perfidy

The Maximum Leader the other day had a post about a proposed royal taxonomy of booze.  He proposed that Scotch is the king of booze, and... well, just go read it.  In reading it, I thought that it was a good idea, but the dear leader was channeling the French and it was poorly implemented.

I believe that there are in fact three warring states of booze.  The three kinds of booze do not generally get along.  Here's how I'd break it out:

The High Test Kingdom of Liquor, The Principate of Wine, and the Republic of Beer.

The High King of Liquor is certainly Scotch.  And many of the roles the Maximum Leader suggests for other distilled spirits are appropriate.  But really, the wines would never submit to the rule of another alcohol.  The Prince of the Wines (after a recent civil war) is the House of Cabernet from California.  They displaced the French Cabernets, who are now plotting in return.  The nobility of the Principate is largely the red wines.  The awkward bourgeoisie - putting on airs, but still with red clay on their feet, is the blush and zinfandels.  The yeomanry is the white wines, though some white wines still cling to noble titles like saxons in Plantagenet England.  The serfs are the box wines. 

The republic of beer is a low place.  The vast majority of the population is low income industrial workers, the proletariat of thin American style lagers.  There is a vibrant entrepreneurial class, though, of independent craft brewers.  Some of these have become successful, and have started aping the manners of the nobility of the Liquors and Wines.  There is also a large corporate managerial class, wholly owned by the large lager magnates, but who aspire to higher quality than they actually possess.  In a curious inversion of life in America, the darker beers are the more respected and wealthy.

In the mountains between Wine and Liquor, there is a barbarous, semi-independent state inhabited by piratical and impoverished fortified wines.  The high sulfate content of the soils there leaves life very hard indeed.

Patton has accused me of being overly concerned about wasting a scarce natural resource. The category tag. In this, of course, he is completely wrong. Naturally, I could have argued that over-categorizing a post dilutes the utility of tags. And I would have been right. But that wasn't the point. I was attacking him on aesthetic grounds, and just to stick a stick in his eye.

Just to prove that I am not some sort of homo-tree-hugging-enviro-commie, this post, which really is about everything, is tagged with every category we have. And, when I have a free moment, I'll add some new categories, and add them to this post.

So there.

Everyone can now stop using "inconvenient truth" - or its derivatives in any sort of writing, anywhere. If you feel tempted to do so in spite of my request, please read Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" and reconsider. Failing that, find an unabridged copy of Orwell's collected works and hit yourself repeatedly in the head with it.

Here's a little something the TSA might find useful.

To review, the bomb:

A bomb:

So, there I was - out of town the past couple days, when I got a call on my cell, from one of my correspondents who happens to have both my office number and my mobile.

The message? "What's wrong with your office phone service?"

I called the office number from my cell phone, and as reported, heard that

We're sorry - your call cannot be completed as dialed. Please check the number and dial again.

WTF? I think I'm still in business, and I know the bill is paid, I said to myself. But at the time, I wasn't in a position where I could spare the inevitable hour+ the search for a solution would take on the phone to some hair-lipped dipshit in Bangalore, Mumbai, or New Jersey. So I punted. (Actually, "teed off" is a more appropriate sports metaphor, under the circumstances)

When I got back to town this evening, I decided I'd spend some time building up karma points, and I've heard that talking to soulless retards is good for one's karma balance. And so I called for technical support. The menu tree on the automated answering system at the service provider was clearly designed to ensure that, except for the most serious problems, no human would ever be bothered with my travails. When I'd finally gotten to the point where I was allowed to make a selection proving that I had, in fact, checked all the obvious problems and found them n/a, I did as requested, and pressed "1" to be transferred to a supposedly sentient being. After the standard boilerplate about how, to ensure quality, my call might be recorded, I heard a couple clicks, followed by a message:

We're sorry - your call cannot be completed as dialed. Please check the number and dial again.

After I'd taken a moment to mop up a bit of the blood that burst, geyser-like, from my ears, I called again, and speed-pounded all the same responses as the first time, this time reaching quite the chatty Kathy (though his name was Greg) who asked me to do all the standard shit, and who seemed credulous as I paused after each request for just a long-enough time to allow him the delusion I was actually following his instructions. And when it was all over, I had several phone lines on which I could make outbound calls to anyone, but could only receive inbound calls from other customers of the same provider, though none from anyone who'd been smart enough to choose a different telephone company.

Just as I had been when the call began.

Except for one thing - I now have an "RT Ticket" (whatever that is) and a promise that the engineers in New Jersey will provide something (not necessarily a solution, but something) within 24-48 hours.

Marvelous. Just bloody marvelous. I don't think it would be right to name the company with whom I've so enjoyed this mincing waste of time and loss of telephonic contact from much of the business world, because, while the truth is an absolute defense against libel claims, and everything I've related here is the truth, they don't have a forum here to defend themselves.

[wik] Oh, and on a completely unrelated note, Vonage sucks. Like a Hoover.

[alsø wik] Correction, Vonage sucks like a Hoover trapped inside a Eureka.

[alsø alsø wik] On third thought, Vonage sucks like a Hoover trapped inside a Eureka, jammed up Dave Oreck's ass. Sideways. No disrepect to Dave Oreck intended, of course.

[wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër?] Yes, Virginia, this does get me out of the hot seat, probably at least until the esteemed Minister Ross weighs in again.

The Ministry of late has not talked much of politics. This could be because the Ministry feels that politics is beneath us. Because we operate on a higher plane, and do not wish to sully our hands with the stinking, encrusted cesspool that is politics. Or, it could be because politics gets in the way of dick jokes.

Our recent reticence to discuss politics is not a hard and fast rule. Its more a guideline. And today, a political item caught my eye. It is perhaps passe to pile on Howard Dean; he of the scream, the pulsating cranial veins, and overheated rhetoric. Shooting ducks in a barrel, some might say. Nevertheless, today's performance before a group of business types in Florida is remarkable even for our Rove-controlled Deanomatic android.

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) -- Down with divisiveness was the message Wednesday delivered by Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean as he told a group of Florida business leaders that Republican policies of deceit and finger-pointing are tearing American apart.

With a lead like that, one could expect to hear soothing, healing words follow. Something about how infighting and rhetoric distract us from sober and responsible discussion of the issues of the day. Maybe a nod toward respecting differences, knowing that human knowledge is forever imperfect, and however much we differ in our policy proscriptions, we all reconize that everyone has the best interests of the nation and its citizens at heart.

But wait, this is Dean:

"the most divisive president probably in our history."

Divisiveness is bad, you fucking divisivist!

"He's always talking about those people. It's always somebody else's fault. It's the gays' fault. It's the immigrants' fault. It's the liberals' fault. It's the Democrats' fault. It's Hollywood people,"

Ending divisiveness by accusing others of bigotry, zenophobia, partisanship, blinkered ideoloical fixation, hatred of the Lindsey Lohan, and, well, divisiveness, is probably not the most well thought out scheme. Maybe even risky. What it looks like is what the psychologists call projection.

The Republican agenda "is flag-burning and same-sex marriage and God knows what else,"

Is Deano suggesting that the Republicans are for flag-burning and same sex marriage? I mean, big tent and all, but I don't think that's what there about. Oh wait, they're against all that. Which, if Dean is against the evil Republicans who can do no right, does that mean that he supports flag-burning? Or is he suggesting that "flag-burning and same-sex marriage and God knows what else" is the sum of the Republican agenda? That God knows what else leaves a lot of room for fiscal, national security, and lots else. Regardless, casting your opponents' agenda in such terms is hardly conducive of unity.

Dean also attacked the president on national defense, health care, education and Social Security.

"He is bankrupting the middle-class," Dean said.

"Attacked." A key ingredient in any effort to end divisiveness. And a little class warfare fearmongering to liven up the mix.

"The president made a big deal about bringing the Iraqi prime minister to address Congress," said Dean, the former Vermont governor and 2004 presidential candidate. "The Iraqi prime minister is an anti-Semite."

Calling the only elected Arab leader in the whole fricking world an anti-semite is perhaps unwise. Especially when his next door neighbor is the real deal. Dean opposes the President. The President hates Ahmedijubabbul, who is an anti-semite and has called for the extinction of Israel. If Dean supports the right of Israel to defend itself, supporting the President might be a useful first step.

The AP article neglected to mention one thing, though. Dean also compared a Republican to Stalin. The irony here is delicious, a leftist calling... oh, never mind:

"Thank God for Bill Nelson, because we'd have another crook in the United States Senate if it weren't for him. He is going to beat the pants off Katherine Harris," Dean said during his 20-minute address. "She doesn't understand that it's…improper to be chairman of a campaign and count the votes at the same time. This is not Russia and she is not Stalin."

There isn't a Godwin's Law for comparisons to Stalin, but there should be. Dean loses the argument on style points alone, no matter Harris' actual character.

It really, truly amazes me. I am astounded that a public figure, the head of one of America's two major political parties, could have the unmitigated gall to call for an end to divisiveness, and then say all of... that. What kind of cognitive disconnect exists in his brain that allows the simultaneous presence of such mutually exclusive ideas? It becomes ever more plausible, at least to this observer, that Dean really is a covert Rovian operative, and possibly a more animated version of the original Gore-class andoid.

[wik] GeekLethal reminds us in the comments of a salient bit of movie-quotery; or rather, indulges in some creative movie-quote-paraphrasery:

"The Gore series had rubber skin. We spotted them easy, but these are new. The Deans look human - sweat, bad breath, everything. Very hard to spot. I had to wait till he moved on you before I could zero him.”

NASA has released its bold plan to send mankind to the stars. Well, to send a few people to the moon sometime in the next century, anyway. When President Bush promised in 2004 to do in sixteen years what we did forty years ago in eight, I was underwhelmed. I am now subunderwhelmed. Check out a few groundbreaking details:

NASA has been working intensely since April on an exploration plan that entails building an 18-foot (5.5-meter) blunt body crew capsule and launchers built from major space shuttle components, including the main engines, solid rocket boosters and massive external fuel tanks.

Meaning that using components that in large measure we have already invented and already used, in 13 years we can be back on the moon. And as an added bonus, the crew capsule will be disposable!

NASA's plan, according to briefing charts obtained by Space.com, envisions beginning a sustained lunar exploration campaign in 2018 by landing four astronauts on the moon for a seven-day stay.

That will be somewhere around the 45th anniversary of the immediately previous seven day moon mission.

NASA's plan envisions being able to land four-person human crews anywhere on the moon's surface and to eventually use the system to transport crew members to and from a lunar outpost that it would consider building on the lunar south pole, according to the charts, because of the regions elevated quantities of hydrogen and possibly water ice.

So we’re considering building an actual outpost. Sometime around 2080, I imagine. By the time NASA gets around to building that, they might have to rent landing space from Branson’s Virgin Galactic Lunar Amusement Park.

One of NASA's reasons for going back to the moon is to demonstrate that astronauts can essentially "live off the land" by using lunar resources to produce potable water, fuel and other valuable commodities. Such capabilities are considered extremely important to human expeditions to Mars which, because of the distances involved, would be much longer missions entailing a minimum of 500 days spent on the planet's surface.

Hey that’s a great reason. Prove you can live off the land, using a hundred billion dollars worth of lowest-bidder equipment. That’ll show the Chinese.

NASA's Crew Exploration Vehicle is expected to cost $5.5 billion to develop, according to government and industry sources, and the Crew Launch Vehicle another $4.5 billion. The heavy-lift launcher, which would be capable of lofting 125 metric tons of payload, is expected to cost more than $5 billion but less than $10 billion to develop, according to these sources.

$10 billion dollars. That’s not a lot of money. Of course, that’s just to develop the vehicles. Then we’ll actually have to buy them. Maybe one or two, so we can make one Lunar voyage per year and still have launch capacity to service the ISS and Hubble. I should think that by using pre-existing hardware, you’d be able to actually, you know, save money.

NASA would like to field the Crew Exploration Vehicle by 2011, or within a year of when it plans to fly the space shuttle for the last time.

Or put another way, no less than a year after Rutan wins the $50 million prize for first reusable private orbital vehicle

Development of the heavy lift launcher, lunar lander and Earth departure stage would begin in 2011.

By which time, all the manufacturing plants developing the shuttle components will be closed, and using those parts will no longer be possible, seeing as we’ll probably lose another shuttle sometime in the next six years.

By that time, according to NASA's charts, the space agency would expect to be spending $7 billion a year on its exploration efforts, a figure projected to grow to more than $15 billion a year by 2018, that date NASA has targeted for its first human lunar landing since Apollo 17 in 1972.

$7 billion a year. Just imagine what smart people could do with that sort of cash.

How anyone could imagine that this is a sensible plan is beyond me. The engineers at NASA certainly know better. If NASA just used the comparatively honest and efficient defense procurement system, they could be back on the moon in a few years, especially given that they could use pre-tested shuttle components. Aargh.

I would like for Cindy Sheehan, the Environmental Minister of Germany Jürgen Trittin, Islamic whackjobs and this fucktard to go drink a large, steaming mug of shut the fuck up.

Hurricane Katrina was not the fault of George Bush, the Republicans, American environmental policy or a vengeful Allah.

I'm not talking about Terri Schiavo, nor am I talking about the Pope (who, being Polish and therefore tougher than leather probably has a good twenty years left in him no matter how grim things seem now). I'm talking about the passing of sometime Ministry commentor Patton of Opinion8.net from blogging. Disgusted by the dorky slap-fights generated by the Schiavo affair (about which he posted in typically thoughtful manner), he's done.

But like Mr. Lileks, I've grown weary of it. Always one to check the pulse of his audience and act on it, Ace (also linked to your right) created "The Flame War Thread". The purely made-up invective slung about on that thread was cathartic enough (though I didn't participate) to distract me from the sinking feeling that, for some time to come, commentary on the internet is going to be dominated by precisely the form of crap of which Lileks despairs.

I'm with Lileks. Watching otherwise agreeable folks arguing as though they know the answer to an utterly unanswerable question has convinced me that it's not worth waiting for the invective to quit flowing. A bunch of folks whom I thought could rationally discuss their way to agreement, or at least to a polite consensus on how to avoid unpleasantness, have proven to me that my judgment was flawed. Too many folks, though thankfully still a minority, are taking this "new medium" thing way too seriously, becoming pompous and pronunciatory, and seem actually to believe their own shit.

While Lileks will be back sometime later in April, I won't, other than as a reader of the excellent sites listed to the right. Mr. Lileks' piece triggered the realization for me: I just don't care to add to the chum already in the water. I've never had pretense to knowing it all. Damned if that doesn't put me out of place in the slice of the 'sphere I've been hanging around. Some other day, in some different forum, about different subject matter, perhaps, but no more for me in this one. The internet will soldier on just fine, even absent my sporadic commentary, just as the creators intended.

Many thanks to those of you who've been kind enough to read, comment, and link.

I hope he decides at some point in the future to return. He doesn't write much, but he writes so well. Good luck to ya, you Ohiotexan jerkwad.

With affection,
The Ministry

Buckethead has taken exception to my assertion that his prescience in supporting George W. Bush's Middle East policy amounted to his drinking the kool-ade (or suckling the whiskey tit).

thanks also for your charitable description of my prescience in
re: to the growth of democracy in the middle east. I wasn't a far seeing visionary, confident in the desire of people everywhere to embrace freedom if they were only given the chance. I just drank the koolaid.

Or suckled the whiskey tit. Don't forget the whiskey tit.

In all fairness, Buckethead was an early and ardent supporter of Bush's policies, and I am very pleased to see that recent events seem to bear him out. If in fact he comes out on the right side of history and I on the wrong, it wouldn't exactly surprise me. He also deserves credit for not emailing me every time a Lebanese flagwaver farts with notes reading "I TOLD YOU SO" [which, to be honest, is his perogative]. His restraint is, in fact, admirable. Hopefully he will throw off his midwinter lethargy and begin regular posting soon, as my one-man-band routine is as strenuous for me as it is tiresome for you all.

President Bush was reelected last Tuesday, and by a large margin. Not a landslide, but a three and a half million vote lead is not squeaking by, either. As a conservative and a republican (not the same thing, by the way) I was relieved and pleased that my candidate had won the election. I went to bed when it became clear that it was over, and was up in time to see Kerry's gracious concession speech. The talking heads began their usual dissection of the results, and wondered what it meant for the losing side. All seemed well with the world, and I made a conscious decision not to post any gloating remarks here at perfidy, lest I seem to be, well, gloating.

I might not have bothered. My small gloats would have been entirely lost in a sea of ridiculous whining and moaning from the left. Leaving aside the moonbats at the Democratic Underground, and the covers of leftist British newspapers, there has been an awful lot of crying. But along with the crying has come loads of insults directed at the winner, and those who supported him.

In Slate, Jane Smiley has some not very smiley things to say about the 51% of the electorate that voted for Bush:

Why Americans Hate Democrats - A Dialogue

The unteachable ignorance of the red states

The reason the Democrats have lost five of the last seven presidential elections is simple: A generation ago, the big capitalists, who have no morals, as we know, decided to make use of the religious right in their class war against the middle class and against the regulations that were protecting those whom they considered to be their rightful prey - workers and consumers. The architects of this strategy knew perfectly well that they were exploiting, among other unsavory qualities, a long American habit of virulent racism, but they did it anyway, and we see the outcome now - Cheney is the capitalist arm and Bush is the religious arm. They know no boundaries or rules. They are predatory and resentful, amoral, avaricious, and arrogant. Lots of Americans like and admire them because lots of Americans, even those who don't share those same qualities, don't know which end is up. Can the Democrats appeal to such voters? Do they want to? The Republicans have sold their souls for power. Must everyone?

Progressives have only one course of action now: React quickly to every outrage - red state types love to cheat and intimidate, so we have to assume the worst and call them on it every time. We have to give them more to think about than they can handle - to always appeal to reason and common sense, and the law, even when they can't understand it and don't respond. They cannot be allowed to keep any secrets. Tens of millions of people didn't vote—they are watching, too, and have to be shown that we are ready and willing to fight, and that the battle is worth fighting. And in addition, we have to remember that threats to democracy from the right always collapse. Whatever their short-term appeal, they are borne of hubris and hatred, and will destroy their purveyors in the end.

Ironically, she implies that Democrats aren't Americans. This is one of the more sensible responses to Kerry's loss that I found.

Over at Q and O, Jon collects some responses from the left:

TBOGG:

James Wolcott nails it with a sledgehammer:

"Good, Go Ahead, America, Choke on Your Own Vomit, You Deserve to Die."

AMERICAN STREET:

Osama Wins!!

VARIOUS COMMENTERS AT ATRIOS:

I hope the people who voted for Bush get eight legs, ten arms and brain tumors.

...

The rest of the world should know that we ... will never succomb to the relentless efforts of right-wing extremists who seek to turn the United States of America into a replica of the Third Reich.

...

welcome back to 1923

...

What we have been doing isn't working, it's time for a new plan. I bet the Jews and Germans thought they could ride Hitler out, too. You see where that got them.

...

...Chimpy McCokespoon...

...

[Ohio] is just as full of morons as any other, except more so. Fucking ruined my life and my body - hope to be able to kill a few of them before I leave...

...

We are on the path to becoming a fascist state--only revolution or a violent coup will stop it.

As a conservative, it would be easy to take offense at all of this - and there is plenty more out there. I can personally vouch for the fact that had Kerry won, I would not be reacting in this peculiar manner. There seems to be a common feeling among right wing bloggers that the reactions of the left seem a little too much, a little over the top in both vituperativeness and whining tone. Patton over at opinion8 shared a similar thought via email, and Michelle Catalano has an interesting story to tell over at a small victory.

Why all of this rage, angst and fear over Bush's victory? Let's leave that for a moment, and move a little closer to home. I can easily dismiss the ravings of other bloggers, because they're likely talking out of their ass just as I often do here. But intelligent people that I personally know, have met face to face and who know me are guilty of the same rhetoric that I cited above. Yesterday, Mrs. Buckethead's band was in the studio working on their new, full length album. One would think that this would be a happy time for the band, but the news of Bush's victory weighed heavy on their minds. You see, everyone in the band save my wife is a liberal. Oh, to be sure, the bass player votes Republican just to spite an old girlfriend, and GuitarPicker is a longtime commenter here at Perfidy and has many libertarian leanings. But the band is in fact reliably liberal.

After her experience yesterday, my wife was loathe to return to the studio today. Nearly everyone in the band had said something grossly offensive to conservatives, completely unwilling to remember or recognize that my wife the conservative was in the room. One of the other singers made a comment along the lines of, "How could so many people be so stupid and vote for that idiot?" My wife gently pointed out, "I am not an idiot and I voted for him." The response was classic - "Oh, we don't mean you!" This pattern is classic bigoted behavior. Bigot: "All x are filthy, stupid mouthbreathers." Interlocutor: "What about this x?" Bigot: "Oh, that one's different. It's all the rest of them that I'm talking about."

No doubt, that singer would be shocked to hear her pronouncements classed as bigotry. She is a liberal, from a long and distinguished line of liberals, and nothing she says could ever be bigotry. She is careful to excise all racist, classist, sizeist, and genderist concepts from thought and speech. But, damn, those conservatives are baby-eating, rapist, warmongering idiots. Other members of the band had similar thoughts to offer my gentle conservative wife. The usual gamut of base canards was offered - Bush is stupid, the fundamentalist Christians are going to put us in camps, and of course, OIL! The banjo player had shaved his head and vowed never to cut until a democrat was once again in the white house, and we are free of the abomination that is George W. Bush. (Saving grace - apparently he looks like much less of a dirty hippy than previously. I hope he ends his days an old man, never having cut his hair.)

Mrs. Buckethead is not political in the sense that I am. While her conservatism is likely stronger than mine, she does not enjoy political argument and finds political discussion rather beside the point. She'd much rather play music. So, being subjected to this from her friends and bandmates is painful on at least a couple levels. One, she is being insulted by friends who in the depth of their pain over Kerry's loss, seem unable to realize that they are saying rather hurtful things. Two, she doesn't like to talk about these things - and therefore has never developed the snappy comebacks and putdowns that characterize modern political argument. She doesn't want to appear a poor winner, despite the fact that that means that these ungracious slobs can continue being tragically poor losers.

And here, on this very website, my friend Ross has given into the temptation to view Bush's victory as apocalypse. Despite the fact that the previous four years have failed to see the arrival of apocalypse; the determined chicken littles on the left - just like the preachers in the nineteenth century who constantly were calibrating the date of the arrival of the end times - must postpone the immanentizing of the eschaton. Here's a sample of what Ross thinks about Bush's reelection:

But Bush represents the certainty of an economic death spiral, the affirmation of xenophobia (and just about every other phobia, including homo-), and the sunsetting of liberty. He's got a four year track record to prove it. At least with Kerry there was a chance for fiscal discipline and for cooperation on the international level; no such chance exists now.

We're really entering a new era, now. If you're a smart, wealth-producing, socially liberal, fiscally conservative person, you need to start thinking about protecting yourself and your family from this lunacy, and you need to start doing it right now. The bible-wielding welfare-staters are coming for us. They want to spend our tax dollars on things we don't agree about, like stupid wars. They want to force everyone to hate gays. They want to take away a woman's right to choose. They do not believe the environment should be protected. They want to swagger around the playground, declaring that the opinions of those who live elsewhere in the world don't matter. They talk financial discipline, but implement the largest discretionary spending increases in modern times. They hand huge breaks to the buddies of the people in charge of their "party", and they hand the bill to us, and to the next generation. 

So how do you protect yourself and your family against this lunacy? I don't know yet. I'm trying to figure it out. I'm not sure it's possible; at least, not in America.

So there you have it! Now that the benighted majority has consigned us to another four years in hell, what can we be certain of? The economy will go into a death spiral - despite the stock market rally that is still ongoing, and the new positive job numbers that just came out. We know that our leadership hates all the wogs. Despite the fact that we were once all wogs ourselves, and that same leadership has committed this nation to the expenditure of blood and treasure in an attempt to bring freedom to those same brown skinned folk. Also, the administration and all its followers are afraid of everything, including gays. Well, that's obvious, isn't it? Without fear, the hate core of the right could never create the fear based police state that Ross figures is right around the corner. Liberty, well that's right out the window. (Except the liberty to own guns. The left never did support the complete bill of rights.) We'll start more stupid wars, which will make the rest of the world hate us even more, and that will destroy the environment, and we'll all either freeze to death or broil, depending on what the global warming activists are predicting today. And don't forget the swaggering. The villain must swagger, because otherwise we won't know he's evil. That's important, because unless a villain swaggers, you never have the satisfying denouement.

I think Ross has his hate labels confused though, given that the bible thumpers rarely if ever support the welfare state - though they are famous for their charity. They'll be coming for you, though. Probably to give you a homemade pie or something, but they'll be coming nevertheless. Ross, at least you are a Canadian; you can run to the Canadian embassy when the jackbooted thugs start roaming the streets. I guess the rest of us are stuck here to face the worst.

I cannot express in words the extent to which this kind of thinking both bores and offends me. Every time a Republican wins national office, the litany of despair begins anew. In situations like 2000, the litany is embellished with whining over stolen elections. Always it's dark conspiracies and the end times drawing nigh. Only two liberals of my personal acquaintance have resisted the temptation to parade this thinking in front of me or my wife: Johno and Mapgirl. (And with my hair trigger set, I came close to accusing Johno of it - sorry, dude) I understand the disappointment, but seriously liberals, believe me when I say that:

• The fifty-nine million of your fellow citizens (a majority, btw) who voted for Bush are not idiots, at least no more so than a normal bell curve would indicate.
• Neither are they evil, fascist, or baby-eating.
• Liberals will not be put in camps.
• We have just as strong, if not stronger, feelings for liberty than you. If by some strange cosmic irony, someone does start a police state in the next four years, I assure that we'll be fighting it too, and we're a hell of a lot better armed.
• The economy will not suffer a melt down.
• Rationalizing the tax code and reforming social security are not bad ideas. Further, they are not sneaky attempts to create a police state or some other nonsense. See above.
• If the rest of the world hates us, 1) that's not new and 2) It doesn't mean we're wrong.
• The end times are not nigh.

Make the attempt to be a gracious loser, for lose in fact you did. Last Tuesday, Bush became the first candidate since 1988 to receive a clear majority of the vote. His party increased its strength in both houses of Congress. Deal with it, accept it in you hearts, and get on with your life. Cease and desist referring to me and others who supported the president as idiots, morons and worse. The world will not come to an end.

Now we have our own near-Clueless-length post on the matter. Observe:

Phil linked to Dawn's, uh, statement? on her self-described "moderate" views.

Let's go find the most amusing sentences. Well, maybe those that are most amusing to us crazy-ass secularists.

"This is a typical tactic of secularists, angry leftists, libertarians, and others who attempt to use their own sense of moral superiority against those who take a principled moral stand. "
Our lead-off is this remarkable example of self-parody. I am reasonably confident she has no idea what she's just said.

"He takes the most far-out, "God Hates Fags"-type counterdemonstrators, and parades them as though everyone who opposes homosexual marriage must be like them."
Yeah, and the right would NEVER do this. ;)

"In fact, a recent poll showed that 20 percent of white evangelicals support civil unions"
Holy Cow! A whole 20%? Feel the love, everyone. At least from the 20%. The other 80%, maybe not.

"I personally would not oppose civil unions for homosexuals. Morally, I object to them very strongly. However, I am willing to allow them because I believe it is impossible at this point in time to turn back the tide of homosexuals wanting certain legal rights. "
No other reason? Just that one? You're just goin' with the tide? I can't be sure of what Christ would say about that, but there's gotta be something, somewhere.

"Marriage is society's model for the highest form of a human relationship—the two-parent family. Were the government to sanction any kind of "marriage" other than that between one man and one woman, it would send the message that marriage is only about with whom or with what one has sex."
The highest form. Wow. Didn't know that. Um, so why exactly? What part of regular, plain-ole straight marriage makes it the highest form? The parenting bit? This tells us what Dawn is really thinking, see? She doesn't feel that there is anything to a homosexual relationship other than sex. She said it. Right there.

"There's a reason why murder is a crime even when the person murdered is not a productive member of society. "
Even when? But it's almost not a crime? Me for the not understanding! Me not understand!

"Two men plot a murder and, just in case they get caught, they get "married" first. "
Oh, please. It's called the Fifth Amendment; go look it up. At least until we have Patriot Act III, and we lose it, on account uh terrur.

"Note also the hatred in Dennison's language, his reference to "the good Jesus People." Again, he's using the timeworn secularist tactic of painting anyone who disagrees with him as being hate-filled, while he is a kind and loving person who only has righteous anger. "
Allow me to further qualify precisely how we actually dofeel, Dawn! We do not think you are filled with evil. Rather, we recognize that you are filled with a gooey, Walmartish sort of self-righteousness, the kind that is most often found amongst those who have succeeded in surrounding themselves with large numbers of sufficiently like-minded persons, and have therefore not been challenged by intolerance, or often even had it pointed out to them. But maybe Dawn has a gay friend! Cluckity cluck -- too bad for him. She's trying to save a country here, dammit!

""Pray Until Something Happens."
Too good to pass up! Make up your own caption. ;)

"People like Phil Dennison—and I'm only singling him out because he put his views out there for all to see—subscribe to a relativist rationale, where liberty means pleasure to the exclusion of responsibility and truth. That is exactly the philosophy against which our Constitution was created to protect us."
Boy, do you ever not get America, babe. Liberty means that I get to decide, for myself, what pleasure and responsibility and truth are. We don't take Judeo-Christian (pick a denomination, any denomination) fundamentalist mores and hold them up as an ideal.

My ideal American is someone who keeps his religion to himself, carefully considers his actions when those actions impact others, takes political positions based on an honest balance of fact and opinion, and has at least a vague sense of why those who sacrificed themselves to create a country and society where individual freedom is paramount, and happiness (pleasure, if you will) is to be pursued.

Here is the great truth that Dawn just doesn't get, and why the tyranny of the majority is something responsible citizens must protected everyone against: Only 3% of the population of this country is gay. Just leave them alone. Stop your demonstrations, stop your hate, stop your attempts at "conversion", at "fixing", at all that crap. Just stop. Go away and find something else to do.

I think that a religious conservative's lack of respect for personal dignity and responsibility stems from their conviction that no such safe haven exists; that God judges all, and that judgement extends through individual actions to the judging of society.

You either believe in equality or you don't. Dawn believes in equality where it benefits her, or is convenient for her belief system, then reserves the right to draw whatever moral lines she pleases. That insidious self-righteousness is precisely one of the evils that the constitution is intended to protect us against; it becomes particularly and overtly dangerous when it seeks enforcement through law.

I can't help but feel that with a large percentage of the population out there being ready and willing to impose their morality on a small, hunted minority we must find a way to take power from the federal level and put it back in the states, where it belongs. We can't have nut cases pushing for homogenizing, hateful crap like the FMA. There has to be a safe haven, a place for people to go, where like-minded people can live in tolerance. It's a big country.

FMA people, please go live in your red states. Make all the draconian laws you want. Moralize amongst yourselves; pretend that God thinks what you think he thinks.

"Defense of Marriage"? Bullshit. It's "Attack the Fags". How about Dawn, or some other "Christian" (I use the term loosely because I know some real Christians, who live the teachings), tells us when she asks a "God Hates Fags-type counterdemonstrator" to leave the, uh, counterdemonstration. Or maybe ask them to wear a special T-shirt. Sometimes it gets hard to tell you-all apart.

A recent comment has caused me to rethink my goals, values and position in life.

RegretsYou | 02/09/04 7:55 AM | Email:worthless@pos.org | IP 216.127.72.7

Please take your hateful, talentless, war-loving, trailer-trash family back to rural Ohio, where your kind belongs. Oh, that's right, they only have real jobs there, not shameful, government-waste, meaningless, busywork jobs like yours. And may God help your hapless son.

And you know, he's exactly right. It was, oddly enough, a kind of road to Damascus, scales falling from the eyes kind of experience. There I was, sitting in my flannel pajamas and checking the blog before getting ready for work, and bam! There it was! I don't belong here in this cosmopolitan DC milieu. My attempts to move beyond my heritage have failed utterly. I just can't get past my upbringing. So I called my dad, and told him. And we've decided to move the family back to Ohio. Advanced degrees and high paying jobs are just poor camouflage for our trailer trash roots.

Dad's thinking he's gonna buy a Ford F150, but then he always knew more about cars than I did. I'll just get something that'll look nice in front of a double wide. We'll fit in there, with our kind. We can get real jobs like pulling up concrete, or maybe even digging ditches. That would be the nes plus ultra of authentic, proletarian vocations, don't you think? And we could hang out in the local bars, and talk with the other xenophobic, jingoistic, back-country rubes. Although we'd have to be careful not to let it out that we went to college. Hicks don't take kindly to condescending, college educated folk telling them what's what.

It will be a relief to leave government contracting behind. It's been so frustrating trying to get government workers to adapt to commercial sector timetables. I can just relax and swing a 20lb sledge; and think about going home to my son, and how I'll teach him about the mendacity of the French, creationism, and how it's good for honest Americans to blow up the little brown people. Of course, I'll have to be careful not to overdo it. He might rebel and go to college! JC might pick all manner of noxious habits, and learn to hate everyone he knows. Of course, he's hapless – just like his talentless Dad and Granddad, so I won't have much to fear, I think.

I'll call the wife right now and tell her to start packing. And maybe God will help us along with a million dollar buyout.

RegretsYou, please leave your real email address in the comments, as I'd like to thank you personally for the insights you've given me and my family. I followed the ip address the blog software logged, but it only led here. You have nothing to fear! Talentless hacks can't afford lawyers.

You are all pretentious twats. Every last one of you. You're all latte-sipping, iMac-using, suburban-living tertiary-industry-working WASPs who offer absolutely no new insights on anything whatsoever apart from maybe one specialist field if we're lucky.

The Commissar drops a clue that perhaps James Joyce does not think highly of us.

Well, Mr. Joyce of Kuro5hin can kiss my ass. Even though this is a pMachine blog. I drink black coffee, and I no longer own a Mac. Well, I do, but I don't use it. It's a pre-PowerPC Quadra. Well, sometimes, I haul it out and play Escape Velocity. But I don't have an iMac. My Aunt does though! And she has an AOL account! I bet you hate her, too. But I digress. At least I'm not named after an opaque novelist no one reads.

A vigorous exchange on Winds of Change left me wondering...exactly how many insults were thrown in my direction? I should, of course, count the insults I hurled in return as well. I might have been pre-emptive once or twice as well. ;)

"full of 'understanding' for the suicide bombers"
"bleeding-heart liberal"
"an enabler" (for terrorism)
"I fear the evils of our Islamo-facist enemies less than I fear what fools like Ross may make both inevitable and necessary"
"People like Ross are delaying the American quest for victory"
"secular-left apologist of suicide bombing"
"completely disassociated"
"you are not a serious person"

And here are my uber-insults:

"sanctimonious ass"
"frothing extremists"
"two-tone mental stance"
"As for my conjuration of smart remarks: Someone has to, and you're not holding up your end."
"save your "9/11 means nothing" bullshit for a little rally of like-minded jackboot-steppers"
"Make sure nobody gives Telenko the controls for the spaceship"

Darn it, I don't come out looking too good in the insult count. I believe I have hurled more than I have received, and that is piss-poor news for my purported civility.

I feel bad about the "frothing extremist" thing. That was totally unnecessary. Sorry Mary! Heat of the moment, Lord of the Flies, and all that.

As Johno has noted, Ross is in a pissing match with the good people over at Winds of Change. I wish there was some way to say, "Why can't we all just get along?" without sounding like a complete sap. Ross, Trent, and others have moved past the ability (at least in this exchange) to see the valid points in the other's comments. While I definitely trend toward Trent, Tom, Joe and the others in my assessment of the situation with the War on Terror (as my previous post should make obvious) I haven't felt the need to call Ross a fool, or an idiotarian. Yet.

Trent and the others are a little too eager to cast Ross and others into the outer darkness because of his liberal views, rather than argue. Ross is of course a little too eager to turn up the invective as well. Reasoned debate is a good thing; but it's a lot easier to get in person, with a beer in hand. (We've seen that before right here on this very blog, haven't we?)

That's true, apparently, if you're Trent Telenko. I guess they're everywhere. Here is my rambling response...lunchtime is limited today, and therefore so is my ability to polish the words.

Dear Trent: Good Lord. Where do you get the balls to tell me that I pretend 9/11 didn't happen? I guess it's simple enough if you just enjoy making it up as you go. Find me anything I've ever written that implies that. I live in Washington DC. I was here on that day. I spent a good-sized part of it terrified because the person I cared about more than anything in the world was in a State Department building, and rumors were floating around about another plane, and that a car bomb had gone off, destroying the building, and I didn't know what had happened to her. So save your "9/11 means nothing" bullshit for a little rally of like-minded jackboot-steppers. It's not applicable to me, and frankly it's not generally applicable at all. You debase yourself every time you imply it about another person.

Ah, calm.

Perhaps you're referring to the fact that my _reaction_ to 9/11 is different from yours. Once again, I'm not sure how you know, exactly, what my reaction is.

I don't pretend that a death cult is not involved, because a death cult _is_ involved, plain as day. I don't write that Arab culture isn't sick, because I happen to think that in many ways, it is. Perhaps you are confusing what I have actually written with something else?

You and I differ on whether genocide and atrocities are necessary to remedy the situation. There is no simple outcome to this; there is no absolute "logical conclusion" to be had from the facts at hand (or at least those at my disposal). Good god, man, we're dealing with social sciences and human beings, here. Nothing is predictable; nothing is certain.

Which side of the February 26, 1993 divide are you on? THAT was the wake up call, and there may have been earlier ones. That was when Islamic terrorism crossed the line in clear effort. They've had the will to do this for a very long time now. 9/11 was the first operation that accomplished its goals at scale.

You miss the point of this discussion in a spectacular way. Iraq is not the issue, and never has been. The issue is resource allocation and effective means of defense against the super-empowered angry man, and states who defend him. If we set aside all other issues, I could certainly support military intervention in Iraq, for simple "it's the right thing to do" reasons.

We're in the middle of a spending several hundred billion dollars to effect change in Iraq. We don't really know how that's going to turn out -- it's a risk, right now. The benefits are highly nebulous and off in the future. Kay's testimony and report shows that the country did not have significant WMD (or any at all, for that matter). Alarmingly, though, he found that there are some pretty "smart" guys running around in the middle east who might be able to create certain kinds of WMD, whose talents are for sale. What could they build? Low-tech nuclear, possibly biological, certainly chemical. Where will they go now? They will go places where we do not have monitoring.

Each of these capabilities will, over the next century, become progressively more available to smaller and smaller groups. I conclude that we _will_ suffer from this form of terrorism; and there is no way to stop it.

We can delay, perhaps. A massive onslaught of violence and posturing against Middle Eastern culture will achieve some delay. Arab culture and radical Islam seem to be the primary generators of violence on the face of the planet, at the moment. Religious intolerance is stunning difficult to root out and eliminate. We must find a way to generate massive intolerance _within_ Arab culture to the cancer in its midst, to create the ultimate solution. That is an open problem.

The singular focal point of _secular_ Middle Eastern anger at America involves Israel. Given the resources we are expending and have expended on Iraq, can we find a better use? I believe we can. Invading Iraq to provide an example of how an Arab state _could_ be is POINTLESS without some benign resolution to the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. You can set up any democracy you want in Iraq, and anything you do of merit will be poisoned by that fundamental conflict. Note that I do NOT advocate a particular solution to that conflict, at this point -- I advocate a specific OUTCOME. Anything that achieves an outcome of stability, separation, and relative peace is acceptable.

Longer term, I view decentralization as the only defense against the progressive danger of WMD. I conclude that over the long run, free cities cannot be defended from the terrorism of the super-empowered angry man. We must study our infrastructure and create many points of strength, where we currently have single points of weakness. We must, by government intervention if necessary, decentralize our financial and political systems.

We live on a vast continent, and it's time we took advantage of that.

A couple of random notes:

WMD are either state-sponsored or not. Tens of thousands of Russian nuclear missiles aimed at the US are a civilization-ending threat (not to mention life-on-the-planet-ending). One nuclear weapon, detonated in a city, is an immeasurable tragedy and horror, but not a civilization ending event. Eliminating state-sponsored terrorism is a critical goal. Clearly, military operations in Afghanistan accomplished this goal. Just as clearly, the massive expenditures in Iraq are not justified with a corresponding reduction in terrorist capabilities or potential.

When I look at the list you use to "qualify" Iraq for invasion, what strikes me is how precisely Saudi Arabia maps into it. I find it very hard to believe that somewhere in SA, we would not find a rich man, funding a clever man, to build a horror. Certainly, SA is a primary source of funding for the "death cult" that is attempting to propagate itself around the globe.

The easiest form of terrorism is to simply fill a van with explosives, drive it next to a building, and detonate it. This technique could easily be used to kill tens of thousands of people in America. It wouldn't necessarily kill them all at once, but if a series of bombings were to take place, the effect might be even stronger. Why have we not seen this form of attack? Don't tell me it's because the INS is doing its job. That's a joke. I'm really not sure why we haven't see more domestic terrorism, but I think the answer is twofold: First, there just really aren't all that many of these suicidal nutjobs. Second, when said carefully trained nutjobs arrive in America, blend in, and possibly make friends, quite a large number of them realize that they've been living a lie, and fade away.

My basic, but uninformed solution for the Israeli/Palestinian crisis: Build the wall. Put it on the green line. Evict or imprison Arafat and his cronies. PAY for the relocation of Israeli settlers back into Israel proper. PAY to establish an economy in Palestine. With some meaningful self-direction, a decent economy, and secular causes _removed_, the radicals will find themselves on the receiving end of massive internal hostility. Inform Israel that their military aid is contingent upon acceptance (at no cost) of this offer. Inform the new Palestine (or whatever the hell they call themselves), that _any_ spending on a formal military will be met with an increase in military aid to Israel double the expenditure, and a cessation of any economic aid whatsoever. Create "truth" commissions on both sides, offering amnesty for detailed information, cessation of activites, and surrender of all war materiel. Place Jerusalem under UN authority, making it an independent "sub-state", with its own elected council, evenly divided along religious lines. The oath of office is a binding oath to preach non-violence and tolerance. Build desalination plants on the coast and convey the water to the new palestine. Create a UN-sponsored, secular education system in the new palestine. Fund it so no family will ever need to send a child to a religious school again. Do I want to reward terrorism by just _giving_ people all this? Hell, no. But I want more terrorism even less. And for my global strategy, I need Israel and suroundings to be peaceful and prosperous, on both sides.

I have been thinking about something that I know is controversial, and I struggle with it. It is a formal policy of assassination. Essentially, any _public_ religious figure who _publicly_ advocates "death to america (or another western country)" AND demonstrably and provably supports terrorism, through guidance or resources or some such, without repudiation of those statements, is subject to this policy. Anywhere in the world, any time. The uttering of "death to america" puts us on notice of intent to kill our citizens, from a particular individual. It may be necessary to generate an equal and opposite reaction.

N.B. Revised extensively on the advice of commenters including my wife, who is more wise than I.

I am a man of many peeves, so many that I don't have pets. I'm more like a peeve farmer. And the "white person clap" is the first among them.

"What?," you ask? Well, I'll tell you! The white-person clap is when one claps one's hands on the first and third beats of a measure of music, no matter whether it's the 1812 Overture-- where it is almost appropriate-- or "Funky Drummer"-- where it's just not. The net effect, when such people inhabit an audience alongside more soulful people clapping on two and four, is that claps occur on all four beats of the measure as the two traditions collide. Ugly, ugly, ugly, and decidedly unfunky.

This time of year, PBS' programming is nothing but wall-to-wall music performances punctuated by reruns of The Vicar of Dibley. The same-ness of the performances is both stunning and discouraging. From the dude with the frizzy mullet and the white piano to former members of Elvis Presley's band with special guests, every single audience is the same: uniformly anglo, trending older, and uniformly unable to distinguish weak pulses from strong ones. 

Here's what happens every time: the big show finale comes... the house band kicks into some ridiculous arrangement of Proud Mary featuring The Canadian Brass... the band is tight, the backbeat is heavy on TWO and FOUR, and 1500 white people in boat shoes begin swaying back and forth and clapping on ONE and THREE like it's goddamned Lawrence Welk.

I swear to God, every time I see this shit it makes me crazy. We've had sixty years... sixty fricking years... of Rock and Roll... of TWO and FOUR - these people grew up on Little Richard, Elvis and Aretha... and they still can't find a backbeat. The JB's might as well be a polka band! The MG's might as well be Peter Paul and Mary! What the hell is so hard about feeling one TWO three FOUR?

It's not even like people are being asked to feel funky shit like "bom rest CHICKadika bom bombom CHICKadicka." Leave that to the pros. It's "boom CHUCK boom CHUCK boom CHUCK boom CHUCK." That's four on the floor, people, you grew up with it! There are no excuses! What the hell?

Jesus Christ! &*%! @?^!!!!

*panting*

The December Award for Inadvertant or Vertant Perfidy goes to... PBS, because I can. Stank you very much.

[wik] Duane, on my crosspost at Blogcritics, notes the following:

Traditionally (and there is a tradition here, oh yes!), the white person's clap consists of clapping on the 1 and 3 beats of a 4/4 meter, when the natural emphasis is on the 2 and 4 beats. You can see that in large audiences when a bunch of dorks are one beat out of sync with the music, so the net effect is that there are clapping sounds on all four beats -- the dorks (about 1/2 the crowd) and the rest (the eyerolling other 1/2) contributing equally. Quite maddening. Who are these people? Why are they mostly white? I used to blame Lawrence Welk and the polka, but now. I just don't know.

I don't know either, Duane. Maybe there's a vaccine? 

Buckethead's cute li'l heartwarmer about cannibalistic mink (below) seemed funny on Friday, but it's Monday and my bile is up. This kind of crap does irreparable damage to the cause of actually reasonable environmental crusades by making us all seem bugfuck crazy.

You see, I am inherently inclined to view favorably the causes of nutball environmentalists. It's part of my bleeding-heart centrism. That's not to say that I endorse them, their means, or their crackpot theories, but I really, really agree that it's a good idea to, for example, reduce fossil fuel emissions worldwide, manage the clearing and cutting of forests, explore alternative fuel solutions, and work towards getting more people to accept a low-animal-product diet as a healthy and tasty alternative.

However, asspots like these here ruin the whole party. In fact, asspots like these are the whole damn party, if you write off (as I do) the birkenstock-and-black-sock "concerned liberal" crowd who write small checks to the WWF, ride in bicycle rallies, compost their trash, and live in small rural college towns. So many of the real environmentalists live on the Chesapeake or in upper Maine, wear gumboots, hunt, log, and trap, and actually see, and give a shit about the actual world we live in. But these guys never make it on the news, because they never blow things up.

When I was in college, the Monkey Wrench Gang and "ecofeminism" was all the rage. Somehow all that stuff just seemed to me to be... how do I put this...bullshit... and left me wary of far-left crusades like environmentalism, campus "free speech" crusades, antiglobalism, and Dennis Kucinich. So much of it is woolly-headed crypto-Marxist claptrap that totally ignores reality in favor of impossible solutions. And we've seen what good Marxism has done for the world.

You know, not to ramble or anything, but I guess this kind of well-meaning mink-slaughter is just the kind of thing you'd expect from a demographic who put Che's sexy mug on tee-shirts and angrily defend Stalin against those slanderers who think murder is a big deal -- "You don't get it! Those were mistakes! We'll get it right next time!" Leaving it unclear whether getting it right means that soon we'll all live in the Worker's Paradise, or soon we'll all be dead. Personally, I'm not sure which would be worse. 

So fuck them. Although shenanigans like this mink-slaughter are only a tragedy for a few mink and some farmers, plenty of environmentalists are more sinister. The San Diego arsonists, tree-spikers, and the rest of their radical ilk are petit terrorists, plain and simple, and they make it really fucking hard for the rest of us concerned citizens to be taken at all seriously. 

Back in my halcyon grad-school days, I used to think Ted Rall was a pretty nifty cartoonist. Sure, he was a hard-lefty, but he scored a lot of really excellent points off the American Right, especially their gibbering and howling in the run-up to the Kangaroo Impeachment of President Billy Nutsack. Moreover, I lived in Amherst MA, where my stolid Centrism played like John Birch in some places. So, I read him, I liked him, I didn't always think he made sense. 

But no more. Over the last couple years, I've watched Ted Rall sink deep, deep into moral equivalency and come out the other side into crazyland. 

In this post, Michael Totten lovingly and thorougly fisks a Ted Rall column that among other things asserts " the more we tell ourselves that the Iraqi resistance is a bunch of evil freedom-haters, the deeper we'll sink into this quagmire," and elsewhere calls the same Ba'ath resistance "patriots."

If you read that carefully, you see that Ted Rall really is calling those crazy Ba'ath truckbombing rapist warlord shitwads "morally good freedom-loving patriots." Also, apparently the Iraqi police-trainees who were killed last week, the ones who are helping to establish a homegrown Iraqi social order that is not based on rape, terror, and disappearances, are "[c]ops, who work for a foreign army of occupation [and therefore] are not innocent. They are collaborators. Traitors. They had it coming."

Let me get this straight.

The remnants of a brutally repressive regime, who have taken to killing innocent people and are dedicated to fomenting chaos, starvation, poverty, and martial law in their own country so that they may return to their former positions as local warlords, are freedom loving patriots. Okay, sure, whatever.

And The Iraqi citizens training as police officers, who are working to dig their country and people out of the Saddam Hussein Memorial Thirty-Year Shit-Trench are traitors who had it coming. Got it. Great.

What the fuck, please? I mean, you can argue about how full the glass is. We can, and will, argue as to whether the Iraqi libervasion was justified, for years to come. But that doesn't change certain things they in most places call "facts." Fact: The libervasion happened. We broke the eggs and killed a bunch of people. Now the US can a) bug out and leave the mess they created to fix itself however it will, or b) stick around and try to keep things afloat.

Fact: There is plenty of room to argue about how best to handle the occupation. The President may, or may not, have the right strategery. I'm betting towards "not," personally. But this argument does not negate the fact of the invasion, option b).

Fact: By any moral code accepted by a large number of average people in the Western world, there is a difference between blowing yourself up along with a number of other people, and training a police force to make sure that kind of thing doesn't happen.

Fact: Moral equivalence is fine as a mind-exercise. Moral equivalence is even fine as a tool for living, as long as it is one of many designed to make a person well-rounded. However, moral equivalence is a hell of a stupid way to live. Hence the term, "Fisking."

I'm horrified that certain elements of the American Left, a group who on the whole are perfectly reasonable patriotic people who just happen to see things differently than most of the blog world, have come to the conclusion that American action is always wrong, resistance to power is always right no matter what the flavor, and that training local police forces in Iraq so that US soldiers may cede authority to them is equivalent to flying a loaded jetliner into a building full of people.

It goes without saying (or at least it should), but Iraqi police recruits are as much traitors to their country as the Democratic Party is to our own, with no respect to Ann Coulter, Michael Savage, or any of the rest of the creeps who are Ted's peers on the other side.

Gives the rest of us a real bad name, it does, and it makes me wanna punch them in the neck.

Please read the fisking, and watch Michael crush a vestige of my slightly-more-liberal past like a bug. It's kind of sad. I really used to like that shitwad.