Right Wing Nut House

My latest is up at FPM where I examine the challenge by the Islamists in the Egyptian parliament to the military.

A sample:

The Islamists are making a move to challenge the military because of two recent incidents that have angered the Egyptian people and made the government even more unpopular than it was previously.

The first incident occurred on February 1 when a huge riot broke out following a soccer game in Port Said. Authorities said that 79 people died and hundreds were injured when fans of the home team swarmed the field after a rare win, attacking opposing fans and players, and overwhelming the small number of riot police who were deployed for the game. The next day, riots broke out in Cairo and elsewhere that killed two and injured more than 900. The people blame the military for the pitifully inadequate security at the stadium. Most of the dead died of asphyxiation when people trying to exit the melee were blocked by a locked gate. There were also questions about how fans had been able to bring knives and other weapons into the stadium.

The second incident that has angered parliament and the Egyptian people was the lifting of the travel ban on the 16 Americans who are on trial for illegal funding of the NGOs they worked for. Parliament believes that the government caved in to American pressure and threats from Congress to deny Egypt the $1.3 billion in aid the US gives to Egypt every year. It was this incident that precipitated the confrontation in parliament with the military government and presages political turmoil.

The Brotherhood seems to be in tune with the people on these issues, and has apparently decided to press its advantage. The lifting of the travel ban especially seems to have outraged the citizens of Egypt due to interference in the judicial process by the military, as the original judge in the case has alleged. This initiated an intense questioning of ministers in parliament, as lawmaker after lawmaker called for a vote of no confidence. “I wish members of the U.S. Congress could listen to you now to realize that this is the parliament of the revolution, which does not allow a breach of the nation’s sovereignty or interference in its affairs,” said the parliament’s speaker, FJP member Saad el-Katatni.

The military says only it has the authority to dismiss the government. To make that point, ministers who were scheduled to answer questions from lawmakers on the NGO issue failed to show up for the afternoon session of parliament. “It seems that the government is pushing for a crisis with parliament,” el-Katatni said.

The no confidence vote is a process that should take about two weeks, as each minister in turn needs to be questioned by lawmakers. But it is unclear that, even if the parliament is successful, there will be any changes to the government. The military has sole authority to name the prime minister and his cabinet, which means that even if they are voted out, the military could appoint the same people.

One observer of Egyptian politics, Mazen Hassan, a political science professor at Cairo University, said, “It has the perfect bits and pieces by which [parliament] can gain popularity.” Indeed, the parliament voted two other measures that promised to be very popular among the nationalist-minded Egyptian populace.

Both measures are largely symbolic, but represent an ominous sign of things to come. First, the parliament, by a show of hands, accepted a report by the Arab Committee that called for the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador, the recall of the Egyptian ambassador from Israel, and a halt to the sales of natural gas to the Jewish state. The Islamists also introduced a measure that would cut the $1.3 billion in aid from the US to Egypt. Both issues are a challenge to the military government, which has reserved the power to make such decisions. But the popular sentiment expressed in both resolutions will strengthen the hand of the Brotherhood going into the presidential elections. It may also get the military to compromise on the make-up of the government, putting some Islamist ministers in power if the no confidence vote is successful.

They only have the system deployed around three southern cities, but once they complete the construction of all planned batteries, they should be able to cover the entire southern border region with Gaza.

I wrote about Iron Dome at FPM:

Iron Dome has an unconventional history. It took only three years from design to deployment - a rarity among complex weapons systems. The tracking system was developed by Elta, an Israeli defense company while the computer software was created by the Israeli firm mPrest Systems. The interceptor rocket was built by Rafael.

It is a marvel of technology and can actually determine if a rocket is a threat to a population center, or whether it will land harmlessly in an open field. CNN describes the system:

First deployed in April 2011, the Iron Dome system targets incoming rockets it identifies as possible threats to city centers and fires an interceptor missile to destroy them in mid-air. Each battery is equipped with an interception management center to calculate the expected location of impact, and to prioritize targets according to pre-defined targets. The battery also has firing-control radar used to identify targets, and a portable missile launcher.

This was the first serious battlefield test of Iron Dome and it passed with flying colors. The Jerusalem Post reports that Iron Dome intercepted a total of 27 rockets for a 90% success rate. It is currently deployed around three of the larger cities in the south: Ashdod, Ashkelon, Beersheba. The system is entirely mobile and it is expected that once all batteries are deployed, Israel will potentially be able to intercept any missile fired from Gaza.

“The most important question is how would the Iron Dome affect the decisions of Hamas leaders and their Iranian supporters,” said Dore Gold, Israeli Ambassador to the United States. “While Hamas rockets are aimed primarily to target civilians and terrorize the Israeli home front, a secondary and just important aim is to hit strategic sites in the future,” he added. Gold also pointed out that by eliminating the terrorists’ ability to hit strategic targets, it will force them to re-think what kinds of rockets they will have to purchase in the future.

The most common rocket in the terrorists’ arsenal is the Qassam - a small, inaccurate projectile whose major benefit appears to be its easy portability. There are several variants of the weapon and its range is limited to between 5 and 15 miles. Hamas also has a Russian-designed Grad rocket system that is truck mounted, which it purchased from Iran. Iron Dome can intercept all of these rockets.

A fourth Iron Dome battery is expected to be added later this year with 5 additional batteries to be manufactured by 2013. An Israeli defense official told CNN that it would take 13 batteries to cover the border with Gaza. The system was partially funded by the US government, which gave Israel $205 million to develop and test the system. Another $200 million has been authorized by Congress for additional batteries.

Israel needed Iron Dome to perform above expectations the past few days because the PRC and its Islamic Jihad allies felt it necessary to respond to the pinpoint strike that took out al-Qassi. That strike reveals a slight change in Israeli defense doctrine, according to YNet News. While Israel has always reserved the right to take preemptive action against the terrorists, this sort of targeted assassination is the result of the terrorist attack last August that killed eight Israelis. the Israelis apparently had an opportunity to kill al-Qassi at that time, but decided against it because they knew there would be a retaliatory rocket strike by the terrorists on civilians. Once Israel’s intelligence services got wind of the plot, it was decided to take out al-Qassi despite the almost certain retaliation with rockets on Israeli civilian centers.

This is a tremendous technical achievement for the Israeli arms industry. Whether it will truly alter the strategic equation along the border with Gaza is another question and won’t be known for several years.

As I was going through articles on Super Tuesday yesterday, I couldn’t believe me eyes. Much of the punditry was spinning Mitt’s smashing victory — winning twice as many contests as Santorum and slaughtering his rival in the total delegates won — as, if not a loss, then something less than what it was.

I wrote about this for PJ Media:

Let us put this nonsense to bed once and for all: Mitt Romney was a huge winner on Super Tuesday. By any objective measurement — total votes, delegates won, margin of victory, and the fact that in the four contests he didn’t win he finished second (even beating Santorum in Georgia) — Romney should be credited with almost putting the nomination out of reach. Only a miracle — “an act of God” says the Romney camp — could deny him the Republican nomination at this point. That’s only a slight overstatement.

As Josh Putnam pointed out before the Super Tuesday delegate count was even known, there is no practical or realistic path to 1144 — the number of delegates needed for the nomination — for either Santorum or Gingrich. Santorum would have to start beating the pants off Romney to gain the lion’s share of delegates in states that award them proportionally, and would also have to cross thresholds of more than 50% of the vote in some states that have the winner-take-all rules. And all Romney has to do is finish a fairly close second in states he doesn’t win to keep piling up the delegates.

RealClearPolitics gives Romney 404 delegates to Santorum’s 161. The problem with playing catch-up is best illustrated by what happened in Oklahoma. Santorum won the state by 5 points over Romney, but only picked up one delegate on him — 14-13. With Romney currently enjoying a 250-delegate lead, the delegate math starts to weigh heavily on Santorum’s campaign.

No, it is not impossible for Santorum to win. But it is now extremely unlikely — largely as a result of what transpired on Super Tuesday. In order for Santorum to win, he would have to garner 65% of the remaining delegates at stake. Gingrich would need 70%. Romney needs just 48%. So far, Santorum has won 22% of the delegates while Romney has grabbed 52%. Even if Gingrich were to drop out, the prospect of Santorum running up those totals is a very long shot at best.

It is false to assume that every single Gingrich supporter would transfer their allegiance to Santorum if the former speaker were to drop out. That makes the argument that splitting the conservative vote is the only thing keeping Santorum from winning an inaccurate one. In fact, Santorum is already dominating the conservative vote with Gingrich finishing a distant second. Only in Georgia did Newt beat Rick among conservatives. Elsewhere, it was Santorum: 36-12 in Vermont; 50-18 in Ohio; 53-22 in Tennessee; and 32-9 in Oklahoma.

No doubt a race without Gingrich would give Santorum a nice little bump in some northern states. And he would continue to dominate Romney in many Deep South states. But the rules, and the math, still favor Romney — even with a Gingrich withdrawal.

Reading my mind, Nate Silver helpfully did some figuring and came up with some numbers to show the effect of Gingrich dropping out of the race:

So suppose that you took those estimates from the Public Policy Polling surveys — Mr. Santorum gets 57 percent of Mr. Gingrich’s voters, Mr. Romney 27 percent, and Mr. Paul 16 percent — and redistributed Mr. Gingrich’s votes accordingly in the states that have already voted. Then you recalculated the delegate distribution based on the revised vote totals.

[...]

Calculating the delegate totals is more challenging. One issue is states like Iowa, in which the results reported by the news media are from a presidential-preference straw poll that is not directly tied to delegate selection. In these cases, I assumed that delegates were proportional to the straw poll results, even though they are picked though a separate process. Another is states that allocate some of their delegates by Congressional district. I was able to find district-by-district results for Georgia, Michigan, South Carolina and Ohio and make exact calculations for those states, but had to make some best guesses in Oklahoma and Tennessee.

With those qualifications in mind, this general result should hold: Mr. Romney would still be significantly ahead in the delegate count. I have him with 404 delegates versus 264 for Mr. Santorum and 71 for Mr. Paul.

Mr. Romney’s delegate total, in fact, is very slightly higher than it would have been before the redistribution of the vote. There are cases when the shift in votes costs him delegates, such as in winner-take-all districts, or when one of his opponents gains more votes and crosses a threshold that enables him to receive proportional delegates. But Mr. Romney is being given some votes under these assumptions — if not as many as Mr. Santorum — and that helps him in cases where the delegate allocation is more proportional. These factors came close to balancing out, but Mr. Romney gained about 10 delegates on net.

[...]

It would undoubtedly still help Mr. Santorum if Mr. Gingrich dropped out — especially if Mr. Gingrich endorsed Mr. Santorum and asked his delegates to vote for him. In fact, the combined total of Santorum and Gingrich delegates right now is quite similar to the number that we calculate Mr. Santorum would have won without Mr. Gingrich in the race.

But that would be just the first step for Mr. Santorum — at best, a necessary but not sufficient condition for a comeback. He’ll need to find some further means by which he can eat into Mr. Romney’s coalition, and he’ll need to do so in a hurry since 21 states have already voted.

The question isn’t what the race would have been without Gingrich in it. The question is what might the race look like going forward without him. In that, Santorum gets closer, but still needs 65% of the remaining delegates to get to 1144. And, barring a total collapse, Romney will win too many states for that to happen.

It would seem that Romney won’t get any respect from the media until he actually wins the nomination. Until then, we’ll continue to get nonsense like this from the pundits.

The RINO Hour of Power is back! Two of the most famous RINO’s on the web — Jazz Shaw and Rick Moran — are ready to rock your political world with their unique blend of humor, wit, and sharp analysis.

Joining Jazz and Rick will be Mary Katherine Ham, political writer and analyst. The gang will discuss the recent flap over contraception and how it is hurting the GOP’s chances to beat Obama in the fall.

Listen live at 8:00 PM eastern time. A podcast will be available shortly after the end of the show.

You can join us live by clicking the icon below or by clicking here.

I have a preview of the Ohio primary up at PJM this morning.

Unfortunately for Rick Santorum, even a win in Ohio may not give him a majority of delegates. This is because the former senator failed to gather enough signatures in three congressional districts to qualify for reaping any of the 9 delegates at stake. He also failed to get the required signatures in six other districts. As for the latter, he may qualify to get one or perhaps two delegates in those six districts, but not all three. All told, Santorum might win the state but lose up to 25% of the delegates. Under the rules, Santorum can petition the party to include those delegates in his totals at a later date, but if Romney wins the popular vote, even if Santorum won the congressional district, he might have trouble collecting them.

Santorum’s delegate problems notwithstanding, there is a race to be won in Ohio and to the winner probably goes the perception of victory on Super Tuesday. Ohio is a big state - a microcosm of the country itself. The percentages of race, class, ethnicity, and religion roughly mirror those found in the country at large. It stands to reason that if a candidate can cobble together a winning coalition in Ohio for the GOP primary, he has a good head start on doing the same thing for the general election.

No less than six polls have been published in the last 24 hours, with two showing Santorum slightly ahead, three with Romney leading, and one that shows a tie. All polls show the leader within the margin of error. These polls are essentially unchanged from surveys that were published Friday and Saturday. Might we deduce that Romney’s momentum may have stalled and that the race is truly deadlocked? Unless something very surprising happens, it is likely to be a long night on Tuesday to find out the answer to that question.

In truth, both candidates need Ohio very badly to claim victory on Super Tuesday. As far as the primaries are concerned, Santorum is ahead in Tennessee and Oklahoma and has a shot at winning the North Dakota and Alaska caucuses (Idaho, where caucuses are being held Tuesday night,  is 27% Mormon and will very likely fall to Romney). Romney will win his home state of Massachusetts, Vermont, and Virginia (where Santorum is not on the ballot), and very likely the Idaho caucus. It would seem that a win in Ohio would feed the perception that the candidate who wins Ohio has carried the day and will be the beneficiary of the positive press that would follow. This would obviously benefit Rick Santorum far more than Mitt Romney because of Santorum’s dwindling war chest, which, at the moment, depends instead on the buzz  generated by a perceived win on Super Tuesday rather than a campaign organization that can raise millions of dollars in a short period of time.

I think Romney squeaks by in Ohio although it will be very close. He will win the lion’s share of the delegates thanks to Santorum’s poor organization.

So is the race over? For all intents and purposes, yes. Even if Santorum wins in Ohio, Romney is going to increase his lead in actual delegates. He will have anywhere from a 150-250 delegate lead on Santorum by tomorrow morning. Since most of the GOP primaries now award their delegates based on a proportional system, Santorum would have to win decisively in many of the remaining primaries for him to catch Romney and reach the magic number of 1144.

Josh Putnam at FHQ:

FHQ has been saying since our Very Rough Estimate of the delegate counts a couple of weeks ago that Romney is the only candidate who has a chance to get there. But, of course, I have not yet shown my work. No, it isn’t mathematically impossible, but it would take either Gingrich or Santorum over-performing their established level of support in the contests already in the history books to such an extent that it is all but mathematically impossible. Santorum, for instance, has averaged 24.2% of the vote in all the contests. Since (and including) his February 7 sweep, he is averaging 34.7% of the vote. That is an improvement, but it is not nearly enough to get the former Pennsylvania senator within range of the 1144 delegates necessary to win the Republican nomination.

FHQ has modified that original model and put together a spreadsheet that not only better captures the rules in each state, but also allows for a constant level of support across all upcoming contests to be to be plugged in. Let’s begin by assuming that Santorum enters with 19 delegates and project a 50% level of support across all the remaining contests with bound delegates. This 50% would apply to not only the statewide vote but the congressional district votes as well. In other words, this would trigger a winner-take-all allocation of delegates in most states that have the conditional winner-take-all/proportional rules hinging on a candidate receiving a majority of the vote.

This is extremely generous. It assumes that candidate X would win nearly all the delegates in states that were not already directly proportional. Less generously, this does not count, like the previous version of this exercise, caucus states with unbound delegates (see Iowa, Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, etc.) nor automatic delegates who have yet to endorse.

Where does that leave Santorum? 1075 delegates.

But hold on. What if we add another layer to this by accounting for the thresholds for receiving delegates in the various states (typically 15% or 20%)? This would have the impact of reallocating delegates of those under the threshold in proportional environments to those candidates over the threshold. That would mean more delegates. If we set the number of candidates over the threshold to its lowest value — 2 candidates in 20% threshold states and 3 in 15% threshold states¹ — that maximizes the number of reallocated delegates.

Where does that leave Santorum? Again, this is assuming winner-take-all rules have been triggered in all the conditional states. It assumes that the likely bare minimum of candidates has crossed the thresholds to receive reallocated delegates. This is very generous.

1162 delegates. That’s cutting it awfully close.

One would think that Santorum will stay in the race at least until after the Missouri caucuses on March 24. Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana all hold primaries prior to that date and he may want to test Josh’s best case scenario before calling it quits.

And Gingrich? It’s a vanity run now for the former speaker. If he stays in after Super Tuesday, it will be out of spite for Romney and as an ego stroking exercise. Once the math sinks in, however, the calls for him to step aside will increase from party leaders.

Love him or hate him, Romney appears to be on a clear path to the nomination.

My latest is up at FPM and I cover the Russian presidential elections held yesterday.

Putin’s victory has come at a huge cost. It is sure to energize the growing opposition to his rule that has seen tens of thousands of Russians turn out for demonstrations in the dead of winter. There will also be a price to pay with regards to the steadily deteriorating relations with the United States. The US has strongly criticized the Russian government for its intransigence at the UN regarding the Syrian revolt, as well as openly siding with the protestors who are bitter over what is widely seen as a stolen parliamentary election last year.

In a victory speech on Sunday night, Putin addressed a large throng in Manezh square outside the Kremlin and, as his eyes brimmed with tears, proclaimed, “I promised that we would win and we have won! We have won in an open and honest struggle.”

Most independent and opposition election observers would vehemently disagree. The many charges of vote fraud include:

• “Carousel voting” where large groups of voters go from polling place to polling place to cast several ballots.

• “Centralized voting” where managers of factories, schools, hospitals, and other large organizations pressure employees to vote for a candidate. Ballots are sometimes collected at the workplace.

• The Guardian reports “Two women hover over a ballot box in the industrial Russian city of Cherepovets, stuffing in ballot after ballot.”

• As usual, the Caucasus vote was nearly 100% for Putin and United Russia.

• Videos from various parts of the country showed numerous other cases of ballot stuffing. The independent election monitoring group Golos reports 5,000 complaints of irregularities and fraud in the vote.

“Russia has no legitimate government or legitimate president,” opposition leader Alexey Navalny said. Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov said the election was “illegitimate, unfair and intransparent.”

But Putin defiantly told the cheering crowd of supporters that “this was not only the election of president of Russia, this was a very important test for all of us, for our entire people. This was a test for political maturity, for independence.”

Protestors are planning massive rallies in Moscow and other major cities beginning Monday. Putin has warned that “unsanctioned” protests will be dealt with harshly. Moscow police — 35,000 will be on the streets on Monday — have called up 6,500 reserves and plans a show of force to prevent independent groups — angry at protest organizers who have scheduled a sanctioned demonstration far from the Kremlin — from marching to Manezh Square and pitching tents, imitating the “Occupy” movements in various western countries. A popular anti-Putin blogger has vowed to lead the unsanctioned protest, saying, “People need to go out on the streets and not leave until their demands are met.”

I ask later in the article why did Putin feel the need to cheat? Pre-election polls had him winning a huge victory with more than 55% of the vote.

Is it a problem with self esteem? Insecurity? The guy has pulled some crazy and bizarre stunts over the years. Remember when he walked up to a young boy, raised his shirt, and kissed him on his bare stomach? He is often seen shirtless and performing some kind of manly act.

He always looks ill at ease too. I would say Vladimir Putin is a man who is not comfortable in his own skin and needs constant reassurance. Hence, pulling off fraudulent elections that raise his margin of victory.

No matter. We’re stuck with him for 6 more years - at least.

Since it’s Sunday, how about a little non-political distraction? Besides, I love cats and any opportunity that presents itself where I can tweak dog owners a bit is welcome.

In an article by a young intern at The New Republic, Perry Stein writes about the fact that posting cat pictures or writing about cats will bring more readers and links than writing about dogs. But why is that?

But the reason that cats have catapulted to cyber-fame isn’t purely biological: There are social factors at play as well. Steve Dale, a cat behavior consultant and pet journalist, told me that cat aficionados have been particularly drawn to the Internet because they lack other public safety valves where they can express their affection. “In the world of cats, there is no dog park,” Dale says. “For cat owners, the dog park is the Internet.”

Indeed, the Internet isn’t only a high-volume marketplace of cat memes-it’s also home to very intense communities of cat owners, who gather to share stories and seek answer about their pets. Mieshelle Nagelschneider, author of Random House’s forthcoming book Cat Whisperer, said that cat owners, have taken to the Internet as a means to actively, and collectively, reverse the stigma attached to them: Cat owners have long felt that they don’t get the respect of their counterparts who have dogs, even though there are more domesticated felines (a total of 86 million, according to the Humane Society) than canines. “I think the web has helped emerge this undiscovered beachfront property, that is cat owners,” Nagelschneider says.

There may be more deep-seated psychological responses at play as well. Cats’ famously reserved and withholding personalities naturally seduce us into paying closer attention to them. And unlike humans and dogs, cats are not only natural predators-they are also prey, a reason why cats often appear reserved and stealthy. Cats’ inherent vulnerability, Orvell says, naturally solicits our sympathy, and even puts us in touch with our own mortality. “There’s a complex set of reactions to cats, and the videos bring that into play,” Orvell said.

Don’t get me wrong. I love dogs. They are loyal, loving, smart, and wonderful companions whether you live alone or in a family setting.

Cats are otherworldly. Ultimately, I think that in the back of most cat lovers’ minds is the idea that their pet is an alien species, visiting earth for a while in order to capture and captivate us with their strange and wonderful antics. Their intensity, their grace and agility, their ability to shamelessly manipulate us — so unlike dogs, unlike any other animal on earth.

In Theodore H. White’s autobiography “America in Search of Itself,” the author relates his experience in the 1950’s when he worked for the old Collier’s magazine and was asked by management to investigate why the magazine was bleeding readership and going bankrupt.

White examined statistics that didn’t tell him what he was to find out later; that television was replacing the mass market magazines like Colliers,  Saturday Evening Post, Harper’s, and other national news/feature publications that reined for 75 years as venues where advertisers could sell their wares to a national audience. But White found something I think is fascinating; if Colliers ran a cover that featured a cat, newstand sales soared by more than a million. If they featured a dog or puppy, sales dropped. Probably something akin to that phenomenon is at work on the internet.

Someone once asked me what cats are thinking about when they look you straight in the eye and stare. “Lunch” I answered. The Geico commercial about the couple who took in a black panther rather than spend the money on a home security system is revealing in this respect. The panther sits atop the dresser eying the couple lying wide awake in bed, terrified. His stare is both frightening and mesmerizing. Is part of that the fact that for 3 million years, hominids were one of the major food sources of the ancestors of cats? Are our brains hard wired to fear and worship the beasts?

In the end, cats are what they are and many of us - about 86 million - try not to think why.

Besides, I’d like to see a dog look as relaxed and unconcerned as my Lucky.

Andrew Breitbart, dead suddenly at the age of 43, was not my cup of tea. He was too strident, too much the serial exaggerator, and was far too emotional to argue logically or in a reasoned manner.

And yet, I wrote this at American Thinker this morning:

Ed Morrissey writes at Hot Air that Andrew Breitbart was “our Merry Prankster”:

He was willing to take risks and look foolish in order to make a point or win an argument, with more courage than most would muster. No one who saw it will ever forget how he seized the podium at Anthony Weiner’s press conference and demanded vindication from media outlets who had been disparaging him and defending Weiner when the former Congressman got caught literally with his pants down. Few men have had the kind of impact Andrew did in such a short time, and he leaves behind a media empire that is still gaining strength.

Breitbart had a zest for political combat. He reveled in being a polarizing figure. He had a genius for getting the goat of the opposition and never apologized for his swashbuckling style of journalism.

In the ancient world, opposing kings preparing for war would send out their champions to engage in single combat, sometimes to decide the outcome of the conflict, more often to indicate which side God was on. Andrew Breitbart was a conservative champion. But instead of riding out to meet a single warrior, he gladly sallied forth - sometimes alone - to combat the entire left. Along the way, he picked up many allies - and made many enemies. Win or lose, it seemed that most of the time, God was indeed on his side.

But if “A man’s greatness can be measured by his enemies,” so, too can it be judged by his friends. Don’t listen to the prattling left today. Simply remember a man, made for his time, unique in his abilities, who left us for a far, far better place.

Technically speaking, Mr. Breitbart was not a “journalist” in what we might think of as the “traditional” sense. That’s fine. The entire point of Mr. Breitbart’s existence was to destroy “traditional” journalism, rightly seeing much of it as biased, shallow, manipulative, and elitist. Like the milieu in which he chose to operate — the internet — Breitbart’s websites were hit or miss operations. He could be as manipulative of images and copy as any mainstream journalist (The NAACP video was discretely edited to make the DoA employee look like a racist when in fact, her remarks were taken wildly — and deceitfully — out of context.)

But these tactics had been used by the mainstream media against the right for decades. And this poses the question of just what kind of journalist Breitbart was?

In the grand tradition of Tom Paine, Philip Freneau, Horace Greely, Hunter Thompson, and Gore Vidal, Breitbart was a master polemicist. His goal was not so much to inform, as it was to chastise the wicked. His advocacy for conservatives and conservative causes was carried out with a zestfulness and razor sharp humor that is often lacking on the right. In an age when most activists from both sides are dour-faced, bitter partisans, Breitbart brought a smile with his snarl. He endeared himself to many on the right for his unflinching, giving-as-good-as-he-got attitude toward the opposition. In short, he gave movement conservatives heart to persevere in the face of withering and usually unfair criticism from their adversaries.

There was nothing gentle about Breitbart in the public arena. He saw politics as a street fight where there were few rules and just about everything and everyone was fair game. Mudslinging, innuendo, character assassination, and exaggerated controversies were his stock in trade — just as it is for most of the left. While many of us bemoan the loss of civility and comity in politics and government, Breitbart didn’t care. If this is the way the game was to be played, to hell with trying to change it, he would go them one better. The difference between Breitbart and his enemies is that Andrew never made any pretense that he was playing by the rules, or seeking accommodation, or even trying to persuade. His opponents piously, and hypocritically criticized him for using exactly the same tactics that they themselves employed with as much relish as Breitbart enjoyed.

He lived his life and plied his trade without apologies - despite there being times when one should have been forthcoming. That, too, was part of the game. There weren’t any apologies coming from his opponents when he got something right or broke an important story that liberals would largely ignore. By that standard, Breitbart didn’t need to feel sorry or express regret. If the left was going to play the game by their own set of rules, Andrew would enthusiastically accept that challenge — and beat them anyway.

Breitbart’s legacy will be a more democratized political conversation. This is not a perfect good. Few things are. But it’s a damn sight better than what the media moguls, the establishmentarian pundits, and the elitist snobs created and zealously maintained for decades; a clubbish, narrow-minded, and out of touch press that deliberately suppressed viewpoints and personalities that failed to meet its means-test for permissible dialogue. The riot of voices and opinions unleashed by Breitbart on his 5 websites — and currently being eagerly copied by others — have blasted the ancien regime and changed the media forever.

For one so young to have accomplished so much in so short a time is a rare and wonderful thing, indeed.

First of all, take a deep breath.

Secondly, recognize this for what it is: An academic exercise. I’ve heard ethicists trying to justify the Holocaust but that doesn’t mean they favor it. This is what ethicists do for a living; they ask questions.

By seeking to expand or limit the definition of a “person,” their arguments clarify other real life ethical situations. Not that babies already out of the womb should be murdered. Again, they are not arguing that position. But rather, they are presenting hypothetical arguments for discussion that might apply to other ethical decisions. This is about form, not content. It’s about the shape of ethical arguments, not their substance.

In this case, it’s a silly game played by those who aren’t much interested in academic freedom as much as they are in their own personal aggrandizement. I can’t believe that the authors of the paper didn’t realize the firestorm of controversy that would erupt. They easily could have taken a different hypothetical to illustrate the form of their arguments. The fact is, they have needlessly offended millions of people — as those ethicists who have created exercises justifying other horrific events have done in the past.

Here’s an hysterical overreaction by by the National Catholic Register. The gentleman obviously doesn’t understand the field of medical ethics and how those ethics are derived in a world that is incredibly complex. The melding of technology, knowledge, and personal morality in medicine have put enormous burdens on doctors and other health care providers that strain the limits of our capacity to act ethically. When does life begin? When does life end? What is “quality of life?” These are not simple questions, despite what some on both sides of the issue believe. In the real world, doctors have to define those answers every single day. Each patient is different. Each case demands an individual evaluation. They look to the work of ethicists not so much for answers, but rather as a way to make their own judgments regarding life and death.

I understand the depth of feeling this exercise has evoked. But it is not evidence of a “slippery slope” for the simple reason that no one is arguing the position that, in the real world, babies already born have no absolute right to life. It is a terrible hypothetical — much like the way some view the famous Quantum Mechanics hypothetical of Schrodinger’s cat. But it has no practical application outside of how the hypothetical is argued — not what it is arguing.

Making an effort to understand why ethicists would ask such a question — and rightly criticizing the authors of the paper for their insensitivity — is what is needed here. Not over the top hellfire and damnation for academics who raise troubling questions about medicine in the 21st century.

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