background because they show how the case looked when Huckabee had to deal with it.

The Castration of Wayne DuMond

Talk Left on Wayne Dumond

One thing is for certain. Right-wing pundits are as hypocritical as their left-wing brethren. In the case of "Scooter" Libby and (late) in the Duke lacrosse hoax, right-wing opinion-mongers professed a deep concern about due process, the presumption of innocence, and the danger of out-of-control prosecutors. All of that has been tossed aside in the attacks on Huckabee.

This is how the new media revolution ends

Not with a bang but a simper

It’s come to this: Mary Katharine Ham talks MILFs on O’Reilly

MKH plays earnest straight man to O'Reilly's sleazy, sniggering, tabloid major domo.

Here's one for "The Law is an Ass" files

Mom who killed son may still get alimony

Court rules dad's payments could resume when his ex-wife is released from prison

A father whose ex-wife killed their son in a drunken rage does not have to pay alimony while she is in prison, but may have to resume payments when she gets out, a state appeals court ruled yesterday.

A three-judge Appellate Division panel found there is nothing in the law that would automatically stop alimony payments to a former spouse who killed a child.

Tough question

Is Libertarianism "applied autism" or something even worse? After this, i'm leaning toward something worse.

Nearly speechless

Anyone who doubts that "Libertarianism is applied autism" should check out the the comments over at Volokh.

National review: The continued decline of a once great magazine

A few days ago I noted that National Review had been far more supportive of GWB than they had been of other GOP presidents. That puzzling trend continues with this piece:

“Conservatives Left Behind”

K-Lo summarizes the main reasons why the Right has lost patience with Bush. Nonetheless, she still is not willing to make a clean break of it. Her “logic” is interesting even if it is not compelling.

She speaks of “Bush Estrangement Syndrome” as though not supporting politicians who don’t support your causes is a form of mental illness. Yet her defense of Bush sounds like nothing so much as the rationalizations of an abused and neglected spouse:

Pre-January 2009, can this marriage be saved? You know, as his luck would have it, staying together is worth it for the kids. And every once in a while say, if there’s a Supreme Court opening this summer, as has been rumored, and he nominates a judge like Alito or Roberts President George W. Bush may just remind us why we fell for him in the first place. It might not be the best marriage, but we share a love a love of country, a love of democracy, a love of the Constitution. Yeah, he created a dubious Cabinet department. But we also haven’t been attacked for six years under his presidency. He’s not perfect, and he may not always know how to express himself, and he may not always know how to appreciate his friends, but he’s our guy, with enough of the right instincts to make us never truly regret the choice. And history may rightly gloss over the mistakes his frustrated friends saved him from in the end, there’s some leadership there. And that makes all the difference.

We’re talking about a president here, a politician, and National Review starts channeling Ladies Home Journal.

Lopez does not address the fundamental issue of a war leader who will not lead us to victory. A war president who, scandalously, pursues an arrogant, wrong-headed, and misbegotten domestic agenda while American troops die in a quagmire of his own making. Peggy Noonan touched on something important when she described the motivation behind the immigration bill.

They are trying to lay down markers for history. Having lost the support of most of the country, they are looking to another horizon. The story they would like written in the future is this: Faced with the gathering forces of ethnocentric darkness, a hardy and heroic crew stood firm and held high a candle in the wind. It will make a good chapter. Would that it were true!

This is low, cynical politics. Having FUBARed Iraq, and with no solution to offer, this White House decides to do a little legacy-polishing. I do not remember Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton stooping this low. Yet, Lopez still thinks of him are “her guy”. Somehow, I don’t think it is the estranged conservatives who are pathological; it is the girls and boys at NR who need a shrink.

He may be right

Scott Chaffin thinks that the flying TB patient sums up Everything Wrong With America Today, All in One Story

For me, i am amazed at how quickly this story went from serious (deadly serious) to Oprah-fied.

Pet peeve

I'm sick of "politically incorrect" being used as cover for loutishness. I'm tired seeing of any and all objections to crude humor dismissed as creeping PC.

Tossing around the c-word, b-word, or n-word does not transform a wimp into a brave warrior for freedom. It just shows that some parts of his psyche never left the eighth grade. This is nothing to be proud of.

The faux machismo of the AutoAdmit guys is funny in a pathetic, sad way. When the controversy first surfaced, they told the women who complained to toughen up and deal with it. Now that one of them got bit in the backside, they whine. I'm reminded of that tough prison guard in The Shawshank Redemption -- the one who "cried like a little baby" when the police arrested him.