Whiskey Fire

Malignant Narcissist

Nothing to add here, just wanted to share. -- Malignant Bouffant

 

THERS: seems appropriate...

States & Their Rights

A masterpiece of "180° wrong on the First Amendment" reactionary thought, ripped from the pages of The American Spectator, as typed by one (&, I hope, the only) George Neumayr, a professional Catholic ([E]editor of Catholic World Report and press critic for California Political Review.) yet. 

Neumayr's papismconstitutional scholarship has led him to conclude that the First Amendment means only that the Feds need not inquire when any state decides to burn a mosque or otherwise enforce a religious preference.

Such pitiful reliance upon mindless cliché and bogus First Amendment jurisprudence renders public officials useless in the face of dangerous stupidity.

(We must pause to ask. The above sentence: As pleasurable to type as it was painful to read? Yeesh.)

The truth is that the First Amendment protects neither the Ground Zero mosque nor Jones's burning of copies of the Koran. How do we know this? Because under the real First Amendment, the one written by the Founding Fathers, local communities within states were perfectly free to pass laws prohibiting the construction of particular religious buildings or pass laws that banned book burnings.

The plot of National Treasure III revealed to us? "169 years ago, the Bilderbergers hid the REAL First Amendment! Now, Nicolas Cage wants to find it!"

Six of the thirteen states that signed the Constitution ran established churches. It is a historical fact that the First Amendment was written not to suppress those state churches but to protect them. Those six states would have never signed the Constitution otherwise. They insisted on the language, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," to make clear that the federal government had no right to establish its own religion and disestablish theirs. The wall of separation in the Constitution is not between government and religion but between the federal government and the states' religious activities.

We're no Constitutional scholar (Nor, we suspect, is Mr. Neumayr, & to be forthright, we're not even a "scholar.") or lawyer, but this goes beyond ordinary Bizarro World, "Shut up, that's why!" opposition to anything allegedly liberal & enters a parallel & imaginary universe where judicial activism is unheard of, judges serving strictly to preserve the Constitution, unchanged from the wisdom of its Founders.

The notion that the First Amendment requires individual states to treat all religious believers equally was invented out of thin air by judicial activists. For decades after the Constitution was written, several states baldly preferred one religion over another. As author M. Stanton Evans has written, "there remained a network of religious requirements for public office -- typically, that one be a professing Christian of orthodox persuasion. Such requirements existed in New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Georgia and the Carolinas. For example, the state of Vermont, one of the more liberal states of the era (admitted to the Union in 1791) required the following oath of office: 'I do believe in one God, the Creator and Governor of the Universe, the rewarder of the good and the punisher of the wicked. And I do acknowledge the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be given by divine inspiration and own and profess the Protestant religion.'"

All well & good, but it leaves us hanging. Does M. Stanton Evans go on w/ what happened after those post-Constitutional decades of bald religious preference? Would Neumayr have us believe that at some point in time (now lost in revised reactionary history) pre-Marx Marxist judges shoved the "real" Constitution in the back of the junk drawer, whence it was pushed out by the addition of more junk, fell down the back of the cabinet, & was lost to real history? And nobody noticed? 150+ yrs. of judicial wrong-think have rendered America helpless in the face of the minority.

The rejection of the real Constitution for the phony "living" one explains today's tyranny of the minority. That tyranny has assumed ironically divergent forms in recent days. In New York City, a majority stands aghast as a group of Muslims tries to build a mosque within blocks of the World Trade Center ruins. In Florida, the majority stands appalled but idle before the pastor of a tiny church who launches an "International Burn-a-Koran Day." Both incidents are, in varying degrees, acts of gross and pointless incivility that do not truly enjoy constitutional protections, but all public officials can mumble in the face of them is the cliché du jour that Americans have a "right to be wrong."

Now I'm completely lost. The happened-in-the-parallel-universe approach works if one assumes there have been, at least in Neumayr's mind, "incidents" (Has anything actually happened, besides blather & argle-bargle? The planning & discussion of a building project now constitute an "incident?" Or is reactionary outrage alone now an "incident?") The comparison of a majority (Of?) "standing aghast" & "standing appalled but idle" is where I started to wonder where the hell I was. By the time I noticed "do not truly enjoy constitutional protections" I was wishing I'd left some markers along the trail; George's magical forest can addle the strongest of minds, let alone the tee vee & Internet-sapped brain w/ which I'm working. 

And in conclusion, Mr. Neumayr would like to issue a gratuitous bitch-slap or two.

The planned burning of copies of the Koran is a gratuitously stupid and ugly act, one which will mirror radical Islam's violence not illuminate it. But it is also dumb for the U.S. government to elevate the aberrant event's significance. Why are Hillary Clinton and company even talking about it? Jones is the pastor of a church with 50 members. He should be ignored. Instead, the Obama administration and the media, both desperately looking around for evidence of "Islamophobia," continue to build him up, thereby prolonging an Islamic outcry that will endanger U.S. troops.

Take that, America-hating libs! He knows what you're really up to! The exact opposite of what you say. General Petraeus didn't stir the pot looking for "Islamophobia," did he? Well?

Elements of Style©: The reasoned, objective, civil, non-buzz phrase argument. Examples: "foolish and false," "pitiful reliance upon mindless cliché and bogus First Amendment jurisprudence," "invented out of thin air by judicial activists," & of course "Ground Zero mosque." Twice.

M. Bouffant (Syndicated here.)

Political Scientists Are NERDS Who Can't Understand That John McCain Gets Very Sweaty

Marc Ambinder gets all gushy about a book about the 2008 election written, or perhaps gushed, by the incredibly gushy Marc Ambinder and John Heilemann. The book is 'juicy"! It is "gossipy"! And for Ambinder, that means that this book is the real shit, man, not that boring nerdy pointy-headed academic political science mumbo-jumbo:

Political scientists aren't going to like this book, because it portrays politics as it is actually lived by the candidates, their staff and the press, which is to say -- a messy, sweaty, ugly, arduous competition between flawed human beings -- a universe away from numbers and probabilities and theories.

As any Village Insider knows, the only thing that's really real about politics is insider gossip about who's fucking who. The surest sign that you just don't belong to this very special club is to give a shit about how the Village Insiders are fucking the country.

Stupid Jedi Mind Tricks

by Monica_A

Does Mary Matalin really believe Americans don't recall when 9/11 happened or who was in charge? Shouldn't John King or Carville (sometimes it's best to keep your mouth shut when it comes to your spouse) have corrected her statement?  I know it's "let's prove we're not in the bag for Obama, but come on! Do your jobs, liberal media. This can easily be proven to be a false assertion.

Mysterious Engines Run

David Broder.

Looming beyond the publicized cases of these relatively low-level operatives is the fundamental accountability question: What about those who approved of their actions? If accountability is the standard, then it should apply to the policymakers and not just to the underlings. Ultimately, do we want to see Cheney, who backed these actions and still does, standing in the dock...

In times like these, the understandable desire to enforce individual accountability must be weighed against the consequences. This country is facing so many huge challenges at home and abroad that the president cannot afford to be drawn into what would undoubtedly be a major, bitter partisan battle over prosecution of Bush-era officials. The cost to the country would simply be too great.

"If accountability is the standard..."?

This is damning on its face. I can add nothing.

Please Go to the Dead Trees Already

Ross Douthat:

They resemble nothing so much as the anti-war protests during Bush's first term. The claim that they don't have an organizing premise strikes me as obviously wrong: They're anti-bailout, anti-stimulus, anti-deficit, and anti- the tax increases that will eventually be required to pay for the current spending spree, and complaining that they don't also have a ten-point plan for reforming Medicare and Social Security reflects a misunderstanding of the nature of protest marches, I think.

Nobody's complaining that they don't have a plan; rather, the tea-baggers are deeply confused and don't have a point, except that they don't like Obama and have a moron-level grasp of economics. I mean, come on:

But they do have all of the weaknesses of the anti-war marches: Their message is intertwined with a sense of disenfranchisement and all kinds of inchoate cultural resentments, they've brought various wacky extremists out of the woodwork (you know, like Glenn Beck), and just as George W. Bush benefited from having opposition to his policies identified with peacenik marchers in Berkeley and Ann Arbor, so Barack Obama probably benefits from having the opposition (such as it is) associated with a bunch of Fox News fans marching through the streets on Tax Day, parroting talk radio tropes and shouting about socialism.

Their message is inchoate cultural resentment: and that is in point of fact the most charitable possible interpretation of their "movement," unless we're supposed to take seriously the idea that we should freeze spending in a recession. (and FWIW. contra Douthat, I have not yet seen a single tea-bag sign decrying subjunctive tax increases: they all believe their taxes have been already raised, despite the fact that they haven't.) More importantly, the rallies did not bring Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity out of the woodwork: they are the woodwork. They're the whole show. There's no "reasonable message" to hijack by extremists. The extremists own their own fucking TV news network!

And that's the major glaring difference between the teabaggers and the major anti-war protesters. ANSWER may have orgainzed those marches but you'd have to  be, well, a Fox news fan to believe ANSWER has a constituency that large. What made the ant-war protests so big was that there really was a large number of Americans who hated the idea of the war, on the merits, because the war was a stupid idea proposed by obvious fools, and at that time had absolutely no means of making that case in any other way. There was no room for that case to be made on television or in the newspapers, and most strikingly, Democratic leaders were by and large MIA.

In this sense the anti-war protests and the teabaggery ought to be seen as photo negatives: most of the anti-war people (if not necessarily the organizers) knew what they were talking about and actually did represent a much larger constituency, at least potentially: Obama reaped that popular windfall. The teabaggers don't understand their ostensible issue and are a demographic dead end.

So when Douthat says, basically, "don't laugh at the teabaggers, they might end up looking as smart as the anti-war protesters," that only makes sense if you can come up with a way to fudge the question of who is actually right about the issue. But whatever. I don't think the NYT op-ed section is getting any smarter anytime soon. 

When You Lose, You Get Depressed, Or Bored

Hardly an earth-shattering revelation, but then again, some people who aren't too bright need to be reminded of it. But the tea-partiers and Galt's Gulch goers (or, rather, the Beckettian Randians: "I can't go Galt, I'll go Galt") are not the only ones feeling out of sorts lately. Andrew Malcolm was bored, Adam Nagourney was all sad rainy days and Morrisey songs and ponies with the sniffles:

Placid and unsmiling, he was the professor in chief, offering familiar arguments in long paragraphs — often introduced with the phrase, 'as I said before' — sounding like the teacher speaking in the stillness of a classroom where students are restlessly waiting for the ring of the bell....

This was Mr. Obama as more enervating than energizing.

What the wingnut tribes and the pundit clans have in common is that Obama is just smarter and more likeable than they are. It would be kind of revealing (which is why you won't see it) to have those little audience-meter thingies up for press conferences like they had for the debates. Obama got some sharp questions last night -- or adversarial, anyway; most of them were pretty stupid. When Ed Henry got his nose whapped with the rolled-up newspaper, the dials would have shot up applauding the president. Which is to say, I'm betting that most people who saw the press conference saw the guy they liked during the debates, namely, the only guy on the teevee screen who looked like an adult who knew what he was talking about and was not obsessed with trivia.

Which is a novel sight, and the key to Obama's appeal. As is obvious, and as I've said before, Obama is quite lucky in his enemies, a class that includes most of the opinionating media elite. He just has to go on the teevee and look rational, and he's solid. That thing where Bush tried to explain and sell his policies, with the Social Security reform and the file cabinet, and the Series of Major Speeches about Iraq, remember that? Well, Obama is actually good at it.

There is certainly room to legitimately criticize Obama, but, again, as I've said before but am saying again because it's my blog, dammit, is that this criticism comes from the left. Which means, ultimately, that if not for Paul Krugman's rather flukish and anomalous presence on the otherwise mostly silly NYT op-ed page, we wouldn't be hearing any of this sort of criticism whatsoever outside of Blogland. And this sort of criticism is usually framed as "Obama has his critics on the right, and on the other side, there's Paul Krugman, so it's entirely balanced and equal!" Which is pretty much exactly how I heard it on Morning Edition the other day on the Socialist NPR.

This is a lot like the 1990s, unsurprisingly, where Clinton also could be legitmately criticized from the left, but where such criticism I don't think ended up having most positive effect, unfortunately, for a lot of reasons I won't go into right now, and which could of course be debated. The one thing to take from the 1990s now, I think, is that whatever happens we don't want to end up with a popular president on the one hand but on the other a party that wasn't really able to compete very well in the next three election cycles. Which means if you're going to spend money donating or energy volunteering, it would be a good idea to do this for decent primary challengers to conservative wanker Democrats in 2010. More and better Democrats, that's still the desiderata.

And there should also be a lot of pointing and laughing at wingnuts and pundits. Obama is not as far left as he could or should be, but no more Whitewaters, dammit.

My NPR Morning

Got in car, turned on NPR.

1. Heard Garrison Keillor reading a poem. Nothing gets self more fired up for week than Garrison Keillor reading poem in trademark Robitussinesque fashion. Desperately fought to stay awake and not drive into ditch.

2. Heard Juan Williams offering opinion, as is paid to do. GOP & Moderate Democrats said to represent "American imagination"; laughably misleading public opinion statistics offered as "support" for said inane "opinion," as Juan Williams paid to provide. Began to greatly regret not driving into ditch.

3. Heard Morning Edition hosts recite poem about Twitter. Desperately wished to be dead at bottom of ditch in twisted fiery wreckage of minivan.

Resolved: listen to music on morning commute in future; even Night Ranger or Paula Abdul CDs likely preferable.

The Game of Winner Wins

Yes, Jon Stewart committed journalism last night, though it might be more accurate to say he just pointed out to a lousy journalist how lousy most journalism is nowadays. It would be even more accurate to say that all Stewart did was point out to an empty bloviator just how fact-free and dangerous his bloviating is. 

And, great! Though I have my doubts as to how much of or what kind of an impact it will have. Don't get me wrong, I watched it in awe, it was pretty fantastic. But what does it all mean? Who knows. If it makes business coverage/entertainment of the sort that Cramer does look half as stupid as it is -- all that rah-rah stock market CEO rock star bullshit -- then that would be something positive. CNBC is propaganda for unaccountable capitalism, pretty much, and that can't be mocked enough. "It's not a fucking game," as Stewart said. And, well, exactly. 

That's what the real issue is, how important stuff like the economy, war, the political process, is only ever discussed by Serious People like it's a game, where all that ever matters is who is in, and who is out, what's hot like phat pants and what's not like Dockers. And that point, while obvious, is easily missed. "Jon Stewart's cool! Let's play the game his way now!" Happy claps! Happy claps!

To wit. Here, frighteningly, is Andrew Sullivan, being, as usual, frightening:

It's not enough any more, guys, to make fantastic errors and then to carry on authoritatively as if nothing just happened. You will be called on it. In some ways, the blogosphere is to MSM punditry what Stewart is to Cramer: an insistent and vulgar demand for some responsibility, some moral and ethical accountabilty for previous decisions and pronouncements.

Braver, please. And louder.

Okay! Fuck you and your Bell Curve, Andy. Love, The Fifth Column. 

Earlier in his post Sullivan says that Stewart is becoming as cool as "the South Park guys," which is kind of painful to have to read. Besides, the South Park guys -- Mark and Trippy, I think they're called -- are ultimately pretty shallow, which is why for all their bold japes and daring hi-jinks they always wind up ending their shows with a stupid "moral-of-the-story" segment in the mode of GI Joe cartoons. Sometimes they're embarrassed enough to undercut the didacticism with a poop joke or similar, but that's no more profound a statement than sniffing glue because there's nothing else to do at a dead end. What South Park does is 2/3 making fun of cliches and 1/3 making other cliches look hip. 

Sullivan, of course, does exactly the same thing, only more pompously. "Braver, please. And louder." Bite me, Obi-Wan. Sullivan, of course, is "MSM punditry." It's not like Sully has the street cred of some real badass, like, say, Howard Fineman.

Which gets us back to the problem, that of getting past the game. Because the the wheel turns, and on the other side of "Stewart is cool" is the predictable "no, he's a nerd" backlash. Take, for instance, Alessandra Stanley getting sniffy about how he has "a messianic streak to his political satire," and how "it's never much fun to watch a comedian lose his sense of humor." Which is to say, it's kind of nerdy to actually care about anything, like how a financial metdown hurts people. Un-cool! Or, take Howie Kurtz, please:

"You knew what the banks were doing and were touting it for months and months," Stewart said. "It was disingenuous at best and criminal at worst."

Actually, Cramer didn't know. Neither did most financial journalists. They should have been more aggressive in challenging the highly leveraged banks, the credit default swaps, the Washington regulatory cops who slept on the beat. But they were as stunned as anyone when Bear and Lehman went under and AIG and Citi had to be rescued.

Finally, Stewart hurled a charge that I was sure would prompt a rousing defense from Cramer, who views himself as the former insider looking out for Joe Investor. Stewart suggested that CNBC was catering to its Wall Street audience. "Which side are they on?" he demanded.

Cramer remained meek. He had been "late" in blowing the whistle. He agreed to improve and they shook hands. The lecture was over.

Can't have anyone pointing out that the game is a game, Howie, can we? Or else we can't play anymore. And it's fun to pretend that CNBC isn't "catering to its Wall Street audience"! 

To Be Serious, you have to play. And that's not changing anytine soon.

Howard Fineman: One of Us! One of Us!

Howard Fineman is a crazy person. Really!

This is an abysmally stupid column, but no more or less stupid than anything else Fineman has written before, or will inflict upon the world in the years to come. There is however a conceit to it that is instructive as to the virulent pathology of the elite media mindset.

The column is an accumulation of gibberish about how The Elite are having qualms about Obama, and that such qualms place him in the incredibly precarious political position of being left with no real support except for that of the majority of Americans.

Luckily for Obama, the public still likes and trusts him, at least judging by the latest polls, including NEWSWEEK's.But, in ways both large and small, what's left of the American establishment is taking his measure and, with surprising swiftness, they are finding him lacking....

Which is, believe it or not, not what's most astonishing about the column. It's dumb, but about par for the course by the standards of modern punditry. (You have to like how Fineman is concern trolling because Obama is making the foolish mistake of trying to reach out to people across the political spectrum -- partisanship is suddenly hip, hooray.)

Here's what really kills me. Fineman defines the Establishment thusly:

If the establishment still has power, it is a three-sided force, churning from inside the Beltway, from Manhattan-based media and from what remains of corporate America.

Got that? And these are the forces arrayed against Obama. Now, look at how Fineman concludes:

The American people remain on his side, but he has to be careful that the gathering judgment of the Bigs doesn't trickle down to the rest of us.

"The rest of us"...?

"Us"?

Howard Fucking Fineman writing in Newsweek fucking magazine thinks he is "us" and not "The Bigs," the "establishment," totally not at home inside the Beltway, a stranger to Manhattan, far removed from corporate America?

These people are completely bananas. The reason they're so out of touch is they have no clue how insane they are.