Whiskey Fire

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Best. Update. Ever.

Jonah Goldberg is one of the finest young conservative minds of our time.

The Slippery Slope of Fighting Barbarism   [Jonah Goldberg]

A friend sends this quote of the day along:

Your debate with Beinart made me remember this great Evelyn Waugh quote. It'd be interesting to hear a Ron Paul acolyte respond to this point:

"It is in the nature of civilization that it must be in constant conflict with barbarism. Very few empires have been the result of a deliberate ambition. They have grown, inevitably, because it has been found necessary to expand in order to preserve what is already held. The French had to annex Algiers because it was the only way in which the Mediterranean could be made safe from pirates. Empire moves in a series of 'incidents,' and these 'incidents' mean that it is impossible for a country to live in isolation. Barbarism means constant provocation."

From "We Can Applaud Italy" (1935), in The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh.

Update: Just for the record, the above post does not, in fact, constitute an endorsement of Waugh's applause for Italy. I just thought the quote was interesting.

This is not a parody. "I just thought the quote was interesting." Liberal Fascism, right... (Also noted here.)

They Lowly Croak

Red State wants a "do over" of the GOP debate. Among other things, they "demand":

One or more of the Republican candidates should demand a do over wherein we can have a substantive debate about substantive issues that exclude CNN's agenda, which is clearly out of touch with the Republican party, and the drivel we saw from YouTube.

I cannot possibly express just how much I support the idea of a televised GOP debate in front of an all-wingnut audience stocked with all-wingnut questioners.

Do-over! Do-over! Let Malkin moderate. DOOOOOOOOOOO-Over!

Brag and Complain

Wingnuttia is getting upset, yawn, at the General's question:

A retired Army general, Keith Kerr, just listed all his military credentials and then left the crowd silent by saying at the end of his video that he is "an openly gay man" and wants to know why gays can't serve in the military.

Kerr is apparently a Democratic Plant sent to ruin the GOP debate.

Whatever.

But... If any of the GOP candidates were able to produce any goddamn coherent answer to the question, you know, it wouldn't be embarrassing.  The reason it's embarrassing is that on this policy issue the GOP candidates can't answer it in a way that will please both their base and, well, people who aren't crazy.

UPDATE: Man, they're really bouncing off the walls.... The really hilarious thing is that the reason CNN selected the people they did was likely that the actual wingnut questions were, well, too  wingnuty for prime time...
 

God Is All Good (Ex Post Facto)

There is some evidence that Jonah Goldberg is a moron. For instance, this, where he says that if it's OK that conservative politicians can get asked about their religious convictions, how come liberal politicians can't get asked questions about their religion, which is liberalism.

I swear to John Stuart Mill that I am merely paraphrasing.

What I find annoying is that liberalism largely exempts itself from this sort of investigation (and liberal journalists dispense this exemption freely and without reflection). The beauty of religious conservatives is that their dogma is open to scrutiny and investigation. Conservatives generally have a written canon that includes everything from the Bible to scores of political books. Liberalism's canon is largely unwritten, it's dogma made-up as they go along (and yes, I'm over-generalizing to make a point; there are plenty of important liberal philosophical treatises that go unread by politicians and political journalists).

Goldberg is assuming that the thoroughly crazy culture of wingnut conservatism in which he was and is cocooned is some sort of norm and is trying to project that onto the rest of us, the fucker.

"Liberalism" is not my primary intellectual orientation or area of interest; neither is it my chosen criterion for social belonging -- the modalities of how I like to fuck around on the internet notwithstanding. I only do this shit here because assholes like Goldberg have power far disproportionate to their capabilities or deserts, frankly, and they are destructive and dangerous, and I like to make fun of them.  (See, somehow, they're also completely hilarious, which is some compensation.)

Just because lunatics like Goldberg choose to belong to a ludicrous ideological cult with absurd dogmatic beliefs does not mean that "liberals" do. I'm a "liberal" because by and large I think that "liberal" policy choices will work better than "conservative" ones: no stupid wars; no torture; global warming is real, let's stop it; we need a not-nuts energy policy; women are too often given too much shit, even today; minorities get a raw deal; homosexuals deserve equal rights; the drug war is idiotic and wasteful; Social Security works pretty well, all things considered; a single-payer healthcare system would be better than the misbegotten wreck we have now.... 

These are NOT for me remotely philosophical or Jaysus forbid "spiritual" issues. They're matters of policy -- of what will work for the benefit of the greatest number of people, and what won't.

This is not an especially difficult point, but one Goldberg is completely incapable of grasping:

As someone who subscribes to the view that liberalism is a secular religion, it is very frustrating that liberal politicians do not offer up a paper trail for people to scrutinize the way conservatives do. Liberalism has a dogma as rich and serious as conservatism, but you can't go to a liberal politician and ask: Are you loyal to John Dewey? Richard Rorty? John Rawls? You can't ask what their bible is because they are acolytes of the bookless faith of good deeds, the cult of do-goodery. So when they argue for keeping "religion" out of politics they are saying "keep your religion out of politics." When they say that we need to "get past ideology" they are saying we need to get past your ideology. This means that conservatives must constantly defend their own territory rather than demand a similar accounting from liberals.

That Goldberg can't conceive of ideas, books, or thinkers without cramming all that shit into the categories of faith and belief and dogma tells you all you need to know about him, and the "movement" to which he belongs and which has given him a platform.

It tells you that Jesus fuck, he's one crazy dumbass. The "liberalism is a secular religion" stuff is an article of wingnut faith, but that hardly makes it true.

If "what will work and what won't" were even remotely characteristics of the wingnut mind, we would not have had (1) the 1990s impeachment madness; nor (2) the Iraq nightmare. The two greatest political traumas of my nation in my adult lifetime. Neither were remotely necessary. Both came about because a relatively small group of politicized fanatics believed insane things that were not true.

So fuck off with that "secular religion" shit, you horrible asshole.

I Wonder How You Keep Track of Me

by Molly Ivors

Thers often notes that we have a faithful marriage partly because cheating would be complicated and annoying and a lot of work. (Oh, and you know, we love each other and all that.)

But it would be far less complicated for us than for others. Hell, we don't even have a police detail.

As New York mayor, Rudy Giuliani billed obscure city agencies for tens of thousands of dollars in security expenses amassed during the time when he was beginning an extramarital relationship with future wife Judith Nathan in the Hamptons, according to previously undisclosed government records.

The documents, obtained by Politico under New York’s Freedom of Information Law, show that the mayoral costs had nothing to do with the functions of the little-known city offices that defrayed his tabs, including agencies responsible for regulating loft apartments, aiding the disabled and providing lawyers for indigent defendants.

At the time, the mayor’s office refused to explain the accounting to city auditors, citing “security.”

The Hamptons visits resulted in hotel, gas and other costs for Giuliani’s New York Police Department security detail.
..........
But the practice of transferring the travel expenses of Giuliani's security detail to the accounts of obscure mayoral offices has never been brought to light, despite behind-the-scenes criticism from the city comptroller weeks after Giuliani left office.

The expenses first surfaced as Giuliani's two terms as mayor of New York drew to a close in 2001, when a city auditor stumbled across something unusual: $34,000 worth of travel expenses buried in the accounts of the New York City Loft Board.
..........
The receipts have languished in city files since Giuliani left office, apparently in part because of City Hall's decision to bill police expenses to a range of little-known city offices.

"There is no really good reason to do this except to have nobody know about it," Carol O'Cleireacain, a Brookings Institution senior fellow who was budget director under Giuliani's predecessor, David Dinkins, said of the unusual billing practices.
..........
None of the 2001 trips to Southampton appear in Giuliani's official schedule. However, the schedule does contain a potential clue to his destination. Before three of them, Giuliani paid a visit to his barber, Carlo Fargnoli, on York Avenue near the mayor's official residence, Gracie Mansion.

Let's leave aside for the moment the fact that he was screwing around on his wife in plain sight. (That's Donna Hanover, wife number 2, for those of you keeping a scorecard; they split in the middle of all this).  No one is questioning that he needed a security detail, or, as Lindsay notes, that he had a right to get out of town sometimes.

But.

He traveled with 4 officers, who routinely racked up $1K a night bills, sometimes twice that. Did they know why they were there? Why he was? If they were there to provide security, why weren't they staying with him? I'm not suggesing a Lincoln-esque sharing of the bed with his security detail, but a hotel down the road--in fact, over eleven miles away--seems a little inefficient for the purposes of protecting Hizzoner.*

Steve Benen thinks, a bit optimistically, I think, that this is the end of Rudy. I dunno. Maybe his prostate cancer will pop back up again, like the last time it was looking like he had to face She Who Must Not Be Named.

Cuing Arkansas state troopers in 5... 4... 3... 2...

*NB, it may be that Ms. Nathan's place wasn't really 20 minutes away from the hotel billed here, but it certainly wasn't next door, either. Several sources say she could see Noyack Bay from her condo, so a hotel on the south shore seems like an odd choice.

UPDATE: The Kenosha Kid has another theory as to why this might be the end of Rudy and, as it addresses the silent core racism of the Republican base, he might have a point.

Facing the Salt

Gives us the bacon and you keeps your nasssssty sugarses and spicy nutses!

Via Res.

Rumbling Joker

by Molly Ivors

There's an old saying that "success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan." If there were no other evidence, the war in Iraq can now officially be considered a clusterfuck, since it's clearly been abandoned in a rest stop toilet while its progenitors attempt to speed away, free.

Whoa, buddy. You know how fast you were going? And this kid says he knows you.

Even conservatives are laughing at the patent bullshit of Newsweek columnist Karl Rove's assertion that his beloved swaggering cowboy never had any intention of going to war, but that big bad old Democratic Congress made him do it.

Umm, yeah. I'm basically supportive of Dems, but if 2007 has taught us anything, it's that "bully" isn't in their vocabulary. Nor is "standing up to creeping fascism" or "defending the Constitution" (with a few notable exceptions).

If only there were some means by which one might check what actually, you know, might have happened at some time in the past... some sort of device designed to record a person talking or speaking, hell, even a means of using an implement--a sharpened stick, perhaps--to make marks which might later be interpreted. Oh, well. I guess we'll just have to go with memory.

Fuck you, Karl.

And everybody chuckles: Oh, there's Karl with another lie again! He's such a stitch!

Compare this to the immediate fact-checking of Bill Clinton when he insists that he "was against the Iraq War from the beginning." Of course, he's campaigning for Hillary, and she doesn't really want to adopt this brat either, even though she once gave it a cookie. But if Bill Clinton is anything, it's deliberate in his speech--he supported the AUMF and the right of Cowboy George to sabre-rattle, but not the invasion itself. From 2007, that may seem like a bullshit response, but in 2003, it was where a lot of people stood. Not me or Thers, but a lot of people.

And sorry, but I think this is a pretty valid point: "it would have been inappropriate at the time for him, a former president, to oppose — in a direct, full-throated manner — the sitting president’s military decision." Those who smeared Clinton as "wagging the dog" when he attempted to take out bin Laden might have shown similar restraint.

It's worth noting too that Clinton's assertion came, not as a comment on the war, but as a comment on inequitable taxation rates and the fact no one is being asked to pay for it.

Mr. Clinton’s remark yesterday came in the context of opposition to Republican-backed tax cuts for wealthy Americans like himself, and how that loss of revenue affected financing for the military.

“Even though I approved of Afghanistan and opposed Iraq from the beginning, I still resent that I was not asked or given the opportunity to support those soldiers,” Mr. Clinton said.

That's the news here: that this war is bankrupting our nation and our children and will continue to do so for generations to come. I'm no economist, but a recession and a housing crunch on top of a war paid for with credit cards can't be good thing. Bill Clinton was clear about the issue yesterday: it's 1992 again, and it's The Economy, Stupid. And endless war is a luxury we can no longer afford.

Hillary Clinton voted for the AUMF. She was lied to. So were we all. I'm not wholly unsympathetic to the "I could see through the bullshit; why couldn't she?" argument, but I think a lot of people, in those weird, heady days when plenty of people were on a patriotism bender, made similar, and often worse mistakes. I do think she needs to come up with at least as clear a vision of how to Get the Fuck Out as John Kerry did in 2004, since, if anything, the situation is more desperate, less tenable now than it was then. She also needs to shed Colin Powell, who mentored unindicted traitor Richard Armitage and drove a big fucking water truck for this war.

It's a sign of the state of our discourse that an ex-head of state and presumptive First Fella is held to a higher standard of honesty than the architect of the modern neocon resurgence with a list of bullshit titles as long as your arm, all designed to keep him in the White House and on the government teat. That he's now given space in a major news weekly to spew his brand of disingenuous crap is icing on the cake.

Remind me again: why do Republicans get to lie with impunity?

Quite Hellbent

Just out of curiosity, what does it mean that The Matrix, the first one, is a watchable movie, when the dialogue is so astoundingly stupid? "Buckle your seatbelt, Dorothy, because Kansas is going bye-bye"? How many bong hits do you need before you want to punch a screenwriter square in the chitlins?

"A killing machine, designed for one thing!" "Search and destroy..."

Learning to Hunt

Saw this at Memorandum, and then at Roy's, but... wow. (See also Steve M.) Drudge, and following him the Instant Pundit, get sniffy -- in both senses of the term -- at the breaking news of the innuendo that Hillary Clinton is having gay lesbian sex with her female aide, Huma Abedin.

Talk about your zombie wingnut obsessions. Your lesbian zombie wingnut obsessions. Because heh heh heh Hillary, she's a lesbian, a lesbian! Although now it has the extra added wrinkle that the object of her depraved but hawt! affections is a Known Muslim. And Hawt!

And I'm "puerile" because I like to say "fuck"...

If you are feeling grim, read the post and comments here, and marvel at the maturity of the Right Blogosphere. Fuck fuck fuckitty-fuck.

Insane Without Innocence

by Molly Ivors

(I'll turn Thers's blog back over soon, I promise, but this time of the semester, it's whoever is avoiding a larger pile of papers.)

It must be difficult to be Ann Althouse.

Seriously.

When your dearest wish in life is to be Maureen Dowd and you just can't quite manage it, even in New York, well, that's gotta hurt.

I'm not even going to bother with her latest piece of tripe, which goes back to that same idiotic  canard about weasley Rick Lazio getting in Hillary's face and her response to it. It was seven years ago, he was a dick, she's a good senator. End of fucking story.

Had Lazio been elected, as Althouse seems devoutly to wish here, he would undoubtedly have been arrested in a prostitution sting or for driving drunk with a 23 year old on his lap or for bribery or dirty IMs by now. 

I'm much more interested in the comment thread.

Boys didn't read the Little House books, which I always thought was unfortunate, as they contain many huge honking chunks of actual wisdom, like how to make bullets and cheese, and the dangers of gluing a pig's mouth shut with molasses, and that you can play ball with a pig's bladder (after it's dead, natch), and why you shouldn't use a wooden chimney, even if you're in a hurry. But I was thinking about them in a different context today.

One of Laura's least proud moments was a poem she wrote at 14 or 15 about the woman who would become her sister-in-law. According to the book (Little Town on the Prairie, IIRC), she was frustrated at Eliza Jane Wilder because she was driven, and knew she needed to do well in school to get a job as a teacher. Wilder was an indifferent disciplinarian and listened to Laura's longtime nemesis Nellie Olesen about schoolyard politics. Of course Nellie passed back along the teacher's confessions, including a dark chapter in her childhood involving head lice. So Laura wrote a poem:

Going to school is lots of fun;
From laughing we have gained a ton.
We laugh until we have a pain
At lazy, lousy, Lizy Jane.

Eventually, Miss Wilder is driven crazy by the endless taunting of this poem and steps down. Family holidays must have been a hoot at their place.

Now, what could have brought that up?

Mary said...

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2:29 PM

It goes on like that until well after midnight. Ann's defenders pull out all their Big Guns, including calling the dustup a "Catfight!" and this delightful moment: "Anybody else envisioning Mary sitting in front of her computer, Indigo Girls blasting in the background, alternately cackling at the computer screen, gulping wine coolers, rapidly typing a new diatribe, gigling madly, and weaving macrame beads into her armpit hair?   Or is it just me?" Odd, from a defender of Queen Winebox. I can see why these people are the ones defining what is and isn't an appropriate use of feminism.

But the Lizy Jane moment comes at 5 am, when Althouse herself wanders back:

Ann Althouse said...       

       

ALL POSTING BY MARY -- A FORMER STUDENT OF MINE WHO KNOWS SHE IS BANNED -- SHOULD BE REGARDED AS STALKING. SHE KNOWS THIS AND SHE HAS BEEN BANNED REPEATEDLY. EVERYTHING SHE WRITES IS BEING DELETED AND SHE KNOWS THIS YET CONTINUES TO POST. DO NOT RESPOND TO HER. SHE NEEDS TO DESIST NOW.

      

5:01 AM

I, uh, think you dropped your marbles back there, professor.

I'm not wholly unsympathetic to the idea that a student might glom onto an old professor's blog and become something of a nuisance. But having once had the teacher-student relationship, one would hope that you would engage with the ideas presented, defend your student's right to express them, and try to disprove them through logic. Banning and deleting and allowing your henchmen to attack a young person known to you, gender aside, is bad pedagogy. That Althouse claims to be a feminist and allows so many of Mary's attackers abuse her on basic gender grounds is absurd. I cannot, for obvious reasons, address the substance of Mary's arguments, just the responses to them.

But man, it sure drove Miss Havisham around the bend.

h/t Ntodd

UPDATE:
Wow.

Ann Althouse said...       

       

Mary, you are on notice that I may forward all your comments here to the law school.

She really has some professional scruples, doesn't she?

Note to Ann: Banning is a technical process, not just asking someone to go away. You should look it up.