I was just reading about Tom DeLay’s lawyer and how he’s still trying to get the case dismissed. But the basis for it is simply absurd, and has almost no chance of succeeding; and I’m sure his lawyers know that better than me. So why does he bother?
I assert that this is yet another case of high-priced lawyers scamming their client, by doing lots of toughguy fighting that serves no purpose other than to look tough. Whether or not they think the prosecutor can win the case, I’m sure the lawyers know that the charge is legitimate. The prosecutor has to prove his case, but it was most certainly a crime. But I believe that his lawyers are persisting on this, so that it looks like they’re doing lots of work and earning their fees. And you gotta know that DeLay’s the type of client who likes that. Jerks like him seem to like needless fighting better than the necessary kind. They just like to show what fighters they are. And in the meantime, the lawyer fees keep piling up.
And worse for DeLay (thus better for us), it keeps DeLay’s name in the headlines, reminding everyone that he’s under indictment and trying to do anything possible to stop the case. In fact, it gives the appearance as if he’s cheating again; trying to squirm out from what he did. And it might even make people think that he couldn’t win an outright case (which is probably true). Sure, it also serves to feed his defenders a line of support; a hook to hang their arguments on. But the damaging headlines more than offset that. Especially as his defenders aren’t hearing anything new with this, while his attackers get the lovely headlines.
From a political standpoint, DeLay’s best defense would just be to blow-off the whole thing and gladly accept his day in court. But the main thing would be to lay low and keep it out of the headlines. The more he fights, the more serious he thinks this is. And if he thinks it’s serious, everyone else will too. And that’s not what he wants. If you think your case is a slamdunk, you don’t need to fight hard and you don’t need a badass lawyer. If you’re not worried about the charges, you’re not going to pay someone to fight tooth-and-nail.
But DeLay’s lawyer keeps showing us that this is very serious and that he’s worried. And while his “Dem DA out to get me” argument might work with his supporters; he knows damn well that that isn’t the case. Especially as he’s already told the prosecutor that he did the crime. And so the harder DeLay struggles to get out of this, the worse he looks politically, and the more those fees keep piling up. And with almost no possibility of gain to show for it. He might win the case, but this pre-trial fighting isn’t doing much to help him. I’d say this saddens me, but I’d be lying.
The only part that does sadden me is that the DA’s office has to take all of these challenges seriously. They may be frivolous, but even frivolous challenges have to be addressed. And in the meantime, that means more time and energy spent on the case; and thus more taxpayer money thrown down the drain. And all so DeLay can feel like a fighting man and like his high-priced lawyer is worth the high price. He’s a mean little man, and this is all he’s got left.
P.S. Biobrain readers are forbidden from sending this post to DeLay. For your eyes only.
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
Monday, November 21, 2005
The Dangers of Watercooler Gossip
I just read the LA Times story exposing Curveball, and boy is it a doozie. If you haven’t read it yet, I suggest you do. I’ll wait. Roger Ailes quotes a good part, but here was a favorite of mine:
The analysts refused to back down. In one meeting, the chief analyst fiercely defended Curveball's account, saying she had confirmed on the Internet many of the details he cited. "Exactly, it's on the Internet!" the operations group chief for Germany, now a CIA station chief in Europe, exploded in response. "That's where he got it too," according to a participant at the meeting.
Uh, yeah. Defending a claim of secret data because you found it on the internet. I believe that’s what they call “Fucking Stupid”. My own mother automatically discounts anything I source as being from the internet, but here we have a chief analyst using it to confirm top secret intelligence that was to justify war. Great. I’m sure that analyst has gotten the promotion she so obviously deserves.
To be sure, I honestly believe that part of the problem is that too many people instinctively believe Arabic-type people to be stupid and too naïve to lie. I’m not sure if it’s the accent or what, but that’s certainly the impression that many people give off. Sure he’s an engineer, but perhaps he can’t do internet research. But there was clearly more to this than that. There was clearly a case of CIA people just trying to find the justification for war that they knew Bush needed. This quote just about says it all:
Other warnings poured in. The CIA Berlin station chief wrote that the BND had "not been able to verify" Curveball's claims. The CIA doctor who met Curveball wrote to his supervisor shortly before Powell's speech questioning "the validity" of the Iraqi's information. "Keep in mind that this war is going to happen regardless of what Curve Ball said or didn't say and the Powers That Be probably aren't terribly interested in whether Curve Ball knows what he's talking about," his supervisor wrote back, Senate investigators found.
That’s right; they knew that the “Powers That Be” weren’t interested in whether Curveball was telling the truth. They wanted what he had to say in either case. And it was all so obvious that a supervisor wrote to his underling to keep it in mind.
And also keep in mind that the above quote came before Colin Powell’s UN presentation. And as the article makes clear, Powell says that he strongly questioned the validity of Curveball, because he knew that so much was riding on the one guy. It also says that people who were there when Powell was briefed knew that a “fabricator warning” had been issued for Curveball, but didn’t say anything. But again, the Powers That Be misled Powell because they knew he had high credibility and wouldn’t completely jeopardize it with false claims. What does it say when the Secretary of State isn’t a Power That Be, but is just used because he was the only one with any credibility left.
I’ll end with a few quotes which speak for themselves:
Days later, the CIA and DIA rushed to publish a White Paper declaring the trucks part of Hussein's biological warfare program. The report dismissed Iraq's explanation that the equipment generated hydrogen as a "cover story." A day later, Bush told a Polish TV reporter: "We found the weapons of mass destruction."
But bio-weapons experts in the intelligence community were sharply critical. A former senior official of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research called the unclassified report an unprecedented "rush to judgment." The DIA then ordered a classified review of the evidence. One of 15 analysts held to the initial finding that the trucks were built for germ warfare. The sole believer was the CIA analyst who helped draft the original White Paper.Hamish Killip, a former British army officer and biological weapons expert, flew to Baghdad in July 2003 as part of the Iraq Survey Group, the CIA-led Iraqi weapons hunt. He inspected the truck trailers and was immediately skeptical."The equipment was singularly inappropriate" for biological weapons, he said. "We were in hysterics over this. You'd have better luck putting a couple of dust bins on the back of the truck and brewing it in there."
…………………
Jerry and his team interviewed 60 of Curveball's family, friends and co-workers. They all denied working on germ weapons trucks. Curveball's former bosses at the engineering center said the CIA had fallen for "water cooler gossip" and "corridor conversations." "The Iraqis were all laughing," recalled a former member of the survey group. "They were saying, 'This guy? You've got to be kidding.' "
…………………
"After the first couple of days, he said, 'This doesn't sound good,' " Drumheller recalled. "After the first week, he said, 'This guy is lying. He's lying about a bunch of stuff.' "But Curveball refused to admit deceit. When challenged, he would mumble, say he didn't know and suggest the questioner was wrong or the photo was doctored. As the evidence piled up, he simply stopped talking."He never said, 'You got me,' " Drumheller said. "He just shrugged, and didn't say anything. It was all over. We told our guy, 'You might as well wrap it up and come home.' "
…………………
The CIA had advised Bush in the fall of 2003 of "problems with the sourcing" on biological weapons, an official familiar with the briefing said. But the president has never withdrawn the statement in his 2003 State of the Union speech that Iraq produced "germ warfare agents" or his postwar assertions that "we found the weapons of mass destruction."
I know us good guys always find it upsetting when villains and liars never confess to their evil deeds, but that’s the way it is. In the end, you just have to satisfy yourself that you’re right and hope that there’s some afterlife to punish these people. Because they’ll never give you the satisfaction of admitting the truth; whether they’re wacko Iraqi defectors or incompetent world leaders.
The analysts refused to back down. In one meeting, the chief analyst fiercely defended Curveball's account, saying she had confirmed on the Internet many of the details he cited. "Exactly, it's on the Internet!" the operations group chief for Germany, now a CIA station chief in Europe, exploded in response. "That's where he got it too," according to a participant at the meeting.
Uh, yeah. Defending a claim of secret data because you found it on the internet. I believe that’s what they call “Fucking Stupid”. My own mother automatically discounts anything I source as being from the internet, but here we have a chief analyst using it to confirm top secret intelligence that was to justify war. Great. I’m sure that analyst has gotten the promotion she so obviously deserves.
To be sure, I honestly believe that part of the problem is that too many people instinctively believe Arabic-type people to be stupid and too naïve to lie. I’m not sure if it’s the accent or what, but that’s certainly the impression that many people give off. Sure he’s an engineer, but perhaps he can’t do internet research. But there was clearly more to this than that. There was clearly a case of CIA people just trying to find the justification for war that they knew Bush needed. This quote just about says it all:
Other warnings poured in. The CIA Berlin station chief wrote that the BND had "not been able to verify" Curveball's claims. The CIA doctor who met Curveball wrote to his supervisor shortly before Powell's speech questioning "the validity" of the Iraqi's information. "Keep in mind that this war is going to happen regardless of what Curve Ball said or didn't say and the Powers That Be probably aren't terribly interested in whether Curve Ball knows what he's talking about," his supervisor wrote back, Senate investigators found.
That’s right; they knew that the “Powers That Be” weren’t interested in whether Curveball was telling the truth. They wanted what he had to say in either case. And it was all so obvious that a supervisor wrote to his underling to keep it in mind.
And also keep in mind that the above quote came before Colin Powell’s UN presentation. And as the article makes clear, Powell says that he strongly questioned the validity of Curveball, because he knew that so much was riding on the one guy. It also says that people who were there when Powell was briefed knew that a “fabricator warning” had been issued for Curveball, but didn’t say anything. But again, the Powers That Be misled Powell because they knew he had high credibility and wouldn’t completely jeopardize it with false claims. What does it say when the Secretary of State isn’t a Power That Be, but is just used because he was the only one with any credibility left.
I’ll end with a few quotes which speak for themselves:
Days later, the CIA and DIA rushed to publish a White Paper declaring the trucks part of Hussein's biological warfare program. The report dismissed Iraq's explanation that the equipment generated hydrogen as a "cover story." A day later, Bush told a Polish TV reporter: "We found the weapons of mass destruction."
But bio-weapons experts in the intelligence community were sharply critical. A former senior official of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research called the unclassified report an unprecedented "rush to judgment." The DIA then ordered a classified review of the evidence. One of 15 analysts held to the initial finding that the trucks were built for germ warfare. The sole believer was the CIA analyst who helped draft the original White Paper.Hamish Killip, a former British army officer and biological weapons expert, flew to Baghdad in July 2003 as part of the Iraq Survey Group, the CIA-led Iraqi weapons hunt. He inspected the truck trailers and was immediately skeptical."The equipment was singularly inappropriate" for biological weapons, he said. "We were in hysterics over this. You'd have better luck putting a couple of dust bins on the back of the truck and brewing it in there."
…………………
Jerry and his team interviewed 60 of Curveball's family, friends and co-workers. They all denied working on germ weapons trucks. Curveball's former bosses at the engineering center said the CIA had fallen for "water cooler gossip" and "corridor conversations." "The Iraqis were all laughing," recalled a former member of the survey group. "They were saying, 'This guy? You've got to be kidding.' "
…………………
"After the first couple of days, he said, 'This doesn't sound good,' " Drumheller recalled. "After the first week, he said, 'This guy is lying. He's lying about a bunch of stuff.' "But Curveball refused to admit deceit. When challenged, he would mumble, say he didn't know and suggest the questioner was wrong or the photo was doctored. As the evidence piled up, he simply stopped talking."He never said, 'You got me,' " Drumheller said. "He just shrugged, and didn't say anything. It was all over. We told our guy, 'You might as well wrap it up and come home.' "
…………………
The CIA had advised Bush in the fall of 2003 of "problems with the sourcing" on biological weapons, an official familiar with the briefing said. But the president has never withdrawn the statement in his 2003 State of the Union speech that Iraq produced "germ warfare agents" or his postwar assertions that "we found the weapons of mass destruction."
I know us good guys always find it upsetting when villains and liars never confess to their evil deeds, but that’s the way it is. In the end, you just have to satisfy yourself that you’re right and hope that there’s some afterlife to punish these people. Because they’ll never give you the satisfaction of admitting the truth; whether they’re wacko Iraqi defectors or incompetent world leaders.
Polling Propaganda
If you post on a Yahoo message board, and perhaps many other message boards, that President Bush is polling very poorly, you will inevitably be told that Republican politicians, and in particular Republican politicians occupying the Whitehouse, are not concerned with polls and don’t really care what they say. And isn’t that exactly the problem?
And does it really matter if Bush is concerned with his poll numbers? Is the point of mentioning the polls supposed to be that Bush is worried about them, or is the point supposed to be that he’s unpopular and that people don’t approve of what he’s doing? I assert it’s the latter; and if Bush isn’t worried about them, then this is yet another thing he’s doing wrong. It means that he doesn’t care whether or not he’s doing his job. For most people, this is a sign of lazy contempt, and would suggest that they are unsuited for their job. Republicans have made it a virtue; at least in Bush’s case.
But this is more than just a matter of Bush ignoring the voices of dissent (while perhaps listening too well to the voices in his head). This is about the propagandic mindset of the conservatives. For us, we mention the poll numbers because it emphasizes how out of touch Bush is with America, and how he’s on the wrong course. And I’ll admit that there might be a touch of gloating about it all. But overall, we think the polls speak for themselves, which is to suggest that Bush is wrong and in trouble.
The Message
But that’s not what they hear at all. What they hear is anti-Bush propaganda. And what they’re telling you is that they’re ignoring the propaganda, and that it’s not working on Bush either. And that’s just how they think. It’s not about the facts or the truth. It’s about the facts and truth that you choose to use. And if you choose to cite facts which make Bush look bad, then you’re doing so in order to convince people to drop their support for him. And even more so, that you’re trying to undermine him. For them, that’s the importance of this news. Not of what the news itself says, but what we do with the news and the message that we’re sending.
I’m not suggesting that these people don’t believe the poll numbers to be true (though that may be part of it). But propaganda doesn’t have to be fake; propaganda just means that you’re promoting certain facts to achieve a certain agenda. It’s about rousing your team, and disheartening the other team. That’s all that matters. And in this case, they think our specific purpose is to convince them to drop their support for Bush. And they think that, were Bush to care about the polls, he’d be disheartened and really start screwing up. I’m not exactly sure how he can screw-up any more than he has, but I’m afraid to find out.
Think of them as political Freuds. For them, a poll is never just a poll; but rather a deep and meaningful insight into your political psyche. It’s all about self-fulfilling prophecies; people saying things in order to make them come true. And so you’d only say the things that you want to happen. The only reason you’d mention Bush’s lousy poll numbers is because you’re a “libtard” intent on driving those numbers down further, to destroy Bush. Equally, the only reason you’d mention the problems in Iraq is because you want to make those problems worse and hurt America and/or Bush. That really is how they think about things, and how they make their own reality.
And if they don’t think we’re outright propagandists, then they assume that we’re latent propagandists who aren’t even aware of the propaganda that lurks deep within our subconscious. But in either case, it’s obvious to them where we’re going with this stuff, and that it’s against America and/or Bush. And frankly, I suspect they consider the second to be worse than the first.
Posterboys of Propaganda
And they believe this, solely because it could have these effects; from a propaganda point of view. Even now, we’re told that Congressman Murtha’s recent statements on withdrawal make him “the posterboy for Al Jazeera”; as if a US Congressman really should self-censor himself, simply because an Arabic news org might quote him. As if we all need to put on a happyface and lie, simply because the terrorists might hear about it and get discouraged; as if they didn’t already know what’s going on in Iraq far better than us. As if they’re scouring the Yahoo message boards looking for any encouraging news about their endeavors. Even now, I can hear Zarqawi relishing the news. “Look guys! Gator122571 doesn’t think we should be tortured. He even got three rec’s. Hoorah! Hoorah! I’m very encouraged! Suicide packs for everyone!” Or something like that, I’m sure.
And should we assume that this means that Bush and the others are also self-censoring? As if Bush grouses in private about what a shitfest he started, and that he’d just love to tell us all about what he did wrong there; if only it didn’t encourage the terrorists. Geez, I’d hate to see how badly things would be going if they weren’t censoring themselves. Al Jazeera would run out of posters to put them all on.
Interestingly enough, I just checked Al Jazeera’s website, and Murtha is not currently a posterboy; nor do they have his name anywhere on their homepage. And for irony’s sake, the main story they have related to this has Rumsfeld suggesting that Murtha’s call for withdrawal would “strengthen US enemies and embolden terrorists”. So even Al Jazeera reports this kind of stuff; though they did not quote anyone as saying that he was their posterboy. Additionally, the point of the story is Rummy saying that we won’t be withdrawing troops until Iraq is ready; so I guess their propaganda is relatively fair and balanced, as this is the same story that Fox has. Then again, my Arabic’s a bit rusty (ie, nonexistent), so I was limited to reading the English version. I’m sure the real version is much more inflammatory, including the Bush pictures with devil horns. It’s all propaganda with those people, isn’t it?
The Right Message
And so when they tell us that they don’t care about the negative polls, it’s not just them putting on a happyface, or them ignoring the truth, or even them saying that they really don’t care about polls. No, they’re telling you that your propaganda isn’t working, and that you might as well not even bother. That’s not at all true, as they hate the polls as much as we would (had Clinton ever polled so badly); but the message they want to send is that they don’t care and that you shouldn’t either. Similarly, the whole uproar over Murtha is intended to send the message that Dems shouldn’t act as Murtha has. The Republicans’ concern is not about whether the terrorists get the wrong idea, but that the Dems will get the right one.
Of course, had Murtha said these things two years ago, he’d have been attacked in order to put his seat at risk; and they’d hope he kept saying more. Things are so bad for them these days, they’re attacking him just to keep him and the others quiet. Their attacks on him are really coded propaganda in either case. But the propaganda isn’t intended to stave off terrorist attacks or save American lives; but solely to save the GOP from the ruin they’ve brought upon themselves. But it’s really all they’ve got left; to hope that the Dems can’t take advantage of the situation and regain control of Congress.
I had a decent ending to this post, but I can’t find the good tie-in from the last paragraph, and it’s late, so I’m just ending it with a quote. The Carpetbagger post I cited above had such a good closing line that I decided to steal it, even if it’s not particularly relevant:
Remember, when you talk to God, it's prayer. When God talks to you, its schizophrenia.
And does it really matter if Bush is concerned with his poll numbers? Is the point of mentioning the polls supposed to be that Bush is worried about them, or is the point supposed to be that he’s unpopular and that people don’t approve of what he’s doing? I assert it’s the latter; and if Bush isn’t worried about them, then this is yet another thing he’s doing wrong. It means that he doesn’t care whether or not he’s doing his job. For most people, this is a sign of lazy contempt, and would suggest that they are unsuited for their job. Republicans have made it a virtue; at least in Bush’s case.
But this is more than just a matter of Bush ignoring the voices of dissent (while perhaps listening too well to the voices in his head). This is about the propagandic mindset of the conservatives. For us, we mention the poll numbers because it emphasizes how out of touch Bush is with America, and how he’s on the wrong course. And I’ll admit that there might be a touch of gloating about it all. But overall, we think the polls speak for themselves, which is to suggest that Bush is wrong and in trouble.
The Message
But that’s not what they hear at all. What they hear is anti-Bush propaganda. And what they’re telling you is that they’re ignoring the propaganda, and that it’s not working on Bush either. And that’s just how they think. It’s not about the facts or the truth. It’s about the facts and truth that you choose to use. And if you choose to cite facts which make Bush look bad, then you’re doing so in order to convince people to drop their support for him. And even more so, that you’re trying to undermine him. For them, that’s the importance of this news. Not of what the news itself says, but what we do with the news and the message that we’re sending.
I’m not suggesting that these people don’t believe the poll numbers to be true (though that may be part of it). But propaganda doesn’t have to be fake; propaganda just means that you’re promoting certain facts to achieve a certain agenda. It’s about rousing your team, and disheartening the other team. That’s all that matters. And in this case, they think our specific purpose is to convince them to drop their support for Bush. And they think that, were Bush to care about the polls, he’d be disheartened and really start screwing up. I’m not exactly sure how he can screw-up any more than he has, but I’m afraid to find out.
Think of them as political Freuds. For them, a poll is never just a poll; but rather a deep and meaningful insight into your political psyche. It’s all about self-fulfilling prophecies; people saying things in order to make them come true. And so you’d only say the things that you want to happen. The only reason you’d mention Bush’s lousy poll numbers is because you’re a “libtard” intent on driving those numbers down further, to destroy Bush. Equally, the only reason you’d mention the problems in Iraq is because you want to make those problems worse and hurt America and/or Bush. That really is how they think about things, and how they make their own reality.
And if they don’t think we’re outright propagandists, then they assume that we’re latent propagandists who aren’t even aware of the propaganda that lurks deep within our subconscious. But in either case, it’s obvious to them where we’re going with this stuff, and that it’s against America and/or Bush. And frankly, I suspect they consider the second to be worse than the first.
Posterboys of Propaganda
And they believe this, solely because it could have these effects; from a propaganda point of view. Even now, we’re told that Congressman Murtha’s recent statements on withdrawal make him “the posterboy for Al Jazeera”; as if a US Congressman really should self-censor himself, simply because an Arabic news org might quote him. As if we all need to put on a happyface and lie, simply because the terrorists might hear about it and get discouraged; as if they didn’t already know what’s going on in Iraq far better than us. As if they’re scouring the Yahoo message boards looking for any encouraging news about their endeavors. Even now, I can hear Zarqawi relishing the news. “Look guys! Gator122571 doesn’t think we should be tortured. He even got three rec’s. Hoorah! Hoorah! I’m very encouraged! Suicide packs for everyone!” Or something like that, I’m sure.
And should we assume that this means that Bush and the others are also self-censoring? As if Bush grouses in private about what a shitfest he started, and that he’d just love to tell us all about what he did wrong there; if only it didn’t encourage the terrorists. Geez, I’d hate to see how badly things would be going if they weren’t censoring themselves. Al Jazeera would run out of posters to put them all on.
Interestingly enough, I just checked Al Jazeera’s website, and Murtha is not currently a posterboy; nor do they have his name anywhere on their homepage. And for irony’s sake, the main story they have related to this has Rumsfeld suggesting that Murtha’s call for withdrawal would “strengthen US enemies and embolden terrorists”. So even Al Jazeera reports this kind of stuff; though they did not quote anyone as saying that he was their posterboy. Additionally, the point of the story is Rummy saying that we won’t be withdrawing troops until Iraq is ready; so I guess their propaganda is relatively fair and balanced, as this is the same story that Fox has. Then again, my Arabic’s a bit rusty (ie, nonexistent), so I was limited to reading the English version. I’m sure the real version is much more inflammatory, including the Bush pictures with devil horns. It’s all propaganda with those people, isn’t it?
The Right Message
And so when they tell us that they don’t care about the negative polls, it’s not just them putting on a happyface, or them ignoring the truth, or even them saying that they really don’t care about polls. No, they’re telling you that your propaganda isn’t working, and that you might as well not even bother. That’s not at all true, as they hate the polls as much as we would (had Clinton ever polled so badly); but the message they want to send is that they don’t care and that you shouldn’t either. Similarly, the whole uproar over Murtha is intended to send the message that Dems shouldn’t act as Murtha has. The Republicans’ concern is not about whether the terrorists get the wrong idea, but that the Dems will get the right one.
Of course, had Murtha said these things two years ago, he’d have been attacked in order to put his seat at risk; and they’d hope he kept saying more. Things are so bad for them these days, they’re attacking him just to keep him and the others quiet. Their attacks on him are really coded propaganda in either case. But the propaganda isn’t intended to stave off terrorist attacks or save American lives; but solely to save the GOP from the ruin they’ve brought upon themselves. But it’s really all they’ve got left; to hope that the Dems can’t take advantage of the situation and regain control of Congress.
I had a decent ending to this post, but I can’t find the good tie-in from the last paragraph, and it’s late, so I’m just ending it with a quote. The Carpetbagger post I cited above had such a good closing line that I decided to steal it, even if it’s not particularly relevant:
Remember, when you talk to God, it's prayer. When God talks to you, its schizophrenia.
Saturday, November 12, 2005
Titty Falafel Strikes Again!
Bill O’Reilly has long since gone off the deep-end and is now spending all his time sucking the drain at the bottom of the pool. I’m serious. I just read this crap from Media Matters and it just confirms the fact. If you haven’t heard the clip, you should. In it, Bill states in no uncertain terms that, because San Franciscans voted to ban military recruiters from their high schools and colleges, it would be perfectly acceptable with him for Al Qaeda to bomb the city. Not only that, but that if they did bomb that “we’re not going to do anything about it.”
Needless to say, the only thing preventing this from being considered traitorous is simply because nobody would actually take him seriously. Nor was he being truly serious. If you hear the clip, it’s obvious that he wasn’t making a joke; but I’m sure he doesn’t really mean what he said either. He was just trying to impress the youngsters in the audience. But if he had the final choice on this, I’m sure he would choose to not bomb San Fran; if for no other reason than because he’d hate to risk losing his loofah supply. But he obviously has no problem using that kind of strong rhetoric.
And there are so many problems with his statement that it really makes it hard to know which part to focus on. But here’s the part for me: Why are conservatives so fucking clueless when it comes to Al Qaeda and what makes them tick? Because they always get it wrong. The whole “Al Qaeda says America wants to take over the Muslim world, so we’re going to invade a Muslim country and prove them right” thing is probably the main thing. But it goes deeper than that.
America’s Safest City
And here it is in this case: Say some Al Qaeda operative was listening to O’Reilly’s show (these terrorists are crazy, so I wouldn’t put it past them), would they have taken Bill up on his offer and bomb San Francisco? Or even more so, if President Bush made a similar statement, and said that we wouldn’t retaliate or anything for bombing San Fran, and that the city was not “off-limits.” Assuming that the terrorists took it seriously and believed it to be true, would that encourage Al Qaeda to attack?
Of course not. That would defeat the whole purpose. The whole purpose of them bombing us is to show us that they can hurt us and that we can’t stop them from doing so; and to therefore make us negotiate with them or compromise or give-in or something. But…if we open up the city for them to bomb…there wouldn’t be any fucking point for them to do so! So in effect, if the terrorists were to take O’Reilly’s symbolic offer seriously, he has made San Francisco the safest city in America!
Additionally, if the reason O’Reilly or Bush was inviting them to bomb was because San Francisco wanted to prevent our military from recruiting at their schools; it would seem that Al Qaeda would even be less likely to attack them. If anything, they’d send a note of thanks.
The Muslim Bogeymen
But to guys like Bill O’Reilly, that kind of thing is beside the point. I’m sure he’d wholeheartedly agree that Al Qaeda would want San Fran to vote that way, but that’s not where he was going with this. No. Instead, the angle he was taking, at least at this point of his show, was in using Al Qaeda as the bogeyman. As someone to scare the kids back into line with.
But this isn’t an isolated incident at all. In fact, this is how the O’Reilly’s always use Al Qaeda. As if it’s their personal threat; to use whenever they feel. As if it’s something they can throw at others, to keep them in line. Like your folks saying that Santa wouldn’t get you anything if you acted bad. When they say it, they hope it’s true; but in the end, you always get something, no matter how dicky you behaved.
Heck, it’s even more like when wacko Pat Robertson told the residents of Dover, PA earlier this week that they had “voted God out of (their) city,” and couldn’t ask him for help anymore. As if Pat’s got some kind of direct hotline to God and knows what God wants taught in our schools. Who the hell does he think he is? The fucking Pope or something? Jesus christ, what a egohead!
But that’s what this is all about. Them using Al Qaeda as a device to keep us in line. If there wasn’t an Al Qaeda, these jerks would have invented one (and there are some reasons to suspect they did). But the Al Qaeda of their imagination is never the one of reality. Theirs is always the Al Qaeda that thought we’d sue them after 9/11; and just needs to be shown one last lesson before it’ll die out in disgrace. The Al Qaeda that risks their lives, simply because they “hate freedom”; but will fold like a paper hat if given the toughguy routine. The Al Qaeda that “wins” or “loses” on a daily basis; depending on how Congress votes, and how optimistic the libs are on the Yahoo message boards.
In fact, this is all is reminding me of the whole Devil story. About the wicked angel who was cast out from Heaven by God, and then has nothing better to do than to punish God’s enemies and those who disobey God’s laws. Uh, hello! Why would the Devil punish God’s enemies? He hates God. If anything, he’d be buying Hitler and the rest of them a beer and thanking them for a job well done. I can understand a little S&M action with the hot chicks or something; but I really can’t see it being so much fun to be sticking hot pokers up Stalin’s butthole for all of eternity. Call me crazy, but I suspect the Devil has better things to do with his time. We can only hope, right?
And the same goes for the Republican’s Al Qaeda. For some reason, it’s all about punishing Bush’s enemies and those who make America weak. I don’t understand why Bin Laden would risk his life, just so Bush could pressure Congress into authorizing another taxcut; but I guess they don’t call him a madman for nothing. Then again, perhaps this is all an evil plan by Osama to allow Bush to ruin our economy; and thus destroy our great nation. Makes you think, huh.
Extra Bonus: The O’Reilly We Can Never Forget (The first in a new series)
(per Smoking Gun)
34. During the course of this dinner in approximately early May 2002, Plaintiff’s supervisor, Defendant BILL O’REILLY, lavished Plaintiff ANDREA MACKRIS with unsolicited advice regarding her handling of future relationships with members of the opposite sex. Defendant BILL O’REILLY advised Plaintiff ANDREA MACKRIS to avoid future contact with her ex-fiancé, to have manicures and pedicures and “pick up 23-year-old men in bars,” to attend charity events and meet men with credentials, and to otherwise spend the next year doing what she felt like doing, without thinking twice about the consequences. Defendant BILL O’REILLY then suggested at the end of the year, they’d discuss promoting Plaintiff to a producer position for “The O’Reilly Factor.”
35. After these words during the course of their dinner in early May 2002, Defendant BILL O’REILLY’s demeanor abruptly changed. O’REILLY’s eyes became glazed and bizarrely strayed in opposite directions. Suddenly, without provocation or warning, Defendant BILL O’REILLY said to Plaintiff ANDREA MACKRIS: “And just use your vibrator to blow off steam.” When Plaintiff reddened, Defendant BILL O’REILLY asked lewdly: “What, you’ve got a vibrator, don’t you? Every girl does.” When Plaintiff responded indignantly, “No, and no, they don’t. Does your wife?” Defendant replied: “Yes, in fact she does. She’d kill me if she knew that I was telling!” Plaintiff was repulsed.
Extra Bonus Quiz
1) Why did Bill O’Reilly’s wife not kill him? What did she receive instead?
2) Is it possible to have sex with Bill O’Reilly and not think twice about the consequences? What if he hadn’t drugged you?
3) Is it really sexual harassment if they make the men do the same things? What if it’s in their corporate charter? Explain.
4) Is this really any different from what they make their employees do every day on television? I mean, really??
Extra-Extra Bonus Question: In fifty words or less, explain whether you’d prefer to sleep with Bill O’Reilly for a year, and end up as a producer on his show (ugh!); or to act as the official Whitehouse correspondent for Fox News throughout the 2004 election season, with a promise that Kerry would eventually win. Also explain why existing rape laws should cover both scenarios.
Remember, in both cases it is mandatory to perform to your boss’s satisfaction; and there’s always the possibility that they’re lying and you’ll end up with nothing. You have fifty minutes to complete this quiz. Good luck.
Needless to say, the only thing preventing this from being considered traitorous is simply because nobody would actually take him seriously. Nor was he being truly serious. If you hear the clip, it’s obvious that he wasn’t making a joke; but I’m sure he doesn’t really mean what he said either. He was just trying to impress the youngsters in the audience. But if he had the final choice on this, I’m sure he would choose to not bomb San Fran; if for no other reason than because he’d hate to risk losing his loofah supply. But he obviously has no problem using that kind of strong rhetoric.
And there are so many problems with his statement that it really makes it hard to know which part to focus on. But here’s the part for me: Why are conservatives so fucking clueless when it comes to Al Qaeda and what makes them tick? Because they always get it wrong. The whole “Al Qaeda says America wants to take over the Muslim world, so we’re going to invade a Muslim country and prove them right” thing is probably the main thing. But it goes deeper than that.
America’s Safest City
And here it is in this case: Say some Al Qaeda operative was listening to O’Reilly’s show (these terrorists are crazy, so I wouldn’t put it past them), would they have taken Bill up on his offer and bomb San Francisco? Or even more so, if President Bush made a similar statement, and said that we wouldn’t retaliate or anything for bombing San Fran, and that the city was not “off-limits.” Assuming that the terrorists took it seriously and believed it to be true, would that encourage Al Qaeda to attack?
Of course not. That would defeat the whole purpose. The whole purpose of them bombing us is to show us that they can hurt us and that we can’t stop them from doing so; and to therefore make us negotiate with them or compromise or give-in or something. But…if we open up the city for them to bomb…there wouldn’t be any fucking point for them to do so! So in effect, if the terrorists were to take O’Reilly’s symbolic offer seriously, he has made San Francisco the safest city in America!
Additionally, if the reason O’Reilly or Bush was inviting them to bomb was because San Francisco wanted to prevent our military from recruiting at their schools; it would seem that Al Qaeda would even be less likely to attack them. If anything, they’d send a note of thanks.
The Muslim Bogeymen
But to guys like Bill O’Reilly, that kind of thing is beside the point. I’m sure he’d wholeheartedly agree that Al Qaeda would want San Fran to vote that way, but that’s not where he was going with this. No. Instead, the angle he was taking, at least at this point of his show, was in using Al Qaeda as the bogeyman. As someone to scare the kids back into line with.
But this isn’t an isolated incident at all. In fact, this is how the O’Reilly’s always use Al Qaeda. As if it’s their personal threat; to use whenever they feel. As if it’s something they can throw at others, to keep them in line. Like your folks saying that Santa wouldn’t get you anything if you acted bad. When they say it, they hope it’s true; but in the end, you always get something, no matter how dicky you behaved.
Heck, it’s even more like when wacko Pat Robertson told the residents of Dover, PA earlier this week that they had “voted God out of (their) city,” and couldn’t ask him for help anymore. As if Pat’s got some kind of direct hotline to God and knows what God wants taught in our schools. Who the hell does he think he is? The fucking Pope or something? Jesus christ, what a egohead!
But that’s what this is all about. Them using Al Qaeda as a device to keep us in line. If there wasn’t an Al Qaeda, these jerks would have invented one (and there are some reasons to suspect they did). But the Al Qaeda of their imagination is never the one of reality. Theirs is always the Al Qaeda that thought we’d sue them after 9/11; and just needs to be shown one last lesson before it’ll die out in disgrace. The Al Qaeda that risks their lives, simply because they “hate freedom”; but will fold like a paper hat if given the toughguy routine. The Al Qaeda that “wins” or “loses” on a daily basis; depending on how Congress votes, and how optimistic the libs are on the Yahoo message boards.
In fact, this is all is reminding me of the whole Devil story. About the wicked angel who was cast out from Heaven by God, and then has nothing better to do than to punish God’s enemies and those who disobey God’s laws. Uh, hello! Why would the Devil punish God’s enemies? He hates God. If anything, he’d be buying Hitler and the rest of them a beer and thanking them for a job well done. I can understand a little S&M action with the hot chicks or something; but I really can’t see it being so much fun to be sticking hot pokers up Stalin’s butthole for all of eternity. Call me crazy, but I suspect the Devil has better things to do with his time. We can only hope, right?
And the same goes for the Republican’s Al Qaeda. For some reason, it’s all about punishing Bush’s enemies and those who make America weak. I don’t understand why Bin Laden would risk his life, just so Bush could pressure Congress into authorizing another taxcut; but I guess they don’t call him a madman for nothing. Then again, perhaps this is all an evil plan by Osama to allow Bush to ruin our economy; and thus destroy our great nation. Makes you think, huh.
Extra Bonus: The O’Reilly We Can Never Forget (The first in a new series)
(per Smoking Gun)
34. During the course of this dinner in approximately early May 2002, Plaintiff’s supervisor, Defendant BILL O’REILLY, lavished Plaintiff ANDREA MACKRIS with unsolicited advice regarding her handling of future relationships with members of the opposite sex. Defendant BILL O’REILLY advised Plaintiff ANDREA MACKRIS to avoid future contact with her ex-fiancé, to have manicures and pedicures and “pick up 23-year-old men in bars,” to attend charity events and meet men with credentials, and to otherwise spend the next year doing what she felt like doing, without thinking twice about the consequences. Defendant BILL O’REILLY then suggested at the end of the year, they’d discuss promoting Plaintiff to a producer position for “The O’Reilly Factor.”
35. After these words during the course of their dinner in early May 2002, Defendant BILL O’REILLY’s demeanor abruptly changed. O’REILLY’s eyes became glazed and bizarrely strayed in opposite directions. Suddenly, without provocation or warning, Defendant BILL O’REILLY said to Plaintiff ANDREA MACKRIS: “And just use your vibrator to blow off steam.” When Plaintiff reddened, Defendant BILL O’REILLY asked lewdly: “What, you’ve got a vibrator, don’t you? Every girl does.” When Plaintiff responded indignantly, “No, and no, they don’t. Does your wife?” Defendant replied: “Yes, in fact she does. She’d kill me if she knew that I was telling!” Plaintiff was repulsed.
Extra Bonus Quiz
1) Why did Bill O’Reilly’s wife not kill him? What did she receive instead?
2) Is it possible to have sex with Bill O’Reilly and not think twice about the consequences? What if he hadn’t drugged you?
3) Is it really sexual harassment if they make the men do the same things? What if it’s in their corporate charter? Explain.
4) Is this really any different from what they make their employees do every day on television? I mean, really??
Extra-Extra Bonus Question: In fifty words or less, explain whether you’d prefer to sleep with Bill O’Reilly for a year, and end up as a producer on his show (ugh!); or to act as the official Whitehouse correspondent for Fox News throughout the 2004 election season, with a promise that Kerry would eventually win. Also explain why existing rape laws should cover both scenarios.
Remember, in both cases it is mandatory to perform to your boss’s satisfaction; and there’s always the possibility that they’re lying and you’ll end up with nothing. You have fifty minutes to complete this quiz. Good luck.
Sunday, November 06, 2005
Punkass Bitch
Stephen Hadley is a punkass bitch. I started a post on this last week which explored that theme, but I really didn’t like it as much as the opening line. And it got kind of stale, so I’m keeping the opening line and dumping the rest. It was about what a lousy liar Hadley is, and how he figuratively pissed himself when he had to answer a question regarding the Niger documents and a meeting with Italian security.
Needless to say, I proved my case thoroughly, but it was longer than it was interesting; so you’ll just have to take my word for it. But it’s true, it’s all true. Stephen Hadley really is a punkass bitch.
Needless to say, I proved my case thoroughly, but it was longer than it was interesting; so you’ll just have to take my word for it. But it’s true, it’s all true. Stephen Hadley really is a punkass bitch.
Thursday, November 03, 2005
A Fashion God Indeed
Oh my fucking god! Per AP, regarding recent Michael Brown email releases:
"My eyes must certainly be deceiving me. You look fabulous — and I'm not talking the makeup," writes Cindy Taylor, FEMA's deputy director of public affairs to Brown on 7:10 a.m. local time on Aug. 29.
"I got it at Nordstroms," Brown writes back. "Are you proud of me? Can I quit now? Can I go home?" An hour later, Brown adds: "If you'll look at my lovely FEMA attire, you'll really vomit. I am a fashion god."
A week later, Brown's aide, Sharon Worthy, reminds him to pay heed to his image on TV. "In this crises and on TV you just need to look more hardworking ... ROLL UP THE SLEEVES!" Worthy wrote, noting that even President Bush "rolled his sleeves to just below the elbow."
Not that there should be anything too shocking about this, but it still is. I guess the shocking part was that I had kind of always assumed that this kind of stuff was saved for Bush. Both the underling’s lavishing praise and the whole PR/appearances idea of government work. But I guess this extends to his staff too. I’m just hoping that they were having an affair or something, or that maybe she wanted to. That’d be far better than if this was just the normal way that his aides talked to him.
To be honest, I saw pictures of Brownie, and none of them seemed particularly fabulous or fashionable. I guess I’m just not into that kind of thing and don’t notice stuff like that. I wonder if it would sadden him to know that we weren’t giving him any style points at the time. The only thing he got right, and we didn’t even notice.
"My eyes must certainly be deceiving me. You look fabulous — and I'm not talking the makeup," writes Cindy Taylor, FEMA's deputy director of public affairs to Brown on 7:10 a.m. local time on Aug. 29.
"I got it at Nordstroms," Brown writes back. "Are you proud of me? Can I quit now? Can I go home?" An hour later, Brown adds: "If you'll look at my lovely FEMA attire, you'll really vomit. I am a fashion god."
A week later, Brown's aide, Sharon Worthy, reminds him to pay heed to his image on TV. "In this crises and on TV you just need to look more hardworking ... ROLL UP THE SLEEVES!" Worthy wrote, noting that even President Bush "rolled his sleeves to just below the elbow."
Not that there should be anything too shocking about this, but it still is. I guess the shocking part was that I had kind of always assumed that this kind of stuff was saved for Bush. Both the underling’s lavishing praise and the whole PR/appearances idea of government work. But I guess this extends to his staff too. I’m just hoping that they were having an affair or something, or that maybe she wanted to. That’d be far better than if this was just the normal way that his aides talked to him.
To be honest, I saw pictures of Brownie, and none of them seemed particularly fabulous or fashionable. I guess I’m just not into that kind of thing and don’t notice stuff like that. I wonder if it would sadden him to know that we weren’t giving him any style points at the time. The only thing he got right, and we didn’t even notice.
Fristed!
Bill Frist, M.D., whining at his blog about Harry Reid’s secret bitching ceremony (Frist was the guest of honor):
One moment, we were talking about finally acting to get our deficit under control. The next: closed doors. Zipped lips. No C-Span. Everything secret.
That’s right. After five years of ballooning deficits, the Senate was finally about to do something about that pesky budget; and whaddya know, those damn Dems shutdown the Senate. Shit. What are the odds? An event like this isn’t expected to happen again for another twenty years. Now we’ll never get a balanced budget! That Harry Reid sure knows how to mis-time his stunts. If only he had done this a day later. We would have had a balanced budget, and our grandchildren’s future would have been secure. Now it’s Raman and Spam for the next fifty years…all thanks to those meddling Dems.
And no C-Span?? Holy shit. Talk about your end of worlds. I once lost ESPN for a whole afternoon during the Lumberjack Olympics and I’ve never spoken to my mom since. But C-SPAN; that’s a whole other ballpark. That’s like losing all your public access stations and your PBS. That’s serious business. And no wonder Frist was upset. An ego like his needs constant satellite projection, or risk having a total mental blow-out. There’s a lot of pressure building up in there and if he isn’t able to release it on a nationwide scale every ten minutes, we could lose the Capitol building all together.
He ended his post with this promise:
So ... When Harry Reid and his colleagues are done pouting behind closed doors, my door will be OPEN. Open to talk about how we're going to secure our borders; open to talk about filling the vacancy on the Supreme Court; open to talking about ending wasteful Washington spending and restoring fiscal discipline to our government. Open to DOING THE JOB THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ELECTED US TO DO.
Well it’s about fucking time. I always thought they were in Washington to put the squeeze on corporate lobbyists and Indian tribes. But lo and behold, they actually do intend to do something about our problems. Hoorah! Hoorah! Bill Frist is open to talk about them. They just need to wait for Harry Reid to stop pouting, and they’ll finally get to the business of talking. If only they had told us sooner; we could have started talking weeks ago! And with any luck, they might actually start moving to do something, in another five or six years. I guess the Spaman future isn’t quite as bleak as I thought.
I’d be negligent to leave out Fristy’s excellent Chinese proverb:
"The man who strikes first admits that his ideas have given out."
Of course, the whole Secret Rule 21 thing really was a pretty good idea. And this wasn’t a first strike, but rather one more skirmish in an ongoing battle. And this idea seems to have served its purpose and left the Repubs totally flat-footed and resorting to the very insults they imagine were flung at them. But whatever. It’s Chinese, so you have to give Bill some style points for that one. I would have been damned impressed had he delivered it in the original Chinese, but I think its enough that he ate the cookie afterwards. You’re a good boy, Frist. Maybe we’ll make you President yet.
P.S. Is there really any chance that Frist wrote that? For god’s sake I hope not.
One moment, we were talking about finally acting to get our deficit under control. The next: closed doors. Zipped lips. No C-Span. Everything secret.
That’s right. After five years of ballooning deficits, the Senate was finally about to do something about that pesky budget; and whaddya know, those damn Dems shutdown the Senate. Shit. What are the odds? An event like this isn’t expected to happen again for another twenty years. Now we’ll never get a balanced budget! That Harry Reid sure knows how to mis-time his stunts. If only he had done this a day later. We would have had a balanced budget, and our grandchildren’s future would have been secure. Now it’s Raman and Spam for the next fifty years…all thanks to those meddling Dems.
And no C-Span?? Holy shit. Talk about your end of worlds. I once lost ESPN for a whole afternoon during the Lumberjack Olympics and I’ve never spoken to my mom since. But C-SPAN; that’s a whole other ballpark. That’s like losing all your public access stations and your PBS. That’s serious business. And no wonder Frist was upset. An ego like his needs constant satellite projection, or risk having a total mental blow-out. There’s a lot of pressure building up in there and if he isn’t able to release it on a nationwide scale every ten minutes, we could lose the Capitol building all together.
He ended his post with this promise:
So ... When Harry Reid and his colleagues are done pouting behind closed doors, my door will be OPEN. Open to talk about how we're going to secure our borders; open to talk about filling the vacancy on the Supreme Court; open to talking about ending wasteful Washington spending and restoring fiscal discipline to our government. Open to DOING THE JOB THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ELECTED US TO DO.
Well it’s about fucking time. I always thought they were in Washington to put the squeeze on corporate lobbyists and Indian tribes. But lo and behold, they actually do intend to do something about our problems. Hoorah! Hoorah! Bill Frist is open to talk about them. They just need to wait for Harry Reid to stop pouting, and they’ll finally get to the business of talking. If only they had told us sooner; we could have started talking weeks ago! And with any luck, they might actually start moving to do something, in another five or six years. I guess the Spaman future isn’t quite as bleak as I thought.
I’d be negligent to leave out Fristy’s excellent Chinese proverb:
"The man who strikes first admits that his ideas have given out."
Of course, the whole Secret Rule 21 thing really was a pretty good idea. And this wasn’t a first strike, but rather one more skirmish in an ongoing battle. And this idea seems to have served its purpose and left the Repubs totally flat-footed and resorting to the very insults they imagine were flung at them. But whatever. It’s Chinese, so you have to give Bill some style points for that one. I would have been damned impressed had he delivered it in the original Chinese, but I think its enough that he ate the cookie afterwards. You’re a good boy, Frist. Maybe we’ll make you President yet.
P.S. Is there really any chance that Frist wrote that? For god’s sake I hope not.
Tuesday, November 01, 2005
Republicans and the Borg
There’s an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that always kind of bugged me. It was a Borg episode, and in this one, the crew of the starship Enterprise capture a young Borgling and devise a plan to use him to destroy the Borg. Their cunning plan is to upload an unsolvable problem onto the Borgling and then reintroduce him to the Borg mothership. Upon doing so, the rest of the Borg will be infected with this same unsolvable problem and thus be rendered useless. For you see, being a computer, the Borg will be forced to expend all of their resources in solving this unsolvable problem. And because it is unsolvable, they’ll be at it for a long long time; and thus, rendered harmless. Or so goes the theory.
But I’ve always had a problem with that episode. I mean, how could they know that it’s unsolvable? They don’t have Borg-like minds, and the Borg are most certainly more advanced than the crew of the Enterprise. How could the Enterprise know that this problem would stifle the Borg? Maybe the Borg would contemplate it for a few mere seconds before spitting out the answer in a lofty and arrogant fashion? And boy, wouldn’t the Enterprisers feel pretty stupid after that. They had just engaged in at least half an hour of ethical debate regarding the morality of infecting this Borg youth with the Borg-destroying problem; and it took no longer for them to answer it than it would take for us to sneeze. Embarrassing.
But that wasn’t my bigger problem. My bigger problem was, why would the Borg be so stupid as to be sidetracked by such a silly problem? Why would they devote any time at all to such a trivial and silly task? My god, are we talking the Borg here, or a bunch of teenage stoners hopped up on loco weed? Next thing you know, they’ll be contemplating whether “big” could ever be the new “small”, and why Triskets are so scratchy, yet somehow so delicious. Could a super-race of computer-humans be so easily confused? Why not just stuff them full of frozen burritos and watch them pass-out into oblivion?
And that always bugged me. There are a lot of ST:TNG episodes that bug me, but that one especially so. Because I just don’t buy it. I don’t see this as a working solution against the Borg. It was just a meaningless setup so they could have yet another silly discussion on ethics. This was the bigtime PC-era of Next Generation and so everything just had to be loaded down with ethical debate. But you know what; sometimes it really is best just to blast em and move on. Not everything has to be a moral dilemma. Sometimes, the right thing is the obvious thing and you should just push ahead and do it.
I suspect that this had to do with the lack of decent hookers on the Enterprise. I’m not saying they didn’t have any. I’m just saying they didn’t have enough of them. And so we were stuck with a whole lot of pussyfooted pansiness in space. Week after week, great gnashing of teeth and tearing of hair preceded each and every decision; and it was all enough that you kind of hoped that the Borg would finally win out and give these pussies a taste of real leadership. Especially whenever Whoopi Goldberg was involved.
But this one episode was particularly silly. I’m sorry, but if you’re balancing a decision that could potentially doom billions and billions of people to a horrible Borg-like existence and/or certain death, versus preventing that fate in a slightly underhanded way, you always pick the underhanded way. I’m sorry. It’s that simple. And you better believe that the Borg wouldn’t think twice about using such a technique on us. So you got to wonder how it is that ethics could possibly allow the unethical guys to win. If anything, that should be the ultimate in unethical behavior.
So even the ethics of this one was wrong, silly, and ultimately harmful to mankind. And if some TNG fan uses the ethics they picked up from that episode and decide to not save the billions of people, I think it’s safe to say that a lawsuit or two wouldn’t be unimaginable; to say the least. They really had it coming.
Rightwing Psycho-out Bullshit
Back on earth, I’ll tell you why I’m thinking about that episode. I was over at the glorious and eponymous Roger Ailes website (a truly wonderful individual who will soon be including me on his Blogroll, ahem “Enemies List”), and was reading about Scum Drudge’s recent suggestion that the opposition of Judge Alito smacks of anti-Italianism. And that’s nothing but a joke; and Drudge knows the punchline is on us.
He doesn’t think we’re anti-Italian. The idea is beyond laughable. But he doesn’t care. In fact, the absurdity of the charge makes its defense all the more unbearable and irritating. They’ve done this with other judges who have had specific ethnic backgrounds. They did this with Iraq, by implying that liberals didn’t think that “brown skinned people” were intelligent enough to handle democracy. And they’re doing this now. They know that these things aren’t true, but they don’t care. And they even know that they’re the bigger bigots regarding these matters. But that’s just the icing on the cake for them. Hypocrisy can be quite delicious, if served properly.
They’re doing these things because it messes with our heads and throws us off our game. Here’s what I wrote over at Roger’s:
This is just more rightwing psych-out bullshit to take the discussion away from where it should be. We're supposed to waste our breath defending against the absurd idea that we're anti-Italian, so that we won't use that time discussing the issues of Alito's nomination.
Not that they necessarily think that it'll permanently change the subject. It's just one more monkeywrench in their toolbox. They just toss out a bunch of crap and laugh as we scramble to refute it all. But Drudge takes this kind of thing as seriously as if we accused him of fucking his sister. He'd know that we didn't have the proof, and would just blow it off. To even discuss it is to give it a form of success. But to ignore it is to risk having the label stick.
That's why they do it. They toss out a bunch of crap and get us on the defensive. Swift Boats was a prime example, and they do it all the time. In the end, we spend more time defending against absurd charges than we do discussing real issues. And that's exactly what they want. The best defense is a good offense, and the Republicans are very good at being offensive.
We’re the Borg
And I finished writing that, and my brain started to wander (I have been drinking for a few hours), and somehow I ended up thinking about that episode. And it struck me what this is all about. We’re the fucking Borg. We’re the ones who have these programs loaded on us that we spend all our energy fighting. And we think about it and argue against it and attack and defend and everything; and for what? A silly point. An absurdity. Something that is laughable on its face, backside, and ass.
Top-down, these are silly suggestions that shouldn’t warrant the tiniest amount of thought. These aren’t accusations. They’re silly little games, intended to fuck us up. And it works; everytime. And we’ll even spend time discussing how these tricks aren’t working, and how it’s good for us to shoot down these ideas. We could even get into the idea that perhaps it’s healthy for us to discuss and refute such things, and how this only makes us stronger. Perhaps it’s intellectually lazy to dismiss such theories too quickly. And in the meantime, we’re completely getting reamed up the ass.
This is exactly what they want. Not for the label to stick, but for us to have to waste time discussing it. Because they know that’s our weakness. We like to think about things and engage in rational debate. And we take things very serious and give everything thorough consideration. I’m not necessarily saying we’re smarter, or that all liberals are geniuses. I’m saying that we waste time thinking about shit that doesn’t need to be thought about and we’re being kept off-message and off-track. Don’t get me wrong; back-to-basics debates are fun and everything; but they don’t win elections. And that’s our weakness. The Borg might not be fooled by an unsolvable problem, but the liberals surely are.
In fact, that’s the ultimate irony of this. In our universe, it’s the Borg infecting the humans with pointless abstract debate, which distracts and confuses them. Because the Republicans don’t engage in this kind of debate. I know they like to think they do, but all they’re ever looking for is the big rationalization for whatever it is they want next. They’re end-result kind of people and they really don’t care how they get there. Not action-wise, of course. They’re not willing to commit genocide and whatnot to get their ends (or I should hope not). But as far as internal debate goes, there is none.
For them, it’s all about how they sell the next idea. Democrats use polls to determine what position to take, and Republicans use them to determine how to sell their position. Because unlike us, they’re not trying to hash out what the best end-result is. They don’t care what the public wants; they want the public to want what they’ve got. They already know what results they want, and they’re just trying to figure how to get it. And one way is to devastate your enemy with silly accusations and meaningless debate. And it works.
The Best Defense
And here’s the thing, there is no easy answer to this. I’m not necessarily saying that we can ignore these things. Swift Boats was ignored by Kerry, but that didn’t work. But an immediate assault isn’t that great of an idea either. And that’s the whole point. If we could easily avoid falling into the trap, it wouldn’t be much of a trap. We’re supposed to fall into this. They’re very good at this and they know that we will. They know that we can’t risk dignifying their absurd attacks with a response, nor can we waste the time and energy; but they also know that if we don’t respond, the attacks look valid. And so what can you do? Nothing. That’s why the Repubs do this.
But there is a way out. The best defense is a good offense, and that’s what we need to do. We need to figure out how to get things back onto them. This is all just a game of tennis, and we just need to make sure that the ball either stays on their side, or they overreach and knock it out of bounds. But the dumbest thing to do is to wait for this to happen. And that’s exactly what we do too much of the time. We sit back and wait for the attacks. Because that’s what we like to do.
Imagine a star tennis player going up against a tennis machine with unlimited tennis balls. The star player will do a much better job of fielding the ball, but in the end, the machine will win. Not because the machine was better or smarter or more right; but because the machine isn’t trying to win. It just wants to keep shooting out more balls. And that’s what the Republicans do to us. They keep shooting more balls at us, hoping that we’ll spend our time whacking them back. And in the meantime, they gut our government and ruin our economy and design a society more in fitting with their greedy desires.
And that is what this is all about. We need to take the fight to them. It’s not enough to defend your position; and in some cases, it’s best not to defend at all. There are unsolvable problems, and it’s simply foolish to answer them. We need to learn how to do that.
But I’ve always had a problem with that episode. I mean, how could they know that it’s unsolvable? They don’t have Borg-like minds, and the Borg are most certainly more advanced than the crew of the Enterprise. How could the Enterprise know that this problem would stifle the Borg? Maybe the Borg would contemplate it for a few mere seconds before spitting out the answer in a lofty and arrogant fashion? And boy, wouldn’t the Enterprisers feel pretty stupid after that. They had just engaged in at least half an hour of ethical debate regarding the morality of infecting this Borg youth with the Borg-destroying problem; and it took no longer for them to answer it than it would take for us to sneeze. Embarrassing.
But that wasn’t my bigger problem. My bigger problem was, why would the Borg be so stupid as to be sidetracked by such a silly problem? Why would they devote any time at all to such a trivial and silly task? My god, are we talking the Borg here, or a bunch of teenage stoners hopped up on loco weed? Next thing you know, they’ll be contemplating whether “big” could ever be the new “small”, and why Triskets are so scratchy, yet somehow so delicious. Could a super-race of computer-humans be so easily confused? Why not just stuff them full of frozen burritos and watch them pass-out into oblivion?
And that always bugged me. There are a lot of ST:TNG episodes that bug me, but that one especially so. Because I just don’t buy it. I don’t see this as a working solution against the Borg. It was just a meaningless setup so they could have yet another silly discussion on ethics. This was the bigtime PC-era of Next Generation and so everything just had to be loaded down with ethical debate. But you know what; sometimes it really is best just to blast em and move on. Not everything has to be a moral dilemma. Sometimes, the right thing is the obvious thing and you should just push ahead and do it.
I suspect that this had to do with the lack of decent hookers on the Enterprise. I’m not saying they didn’t have any. I’m just saying they didn’t have enough of them. And so we were stuck with a whole lot of pussyfooted pansiness in space. Week after week, great gnashing of teeth and tearing of hair preceded each and every decision; and it was all enough that you kind of hoped that the Borg would finally win out and give these pussies a taste of real leadership. Especially whenever Whoopi Goldberg was involved.
But this one episode was particularly silly. I’m sorry, but if you’re balancing a decision that could potentially doom billions and billions of people to a horrible Borg-like existence and/or certain death, versus preventing that fate in a slightly underhanded way, you always pick the underhanded way. I’m sorry. It’s that simple. And you better believe that the Borg wouldn’t think twice about using such a technique on us. So you got to wonder how it is that ethics could possibly allow the unethical guys to win. If anything, that should be the ultimate in unethical behavior.
So even the ethics of this one was wrong, silly, and ultimately harmful to mankind. And if some TNG fan uses the ethics they picked up from that episode and decide to not save the billions of people, I think it’s safe to say that a lawsuit or two wouldn’t be unimaginable; to say the least. They really had it coming.
Rightwing Psycho-out Bullshit
Back on earth, I’ll tell you why I’m thinking about that episode. I was over at the glorious and eponymous Roger Ailes website (a truly wonderful individual who will soon be including me on his Blogroll, ahem “Enemies List”), and was reading about Scum Drudge’s recent suggestion that the opposition of Judge Alito smacks of anti-Italianism. And that’s nothing but a joke; and Drudge knows the punchline is on us.
He doesn’t think we’re anti-Italian. The idea is beyond laughable. But he doesn’t care. In fact, the absurdity of the charge makes its defense all the more unbearable and irritating. They’ve done this with other judges who have had specific ethnic backgrounds. They did this with Iraq, by implying that liberals didn’t think that “brown skinned people” were intelligent enough to handle democracy. And they’re doing this now. They know that these things aren’t true, but they don’t care. And they even know that they’re the bigger bigots regarding these matters. But that’s just the icing on the cake for them. Hypocrisy can be quite delicious, if served properly.
They’re doing these things because it messes with our heads and throws us off our game. Here’s what I wrote over at Roger’s:
This is just more rightwing psych-out bullshit to take the discussion away from where it should be. We're supposed to waste our breath defending against the absurd idea that we're anti-Italian, so that we won't use that time discussing the issues of Alito's nomination.
Not that they necessarily think that it'll permanently change the subject. It's just one more monkeywrench in their toolbox. They just toss out a bunch of crap and laugh as we scramble to refute it all. But Drudge takes this kind of thing as seriously as if we accused him of fucking his sister. He'd know that we didn't have the proof, and would just blow it off. To even discuss it is to give it a form of success. But to ignore it is to risk having the label stick.
That's why they do it. They toss out a bunch of crap and get us on the defensive. Swift Boats was a prime example, and they do it all the time. In the end, we spend more time defending against absurd charges than we do discussing real issues. And that's exactly what they want. The best defense is a good offense, and the Republicans are very good at being offensive.
We’re the Borg
And I finished writing that, and my brain started to wander (I have been drinking for a few hours), and somehow I ended up thinking about that episode. And it struck me what this is all about. We’re the fucking Borg. We’re the ones who have these programs loaded on us that we spend all our energy fighting. And we think about it and argue against it and attack and defend and everything; and for what? A silly point. An absurdity. Something that is laughable on its face, backside, and ass.
Top-down, these are silly suggestions that shouldn’t warrant the tiniest amount of thought. These aren’t accusations. They’re silly little games, intended to fuck us up. And it works; everytime. And we’ll even spend time discussing how these tricks aren’t working, and how it’s good for us to shoot down these ideas. We could even get into the idea that perhaps it’s healthy for us to discuss and refute such things, and how this only makes us stronger. Perhaps it’s intellectually lazy to dismiss such theories too quickly. And in the meantime, we’re completely getting reamed up the ass.
This is exactly what they want. Not for the label to stick, but for us to have to waste time discussing it. Because they know that’s our weakness. We like to think about things and engage in rational debate. And we take things very serious and give everything thorough consideration. I’m not necessarily saying we’re smarter, or that all liberals are geniuses. I’m saying that we waste time thinking about shit that doesn’t need to be thought about and we’re being kept off-message and off-track. Don’t get me wrong; back-to-basics debates are fun and everything; but they don’t win elections. And that’s our weakness. The Borg might not be fooled by an unsolvable problem, but the liberals surely are.
In fact, that’s the ultimate irony of this. In our universe, it’s the Borg infecting the humans with pointless abstract debate, which distracts and confuses them. Because the Republicans don’t engage in this kind of debate. I know they like to think they do, but all they’re ever looking for is the big rationalization for whatever it is they want next. They’re end-result kind of people and they really don’t care how they get there. Not action-wise, of course. They’re not willing to commit genocide and whatnot to get their ends (or I should hope not). But as far as internal debate goes, there is none.
For them, it’s all about how they sell the next idea. Democrats use polls to determine what position to take, and Republicans use them to determine how to sell their position. Because unlike us, they’re not trying to hash out what the best end-result is. They don’t care what the public wants; they want the public to want what they’ve got. They already know what results they want, and they’re just trying to figure how to get it. And one way is to devastate your enemy with silly accusations and meaningless debate. And it works.
The Best Defense
And here’s the thing, there is no easy answer to this. I’m not necessarily saying that we can ignore these things. Swift Boats was ignored by Kerry, but that didn’t work. But an immediate assault isn’t that great of an idea either. And that’s the whole point. If we could easily avoid falling into the trap, it wouldn’t be much of a trap. We’re supposed to fall into this. They’re very good at this and they know that we will. They know that we can’t risk dignifying their absurd attacks with a response, nor can we waste the time and energy; but they also know that if we don’t respond, the attacks look valid. And so what can you do? Nothing. That’s why the Repubs do this.
But there is a way out. The best defense is a good offense, and that’s what we need to do. We need to figure out how to get things back onto them. This is all just a game of tennis, and we just need to make sure that the ball either stays on their side, or they overreach and knock it out of bounds. But the dumbest thing to do is to wait for this to happen. And that’s exactly what we do too much of the time. We sit back and wait for the attacks. Because that’s what we like to do.
Imagine a star tennis player going up against a tennis machine with unlimited tennis balls. The star player will do a much better job of fielding the ball, but in the end, the machine will win. Not because the machine was better or smarter or more right; but because the machine isn’t trying to win. It just wants to keep shooting out more balls. And that’s what the Republicans do to us. They keep shooting more balls at us, hoping that we’ll spend our time whacking them back. And in the meantime, they gut our government and ruin our economy and design a society more in fitting with their greedy desires.
And that is what this is all about. We need to take the fight to them. It’s not enough to defend your position; and in some cases, it’s best not to defend at all. There are unsolvable problems, and it’s simply foolish to answer them. We need to learn how to do that.
Sunday, October 30, 2005
Dr. Kass, Medical Man
Atrios’ use of the term “Wanker of the Day” is usually not as apt as it was today with his current wanker, Leon R. Kass, M.D., Ph.D. Writing for Boundless Webzine, a website of Creep Dobson’s Focus on the Family, Dr. Kass preaches against the evils of the dreaded Birth Control Pill. Per his bio, Dr. Kass is currently serving alongside the likes of Dr. Charles Krauthammer on The President’s Council of Bioethics. Dr. Kass is also the Addie Clark Harding Professor in the Committee on Social Thought and the College at the University of Chicago and Hertog Fellow in Social Thought at the American Enterprise Institute. Needless to say, this isn’t just some jackharry crackpot with more indignation than ability. He’s an official crackpot.
I also learned that Dr. Kass is married to Amy Apfel Kass, Senior Lecturer in the Humanities at the University of Chicago and Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute (read: career woman). The Kasses have two married daughters and four young granddaughters, which seems odd, as our current wankfest involves the evils of birth control pills.
To have two grown-up daughters and still be married, he must have been married for a very long time. Yet only two kids?? Is it that Dr. Kass, medical man, was shooting a lot of blanks these past few decades? Were they test-tube babies, in defiance of God’s Will? Or perhaps his disdain for birth control was solely limited to the Pill, leaving open the possibility that he preferred prophylactic enhancements for her pleasure.
Or more likely, this might be yet more proof that the joyful sex life of the married couple is not quite as joyful or thrilling as Dr. Kass would have us believe. It’s almost as if he’s just playing a big hoax on the abstinent Christians out there. “Oh yeah, it’ll be even better if you wait,” he says with a wink; but the lack of children says something else.
And after all, one only needs to look at all the extramarital sex going around to realize that, for many people, sex with their life partner leaves a little something to be desired. As if, perhaps, they’re not getting it at home. I’m sure the pill is somehow to blame for that too. But whatever it was, I find it safe to say that there was probably a lot of wanking going on in the Kass household.
Sexier Sex
He clearly states over and over that sex should always be reserved for the married; and even goes as far as to suggest that sex education in school should actually romanticize sex, so as to make it sound even more wonderful and awesome. He writes of the “failure of sex education to attempt to inform and elevate the erotic imagination of the young.” And goes on to say that by explaining how sex works, they’re making it less erotic.
Right. Sex is less sexy if you know how it works; and this is a problem. And if the clinical presentation of sex by your middle-aged spinster health teacher is “technocratic” and makes sex sound worse; then what exactly is the complaint? It sounds like he’s just trying to make things worse. Call me crazy, but I’d prefer that my kids think that sex was boring than to believe it is erotic and exciting. But I suspect they won’t listen to me in either case.
He goes on to write: “True sex education is an education of the heart; it concerns itself with beautiful and worthy beloveds, with elevating transports of the soul.” That’s right; a man of science and a leading bioethicist is suggesting that the education of sexual physiology and technique be replaced with the poetry of Shelly and Keats. I’ve never read either, but I suspect that this might be at least a partial explanation as to why he only had two kids. He was reading the wrong How-To manual.
Making Babies
And mind you, it’s not enough that people are married. Or if they were intellectually honest (which they’re not), it wouldn’t be enough. Because they don’t just say that sex is for married people. They say that sex is for baby-making, and that babies can only be raised properly by a married couple. But then if a couple can’t have babies, then why should they be having sex?
One could even argue that, if sex is for making babies, then an unmarried couple that can have babies is a more apt sexual coupling than a married couple which cannot; as the unmarried couple can always get married, but the married couple still can’t procreate.
And if the purpose of marriage is procreation, then why are the baby-disabled allowed to get married at all? That made sense back before we understood how this kind of thing works. But in this modern age, we have a pretty good idea of whose peters and cooters are in working order. As a personal example, my wife once got fixed, and before they’d unfix her (we wanted kids); they made sure to do a peter test on me to make sure that my equipment was working properly and that the operation wouldn’t be a waste of our time (I passed with flying colors, so to speak).
And so we know who can and can’t be making babies, and could make marriage-suitability decisions based on that information. Were the Kasses intellectually consistent, they would be forced to denounce the marriage of the baby-disabled. If anything, they should be seen as an abomination; particularly if one of the pair has working equipment. It’s one thing for gays to shack-up; as the Dobsons can never be quite sure that they won’t be passing on that gay-loving sperm. And so it makes sense to take them off the market in pairs. But if a baby-abled gets together with a baby-disabled person, they’re taking their precious God equipment offline permanently. And that’s the kind of thing that makes baby Jesus cry.
I’m probably getting far too personal with this, but after all, what is sex if not personal? And if we’re not going to use real-life examples; then we’re more likely to get fantasyland jokes, like the works of Kass and Dobson. So to get personal, what have the good doctor and his wife been doing all these years, with only two children? And now that their children are grown, do the Kasses still need to stay together? And to be gross, are they still doing it?
Dr. Kass believes that sex is a wonderful thing that should be preserved for married couples, for the purpose of bringing babies into the world properly; yet for him, this “wonderful thing” seems to have only accomplished its purpose twice. I know unmarried people who have done better. Either there’s something wrong in the Kass household, or God just doesn’t like him very much. Probably both.
Ideological Fools
And check this out; everything I just wrote wasn’t even why I started writing this. I got kind of side-tracked when I read that this long-married man, who’s all about sex being better if you’re married, only had two kids. But that wasn’t what I got into this for. No. I was here on a different tangent: Dr. Kass’s argument versus the realities of the unwed mother and abortion.
This was another case of a conservative having a valid, if oddball argument; but only by limiting the subject matter by treating it as if it existed in vacuum. He only discusses the unwed sex of those using birth control; but is forced to deny the existence of non-users. And the vacuum is glaringly obvious once we have a glance at our Social Conservative List of No-No’s. No, I’m not referring to the big one: homosexuals. But almost as important to the Dobsons: Unwed mothers and Abortion.
Naturally, any thinking person would immediately identify the problems of unwed mothers and abortion as being mutually self-canceling. Specifically, that the second problem is an obvious solution for the first; and the first being a natural outcome of avoiding the second. Only an ideological fool would suggest that both of these are problems. That’s like complaining about your runny nose, while railing against kleenex. (And no, I’m not likening abortion to sneezes).
But it all makes sense once you realize what these sickos are really after: Punishment. I actually wrote this section after I wrote the end, so I’ll just leave this issue for now; to be picked up later on at the end. But needless to say, more abortions would mean fewer unwed mothers. And more birth control pills would mean fewer abortions. And that is why the only mention of abortion in his piece lumps it together with the Pill; rather than admitting that the one is only necessary when girl fails to take the other.
Imagine how different that piece would be if he had to admit that abortion is only necessary because all girls aren’t on the Pill. His readers could then weigh the consequences of “Free Love” with that of “Baby Murder” (their term), and he would lose a large segment of his audience. So abortion has to be excluded from the discussion; with the only reference to it implying that it’s somehow linked to the Pill, rather than an alternative to it.
Onto the Unwed
Unwed motherhood; it’s a problem, especially to the Dobsons. It’s just wrong and against God’s Will and is causing so many of our modern problems. Conservative columnist and joke on humanity Maggie Gallagher, a long-time unwed mother whose success contradicts almost everything she writes, often drones on about the social and economic destruction created by those who follow her footsteps (though she rarely admits to her unwedded status (she’s married now)). On a sidenote, Gallagher is a perfect example of conservative-brand welfare. The only real jobs she’s had were writing for conservative think-tanks and organizations. So they’re willing to give money to ignorant unwed mothers, just as long as they continue to crank out pro-conservative pap. (Something for you welfare queens out there to take note of.)
But here’s the thing, there is one thing that unwed mothers generally have in common: They don’t use birth control and they sleep around with people they shouldn’t. We hear about this all the time: Older males preying on young and foolish teenage girls; just to leave them in the lurch when babytime comes. And then there are the sluts who will sleep with any Tom, Dick, or Harry that come along. But then, when push comes to shove, they don’t even know which guy to send the Attorney General after. And there are all kinds of girls doing it with the wrong guy, even their boyfriends, and being abandoned. The conservative world is chock full of these stories.
And let’s face it, if these guys weren’t the “wrong ones” then they’d marry the girl and the baby wouldn’t be born out of wedlock. So it’s fairly easy to conclude that almost all unwed mothers are having trouble picking the “right” guys. And don’t forget, there are also the social ills caused by women who want the baby, but not the man; and get knocked up with the intent of being a single mother. This is particularly prevalent among the lesbian scene, I understand; and I’m sure the conservatives haven’t even gotten warmed up inventing new woes to blame on this troubling trend.
But again, there is one thing that all these kinds of girls have in common: They don’t use birth control. Or if they did, the odds are very strong that they didn’t use them properly, because they didn’t know how (and showing them how is one of Kass’s big problems). And yet they sleep with the wrong guys; with “wrong” meaning exactly what the Dobsons and Kasses think it to mean.
Nailing Dr. Kass
But you see, this is a critical nail against Kass’s argument. He argues that because women who pop the Pill don’t need to worry about anything popping out nine months later, that they won’t be picking the right kind of guys to sleep with. And thus they’ll debase sex and degrade themselves. As Kass says of Pill poppers: “Her sexuality unlinked to procreation, its exercise no longer needs to be concerned with the character of her partner and whether he is suitable to be the father and co-rearer of her yet-to-be-born children.”
With the pill, “Girls just want to have fun,” Kass says anachronistically circa-1984, and won’t do a good enough job of picking their lovers. But uh, hello! How does this fit in with the problem of the unwed mothers? They’re not using birth control, and it’s quite obvious that they’re doing a pretty poor job in the Picking Lover’s Department. And yet their hormones haven’t been separated from the consequences. They know that when the sucker goes in, they don’t know what all might be coming out. So what gives? Doesn’t this entirely undermine Kass’s argument?
Of course it does. Especially when you think a little more about it. Who is doing worse: a woman who is so foolish as to have unprotected sex with creeps who also aren’t protected and don’t care to be, or the woman who plans ahead and has handy birth control for sex with those same creeps? And further, who is more responsible than the women who have the foresight to consult with their doctors regarding birth control and to regularly take the pills he prescribes? Are we really to believe that these women are picking worse lovers than the completely unprotected? Of course not. Only a fool would say that. A fool named Leon Kass.
And it should be mentioned that a more salient reason why Kass has to exclude unwed mothers from the discussion (the phrase does not appear in his essay), is because the problems he discusses are actually much worse for women who don’t use birth control. In fact, the evils he lists are all usually attributed to unwed mothers, and to make mention of them in his discussion is to remind us where more of this blame lies. But it isn’t with birth control or the Pill; it’s with unmarried sex. And if the Pill is causing these problems, than the lack of the Pill makes them infinitely worse.
So if he discusses unwed mothers, the associations made by his readers will instead be focused on that problem, which is significantly more tangible and easily described. But the worst problems of unwed motherhood are almost entirely solved by the Pill. That’s why we recommend it. So he is forced to deny the existence of this important social issue. An unalert reader (which is the only type who could take Kass’s work seriously), would almost believe that he was discussing unwed motherhood. By using similar rhetoric, it is almost as if he is attributing the problems of unwed mothers to the Pill!
But there are unwed mothers, and they are unarguably exhibiting worse behavior than the Pill-Girls. Dr. Kass can exclude this fact from his discussion, but it is only intellectual dishonesty that allows him to do so. To be honest, is to admit defeat.
Case Closed
And this is utterly devastating to Kass’s argument. It’s over and done with. He loses. And it’s obvious to see what Kass’s argument really is. He’s against birth control, but doesn’t have a good argument against it. He has a real argument, but it’s a laughable one which he can never be open about. The real argument is that the Kasses want punishment against those having sex. He doesn’t mind you having sex, but just as long as there are nasty consequences to it. You’ll be an example to the others: A walking after-school special.
And so what else does this mean besides more unwanted pregnancies and lots of STD’s? Premature deaths, suffering, embarrassment, expense, ruined lives, what have you. All in an attempt to get people to stop having sex. But they always say that it’s for the sake of the consequences; as if we need consequences so that we can warn people of the consequences that we’re ultimately to blame for! The means justifies the ends, and vice versa; because they’re the same damn thing.
And not only is he willing to sacrifice people to these consequences, he’s insisting that we must do so; to save the others. He states that it is immoral and wrong to do otherwise. As he complains that “most programs of sex education in public schools have a twofold aim: the prevention of teenage pregnancy and the prevention of venereal disease, especially AIDS.” This approach he says is “at best, morally neutral,” and that because it’s so important, “amorality on this subject is itself morally culpable.”
And again, he can only say this because he believes that sexual consequences are more important to have than the prevention of those consequences. He’s saying that it is morally wrong to cure what can be cured because immoral actions require a moral consequence; and that we’d be promoting immorality were we to remove the consequences from the immoral actions. And to argue this, he had to attribute unrelated problems to the Pill; of women picking the wrong lovers and whatnot. But not only is it obvious that this problem isn’t caused by birth control pills; but that it’s still a better problem than the moral consequences he wants us to stop curing.
I don’t know about you, but I’d prefer that my daughter be sleeping with the wrong guy, than for her to sleep with the “right” guy and get knocked up when she didn’t want to be. I’d prefer that she slept-around and finished college; rather than settling down with Mr. Right at age 18 due to an “accident”. Don’t get me wrong; I’d rather she not sleep around at all, but that’s not really my choice, is it. And if she does sleep around, I’d prefer that it be without negative consequences. Sometimes, you have to be cruel to be kind; but an unwanted baby is beyond cruel; it’s humane. A human should not be brought into existence simply as a lesson in morality.
Bioethicist Leon Kass sees things differently and would prefer to make that decision for me and my daughter. He would also prefer that this “right” guy give AIDS to my daughter, than to wear a condom. Not that he condones AIDS, but he prefers it to consequence-less actions. Apparently, abstract immoralities are worse than concrete diseases and unwanted children.
Heck, one would almost think that the Kasses don’t believe that God is going to be punishing us after it’s all over. You’d think he’d see that as the ultimate consequence. But somehow, that never enters the discussion either; and so he sees Pilled-up sex as being consequence-less. People have burned for lesser heresies than that.
And so this is an example of our modern conservative ethicist. Someone who desires and demands that bad things happen to people; simply as a warning to others. This is a man who has the ear of the president, and can give input into important ethical decisions that affect America and the world. This is our conservative man of thought. A medical doctor who desires bad things to happen to people; just to prove a point. Things which we can easily prevent; but for which he believes it is wrong to do so. Imagine a heart doctor refusing to perform a bypass-operation, in order to demonstrate to others the dangers of Krispy Kreme. This is conservative ethics: when morality comes before the medicine.
I also learned that Dr. Kass is married to Amy Apfel Kass, Senior Lecturer in the Humanities at the University of Chicago and Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute (read: career woman). The Kasses have two married daughters and four young granddaughters, which seems odd, as our current wankfest involves the evils of birth control pills.
To have two grown-up daughters and still be married, he must have been married for a very long time. Yet only two kids?? Is it that Dr. Kass, medical man, was shooting a lot of blanks these past few decades? Were they test-tube babies, in defiance of God’s Will? Or perhaps his disdain for birth control was solely limited to the Pill, leaving open the possibility that he preferred prophylactic enhancements for her pleasure.
Or more likely, this might be yet more proof that the joyful sex life of the married couple is not quite as joyful or thrilling as Dr. Kass would have us believe. It’s almost as if he’s just playing a big hoax on the abstinent Christians out there. “Oh yeah, it’ll be even better if you wait,” he says with a wink; but the lack of children says something else.
And after all, one only needs to look at all the extramarital sex going around to realize that, for many people, sex with their life partner leaves a little something to be desired. As if, perhaps, they’re not getting it at home. I’m sure the pill is somehow to blame for that too. But whatever it was, I find it safe to say that there was probably a lot of wanking going on in the Kass household.
Sexier Sex
He clearly states over and over that sex should always be reserved for the married; and even goes as far as to suggest that sex education in school should actually romanticize sex, so as to make it sound even more wonderful and awesome. He writes of the “failure of sex education to attempt to inform and elevate the erotic imagination of the young.” And goes on to say that by explaining how sex works, they’re making it less erotic.
Right. Sex is less sexy if you know how it works; and this is a problem. And if the clinical presentation of sex by your middle-aged spinster health teacher is “technocratic” and makes sex sound worse; then what exactly is the complaint? It sounds like he’s just trying to make things worse. Call me crazy, but I’d prefer that my kids think that sex was boring than to believe it is erotic and exciting. But I suspect they won’t listen to me in either case.
He goes on to write: “True sex education is an education of the heart; it concerns itself with beautiful and worthy beloveds, with elevating transports of the soul.” That’s right; a man of science and a leading bioethicist is suggesting that the education of sexual physiology and technique be replaced with the poetry of Shelly and Keats. I’ve never read either, but I suspect that this might be at least a partial explanation as to why he only had two kids. He was reading the wrong How-To manual.
Making Babies
And mind you, it’s not enough that people are married. Or if they were intellectually honest (which they’re not), it wouldn’t be enough. Because they don’t just say that sex is for married people. They say that sex is for baby-making, and that babies can only be raised properly by a married couple. But then if a couple can’t have babies, then why should they be having sex?
One could even argue that, if sex is for making babies, then an unmarried couple that can have babies is a more apt sexual coupling than a married couple which cannot; as the unmarried couple can always get married, but the married couple still can’t procreate.
And if the purpose of marriage is procreation, then why are the baby-disabled allowed to get married at all? That made sense back before we understood how this kind of thing works. But in this modern age, we have a pretty good idea of whose peters and cooters are in working order. As a personal example, my wife once got fixed, and before they’d unfix her (we wanted kids); they made sure to do a peter test on me to make sure that my equipment was working properly and that the operation wouldn’t be a waste of our time (I passed with flying colors, so to speak).
And so we know who can and can’t be making babies, and could make marriage-suitability decisions based on that information. Were the Kasses intellectually consistent, they would be forced to denounce the marriage of the baby-disabled. If anything, they should be seen as an abomination; particularly if one of the pair has working equipment. It’s one thing for gays to shack-up; as the Dobsons can never be quite sure that they won’t be passing on that gay-loving sperm. And so it makes sense to take them off the market in pairs. But if a baby-abled gets together with a baby-disabled person, they’re taking their precious God equipment offline permanently. And that’s the kind of thing that makes baby Jesus cry.
I’m probably getting far too personal with this, but after all, what is sex if not personal? And if we’re not going to use real-life examples; then we’re more likely to get fantasyland jokes, like the works of Kass and Dobson. So to get personal, what have the good doctor and his wife been doing all these years, with only two children? And now that their children are grown, do the Kasses still need to stay together? And to be gross, are they still doing it?
Dr. Kass believes that sex is a wonderful thing that should be preserved for married couples, for the purpose of bringing babies into the world properly; yet for him, this “wonderful thing” seems to have only accomplished its purpose twice. I know unmarried people who have done better. Either there’s something wrong in the Kass household, or God just doesn’t like him very much. Probably both.
Ideological Fools
And check this out; everything I just wrote wasn’t even why I started writing this. I got kind of side-tracked when I read that this long-married man, who’s all about sex being better if you’re married, only had two kids. But that wasn’t what I got into this for. No. I was here on a different tangent: Dr. Kass’s argument versus the realities of the unwed mother and abortion.
This was another case of a conservative having a valid, if oddball argument; but only by limiting the subject matter by treating it as if it existed in vacuum. He only discusses the unwed sex of those using birth control; but is forced to deny the existence of non-users. And the vacuum is glaringly obvious once we have a glance at our Social Conservative List of No-No’s. No, I’m not referring to the big one: homosexuals. But almost as important to the Dobsons: Unwed mothers and Abortion.
Naturally, any thinking person would immediately identify the problems of unwed mothers and abortion as being mutually self-canceling. Specifically, that the second problem is an obvious solution for the first; and the first being a natural outcome of avoiding the second. Only an ideological fool would suggest that both of these are problems. That’s like complaining about your runny nose, while railing against kleenex. (And no, I’m not likening abortion to sneezes).
But it all makes sense once you realize what these sickos are really after: Punishment. I actually wrote this section after I wrote the end, so I’ll just leave this issue for now; to be picked up later on at the end. But needless to say, more abortions would mean fewer unwed mothers. And more birth control pills would mean fewer abortions. And that is why the only mention of abortion in his piece lumps it together with the Pill; rather than admitting that the one is only necessary when girl fails to take the other.
Imagine how different that piece would be if he had to admit that abortion is only necessary because all girls aren’t on the Pill. His readers could then weigh the consequences of “Free Love” with that of “Baby Murder” (their term), and he would lose a large segment of his audience. So abortion has to be excluded from the discussion; with the only reference to it implying that it’s somehow linked to the Pill, rather than an alternative to it.
Onto the Unwed
Unwed motherhood; it’s a problem, especially to the Dobsons. It’s just wrong and against God’s Will and is causing so many of our modern problems. Conservative columnist and joke on humanity Maggie Gallagher, a long-time unwed mother whose success contradicts almost everything she writes, often drones on about the social and economic destruction created by those who follow her footsteps (though she rarely admits to her unwedded status (she’s married now)). On a sidenote, Gallagher is a perfect example of conservative-brand welfare. The only real jobs she’s had were writing for conservative think-tanks and organizations. So they’re willing to give money to ignorant unwed mothers, just as long as they continue to crank out pro-conservative pap. (Something for you welfare queens out there to take note of.)
But here’s the thing, there is one thing that unwed mothers generally have in common: They don’t use birth control and they sleep around with people they shouldn’t. We hear about this all the time: Older males preying on young and foolish teenage girls; just to leave them in the lurch when babytime comes. And then there are the sluts who will sleep with any Tom, Dick, or Harry that come along. But then, when push comes to shove, they don’t even know which guy to send the Attorney General after. And there are all kinds of girls doing it with the wrong guy, even their boyfriends, and being abandoned. The conservative world is chock full of these stories.
And let’s face it, if these guys weren’t the “wrong ones” then they’d marry the girl and the baby wouldn’t be born out of wedlock. So it’s fairly easy to conclude that almost all unwed mothers are having trouble picking the “right” guys. And don’t forget, there are also the social ills caused by women who want the baby, but not the man; and get knocked up with the intent of being a single mother. This is particularly prevalent among the lesbian scene, I understand; and I’m sure the conservatives haven’t even gotten warmed up inventing new woes to blame on this troubling trend.
But again, there is one thing that all these kinds of girls have in common: They don’t use birth control. Or if they did, the odds are very strong that they didn’t use them properly, because they didn’t know how (and showing them how is one of Kass’s big problems). And yet they sleep with the wrong guys; with “wrong” meaning exactly what the Dobsons and Kasses think it to mean.
Nailing Dr. Kass
But you see, this is a critical nail against Kass’s argument. He argues that because women who pop the Pill don’t need to worry about anything popping out nine months later, that they won’t be picking the right kind of guys to sleep with. And thus they’ll debase sex and degrade themselves. As Kass says of Pill poppers: “Her sexuality unlinked to procreation, its exercise no longer needs to be concerned with the character of her partner and whether he is suitable to be the father and co-rearer of her yet-to-be-born children.”
With the pill, “Girls just want to have fun,” Kass says anachronistically circa-1984, and won’t do a good enough job of picking their lovers. But uh, hello! How does this fit in with the problem of the unwed mothers? They’re not using birth control, and it’s quite obvious that they’re doing a pretty poor job in the Picking Lover’s Department. And yet their hormones haven’t been separated from the consequences. They know that when the sucker goes in, they don’t know what all might be coming out. So what gives? Doesn’t this entirely undermine Kass’s argument?
Of course it does. Especially when you think a little more about it. Who is doing worse: a woman who is so foolish as to have unprotected sex with creeps who also aren’t protected and don’t care to be, or the woman who plans ahead and has handy birth control for sex with those same creeps? And further, who is more responsible than the women who have the foresight to consult with their doctors regarding birth control and to regularly take the pills he prescribes? Are we really to believe that these women are picking worse lovers than the completely unprotected? Of course not. Only a fool would say that. A fool named Leon Kass.
And it should be mentioned that a more salient reason why Kass has to exclude unwed mothers from the discussion (the phrase does not appear in his essay), is because the problems he discusses are actually much worse for women who don’t use birth control. In fact, the evils he lists are all usually attributed to unwed mothers, and to make mention of them in his discussion is to remind us where more of this blame lies. But it isn’t with birth control or the Pill; it’s with unmarried sex. And if the Pill is causing these problems, than the lack of the Pill makes them infinitely worse.
So if he discusses unwed mothers, the associations made by his readers will instead be focused on that problem, which is significantly more tangible and easily described. But the worst problems of unwed motherhood are almost entirely solved by the Pill. That’s why we recommend it. So he is forced to deny the existence of this important social issue. An unalert reader (which is the only type who could take Kass’s work seriously), would almost believe that he was discussing unwed motherhood. By using similar rhetoric, it is almost as if he is attributing the problems of unwed mothers to the Pill!
But there are unwed mothers, and they are unarguably exhibiting worse behavior than the Pill-Girls. Dr. Kass can exclude this fact from his discussion, but it is only intellectual dishonesty that allows him to do so. To be honest, is to admit defeat.
Case Closed
And this is utterly devastating to Kass’s argument. It’s over and done with. He loses. And it’s obvious to see what Kass’s argument really is. He’s against birth control, but doesn’t have a good argument against it. He has a real argument, but it’s a laughable one which he can never be open about. The real argument is that the Kasses want punishment against those having sex. He doesn’t mind you having sex, but just as long as there are nasty consequences to it. You’ll be an example to the others: A walking after-school special.
And so what else does this mean besides more unwanted pregnancies and lots of STD’s? Premature deaths, suffering, embarrassment, expense, ruined lives, what have you. All in an attempt to get people to stop having sex. But they always say that it’s for the sake of the consequences; as if we need consequences so that we can warn people of the consequences that we’re ultimately to blame for! The means justifies the ends, and vice versa; because they’re the same damn thing.
And not only is he willing to sacrifice people to these consequences, he’s insisting that we must do so; to save the others. He states that it is immoral and wrong to do otherwise. As he complains that “most programs of sex education in public schools have a twofold aim: the prevention of teenage pregnancy and the prevention of venereal disease, especially AIDS.” This approach he says is “at best, morally neutral,” and that because it’s so important, “amorality on this subject is itself morally culpable.”
And again, he can only say this because he believes that sexual consequences are more important to have than the prevention of those consequences. He’s saying that it is morally wrong to cure what can be cured because immoral actions require a moral consequence; and that we’d be promoting immorality were we to remove the consequences from the immoral actions. And to argue this, he had to attribute unrelated problems to the Pill; of women picking the wrong lovers and whatnot. But not only is it obvious that this problem isn’t caused by birth control pills; but that it’s still a better problem than the moral consequences he wants us to stop curing.
I don’t know about you, but I’d prefer that my daughter be sleeping with the wrong guy, than for her to sleep with the “right” guy and get knocked up when she didn’t want to be. I’d prefer that she slept-around and finished college; rather than settling down with Mr. Right at age 18 due to an “accident”. Don’t get me wrong; I’d rather she not sleep around at all, but that’s not really my choice, is it. And if she does sleep around, I’d prefer that it be without negative consequences. Sometimes, you have to be cruel to be kind; but an unwanted baby is beyond cruel; it’s humane. A human should not be brought into existence simply as a lesson in morality.
Bioethicist Leon Kass sees things differently and would prefer to make that decision for me and my daughter. He would also prefer that this “right” guy give AIDS to my daughter, than to wear a condom. Not that he condones AIDS, but he prefers it to consequence-less actions. Apparently, abstract immoralities are worse than concrete diseases and unwanted children.
Heck, one would almost think that the Kasses don’t believe that God is going to be punishing us after it’s all over. You’d think he’d see that as the ultimate consequence. But somehow, that never enters the discussion either; and so he sees Pilled-up sex as being consequence-less. People have burned for lesser heresies than that.
And so this is an example of our modern conservative ethicist. Someone who desires and demands that bad things happen to people; simply as a warning to others. This is a man who has the ear of the president, and can give input into important ethical decisions that affect America and the world. This is our conservative man of thought. A medical doctor who desires bad things to happen to people; just to prove a point. Things which we can easily prevent; but for which he believes it is wrong to do so. Imagine a heart doctor refusing to perform a bypass-operation, in order to demonstrate to others the dangers of Krispy Kreme. This is conservative ethics: when morality comes before the medicine.
Friday, October 28, 2005
Off Her Meds
Via the Great and Illustrious Roger Ailes, I just read a disturbing piece from Peggy Noonan. And when I say “disturbing” I mean in relative terms compared with the typical Peggy Noonan piece; which are disturbing unto themselves. She is clearly on the short bridge to Cuckooland with this one, so hold on tight:
It is not so hard and can be a pleasure to tell people what you see. It's harder to speak of what you think you see, what you think is going on and can't prove or defend with data or numbers. That can get tricky. It involves hunches. But here goes.
Jesus christ, I’ve had mushroom trips that made more sense than this. To be fair to Peggy, I suspect that this paragraph was written at the insistence of her editor, to serve as a disclaimer to let us know that the person we’re about to read is completely off their rocker and is about to share some delusional fantasies, in the hope that we’re seeing the same shit. I’ve had moments like that too; but each time was successful in convincing myself that the dots on the wall really weren’t moving. Unfortunately, Peggy has had no such luck. And that’s just the beginning.
Her point seems to be that we’re all suffering from Information Overload, and that life has become too confusing, too complex, and too scary. But she doesn’t realize that that’s the problem, and attributes it all to the “wheels coming off the trolley”. And the real message is clear: Peggy Noonan is suffering from Information Overload (along with a whole host of other mental problems), and has become confused and scared. The wheels are indeed coming off, but only the ones in Peggy’s mind. Here’s what I mean:
It’s a bit long, but the third paragraph starts with “I'm not talking about "Plamegate." As I write no indictments have come up. I'm not talking about "Miers." I mean . . . the whole ball of wax. Everything. Cloning, nuts with nukes, epidemics…” This laundry list of troubles ends with, “Great churches that have lost all sense of mission, and all authority. Do you have confidence in the CIA? The FBI? I didn't think so.”
And no, that really doesn’t make much more sense in context. But the main point is that she knows too much stuff, and it’s just blowing her mind. For the rest of us, things may seem relatively normal. I myself think that this is the best time to live in yet. But for poor Peggy Noonan, these are the End Times. (I should note that she never uses that phrase, but that’s clearly what she means).
Too Much Information
I mean, the question isn’t whether we have confidence in the CIA or FBI. It’s whether we ever should. Anyone with a brain would be hard-pressed to argue that this is the worst time in the history of either agency; but to Peggy, things haven’t looked worse. And oh no, our great churches haven’t seen worse times. Crusades, inquisitions, reformation, burning witches, corruption, Vatican II; all child’s play compared with today’s churchy woes.
And the same goes for her entire list of modern troubles. But it’s not that anything is worse, it’s just that she knows about it and it worries her. Peggy is a worrier, and thanks to the 24-hour news cycle, TMI is kicking her butt.
Blaming Bush
And the thing that bugs her most is that Bush is to blame for many of these problems. She even says as much. Saying things like how “some of us have felt discomfort regarding President Bush’s leadership the past year,” and how he seems to be “looking for trouble” and is making “startling choices.” But this hasn’t started this past year. It’s just her perceptions that have changed.
And that’s the most troubling aspect of all for her. Her strong leader seems to be making some really bad decisions, and it’s totally freaking her out. She worked with Reagan, a man always slightly out of touch with reality; and towards the end, half out of his mind; but this is what’s freaking her out.
I mean, sure, Reagan was responsible for secretly selling banned weapons to anti-American terrorists, in exchange for hostages; and lied about it. (He just couldn’t get the hostages back otherwise). And sure, he then funneled that money illegally and unconstitutionally to Central America, to support thugs and killers. And there are some indications that they may have even gotten into cocaine smuggling to finance these illegal operations. And then there’s the issue of supporting and training the extremist Muslims which are now threatening our country; as well as aiding Saddam in his quest for WMD’s. And their best defense is that Reagan had no idea what was going on in his Whitehouse, or what he was agreeing to. But it’s Bush’s leadership that’s freaking her out.
But of course, she’s still too enamored with him to actually blame him; so she instead blames everything on the End Times. Perhaps if she could personalize all this and place blame where it belongs, it would help her realize that everything isn’t hopeless; and she’d be greatly comforted. But that would involve blaming her party and her fearless leader. She’d much rather continue to believe them all to be competent, but that even competence isn’t good enough any more. Because we’re all doomed!!
The End of Something
But that’s nothing. Check this shit out:
A few weeks ago I was chatting with friends about the sheer number of things parents now buy for teenage girls--bags and earrings and shoes. When I was young we didn't wear earrings, but if we had, everyone would have had a pair or two. I know a 12-year-old with dozens of pairs. They're thrown all over her desk and bureau. She's not rich, and they're inexpensive, but her parents buy her more when she wants them. Someone said, "It's affluence," and someone else nodded, but I said, "Yeah, but it's also the fear parents have that we're at the end of something, and they want their kids to have good memories. They're buying them good memories, in this case the joy a kid feels right down to her stomach when the earrings are taken out of the case."
This, as you can imagine, stopped the flow of conversation for a moment. Then it resumed, as delightful and free flowing as ever. Human beings are resilient. Or at least my friends are, and have to be.
“Resilient,” yes. I guess that’s what they’re calling it these days when you can actually refrain from saying those things the doctor warned you about. And it’s just a hunch, but I suspect that Peggy has an awful lot of these conversation-stopping moments; though I doubt the resumption of conversation is quite as delightful and free flowing as she’s led to believe. It’s a wonder anyone invites her to parties anymore.
And this is clearly part of a theme with her. She’s decided that all of these events are leading up to something horrible and disastrous, and that if we don’t act as crazy as her about it, then we’re either lost in “classical and constitutional American optimism” or “going through the motions” and trying to live it up before things get really bad. Leftie-types have been complaining about this mindless materialism for decades; but Peggy’s now pegged it as a reaction to the post-9/11 world. And she cites as proof the number of accessories that parents buy their demanding teens; as if this was a very recent phenomenon. I wonder how many earrings she had before 9/11.
But in no case does it occur to her that she’s just fucking crazy. Or more likely, it does occur to her and she’s worried about it; thus this column, which is intended to either seek out other like-minded people, or perhaps to create them. But she’s really struggling hard to convince herself that she’s not the only one.
Even Teddy Knows…
As proof that she’s not the only one, she cites an anecdote from Christopher Lawford, a nephew of Ted Kennedy. Apparently, while Teddy was drinking heavily amongst friends and family, he said “I’m glad I’m not going to be around when you guys are my age.” When asked why, he replied “Because when you guys are my age, the whole thing is going to fall apart.”
And I’m sure that the floor just dropped right out from under poor Peggy when she read that; as this confirmed everything she already believes. Sure, he could have just meant that the government will go to the crapper due to Bush’s budget deficits, or that the youngsters are going to ruin everything, or maybe that he personally will be falling apart at that old age; or just about any other damn thing a drunken Kennedy might have been thinking about at the time. Hell, he might even have been confessing to a Kennedy plot to ruin America! But like all deranged people, she sees this as yet more confirmation of her “hunches”. When all the pieces keep fitting together, you’re either on the right path or completely insane; and too often, the line between the two is utterly blurred.
She writes of this “And—forgive me—I thought: If even Teddy knows…” That’s right, when a drunken Ted Kennedy confirms your biggest paranoid delusions with vague and ominous remarks, you must be right!
Diagnosis: Fucking Insane
In the end, I can say little else but that this woman is insane. And not just any insane. She is fucking insane. But the cause of this is simple: She’s a liberal trapped in a conservative’s body. It’s obvious from her list of woes and worries that, like most of us, she’d like a strong and proficient daddy government to take care of these things so she doesn’t have to. She’d rather not even think of these things. But as a Bush Conservative, it’s her job to worry.
The Bushies have been forcing her to think about 9/11 and suitcase nukes and rogue states and Social Security meltdowns and all kinds of other creepy and scary things that she can’t do anything about, and it’s really starting to get to her. That’s been part of the neo-con push: to scare the shit out of the Peggy Noonans so they’ll feel powerless and scared, and therefore be more receptive to the solution to their problems: The Iraq Solution. It’s a standard marketing technique. You identify and amplify a problem, and then offer your solution. And the neo-cons had one hell of a solution.
But even that’s fallen through, and now she’s just scared shitless. The big marketing campaign is over, but someone forgot to turn off Peggy. She’s still waiting for the handsome actor to come out from behind her washing machine to offer her a newer product; a shinier answer. Something to help make sense of it all. All the old standbys of church, government, and friends have fallen through, and Peggy’s now out on her own; freaking it up public-style in newspapers throughout the land. Her brand of psych-out conservatism is over, but Peggy still plays on; a helpless victim of the very machinations she helped to institute on the rest of us.
Like most of her recent columns, this was little more than a cry for help; a plea to be kept blissfully ignorant. And the irony is that she’s so much closer to that than she can possibly imagine; and really just needs to work a little harder on the blissful part. It was for people like Noonan that Valium was invented. I hope she finds her peace soon.
It is not so hard and can be a pleasure to tell people what you see. It's harder to speak of what you think you see, what you think is going on and can't prove or defend with data or numbers. That can get tricky. It involves hunches. But here goes.
Jesus christ, I’ve had mushroom trips that made more sense than this. To be fair to Peggy, I suspect that this paragraph was written at the insistence of her editor, to serve as a disclaimer to let us know that the person we’re about to read is completely off their rocker and is about to share some delusional fantasies, in the hope that we’re seeing the same shit. I’ve had moments like that too; but each time was successful in convincing myself that the dots on the wall really weren’t moving. Unfortunately, Peggy has had no such luck. And that’s just the beginning.
Her point seems to be that we’re all suffering from Information Overload, and that life has become too confusing, too complex, and too scary. But she doesn’t realize that that’s the problem, and attributes it all to the “wheels coming off the trolley”. And the real message is clear: Peggy Noonan is suffering from Information Overload (along with a whole host of other mental problems), and has become confused and scared. The wheels are indeed coming off, but only the ones in Peggy’s mind. Here’s what I mean:
It’s a bit long, but the third paragraph starts with “I'm not talking about "Plamegate." As I write no indictments have come up. I'm not talking about "Miers." I mean . . . the whole ball of wax. Everything. Cloning, nuts with nukes, epidemics…” This laundry list of troubles ends with, “Great churches that have lost all sense of mission, and all authority. Do you have confidence in the CIA? The FBI? I didn't think so.”
And no, that really doesn’t make much more sense in context. But the main point is that she knows too much stuff, and it’s just blowing her mind. For the rest of us, things may seem relatively normal. I myself think that this is the best time to live in yet. But for poor Peggy Noonan, these are the End Times. (I should note that she never uses that phrase, but that’s clearly what she means).
Too Much Information
I mean, the question isn’t whether we have confidence in the CIA or FBI. It’s whether we ever should. Anyone with a brain would be hard-pressed to argue that this is the worst time in the history of either agency; but to Peggy, things haven’t looked worse. And oh no, our great churches haven’t seen worse times. Crusades, inquisitions, reformation, burning witches, corruption, Vatican II; all child’s play compared with today’s churchy woes.
And the same goes for her entire list of modern troubles. But it’s not that anything is worse, it’s just that she knows about it and it worries her. Peggy is a worrier, and thanks to the 24-hour news cycle, TMI is kicking her butt.
Blaming Bush
And the thing that bugs her most is that Bush is to blame for many of these problems. She even says as much. Saying things like how “some of us have felt discomfort regarding President Bush’s leadership the past year,” and how he seems to be “looking for trouble” and is making “startling choices.” But this hasn’t started this past year. It’s just her perceptions that have changed.
And that’s the most troubling aspect of all for her. Her strong leader seems to be making some really bad decisions, and it’s totally freaking her out. She worked with Reagan, a man always slightly out of touch with reality; and towards the end, half out of his mind; but this is what’s freaking her out.
I mean, sure, Reagan was responsible for secretly selling banned weapons to anti-American terrorists, in exchange for hostages; and lied about it. (He just couldn’t get the hostages back otherwise). And sure, he then funneled that money illegally and unconstitutionally to Central America, to support thugs and killers. And there are some indications that they may have even gotten into cocaine smuggling to finance these illegal operations. And then there’s the issue of supporting and training the extremist Muslims which are now threatening our country; as well as aiding Saddam in his quest for WMD’s. And their best defense is that Reagan had no idea what was going on in his Whitehouse, or what he was agreeing to. But it’s Bush’s leadership that’s freaking her out.
But of course, she’s still too enamored with him to actually blame him; so she instead blames everything on the End Times. Perhaps if she could personalize all this and place blame where it belongs, it would help her realize that everything isn’t hopeless; and she’d be greatly comforted. But that would involve blaming her party and her fearless leader. She’d much rather continue to believe them all to be competent, but that even competence isn’t good enough any more. Because we’re all doomed!!
The End of Something
But that’s nothing. Check this shit out:
A few weeks ago I was chatting with friends about the sheer number of things parents now buy for teenage girls--bags and earrings and shoes. When I was young we didn't wear earrings, but if we had, everyone would have had a pair or two. I know a 12-year-old with dozens of pairs. They're thrown all over her desk and bureau. She's not rich, and they're inexpensive, but her parents buy her more when she wants them. Someone said, "It's affluence," and someone else nodded, but I said, "Yeah, but it's also the fear parents have that we're at the end of something, and they want their kids to have good memories. They're buying them good memories, in this case the joy a kid feels right down to her stomach when the earrings are taken out of the case."
This, as you can imagine, stopped the flow of conversation for a moment. Then it resumed, as delightful and free flowing as ever. Human beings are resilient. Or at least my friends are, and have to be.
“Resilient,” yes. I guess that’s what they’re calling it these days when you can actually refrain from saying those things the doctor warned you about. And it’s just a hunch, but I suspect that Peggy has an awful lot of these conversation-stopping moments; though I doubt the resumption of conversation is quite as delightful and free flowing as she’s led to believe. It’s a wonder anyone invites her to parties anymore.
And this is clearly part of a theme with her. She’s decided that all of these events are leading up to something horrible and disastrous, and that if we don’t act as crazy as her about it, then we’re either lost in “classical and constitutional American optimism” or “going through the motions” and trying to live it up before things get really bad. Leftie-types have been complaining about this mindless materialism for decades; but Peggy’s now pegged it as a reaction to the post-9/11 world. And she cites as proof the number of accessories that parents buy their demanding teens; as if this was a very recent phenomenon. I wonder how many earrings she had before 9/11.
But in no case does it occur to her that she’s just fucking crazy. Or more likely, it does occur to her and she’s worried about it; thus this column, which is intended to either seek out other like-minded people, or perhaps to create them. But she’s really struggling hard to convince herself that she’s not the only one.
Even Teddy Knows…
As proof that she’s not the only one, she cites an anecdote from Christopher Lawford, a nephew of Ted Kennedy. Apparently, while Teddy was drinking heavily amongst friends and family, he said “I’m glad I’m not going to be around when you guys are my age.” When asked why, he replied “Because when you guys are my age, the whole thing is going to fall apart.”
And I’m sure that the floor just dropped right out from under poor Peggy when she read that; as this confirmed everything she already believes. Sure, he could have just meant that the government will go to the crapper due to Bush’s budget deficits, or that the youngsters are going to ruin everything, or maybe that he personally will be falling apart at that old age; or just about any other damn thing a drunken Kennedy might have been thinking about at the time. Hell, he might even have been confessing to a Kennedy plot to ruin America! But like all deranged people, she sees this as yet more confirmation of her “hunches”. When all the pieces keep fitting together, you’re either on the right path or completely insane; and too often, the line between the two is utterly blurred.
She writes of this “And—forgive me—I thought: If even Teddy knows…” That’s right, when a drunken Ted Kennedy confirms your biggest paranoid delusions with vague and ominous remarks, you must be right!
Diagnosis: Fucking Insane
In the end, I can say little else but that this woman is insane. And not just any insane. She is fucking insane. But the cause of this is simple: She’s a liberal trapped in a conservative’s body. It’s obvious from her list of woes and worries that, like most of us, she’d like a strong and proficient daddy government to take care of these things so she doesn’t have to. She’d rather not even think of these things. But as a Bush Conservative, it’s her job to worry.
The Bushies have been forcing her to think about 9/11 and suitcase nukes and rogue states and Social Security meltdowns and all kinds of other creepy and scary things that she can’t do anything about, and it’s really starting to get to her. That’s been part of the neo-con push: to scare the shit out of the Peggy Noonans so they’ll feel powerless and scared, and therefore be more receptive to the solution to their problems: The Iraq Solution. It’s a standard marketing technique. You identify and amplify a problem, and then offer your solution. And the neo-cons had one hell of a solution.
But even that’s fallen through, and now she’s just scared shitless. The big marketing campaign is over, but someone forgot to turn off Peggy. She’s still waiting for the handsome actor to come out from behind her washing machine to offer her a newer product; a shinier answer. Something to help make sense of it all. All the old standbys of church, government, and friends have fallen through, and Peggy’s now out on her own; freaking it up public-style in newspapers throughout the land. Her brand of psych-out conservatism is over, but Peggy still plays on; a helpless victim of the very machinations she helped to institute on the rest of us.
Like most of her recent columns, this was little more than a cry for help; a plea to be kept blissfully ignorant. And the irony is that she’s so much closer to that than she can possibly imagine; and really just needs to work a little harder on the blissful part. It was for people like Noonan that Valium was invented. I hope she finds her peace soon.
Thursday, October 27, 2005
Hero Reid
I’ve said it before, and I’ll hopefully say it again: I love Harry Reid. He knew to immediately praise Harriet Miers as a good choice, and now comes back with “The radical right wing of the Republican Party killed the Harriet Miers nomination.” And that’s the right way to do it. To emphasize what a bunch of fruitcakes the far right is; so extremist that they’d even oppose a Bush nominee! That someone handpicked by Bush would not pass their ideological test is just more evidence of how ideologically extreme they are, and how out of touch they are with America.
But could Reid have pulled that off, had he initially denounced Miers? Nope. He’d look like a fool if he had denounced Miers, but then tried to blame this on the rightwing fruitcakes. It’s a tad deceptive, but that’s just how the game is played. Maybe he really did like Miers, but in either case, it was for the best that he didn’t oppose her nomination. And now he’s in a much better position to oppose Bush’s next nominee, if he wants to.
Sure, Miers was incompetent. And sure, she would have sided with the Bushies too much. But at the end of the day, we couldn’t have derailed this nominee, and so it was best to not give the Repubs a liberal strawman to attack. Had we violently opposed her, it could only have served to rally the conservatives behind her. And she would have been confirmed, and we’d look like the ideological extremists. That’s how the Repubs have been doing it for years, and it’s about time that the Dems were able to break the mold. I don’t know how well this fools America, but the media was certainly scammed by it every time.
And now, Bush is forced to pick an ultra-con as the replacement nominee; but which type? As Josh Marshall points out, there are lots of victorious ultra-conservatives on this one, and none of them have the same ideal judge in mind. And so Bush has to decide which base to please. Or if he goes with his typical instincts, he’ll just plow right ahead and pick another Miers, and wouldn’t that be fun. And if he does go ultra-con, he’ll offend much of America. And the more he tries to please his base, the more he’ll be offending America. So it’s just a lose-lose for Bush, all the way around.
Especially as their worst-case scenario is that they get an ultra-con who tips the balance of the court, and they settle all the social issues which deliver so many Republican votes. By installing ultra-conservatives in the judiciary, Repubs are putting themselves right out of business. That’s the last thing the Bushies want. As it’s been for years and years, the Republican leadership is comprised of greedy conservatives who only use social issues to fool the rube soc-cons. And now Bush is stuck in a position of having to give them something real.
Overall, Harry Reid played it right again, and I’m pleased as punch to see him in charge. I wasn’t happy that Tom Daschle got beat last year, but it really was for the best. He was typical of the clueless Dem leadership which only knew how to look like a victim. I’m sure he was an alright guy, and I don’t know much about his Senate skills; but he wasn’t a fighter, and so he was the wrong guy for these times. The Repubs are playing a game, but they’re playing for keeps; and we needed a leader who understood that. Harry Reid seems to be getting it all right, so I’ll just say it again: I love Harry Reid.
But could Reid have pulled that off, had he initially denounced Miers? Nope. He’d look like a fool if he had denounced Miers, but then tried to blame this on the rightwing fruitcakes. It’s a tad deceptive, but that’s just how the game is played. Maybe he really did like Miers, but in either case, it was for the best that he didn’t oppose her nomination. And now he’s in a much better position to oppose Bush’s next nominee, if he wants to.
Sure, Miers was incompetent. And sure, she would have sided with the Bushies too much. But at the end of the day, we couldn’t have derailed this nominee, and so it was best to not give the Repubs a liberal strawman to attack. Had we violently opposed her, it could only have served to rally the conservatives behind her. And she would have been confirmed, and we’d look like the ideological extremists. That’s how the Repubs have been doing it for years, and it’s about time that the Dems were able to break the mold. I don’t know how well this fools America, but the media was certainly scammed by it every time.
And now, Bush is forced to pick an ultra-con as the replacement nominee; but which type? As Josh Marshall points out, there are lots of victorious ultra-conservatives on this one, and none of them have the same ideal judge in mind. And so Bush has to decide which base to please. Or if he goes with his typical instincts, he’ll just plow right ahead and pick another Miers, and wouldn’t that be fun. And if he does go ultra-con, he’ll offend much of America. And the more he tries to please his base, the more he’ll be offending America. So it’s just a lose-lose for Bush, all the way around.
Especially as their worst-case scenario is that they get an ultra-con who tips the balance of the court, and they settle all the social issues which deliver so many Republican votes. By installing ultra-conservatives in the judiciary, Repubs are putting themselves right out of business. That’s the last thing the Bushies want. As it’s been for years and years, the Republican leadership is comprised of greedy conservatives who only use social issues to fool the rube soc-cons. And now Bush is stuck in a position of having to give them something real.
Overall, Harry Reid played it right again, and I’m pleased as punch to see him in charge. I wasn’t happy that Tom Daschle got beat last year, but it really was for the best. He was typical of the clueless Dem leadership which only knew how to look like a victim. I’m sure he was an alright guy, and I don’t know much about his Senate skills; but he wasn’t a fighter, and so he was the wrong guy for these times. The Repubs are playing a game, but they’re playing for keeps; and we needed a leader who understood that. Harry Reid seems to be getting it all right, so I’ll just say it again: I love Harry Reid.
Friday, October 21, 2005
The Chimpeachment Express
Guest Post by Doctor Snedley, Doctor Biobrain’s Personal Assistant
I just read the “great” John Dean’s latest ramblings on the whole “Plame” matter. As predicted, Dean is yet again downplaying another presidential scandal which might possibly lead to impeachment. And why? Why else! Because he wants his precious "Watergate" scandal to stand as the biggie. The impeachment to end all impeachments. That's why he totally downplayed the whole Clinton impeachment, and why he's downplaying this one. Because he knows that if this blows into a full-blown impeachment and takes down the President, the Watergate Gravytrain will quickly come to a halt and he'll have to get a real job.
So it's no more free lunch, Dr. Dean. The Chimpeachment Express is now rolling into the station. Full steam ahead! Next stop: Constitutional Monarchy!
I just read the “great” John Dean’s latest ramblings on the whole “Plame” matter. As predicted, Dean is yet again downplaying another presidential scandal which might possibly lead to impeachment. And why? Why else! Because he wants his precious "Watergate" scandal to stand as the biggie. The impeachment to end all impeachments. That's why he totally downplayed the whole Clinton impeachment, and why he's downplaying this one. Because he knows that if this blows into a full-blown impeachment and takes down the President, the Watergate Gravytrain will quickly come to a halt and he'll have to get a real job.
So it's no more free lunch, Dr. Dean. The Chimpeachment Express is now rolling into the station. Full steam ahead! Next stop: Constitutional Monarchy!
Harriet the Bookkeeper
I was just reading at Carpetbagger about Harriet Miers and her law license suspensions. Not only has she lost it to unpaid dues once, but twice. And Carpetbagger contrasts this with the image we’ve been given of Miers as a meticulous person who takes care of all the details. And let me just give my perspective of this.
As an accountant, I’ve had lots of involvement with these detail-oriented people. The accounting profession is literally teeming with them. In fact, they really give the rest of us a bad image. But the thing is, I don’t count those people as being accountants. Because it’s not about your job title, but about the way you think. I’ve always broken the profession into two categories: accountants and bookkeepers; but this applies outside the profession too.
Accountants are the smart guys who not only know the rules, but also know why we have the rules. And it’s that second part that is so important. If you don’t know why you’re doing something, you won’t know if you maybe shouldn’t be doing it, or how to find a better way of doing it. And that’s the problem with the bookkeeper-types. They know the rules and they know that rules are to be enforced. So that’s what they do. They enforce rules.
But they have no real concept of the bigger idea behind the rules and have no idea when the rules shouldn’t apply; nor do they think that they should know such things. They know rules and they like to enforce them, and they don’t really care where the rules come from. All that matters is that they’ve got their rules, and by god, those rules will be followed. And that’s what you want from a bookkeeper; someone who enjoys enforcing your rules. But because higher-ups mistake this anal tunnel-vision as dedication and devotion, these people inevitably get promoted to positions beyond their abilities and eventually end up as my boss. That’s why I’m self-employed.
Anal Analysis
And the reason for this analness is simple. These people are just plain dumb and so they institute rigid rules and hierarchy on the world in order for it to make sense to them. If things weren’t simple, they’d just collapse into a ball and die. Complexity boggles them, so they simplify everything down to unbendable rules.
But life isn’t simple, so they’re always bound to fail. Rather than learning big overarching principles behind everything, they insist on internalizing millions of little rules. And sometimes these rules are contradictory, and too often they’re completely arbitrary; and yet the bookkeeper will continue to insist that there is no contradiction and that obedience is mandatory. These are just unimaginative people who can’t perceive a world with different rules, even for the rules that they invent. The rules are the rules; and that’s what we’re stuck with…unless a superior says otherwise. But for an underling or outsider to even question the rules is a clear violation of the rules. Rules exist for the sole purpose of having rules which exist.
But that doesn’t apply to themselves. Sure, they’d prefer to be perfect in every way, but they aren’t. And like most people, these bookkeeper-types are great rationalizers. And so they find their little excuses and ways out. They slip-up, screw-up, and fuck-up; and they do it as regularly as the rest of us. We’re just less likely to catch them at it because we’re not like that. Plus, we’re less likely to rub it in than when they catch us (Personal Disclaimer: I have never actually made a mistake). And even worse, they hate mistakes and imperfections so much that they’re far more likely to blame you for their screw-ups.
But they screw-up and they’re careless and they forget things. Everybody does. That’s part of life. You know, fuck it. I really don’t feel like finishing this section. I kind of know what I’m trying to say, and I think it’s pretty obvious to you too. But I’m getting tired and this damn post has been sitting on my computer all day. And sometimes, you just gotta say “fuck it” and just finish the damn post. So that’s what I’m doing. I know that I’m slightly lacking in this one section, and it really is a key section; in fact, it’s the crux of my argument. But if it upsets you so damn much, why don’t you fill it out your own damn selves. I’m drunk and I’m just not going to take any more crap from any of you. Continue reading.
Miers
And so that might explain Harriet Miers and her meticulous ways which allowed her to forget to pay her own law license dues. Were these bills for Bush’s subscriptions to Boys’ Life or Maxim, she would certainly have made sure that they were taken care of. But for herself, that’s just not very important. Besides, she didn’t have a boss to tell her the rules about that one, so it’s understandable that she wouldn’t know the importance.
And of course, this is all speculation and perhaps I’m being mean. Perhaps there was some other reason why she didn’t pay her dues (maybe she’s on a tight budget). Or whatever. But I really think that this explains Miers very well.
And if it’s true, then it’s obvious that she’ll make a very lousy Supreme Court justice. For them, it’s all about overarching principles. Even the “originalist” justices and their supposedly unbending view of the constitution must invoke greater principles to justify their decisions. I’m a smart man, but the complexity of constitutional law just baffles me. And a bookkeeper-type like Miers will be completely lost.
A regular judge can base everything on specific rules and rigid obedience to the law. But it’s the Supreme Court’s job to determine what should be law; not to enforce it. And it just doesn’t look like that’s really Ms. Miers’ strong suit. The Supreme Court is all about the big picture, not haggling over details. This just isn’t the job for her. I wonder if she does taxes.
As an accountant, I’ve had lots of involvement with these detail-oriented people. The accounting profession is literally teeming with them. In fact, they really give the rest of us a bad image. But the thing is, I don’t count those people as being accountants. Because it’s not about your job title, but about the way you think. I’ve always broken the profession into two categories: accountants and bookkeepers; but this applies outside the profession too.
Accountants are the smart guys who not only know the rules, but also know why we have the rules. And it’s that second part that is so important. If you don’t know why you’re doing something, you won’t know if you maybe shouldn’t be doing it, or how to find a better way of doing it. And that’s the problem with the bookkeeper-types. They know the rules and they know that rules are to be enforced. So that’s what they do. They enforce rules.
But they have no real concept of the bigger idea behind the rules and have no idea when the rules shouldn’t apply; nor do they think that they should know such things. They know rules and they like to enforce them, and they don’t really care where the rules come from. All that matters is that they’ve got their rules, and by god, those rules will be followed. And that’s what you want from a bookkeeper; someone who enjoys enforcing your rules. But because higher-ups mistake this anal tunnel-vision as dedication and devotion, these people inevitably get promoted to positions beyond their abilities and eventually end up as my boss. That’s why I’m self-employed.
Anal Analysis
And the reason for this analness is simple. These people are just plain dumb and so they institute rigid rules and hierarchy on the world in order for it to make sense to them. If things weren’t simple, they’d just collapse into a ball and die. Complexity boggles them, so they simplify everything down to unbendable rules.
But life isn’t simple, so they’re always bound to fail. Rather than learning big overarching principles behind everything, they insist on internalizing millions of little rules. And sometimes these rules are contradictory, and too often they’re completely arbitrary; and yet the bookkeeper will continue to insist that there is no contradiction and that obedience is mandatory. These are just unimaginative people who can’t perceive a world with different rules, even for the rules that they invent. The rules are the rules; and that’s what we’re stuck with…unless a superior says otherwise. But for an underling or outsider to even question the rules is a clear violation of the rules. Rules exist for the sole purpose of having rules which exist.
But that doesn’t apply to themselves. Sure, they’d prefer to be perfect in every way, but they aren’t. And like most people, these bookkeeper-types are great rationalizers. And so they find their little excuses and ways out. They slip-up, screw-up, and fuck-up; and they do it as regularly as the rest of us. We’re just less likely to catch them at it because we’re not like that. Plus, we’re less likely to rub it in than when they catch us (Personal Disclaimer: I have never actually made a mistake). And even worse, they hate mistakes and imperfections so much that they’re far more likely to blame you for their screw-ups.
But they screw-up and they’re careless and they forget things. Everybody does. That’s part of life. You know, fuck it. I really don’t feel like finishing this section. I kind of know what I’m trying to say, and I think it’s pretty obvious to you too. But I’m getting tired and this damn post has been sitting on my computer all day. And sometimes, you just gotta say “fuck it” and just finish the damn post. So that’s what I’m doing. I know that I’m slightly lacking in this one section, and it really is a key section; in fact, it’s the crux of my argument. But if it upsets you so damn much, why don’t you fill it out your own damn selves. I’m drunk and I’m just not going to take any more crap from any of you. Continue reading.
Miers
And so that might explain Harriet Miers and her meticulous ways which allowed her to forget to pay her own law license dues. Were these bills for Bush’s subscriptions to Boys’ Life or Maxim, she would certainly have made sure that they were taken care of. But for herself, that’s just not very important. Besides, she didn’t have a boss to tell her the rules about that one, so it’s understandable that she wouldn’t know the importance.
And of course, this is all speculation and perhaps I’m being mean. Perhaps there was some other reason why she didn’t pay her dues (maybe she’s on a tight budget). Or whatever. But I really think that this explains Miers very well.
And if it’s true, then it’s obvious that she’ll make a very lousy Supreme Court justice. For them, it’s all about overarching principles. Even the “originalist” justices and their supposedly unbending view of the constitution must invoke greater principles to justify their decisions. I’m a smart man, but the complexity of constitutional law just baffles me. And a bookkeeper-type like Miers will be completely lost.
A regular judge can base everything on specific rules and rigid obedience to the law. But it’s the Supreme Court’s job to determine what should be law; not to enforce it. And it just doesn’t look like that’s really Ms. Miers’ strong suit. The Supreme Court is all about the big picture, not haggling over details. This just isn’t the job for her. I wonder if she does taxes.
Thursday, October 20, 2005
Guest Embellishment
Did you check out the Louis Freeh interview on The Daily Show tonight? What a snorefest. It was hard to tell if Jon didn’t know much about the guy, or if he was just being nice. But that’s the way Jon is too much of the time. It’s gotten to the point that I sometimes wish he didn’t have serious guests anymore, because he doesn’t ask the questions that I want asked. And if he’s not going to ask my questions, he might as well not ask them to a celebrity, because I really couldn’t give a shit what they say.
But did you hear his FBI agent story/joke towards the end? What a pile of shit. I’m sure that it was somehow based on a true story. He probably did have to bug a mobster-type guy, and there probably were dogs involved that they may have had to bribe with food. I don’t know enough about Freeh to suggest that he would have invented all of this up, so I’ll give him that much.
But it all falls apart when he gets to the part of the mobster guy doubting that they could have gotten passed his dogs. I mean, come fucking on! If someone reaches in and pulls an electronic bugging device out of my ass, I’m going to assume that he somehow neutralized my anal defenses and leave it at that. And I paid a good bit more than one thousand dollars for it, let me tell you; but if the FBI tells me that that’s what they did, then who the hell am I to doubt it? So the whole thing just sounds like bullshit invented to make a boring story sound less boring.
But it’s just dumb that the mobster guy would have so much faith in his dogs, that he’d completely forget about the reason why the FBI is there; namely, to bust him. That’s what a normal mobster guy would be worried about, or so I would imagine. But oh no, this mobster spends his time focused solely on figuring out how they got past his dogs. Most guys would start thinking about jail-time or perhaps even worry that he might get whacked to prevent him from squealing. But not our mobster. Oh no. He’s more like the killer in a cheap whodunit; all he wants to know is how the detective caught him.
Equally dumb is the FBI agent in this story, who’s so proud of getting past the dogs that he’s actually arguing with the criminal over it. Going on and on to prove that they really had gotten past the dogs. Hell, it’d have been smarter to make the guy think that it was an inside job, with the bug placed there by one of his own guys. You should always take advantage of the other guy’s ignorance and make it seem like you’ve got him far better than you did.
So if this story’s true, it makes Agent Freeh out to be an even bigger putz than we had at first imagined. But it’s not true. He just made it up to improve his story. And now he’s improved it so much that he’s forgotten how “improved” it really is, and insists on repeating it for all of America. Repeating an obviously embellished story.
And the overall tone between this supposed mobster-type and Agent Freeh sounds more like two Rotary members reminiscing over a successful pranking. The reality of the situation seems to have been sucked right out, and replaced with Humorous Anecdote reality. Where anything goes and an interesting story always beats a true one. And the ending with the dogs coming over and licking Freeh’s face is just stupid. It makes for a good story, but it’s crap for reality and an insult to all of our intelligy.
And it’s obvious that he tells this story a lot. At dinner parties and whatnot. He probably once told the story without the elaborate ending, And while it was only marginally interesting, it was probably the best story he had. And so smarter people slightly punched up the story for him after he got done with it, and he eventually incorporated those better elements into his story. And now he’s got one interesting story he can tell. One interesting story from an otherwise uninteresting man.
And that’s just crazy. This guy was Clinton’s FBI guy since September 1993 and he stayed on until June 2001. He has inside info on Whitewatergate, Filegate, Travelgate, Monicagate, and all the other Gates. He oversaw the investigation of the Davidian/Waco Fire and Ruby Ridge. Vince Foster. Richard Jewell. Wen Ho Lee. All that stuff. This guy was fucking there. Right in the fucking middle of it all. And yet the most interesting thing he can say is a semi-true story about a mobster’s guard dogs?? The one topic that really seemed to light up his eyes wasn’t even completely real?? What the fuck is the matter with that guy?
At this point, I wrote something excessively mean towards Louis Freeh, his dullness, and certain places he might like to stick it. But I can’t say for certain that these remarks were entirely deserved, so they’ve been deleted. If you’d still like to read these remarks, please send me a self-addressed stamped-envelope and I’ll see what I can do. But needless to say, Louis Freeh told a bullshitty story and it was the only real thing he seemed to want to talk about. And that tells us a lot of the man.
BTW: Per Wikipedia, Freeh is now senior vice chairman and general counsel at MBNA. So now when you fail to pay your MBNA card on-time, you’ll know that it’s not because you’re a bum who can’t afford his own purchases. Nope. This time, it’ll be because you’re sticking it to the Man. The really boring man with the marginally boring story.
But did you hear his FBI agent story/joke towards the end? What a pile of shit. I’m sure that it was somehow based on a true story. He probably did have to bug a mobster-type guy, and there probably were dogs involved that they may have had to bribe with food. I don’t know enough about Freeh to suggest that he would have invented all of this up, so I’ll give him that much.
But it all falls apart when he gets to the part of the mobster guy doubting that they could have gotten passed his dogs. I mean, come fucking on! If someone reaches in and pulls an electronic bugging device out of my ass, I’m going to assume that he somehow neutralized my anal defenses and leave it at that. And I paid a good bit more than one thousand dollars for it, let me tell you; but if the FBI tells me that that’s what they did, then who the hell am I to doubt it? So the whole thing just sounds like bullshit invented to make a boring story sound less boring.
But it’s just dumb that the mobster guy would have so much faith in his dogs, that he’d completely forget about the reason why the FBI is there; namely, to bust him. That’s what a normal mobster guy would be worried about, or so I would imagine. But oh no, this mobster spends his time focused solely on figuring out how they got past his dogs. Most guys would start thinking about jail-time or perhaps even worry that he might get whacked to prevent him from squealing. But not our mobster. Oh no. He’s more like the killer in a cheap whodunit; all he wants to know is how the detective caught him.
Equally dumb is the FBI agent in this story, who’s so proud of getting past the dogs that he’s actually arguing with the criminal over it. Going on and on to prove that they really had gotten past the dogs. Hell, it’d have been smarter to make the guy think that it was an inside job, with the bug placed there by one of his own guys. You should always take advantage of the other guy’s ignorance and make it seem like you’ve got him far better than you did.
So if this story’s true, it makes Agent Freeh out to be an even bigger putz than we had at first imagined. But it’s not true. He just made it up to improve his story. And now he’s improved it so much that he’s forgotten how “improved” it really is, and insists on repeating it for all of America. Repeating an obviously embellished story.
And the overall tone between this supposed mobster-type and Agent Freeh sounds more like two Rotary members reminiscing over a successful pranking. The reality of the situation seems to have been sucked right out, and replaced with Humorous Anecdote reality. Where anything goes and an interesting story always beats a true one. And the ending with the dogs coming over and licking Freeh’s face is just stupid. It makes for a good story, but it’s crap for reality and an insult to all of our intelligy.
And it’s obvious that he tells this story a lot. At dinner parties and whatnot. He probably once told the story without the elaborate ending, And while it was only marginally interesting, it was probably the best story he had. And so smarter people slightly punched up the story for him after he got done with it, and he eventually incorporated those better elements into his story. And now he’s got one interesting story he can tell. One interesting story from an otherwise uninteresting man.
And that’s just crazy. This guy was Clinton’s FBI guy since September 1993 and he stayed on until June 2001. He has inside info on Whitewatergate, Filegate, Travelgate, Monicagate, and all the other Gates. He oversaw the investigation of the Davidian/Waco Fire and Ruby Ridge. Vince Foster. Richard Jewell. Wen Ho Lee. All that stuff. This guy was fucking there. Right in the fucking middle of it all. And yet the most interesting thing he can say is a semi-true story about a mobster’s guard dogs?? The one topic that really seemed to light up his eyes wasn’t even completely real?? What the fuck is the matter with that guy?
At this point, I wrote something excessively mean towards Louis Freeh, his dullness, and certain places he might like to stick it. But I can’t say for certain that these remarks were entirely deserved, so they’ve been deleted. If you’d still like to read these remarks, please send me a self-addressed stamped-envelope and I’ll see what I can do. But needless to say, Louis Freeh told a bullshitty story and it was the only real thing he seemed to want to talk about. And that tells us a lot of the man.
BTW: Per Wikipedia, Freeh is now senior vice chairman and general counsel at MBNA. So now when you fail to pay your MBNA card on-time, you’ll know that it’s not because you’re a bum who can’t afford his own purchases. Nope. This time, it’ll be because you’re sticking it to the Man. The really boring man with the marginally boring story.
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