Right Wing Nut House

Via Little Green Footballs, we discover perhaps the greatest idea the far left has ever had in their rather checkered history:

Why Can’t America Have Human Rights?

Thursday, September 14th, 2006, 6:30 pm

The Nave at The Riverside Church, 490 Riverside Drive, New York

www.breakthrough.tv

An evening of performance and talks on Human Rights in the United States, including the death penalty, detentions and deportations, poverty, and violence and discrimination on the basis of sex, race, religion, and sexuality. The Forum will work to strengthen our connections and raise our voices to build an America that supports human rights instead of violating them.

They read my mind.

I too, have always wanted human rights in America. I too, wish we could dispense with all this constitutional nonsense which states that government’s derive their power from the consent of the governed. After all, that idiocy is more than 200 years old - time for a change. It would be so much easier if the government was able to tell us which rights it was willing to grant and which ones, well, we had no business worrying about.

That’s the practical effect of what this grouping of unbalanced, emotionally unstable, ignorant, and dangerous people are advocating. Because in order to achieve their nirvana of a “human rights” paradise, a radical altering of the relationship between the people and their government would have to take place.

Want to get rid of discrimination? It’s already illegal, of course. There are remedies in place to address the grievances of individuals who feel they have been denied opportunity based on their race, sex, or religion. (Many states also have remedies for those who feel discriminated against based on their sexual orientation). What these mountebanks are talking about is reaching down into the very heart of the personal and making it political. They wish to legislate the way that citizens think. In their version of the United States, even if you are unaware that you are discriminating against someone in a protected group, you would be held liable anyway. This is because what matters is the result of your hiring practices (or lending practices or any other decision made by private citizens affecting the protected classes). Intent is thrown out the window. If you don’t have enough members of the protected groups in your workforce, your hiring practices are discriminatory period.

This nonsense has been advanced by the gaggle of goosebrains who will be gathering later this month to lecture, to harangue, and to pontificate about what a human rights nightmare the United States of America has become.

Never mind that the death penalty is supported by a majority of the American people and that it is regularly reviewed by the courts. Will we someday get rid of the death penalty? Probably. But it won’t be because a bunch of blowhard moralists try and shame us into following their lead?

How about getting rid of poverty? First, it is an interesting construct that living in poverty is a violation of someone’s “human rights.” Ostensibly, the radicals believe that discrimination and racism by the government is the cause of poverty. The fact that these lickspittles don’t bat an eyelash when you point out that 48% of people who live in poverty are white makes their critique ring a little hollow. Why slow them down when they’re on an ant-American roll?

This discrimination and racism manifests itself in the inferior education offered to those in poverty stricken areas. No one seems to care that most of these school districts are in cities run by people of color and where school districts are managed (or mismanaged) by same. And you better keep your mouth shut about tax policies formulated by the racists who discriminate against people of their own race that drive businesses and hence jobs away from the cities. Practical economics tend to give the moonbats a headache.

Making America a human rights paradise will also apparently include doing away with jailing people for their crimes and amending our immigration laws to end the deportation of anyone not here legally. The latter would mean that we would do away with immigration laws entirely which would be a boon to the poverty bureaucrats in that no one seems to care about a massive influx of instant citizens who would be either unemployed or unemployable. And since their human rights paradise would demand these people be taken care of until they can get on their feet (and beyond), one would hope that there would be enough rich people to soak so that the requisite amount of tax monies could be raised for the poverty industry to enrich themselves.

As for ending violence, (another invented “human right”), it would be interesting to see how the Bierkenstock sandal wearers would go about that massive undertaking. Censorship of violent programs on TV and the media? Perhaps making alcohol and drugs illegal? Maybe require the burning of incense and chanting 3 times a day in order to soothe the souls of us savage beasts?

Deny people access to drugs and alcohol and the violence problem in America is reduced substantially. As for the sociopaths, one supposes that the technological innovations of the future will include some kind of conditioning regimen a la A Clockwork Orange. While they’re at it, it would not surprise me if this group of proto-authoritarians would be in favor of using that conditioning to address other “human rights” problems we have here in America such as racism, sexism, and other personal demons that the government currently discourages but under the lefties tender loving care would be banished via brainwashing.

The bottom line of all this moralizing and America bashing is that the prescriptions that will be offered up by this rogues gallery of galoots will look a lot like efforts of every other utopian schemer - including Lenin - and that realize a top-down, authoritarian society to force people to adapt is the only way to achieve their goals.

I wonder who will be on top telling us what’s best for us to think, to believe? Better question: Who do you think that committed group of radicals thinks will be on top when the revolution is over?

They haven’t seen it, but they know they won’t like it.

The netnuts are going net nutty over the ABC mini-series Path to 9/11 because, as far as I can tell:

1. The screenwriter is some kind of conservative.

2. It assigns blame for 9/11 to Bill Clinton (how much depends on how loony the lefty is)

3. No one will return Jennifer Nix’s calls.

4. Rush Limbaugh likes it.

5. Did I mention that the screenwriter may be a conservative?

And for these deep and noble reasons, the left is climbing the walls with angst ridden soliloquies railing against the unfairness of it all. They have tried so hard to reinvent the Clinton years as some kind of golden age of anti-terrorism nirvana and that everything fell all to hell in the 8 months that George Bush bungled his way to 9/11 that anything which challenges that fantasy simply must be attacked and destroyed.

It is, as I’ve said before, a large part of The Narrative which the left uses to tell bedtime stories about the Bush Administration. Challenging The Narrative is challenging the carefully constructed fantasy/history created by liberals to undermine everything this President has done to try and protect the United States in a time of war. The Narrative has become so all-pervasive that even when it starts to fall apart as it has with the Armitage revelations in Plamegate, the resistance in abandoning any of it is as fierce as a mother bear protecting its cub.

Witness the absolute need to discredit how the President led this country in the days and weeks following 9/11. The left doesn’t want anyone to remember how the country rallied to the President immediately following the fall of the towers but rather that he was reading a silly children’s book as the attacks were underway.They don’t wish people to recall what was almost universally vouchsafed by observers as his strong leadership in the aftermath of the attack but rather the failures of his Administration leading up to them.

What is beginning to terrify the left about this 5 year anniversary of 9/11 is that all those old feelings will resurface among the American people and their dreams of taking over the House and Senate in November may be in danger. On that score, they have less to fear than they realize but perhaps their being out of power so long has dulled their political sensibility while heightening their paranoia.

On that score, Think Progress contributes the unbalanced attack of the day on Path to 9/11 despite not seeing the show and relying on a “review” by Salon’s Heather Havrilesky (actually a three paragraph summary) that sums up the “deceptively biased” project as “painting the president (Clinton) as a buffoon more interested in blow jobs than terrorists.” If this were true, I would join my brothers and sisters on the left in condemning the mini series in no uncertain terms.

Unfortunately for Think Progress, we have someone who has actually seen the film; Justin Levin writing at Patterico’s:

The ironic part is, the critics of this movie who haven’t seen it yet are going to have egg on their face. This film in no way “blames the entire event on Clinton” as some falsely claim. “The Path to 9/11″ absolutely slams Bush in a number of ways:

1. It depicts Condi Rice ignoring Richard Clarke’s advice about Al-Queda and undercutting his authority within the White House.

2. It depicts the August 6th “Presidential Daily Briefing” wherein Rice is explicitly warned before 9/11 that Bin Laden intends to hijack American airplanes.

3. It makes Richard Clarke look like a tragic hero (even though everyone knows that he later went on to become one of Bush’s biggest critics).

4. It contains an epilogue that cites 9/11 Commission members giving the current government a failing grade in implementing their recommendations.

Few people have seen the whole film. Even the select group in Washington only got to see the first half of the film (which obviously doesn’t deal with the Bush administration, based on how the timeline worked). As a result, there is a lot of misinformation going on about what “The Path To 9/11″ is really about.

Think Progress is used to having egg on its face as they were one of the leading lefty blogs who jumped on the Jason Leopold “Rove will be indicted” bandwagon. No matter. For them and other lefties, it isn’t so much that Clinton is going to be portrayed as a President that helped America sleepwalk through the decade with regards to the terrorist threat it’s that George Bush won’t be blamed enough for the events of 9/11.

The effort to whitewash Clinton’s failures during the 9/11 Commission’s public hearings had conservatives up in arms and for good reason; what we now know about that period in history makes it the height of hypocrisy to try and absolve Clinton of his curious lack of will in going after Bin Laden even after the first WTC bombing and the Africa embassy bombings. It had nothing to do with Monica, of course and any docu-drama that tries to bring that issue up except as a way to show how Clinton may have been distracted by the attacks by Republicans will lose any credibility among serious conservatives. But to not show how close we were to actually killing Osama during that time would do a disservice to history.

It would also be a travesty to leave out the story of FBI Director Louis Freeh and the Bureau’s number one counterterrorism agent John O’Neill whose exasperating turf battles with Freeh (the FBI Chief disliked O’Neill intensely) put numerous roadblock’s in the agent’s way in his hunt to unravel the plot he knew was taking shape. This was a battle that spanned both the Clinton and Bush presidencies and revealed Freeh to be a mountebank of tragic proportions.

And like the other movie that liberals loved to hate United 93, I assume we’ll get plenty of searing scenes of our government - the FAA, the military, and the executive branch - reaching out in first confusion, then frustration, and then finally in a befuddled paralysis as the planes hit their targets one after another.

Blaming Clinton for 9/11? In what universe? What the left objects to is that their favorite punching bag of a President is not coming in for all the blame, a laughable historical construct that only an idiotic liberal could fantasize about.

I would suggest that we all sit back and watch the mini-series and judge for ourselves. An objective observer may just find much to praise in a film that finally gives the lie to The Narrative in which 9/11 was purely the result of Bush incompetence (or for the more unbalanced, Bush perfidy) rather than the fault of America itself and our historical myopia regarding overseas threats.

In the end, how much does it matter in a real sense what portion of blame should be ladled out to each President? Three thousand Americans are dead and the people who did it as well as their numerous off shoots and subsidiaries, are still out there waiting to strike again.

Best that the left concentrate more on figuring out whether to engage the enemy in the War on Terror rather than some silly TV show that might tarnish their carefully constructed Narrative about Bush.

Two stories. One about a TV docudrama. One about the putative end to a scandal that was to have brought down (at various times), the President, the Vice President, Karl Rove, and the Republican party.

What they have in common is that both are part of the carefully constructed Narrative of the Bush Administration told in storybook fashion by the left these past 6 years. In fact, they are the keystones to that Narrative and as such, their transfiguration from established fact to political myth undermines the entire rationale for the left’s opposition to the War on Terror as well as several vital themes in The Narrative that Democrats were counting on to bring them victory in November.

First, the docudrama Path to 9/11. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with the 9/11 Commission Report knows of the Clinton Administration’s missed opportunities in the hunt for Bin Laden. And, although I haven’t seen it, I can guarantee FBI Director Louis Freeh and his stubborn refusal to fully support his number one counterterrorism agent Jack O’Neil (played by Harvey Keitel in the film) in his quest to get Osama will not come off well either. Evidently, Secretary of State Allbright and National Security Advisor Berger are also given unflattering treatment.

All of this destroys The Narrative, of course. How can you have Bush dropping the ball on terrorism that the Clinton Administration so ably managed during their years in the White House if those years are portrayed as a time of missed opportunities and unheeded warnings as well?

This part of The Narrative has always been problematic for the Clintonistas and they made a mighty effort during the 9/11 Commission public hearings as well as expertly managing the aftermath following the release of the report so that as little blame as possible accrued to them. It worked pretty well although the last polls taken on this issue that I could find were from 2004 and show the country convinced that both Administrations were equally at fault for the attack.

In truth, neither Administration served America well in the years leading up to and the day of the attack. The American nation was in a titanic state of self denial not only about al-Qaeda but also about the nature of the threat from Islamism. “Blame” is irrelevant when all of us were led to believe by both Clinton and Bush that America was safe and that there were no threats that could harm us. Sleepwalking through history like this is something we Americans have done many times. It wasn’t invented by Clinton. Clinton’s national security team may or may not have taken al-Qaeda more seriously than the Bush team. But neither recognized the existential threat that radical Islam posed to the nation and neither took the necessary steps either in homeland security or overseas intelligence gathering to mitigate the threat.

But for the left, the truth of the matter in blame for 9/11 endangers the “Bush Incompetence” part of The Narrative. People may not blame the President for 9/11 any more than they blame Clinton but when interwoven with other fact flakes, exaggerations, and outright lies, it buttresses their storyline by becoming one more example of the President’s critical lack of competence in managing the affairs of the nation.

The netnuts are pushing back against this threat to The Narrative by vowing to boycott the film. Meanwhile, the Clintonistas are playing a much different game. There is word that there is an effort by former officials to lobby The Disney Company to edit the film so that some of the scenes involving Clinton dithering on terrorism are excised:

I’m hearing all kinds of disturbing, though predictable, stories about a Clintonista offensive against “The Path to 9/11,” an ABC documentary written and produced by Cyrus Nowrasteh (”Into the West”), and directed by David Cunningham (”To End All Wars”). I haven’t seen it yet (although I hope to this weekend), but it is already drawing rave reviews from people who have (the piece is reviewed at FrontPage, here).

Apparently, the documentary recounts the bureaucratic bungling and lack of action against al Qaeda that was pervasive prior to the September 11 atrocities. It is by no means, I understand, pro-Bush. It is, instead, an effort to present history accurately. This evidently has many former Clinton officials and apologists in their default kill-the-messenger mode. Great pressure is being brought to bear on ABC and Disney to reopen the editorial process at this late stage (the documentary is supposed to air on September 10-11) so that the years 1993-2001 may remain forever airbrushed.

Lest anyone think the Bush Administration is treated with kid gloves, read this piece at Patterico’s by Justin Levin who has seen the film:

The ironic part is, the critics of this movie who haven’t seen it yet are going to have egg on their face. This film in no way ”blames the entire event on Clinton” as some falsely claim. “The Path to 9/11″ absolutely slams Bush in a number of ways:

1. It depicts Condi Rice ignoring Richard Clarke’s advice about Al-Queda and undercutting his authority within the White House.

2. It depicts the August 6th “Presidential Daily Briefing” wherein Rice is explicitly warned before 9/11 that Bin Laden intends to hijack American airplanes.

3. It makes Richard Clarke look like a tragic hero (even though everyone knows that he later went on to become one of Bush’s biggest critics).

4. It contains an epliogue that cites 9/11 Commission members giving the current government a failing grade in implimenting their recommendations.

There’s more, I’m sure. If it is at all accurate, it will portray the military, the FAA, and others as paralyzed by events.

And that’s all the right wants - accuracy. But apparently the Clintonistas have other things on their minds; namely, Hillary in ‘08 and how anything reflecting badly on the Clinton years will hurt her chances in the Presidential election.

A fascinating historical counterpoint to this effort by the Clinton mafia to airbursh history is the remarkable story that involved the great historian William Manchester and his searing account of those horrible days in November 1963 that saw the assassination of Kennedy and its aftermath. While Manchester claims that the Kennedy family did not have an absolute veto over what went into the final draft of Death of a President, his story (found in his expanded essay Controversy) about the back and forth between he and the Kennedy family about details in the book was both poignant and, at times disturbing.

Bobby Kennedy had yet to break with LBJ and was worried that the disdain portrayed in the book by RFK and his people toward Johnson would precipitate a split before he was ready. Bobby was running in 1968 and thought that the book made him look petty and vindictive. The enormous pressure exerted by the Kennedy family on Manchester to change much of the book’s treatment of the relationship between RFK and Johnson almost gave the author a nervous breakdown. In the end, most of it stayed.

This puts the Clintonista effort to lean on ABC to edit Path to 9/11 in a little different light. They are not so much concerned about Bill’s legacy as Hillary’s future. In this respect, it makes Sandy Berger’s trip to the National Archives for which he was convicted of destroying secret documents all the more interesting.

And it highlights the necessity for the left to try to keep the underpinnings of The Narrative intact by keeping the focus of failure squarely on the Bush Administration. If that block were ever removed from the edifice holding up the storyline of Bush incompetence, The Narrative itself is endangered.

And that brings us to the end of the Wilson-Plame Affair and how the left is scrambling today to salvage the fragments of that scandal and try and reweave The Narrative to cover the gaping hole left by the total and complete discrediting of liar Wilson.

The Washington Post administered the coup de grace:

Nevertheless, it now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame’s CIA career is Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming — falsely, as it turned out — that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials. He ought to have expected that both those officials and journalists such as Mr. Novak would ask why a retired ambassador would have been sent on such a mission and that the answer would point to his wife. He diverted responsibility from himself and his false charges by claiming that President Bush’s closest aides had engaged in an illegal conspiracy. It’s unfortunate that so many people took him seriously.

The loss of the Wilson portion of The Narrative is a much more devastating a blow. Upon the Wilson house of cards was built the entire “Bush lied, people died” meme as well as much of the rationale for the anti-war movement in the first place. It’s like the old nursery rhyme “For want of a nail, the war was lost.”

If Wilson lied, the uranium story is true.
If the uranium story is true, Bush didn’t lie.
If Bush didn’t lie, Saddam was a threat.
If Saddam was a threat, following 9/11, he should be dealt with.
If we were going to deal with Saddam, we had to invade.

In addition to the anti-war part of The Narrative, the Wilson imbroglio also contributed mightily to the “Bush is dictator” portion of The Narrative. The fact that Karl Rove and others in the Administration told tales about Valerie Plame is now placed in an entirely different light not to mention Fitzgerald’s investigation being undercut substantially. What was going to be “Fitzmas” with White House officials being frog marched to jail willy nilly is now seen for what it always was; a witchunt carried out by an out of control federal prosecutor, egged on by partisans who hoped to use what Fitzgerald uncovered in an impeachment move against the President (and perhaps the Vice President as well). This is still a possibility but its success has become problematic.

The initial “reweaving” of The Narrative comes from Wilson himself. Here is a portion of a letter he had published today at Democratic Underground (no link to DU, please):

I want to let you know how much Valerie and I continue to be buoyed by your support and your dedication to getting the truth out and holding the administration and its lackeys accountable for the terrible policies they have foisted on our country and on the world. We must keep fighting.

As you think about this, our website (Wilsonsupport.org) has a copy of the letter I sent to the SSCI when its report first came out, challenging some of its conclusions. The LeftCoaster has a terrific study by eriposte on the whole Niger forgery case from beginning to end. Firedoglake and the Next Hurrah both have highly informative analyses of the case by skilled researchers and former prosecutors. I recommend them all as resources to jog memories. by this afternoon, I expect that our own team will have an updated set of talking points to distribute for your use as well.

Each of you in one way or another has contributed to the public’s (and in many cases our own) understanding of the issues from the beginning. Thank you for continuing to do.

In short, they’re not giving up. It should be interesting over the next few days to see how the Plame story can continue without Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson as helpless victims.

What all of this amounts to is that the left has its work cut out for it. For nearly 5 years, The Narrative has proceeded relatively smoothly with the storytellers able to bat aside challenges to the fable rather easily. These are the first real cracks in the facade of lies, exaggerations, false allegations, witchunts, and sometime laughable sometimes serious attempts to undermine the credibility of the President of the United States during a time of war. It all adds up to politics trumping truth. And if these two events contribute in even a small way to undermining The Narrative, we may be at a turning point that could eventually reveal the perpetrators of this myth making as the cads and calumnious haters they truly are.

Several times since I began this blog, I have pointed out that the unbelievably vicious hate spewed by the left toward President Bush has automatically enabled every nut with a gun in America (and around the world) to believe that assassinating the President would make them a hero.

There is nothing new to this idea as a similar fear was expressed many times during the Clinton Administration. The vitriol directed towards Clinton by the far right made the Secret Service extremely nervous until the day he left office. Indeed, there were two bona fide and thankfully clumsy attempts to harm the President, neither of which placed the Commander in Chief in any danger but underscored the very real nature of the threat.

And the Warren Commission’s deliberations in trying to decide how much blame for the assassination should be given the city of Dallas and the venomous hate directed toward Kennedy in the weeks leading up to his visit on November 22, 1963 were instructive with regards to both Oswald and Ruby’s actions.

This is why our Secret Service takes an incredibly dim view of people who even joke about assassinating the President. Threats to our national leaders by foreign elements is one thing. But home grown nuts who feel justified in murdering the President because the constant exaggerated rhetoric about dictatorships, and Hitler, and making conspiracy theories a mainstream element of politics gives a potential assassin the false belief that there are a lot of people out there who want to see Bush dead.

Is it a “false belief?” I hope so. I really don’t want to believe that there are lefties out there who would wish to see the President killed. Even the Brits who made a movie about what happens in America after the assassination of Bush don’t advocate the killing of the President. The docudrama called Death of a President set to air this fall on British TV appears to be a harsh critique of of American domestic and foreign policy that is dramatized by showing what would happen in the aftermath of Bush’s killing:

Peter Dale, head of More4, which is due to air the film on October 9, said the drama was a “thought-provoking critique” of contemporary US society.

He said: “It’s an extraordinarily gripping and powerful piece of work, a drama constructed like a documentary that looks back at the assassination of George Bush as the starting point for a very gripping detective story.

“It’s a pointed political examination of what the War on Terror did to the American body politic.

“I’m sure that there will be people who will be upset by it but when you watch it you realise what a sophisticated piece of work it is.

“Sophisticated” indeed. And judging by the fact that the author of this piece put the War in Terror in quotation marks earlier in the article - as if there is no such thing except in the fevered imagination of those silly Americans - one can guess what that “examination” of our body politic will find.

I don’t necessarily mind the idea behind the film. It may have been a better idea to wait until Bush was out of office and then doing the film as an alt/history piece rather than a futuristic sci-fi extravaganza. But if the idiot wants to embarrass himself by making such a film (most British filmakers end up embarrassing themselves when trying to make a film about America), let him have at us and be done with it. And although there would be protests aplenty, my curiosity would get the better of me and if the film were released for TV here, I would probably watch it.

But even the British director isn’t saying that killing Bush would be a good thing. No one that I know of has even hinted at something like that nor would they dare make light of such a situation and nobody ever would, would they?

Would they?

The work may or may not be good drama and may or may not make some excellent points about American political culture. I’m just saying I don’t want Bush to be assassinated. Really, truly. Here are the top ten reasons why:

10. Regular television programming would be pre-empted for days, except maybe for the Super Bowl.

9. News coverage of the assassination and state funeral would shine the rosiest light possible on the President’s memory, causing some viewers to think maybe he wasn’t so bad, after all. (In fact, this might be the only way Bush could get his approval numbers over 50 percent again.)

8. Darryl Worley would record a song about it.

7. For the next several months you wouldn’t be able to pass a supermarket tabloid rack without seeing pictures of Bush and Jesus — together forever.

6. You’d have to listen to your wingnut father-in-law rant about it all through Thanksgiving dinner.

5. The Right collectively would become even more paranoid than it is already.

4. For the rest of your life, you’d have to listen to people referring to Bush as a “martyred president.”

3. The assassination would fuel a whole new generation of conspiracy theorists.

2. Bush wouldn’t live long enough to see what historians will write about his presidency.

1. Dick Cheney.

Ms. Maha of Mahablog evidently is in desperate need of attention. Next time, may I suggest you wet your pants? Judging by the infantile attempts at humor above, I daresay you would find the fawning over by adults who wish to change your diaper more in keeping with both your intellectual prowess and emotional maturity.

That said, I am at a loss for words (so of course I’ll continue anyway).

To say that the above is in poor taste is a given. I don’t care where you are on the political spectrum, if you don’t condemn this unbelievable affront to human decency then you should be ashamed of yourself. Maha can say that she doesn’t want Bush to be assassinated until she’s blue in the face but writing what she did goes so far beyond the pale of legitimate political attack that an apology to her readers should be in order.

Except, her readers agree with her. This is one of the first comments:

great post maha! good reasons all — but #1 is especially disturbing

Comment by temperance — August 31, 2006 @ 12:40 pm

Please note that the commenter finds the constitutional ascension of Dick Cheney to the Presidency “disturbing” but not the assassination of Bush itself.

I wonder if Lambchop is going to take Maha to task for this outrageous slander. I wonder if Dave Niewert will write another ponderous post using his extensive lexicon of faux psychobabbling terms to describe the sickness of thought and reason at work here. I wonder if Billmon will grace us with another one of his specialities; incoherent ramblings that will eventually blame “neocons” for Maha’s idiocy. I wonder if TBogg will try and top what Maha did?

Does it matter? Not really. All of the above and the company they keep on the left have long since left rationality behind and have descended into a hellish nightmare of political warfare that brooks no opposition and judges orthodoxy based on the most intellectually narrow and emotionally shallow reasons imaginable. In their world, the death of Bush at the hands of an assassin would not necessarily elicit public celebration but rather more likely, present an occasion for snark such as we see above. They are much too sophisticated to share in the horror that such an event would cause the overwhelming majority of their countrymen.

I would like to believe that someone on the left will leave a comment scolding Maha for her obscenity of a post. But then, I’d like to believe in the tooth fairy except I gave that up long ago.

UPDATE

Malkin has a tour de force roundup of the history of lefty assassination fantasies. I’m going to bookmark that post.

UPDATE II

I am sorry to report that any rumors you may have heard that there was a smidgen of gray matter in Ms. Maha’s brain were not only grossly exaggerated but probably based on the assumption that since her lips move, coherence must emerge from her mouth.

Judge for yourself: (See Update)

Gracious, poor Rick Moran of Right Wing Nut House came down with the vapors over my post, above, which I figured even a rightie would recognize as mere silliness. (Some people have no sense of humor.)

I cannot tell you Barbara how silly your post was. In fact, as I pointed out above, I fully realized you were making fun of the idea of Bush being assassinated.

THAT’S THE WHOLE POINT YOU NINCOMPOOP!

Let’s have a little “silliness” about the Holocaust, shall we?

Why did the Auschwitz shower heads have 12 holes? Because Jews have 10 fingers!!

I LOVE THIS! Let’s try some lynching silliness:

Rope. Tree. Maha. Some assembly required. (Gawd, I KILL myself)

For a real knee slapper, let’s get silly about BOTH the Holocaust and Blacks:

What did the cook say to the jewish black dude?
Get in the back of the oven?

How about some illegal immigrant silliness?

Why didnt Mexico send a team to the olympics this year?
Because everyone who can run, jump, or swim is already over here.

I love being silly, don’t you Barbara? And the reason I was being silly about these subjects was to force feed the idea into your miniscule intellect THAT THERE ARE SOME THINGS THAT YOU SIMPLY CANNOT BE “SILLY” ABOUT.”

It has nothing to do with “political correctness.” It has everything to do with simple common decency. And you blew it girl, period.

Shame on you. For shame. Shame.

TO ARMS! TO ARMS! The forces of darkness are gathering to strike a blow against liberty, justice, the American way, and…and…THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE!

The Electoral college?

Yes, it’s true. Not content to simply posit conspiracy theories about how Republicans steal elections, liberals have now set their sights on stripping America of one of her oldest and most cherished institutions. Now, gentle reader, before you scratch your head and ask the obvious question of who cares if we give the Electoral College the heave-ho, perhaps a little history lesson is in order. And who better to give it than I, Professor Moran, BFA, MS, and VAH (Very Amateur Historian).

WHAT IS THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE AND DO THEY HAVE A FOOTBALL TEAM?

I’ll take the second question first, Mr. Trebek. Not that I’m aware of although I understand they’ve had some pretty wild keggers over the last 217 years. And starting in 1920 when the college went co-ed, it’s rumored that Toga Parties became all the rage.

Notwithstanding such juvenile shenanigans, the Electoral College is a product of one of the more divisive debates that took place during the Constitutional Convention. For a very educational and thorough examination of this history, I recommend you go here since I’ll be dealing with only the bare bones of what the institution is all about.

The College consists of electors, chosen by the states in various ways, that (ideally) reflect the outcome of the popular vote for President in that particular state. The number of electors is what’s important. That number is determined by how many Senators (2) and Congressmen (proportionally awarded based on most recent census) the state has. So Pennsylvania has 21 electoral votes because they have 2 Senators and how many Congressmen? Class? CLASS? WAAAAAKE UUUUP!. Thank you. Nineteen Congressmen is the correct answer.

The kicker is that it’s a winner take all competition. Whoever wins the popular vote gets all the electors from that state.

ISN’T THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE KIND OF ARCHAIC?

Depends what you mean by archaic. Given that liberals have voted against every major weapons system currently in use by the military (an exaggeration, but hey! We don’t call this site the RIGHT WING Nuthouse because we’re impartial!), perhaps they wants us to fight terrorism using bows and arrows…or spears. Do you mean archaic in THAT sense?

The answer is no. And like my sainted father used to say “Old things are best.” Many of the reasons for the electoral college are still valid today. Look at the election of 2000. Al Gore would have been President if he had carried one more state. That would have given him a grand total of 18 states voting Democratic. George Bush would have won 32 states and gotten nothing, nada, zip-i-dee-doo-da. This is exactly what the electoral college was set up to prevent. Al Gore, if he had won Florida, would have captured 8 of the 10 largest states and won the election by appealing mostly to urban and coastal constituencies. George Bush demonstrated broader support in the electoral college appealing to states in the north, south, east, and west. Bush, even though narrowly losing the popular vote, proved himself a much more national candidate.

And there are other issues to consider when thinking of ditching the electoral college:

First, the direct election of presidents would lead to geographically narrower campaigns, for election efforts would be largely urban. In 2000 Al Gore won 677 counties and George Bush 2,434, but Mr. Gore received more total votes. Circumvent the Electoral College and move to a direct national vote, and those 677 largely urban counties would become the focus of presidential campaigns.

Rural states like Maine, with its 740,000 votes in 2004, wouldn’t matter much compared with New York’s 7.4 million or California’s 12.4 million votes. Rural states’ issues wouldn’t matter much either; big-city populations and urban issues would become the focus of presidential campaigns. America would be holding urban elections, and that would change the character of campaigns and presidents.

Recently, California passed a law that would award the state’s 55 electoral votes to the winner of the most popular votes nationally rather than the winner of the state’s individual race for President. This is apparently part of a national movement to marginalize the electoral college and give the larger states (mostly liberal and Democratic) a bigger say in who is President.

To say this would be catastrophic to American democracy would not be overstating the case one bit. Done under the guise of the “one man, one vote” battle cry which is largely responsible for the permanent incumbency found today in the House of Representatives, the so-called “direct election” of the President would radically alter not only the way we choose a President but the presidency itself.

WHAT WOULD BE THE PROBLEM WITH DIRECT ELECTIONS FOR PRESIDENT?

Pete Du Pont sums up a couple of the major arguments:

Second, in any direct national election there would be significant election-fraud concerns. In the 2000 Bush-Gore race, Mr. Gore’s 540,000-vote margin amounted to 3.1 votes in each of the country’s 175,000 precincts. “Finding” three votes per precinct in urban areas is not a difficult thing, or as former presidential scholar and Kennedy advisor Theodore White testified before the Congress in 1970, “There is an almost unprecedented chaos that comes in the system where the change of one or two votes per precinct can switch the national election of the United States.”

[snip]

Third, direct election would lead to a multicandidate, multiparty system instead of the two-party system we have. Many candidates would run on narrow issues: anti-immigration, pro-gun, environment, national security, antiwar, socialist or labor candidates, for they would have a microphone for their issues. Then there would be political power seekers–Al Sharpton or Michael Moore–and Hollywood pols like Barbra Streisand or Warren Beatty. Even Paris Hilton could advance her career through a presidential campaign.

If we were to simply go by the popular vote to decide who’s elected President, several other major alterations would occur that would permanently change the landscape of our political culture.

* Candidates would concentrate on big states in their campaigns. Whoever the party nominees were, they would move to California, set up residence, and try to shake 40 million hands. An exaggeration of course. But a politician who already lived in California - say a Governor or Senator - would have an enormous advantage in any race for the Presidency. If such a candidate could run up a huge majority in California the task of getting 50.1% of the vote would become much easier. This begs the question; should one state have such an enormous say in who gets elected President? The state already supplies fully 20% of the electoral votes necessary to get to the magic number of 270. Can you imagine what a 5 million vote lead would mean coming out of California to a national candidate based on directly electing a President?

* Minorities would become marginalized. If you think candidates ignore the concerns of minorities now, you’ll love direct elections for President. More than ever, Democrats would take the minority vote for granted and Republicans would continue their half-hearted attempts at outreach. the rationale being, why spend time and money preaching to (or begging from)) the converted?

* Small states and rural areas would be slighted in national elections. Would a campaign that never visited Bucktooth PA or Watchoutforthatcroc FL be any fun at all? I doubt it. I think that we’d lose something if Presidential candidates only visited big states and big state TV markets. Somehow, watching a candidate interact with these simple folk gives you a handle on what kind of person they are, hence what kind of leader they’d make.

Finally, there is this to consider:

Finally, direct election would also lead to weaker presidents. There are no run-offs in the Interstate Compact–that would require either a constitutional amendment or the agreement of all 50 states and the District of Columbia–so the highest percentage winner, no matter how small (perhaps 25% or 30% in a six- or eight-candidate field) would become president. Such a winner would not have an Electoral College majority and therefore not be seen as a legitimate president.

So rather that trying to eviscerate the Electoral College, we should be embracing it. It was put in the Constitution to allow states to choose presidents, for we are a republic based on the separation of powers, not a direct democracy. And the Electoral College–just like the Senate–was intended to protect the residents of small states. As James Madison said, the Electoral College included the will of the nation–every congressional district gets an electoral vote–and “the will of the states in their distinct and independent capacities” since every state gets two additional electors.

What Mr. Du Pont doesn’t say and what the proponents of abandoning the Electoral College never tire of pointing out is that the Electoral College was put in place because our Founding Fathers didn’t trust Jefferson’s yeoman farmers any further than they could throw them - literally. They saw us common folk as rabble, a dangerous mob and in great need of guidance by men better suited to the task of governing by virtue of their superior breeding and education. The Electoral College was originally seen as a brake on popular passions and allowed for the wisest men in the country to gather once every four years to pick our national leader.

How the Electoral College has evolved over the years to reflect the will of the people in the various states in Presidential elections is one of the more fascinating aspects in studying the American government. In fact, since the choosing of electors is up to each individual state, the system is a hodge-podge of processes and procedures that functions largely out of respect for tradition:

Here is a list of how the different states have political parties choose who will be their electors. It also shows whether or not the electors’ names appear on the ballot in November. Finally, it indicates which states have passed laws to bind their electors. Not too many do, and even fewer have defined penalties for an unfaithful elector. Yet, of more than 16,000 electors in U.S. history, less than a dozen have ever voted contrary to the wishes of the people who elected them. Don’t you wish we could say the same about our other elected officials?

The evolution of the College from something akin to the College of Cardinals to a body that reflected the democratic will of the people didn’t take long. Electors running in each district usually made it clear who they would vote for President when the College convened. But the federalist impulse behind the invention of the college remains to this day, a demonstration of the recognition that we are indeed a federal republic. And getting rid of the Electoral College would go a long way towards destroying that idea.

WILL WE TOSS THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE ANY TIME SOON?

Not as long as the current political party situation remains unchanged. Republicans would be at enormous logistical disadvantage under such a system. Think of it like a war. Republicans have a lot more territory to defend than Democrats and thus, their resources would be stretched much thinner. To get to the magic number of 50.1% of the popular vote, Democrats would be able to expend a lot less energy and money to defend their own turf thus freeing them up to raid Republican strongholds. Republicans would have to fight off Democratic insurgencies in red states while carrying on an expensive battle in blue states to pick off a few voters here and there.

No wonder the idea is popular with liberals. It would maximize the influence of their strategic assets while diminishing the power of most of the people who disagree with them.

But hey! All for a good cause, right?

UPDATE

Good Lt. blogging a the Jawas:

Yes. The Democrats want the dense inner-city populations and their infinitely successful approaches to problems like education, crime and corruption to run the national government without regard to what anybody else outside of the large population centers might think.

Times have changed so much under the long dark night of Bushiburton fascism that the very democracy that was perfectly acceptable a decade ago has collapsed entirely and needs to be replaced with procedures favorable to urban liberal constituencies.

Du Pont puts the issue correctly. Mucking with the electoral college will basically disenfracnchise rural voters. Campaigns will not only ignore them but it is likely that Administrations will also give their concerns short shrift.

If Jimmy Carter didn’t exist, our enemies would have to invent him.

How the world avoided unmitigated catastrophe on this man’s watch is one of the great mysteries of the universe, on a par with finding proof that dark matter exists and how in God’s name Britney and Kevin are still married. His stewardship of our government in the late 1970’s will go down as one of the more curious episodes in the history of the American experiment, made all the more surreal today by his status as global nag and international defender of thuggish brutes.

How this man found himself on January 20, 1977 sitting in the oval office rather than the back porch of his peanut farm has to be considered one of the biggest accidents of history of all time.

It was Watergate, of course. And Gerald Ford’s perceived clumsiness. And the sour end to Viet Nam. And a turning inward by the “Me” Generation - all of which created a perfect storm of stupidity and a feel-good self righteousness that allowed a one term governor of Georgia (whose style over substance campaign entranced a media ready to be entranced by an “outsider”) to ascend to the highest rung of power in our democracy.

It wasn’t just incompetence, although he and his befuddled advisors never could get a handle on inflation, the economy, and most especially, the dirty necked galoots who ousted the Shah of Iran. And thankfully, the Soviet Union at the time had their own leadership problems with an old, infirm, and nearly senile Brezhnev, thus moving cautiously until they were absolutely sure they could get away with murder in Cuba, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, and other points on the globe that were subsumed by the March of History.

In fact, it wasn’t until the last two years of this mountebank’s presidency that the Russians got rolling. If they had begun their assault on western interests a year or two earlier, God knows what the result would have been.

In this, we can look at Jimmy Carter whose very existence is the answer to the age old riddle “Is there a God?” This atheist is almost convinced that the only reason the United States and indeed the world survived the Carter presidency was because of the intercession of a Supreme Being who took pity on the American people and directed events in such a way as to mitigate this living representation of the Peter Principle’s ignorance and incompetence.

Since his ignominious landslide defeat at the hands of Ronald Reagan in 1980 (that Carter never acknowledged as a rejection of his policies or personae), this strange and curiously myopic man, who flits and scurries around the world like a fruit fly in search of a rotting banana, has turned down the covers of his bed for some of the most unattractive and tyrannical despots on the planet. Arafat, Mugabe, the mullahs in Iran, Hugo Chavez, Kim Jong Il - the list includes dictators with the blood of hundreds of thousands on their hands. It is almost as if, unable to purge the demons of his past in America, he is attracted to and defends those who have proven perfectly capable of some real life purges - men who are leaving a bloody trail in history and who owe much of whatever legitimacy they have to the need for this fakir to dance in the international limelight.

The most recent evidence showing how lucky the world was that this man was not vouchsafed 4 more years by the voters, thus saving the denizens of planet earth the nightmare of having to deal with a potential Superpower confrontation thanks to an emboldened Soviet Union challenging a hesitant and weak United States comes to us via an interview Carter gave to the Daily Telegraph.

His words drip with self righteousness when he talks about Britain’s Tony Blair:

Tony Blair’s lack of leadership and timid subservience to George W Bush lie behind the ongoing crisis in Iraq and the worldwide threat of terrorism, according to the former American president Jimmy Carter.

“I have been surprised and extremely disappointed by Tony Blair’s behaviour,” he told The Sunday Telegraph.

“I think that more than any other person in the world the Prime Minister could have had a moderating influence on Washington - and he has not. I really thought that Tony Blair, who I know personally to some degree, would be a constraint on President Bush’s policies towards Iraq.”

Projecting Carter’s own weaknesses onto Blair by accusing him of not “moderating” American policies is the heighth of hubris. Could it be that Blair was not interested in “moderating” Bush’s policies and, in fact, agreed wholeheartedly with them? This thought evidently never crossed Carter’s mind. This could be why most of his contemporaries in Europe held him in such complete and utter contempt.

And that contempt felt by European leaders was the result of Carter’s failure to understand the nature of a threatening world - especially when it came to countering Soviet moves all over the globe. The Europeans saw Carter’s hesitancy, his inconstancy and made their own decisions about American power. Their was a general softening of support for the US as European leaders like Helmudt Schmidt of Germany moved perceptively away from America and Mitterand of France openly courted the Russian bear by making favorable trade deals with the Soviets. Carter’s paralysis in the face of Soviet aggression was altering the balance of power in favor of Russia.

Has he learned anything since then?

But had he still been president, he says that he would never have considered invading Iraq in 2003.

“No,” he said, “I would never have ordered it. However, I wouldn’t have excluded going into Afghanistan, because I think we had to strike at al-Qaeda and its leadership. But then, to a major degree, we abandoned the anti-terrorist effort and went almost unilaterally with Great Britain into Iraq.”

This, Mr Carter believes, subverted the effectiveness of anti-terrorist efforts. Far from achieving peace and stability, the result has been a disaster on all fronts. “My own personal opinion is that the Iraqi people are not better off as a result of the invasion and people in America and Great Britain are not safer.”

It is very generous of Mr. Carter to inform us had he been President on 9/11 that he “wouldn’t have excluded going into Afghanistan” to go after al-Qaeda. The problem is in what he isn’t saying. Please note he does not mention regime change nor does he mention rousting the Taliban so that they would be unable to grant sanctuary to the remnants of al-Qaeda or any other terror group. Presumably, the terrorist training sites would still have been in operation as would the Taliban’s Sharia law which would have continued to treat women as dirt and the modern world generally as a plague. One might ask what the point would have been to attack al-Qaeda without attacking the Taliban but why make the poor fellow tie himself in knots trying to justify the unjustifiable?

And while it may be his opinion that the Iraqi people aren’t better off with Saddam gone, 80% of the Iraqi people themselves disagree which goes to prove that Carter has lost none of the minuscule amount of political acumen he was born with.

As for whether Britain and America are safer as a result of the Iraq liberation, it is impossible to answer that question. It is fashionable to say we are in greater danger but I would posit the notion that thanks to Iraq, we have greater awareness of the dangers we face hence are better prepared to meet them. In a world where Islamists are trying to kill as many of us as possible, there is no such thing as “safe” with or without the Iraq invasion. In the end, the question is irrelevant except as a political construct by the President and his opponents. And how you measure “safety” is completely subjective and hence irrelevant except in this political context.

Finally, we get this outrageous bias from the Telegraph along with some more Carter lunacy:

Asked why he thinks Mr Blair has behaved in the way that he has with President Bush’s belligerent regime, Mr Carter said he could only put it down to timidity. Yet he confessed that he remains baffled by the apparent contrast between Mr Blair’s private remarks and his public utterances.

“I really believe the reports of former leaders who were present in conversations between Blair and Bush that Blair has expressed private opinions contrary to some of the public policies that he has adopted in subservience.”

Bush’s “belligerent regime?” Freeing 50 million people from tyranny in Iraq and Afghanistan is hardly the actions of a “belligerent” administration. The term was deliberately used by the reporters and the depiction of the Bush administration as a “regime” which is more descriptive of a dictatorship than a democracy is outrageous. Only lefty loons believe the US has descended into dictatorship and to have it appear on the pages of a supposedly respected newspaper is despicable.

And so are Carter’s remarks about Blair. The British Prime Minister timid? In what universe? And Blair has disagreed with the Administration privately but not gone public with those disagreements which is the sign of a loyal ally, something Carter would know nothing about since his betrayal of the Shah of Iran (and others) which threatens to haunt is all for a long while and is indicative of the messianic streak in his personality. The man’s self righteousness knows no bounds which is why his lecturing of foreign leaders became so tiresome.

I just wish the world itself would tire of this jackanape. His performances have become parodies of themselves because with each appearance, he must become ever more strident and hateful to the President and to American policies. And as a genuine danger to human liberty, he should be denied a platform from which to spout his inanities.

Don’t hold your breath, though. He is a godsend to the anti-American European press and will always find a ready audience here as well for his rants. In that, as with other indignities we are forced to suffer with - like hang nails and crotch rot - we will not easily find a cure.

The important thing, obviously, is that Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig have been freed from their captivity. And in an interesting twist that makes one think that their kidnappers knew all too well what Fox News is and what the attitude of the rest of the world media is toward them, they forced the two journalists to “convert” to Islam.

AND JUST LIKE JILL CARROLL, THEY WERE FORCED TO MAKE A PROPAGANDA TAPE CONDEMNING AMERICA:

Fox Television journalists held for 13 days in the Gaza Strip were released Sunday after they were shown on a videotape saying they converted to Islam.

The two journalists, American Steve Centanni, 60, and New Zealand cameraman Olaf Wiig, 36, “have liberated themselves” by converting to Islam, according to the statement accompanying a videotape from a group calling itself the Holy Jihad Brigades.

Gaza journalists confirmed that Centanni and Wiig arrived at a hotel in Gaza shortly after noon local time.

[snip]

Parts of the latest six-minute tape, aired on al-Jazeera television, showed Centanni and Wiig seated cross-legged. Both read from written statements condemning the American policy in the Middle East. In one scene, both men were shown eating.

“It is Apache helicopters firing Hellfire missiles made in America that kill the residents in Gaza,” Wiig said on the tape.

Their statements were punctuated on the tape with screens of written verse from the Koran, and scenes from Abu Ghraib, the prison in Iraq that was the site of abuse of Muslim prisoners by American soldiers.

This “conversion” wrinkle is certainly personally humiliating for the two reporters. I say this not disparaging Islam but rather pointing out the obvious; conversion at the point of a gun points up the total control the kidnappers had over the lives of their captives. That is the message the kidnappers were sending. And it appears to me that the kidnappers may also be very aware of the fact that Fox News is seen by most of the western press as a “conservative” news outlet. Since it is no secret where the most vigorous opposition to the agenda of radical Islam comes from, one wonders if these particular jihadists were trying to send a message to conservatives; resistance is futile.

Are they that sophisticated? Think Reuters and then tell me they are not. Radical Islamism is the most media savvy enemy America has ever faced. For whatever reason, the old Soviet Union was clumsy and at times, laughably off target in their attempted media manipulations.

But these guys have studied the western mind, studied western politics, and most importantly, studied the process of how the modern collection and dissemination of news is done. They are aware of news cycles and feeding frenzies. We already knew they were very good at creating irresistible images for the wire services and other independent news sources whose reporting the major nets depend on during a war. What their manipulation of images of these particular hostages may mean is that they are aware of the politics of media coverage as well.

It almost appears as if the kidnappers had been reading the blogs over the last week. If there was one way to embarrass their tormentors in the right wing blogosphere, it would be to show that no one can resist the power of their religion. Whether they realize what the reaction by lefty blogs will be - gratitude for their release followed by a lecture on tolerance and some pointed remarks equating this hostage release with the way righty blogs handled the Jill Carroll imbroglio - is impossible to say but given the sophistication of their media relations as well as how internet savvy their cells have proved to be, I wouldn’t put it past them.

And even if the kidnappers don’t know what blogs are, the lefty blogs would have a point regarding Jill Carroll. If you haven’t read it, I strongly suggest you read her gripping story that will be out in book form soon, excerpts of which have appeared in the Christian Science Monitor. (HT: Bill Roggio). Carroll’s ordeal should remind all of us that no matter what one’s politics, all Americans are held hostage when one of us falls into the hands of these thugs.

Carroll was targeted for kidnapping for the exact same reason the Fox News reporters were taken; to influence and terrorize the American public. This is also the reason both were required to make a tape spewing anti-American propaganda. The thugs are not concerned with our petty political squabbles except as a way to divide us. They didn’t “like” Jill Carroll any more than they were fond of Steve Centanni. Carroll’s alleged sympathy for Islam didn’t do her any more or less good than Centanni’s connection to Fox News denoting hostility to radical jihadism. It just didn’t matter.

Maybe the good that comes out of this incident is that conservatives will realize that it doesn’t matter to our enemies whether reporters write sympathetic pieces about them or whether they do highly critical new stories on their movement. What matters is that they are American. That’s all that matters. The rest is so much chaff.

UPDATE

Michelle has links to all the video as well as her transcription of this from Centanni:

I just hope this never scares a single journalist away from coming to Gaza to cover this story because the Palestinian people are very beautiful, kind-hearted, loving people who the world need to know more about and so do not be discouraged. Come and tell the story. It’s a wonderful story. I’m just happy to be here. Thanks for all your support.

Ed Morrissey thinks the conversion ploy shows that the jihadists are amateurs:

The Holy Jihad Brigade apparently wants to include themselves among the Big Three of Palestinian terrorism. They have a strange way of applying. Besides forcing the conversion of the two to Islam, they made them play dress-up and recorded a degrading video of the pair denouncing the West in Arabic robes. I’m not sure who they thought such a display would convince, but Centanni and Wiig wisely played along with the demands, and now this laughable statement gives evidence of the childish and intellectually stunted nature of Palestinian terrorism. Even Haniyeh will be embarrassed by that show.

This could be. “Holy Jihad Brigade” could be a bunch of guys who hang out together after Friday prayers and who decided to get a little attention by kidnapping some westerners. It’s possible they didn’t know the significance of the Fox News connection nor that their motives in releasing the videos were anything more than, as Ed says, a “childish and laughable” exercise in propaganda.

If so, they sure got lucky picking a journalist with ties to a news organization that is closely identified with an ideology that has given the Islamists the most sustained and unrelenting opposition in the west.

Also, be sure to check out the videos at Ms. Underestimated.

Holy Mother! The aforementioned Mr. Russell Shaw is either a publicity glutton or a total nutcase.

Doesn’t this guy know when to shut up?

Not content with making a fool of himself on Friday with a post where he idly wonders if a terrorist attack in October wouldn’t unseat the Republicans and lead to “regime change” in 2008 for the Democrats, Shaw proves today that it wasn’t a fluke, that he is indeed a certifiable loon:

It strikes me as more than a little ironic that some self-regarded patriotic conservatives would somehow interpret my analytical, “what would happen if” I Hope And Pray We Don’t Get Hit Again BUT…post as a call for the enemies of America who hit us on 9/11/01 and cost the lives of nearly 3,000 innocent people to hit us again.

Not only because I wish for the death of no one, but because many of these same people are among the first to agree with Ann Coulter that for speaking out against the way the war on terror has been conducted since they lost their husbands, some of the 9/11 widows are “harpies.”

First of all, the only place on earth that Shaw’s article from yesterday would be considered “analytical” is in perhaps the third grade where the 10 year olds would have very little trouble picking it apart.

But Ann Coulter? Where in the wide, wide, world of sports did THAT come from. Not only is the Coulter thought left dangling like a lone strand of spaghetti at the end of a fork, but the fact is there was a massive backlash against Coulter in the conservative blogosphere for her tirade against the 9/11 widows. This is worse than “analytical.” This is incoherent.

To compare the way that some conservatives cheered Coulter on in her blaspheming the widows with the way they piled on Shaw is, well, nuts. If one were to give me a thousand choices for comparing the way conservatives have come down on Shaw for his idiocy yesterday, Coulter wouldn’t even be on the radar.

Besides, most conservatives pretty much ignored the premise of his article about his “almost wishing” for another massive terrorist strike in favor of tearing into his vision of a liberal Utopia if the Democrats are handed the reins of government by the voters. That and his notion that conservative policies are killing people deliberately. These go unmentioned in today’s installment of the Shaw Chronicles.

Unbelievably strange.

After pouting that he has been misunderstood, Shaw then compares the morality of a terrorist attack against civilians with losses in the Iraq War as evidence of conservative’s moral relavency.

Okay…do your own fisking of that. I think the premise fisks itself quite nicely.

This kind of hopeless stupidity (where sane people just kind of laugh and throw up their hands in resignation that nothing will ever get through to this guy) could simply be chalked up to someone who may have been dropped on his head as a child or the product of some horrible scientific experiment that went wrong. Except Shaw then proceeds to inform us that there are many forms of terrorism - and most of them are carried out by Republicans and conservatives against the American people:

But on the broader scale, some critics may fail to realize that for millions of Americans, terrorism is a frequent presence. Not the terrorism of a shoe-bomber, or of trumped up orange alerts based on intercepts of guys shouting “Jihad” in an Internet chat room, but the real psychological and economic terrorism often visited on Americans in the guise of:

The sight of two uniformed service members approaching your home, and the knowledge that your worst fears after not hearing from your son for two weeks are about to come horribly true;

The “please help us” screams from the victims of Hurricane Katrina- their plight unaddressed by an incompetent FEMA headed by an appointee of the same administration that is keeping us safe from terrorism;

The fourth call you have received this morning from the bill collector, who cares not that you have been put out of work by the greed of a multinational corporation who shipped your job overseas last year (and thanks in most part to the GOP, no longer have bankruptcy as an easily available option).

It’s all there, isn’t it? State sponsored terrorism courtesy of the Republicans.

I have dealt many times with this liberal compulsion to take the English language and bend it to their will by using or inventing words and then defining them not according to general usage or out of any desire to improve clarity but rather in order to appropriate their secondary value as emotional talismans to be stroked and fondled in order to elicit the appropriate response.

Using the word “terrorism” to describe government incompetence or the results of government policies is one such example. Equating what terrorists did on 9/11 with what Shaw considers FEMA incompetence is so far beyond the pale of rational discourse that it beggars belief. It would do no good to point out that you don’t rebuild a major American city that was 80% destroyed in one year even with a Bill Clinton led FEMA. Facts are irrelevant and indeed impediments in Shaw’s construct. What matters is using the word “terrorist” to elicit an emotional response regarding a host of government actions or inactions.

And the left accuses conservatives of fear mongering?

The litany of terrorist acts by the government and conservatives continues:

The need to wait two hours for three buses to take you to work because the price-gougers in the oil markets have made it too expensive to put gas in your car until you get paid again in two weeks;

The baby your niece will be forced to have after being impregnated by her no-good, meth-addled ex boyfriend because the only doctor who performed abortions within 200 miles has decided he doesn’t want to be terrorized by the “pro-lifers” anymore;

The moans from your cancer-ridden aunt in your upstairs guest bedroom- moans that the government won’t let you palliate with medical marijuana or even mercifully cease should she be at peace with her God about that option;

How can you respond rationally to irrationality? How can you debunk someone who thinks that marijuana is a pain killer? How can you explain to someone that anti-abortion protests are legal in the United States and that 76% of women need to travel less than 50 miles for an abortion (slightly farther than the average cancer patient needs to travel for treatment with rural areas skewing both numbers).

As for the vagaries of the oil markets or eeeeevil corporations sending jobs overseas (while 11 million have been created here at home), how can you explain capitalism to a nincompoop? Or explain that if you are getting calls from bill collectors because you have lost your job, you can still file for bankruptcy, that Shaw doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Shaw is an ignoramus. Any doubt erased here:

All of these events happen every day- as the consequence of policies promoted or sanctioned by the same government who is “keeping us safe against terrorism.” And while these events of our daily lives most often do not lead to sudden deaths as with terrorism, they can promote stress and slow death by 1,001 cuts. Cuts as a consequence of what it means to be poor and vulnerable in a nation ruled by the rich and powerful.

And sometimes, it is not only we humans who are victims of terrorism. The polar bear marooned on the ice floe due to global warming, the tiger who futilely scampers away from high-powered rifle fire at the game ranch owned by rich Republican contributors- well, they are victims of terrorism too.

I wish for a nation free of the fear of terrorism- not only the kind that visited our shores nearly five years ago to this day, but for a nation where the indignities of social, economic and environmental injustice strike terror in so many hearts and minds.

Stress = terrorism? Polar bears? Game ranches “owned by rich Republican contributors” victims of terrorism too?

Shaw forgot blades of grass on Republican controlled golf courses that take a beating because conservatives tend to wear spikes while liberals don’t.

Let me tell Mr. Shaw what I wish for: A nation free from myopic idiots like him who give rational thought a bad name. Any more “analytical” pieces like this one and his Friday post and Shaw just might achieve the coveted position of having his name turned into an internet verb.

DEMOCRATS DISCUSS THE THREAT OF TERRORISM AGAINST THE UNITED STATES

I remember the good old days when liberals would place the War on Terror in quotation marks as if the “war” only existed as a political ploy to elect George Bush and Republicans. In this universe, talk of terrorism against the United States was a gigantic trick, a distraction that was used to establish King George’s kingdom while surreptitiously savaging our civil liberties and readying the concentration camps for occupation by regime opponents.

There was something comfortable about this idiotic construct. After all, by denying there was a “war” in the first place, one could blithely go along secure in the knowledge if they were right, liberals had a hook they could use to reel in gullible voters on election day. And if they were wrong and al-Qaeda or some other terrorist group struck, they would simply point out that Bush once again failed to protect us despite their opposition to every single measure the government has taken to do so.

Of course, the left would be banking on the media to help the American people forget that they demeaned the very idea of a War on Terror in the first place. In this, they would probably be successful given the general apathy and short attention span of most voters. But no matter. For the left, it’s “heads I win, tails you lose” when it comes to national security posturing.

Now for reasons having to do with their failure to elicit the proper outrage by the voters against the President’s anti-terrorism efforts - the foolish American people actually support the President’s trying to protect them - the left has switched gears and have taken a “Don’t worry…Be happy” approach to the threat of sudden death from fanatical jihadists:

Most of all, though, we should recall that what’s scary about, say, al-Qaeda isn’t the number of people it has killed, or even the number of people it can kill — it’s the number of people it would like to kill. Terrorists armed with liquid explosives are a problem on a par with lightning strikes or peanut allergies. Terrorists armed with a nuclear bomb is a legitimate nightmare.

I don’t know about you but after reading that I feel much better. I mean, leave aside the fact that dead is dead no matter how the depressing event happens. I would certainly feel worse if I went to the hereafter as a result of eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich than if I met my demise as a passenger on a plane that was blown to smithereens by a liquid bomb planted by some Islamonut. I happen to adore my P & B (Skippy Creamy, of course, with gobs of Concord Grape Jelly) and would be loathe to give it up for anything.

Then again, we don’t ban peanut butter from airplanes. Authorities however, take a rather dim view of liquid bombs being brought on board passenger aircraft, correctly deducing that while peanut butter is sticky and could ruin the upholstery of airplane seats, a liquid bomb might do considerably more damage and should therefore be confiscated before boarding.

According to Mr. Yglesias, however, we should be expending the same amount of resources and attention to terrorism as we do on the pressing problem of overdosing on Skippy. Or perhaps on educating golfers about the fact that the 2 million volts of electricity contained in a bolt of lightening is attracted to an upraised metal golf club the same way that Osama might be attracted to Whitney Houston. If saving lives was the only goal in preventing terrorism, the left could have a point, couldn’t they?

Philip Klein:

Furthermore, terrorism is a different type of threat because in addition to the human carnage it leaves behind, it targets symbols of American power and prosperity (such as the World Trade Center and the Pentagon). Were we to have a nonchalant attitude toward terrorism because it mathematically presents a lower fatality risk relative to other dangers, it would not only put us at risk for attacks worse than Sept. 11, but it would demonstrate weakness to current and potential adversaries. As the 9/11 Commission reported, Osama Bin Laden was inspired by the U.S. withdrawal from Somalia in 1993. How would our enemies and allies view America today were we to brush aside dastardly attacks on prominent symbols of our financial and military might?

Personally, I prefer nonchalance to all this preparedness crap. That way, no one can accuse you of having an “inordinate fear” of terrorism. I’m sure you’ve heard the latest slings and arrows coming from our liberal friends; conservative “bedwetters” and “chicken littles” who quake in their boots about dying in a terrorist attack - as if there was any chance of that happening. Better to brush off the threat and put on macho airs (Do liberals had anything down there that would give them real courage in the first place?). This impresses females and also has a salutary affect on the left’s facial acne eruptions what with all those hormones being released in response to their primal chest thumping and declarations of fearlessness.

And just in case we haven’t quite gotten the message about terrorism being no more of a bother than allergies and thunderstorms, up steps Ron Bailey in that bastion of reasonableness Reason Magazine:

Even if terrorists were able to pull off one attack per year on the scale of the 9/11 atrocity, that would mean your one-year risk would be one in 100,000 and your lifetime risk would be about one in 1300. (300,000,000 ÷ 3,000 = 100,000 ÷ 78 years = 1282) In other words, your risk of dying in a plausible terrorist attack is much lower than your risk of dying in a car accident, by walking across the street, by drowning, in a fire, by falling, or by being murdered.

So do these numbers comfort you? If not, that’s a problem. Already, security measures—pervasive ID checkpoints, metal detectors, and phalanxes of security guards—increasingly clot the pathways of our public lives. It’s easy to overreact when an atrocity takes place—to heed those who promise safety if only we will give the authorities the “tools” they want by surrendering to them some of our liberty. As President Franklin Roosevelt in his first inaugural speech said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself— nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” However, with risks this low there is no reason for us not to continue to live our lives as though terrorism doesn’t matter—because it doesn’t really matter. We ultimately vanquish terrorism when we refuse to be terrorized.

For the record, I stink at math so we’re going to have to take Mr. Bailey’s descent into the statistical wilderness at face value. Besides that, Mr. Bailey actually has a point. There are other things besides terrorism to be afraid of in America - and one of them is Bailey and his ideological ilk.

To say that Mr. Bailey gets first prize for sophistry and jaw dropping idiocy is to let him off too easily. I would first make the request that the next terrorist attack that occurs - and we know that one is coming and will be successful - Bailey, Yglesias, and the entire crew of lefty head cases who are advancing this meme should be forced to pay a visit to the families of the dead and comfort them with their statistics, graphs, and the law of averages. And when queried about why their loved one died, they could always say “Stuff happens.”

I’m sure that will ease their pain and suffering.

But the truly dangerous nature of Mr. Bailey’s (and others) statistical approach to national security lies in its deceptive call for a “return to normalcy.” While I shouldn’t make fun of their obvious sincerity and concern over the government’s aggressive anti-terrorism efforts, the point is that enduring terrorist attacks on a regular basis because we failed do everything possible to prevent them due to the low probability that any one American will die is loony. Not only is it politically unsustainable it is a disheartening effort to cheapen individual human lives. The intellectual gymnastics performed by people who think like this are breathtaking. It turns everything about America that we admire and that others have fought and died for on its head; that the individual is and must be supreme over the state.

For when the state begins to think like Bailey et. al., it becomes easier to treat Americans as an amorphous mass of humanity rather than individuals with rights, privileges, and responsibilities. Their admirable concern for the state’s overreach in its anti-terrorism efforts loses any relevance when one can turn their argument around and say less than .01% of 1% of people’s civil rights have been egregiously violated. Thus, the anti-terror programs that they find objectionable can be justified using their own logic against them.

We are closing in on 5 years at war in this country. We have yet to reach any kind of a national consensus on the liberty vs. security issue, a prerequisite for our survival as a free country and national entity. This argument being made by Bailey, Yglesias, and others is extraordinarily unhelpful in this cause and serves only to undermine our efforts both to protect our selves and our rights.

I kind of liked it better when they didn’t think we were at war at all…

My hometown of Chicago is starting to get quite a reputation for being the laboratory for every loony left idea that’s come down the pike recently. In the late 1980’s, the city followed the lead of Berkley and other enlightened enclaves of the left by making Chicago a nuclear free zone. Presumably, this means that any missiles launched by an enemy at the city will be issued a citation for violating the ordinance if the warheads don’t alter course and blow up some other place, say Madison, Wisconsin.

Then last December, the city became the latest major metropolitan area to ban smoking in restaurants and bars. Now before I hear from the non-smokers who want to take me to task for spreading second hand smoke and thus ruining their health, I would only point to the historic and cultural connections between food, drink, and the nasty weed. Smoking, despite its tarnished reputation, is in fact a social vice, as embedded in the fabric of human interaction as food, alcohol (a more addictive and destructive drug by far) and coffee. And give the food Nazis a few years and they’ll have coffee roasters and growers in their sights.

But a couple of months ago, the City Council decided to give in to the animal rights loonies and ban the sale of Foie Gras in the city’s restaurants. If you’ve never had Foie Gras or don’t know what it is, think liver sausage without the rye bread, dark mustard, and pickle. Made from the livers of geese, its name means “fatty liver” in French. And in order to achieve the best taste and consistency, goose farmers force feed the birds a high fat diet which causes their livers to grow up to 10 times normal size.

Now don’t get me wrong. I feel for the birds just as I feel for the turkeys that are crammed together on turkey farms, never being able to move more than a few feet for their entire lives. And let’s not forget the slaughtering of cattle and pigs, not a pretty sight I’m sure and not very healthy for the animals either.

Animals are bred, raised and slaughtered for the sole purpose of feeding human beings. We grow them as we grow crops like wheat and soy beans. How they meet their end or how they are treated when they are alive should concern us the same way that we should care for any living thing. But animal rights activists look at our food supply in an anthropomorphic way, wishing to ascribe the same moral tenets to food as they do to other humans - sometimes granting the brutes a superior moral frame of reference to people.

This is nuts. It has nothing to do with animals not having “souls” or even the fact that, with very few exceptions, most beasts are not self-aware and thus have a completely different conscious life than humans. It has to do with relative value. A human life - any human life - is more valuable than that of an animal. This self evident construct escapes the animal rights activists whose agitation presupposes no relative difference between man and beast.

But in lobbying for a ban on Foie Gras, the animal rights activists have become quite selective in their pity. In fact, it is pure politics. Foie Gras being an expensive delicacy ostensibly eaten only by the rich, PETA has hit upon an issue that boosts their profile in the activist community, thus assuring an increase in donations while politicians can strut and posture like peacocks in the barnyard, showing off their care and concern for the well being of our feathered friends. And since the delicacy can be passed off as a rich man’s treat, the City Council figured that they could inject a little class warfare into the issue just for good measure.

What they didn’t count on was a revolt by the proletariat against the idea that government should be telling people what moral choices they should or should not be making about what they eat:

Don’t come between foodies and their foie gras.

That was the message sent by Chicago diners who dug into foie gras dishes Monday, on the eve of the city’s ban on foie gras taking effect. High-end restaurants had special foie gras tastings to protest the ban, and even a few down-home sandwich and pizza joints added it to their menus for the occasion.

[snip]

“What’s next?” asked Gadsby, who also hosted an Outlaw Dinner last month at his Noe Restaurant & Bar in Los Angeles, where foie gras will be subject to a statewide ban by 2012. “They’ll outlaw truffles, then lobster, beluga caviar, oysters. There are diners who eat to fill a hunger urge, and there are diners who eat to be dazzled. If you take away the luxury ingredients, how can you dazzle them?”

The Chicago City Council passed the foie gras ban in April, joining California and several European countries that outlawed foie gras alleging animal cruelty.

The “Foie Gras Revolt” has people talking like it’s 1776 rather than 2006:

The ordinance bans only the sale of foie gras, so restaurateurs have speculated that they can get around it by giving away foie gras or serving it at private parties.

Gadsby jokingly wondered whether he could cook with handcuffs on. He said he’d like to hold underground secret foie gras dinners or label foie gras as “duck liver” or “monkfish liver” to sell it.

Meanwhile, various chefs have reported demand for foie gras mushrooming since the ordinance was approved.

Perhaps if we started calling it “Liberty Liver” we could get the anti-Francophiles on our side.

And it’s good to see that there are still some people who take a perfectly practical, all American view of liberty:

Kou Patra and Saurabh Shah, both physicians, attended Gadsby’s dinner on their first day in Chicago after moving from Cleveland. They recently returned from vacationing in France, where they ate foie gras regularly. “I can’t believe we moved to a place where they banned foie gras,” said Patra, 33.

Some Chicagoans are outraged at what they see as a patronizing law, even if they rarely eat foie gras.

“They might as well make a citywide bedtime ordinance,” said bartender David Brown, 29, who feasted on the outlaw ingredients with his wife, Jennifer, at 676. “It’s like banning smoking. If I’m a bartender, I don’t run a health club. We’re adults; we’re allowed to have bad habits.”

This tendency by my hometown City Council to micromanage the behavior and habits of adults is extremely worrisome. It is a harbinger of what may become commonplace in the near future; states and localities taking it upon themselves to shape our diet, eliminating or curtailing foods based not on whether the foodstuffs contain ingredients or additives that are poisonous or will make us sick but rather based on the nebulous and uncertain effect the foods will have on our future health - or, as in the banning of Foie Gras, the effect on animals raised for the sole and exclusive purpose of feeding people.

Travel down that road a bit and you can see the banning of all meat, regardless of how it is grown or managed. This is the goal of PETA of course. And the politicians who voted for this ban and who shamelessly gave in to the activists, should think twice about their surrender the next time they’re enjoying a steak at Harry Carey’s.