Right Wing Nut House

Not very gentlemanly words but as my sainted father used to say, when invited to a knife fight, bring a gun.

I am surprised, shocked, and in a towering rage over the reaction to my post from yesterday about the faggot remark made by She who shall remain nameless always and forever. Not from the left. Hell, for all their supposed smarts, the left is more predictable than a Chicago Cubs losing season and less original than cloned calf.

My beef is with the shallow, ignorant, remarkably stupid righties who not only defend Coulter, but cheer her on. Their explanations vary but center on the idea that she defies “political correctness” and anyone who criticizes her is just an old fuddy-duddy, politically correct priss.

And that’s not my only sin. Evidently, since some liberals agree with me, I have become unclean! I am no longer a “real conservative.” I am infused with lefty group think and am only trying to curry favor by groveling before my enemies begging for approbation.

I feel compelled to point out that I was a “real conservative” before most of these inbreds were in books. And “real conservatives” don’t demonstrate such towering ignorance as this commenter at Hot Air. A few brief excerpts:

Conservatism has lost already. Homosexuality is now accepted by all “right-thinking” people. Would everyone be this upset at someone who eats his own mucous being called a booger-eater? Homosexual behavior has become more pervasive and open in the past 2 decades. Is it going to dry up and go away just because we’re nice to homosexuals? Can one cure cancer by thinking happy thoughts? Are homosexuals rushing to get psychological treatment because they aren’t made to feel bad about their illness? The difference between the open and derisive bigotry against Southerners and against homosexuality, is that there’s nothing wrong with being Southern, but there is something wrong with being a sexual deviant.

Did I fall asleep and wake up in the 19th century? Or maybe even farther back? I think I see Torquemada rubbing his hands together in anticipation of racking the next homosexual who happens to fall into his grasp.

But wait! It gets even better:

The current political battle in the U.S. is no longer a struggle between two allied political parties. It is a battle for political control of the nation, akin to the battle that created the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and Red China. Read some history as to how Rome went from Republic to Empire, and you might see some more parallels to the current political struggle in the U.S.

Civility is fine for a court of law, a debate society, or a normal political campaign. But that’s not what we’re fighting now. The war is between the America that was and the socialist cesspit that will be.

You may not be willing to hate the enemy, but they’re more than willing to hate us. One truthful, much maligned comment by Ms Coulter vs thousands of vitriolic hate-filled comments throughout the left and the MSM demonstrate the truth of that.

To borrow a line from Col. Robert Lee Scott: “You’ve got to learn to hate.”

A few months back, I did a post asking whether or not the left actually believes it when they compare Bush to Hitler. I concluded that yes indeed, they really do find common ground between Bush and a man who gassed 6 million Jews, murdered another couple of million, deliberately started a war that killed 80 million, and countenanced the existence of a massive state run terror apparatus that ruthlessly oppressed tens of millions living in captive nations.

Yep. Sounds like a no brainer to me.

Similarly, our righty friend here actually believes it when he says that America is a “socialist cesspool” and that our electoral battles can be compared to the struggle for power by the Commies in Russia and the fascists in Germany.

Such delusional thinking deserves recognition - and a quick trip to the asylum in a strait jacket.

But what really got my goat were some of the “conservatives” on an email list that I unsubscribed from this morning. Yesterday, I left this explanation as to why She who shall remain nameless always forever should be condemned:

The term she used hurts the feelings of other people - deeply. It scars them. It is not like me calling you an idiot or you calling me a dumbs**t. It is beyond that. It’s even beyond saying something very hurtful about your mother or father.

BUT THERE ARE LIMITS. THERE MUST BE. And Coulter has exceeded those limits. And not for any other cause except her own self-aggrandizement.

A few choice responses to my call for empathy:

1. I’ll be sure to keep a close eye on the suicide statistics among homosexuals in the next months, so as to not miss their reaction to this deeply scarring, emotionally destructive commonly used descriptor of a “wimp.”

Since when is faggot the new f-word? People saying “f*** Bush” get half as much attention as this.

What is the common denominator in all of these messages as well as others that I’ve seen both in the comments on my post and other posts?

The people making the comments have a dead spot where the empathy gene should be plugged in. The wiring that connects being able to gauge an emotional reaction to what you say to the part of the brain that handles communication is either non existent or burned out.

A marmoset has more empathy than these people. And I hasten to add that empathy is NOT political correctness. It is, as my previously sainted father told me, the surest sign of a gentleman.

Gentlemanliness may be something of an outmoded concept to some but there is much praiseworthy in aspiring to be a gentleman. Good manners, a solicitousness toward women and children, and a moral grounding in one’s life are all part of what should be the outward manifestation of an adult man’s personae. Indeed, it is an artificial construct but a vital one nonetheless. It greases the wheels of discourse if the person you are talking to knows when to listen and when to keep their mouth shut - something that is sorely lacking in political discourse today. And the only way to do that successfully is to be aware of the emotional temperature of the party with which you are discoursing.

For those brain dead righties who don’t quite understand what I’m trying to say, here it is in a nutshell; any insult you give that goes to the nub of who someone is; the color of their skin, their belief in whatever God they worship, the heritage from which they sprang, or the most personal and private part of an individual - their sexual identity - cleaves very deeply and causes the kind a psychic pain I daresay you would be loathe to experience. And is unnecessary to boot. Very rarely do any of those attributes in an individual bear upon the issues at hand. And even when they do, another gentlemanly characteristic - simple, common courtesy - should keep you from slinging that kind of mud.

I’m not saying that John Edwards was hurt by these remarks, That’s silly. Anyone running for President has skin so thick a jackhammer would have a hard time finding a vein to deliver an IV. But you are mistaken if you don’t believe that some gay people - perhaps many - experienced the kind of psychic pain I referred to above. That’s because she meant the term as an insult - and because she knew it would get a rise out her audience.

As far as answering the charge that I’m not a “real” conservative I’ll say this; anyone who thinks being a conservative is simply a matter of believing in low taxes, small government, a strong defense, and family values is shallow indeed. Yes, the culture needs defending from the ravages of the left - something I find common ground with social conservatives on a regular basis. But this defense of the culture should not and cannot come at the expense of people. If you decry the “homosexual lifestyle” are you not also railing against the people who practice it? Disagreeing with hate crime statutes and the idea of giving gays statutory protection under the Civil Rights Act are political issues. But accusing gays of being “sinners” and “deviants?” This is beyond the pale and should have no place in our political conversations.

Conservatism used to be about fighting for individual liberties against the creeping power of the state. It is not about using the power of the state to curtail people’s liberties you disagree with or disapprove of nor is it about trying to impose one set of values on everyone else. It is not “libertarianism” to believe the state should stay the hell out of people’s bedrooms - gay or straight - nor dictate who someone has the right to fall in love with. Nor should the state be peering over my shoulder while I’m enjoying classic porn at my favorite internet movie site. This kind of individual liberty should be a matter of agreement by all - left or right.

So I would say to those on the right who question my conservative credentials or believe that it is somehow too PC to weigh carefully how ones words are received by others that perhaps it is you who should re-examine your own beliefs for deviation from the path of conservative enlightenment.

Who knows? A little introspection on your part may yield surprising results.

UPDATE

Goldstein tackles the left for pompously calling on conservatives to denounce such untoward behavior:

Personally, I don’t feel any need whatever to issue public condemnations of Ann Coulter—though were you to ask me, I’d readily tell you that her remark was juvenile, and that it could well be seen as homophobic (though I am in no position to peer into Coulter’s soul; and of course, “faggot”—though tied to homosexuality—has long been wielded as a slur against masculinity, which has little to do with sexual preference, in much the same way “pussy” is used). And the reason I feel no need to publicly condemn Coulter is that Coulter has never spoken for me.

And, as anyone who reads my site regularly knows, I champion the primacy of the individual, and so I react to such posts as Simianbrains—which are merely passive-aggressive attempts to police the kind of speech he finds offensive, while tethering it to a political position he finds unappealing—with what I believe to be an appropriate level of scorn.

Of course, your idea of an “appropriate level of scorn,” and my idea of an “appropriate level of scorn,” are quite a bit different than Mr. Goldstein’s.

Read the whole thing.

Holy Christ! It’s a good thing that conservative bloggers have another target this weekend. Otherwise, Bill Maher would probably be given whatever the blog equivalent would be of a bath in boiling oil followed by a good, solid racking:

As the discussion moved to the attempted assassination of Vice President Cheney last week, Maher asked his panel why it was necessary for the Huffington Post to remove comments by readers concerning their disappointment that the attempt failed. As the conversation ensued, Maher said one of the most disgraceful and irresponsible things uttered on a major television program since Bush was elected.

In a nutshell, the host said the world would be a safer place if the assassination attempt succeeded. And, he even had the nerve to reiterate it. Here’s the deplorable sequence of events for those that have the stomach for it.

What follows is a verbatim transcript of Maher, Barney Frank, Joe Scarborough, and John Ridley discussing the issue. Please note the reaction of the audience:

Maher: What about the people who got onto the Huffington Post – and these weren’t even the bloggers, these were just the comments section – who said they, they expressed regret that the attack on Dick Cheney failed.

Maher: That’s a funny joke. But, seriously, if this isn’t China, shouldn’t you be able to say that? Why did Arianna Huffington, my girlfriend, I love her, but why did she take that off right away?

A “FUNNY JOKE” THAT THE BOMB WAS WASTED?

Maher’s “sense of humor” leaves much to be desired. Perhaps Bill could come up with a couple of other knee slappers about assassination. How funny would it be if a stage light dropped right on his head in the middle of one of his shows? That would be hysterical. Think about it. The physical comedy potential of watching a 200 pound light drop 30 feet and land smack on his noggin is incredible. The look on his face alone might get him an Emmy. He’d be right up there with Buster Keaton, the Three Stooges, and Chevy Chase. Maybe he could even manage to slip on a banana peel at the same time.

Now that would deserve “laughter and applause.”

And why is the fall back position of liberals like Maher that the poor sots who were cheering on the jihadi trying to kill Cheney were the real victims - victims of censorship? That’s loony as Barney Frank patiently tries to explain:

Ridley: It’s one thing to say you hate Dick Cheney, which applies to his politics. It’s another thing to say, “I’m sorry he didn’t die in an explosion.” And I think, you know…

Frank: But you exercise control over the show the way that she does over her blog.

Maher doesn’t get it. He also apparently doesn’t get what it is to be a decent human being.

Maher: But I have zero doubt that if Dick Cheney was not in power, people wouldn’t be dying needlessly tomorrow. (applause)

Maher: I’m just saying if he did die, other people, more people would live. That’s a fact.

First of all, no it is not a “fact” that more people would live if Dick Cheney died in that blast. Where on earth did that come from? What evidence is there that this would be so? Zero. Zilch. Zip. Nada.

It’s stupid. It’s beyond hatred and into obsessive, paranoid loathing to posit such a silly, puerile notion. In fact, if one were to give the idea a few seconds thought, my guess would be that the very next day, a helluva lot more people would die - almost all of them jihadis as we would almost certainly have told Musharraf to go to hell and bombed the crap out of the protected Taliban camps in the tribal areas of the northern provinces of Pakistan. So not only is Maher a miserable excuse for a human being, he’s an ignoramus to boot.

And what about that audience, eh? You go guys.

I did like Barney Frank and Joe Scarborough’s reaction - like they couldn’t believe what they were hearing. At least that shows them to be reasonably human. Why they didn’t get up and leave the lickspittle all by himself is beyond me. But reading Maher’s nonsense, it’s a chore just to keep my jaw from hitting the floor.

As for reaction from the left? Um…their attention is occupied elsewhere so we can’t be too hard on them. But somehow, I don’t think we’ll get Lambchop to write a 3,000 word screed condemning Maher’s “hate speech.” After all, calling someone a pejorative regarding their sexual orientation is so much juicier than the same old boring assassination fantasies about the national leaders of the United States of America.

UPDATE

Now this is a funny assassination fantasy:

Of course, by that same logic, were Maher to expire while eating a small mound of coke off the navel of some seventeen-year-old wannabe pop star, more people would probably watch HBO. And that’s just A FACT!

Allah:

Exit question one: will Cheney embarrass himself by trying to turn this into a fundraising gimmick? Exit question two: given the left’s (appropriate) outrage at Coulter’s attempt to question Edwards’s masculinity, should we expect their snickering about the size of her adam’s apple to stop anytime soon?

Just so we can get it out of the way and deny any of you lefties an opening.

1. Yes.

2. No.

3. Yes

4. Yes

If you actually need the questions, go here and here. I’ve answered them before and don’t feel like repeating myself. Question #2, if too obscure, is “Don’t you think Ann Coulter is typical of all conservatives?” Since every single conservative blogger I have seen this morning has roundly condemned her as well as most going so far as to believe she should never be invited to a respectable political gathering again, any broad brush painting done by liberals can easily be dismissed for what it is; rank stupidity.

Instead of repeating what everyone agrees about Coulter, let us take a moment to marvel at the Pavlovian response that Coulter not only expected but intended with her untoward remark about John Edwards. She is a “controversy slut” as my good friend Jay so succinctly put it. Why in God’s name the left falls for it and why the right then feels the need to respond is absolutely nuts! This is what she wants. She is playing us like a violin - right and left. And the fact that this despicable woman then gets to sit at home and laugh at all of us makes my blood boil.

Well, she’s our problem and it’s time for conservatives to solve it once and for all. If liberals want to help us with her emasculation, fine. Otherwise, shut the F**k up and stop ginning up the outrage over what anyone with half a brain can see is a deliberate attempt by Coulter to garner cheap headlines and publicity. If you want to be stupid enough to play into her hands and jump through the hoops she sets up for you, don’t expect conservatives to follow.

I urge everyone - right and left - to take the following actions:

1. Never write another blog post about Ann Coulter no matter how outrageous, cruel, or bigoted her language.

2. Immediately write the Presidents of Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN demanding that they refuse to schedule Coulter on any show for any reason on their networks.

3. Write the editor of Human Events and demand that they drop her column.

4. If her column appears in your local newspaper, write a letter to the editor demanding that they drop her column.

5. If you see her writings in any on line or print publication, write the editor and demand that they stop carrying her columns.

6. Any upcoming forum in which she is scheduled as a speaker or panel participant, write a letter to the organizers and make it clear that the reason you are not attending is due to Coulter’s presence.

The goal is to starve the witch of the attention she craves. I’ll have more on this later today, including an on-line petition we can sign and send to the cable nets and a report on my progress.

Enough is enough. I am sick to death of this woman leading people to believe that she speaks for conservatives. She doesn’t speak for me. And if you believe that she speaks for you, or if you were one of those mouth breathers who applauded when she used that disgusting epithet deliberately to hurt other people (not just John Edwards), then you are hopelessly beyond the pale yourself and would do well to examine exactly what you believe a conservative is and what is acceptable political discourse.

Anyone who reads this site knows I am not a wallflower when it comes to lashing out at my political foes. But there are limits. And Coulter regularly crosses them - not because she doesn’t know any better but because she deliberately uses hate language to get a rise out of the left and get the rest of us talking about her.

I will no longer be a willing cog in her publicity machine. And if we conservatives really care about our movement and the people who represent it, then we will do everything in our power to limit the exposure of this ghastly person who sells hate like Frosted Flakes and laughs at all of us while carrying her loot all the way to the bank.

UPDATE

Ha! Mark Coffey writes what many of us are thinking:

Jeez, Ann, thanks; predictably, the lefty blogs are all a-twitter, as if something newsworthy had actually happened here (can a massive Glenn Greenwald denunciation of the right be far behind?).

Indeed, I can just see Lambchop hunched over his computer, his stern visage growing darker as he pounds the keyboard relentlessly. No doubt, His Puppetress will tell us all what it really means and that no matter how loudly Coulter is denounced by conservatives, we all secretly want to sleep with her and make little conservative babies.

What a humorless twit.

Our crazy Uncle Andy writes something I tried to say yesterday about conservatives:

It’s a party that wants nothing to do with someone like me. All I heard and saw was loathing: loathing of Muslims, of “illegals,” of gays, of liberals, of McCain. The most painful thing for me was the sight of so many young people growing up believing that this is conservatism. I feel like an old-style Democrat in 1968.

I wouldn’t go quite that far (’68 Democrat? More like a ‘64 Democrat with LBJ and The Happy Warrior) but it is disconcerting to see these college kids with about as much empathy as a Three Toed Sloth.

UPDATE II

I have just sent the following email to Jonathan Klein, President of CNN. I plan on sending similar emails to the Presidents of MSNBC and Fox News:

To: Jonathan Klein, President, CNN

http://www.rightwingnuthouse.com

One of the great things about being a conservative is that contrariness is not only expected but, in some ways, encouraged. I suppose it comes from a lifetime of questioning a liberal culture that has been the dominant fact of living in this country for almost 50 years. However, once you start questioning the world around you, it’s hard to stop with simply critiquing your opponent’s positions and personalities. Challenging your own assumptions by investigating and weighing critical arguments from the other side is a necessity if you wish to remain true to yourself and what you believe.

This is not “wishy washiness” nor is it faithlessness toward conservatives or conservative ideology. Coming to the realization that the prosecution of the Iraq War has been horribly botched or that George Bush has shown weakness and incompetent leadership on issues from immigration to homeland security does not make me any less of a conservative than a Republican partisan who supports the President down the line and brooks no criticism of his performance in office. And I will challenge anyone who says otherwise.

The kind of conservatism practiced by many bloggers and their readers today is unrecognizable to me and I suppose many of my generation who came of political age during the late 1970’s and early 80’s. It is impossible to recapture the excitement, the intellectual ferment, the sheer joy of going to work in Reagan’s Washington during that time. After being in the political wilderness for so long, it was pretty heady stuff to suddenly realize that your ideas actually mattered, that your beliefs were being validated almost on a daily basis.

Back then, conservatives didn’t pay much attention to their differences. And believe me, there were plenty of them. The religious conservatives had only recently organized and flexed some muscle at the ballot box although I don’t think too many other conservative factions gave them much thought. Ronald Reagan certainly didn’t - at least not in any other context than giving lip service to their agenda.

Some may forget that Reagan was hardly a social conservative in the George W. Bush mold and while his rhetoric gave them comfort, his actual support for Constitutional amendments banning abortion, allowing school prayer, as well as early efforts to ignite the culture wars was tepid to non existent. Like FDR who managed the Henry Wallace wing of the Democratic party by adopting some of their class warfare rhetoric and appointing a few of them to positions in government, Reagan used the electoral raw material of the religious right but kept them somewhat at arms length.

I can recall my bemusement when discussing the religious right with my conservative friends. We didn’t dismiss them out of hand but saw the Jerry Falwell’s of the world as loose cannons, liable to say something that reflected badly on the President at any time. All of us were more enamored of conservatives like Irving Kristol whose intellectual journey from left to right mirrored that of so many of my generation. And we admired many of the new conservatives who had come to Washington; back bench Republicans like Newt Gingrich, Vin Weber, and Bob Walker - all smart, savvy politicians who didn’t shy away from combat with either the liberals in Congress or their own leadership.

All that has changed now. The social conservatives have become the most reliable Republican voting bloc in the conservative coalition. They dominate many state and local parties. They have done a fantastic job of organizing to the point that their issues now are at the forefront of the national Republican agenda. They engineered the Congressional majorities in the 1990’s and elected George Bush twice. And they have made themselves into the shock troops for Republican candidates in primaries and elections.

In the meantime, conservatives like me feel left in the dust, We occupy an intellectual backwater and feel out of the Republican mainstream. Like children at a big family gathering, we are sitting at the “little people’s table,” casting jealous glances over where the adults are sitting and cursing the fact that we aren’t old enough to take part in the conversation. The differences that didn’t seem to matter a generation ago now take on an entirely different coloring as politicians wishing to run for national office now shade their past positions on social issues to reflect the electoral realities of being a Republican and running in a party dominated by litmus tests and virtual loyalty oaths.

Just what kind of conservative am I? Am I a “traditional” conservative? A “libertarian” conservative? A “moderate” conservative? A “neo-conservative?” In my intellectual wanderings over the past quarter century I have probably at one time or another been all of those things and more. I gave up trying to peg myself years ago, realizing the futility in trying to define something that has no definition. I am what I am and believe what I believe and those who wish to label me as “this kind of conservative” or “that kind of conservative” will have to deal with it.

But it evidently matters to conservatives who dominate the internet as well as those attending the CPAC conference in Washington this weekend. Straying from orthodoxy as laid down by God knows who - sort of like Justice Marshall’s observation on obscenity being something not definable but recognized when seen - will almost certainly draw withering criticism your way. One can attribute it to the current state of our polarized politics where ideological apostasy in either party generates a fear bordering on panic that the other side will benefit by your abandonment of this or that sacred issue. This is the genesis of lock step liberalism and conformist conservatism. In politics as in war, everyone has got to carry a gun and march into battle toward the enemy. Anything less is treason.

The fact is, everyone knows that the old conservative coalition is a ghost of its former self. When 20% of self identified conservatives actually voted for Democrats in the 2006 election, you know that the right has splintered and that putting the pieces back together may be impossible.

The fault line has always been between the social conservatives and those who consider themselves “libertarian” or these days, “traditional” conservatives. Writing 4 years ago in The American Conservative, James Antle wrote:

The combination of libertarian and traditionalist tendencies in modern American conservatism was due in part to the need to gather together that ragtag band of intellectuals lingering outside the New Deal consensus who were opposed to the rising tide of left-liberalism. An alliance made out of political necessity, it drew some measure of intellectual consistency from the efforts of the late National Review senior editor Frank Meyer. He argued for the compatibility of innate individual freedom with transcendent morality, emphasizing that liberty has no meaning apart from virtue, but virtue cannot be coerced. Meyer saw libertarianism and traditionalism as two different emphases within conservatism, neither completely true without being moderated by the other. In fact, he held either extreme to be “self-defeating: truth withers when freedom dies, however righteous the authority that kills it; and free individualism uninformed by moral value rots at its core and soon brings about conditions that pave the way for surrender to tyranny.”

“Fusionism” was the name for Meyer’s synthesis, and while it was never without critics, it worked well enough for most conservatives and for the development of an American Right that counted anti-statism and traditional morality as its main pillars, alongside support for a strong national-defense posture. When Ronald Reagan became the Republican presidential nominee in 1980, this even became the basis of the GOP platform: smaller government, family values, and peace through strength.

Antle notes that the single unifying factor that created this fusion between social and more libertarian conservatives was the cold war. The fact that the Democrats had abandoned any pretense of confronting the Soviets or maintaining a strong national defense meant that many former Democrats - myself included - felt perfectly comfortable in joining a coalition that stressed standing up to the Communists and rebuilding our national defense and whose rhetoric that promised American renewal and ascendancy was a refreshing change from the cynical, defeatist words coming from the left.

But from what I’ve seen coming out of the CPAC conference - beyond the eager college kids and bloggers as well as activists who make up the guts of the Republican party - is evidence that my kind of conservatism really isn’t welcome anymore.

Perusing the agenda one is struck by how social issues and social activism seem to dominate. Even a seminar entitled “Strategies for a Bold Conservative Future” - which I would ordinarily be interested in attending - has as its participants Phyllis Schlafly, Kenneth Blackwell and Richard Viguerie. To posit the notion that these three able and intelligent people, all closely identified with social conservatism, would have much to say about building a conservative future that I would be very interested in is silly. (John Fund, a more traditional conservative, also participated).

And that is but one example. I realize the reason for this; the stars of the conservative movement, those who are best known, are social conservatives and that in order to goose attendance, it is best to have well known people running the seminars. But it points up the fact that the gulf between people like myself who don’t believe social issues should be such a dominant factor in the conservative movement and those who believe they should has grown to where it may be impossible to re-unite the factions even long enough to win elections.

Libertarians have already largely abandoned the Republican party and rarely agree with conservatives about anything - even the war. Traditional “small government” conservatives are disgusted and stayed home in droves during the 2006 election. (In 2004, conservatives made up 34% of those voting and fell to only 20% in 2006.) Neo-conservatives have largely been discredited and were never really a large part of the coalition anyway.

Whither me?

A third party is out of the question. Such would be a wasted vote in my opinion. I suppose if the Democrats keep tacking to the right, they may eventually capture many of the libertarian conservatives - especially if they can demonstrate fiscal responsibility. But for quasi-traditional, semi-neocon, somewhat social conservatives like me, I may be stuck at the table eating with the little kids for quite a while.

UPDATE

Michelle Malkin is at CPAC and will be updating all day I’m sure.

Ed Morrissey on McCain’s absence:

McCain has gone out of his way to stress his conservative credentials, especially on hot-button topics such as abortion and the war. If that’s true, then what does he have to fear from a conference of conservatives predisposed to his positions? In fact, if he claims to represent conservatives, why should he fear speaking in front of a group of them?

We debated this quite a bit on Blogger’s Corner yesterday (which is somewhat misnamed, since we occupy a row and not a corner, but that’s another story).Someone made the point that the eventual nominee needs the people in this conference to act as foot soldiers in the general election. What does it say to those foot soldiers if that nominee is too afraid to face them because he might get booed — a slim possibility in any case? How does that nominee inspire loyalty in those he explicitly spurned out of the gate?

I think most analysts now think McCain’s campaign is stumbling at this point and whether it can right itself to challenge the Rudy juggernaut is now a legitimate question.

McCain is the closest thing to an “establishment” candidate the GOP has. He has lined up impressive endorsements in the early primary states but has yet to excite many grass roots activists. But he is still a war hero and many establishment types are grateful to him for sticking with Bush in 2004 and not pulling a Hagel. How that translates, as Ed wonders, into support in a caucus state like Iowa or a state like New Hampshire where volunteers are crucial is unknown.

UPDATE

Thanks to UberMitch in the comments who corrects my obscenity attribution above. It was Potter Stewart not Thurgood Marshall who said about obscenity, “I’ll know it when I see it.”

Interesting aside: In Woodward’s book The Brethren, the justices evidently looked forward to cases where they got to decide if a specific movie was obscene. Some, like Justice Douglas didn’t think anything was obscene so he never showed up for the screenings. But the other justices didn’t mind viewing the porn one bit.

This post will be short - relatively speaking. That’s because I await with bated breath the announcements that will soon flow from governments around the world about sharing technology that they’ve been able to wangle from alien visitors.

No. Not visitors from another country.

A former Canadian defense minister is demanding governments worldwide disclose and use secret alien technologies obtained in alleged UFO crashes to stem climate change, a local paper said Wednesday.

“I would like to see what (alien) technology there might be that could eliminate the burning of fossil fuels within a generation … that could be a way to save our planet,” Paul Hellyer, 83, told the Ottawa Citizen.

Alien spacecrafts would have traveled vast distances to reach Earth, and so must be equipped with advanced propulsion systems or used exceptional fuels, he told the newspaper.

Such alien technologies could offer humanity alternatives to fossil fuels, he said, pointing to the enigmatic 1947 incident in Roswell, New Mexico — which has become a shrine for UFO believers — as an example of alien contact.

“We need to persuade governments to come clean on what they know. Some of us suspect they know quite a lot, and it might be enough to save our planet if applied quickly enough,” he said.

First, a word for you true believers out there. I am absolutely positively convinced that aliens exist - that there are dozens and dozens of civilizations in our galaxy alone. Some are more advanced than ours some not. I also believe that UFO’s are real, that people are not seeing things or hallucinating or lying.

But I also believe that saying we have been visited by aliens and that UFO’s are proof of this is a crock. There is exactly the same amount of evidence that UFO’s are transdimensional craft from a parallel universe or that they are time machines where humans from the future have come back to discover where we went wrong as there is evidence that UFO’s are from another planet.

That is to say, there is zero evidence.

And this Hellyer fellow is hysterical. He wants world governments to share technologies from alien crashes?

Holy Mother! Are you trying to tell me that after building a ship capable of travelling the trillions of miles between stars, after avoiding singularities, cosmic strings, black holes, deadly radiation, rogue planets, comets, asteroids, proto-stars, and your odd space debris that they make it all the way to earth AND THEN CRASH?

What in God’s name do we need technology that fails for?

Thanks, but no thanks guys. If we want technology like that all we have to do is buy a Dell.

If the name Hellyer sounds familiar, it should. This is the gentleman who believes that George Bush is preparing to start an intergalactic war:

Mr. Hellyer went on to say, “I’m so concerned about what the consequences might be of starting an intergalactic war, that I just think I had to say something.”

Hellyer revealed, “The secrecy involved in all matters pertaining to the Roswell incident was unparalleled. The classification was, from the outset, above top secret, so the vast majority of U.S. officials and politicians, let alone a mere allied minister of defence, were never in-the-loop.”

Hellyer warned, “The United States military are preparing weapons which could be used against the aliens, and they could get us into an intergalactic war without us ever having any warning. He stated, “The Bush administration has finally agreed to let the military build a forward base on the moon, which will put them in a better position to keep track of the goings and comings of the visitors from space, and to shoot at them, if they so decide.”

Talk about your nightmare scenario. Why, we could be vaporized by a Death Ray from some intergalactic spacecraft in an instant all because Bush is so dumb he thinks we can destroy any ship in the universe using our turbo lasers and photon torpedos.

You know what they say: “Intergalactic war is much too serious a matter to be entrusted to the military.” Best leave it to moonbats like Hellyer. At least he knows how to surrender properly.

Would it surprise you that our friend Mr. Hellyer is also a 9/11 Truther? Re: Foreknowledge and Bush:

I think what did change over time were the consequences. When President Bush decided to declare war on terrorism. Terrorism is a terrible thing, but this was a police problem and an intelligence problem. What was wrong with your intelligence? Why didn’t you know this was going to happen? You spend billions and billions with spooks all over the world and surely you should have known what was going on. And, so I began to be concerned about that.

And then questions were raised by others. Why did the President just sit in the schoolroom when he heard the news? Why did he not acknowledge that he already knew what was going on? As a former Minister of National Defense, when the news came out I had to wonder. Why did airplanes fly around for an hour and a half without interceptors being scrambled from Andrews [Air Force Base]? Is it Andrews right next to the capitol? . . . I think the inquiry has been very shallow and superficial. And I would like to see a much tougher more in-depth inquiry.

I’m waiting for him to combine his two passions; will we soon see from Mr. Hellyer the most gigantic, intergalactic conspiracy of them all?

WERE ALIENS INVOLVED IN THE 9/11 ATTACKS?

Stay tuned…

He was an unabashed liberal, a self proclaimed “New Deal” Democrat who pushed himself into the public’s consciousness with a combination of sheer brilliance and an astonishing output of the written word. Writing articles for publications as diverse as The Nation, Huffington Post, Ladies Home Journal, and TV Guide, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. also contributed to American scholarship, winning two Pulitzer Prizes and two National Book awards for his Andrew Jackson biography and chronicles of the Kennedys.

In the end, he was stricken with a heart attack in a restaurant while dining with his family. For a man who could wax poetic about good food as easily as he could enthrall an audience with insider stories of the Kennedy White House, it is fitting indeed that he was taken while engaging in one of life’s pleasures he so boisterously enjoyed while nestled in the bosom of his family:

Twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, Mr. Schlesinger exhaustively examined the administrations of two prominent presidents, Andrew Jackson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, against a vast background of regional and economic rivalries. He strongly argued that strong individuals like Jackson and Roosevelt could bend history.

The notes he took for President John F. Kennedy to use in writing his own history, became, after the president’s assassination, grist for Mr. Schlesinger’s own “A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House,” winner of both the Pulitzer and a National Book Award in 1966.

His 1978 book on the president’s brother, “Robert Kennedy and His Times,” lauded the subject as the most politically creative man of his time, but acknowledged that Robert had played a larger role in trying to overthrow Castro than the author had acknowledged in “A Thousand Days.”

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. may not have been America’s greatest historian. But his impact on American letters, American culture, and American politics was so profound that his influence surpassed even that of his famous father, Arthur Schlesinger, Sr. who pioneered the study of social history back in the 1920’s. This father-son tag team of insightful academics represented a true link with our past that echoes down to this day. The father was proud of the fact that he actually shook the hand of a man whose own father had served with George Washington in the Continental Army. That kind of reverence for the past was passed on to Arthur Jr.:

Mr. Schlesinger saw life as a walk through history. He wrote that he could not stroll down Fifth Avenue without wondering how the street and the people on it would have looked a hundred years ago.

“He is willing to argue that the search for an understanding of the past is not simply an aesthetic exercise but a path to the understanding of our own time,” Alan Brinkley, the historian, wrote.

Mr. Schlesinger wore a trademark dotted bowtie, showed an acid wit and had a magnificent bounce to his step. Between marathons of writing as much as 5,000 words a day, he was a fixture at Georgetown salons when Washington was clubbier and more elitist; a lifelong aficionado of perfectly-blended martinis; and a man about New York, whether at Truman Capote’s famous parties or escorting Jacqueline Kennedy to the movies.

Some colleagues, perhaps jealous of his celebrity, grumbled about the historian’s flitting about the social scene in New York and Washington, going from party to party while being photographed with Hollywood starlets as well as the high and mighty of politics and industry. But what his critics failed to understand was there was a very good reason that Schlesinger was able to move in so many diverse and even contradictory social circles.

Quite simply, he was a very interesting man.

The range of his intellect was truly remarkable. He could talk about the intricacies of New Deal social policy one minute and expound on the perfection of a well mixed martini the next. By all accounts, he was a fascinating raconteur who mixed politics and history into a delicious mix of tall tale and scholarly lecture. When he held forth at gatherings of the powerful, people listened.

In recent years, he regularly appeared on television as an analyst as well as a partisan voice defending the Democrats and attacking Republicans. His politics reflected his roots as a New Deal Democrat which placed him at odds with the modern hard left on a number of occasions. A strong anti-Communist he was not enamored as many liberals of his generation with committing ground forces to Viet Nam. But once there, he argued for policies that echo hauntingly today.

In his 1967 book The Bitter Heritage: Viet Nam and American Democracy, Schlesinger resigned himself to fighting the war while offering a penetrating historical critique of our involvement:

When it comes to Viet Nam, Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. roosts neither with the hawks nor the all-out doves. Admittedly, he is unhappy that the U.S. ever got involved there, but he argues in this slender book, drawn chiefly from three recent magazine articles, that “our precipitate withdrawal now would have ominous reverberations throughout Asia.” He thinks the U.S. must “stop widening and Americanizing the war,” but he has no illusions about the cutthroat, terrorist tactics of the Viet Cong, and he does not want them to take over South Viet Nam. What, then, is the U.S. to do? Says Schlesinger: “We must oppose further widening of the war” by “holding the line in South Viet Nam…”

Schlesinger also argues that the U.S. should devote its resources more to “clear-and-hold” operations aimed at creating secure areas, than to “search-and-destroy missions, which drive the Viet Cong out of villages one day and permit them to slip back the next.” But he fails to note that no clear-and-hold strategy can succeed as long as guerrillas are permitted to terrorize the countryside—and it is the search-and-destroy sweeps that keep them on the run.

A vocal opponent of the war in Iraq as well as anything and everything Bush, Schlesinger’s last book skewered the Administration for their Middle East policies:

In his last book, “War and the American Presidency,” published in 2004, Mr. Schlesinger challenged the foundations of the foreign policy of President George W. Bush, calling the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath “a ghastly mess.” He said the president’s curbs on civil liberties would have the same result as similar actions throughout American history.

“We hate ourselves in the morning,” he wrote.

But beyond the partisanship, beyond the man about town and debonair socialite, there was a serious, brilliant academic whose high standards and achingly beautiful prose made reading Schlesinger a pure joy.

His first Pulitzer for The Age of Jackson is still required reading for most college courses dealing with that period in American history. Its economic deterministic approach to the Jacksonian movement may be a little dated and the largely discredited theory of cyclical movements in American history - politics swinging like a pendulum between liberal and conservative ideologies - is perhaps a shallow construct. But there is no denying the careful scholarship and brilliant prose that brings the people and events of that period in history to life. Schlesinger incorporated the social history of the times to argue that Jacksonian democracy was not a movement made up of rough and ready frontiersmen allied with Jeffersonian yeoman farmers but a class struggle based on the idea of a centralized government - not unlike policies he supported as a New Dealer.

But the works he is known best for were the result of his friendship and admiration for John and Robert Kennedy. A supporter of Adlai Stevenson in 1960, Schlesinger was asked to work as a Special Assistant to President Kennedy for several reasons, not the least of which was the recognition by JFK that the historian would probably write about the Administration anyway:

In their 1970 book, “Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye,” Kenneth P. O’Donnell and David F. Powers suggest that the new president saw some political risk in hiring such an unabashed liberal. He decided to keep the appointment quiet until another liberal, Chester Bowles, was confirmed as under secretary of state.

The authors, both Kennedy aides, said they asked Mr. Kennedy if he took Mr. Schlesinger on to write the official history of the administration. Mr. Kennedy said he would write it himself.

“But Arthur will probably write his own,” the president said, “and it will be better for us if he’s in the White House, seeing what goes on, instead of reading about it in The New York Times and Time magazine.”

It is unclear exactly what was Schlesinger’s role in the Administration. His official title was misleading; special assistant for Latin American affairs and speech writer. Time Magazine at the time called him the Administration’s conduit to intellectuals. He was a regular at the impromptu seminars put on by Robert Kennedy at his house in Virginia and actually organized most of them. The lineup of intellectuals at these gatherings were truly impressive. Social critics, scientists, historians, military theorists, artists of all kinds - some historians point to the attendance by most of the influential members of the Kennedy Administration at these seminars as proof that much of the intellectual framework for the New Frontier was thrashed out during these sessions.

Following the assassination of JFK, Schlesinger wrote A Thousands Days, a national best seller and worthy of his second Pulitzer. Some may be dismissive of the hagiographic nature of the book (Gore Vidal called it “a political novel”), but there is no denying the power of the prose nor its fascinating glimpse into the center of American power as seen through the historian’s eye.

In 1968, Schlesinger latched on to Robert Kennedy’s ill fated campaign only to see that journey also end in tragedy. The book that emerged from Schlesinger’s pain 10 years later is, to my mind, his finest work; a two volume tour de force examination of not only Robert Kennedy and his campaign for the Presidency, but also the decade of the 1960’s and how the events and ideas that bubbled up from the street during that period changed America.

Schlesinger spent the intervening years studying and writing about violence and its connectedness to ideas and power. He wrestled with this subject for much of the 70’s (taking a break only to help bring down Nixon in his angry The Imperial Presidency) with his journey culminating in the ultimately healing biography of a man he obviously admired and felt great affection for. The book was personal, political, but also extraordinarily sourced and researched. It garnered him his second National Book Award.

Schlesinger may have been a liberal’s liberal. But that didn’t stop him from challenging political correctness nor the dominant New Left ideas regarding foreign policy and America’s role in the world. Not only a staunch anti-Communist, Schlesinger was an internationalist in the traditional sense. He saw America’s mission as bringing freedom to the world wherever possible while working with international institutions like the United Nations to solve conflicts. While his faith in the UN may have been misplaced, he never lost sight of American interests and the need to defend them.

Where he parted company with the new left was in some of their wackier ideas regarding social policy. He was a vociferous critic of multiculturalism, specifically “Afro-centrism” that he at one time compared to the Klan:

In 1991, Mr. Schlesinger provoked a backlash with “The Disuniting of America,” an attack on the emergent “multicultural society” in which he said Afrocentrists claimed superiority and demanded that their separate identity be honored by schools and other institutions.

The novelist Ishmael Reed denounced Mr. Schlesinger as a “follower of David Duke,” the former Ku Klux Klan leader. The Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. caricatured Mr. Schlesinger’s arguments as a demand for “cultural white-face.”

Mr. Schlesinger was nonplussed. He frequently described himself as an unreconstructed New Dealer whose basic thinking had changed little in a half century.

“What the hell,” he answered when questioned by The Washington Post about his attack on multiculturalism. “You have to call them as you see them. This too shall pass.”

A man of the left but not a slave to its diktats and demands for ideological purity. In short, an independent thinker who never let politics get in the way of what he stood for. In this respect, he was a rare breed, right or left.

For Schlesinger, it was the intellectual journey that was important, as he points out in this, one of his last articles, written on January 1, 2007 and published in The New York Times:

History is the best antidote to delusions of omnipotence and omniscience. Self-knowledge is the indispensable prelude to self-control, for the nation as well as for the individual, and history should forever remind us of the limits of our passing perspectives. It should strengthen us to resist the pressure to convert momentary impulses into moral absolutes. It should lead us to acknowledge our profound and chastening frailty as human beings — to a recognition of the fact, so often and so sadly displayed, that the future outwits all our certitudes and that the possibilities of the future are more various than the human intellect is designed to conceive.

For those of us who love our history and respect those who toil with tireless dedication to inform us and challenge our assumptions about who we are and where we have come from, those words should be a clarion call to apply ourselves and learn as much as we can about our past so that we can grasp the present and understand the forces that shape our modern world.

This is where history and politics come together. And the death of Arthur Schlesinger makes us much poorer for having lost a voice that brought our past to life and showed us how relevant it was to our deliberations today.

UPDATE

In re-reading this piece, I see where I got so caught up in describing my favorite Schlesinger book that I failed to give its title!

Robert Kennedy and His Times

For an astonishing 38 years out of the 53 that I have lived on this planet, there has bee a Daley as Mayor of the city of Chicago. Also in those 38 years, the legendary patronage and payoff operation known as “The Machine” has dominated local politics.

The current Mayor Daley - Richard M. - has just been reelected to an unprecedented 6th consecutive term, garnering more than 70% of the vote against two African-American challengers:

Richard M. Daley laid claim to history on Tuesday, steamrolling two opponents and winning a sixth term that promises to make him the longest-serving mayor in Chicago history.

Another four years in the office will push Daley past the current record-holder—his father and role model, the late Mayor Richard J. Daley.

With more than 95 percent of precincts reporting, Daley had received about 71 percent of the vote to defeat challengers Dorothy Brown and William “Dock” Walls. But Chicagoans apparently considered it a ho-hum election, with only about a third of the city’s 1.4 million registered voters turning out to cast their ballots.

A jubilant Daley walked into a ballroom of the Chicago Hilton & Towers to the strains of “Takin’ Care of Business” and, in a speech that lasted just a few minutes, claimed victory before excited supporters.

“An election is not an end,” Daley declared. “Instead it offers a new beginning. … I want to thank the people of Chicago for their continued support.

But the real story of this election was the defeat of a couple of veteran Daley allies on the City Council and the fact that an almost unprecedented 11 Council members will have participate in the run off election in April:

In the worst election night for City Council incumbents in more than 15 years, three aldermen lost their jobs Tuesday, including Ald. Burton Natarus (42nd), the colorful, veteran alderman of downtown Chicago.

Ald. Darcel Beavers (7th) lost to Sandi Jackson, the wife of U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.), and scandal-plagued Ald. Arenda Troutman (20th) was also unseated. But Natarus was hesitant to concede.

Another 11 council members appeared headed toward the runoff election in April after failing to win a majority.

On a night when Mayor Richard M. Daley easily won re-election, the results in wards across the city showed that the mayor’s popularity—and his once-powerful patronage armies—no longer could be counted on to pull along council allies.

And what may have finally put the Machine out to pasture was not legions of reformers storming city hall or massive demonstrations protesting the corrupt way that the city has done business forever. There was no sudden, bolt-of-lightening election that overturned the status quo and brought sunshine into the dark areas of City Hall.

Instead, it was simple disgust. And changing demographics. And a new generation of African American and Hispanic politicians who have made their bones without becoming absolutely beholden to the Daley Machine.

All of this created a perfect storm - a storm that was fashioned by a scandal that typified the way that city politics has been since Big Bill Thompson was taking orders from Big Al Capone; a system where the politician and the criminal walked side by side, rubbing elbows sometimes, while being indistinguishable from one another at other times.

The scandal began with a $40 million a year hired truck program where the city would hire trucks by the hour to perform various city services. Here was a program aching to be fleeced. And The Machine didn’t disappoint. Some of the revelations in the Chicago Sun Times investigation were jaw dropping examples of blatant and systematic corruption at the highest levels of city government:

* Some politically connected companies were getting paid for doing little or no work.

* Some of the trucks were owned by known mobsters.

* Even though city employees were barred from taking part in the program, many set up their wives or relatives with city contracts.

* Truck owners paid bribes in order to get into the program.

* 44 people have been charged in the scandal with 41 already pleading guilty or convicted.

That was just the start. The investigation eventually led to City Hall and one of the mayor’s staunchest supporters, his former patronage boss Robert Sorich. After a court order prevented the city from hiring people based on their political loyalty, Sorich rigged interviews and falsified documents to hide the fact that City Hall was lousy with Daley loyalists. The Feds got him for mail fraud along with two others and snared a 4th for lying to the FBI. For a while, there was considerable buzz that Daley himself was under the prosecutor’s microscope but to date, there have been no charges filed nor are any likely in the near future.

The Machine has known scandal before. It has known federal investigations and indictments before. It has known newspaper exposes, legions of reform minded citizens groups, good government gurus, even reform politicians before. And The Machine just kept chugging along. It absorbed, bribed, or destroyed most of the reformers. It shrugged off the Feds and the States Attorneys. And in election after election after election, it rolled to victory. Sometimes the reformers would gain a modest victory here and there. But in the end, The Machine triumphed because it worked.

So what happened yesterday?

In past elections, patronage armies loyal to the mayor crisscrossed the city to help elect aldermen who readily heeled at the mayor’s command. They scared other council members into submission. But the federal probe of patronage hiring in the mayor’s office crippled those groups.

Labor unions that are feuding with the mayor vowed to step into the void left by the mayor’s legions of campaign workers.

The Service Employees International Union and other labor groups spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and deployed hundreds of workers for challengers. SEIU contributed to the Reilly and Jackson victories, and at least four targeted incumbents were headed to runoffs with union-backed foes.

Jerry Morrison, executive director of SEIU’s state council, declared the results a “big, big win for working families and unions.”

There were several new African American faces who won through to victory including Representative Jesse Jackson, Jr.’s wife, elected outright as an Alderman from the 7th ward running against the daughter of one of the Mayor’s most valued allies. And even the Mayor’s losing opponent Dorothy Brown, County Clerk of the Circuit Court, showed a feistiness and strength that will probably make her a future star in city politics.

Unions, reform minded minorities, and a population trending younger, hipper, and more liberal could mean that this may have been Hizzoner’s last hurrah. For all the graft, corruption, and electoral shenanigans, Daley has presided over something of a city-wide Renaissance with all areas, income groups, races, and neighborhoods enjoying at least some kind of renewal. And while blacks and Hispanics have plenty of bones to pick with Daley, even they admit he has been a good listener and has staffed his office (and The Machine) with plenty of minorities.

Four more years of Daley and then what? The Machine has been eulogized before only to come back stronger than ever. But this time, the city itself has changed. The old ways may not die all at once. But I suspect they will gradually give way to the impulse of the reform minded to replace the machine with something else - something of their own creation.

There will still be graft and corruption. But there won’t be the city-wide control of patronage and contracts exercised by Chicago mayors for nearly a century. We will see if that affects how the city is actually governed. And whether the city will itself be governable.

UPDATE

Ex-Chicagoan now Texan Tom Elia noticed something in the Trib story:

My two favorite parts of the following Tribune piece? The song played at Hizzoner’s victory party: Takin’ Care of Business; and the reason given by experts as to why perhaps stronger candidates didn’t challenge Mayor Daley: they would get ‘throttled.’

They wouldn’t just lose. They would get ‘throttled.’ Hey … it’s Chicago. Takin’ care of bidness.

Sorta like my White Sox “throttling” your Cubbies this year during the Cross Town Showdown, eh Tom?

It’s one thing for an hysteric like Seymour Hersh to go off the deep and and talk about the real possibility that we would use nuclear weapons to destroy Iranian nuclear research and development sites. We expect such stupidity from the man who accused the American government of deliberately testing the Soviet Union’s air defenses by sending a passenger plane into Russian air space only to have it shot down much to our propaganda advantage.

But when the theory is advanced by “experts” like George Lakoff, well. . . all we can do is bow to the superior intelligence and perspicacity of the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley and start digging bomb shelters:

The stories in the major media suggest that an attack against Iran is a real possibility and that the Natanz nuclear development site is the number one target. As the above quotes from two of our best sources note, military experts say that conventional “bunker-busters” like the GBU-28 might be able to destroy the Natanz facility, especially with repeated bombings. But on the other hand, they also say such iterated use of conventional weapons might not work, e.g., if the rock and earth above the facility becomes liquefied. On that supposition, a “low yield” “tactical” nuclear weapon, say, the B61-11, might be needed.

If the Bush administration, for example, were to insist on a sure “success,” then the “attack” would constitute nuclear war. The words in boldface are nuclear war, that’s right, nuclear war — a first strike nuclear war.

We don’t know what exactly is being planned — conventional GBU-28’s or nuclear B61-11’s. And that is the point. Discussion needs to be open. Nuclear war is not a minor matter.

At the very least, we can gather from his writing that the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley is concerned about nuclear war. It’s just a shame that a Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley is a little deficient in the cognitive and not very adept at the linguistic.

But then, it takes a Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley to understand the nuances and “Euphemisms” of the enemy (that’s the White House to those uninitiated into leftist doublespeak) in order to wrest the truth from the dark corners of the Bush Administration so that the glorious light of reason can be shone and the nefarious plans of Bushco destroyed:

As early as August 13, 2005, Bush, in Jerusalem, was asked what would happen if diplomacy failed to persuade Iran to halt its nuclear program. Bush replied, “All options are on the table.” On April 18, the day after the appearance of Seymour Hersh’s New Yorker report on the administration’s preparations for a nuclear war against Iran, President Bush held a news conference. He was asked,

“Sir, when you talk about Iran, and you talk about how you have diplomatic efforts, you also say all options are on the table. Does that include the possibility of a nuclear strike? Is that something that your administration will plan for?”
He replied,

“All options are on the table.”

The President never actually said the forbidden words “nuclear war,” but he appeared to tacitly acknowledge the preparations — without further discussion.

I see the cognitively challenged Professor’s point. The President also never actually said the forbidden words “Hillary is a slut” but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t wholeheartedly believe it.

Or maybe, this linguistics expert missed the President’s point. Do you think that when he said “All options are on the table” he really meant “I’m gonna nuke them suckers back to the stone age?” Or did he mean “All options are on the table?”

It’s a tough call which is why I’m glad we have a Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley working on the translation problem. In this case, not just any old High School English teacher will do. We need someone with not only the linguistic skills to decipher the President’s cryptic comments but also someone very well versed in cognitive dissonance - er, theories that is.

As for the aforementioned Hillary Clinton, the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley helps in translating her rather obscure pronouncements on Iran:

Hillary Clinton, at an AIPAC dinner in NY, said,

“We cannot, we should not, we must not, permit Iran to build or acquire nuclear weapons, and in dealing with this threat, as I have said for a very long time, no option can be taken off the table.”

Translation: Nuclear weapons can be used to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons.

Nuclear weapons can also be used to make excellent scrambled eggs but that doesn’t mean we will use them for that purpose - or for any reason for that matter. But our cognitiveless professor can see beyond the nuance, beyond the horizon, even beyond reason to glean the truth from the utterances of the powerful. Or so he thinks.

The nomenclature “All options are on the table” has been used in one form or another for centuries. The idea of using that phrase has never been to threaten or even hint at the use of nuclear weapons in any situation but rather to 1) state the obvious; and 2) keep a potential adversary guessing about your intentions. To make the gigantic leap of illogic as the professor does that all of a sudden this innocuous, boilerplate response - a response fully expected by the questioner - somehow is revealing of the deep, dark plans of the Bush Administration to use nuclear weapons on Iran is absurd on its face. It is idiotic. And it is embarrassing for anyone with more than a 6th grade education to advance such puerile drivel.

Perhaps it is the result of this Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley being so far out of his depth that he is unable to see the nose in front of his face. But that simply doesn’t matter. It is the superior goodness, the purity of heart, the absolute moral certitude of the professor that counts when coming to grips with the problems of . . . dare I say the words that none dare say?

To use words like “low yield” or “small” or “mini-” nuclear weapon is like speaking of being a little bit pregnant. Nuclear war is nuclear war! It crosses the moral line.

Any discussion of roadside canister bombs made in Iran justifying an attack on Iran should be put in perspective: Little canister bombs (EFP’s — explosively formed projectiles) that shoot a small hot metal ball at a humvee or tank versus nuclear war.

Incidentally, the administration may be focusing on the canister bombs because it seeks to claim that the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002 permits the use of military force against Iran based on its interference in Iraq. In that case, no further authorization by Congress would be needed for an attack on Iran.

The journalistic point is clear. Journalists and political leaders should not talk about an “attack.” They should use the words that describe what is really at stake: nuclear war — in boldface.

First of all, I agree with the professor. From now on, when writing the words “nuclear war” on this site, I will place a smiley face immediately after it (boldface can get old very quick - especially when you consider how many times every day I write the words “nuclear war” on this site, being the war mongering, bloodthirsty neocon that I am.)

As far as the Bush Administration believing that the AUMF is all that is needed for an attack on Iran, isn’t it strange that the only ones making that argument at the moment are liberals in the blogosphere? I have yet to hear anyone from the Administration advance that rather novel theory - especially as the professor frames the issue as being Iran’s interference in Iraq. So far, the Administration has used what they consider evidence of Iran’s assistance to the militias and death squads only to crack down on Iranians in Iraq and not to threaten an attack on Iran itself. That certainly may change. I sincerely hope not. But Bush would almost certainly find the political rug pulled out from underneath him if he attacked Iran without specific Congressional authorization. Even many Republicans have made that clear.

Lakoff is pathetic. His rationale for not using nuclear weapons is self evident and simple minded. What is truly stupid is his belief that he’s somehow saving the world by writing about it - as if the rest of us had become so enamored of destroying Iran’s nuclear weapons facilities that we have lost sight of the consequences of using nuclear weapons. It takes someone awfully full of themselves to presume to lecture the rest of us about the immorality of using nuclear weapons or even the practical consequences that would flow from nuclear war :-).

Nor is the professor’s list of worst case scenarios complete - not by any means. No word from the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley about what Vlad the Impaler in Moscow might think of a radioactive cloud wafting over Russian territory. Such a turn of events would almost certainly spoil family outings in southern Russia for quite a while. For that reason alone, despite the claim that “all options are on the table,” I think that we can all stop digging those new bomb shelters and emerge from the darkness with a fair amount of assurance - if not absolute rock solid certainty - that we will not use nuclear weapons if we decide to take out Iranian nuclear sites, thus avoiding “nation destruction” and - heaven help us - nuclear war!

UPDATE

From the milblog ARGGHHH!!:

Sometimes it’s best to actually study the subject before you go off screaming, ‘Bush is going to start a nuclear war!’ Just being smart doesn’t make you a polymath with a deep grasp of everything you know.

And why are these guys taken seriously? I can only guess ignorance.

Actually, reader Patrick Murray just emailed to remind me that Lakoff was hired in 2004 by the DNC to “reframe” the message coming from the Democratic party for the election.

We know how well that worked out.

During the 2004 campaign, Lakoff suggested that instead of talking about how Bush had run up the national debt, Democrats should label it a “baby tax” the Republican president had imposed on future generations.

He has suggested that same-sex marriage should be referred to as “the right to marry.” Trial lawyers like vice presidential nominee John Edwards should instead be called “public protection attorneys,” and the term environmental protection, which brings to mind big government and reams of regulations, should instead be termed “poison-free communities.”

Excuse me while I call my public protection attorney about suing my poison free community so that my partner and I have the right to marry and allow us to work together, hand in hand, cheek to cheek, to lower the baby tax.

Is this a great country or what?

Despite the fact that Speaker Pelosi has made it very clear that Representative Murtha’s slow bleed the troops plan is a non starter, the Pennsylvania Congressman is evidently determined to bring the issue to the floor for a vote. And at least one influential Democrat is hoping he does:

He described his plan to the Democratic Caucus two weeks ago and again more recently on MoveCongress.org last week.

No sooner was the interview aired than Middle East hawks that have been cheerleading this war from its inception (the White House, FOX News and the myriad of entertainers who make up the Republican right-wing noise machine) started licking their chops at the prospect of exposing the Democrats as cut and run peaceniks that don’t support our troops.

They suggest that efforts such as giving our troops 1) mandatory home base time with their families between deployments — 365 days for the Army and 270 days for the Marines 2) sufficient training and equipment and 3) mandatory face to face physical, mental and emotional health evaluations upon their return from combat — a standard practice before this Administration came to power — will demoralize our soldiers and turn the Middle East into a cauldron of blood and chaos.

First, an obvious disclaimer: Representative Jim Moran (D-Anti-Semite) is absolutely, positively, and without qualification not related to me in any way, shape, or form. I would hazard a guess and say that our genes diverged millions of years ago - his branch of the Morans ending up evolving with the slugs and slimy things in prehistoric swamps only to emerge quite recently to slither around the halls of Congress. The true and noble branch of the Moran family stayed in the trees and ate nuts and fruit, learning how to walk upright only recently because, obviously, we were waiting for the invention of the automobile. No sense in walking when you can grab a ride, right?

At any rate, Mr. Moran has it all wrong. There are precious few of us who would not vouchsafe our military people sufficient rest, time with their families, health screening, and adequate training so that they can continue to perform in such spectacularly competent fashion in Iraq.

And there certainly is not a monolithic response on the right to Mr. Murtha’s plan. Oak Leaf at Polipundit:

Having 12 months between deployments, ensuring that soldiers are trained to military (not Democrat/Republican) standards and returning stop loss to an emergency measure not a routine personal policy is good for readiness, good for the troops and good for the Nation.

If you believe in the Global War on Terror, you will support these reasonable common sense measures and let the military (not politicians) set readiness and training standards.

Not only being the “right thing” it is good politics in the long run.

I, and most others on the right would normally agree with these benchmarks. However, despite what has gone on in the past with deployments, this time around, the stakes are far from normal. We are, in fact, in what I think most people agree - both right and left - is the political crisis of the war.

I say this because it is painfully obvious that regardless of how the present surge strategy plays out, this will be the last opportunity for the Administration to succeed in tamping down the violence in Baghdad (and Anbar province) while giving the Iraqi government some desperately needed political capitol to effect changes in society that will give the Sunnis hope for the future.

The oil revenue sharing plan recently agreed to is an excellent first step - a small one to be sure - but hugely significant. It is the first time the Iraqi government has officially recognized the Sunnis in a positive way. All other recognition of the Sunnis in the Constitution were related to strictures against the Baathists. There have also been some petty local laws that have made the Sunnis feel like outsiders in their own country. This is what has been driving the insurgency; Sunnis believing they have no choice but to die or be herded out of Iraq as refugees or fight the government and the foreign troops that enable their oppressors to survive. As long as the Maliki government can make steady progress on other fronts, the surge will have fulfilled its purpose.

But beyond the surge is the almost dead certainty that we will begin drawing down our forces probably no later than the end of this year and at the latest by the Spring of 2008 regardless of whether the surge works or not. There is no political will in Congress even from Republicans to maintain troop levels beyond that date. There will be no precipitous withdrawal. But neither will there be the desire in Congress - especially by Republicans - for the war to continue at its present level.

There will be “redeployments” and troop rotations back home. Those troops will be replaced by Iraqi troops and police who evidently are benefiting enormously from living with Americans in the neighborhoods where they patrol together, especially the latter.

All of this is in the future. The present situation is an acknowledged crisis and extreme measures are called for - even beyond what has occurred in the past with redeployments. To make a crude analogy, suppose instead of redeploying from the States to Iraq, we were talking about redeploying Patton’s Third Army during the Battle of the Bulge.

Patton’s army was facing east and fighting a pitched battle against the Germans on December 19th when Eisenhower asked the General how long it would take to pull his troops out of the line and march them north to hit the Germans in the flank as they moved farther into the salient or “bulge” made by their rapid advance. Eisenhower, not knowing that Patton had already made plans for such a turn to the north, was surprised when Patton told him that it would take only 48 hours.

The move itself would have the effect of “relieving” Bastogne where the 101st Airborne was hanging on grimly, surrounded as they were by the German army. But, despite the inference made by Patton boosters and popular culture, his move north was not intended to specifically “relieve” anyone. It was an offensive operation aimed at destroying the German army who had finally come into the open. The relief of Bastogne would be a consequence of successful operations carried out against the enemy.

Patton had not only planned the move in advance of his meeting with Ike, he actually started his troops moving before he left for the conference. Thus, 72 hours later, Patton’s Third Army was facing the spearhead of the German attack after pulling his troops out of one fight in south central France, turning them 90 degrees, and marching them more than 150 miles to the north in order to engage the enemy in another battle. It was a truly remarkable achievement in logistics and support not to mention a demonstration of the strength and stamina of the American GI.

Now a careful commander may not have pushed his troops so far so fast. And he almost certainly wouldn’t have engaged the enemy without giving his troops a little rest and a chance to eat a hot meal in the bitter cold. But Patton correctly saw the opportunity to crush the German army and he pushed his exhausted troops into the fight immediately. And despite what I am sure could be defined as severely degraded readiness and efficiency within the ranks of the Third Army, those Americans went into battle because of the enormous opportunity the Germans presented the allies by coming out from behind their defensive positions and going on the offensive.

As I said, a crude analogy but I hope my point is understood. There are times when the die must be cast and the risks taken. This is one of those times. The opportunity we have in Iraq will not come again. And while no one is expecting miracles, there is every hope that the situation can improve dramatically enough so that the Iraqi government can begin to exercise more control over their own capitol while taking the steps necessary to bring the factions together and start the long process toward reconciliation and peace.

I daresay many in the military probably feel as Oak Leaf does and I wouldn’t blame them one bit. But at the same time, you can’t shut the political realities off any more than you can forget the sacrifices of the families and troops who are now bearing the brunt of our past failures and mistakes in Iraq by being forced once again to deploy with less time off and less training than they need or the military may desire.

This, for all practical purposes, is it. Time to realize it and act accordingly.

First of all, I must point out that most of the blog posts on the left about the attack at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan that the Taliban claims targeted Vice President Dick Cheney have, for the most part, played it straight with a little grumbling about his gallivanting around the world at this point. (For some shocking and notable exceptions, see Malkin, AJ Strata, and Dean Barnett.)

Having said that, this post at Down With Tyranny deserves special attention - not only for its towering ignorance but for its unhinged hatred and despicable comparison of Vice President Cheney to Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler’s chief lieutenant in the Gestapo and at the time of his assassination, Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia:

When I was just a child I used to wrestle with a moral dilemma. If I could go back in time to the very beginning of Hitler’s chancellorship– and knowing in the early 1930s what we know currently about what he and the Nazis were up to– would I kill him? The fact that it would mean my own death was something I discounted entirely. Hitler was a man consumed with hatred and insanity who wielded immense power, power he used for destructiveness on a level rarely seen in history.

How does history judge Jan Kubis and Jozef Gabcik, respectively a Czech and a Slovak soldier, who assassinated Reinhard Heydrich on May 27, 1942. They didn’t travel back in time to do it, but from Britain and with the blessing of the Czech government in exile. Heydrich was an SS-Obergruppenfuhrer, chief of Gestapo, one of the 2 or 3 main architects of the Holocaust, and the brutal Governor of Bohemia and Moravia (Czechoslovakia). He wasn’t the vice president of Germany but at the time of his death Hitler considered him his political heir. Kubis and Gabcik ambushed him in his open car in a Prague suburb on his way to work. They were more successful than the Taliban suicide bomber was today.

Oh! So heroic! Oh! So dramatic! Discounting one’s own death in order to kill Hilter? One needs to ask if, in fact, the writer has grown up yet so that he can disabuse himself of such childish notions. What, pray tell, would have been the “moral dilemma” about killing Hitler? Especially, as the morally confused writer points out, if we knew “in the early 1930s what we know currently about what he and the Nazis were up to…”

This would seem to be a no-brainer - even for an unhinged loon like this poor fellow. Except dealing with concepts like “right” and “wrong” is still a chore for most of the left. They have resolved their dilemma by positing the notion that anyone and anything to the right of Ted Kennedy is evil and wrong. That way, they don’t have to think very hard - or know very much for that matter.

As far as what history has had to say about Heydrich’s assassins, some historians have criticized the British for allowing the boys to go ahead with their attack. That’s because what our morally feckless correspondent fails to point out is that as a result of Heydrich’s death, the Gestapo and SS went on a rampage that echoes down through the years all the way to the present.

More than 13,000 Czechs were rounded up and either murdered outright or sent to concentration camps. The entire towns of Lidice and Ležáky were razed to the ground, bulldozed until no trace of human habitation remained. All the men and boys over 16 were executed. Most of the women were sent to camps - others became subjects of medical experiments.

And the children? Immediately after the war, there were pitiful cries for help from the few surviving mothers of Lidice begging for news of their lost children. It wasn’t until several years later that their grim fate came to light; of the 105 children taken from the two towns, only 17 survived. Nine had been adopted by German families with another 8 found in an orphanage in Prague. The rest had been given “the shower treatment” shortly after being taken.

I’ll give you a real moral dilemma, my morally immature blogging friend. Suppose you were Winston Churchill and knew full well the fury that would be unleashed upon the Czech people as a result of the killing of such an important Nazi. Would you still countenance the support of your government for the assassination plot, even knowing that thousands would die horrible deaths?

Kinda makes your moral dilemma about killing Cheney seem rather insipid now, doesn’t it?

Because that is what, in a roundabout and cowardly way you are trying to get at here. If only someone had killed Cheney when he was but a youngster, the world would be such a fine place, isn’t that what you’re saying? I don’t know any other way to read it - especially your disappointment that the Taliban suicide bomber was less “successful” than the Czech assassins of Heydrich.

Perhaps realizing he had gone over the edge, our Brave Sir Blogger pulls back at the last moment and advocates impeachment rather than assassination:

The deaths of vom Rath and Heydrich did nothing to slow Hitler down. What would have happened had the Taliban succeeded in killing Cheney is something we’ll never know. America’s fate is in the hands of Americans. We need to solve our own problems– and fortunately we have a constitutional process in which to do that.

If this is so, why the big write up about the heroes who assassinated Nazis? Why go so far as to point out that Heydrich “wasn’t the vice president of Germany but at the time of his death Hitler considered him his political heir” thus clearly connecting Cheney and Heydrich in your assassination fantasy?

(Note: It is doubtful that Hitler himself ever considered Heydrich his heir but it is clear that many in the inner circle believed the younger man - he was only 38 when he died - would be able to claw his way to the top eventually due to his sheer ruthlessness.)

I am not one to shy away from nasty political epithets. Nor do I believe political give and take to be a sport for the faint of heart. Politics is, in fact, a blood sport waged full tilt and with few holds barred. But anyone who doesn’t see how far beyond the pale this post and this blogger have gone deserve to be banished to the outer darkness. Sickening in its implications, shocking in its hate directed against the Vice President, I wonder if anyone on the left will denounce this calumny as so many on the right do when one of our unhinged brethren steps over the line?

UPDATE

Go. Read Goldstein. Now.

Speaking of Goldstein, I think this comment by him responding on the post linked above, should be saved for all time and should be carved into Glen Greenwald’s mausoleum:

Christ, if Greenwald were any more full of himself he’d run the risk of getting himself pregnant, or at the very least, being charged with his own rape.