Delusions of an Obama Hater

I like disagreement.  I honestly do.  I like to get feedback from people who don't agree with me, in order to get other perspectives on things, as well as to hone my own position by having to explain it to someone who doesn't already agree.  That's how I keep my brain nimble and sharp.  And whether you have too many people telling you what you want to hear, or you spend too much time by yourself and reject everyone else's opinions; you'll get insular thinking which makes your brain lazy and prone to self-deception.  Resistence exercises are necessary for both our mind and bodies if we want to stay in shape.

But all the same, I have yet to find an Obama hater who was capable of offering a good reason for why I shouldn't like him as I do.  That's not to say that I think all Obama lovers are brilliant.  In fact, I think they're about on-par with what you'd expect from the average person.  Some smart; some dumb; most average.  But when it comes to the Obama haters, they remain so blinded by their quest to find something to complain about that they keep bitching about the dumbest things.  And if these people are serious in trying to convince me that I'm wrong for liking Obama, they're sure doing a crappy job at hiding their good evidence, as all I keep getting is the stupid stuff.

And as I've written twice already, I found one such Obama hater in newbie blogger Josh Fulton, who fashions himself a liberal (I think) but is far more aligned with libertarians.  A perusal of his blog shows it to be a series of news stories with a libertarian, anti-capitalist emphasis; occasionally interspersed with his own snarky comments which vaguely allude to the point he imagines he's making.  It's as if he's assuming we already agree with everything he's saying, which sort of defeats the purpose of him saying it.  And just like my fiend Donald Douglas, it's almost as if their entire point of blogging is to test the limits of fair use doctrine.  Not much original thoughts coming from these guys.

And I definitely put this guy in the camp of people who spend so much time with themselves that they can't appreciate the intricities of normal debate; not the least because he instituted comment moderation on his blog because I wasn't respectful enough of him while demolishing his arguments.  I'm obviously one of the very few who reads his blog, yet my tepid insolance was too much for his fragile ego and he'd rather I go away then continue to assail his beautiful mind. 

And just so you know, he encouraged me to read his blog, knowing I was a fan of Obama.  Yet, my debate proved too heated for him and I've now been cut-off.

 The Immoral Lawyer

But enough of that.  You don't read this blog to hear me psychoanalyze people you've never heard of.  You're here to see me snark at people less clever than ourselves.  And thus, I present a greatest hits of hilarious comments which show why Obama haters are so damn crazy; all culled from one two-part comment at my blog and in no particular order.  And trust me, these don't sound better in context. 

In our debate, I had the temerity to suggest that Attorney General Holder's two decades of government service shouldn't be ignored merely because he had chosen to represent Chiquita in a legal dispute.   Just to be clear, I'm the one in quotes.

"Holder has worked for the DOJ for over two decades." And how long have Kissinger, Cheney and Rumsfeld worked for the government? You want them back in their old positions?

Yes, Holder is in the same league as Kissenger, Cheney, and Rumsfeld because they all worked for the government, and since I don't want them back in power, I should be wary of Holder, too.  And this guy can't understand why I mocked him.  And here's Josh's reasoning for why it was wrong for Holder to have once represented the company who brings me my bananas.

Law is not an amoral profession, because we don't live in an amoral world. Everything has moral consequences. It's inescapable. Everyone is definitely entitled to a defense, but that doesn't mean defending them is moral if you don't agree with them. We live in a free enough society that hopefully there will be someone who can take a job because they believe in the client. Otherwise, it's just doing it for the money. That's different from saying people don't deserve a defense attorney who will argue their case to the best of their ability if no one else will represent them.

In other words, if you represent a guilty person and that person could have gotten a different lawyer, you're an immoral person who is defending the immoral deeds that person committed.  And taking a job solely for money is immoral.  How quaint.  Somehow, this guy imagines that only evil lawyers take guilty clients, while the good lawyers wait to find the innocent ones.  Methinks someone's seen a bit too much Matlock.

Oh, and Holder's sin was so egregious that it makes Obama a bad person for having hired him as Attorney General.  And I'm a bad person for not seeing why this is a problem.  Apparently, Chiquita is so evil that they taint anyone even remotely involved with them; including people who defend people who hire people who represent them when they plead guilty for wrongdoing.  But their bananas are so delicious.

Eyewitnessing Lies

In regards to a story in which eyewitnesses claim security guards in military-style uniforms arrested a protester for vandalism at the G20 Summit in Pittsburgh, Josh writes:

a.) You can make the argument they're not military. I don't know. They're wearing military uniforms. I don't know why someone would wear a military uniform if they're not military. They're clearly trying to pass themselves off as military if they're not.

b.) The "proof" that guy was released a few yards down is shoddy. I can't believe you would even consider that adequate. It's from some random blog of a girl who claims to be there, and puts up a picture that doesn't even show the guy's face! It barely shows anything of the person on the ground!
[....]
In the best case scenario, you have absurd security guards dressed in military fatigues abducting someone, handcuffing him 50 yards down the road, then releasing him a few days later, which is itself an example of the police state! How is that tolerable!? How is a peaceful protest allowed to be treated like that!? All these questions go unasked and unanswered by you.

And again, evidence says this guy was arrested for vandalism and I had already provided my sources.  Yet somehow, it's intolerable to have arrested him and I apparently didn't ask or answer why he was arrested, even though I already had.  And he attacks my sources as "shoddy" and "flimsy" yet provided exactly zero of his own.  How dare I try to use actual facts to combat the facts he imagined from a video that lacked context. 

Facts Are For Pussies

But that's nothing.  While denouncing Rahm Emanuel for wanting to use the no-fly list to ban people from buying guns (an idea I don't agree with), he insisted that this was horrible because it would deny the 2nd Amendment to "over a million Americans" on the list. 

And that sounded far-fetched to me.  I mean, I could understand how there could be one million names on the list.  But how could they all be Americans?  That would have to be the dumbest anti-terror list ever.  As if we'd make an enemies list that excluded the people most likely to be our enemies.  For as much as the Bushies were incompetent, this doesn't seem like the sort of thing they'd screw up.  After all, they hate foreigners.  At least the type they'd want to add to this list. 

So I naturally assumed there'd be more than a few foreigners on this list and had to call bull on him.  And being the fact-based kind of guy I am, I went ahead and violated blogger protocal by actually researching this claim.  And sure enough, it's wrong.  According to USA Today, there were one million entries on the list, many of which were variations of the same name, and 95% of which were foreigners.  According to the article, there were roughly 20,000 Americans on the list.

And while it's entirely possible that these numbers are incorrect, this appeared to be the same "one million" claim that Josh was referring to.  And so what does Josh do?  Does he admit the error?  Perhaps post a better source for his claim?  Maybe something to substantiate the idea that we'd only ban American citizens, while allowing foreigners to fly completely unaccosted?  I wish, because then I would have had something to go on.  No, instead I get the sort of "facts are for pussies" claim that Colbert so cleverly satrized.  Check this shit out:

"Over 1,000,000 entries on the no-fly this." Oh, I'm so sorry. This was such a deliberate deception on my part, when it's exactly how it was described in the story and other stories I had read. You're right that does say 400,000 people, but it was written over 2 years ago (over the two years prior the number had ballooned) and it doesn't account for all the people who have been harassed because their name is the same as someone on there. So, I don't feel a need to amend it since by now 1,000,000 is actually probably closer to the real number of people who have been bothered by it than 400,000. I might change it to entries. I don't know. I'm sure if I really wanted to dig I could bust balls on it just like you're busting balls, but it's not in my interest.

Indeed, had he wanted to provide facts to support his unsubstantiated claims, as I had done, he certainly could have.  After all, facts are easy to come by.  But that's just not his style.  Truth doesn't have time for facts.  It's better just to guess and move on.  God forbid we actually know what we're talking about.

And notice the rationalization at the beginning.  I was wrong to correct his numbers because he was just quoting what other people told him.  As if we're merely required to find any source for our claims and can't be held responsible for checking our sources.  But I checked his source, and it said there were "one million names" on the list.  Not American names or, as he assumed, individual citizens.  And so his insistence that these were all Americans was entirely in his mind.

And then he proceeds to justify his incorrect claim by guesstimating that the number probably increased in the two years since the article was written, and if you include the people who were "bothered" by the list, it'd "probably" equal one million.  So he's going to keep his claim of one million Americans, even though it has no factual basis beyond its ability to justify his incorrect claim, and the only source he had said it was 2% of that number.

Oh, and you know what else was in his head: The idea that the article was two years old.  It was written in March of this year. I honestly have no idea why anyone would bother to debate me who is this incapable of reading plain English.  But hey, I'm sure he could have proven that this article was written two years before it was written, but it's not in his interest to bust my balls.  You see, he's too cool for proof.

Debating Crackpots

So anyway, that counts as my post for the day.  Yeah, I know it's kind of weak, but you get what you pay for around here.  And the main point is that this is typical of the Obama bashing I've seen.  At best, you'll get the people who complain that he's not Superman, or that he's not doing enough to pressure Congress into doing things Congress would rather avoid doing.  But most of it is the real crackpot stuff, of people who feel facts rather than learn them, and don't mind paraphrasing the truth when the truth doesn't say what they want it to say.

So when this guy says that Obama will keep troops in Iraq after "military operations" end, while Obama said he's keeping them there after the "combat mission" ends, this guy refuses to make the correction, because he doesn't "particularly care" to know the difference between these phrases.  And sure, if there was no difference, he should be happy to post the phrase that was actually used instead of the phrase he invented.  Hell, if Obama's sin was so offensive, you'd think he'd go ahead and note that Obama says he'll remove ALL the troops by 2012, and this wouldn't hurt his case in the least.  Assuming he thinks this wouldn't make a difference.

But somehow, I think he does know the difference.  Just as he knows the difference between the one million citizens he insisted might have been denied rights by Rahm Emanuel, compared with the 20,000 citizens my link said was accurate.  And when he hears that guys in camos arrested someone for vandalism, he can't help but wonder if there's an untold story of the military kidnapping a random protester and holding him indefinitely for no reason at all.

And all this fits in exactly with what I've thought about the people who don't like Obama.  Because difference of opinion, I understand.  I want people to show me why I shouldn't trust Obama.  I really do.  But when it comes to these people, the facts are all in their heads, and until I can prove to their satisfaction that their imagined facts are wrong, they'll insist that I'm wrong for believing the actual facts I've seen.  And for as much as I enjoy a good challenge, I still haven't figured out how to defeat self-delusion.


And as a final note: Why do people who don't like Obama think the greatest attack they can make against me is to accuse me of liking him and supporting his position?  Do they imagine I didn't already know this?  Perhaps the Obama sign in my yard last year was too subtle for me to notice?  Yes, I like Obama.  Yes, I support him.  I fail to see how that's a character defect.  But I suppose, in their minds, liking Obama is the greatest offense of all.  The rest of their complaints are just icing.

Good Facts Gone Bad

In my previous post, I mocked Josh Fulton, a "liberal" blogger who created a list of 50 reasons why Obama should NOT have won the Nobel, which apparently contained fifty-three reasons.  And looking over the list, it became quite obvious that the reason it was so long was because it was meant to overwhelm us with the immensity of all the horrible things Obama had done, so much so, that we wouldn't notice that it was just a random list of complaints; few of which had anything to do with Peace, and many of which were deceptively incorrect and not supported by the links attached to them.

And in my typical fashion, I was fairly irreverent of this guy's opinions, as is my wont, and downright disrespectable when it came to certain theories of his which I found ridiculous.  Like the suggestion that Attorney General Eric Holder believes in the principle of death squads.  And as is typical of these sort of people who imagine that anyone who disagrees with them is evil, he didn't take kindly to my irreverancy and has now established comment moderation; lest I continue to disrespect his authority. 

Ironically, the people who most fiercely attack their opponents for oppressing dissent are most likely to oppress dissent, which is often why they were complaining in the first place.  And no, this isn't the first anti-Obama leftie who has banned me from their site for criticizing their position.  Nor is he the first to suggest that liberals who don't agree with them aren't "liberals."  Apparently, it's not enough to support big government anymore.

And this affliction of his was entirely fitting with why I was there.  After all, his list of reasons Obama didn't deserve the prize included such oddball items like the hiring of Eric Holder and Rahm Emanuel.  Holder's offense was that he supported the ban on D.C. handguns, as well as having represented Chiquita when they pled guilty to paying Columbian death squads.  Rahm's offense was in suggesting that Senator Kyl didn't want stimulus funds after he attacked the stimulus funds, as well as having suggested in 2007 that we ban the sales of guns to people on the no-fly list.  And yes, apparently gun control is now the pro-war position.

And while I can respect the difference of opinion on why Josh wouldn't agree with Holder or Emanuel on these issues, I found it inexplicable that anyone would seriously suggest that these are such horrid deeds that they disquailify Obama from deserving a peace prize, merely for hiring people who had committed them.  And since I suggested that these deeds didn't taint Obama, it meant that I support the no-fly list, violations of the 2nd Amendment, and death squads. 

The Recap

And trust me when I tell you that, for as disrespectful as I was of reading this stuff, my original comments were much, much worse.  And because this guy doesn't know me, he actually imagined that I wouldn't have said these things to his face.  But I assure you, I'm just like this in person, except louder.  And so he effectively banned me, unless I repented my irreverent sins and respected his opinions more.  And as that's not going to happen, I'm going to post my response here.

And to recap this portion of the argument, I had written that his list contained "outright deceptions," and because I used the plural, he insisted that I needed to list multiple deceptions or retract that precious "s".  And while I could have picked bones with almost everything on the list, as the entire thing was written to maximize shock value, I picked the following items:

* Hypocritical on the Defense of Marriage Act and Don't Ask Don't Tell.

* Continues to spy on peace groups through "fusion centers."
* Supports the growing trend of police militarization.

I'll take these one at a time.
Hypocritical on the Defense of Marriage Act and Don't Ask Don't Tell

This one involved him linking to his own post remarking that the DOJ had "finally" argued against DOMA, and presumably, Obama's offense was that he opposed DOMA while the DOJ continued to defend it in court.  But of course, it had to defend DOMA, as it's the law and Obama has to uphold the law, even if he doesn't approve.  Same goes for DADT.

So that's what I said, pointing out that the Constitution dictates that Obama support these laws.  And his reponse was to note that Rachel Maddow and Howard Dean didn't like the legal brief on DOMA which had been submitted in June.  June.  Yet, we were talking about the August legal brief the DOJ had just submitted.  And while the June brief was an embarrassment that sounded like it was written by a Bushie, the August one sounded good and Obama was on record at the time saying that he wanted Congress to overturn it because it was discrimintory against gays.

And again, this was the event Josh linked to and I had written about.  And even his link suggested that he was happy that Obama had "finally" done this.  Yet all the same, this is used as proof that Obama is a hypocrite and Josh refuses to back down.  Now, if you want to say that Obama isn't putting enough pressure on Congress to overturn DOMA and DADT, I can understand that.  But all the same, I fail to see how that's a reason to withhold a peace prize from someone.

Continues to spy on peace groups through "fusion centers."

On this one, Josh once again posted to his own blog, which failed to mention "fusion centers" or explain exactly how Obama is spying on peace groups.  So I clicked on the source for that post, which also failed to mention "fusion centers" or explain how Obama is spying on peace groups.  In fact, it actually said that the spy was spying on the military.  And I was confused about that, so Josh had to post another link, which involved a long interview explaining everything.

And here's the recap for you:
The ACLU filed a public information request on behalf of several anarchist groups which wanted to disrupt military operations on a base in Washington state by peacfully preventing military vehicles from being repaired and sent back to Iraq.  An email they uncovered indicated that a member who had joined in 2007 was a spy working for the base.  The leader of one of the groups confronted the spy and says that the spy told them that he was a civilian working on the base and was spying on them, along with other spies.  He insisted that he was pressured to do it, wasn't paid to spy, and only reported to the local police.  And that's it.  That's all they know, with the rest being conjecture.  And from this, we're to know that Obama is fully aware of this operation and approves of it. 

And sure, this was clearly a program from before Obama's presidency and involved a guy who was so low-level that he confessed to everything, including the existence of other spies.  And it certainly appears that the local police assumed these groups were far shadier, as they asked the spy to report about "bombs and explosives and drugs and guns," which would suggest that they thought they were dealing with dangerous terrorist groups.  And again, this was all easily uncovered with a public information request and nothing horrible happened to any of the people involved.

In other words, this sounds on-par with the typical Barney Fife sting operation many small towns operate, and nothing like a major military "fusion center" operation we should all fear; but still, Obama clearly approves, so it's yet another reason he shouldn't have received a peace prize.  Right. 

Supports the growing trend of police militarization

And this last one might be the best.  First, the second link he provided for this was to his own blog and involved overly aggresive police operations, which have nothing to do with the military or Obama.  And this link was provided because...I have no idea.  Apparently, police used to be really nice until recently.  Someone needs to tell that to the 60's. 

And the first link was to a cellphone video which showed two guys in camo at the G20 Summit in Pittsburgh shoving someone into an unmarked car and driving off.  Or so it seemed to my untrained eye.  To Josh, this was a military operation.  After snarking at me for having referred to it as a "shakey video", he writes:

Yes, I do think that a video showing military abducting someone off the street in a protest shows me the military abducting someone off the street in a protest. I'm sorry that because the video is "shaky" it doesn't show you the same thing. I guess the truth will just have to carry a stabilizer from now on. By the way, this isn't disputed. As of a week ago or so, that guy was still being held by the military.

Except, well...none of that was true.  As it turns out, those weren't military troops.  They were G20 security guys who happened to be wearing camo. And he wasn't "abducted."  He was apparently driven fifty feet from the crowd, brought out of the car, and then properly arrested.  Apparently, the security guys didn't want to arrest someone in the middle of a riot.  Go figure.  And he wasn't arrested for protesting, but rather, for vandalism.  And needless to say, he wasn't still being held by the military a week later.  Rather, he was immediately brought to the Allegheny Jail and arraigned, along with the other protesters arrested.  And news of this was posted the day after it happened.

But besides that, this is a clear example of Obama approving of using the military against American citizens, based upon the fact that he was at the summit and didn't complain about it.  And because he didn't complain about military abductions that never occured, he isn't worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize.  And again, this is someone who complained that I was too disrespectful, while even now, I consider my response to be understated to the point of comedy gold.

Blinded by Opinion

And these examples were symptomatic of his entire list.  It was all about taking facts, factoids, and anything else he could find and hinting at some nefarious intent on Obama's part, even if he wasn't involved.  And as with this last one, nothing was too ridculous to include and to even suggest that this guy was mistaken was to undermine your credibility.  He saw what he wanted to see and he'd be damned if he let you talk him out of it.

And so he absolutely insisted he saw a military operation, when my initial impression was that there wasn't anything military about this beyond their outfits.  Why would a military operation involve three guys, an unmarked car, and one protester?  That made no sense.  Admittedly, my experience of military operations is limited to what I've seen in television and movies, but all the same, the whole thing struck me as an amatuer group trying to grab one particular guy.  And now we know why.

And sure, maybe all that was a lie and the military really was interested in grabbing one protester and holding him indefinitely.  And maybe Obama's lying about withdrawing from Iraq, and supporting the repeal of DOMA, and maybe the bailout truly was some evil plot to rob American citizens.  But why stop there?  Maybe Ralph Nader is an alien invader, and maybe anarchists really want to destroy America, and maybe Fox News is telling the truth.  That's why belief isn't enough.  That's why opinions are untrustworthy.  That's why we need facts.  And no, it's not good enough to merely link your statement to a fact if that fact doesn't directly support your statement.

Not that opinions and beliefs are inherently wrong, but merely that facts need to be at the basis of those opinions.  And if all you've got supporting your opinions are more opinions, you're going to say a lot of dumb things and be subject to much ridicule.  And for god's sake, make sure that your sources actually say what you think they said.  For as much as this guy insisted that I needed to research all his claims, most of what I found was that he really didn't know what he was talking about.  And no amount of comment moderation will save you from the embarrassment of that.

Obama Haters Continue to Hate Obama

Every once in awhile, someone will respond to something I wrote regarding a generic person who thinks as they think, and I'll realize that I was mistaken about that person's beliefs.  For example, I really did think that anarchists supported anarchy, until I realized they just wanted a limited form of democracy that won't be called democracy and doesn't sound the least bit feasible.  But usually, they confirm exactly what I wrote about them in the first place.

And so it is with Obama's critics.  I wrote a recent post titled Obama Haters Still Hate Obama, which suggested that the only people who would criticize Obama's Nobel Peace Prize are the same people who criticize everything he does.  And sure enough, one of Obama's liberal critics posted a comment linking to what they described as 50 reasons why Obama should NOT have won the Nobel. 

But as I predicted, it was just the same list of complaints against Obama, very few of which have anything to do with world peace.  And apparently, it wasn't even 50.  It was 53.  I feel like I've been had.  And you can read his post if you want, but I'll summarize a few of Josh's reasons for you.

Reasons Obama Didn't Deserve the Peace Prize

Obama is talking tough about Iranian nukes, and therefore is probably doing what Bush did with Iraq.

Says he won't pull troops out of Iraq until the end of 2011, but is probably lying and will keep them there forever.

Increased the deficit.

Is hypocritical on gay rights.

Issued signing statements.

Wants to use the Fed as a "super-regulator."

Is allowing the Fed to monetize debt.

Supports Swine Flu propaganda.

Is using the same misleading unemployment numbers as previous presidents.

Has said things about Healthcare Reform which Josh doesn't like.

Hired people who support gun control.

Hired Rahm Emmanuel.

Hired Eric Holder.

Hired someone who was a Monsanto lobbyist many years ago as an FDA "Czar" (not to "head the FDA" as Josh claimed).

Worked with a Big Pharma lobbyist on healthcare.

Isn't making more corporations pay taxes.

Has attended weekly prayer meetings of an influential Christian group (though his link doesn't support this claim.)

Point Proven

And sure, I picked seventeen of the sillier ones.  But trust me, these aren't the only ones that aren't related to peace.  In fact, I'd guess that maybe ten of the fifty-three belong on this sort of list.  So sure enough, this is just your standard list of random complaints against Obama. 

And even his explanation of this stuff is weak.  Apparently, Holder is bad for world peace because he once represented Chiquita in a civil suit they pled guilty to and paid $25 million in fines, after they admitted to paying protection money to a Columbian terrorist group to not kill their employees.  Plus, he supported the D.C. handgun ban.  Oh, and Rahm made the list for supporting gun control, too.  Apparently, guns are good for world peace.

And just so you know, most of these merely link to Josh's own blog, meaning that these really ARE a list of complaints he's already had and merely compiled them to show how much he doesn't approve of Obama.  and that's exactly what I had written.  The only people who are going to criticize Obama's award are the folks who criticize everything he does.  I have no idea why these people imagine they have any credibility amongst people who don't already hate Obama. 

Had he limited his list to ten items, he could have had a point.  But he wanted to act as if he had some giant laundry list of horrid Obama deeds, some of which consist of nothing more than Josh's own opinion that Obama will eventually prove to have done something wrong, while many others attack Obama for not being a Superman who could have single-handedly saved the world in his first year in office.  And by doing so, he only confirms the fact that Obama is a mainstream president whose main opposition are people looking for something to complain about.

I'm the Blogosphere's Abraham Lincoln, Because I'm Very Tall

As I've argued before, Nazi comparisons are utterly shameless and despicable; the latest being Erick Erickson's reference to Whitehouse Healthcare Spokeswoman Linda Douglas as "the Joseph Goebbels of the White House Health Care shop." 

But let's see, what is it about Goebbels that makes him so memorable as a propagandist.  Is it because he invented propaganda?  No, surely propaganda has been used for thousands of years.  Is it because he was a propagandist and propaganda is always wrong?  No, America has used propaganda, including against Goebbels' government in WWII and that is considered a good thing.  Could it be because Goebbels built the best propaganda machine ever?  No, I would think the Soviets actually did a better job at that, even if I can't name any of their propaganda guys off-hand.

No, the reason Goebbels is so famous is probably because of the whole Nazi, Jew-hating thing; with the burning of books, and the killing of Jews, and the things of that nature.  And the reason to reference him isn't to reference a master propagandist, but an evil one.  Just as I argued before, the reason to evoke the Holocaust is to make a Nazi connection.  That's the whole point.  That's why you do it.  And if you're not trying to make a Nazi connection, then you're just lying.

Propagandist by Profession

And what's stupid about Erickson's reference is that, to call a spokesperson a "propagandist" is absurdist, as that's the nature of the job.  A spokesperson's job isn't to be an objective reporter of reality, but to give the best spin of their employer's side of things.  And that's taken as given.  Nobody assumes that Linda Douglas is going to say negative things about Obama's heatlhcare plan, and if she did, I'd expect her to be fired.  But is she burning books, destroying businesses, and sending conservatives to concentration camps?  Not that I've heard of, and Erickson hasn't suggested it's happening either. 

And those are the things that make Goebbels memorable.  Had he just been the Baghdad Bob of Nazi Germany and acted like a typical spinmeister, nobody would have remembered him.  But he wasn't your standard propaganda machine.  And just like the Holocaust should only be used to describe events that are comparable to the Holocaust (ie, millions of lives intentionally destroyed for an evil purpose), references to Goebbels should be limited to people who did what Goebbels did.  And anyone who does otherwise lacks any credibility. 

Now, if your purpose is to link Nazi atrocities to current atrocities, that could be acceptable; depending on the circumstance.  But any professions of innocence, and that you're merely referencing Goebbels' propaganda techniques or the generic usage of the word Holocaust, are absolute frauds by people who lack intellectual honesty and are lying to themselves.  Whether or not you agree with Linda Douglas, she'll never be Joseph Goebbels.

The Purpose of References

And just to clarify the point: The reason to evoke something is to reference what that person or thing is best remembered for.  For example, while Baghdad Bob was also a propagandist for an evil dictator, he is best remembered as a comical character whose lies were betrayed by basic undeniable facts which exposed his absurd falsehoods.  And if Erickson had compared Douglas to "Bob," nobody would assume it was because she was associated with rape rooms and torture; even if "Bob's" regime was famously associated with both.

References are used as quickie knowledge capsules, to convey a large amount of information in a short space.  But it's not enough simply to find some attribute that is similar to the negative reference, if you're not explictly attempting to link the person to the primary attribute the person is known for.  For example, linking liberals to Nazis just because they both have vegetarian members is utterly absurd, unless you were stupid enough to believe that Nazis are only famous because they didn't eat meat. 

And the rule is that if the purpose of your reference isn't directly obvious to your audience, then your reference was a failure (Dennis Miller, I'm looking at you).  And if the purpose of your reference isn't directly related to how that reference connects to your target (ie, comparing any propagandist you don't like to Joseph Goebbels), it is a fraud.

Overall, unless you're trying to evoke the specific reason for why something is famous (or infamous), you shouldn't use it.  Abraham Lincoln isn't best known for being tall, nihilists aren't best known for being postmodernists, and Goebbels isn't best known for basic propaganda.  And if you're evoking a BIG NEGATIVE without trying to link the BIG NEGATIVITY to the person you're targeting, then you're an outright liar who should avoid speaking until you get something better to say.

Popularity is for Wimps

Shorter Liz Cheney: If our president is popular with Norwegians, he's doing something wrong.

Clueless Chicken Counting

Atrios links to this NY Times article which pimps the Republican idea that they're going to sweep the mid-term elections next year and gain back over forty seats in the House.  And while that's certainly possible, I think they're smoking from the same damn crackpipe that told them they were going to make gains in 2008 and 2006.

Because as these polls from Pew, ABC, Harris show (the only polls that had numbers going back that far), disapproval of Congressional Republicans is lower than it was twelve years ago, back when they were still losing seats.  Back in 1997, right after Republicans lost seats in previous year's election, Republicans had roughly 40% approval.  And again, in 1998, they lost seats in a mid-term election (almost unheard of for a second-term president) and had roughly 40% approval.  And again in 2000, it was roughly 40%, and they lost a few more seats.

But then after 9/11, their approval bounced up, and before the 2002 elections they were still pulling numbers in the mid to high 40's.  2004, saw them down to the low 40's and the gains they received were mostly due to their redistricting schemes.  And then for 2006 and 2008. they were polling in the low 30's and high 20's; and got routed both times.

And now...now they're in the high to mid 20's.  Pew actually has them at 24%, which is the lowest they've shown them in twelve years of polls.  And these aren't outliers.  These are consistent among all the polls and all year, and the numbers aren't improving.  And while the Democratic Congressional numbers aren't stellar, they're still doing far better than Republicans.  Yet we're to imagine that Republicans are posed for some big sweep next year?  Sure, while that's certainly possible, there's nothing that indicates that right now, and historical standards suggest that they're going to get routed again.  I mean, favorability in the 20's essentially means it's mainly the South supporting these guys.  And we weren't going to win in many of those elections anyway.

And so I think all the chest-thumping and triumphalism from these guys is the strongest indicator that they're entirely clueless and setting themselves up for another defeat.  It's all hubris with these guys and if you think you're already on the easy path to victory, you're not looking to fix any problems.  And so they're already declaring victory on Healthcare Reform, despite rising numbers for Obama, while practicing with their rubber gavels.  Sorry guys, but empty optimism isn't a plan.

Obama Haters Still Hate Obama

The AP has the headline: From right and left, questions about peace prize.  And once again, we get this false dynamic, in which it's imagined that there's lots of valid criticism of an event involving Obama simply because they can find people who diss him. 

And the writer even ponders why it would be that even liberals would criticize Obama's prize, as if no one had ever noticed that the far left never liked Obama.  The leftier people supported Hillary and accused Obama of being a centrist (despite Hillary's strong centrist connections) and the leftiest people supported Nader or some other impossible presidential hopeful.  And even the leftier types who supported Obama were reluctant to do so and always added caveats that they knew he'd betray them.

But one quick tweak to the general idea of this article and we get this: People who criticize everything Obama does continue to criticize him.  And that's it.  That's all we're seeing here and the story has all the quality of Dog Sniffs Dog.  Normal people can disagree with Obama, but only a freak is going to criticize this event.  And if anything, this sort of thing should be used as a litmus test of one's rationality.  If you can't even be happy for Obama receiving this award, but instead have to use it as an opportunity to bash the guy, you have no credibility and need to leave quietly.

But rather than realizing their insanity, these people are given yet another platform from which to bash Obama, just as they did when he tried to get us the Olympics.  Somehow, they fail to see that by constantly haranguing Obama for even positive events, they're completely delegitimizing everything they do, so that even their valid attacks will be ignored.

Bombs for Peace

Oh, and speaking of clueless, here was my favorite conservative comment, from Marcus Traianus:

Suure. Bush Freed the people of Iraq and Afghanistan from tyranny…and Obama gets the NPP?

Yes, because war is peace in the minds of conservatives.  And once we're done bombing the world into submission, we'll finally have peace .  And that's the thing, I really do think that Obama partially earned this because the Bushies had set the bar so low that merely returning to pre-neo-con standards of diplomacy is enough.  (And that includes much of the Clinton-era saber rattling). 

It's easy to get credit for aiding world peace when you're given control of a country that was responsible for a large part of the fighting.  Hell, just the knowledge that we're no longer trying to start a war with Iran should be enough to have won him the prize.

Clueless Conservatives and the Nobel Blues

I read Erick Erickson's take on Obama's Nobel prize...

I did not realize the Nobel Peace Prize had an affirmative action quota for it, but that is the only thing I can think of for this news. There is no way Barack Obama earned it in the nominations period.

...and remain baffled as to how these people can be so clueless regarding the inherent racism of this statement.  It's bad enough to think this sort of thing, but I can understand how a racist can do that.  But to write it...on one of the most read conservative blogs...at a time when you're desperately trying to prove you're not racist??  Utterly clueless.

Perhaps some day they'll realize that racism has always been hidden in the guise of so-called "reverse racism," and that these terms are synonymous.  After all, racism wasn't about a guy in a sheet yelling about how we need to treat blacks or Mexicans badly.  Nor was Hitler's anti-semitism about him insisting that we need to be jerks to Jews.  Rather, it was all about payback.  About how the blacks and browns and yellows and Jews are treating us badly and how we need to fight back before it's too late.  They're stealing our women and our jobs and our money and our freedom and we can't put up with it anymore.  That's what racists have always said, and Erickson is continuing in that fine tradition.


And so yes, Erick Erickson, you are a racist.  Not because you oppose Obama, as that's a perfectly natural thing for you to do.  And not because you're upset about his Nobel Prize, though that's a perfectly juvenile attitude to take.  No, it's because you believe that Obama is getting special privileges because of his race and you're upset about it.  It's the only thing you can think of for this news.  Had Obama been on an equal playing field with us white people, he'd just be another angry conservative blogger with no accomplishments, too.  Those blacks get all the luck.

Had you taken the standard conservative line of complaining about liberal bias on the part of the Nobel committee, you might have a point.  It'd be a stupid point, as their liberal "bias" is no worse than your conservative "bias," so they should be able to pick any damn person they want.  But to pin this to Obama's race is a sad, sad indictment of yourself.

Weak Dollar Equals Weak Attack

Reuters has a story about how Republicans have broken a once sacred taboo by attacking Obama for the weak dollar.  But the main take I get from it: Republicans are still floundering and haven't a clue as to what to do about it.  So they're reaching for any attack they can find, in hopes that something will finally stick.

And geez, how stupid do you have to be?  Honestly, how many non-partisans could possibly know what a weak dollar means to them?  Tell them the debt's bad and they'll kind of know what you mean.  Tell them the debt is weakening the dollar and they'll get a slightly confused look on their face, before they mention something about the growing debt.  Perhaps things have changed since I was in the workplace, but this doesn't strike me as water cooler talk.

Hell, I bet most partisans don't really care much.about this stuff.  And at best, your typical Obama-lover or Obama-hater will merely repeat what their favorite source told them, and they'll agree to it completely, as it reaffirmed their love or hate of Obama.  And since most non-partisans don't have preconceived ideas of who to listen to regarding dollar policies, they won't listen to anyone.  As has been noted before, "independents" are generally people who don't care about politics or are ignorant of policy; while the rest are partisans who merely pretend to be "independents" for political expediency.

In other words, this attack will have zero traction.  Instead, it will just be more background noise added to the noise heap.  For as much as the wingnut base demands to be sated with their daily meat, none of it can possibly gain any traction with anyone else, as none of the attacks last long enough to sink-in.  And too much of it is inside pool which outsiders just can't be interested in.  Weak dollar, indeed.

Facebook to Front Page

And to follow up on my earlier post on the media-created phenomenom of Sarah Palin's "social" media success, I read this non sequitur from Reuters:

Palin still has star power. Her comments resonate with a good segment of the conservative Republican base and with Americans who view her as talking "common sense" in the face of the country's elites, analysts said.


Her written comments on the dollar made the front-page lead story of the Financial Times on Thursday.

Palin has successfully used Facebook to rally supporters of her viewpoint. The "death panels" term that rocked the healthcare debate during raucous summer town hall meetings sprung from a Palin Facebook post.

Yes, this has everything to do with Facebook, and nothing to do with, say, Reuters, the Financial Times, and the rest of the media breathlessly reprinting everything she writes.  No follow-up questions.  No proof that she even wrote this.  Just a quote from Facebook, and now it's a national news story worthy of the front page.  Geez, you'd think this was a Twitter from Newt Gingrich, with all the attention it's getting.

And yeah, there are tons of Americans who support Palin who aren't Republican.  Sure, a Bloomberg poll in September showed that only 34% of Americans had a favorable opinion of her, while Marist put the number at 37% in August.  And in an odd bit of coincidence, that pretty much mirrors Obama's unfavorability ratings; just as the number of folks who don't like Palin happens to approximate the number of those who like Obama. 

And a cynic might suggest that this means that Palin is only popular with the people who hate Obama, but I'm sure that can't be the case, or the media would stop pretending she has some wide popularity; rather than one tied to their hatred of Obama.

Moron Quote of the Day

And finally, the moron quote of the day, from Ethan Siegal of The Washington Exchange:

She was the vice presidential candidate in the last election, that's marquee status right there. There are no other Republicans who can say that who want to be the next president of the United States.  So she gets a seat at the table just because of that.

Yes, because losing VP candidates with no name recognition before the election always have "marquee status" and get to sit at the table.  I remember Jack Kemp ruling our world in 1997, as well as the media following every post Quayle made in Usenet, back in '94.  But in reality, even presidential failures are generally ignored after their loss, while Palin is given far more media attention than the guy that got the job she was seeking, Vice President Biden. 

But of course, none of these people can be properly compared to Palin, as they were all more credible both before and after their elections; with Palin standing alone as the Country Pop star of American politics.  And so the media keeps telling us how influential she is, while reprinting her every Facebook word.  Yeah guys, it's Facebook that's giving her all the attention.  You're just reporting the news.

Our Democratic System

Anarchist blogger Broadsnark responded to a post I had made on our democratic system, but because her comments section is super-anal and won't allow long comments, I'm posting my reply here:

First off, I'd like to say that "Love it or leave it" is most definitely NOT what I'm saying here. That's the attitude of those who insist that you have to love America the way that it is and that if you attempt any change of it, including change within the democratic process, you hate America and should leave. And this is the attitude of head-in-the-sand conservatives who insist upon pretending that America has done no wrong and that if you think any wrong has been committed, you hate America. But as much as I love my country (and I truly do), I readily admit that it has done many shameful things that have brought discredit to it. So no, I don't insist that you have to love America the way it is or leave. I myself would like to see many more changes, so that America becomes the ideal of what it should be.


Secondly, I did nothing but state the social contract that we all have with our country. Minors aren't old enough to enter into contracts, but their parents are. So your parent's decisions are binding on you, whether you like it or not. Just ask any child actor who got robbed by his folks and he'll assure you that your parents can enter you into shitty contracts and then steal all your money. And once you turn eighteen, you can choose to leave. That's not my opinion, that's just how the world works.

Finally, the focus of my post was on our democratic process, not on accepting the status quo. And my point is that, if you don't like how our country is, work to change it. Help elect representatives that will represent your interests or run for office yourself. And thusly, change what you want to see changed. And if you can't get enough people to agree with you, then tough. That's how it works. If you think our system is broken, then fix it. And if you don't like our process for fixing it, leave. And if you want to rebel, then rebel, and face the consequences. There are no other options.

And it should be stressed that this argument was explictly written for conservatives who INSIST that Obama doesn't have the right to force healthcare reform on us. And the title of my post came from the conservative belief that "taxation is theft." And as I explained, taxation is in accordance with our system of government, so if taxation is theft, then democracy is also theft. And my "love it or leave it" style rhetoric was specifically chosen to throw their own rhetoric at them; though I never used that specific phrase.

And I like the democratic method, because frankly, I don't agree with lots of what you might want. We can't all win. That's the point. And it doesn't matter if you were born into an oppressive government, or a "fixed" system you don't agree with. You still don't have the right to force anything on me any more than I can force it on you. That's why we agreed to democracy. Because it gives us all a chance to get the government we want, based upon majority opinion.

And from what I can tell, that's what anarchists seem to want too. They want democracy based upon majority opinion, and merely object to what they see as a permanent ruling class that dictates orders. And if that's what you want, elect it. Work to get as many anarchists into Congress as you can, and have them fix the system. What other choice do you have? Can you possibly be saying that you're going to rebel and FORCE the rest of us to adopt your anarchist system? I don't think so. So you either have to use our democratic process to get your anarchy, or you don't get it in this country. There is no other logical option.

And if you don't like it, then go to the magical land that allows us all to be our own personal dictators. But as you realize, such a place doesn't exist. We can't all be dictators. So democracy is the next best option. And if you don't like it, fix it. And if you don't like democracy, leave. I never suggested that you have to love what America is, but if you want to live here, you got to play by the rules. And that's all I was saying.

Anarchy as Democracy

Don't ask me how, but I've fallen in with anarchists.  No, I'm not switching to anarchy.  I've just gotten into a discussion with them.  And as with any time I'm in a discussion, I discuss to win.  And that means I need to know more about their belief system than they do.  That's what makes me so great. 

And one thing I've found is that I'm really not that different from anarchists.  Well, some anarchists.  In fact, one of the ironic things about anarchy is that there are about as many different visions of anarchy as there are anarchists, if not more.  And while some anarchists hate capitalism, others embrace it.  And you never know which type you're dealing with until you assume it's the other type and get corrected.  And I'm not sure, but I think in my discussion, I've gotten involved with the two different types and now I'm totally confused.

But one anarchist tried to help me out by sending me to An Introduction to Anarchism.  But for god's sake, don't click on that link!  You'll most assuredly regret it.  It's long.  Ungodly long.  You can read it if you really want, but don't say I didn't warn you.  And while I appreciate the thoroughness, most of it was meaningless for what I was wanting to know, and it takes so long to get to the actual intro of what anarchy is that you'll probably have stopped reading long before you get there.  Because most of it is about what anarchy isn't.

Anarchy isn't lawlessness.  Anarchy isn't utopianism.  Anarchy isn't equality.  And of course, anarchy isn't the current system, which involves government taking advantage of you to oppress you, yadda yadda yadda.  Ok, I get it.  But what is it?  I'm not exactly sure.  I read all that stuff, and can only conclude that anarchy is whatever you want it to be.  It seems to be more of a feeling than an actual form of government.  And you can bet it's a good feeling.

And you'd think it meant no government, but you'd be wrong.  It basically comes down to anarchy being a free-form democracy run by the people.  That's it.  And they'll have rules that can be enforced, but it just won't be powerful, and I think they won't tax you.  Oh, and while they can enforce laws, they still don't have power over you.  Again, anarchy seems to be more of a feeling than an actual form of government.

No Domination

Here, try this, from the intro:
Perhaps the best way to describe anarchism is as the rejection of all forms of domination of one person over another.

Oookaaaaaay.  Yeah.  The rejection of all forms of domination of one person over another.  Right.  That's going to form the basis of a real government.  Of course.  But notice, this still isn't a description of what it is.  It's just more attack on the current system.  And I'm not shitting you, according to the intro, anarchy will protect "a worker who is declared useless to society and thrown out of the business he’s been working at for 30 years."  Oh, and apparently, the president can currently order airstrikes on civilian populations, something that anarchy will also put a stop to.

And that's the thing: These people aren't actually railing against our government.  They're railing against some fictional government in which we're stuck with a "few" leaders who have unlimited power and can't be stopped.  In their universe, our laws don't apply to our politicians.  Or our police.  As was explained to me, liberals believe in hiring wolves to protect the sheep and nothing can protect us from the wolves, as the laws only apply to us and not them.  Oh, and while the government is all-powerful, it's actually controlled by capitalists; who I guess are also above the law.

And when you really get down to it, you'll find that these anarchists want government.  They just don't want our government, or any government that's ever existed.  They want a government that they can control.  And they think that if you get together with all your neighbors, you can solve the problems that arise and people can work for themselves and won't need to worry about being fired.  In other words, they want democracy, mixed with a strong dash of fairy dust.

Government of the Neighbors

And it's like these people have never been to any meeting with people who disagreed before.  I've seen PTA meetings that got quite heated.  A neighborhood association where I once lived had a meeting that erupted in anger and shouting and almost fighting (thank god I never attend these stupid things) over some stupid issue that I can't even remember.  I once saw an actual coup d'etat at a Knights of Columbus meeting, because the guys who did most of the cooking were never being picked for leadership positions, and so they stacked the election meeting with new members who elected them to all the top positions.  My dad was on the nomination committee and was LIVID over what these jerks did.  It took years for that brauhaw to settle down.

And yet we're to imagine that neighbors will get together and settle real issues?  Property disputes, and rape accusations, and murder?  Really?? I'm going to trust my neighbors to handle this stuff?  Hell, I like my neighbors and live in a cool area with highly educated people who all vote the same way I vote, yet I'd prefer to let the professional police handle my burglary, thank you very much.  And by the time they catch on to my Ponzi Scheme, I'll be in the next county, pulling it again.

Oh, but did I say burglary?  There will be no need for crime, once we get anarchy.  You see, once we get all the money and property away from the "few" who possess it, then we'll all be living in the land of plenty and work will be easier than crime.  And kids will educate themselves and electricity will generate itself and iPod's will rain down like manna from the skies; while no one is ever fired.  Huzzah huzzah! 

And apparently, hunger is created by "the few," because they're all sitting on a giant stack of cheeseburgers that's just waiting to be eaten, if only we could use our anarchy to free the burgers for our own consumption.  And honestly, is it possible for a realist to debate someone with such fantasy expectations? 

Anachronistic Anarchists

And I'm not even going to get into the problems of how we handle healthcare or the elderly or education or any of that.  What's the point?  I read a long ass essay as an "intro" and still lack any sort of real world understanding of how their government is supposed to work.  I'm an accountant, dammit!  Not some pansy-assed philosophy grad.  I need real answers, like how long fixed assets depreciate in anarchy.  I'm a guy who's actually seen the faces of the faceless bureaucrats at the IRS.  Stop telling me about how all-powerful they supposedly are and start telling me how we replace them.

And honestly, I'm not going to keep going with this.  Because I really don't feel confident enough in my knowledge of anarchy to truly snark it properly.  But that's just because every damn person who's trying to explain it to me keeps explaining it in la-la magical fairy terms.  I'm told endlessly about how unfair the government treats me (unbeknownst to me), yet very little as to how this really will work.  Yeah, great, we all live in harmony, but who's going to protect my daughter from rape?  Sounds to me like a tribal justice system or vigilantes, or...something that involves one group having dominance over another, yet I was assured that this wouldn't happen.  But maybe there's no reason to rape once we get anarchy.  Maybe the rapists can rape themselves.  I don't know.

And overall, I think their main problem is that they're stealing rhetoric from the original anarchists, who were describing a different world than the one we live in.  This stuff was created back when governments really were mysterious organizations with almost unlimited powers.  But these days, Cheney can't disappear someone like Jose Padilla without everyone and his brother knowing he was on a navy ship.  And it really IS possible for a black kid from a broken home to end up in the Whitehouse.

One of my favorite books is In the Days of the Comet by HG Wells, in which he describes to a future person how horrible things were in his age, due to lack of zoning laws, employment laws, environmental laws, and the ownership of much by the few.  And while not all of these problems have been solved, it's funny looking back at this as we really have solved many of the problems he's describing.  We're so far removed from his world that it's hard to believe it was written in a century I've lived in. 

Yet, these anarchists are still describing that world, the one where we're all powerless and even educated people are completely at the mercy of a corrupt system..  Because the rhetoric they're using is still caught in the past.  These are anachronistic anarchists.  And these days, you really can be your own boss and be treated as an equal if you have a boss and be paid for what your time is worth.  And if there's a group trying to make this easier and bring about more protection and accountability for citizens, it's liberals and we're using the government to do it.

And their solution, far from getting the laws that helped remedy the situations the original anarchists were railing against, is to blame the govenrment and imagine that we can solve it all if only the government went away and let us solve them.  Somehow, we'll be able to boycott businesses that are bad in ways that our current boycotts fail.  I guess the government is blocking those too.

Donald Douglas Doesn't Know Much About Anarchy

After my recent post on Donald Douglas' attack on anarcho-capitalists as being anarcho-commies, I've learned a lot about anarchy.  And the first thing I learned: Professor Donald Douglas doesn't know anything about anarchy.  And that's fairly surprising, seeing as how anarchic his belief system appears to those who try to undestand it, but it's true. 

And one of the main things I learned was that, Martin Rothbard, who Donald cited as evidence that anarcho-capitalists don't exist is, in fact, the founder of anarcho-capitialism.  It was Rothbard's term and he invented the concept.  To quote Rothbard's Wikipedia page:

Rothbard began to consider himself a private property anarchist in the 1950s and later began to use "anarcho-capitalist."  He wrote: "Capitalism is the fullest expression of anarchism, and anarchism is the fullest expression of capitalism." In his anarcho-capitalist model, a system of protection agencies compete in a free market and are voluntarily supported by consumers who choose to use their protective and judicial services. Anarcho-capitalism would mean the end of the state monopoly on force.

And that makes perfect sense to me, far more sense, in fact, than Donald's attempt to thread the needle; in which he argues that he's against Big Government, just not as against it as the anarchists are.  And in Donald's view, you can't love capitalism if you reject America's government or Tea Parties. 

But of course, if you read what Rothbard said, you'll quickly realize that most conservatives fall into the anarcho-capitalist label; assuming we accept it as legitimate.  In fact, I honestly think the term "anarcho-capitalist" is a far better description than the amorphous "conservative" they prefer.  After all, there's nothing conservative about their plans to destroy government as we know it and replace it with good feelings and fairy dust.

And if anything, one mistake Donald makes is the one that most folks unaquainted with anarchy make (including myself), which is to assume that "anarchy" means anarchy.  But as I'll mention in my next post (assuming I write it), anarchy doesn't really mean what you think it means and you'll feel a tiny bit dumber once you realize the truth. 

But Donald's bigger mistake was that he just didn't like the folks at the G20 summit, didn't like the folks helping them out, and therefore, didn't want to think that anyone associated with conservativism could have been involved. 

Defeat Begets Defeat

If there's one thing I'm great at (and trust me, I'm great at many many things), it's strategy.  I understand strategy like fish understand water.  And one of the oddest pieces of "strategy" I keep hearing from progressives is their insistence that we'd be better off if Dems lost Congress next year, as it would sweep out the sell-out centrist Dems and we could finally get the liberal Democrats we all desire.

But as a top-notch strategist, I can assure you that this "strategy" is complete and utter horseshit.  Past history guarantees that, were Democrats to lose Congress next year, it would be loudly announced that they lost because America is a conservative nation and Democrats were too liberal.  And Obama would be roundly derided for his liberal push on healthcare reform and other "socialist" issues, and Dems would be warned to never attempt anything liberal again.

And why not?  Isn't that exactly what we said after our victory in 2006 and 2008?  We insisted that the election results were proof that Republicans were too conservative and America had rejected their agenda.  So why shouldn't they say the same when conservatives defeat liberals?  And we insist that Republicans can only regain popularity if they reject their ultra-conservativism.  So why wouldn't the same be true for us if we lost?  I mean, if the moderate-liberal loses to the ultra-conservative, wouldn't that mean that America supports conservatives?

And come on, conservatives keep saying that they lost because their candidates weren't conservative enough; and everyone knows how laughable that claim is.  These progressives are making the same dumb argument.  It'd be like if a manufacturer saw that people preferred DVD over VHS and decided to start making more VHS machines.  Dumb.  Just dumb.

How to Win

And so the end result of this would be an immediate shift towards conservativism in 2010, as well as a delayed shift in 2012, as Dems struggled to become more conservative.  And that's exactly what we've seen after every Republican victory.  Can anyone seriously suggest that 1994, 2002, and 2004 gave us the awesome progressive Democrats these people think a 2010 defeat would give us?  I can't imagine how. 

But you know what could give us more progressive Dems?  Victory.  Sweeping victory.  Every time Dems win a landslide, it shows how liberal the nation is.  And the easier the win, the more liberal we must be and the safer it is for us to run ultra-liberals against them in primaries.  That's why we think it's ok to have primary challenges in safe blue districts, while allowing "blue dog" centrists run uncontested in red districts.  But if all the districts were safe, then we'd have hard-liberals contesting all the primaries.

And that just makes sense.  Only partisan extremists believe in the myth that the base stays home if they're not satisfied.  That's bullshit.  The base is the last group that will allow the other side to win.  It's the rest of the electorate that you have to please.  If you don't excite the less political voters, you'll lose.  But the base will always show up; guaranteed.  That's why they're called "the base."  I'm not sure who created the myth that you have to please the base in a general election, but I doubt they knew anything about strategy.

Obamacare Plan B

Carpetbagger's got a post about how the Obama Admin has been increasingly putting on the pressure in regards to getting Congressional Dems to support Healthcare Reform including the Public Option; or at a minimum, agreeing to not let Republicans filibuster it. 

And for as much as many progressives have complained about how Obama isn't doing enough (or even insist that he doesn't want to do enough, in accordance with a bizarre theory which posits that Obama wants to stake his reputation on failure), I've always thought he was playing it low-key as a strategy, but would eventually turn up the heat if he felt it was necessary.  The rest of this is what I wrote as a comment.

I'm of the opinion that this was Plan B (or possibly Plan C or D, depending on who's counting) the whole time. It was best for Obama if he didn't signal that a large portion of his presidency hinged upon getting healthcare reform with a public option, as that would have been like painting a giant bulls-eye on his face. So instead, he left it up to Congress to write the legislation (as per our Constitution), while he sat back and acted as a mildly interested cheerleader.


But it's now quite apparent that Republicans put the bulls-eye on his face after all, and since their best attacks have failed to rally any serious opposition to him or his plans (ie, from anyone who didn't already think he was a socialist), he now feels safe in taking an increasingly more active stand. But even still, it's largely behind the scenes and still hasn't involved Obama publicly insisting on a plan.

And for as frustrating as this is (particularly as he can't possibly let us know what he's really up to), I think this is the best way. I suppose I would have preferred a more aggressive pushback in August, but then again, maybe not. Perhaps it was best to give August to conservatives, so they could huff and puff and overplay their hands. And now, as usual, Obama held tight while his opponents over-reached and gave everything they had, and now he's playing strong again while Republicans slowly realize how impotent their best attacks had been.

Sure, perhaps none of this is intentional and he's just making this shit up as he's going along, but this really does fit exactly into the same pattern we've seen for the past year and a half. Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes, and all that.

Donald Douglas: All Dumb is Liberal

Poor, poor Donald Douglas.  In his herculean effort to maintain his belief that liberal=bad and conservative=good, we see posts like this one, about an anarchist who supposedly Twittered to G20 Rioters in order to help them avoid arrest.  Donald goes as far as to title his post "Queens 'Tin Can' Anarchist Held One Pound of Liquid Mercury," based entirely on a claim written in the NY Post that mercury was found in his apartment. 

I guess this is proof of the NY Times liberal-bias, as they failed to mention this important fact completely.  So in typical fever-swamp fashion, Donald takes this factoid and proceeds to explain to us the dangers of explosives and other such toughguy nonsense which all conservatives inherently know since birth.

But here's the funny part: Donald quotes from Mike Gogulski, a completely different anarachist, who writes in his bio:

My political philosophy — which could be variously termed anarchism, anarcho-capitalism or individualist anarchism...

But then Donald writes in a comment:

I call them "anarcho-communists," Mark. They're really the same in my book.

Yeah, self-described "anarcho-capitalists" are "anarcho-communists" in Donald's weird world.  Similarly, people who despise government and actively fight against it are the same as those who support big government and the use of force to ensure government control over people.  Right.  And mind you, Donald Douglas is a professor of Political Science at a college somewhere in California.  Is it any wonder they're in such deep doo-doo right now?

Donald Responds

Oh, and as it turns out, Donald has a response to this.  I had written a brief version of what I wrote above, and he responded with a stellar argument: He insulted me, mentioned a Lenin picture found in the anarachists apartment (which Donald turned into multiple "pictures," which is absolute proof, as the only people who have pictures of Lenin are card-carrying communists), and then cites two links. 

The first link was to his own blog, in which he posts some pictures of the riots; one picture had an anti-capitalist sign in it, while the other had an anti-government, anti-bank sign.  He then quotes one of my fellow "nihilists," who had lambasted the unfairness of the insurance industry.  Apparently, Donald is so clueless about our healthcare system that he imagines it's "anti-capitalist" to decry unfair business practices that kill people.  Apparently, if you've heard of recission, you're a communist. 

As far as I can tell, this post of his is "proof" that anarchists are liberals because  he combined them into the same post.  Sure, the anarchists were protesting government, while the liberal was wanting stronger government; but hey, they both have complaints against corporations, and that makes them equals. 

Oddly, Donald referred to these people as "anti-globalization," yet their sign suggested they were against borders; which I think would put them in the pro-globalization camp.  I mean, who flouts borders more than the international conglomerates these people detest?  But of course, I've generally found these sort of people lack any kind of inner-consistency, so it's quite possible that it was the protesters who were confused about how you can't be both anti-globalization and anti-borders at the same time; and Donald was correct in labeling them as such.

The second link was from a libertarian who asserted that there are extreme communists who have turned to anti-government anarachy because they're so extreme that they've realized that the government supports capitalism.  And while I'm sure that such people exist, as I once had the misfortune of talking to such a person, I fail to see how this is proof that all anarchists are communists.  After all, this article was written in 1970 and I doubt he was directly referring to the G20 protesters.  And while there are commie-anarchists who oppose government because they think it reinforces inequity, there are also capitalist-anarchists who oppose government because it infringes on their freedom.  And most of the anarchists I know are in the pro-freedom side; including the anarchist he quoted.

Oh, and as a late entry, Donald gave another response which asserted that Gogulski MUST be a socialist because he posted at a socialist website and a real capitalist would NEVER do that.  But as I found, he only had the one post there and it was originally posted at his own blog.  The Socialist Webzine Donald linked to had just reprinted what Gogulski wrote at his own blog.  In other words, Donald's "birds of a feather" argument has no wings.

My Rebuttal

And to this abudance of evidence which Donald may have been alluding to when he posted these links, all I have to say is, he quoted an anarchist who describes his beliefs as"anarcho-capitalism."   But if that's not enough, here are a few lines from Gogulski's Anarchist Declaration, and just try to tell me that this couldn't have come straight from your average Tea Partier:

•Where a tyrant, a majority, a plurality, or a minority presume to grant you power over me, or over anyone else, I shall condemn it, resist it, renounce it and denounce it.


•Where there are those who are subjugated beneath the boot heel of power, by “democratic” means or otherwise, I shall support their resistance, their condemnation, their denunciation and their renunciation.

•I shall make no compromise with evil.

Oh, yeah.  This totally sounds like your average liberal to me.  Sure, we believe in a strong government which can regulate industry and force people to buy insurance, while this guy thinks that democracy is illegitmate and doesn't give us power to compel people to act; but hey, those are just flipsides of the same coin.  Because when you get down to it, Donald doesn't like this guy and he doesn't like us, and that means we must be on the same team.  After all, conservative=good and liberal=bad, and never the twain shall meet.

The Futility of the Lose-Lose Liberals

I'm continually frustrated by liberals who insist that every Republican move is part of some genius strategy that always puts them on top, and how we're all naive fools if we somehow imagine otherwise.  Somehow, they've failed to grasp that we had congressional victories in 1992, 1996, 1998, 2000, 2006, and 2008. Republicans, in contrast, only had victories in 1994, 2002, 2004.  And without 9/11, I seriously doubt they'd have had any Congressional victories after 1994, and definitely think Bush would have been tossed in 2004.

So in the past nine elections, we made congressional gains in six, while losing three; yet still these people continue to talk about how Republicans keep beating us and we can't win until we finally start treating these people the same way they treat us.  Somehow, losing tactics are going to help us win victories that are so big that even these people will finally be satisfied in acknowledging our success.

And now I read not one, but two comments about how the imbecilic behavior by conservatives in celebrating us not getting the Olympics is somehow part of some grand strategy that we're losing.  And these comments come in two varieties: The ones who insist that these conservatives would be ignored if we didn't talk about them, and those who actually think it's part of some savvy plan for them to appear juvenile and anti-American; and that we're "being played" by going along with it.

Liberal-Created Conservatives

And both ideas are horrible. The first is wrong because it somehow imagines that it's wrong for us to criticize them, and insists that moronic conservative attacks should go unanswered.  Now, I can understand if we were talking about hyping some anonymous blogger, but Laura Ingraham does just fine on her own without our help.  They also say the same of our attacks on Rush Limbaugh, Michele Bachman, and Sarah Palin; and we're told repeatedly that attacking these people only makes them more powerful.

But these people weren't created by liberals, and I happen to think that they're a huge BOON for liberals.  I'm glad these people say the moronic stuff they do and the more we can highlight crazy conservatives, the better we look in comparison.  Had these conservatives not existed, we should have created them.  Hell, that is what conservatives do.  They look crazy, so they have to invent strawmen liberals who are even crazier than they are.

For as much as these sort of people think we should emulate conservative attacks, it's like they really aren't paying attention to how those attacks work.  But shining the light on these cockroaches is the best way of combating them; while allowing them to thrive in darkness is exactly what they want.

Karl Rove's Eternal Mindfuck

And the second group is even more maddening, as they insist that any strategy is futile.  Whether you want to ignore the attacks or attack the attacks, these people will assure you that you're playing right into their hands.

This was particularly emphasized back when Rove was a feared political god.  No matter what Rove did, you were assured that it was all intentional and that we would lose.  But of course, that was actually Rove's greatest trick: To convince you that he was a political genius and that resistance was futile.  But of course, his only real strategy was to fight dirty and toss as much mud as possible, in hopes of distracting his opponent.  Meanwhile, his actual strategies often backfired.

And now that he's been exposed as the impotent charlatan behind the curtain, that idea seems laughable. Yet still, we're told that the greatest mistake we can make is to ever laugh at anything these people do or suggest that they've blundered.  Sure, their juvenile behavior on the Olympics was a huge mistake which only increases the more people hear about it, but we're assured that this is all a distraction and that we're "being played."

Meanwhile, Congressional Republicans continue to poll at the same dismal 30% rating they've had since 2006; while Obama continues to enjoy majority support.  In the past eighteen years, we've had twice as many congressional victories as they have, and their prospects look worse now than ever; yet we're still suckers who will never win until we adopt a fool-proof strategy that no one has ever actually explained.  Brilliant.

Call me crazy, but I suspect that these people really have no other strategy in mind beyond criticizing everyone else as being less intelligent than themselves.  Sorry, but cynicism isn't a strategy.

The Absurdity of ACORN Election Fraud

Some conspiracies are better than others, and it's a good test of your intellectual honesty if you know how to spot the bad ones.  And regarding the attack on Obama that ACORN stole the election for him, absolutely dreadful.  I mean, seriously, how could they have pulled it off?  The rest of this is a comment I left at a conservative blog which seriously suggested ACORN gave Obama the election.

Seriously, how could ACORN have achieved such a thing? Take North Carolina, a close win for Obama: He won by 14,177 votes. But for good measure, they'd want to have at least 20,000 fraud votes on their side and probably many more as they wouldn't know how many fake votes they needed until afterwards. So how could they arrange that sort of thing, without one of the people involved confessing to this army of fraud voters? Remember, we're talking a minimum of 20,000 fraud votes without anyone getting caught. How could they do it?

Or how about the 35,000 minimum needed in Indiana? Or the 150,000 fraud votes in New Mexico? Or the 300,000 fraud votes in Virginia? How could they possibly pull this sort of thing in so many different states without anyone noticing or getting caught or confessing? To suggest that ACORN gave Obama the election would be to suggest that they pulled off the greatest scheme in history without getting caught. This, from a group that gets bamboozled by two rich white kids pretending to be street hustlers. I don't think so.

And hey, I'm not trying to get on your case. I'm just trying to help you think through this a bit. There is no evidence to suggest that any major election fraud occurred and everything you're mentioning is voter registration fraud; not election fraud. And the idea that ACORN somehow gave Obama a million mystery votes without getting caught is entirely absurd, and it would probably have been larger than that. Trust me, you don't sound like a bad guy, but you really have to question this stuff a bit more.


And as a comical end note, one of the links this guy gave of "ACORN voter fraud," was only about voter registration fraud and ended with:

And good luck on Election Day, when your GOTV teams try to round up "Mick E. Mouse" and "Don L. Duck" to go to the polls.

Yes, thanks for the luck.  I'm sure we'll need it.

A Holocaust Too Far

I've often said that extremists on both sides of the spectrum have more in common than they do with their more moderate affiliates on either side.  And I see a touch of that now, regarding Congressman Grayson's attack on the Republican healthcare plan as being "Don't Get Sick." 

And I agree with his message and wish we had more Congressmen like Grayson.  While I definitely don't want to see President Obama using this sort of rhetoric, this is the exact sort of thing the House of Reps was made for.  And best of all, rather than fall for the phony outrage by those who thought they had a monopoly on strong rhetoric, he keeps dishing out more.

But he made one mistake: He evoked Hitler.  Why?  After all the stupid Hitler moustaches on Obama and Nazi comparisons, why would anyone think it's ok to bring up the Holocaust in this debate? 

And for posterity's sake, here's the line:

I apologize to the dead and their families that we haven't acted sooner to end this Holocaust in America.

It's a nice line, but I really don't see how we can continue to attack conservatives who use this sort of rhetoric if we defend it on our own side. 

Rationalizing Nazi Attacks

And it's obvious that liberals know better.  I mean, they criticize the hell out of Republicans when they do it.  Yet when I said at Carpetbaggers that Grayson shouldn't have used the word "holocaust," it was suggested that my comment might be "contributing to a holocaust of our own making," while another commenter suggested that because I didn't like Grayson's use of this one word, my family might die for lack of healthcare.  Yeah, I think this rhetoric might be getting a touch out of hand.

And sure, the word meant something before the Holocaust happened.  And many of these folks are trying to hang their hat on that argument.  One person actually wrote "Sadly, "holocaust" is reserved for the jews, in the popular mind..."  Yes, how unfortunate that those damn Jews stole a perfectly fine word for their own purposes.  But, as Wikipedia kindly points out, the term often referred to the slaughter of Jews before the Nazis did it to them.  And originally, it was a burnt sacrifice. 

But who are they kidding?  Grayson meant it in the Nazi sense.  This isn't an unfortunate confusion, like the dumb schlubs who used the word "niggardly" around the wrong people.  Grayson was purposefully evoking the intentional extermination of up to seventeen million people and comparing it with the Republican's corrupt negligence towards those unfortunate enough to not have insurance.  And while that's a horrible thing, it ain't Hitler horrible.

Oh, and a late entry to this game insists that Grayson's usage was only meant to mock pro-lifers who use similar language, and he wasn't making a Nazi reference at all.  In this view, Grayson was using the holocaust as a "dog whistle" which he was blowing in Republican ears, and we're supposed to all know that he wasn't really making a Nazi comparison because of one phrase he said a few sentences earlier, as well as the fact that everyone knows they use that phrase alot.  And no, I don't really see how evoking the Holocaust as a form of mockery is any better than the original idea.

Extremists Think Alike

And check out these comparisons:

Liberal commenter:

So Grayson should not have used the word "holocaust." Instead, he should have referred to "The Republican's Final Solution to the Health Care Crisis."

 Conservative speaker:

“Adolf Hitler issued six million end of life orders–he called his program the final solution. I kind of wonder what we’re going to call ours.”

And note, the liberal actually referred to it as "The Final Solution," while the conservative merely ponders the idea.  I wonder how many of these libs jumped up to defend this guy, as opposed to the number who denounced him for his vicious rhetoric.  Because, to be clear, evoking the Holocaust against your opponent is not only a cheap smear of your opponent; it's also a cheap smear of the Holocaust.  That's why it's considered off-limits.

The Upside to Grayson's Holocaust

Of course, one big plus to this is that the rest of Graysn's two speeches were really good and his Holocaust line is going to make it so that more people hear the rest of what he said.  So you end up with Fox News which was stupid enough to include the picture on the right.  Wow.  They normally don't make that sort of blunder.  Yet, this picture's just about as good as Grayson's whole speech.

And then you get RedState, which is completely confused as to how to respond to the whole thing, with Erick Erickson writing:

The holocaust was real with a real meaning. Roping it into the health care debate cheapens what it was all about.

He then goes on to write that it's "ironic" for Grayson to have made this attack, as Grayson supports a plan which "would compel people into terminating their elderly relatives’ lives."  In other words, Erickson was stunned by all this because he thought that only his side got to make the holocaust connection. 

And in that regard, even the holocaust line wasn't so bad.  But overall, I think we just need to discourage this sort of talk, no matter who it comes from.  Yes, Grayson's two speeches were great and I certainly hope more Dems copy his lead, but all the same, the holocaust needs to be saved for something bigger than lack of insurance.  Until Republicans try to pass a plan which involves Health Chambers which are solely intended to exterminate millions of people, while turning even more millions into sub-human slaves, it ain't a holocaust.