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Random commentary and senseless acts of blogging.
The first Republican president once said, "While the people retain their virtue and their vigilance, no administration by any extreme of wickedness or folly can seriously injure the government in the short space of four years." If Mr. Lincoln could see what's happened in these last three-and-a-half years, he might hedge a little on that statement. Blog critics Gryffindor House Slytherin House Ravenclaw House House Elves Beth Jacob Prisoners of Azkaban Muggles
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Tuesday, March 28, 2006
Lem Recent news of the death of the great Stanislaw Lem is, regrettably, neither hypothetical, chimeric, nor mythical. It is, however, a good enough excuse to post my personal favorite passage from Lem, taken from the Cyberiad, his celebrated analysis of the non-existence of dragons: Everyone knows that dragons don't exist. But while this simplistic formulation may satisfy the layman, it does not suffice for the scientific mind. The School of Higher Neantical Nillity is in fact wholly unconcerned with what does exist. Indeed, the banality of existence has been so amply demonstrated, there is no need for us to discuss it any further here. The brilliant Cerebron, attacking the problem analytically, discovered three distinct kinds of dragon: The mythical, the chimerical, and the purely hypothetical. They were all, one might say, nonexistent, but each nonexisted in an entirely different way... Monday, March 27, 2006
Going Postal Now that the drama is over and Ben Domenech has been fired, the central question stands out more clearly than ever: why on earth did the Post ever hire him to start with? Were they out for new readers? That seems wildly implausible. There's already a rival in town that has the far-right market sown up; the Post can hardly compete with the Washington Times in that area. And Ben's work was intended to appear only on the web, where there are scores of established sites competing for wingnut eyes that don't carry the burden (for this market) of the Post's history of quality journalism. Were they pushed by existing readers? Again, this is unlikely. The Post's readership is likely far more liberal than the paper - after all, DC is one of the farthest left, and most heavily black, cities in the country. (For a paper with such a large black readership, hiring a 'columnist' who smeared Coretta King on the day of her funeral and refused to actually apologize, although he did make a statement that the Post chose to pretend was an apology, was a particularly calculated insult to its readers.) Granted, the suburbs, which are, as usual, more white and more Republican, are also important markets for the Post. But even here, there's little evidence or likelihood that Post readers were clamoring for the crude GOP fundamentalism of Domenech. Those who seek such stuff can already find it in the Times, or skip the dead tress and just listen to talk radio. Easily dismissable is the argument that Domenech actually deserved a broader audience on the merits of his writing. Of the pieces he has written for Red State this year, this is the only one which tries to do what a good column does: take a current story, examine it thoughtfully, and make it part of a larger narrative. Unfortunately, the piece is utterly worthless. The central claim made is that the Abramoff scandal is a result of the dominance of old fashioned "do as you're told" Republicans; the cure is more prominence for genuinely conservative "do what's right" Republicans. Not one piece of evidence for this thesis is advanced, and no wonder. Abramoff himself rose through the ranks of the very rightist movement that Domenech puts forth as the cure for his activities. Every member of Congress tied up in the current scandals is a movement rightist in good standing. Look at their lifetime ratings from the ACU: DeLay (96%), Ney (85), Goode (92), Duke Cunningham (95), Dolittle (95), Pombo (97), Ryun (99) Harris (90), Sam Johnson (99). Domenech's distinction is real, if unoriginal - he just wrong about which side of the line you find the crooks on. Of course, Domenech is probablhy not as ignorant of the ethical standards of the wingnut world as he pretends to be. Indeed, when he got into trouble over plagiarism, he demonstrated personal expertise in the matter, declaring that the plagiarized passages in his work had been inserted by editors without his permission. His plagiarized writings had appeared in several different publications under a variety of diferent editors, but Ben wants us to believe that all of those editors had the habit of inserting plagiarized passages into his work without his knowledge. The only plausible explanation left standing is that the Post was trying to respond to complaints of liberal bias. The obvious problem is that such complaints have long since ceased to be responses to any real, or even imagined, libeal sympathies, but just a crude attempt to bully the media. And when you give a bully everything he asks for, all you get is more bullying. The silliest game of all is to hire more rightists as an attempt to silence the criticism. It's about as smart as trying to persuade thugs to go straight by giving them new jobs hauling truckoads of cash between banks. These are people who whine about liberal bias as a modus operandi. When they get hired into the MSM, they just get a bigger megaphone to go on doing the exact same thing. What the Post got for it's trouble in Domenech's first column was exactly what any editor with two brain cells to rub together would have expected: an attack on the liberal elitism of the Washington Post. Wednesday, March 22, 2006
So we now know that Ben Domenech wrote at least two posts concerning Abramoff and the Department of Interior without ever seeing fit to mention that his own father was Abramoff's goto guy at DoI. And, oh yes, he's also a serial plagiarist - including plagiarizing the Washington Post before he conned them into hiring him. If you're a real journalist, things like not disclosing your interests and stealing other people's work can get you fired. If you're a moonbat rightie, they get you a cushy job at a once-great newspaper. Eleanor Clift asserts that Feingold's censure resolution is a gift for Republicans - yet she never makes any kind of argument that Bush's conduct doesn't, in fact, deserve censure. Nor does she make any real argument as to how censure, which polls show to be popular, is likely to harm Democrats. All she can do is quote that famous anonymous 'party strategist'. They seem to be in the media quite a lot; maybe we'd be doing better if our 'party strategists' spent less time giving out anonymous quotes and more time developing actual winning strategies. What this strategist has to say is, "If someone proposed stringing up Bush like they did Mussolini, that would have a lot of support in the base of the party, too... But it’s not smart." In other words, pay no attention to those crazy people in the blogosphere or the grass roots. We aren't angry over NSA spying because we believe in the rule of law or checks and balances, abstruse ideas that the blogosphere is far too plebian and unwashed to comprehend. We just hate Bush for inexplicable partisan reasons that have no rational explanation, but probably are connected to the facts that he's so tough on Al Qaeda and we just love Osama. Ignore those crazies in the blogosphere and stick to the strategy of having no actual position on any issue. Voters adore invertebrates; that's why we've been winning so many elections lately. What makes this even more of a joke is Clift's (not so well) hidden agenda. She has for some time been more of a CLintonista than a real liberal or Democrat, and is heavily committed to the Hillary 08 bandwagon. Feingold's resolution, and Hillary's invisibility, are both being noticed in the grass roots, so it's clearly in Hillary's interest to spread a counter-narrative that censure is hurting Democrats. It's Clift, not Feingold, who is really working to give the GOP exactly what it needs to stay unified and in power - a 2008 ticket headed by a compromised and unpopular candidate. Friday, March 17, 2006
The first poll on censure has been published, with the unsurprising result that a narrow plurality (48% - 43%) of Americans favors censure. The most surprising result is that Republicans are opposed by only a 2 - 1 margin; the oddest is that independents are opposed (47 - 42) to censure - but support (47 - 40) impeachment. The Times, which didn't bother to wait for any polling data before labelling censure as "unpopular", is crowing that Feingold has united Republicans. But mostly what's visible is Republican politicians uniting behind a leader who remains unpopular. How this hurts us in an election year is unspecified. Republicans in Congress are currently looking at a very ugly picture. Their approval ratings are low, but that's far from the worst of it. They face a very unhappy base, and can't easily take the steps their base wants, especially spending cuts, this close to an election. Unlike Democrats, the Repubs have a base that wants them to do things that are actually unpopular. It used to be that the public disliked Congress as a whole, but liked their own Rep. This may well no longer be true. A recent Pew poll showed the astonishing result that 41% believe their own Congressman has taken bribes. And it isn't going to get better over the next few months, with new indictments almost certain to come down between now and the election. Given that setting, forcing Republican Senators and Congressman to choose between being loyal to their unpopular President or going against him and ticking off their base even more is a solid strategy that puts the enemy in a lose-lose position. Wednesday, March 15, 2006
Kevin Drum suggests that Feingold's censure resolution is poor political theater. He's probably mistaken, if only because he assumes that the bill is a partisan move. Almost certainly the real reason that Feingold has gone for censure is to play to the Democratic base in preparation for 2008, and in that he's been spectacularly successful. That Feingold is pushing his own ambitions is no excuse for the Democrats who are running away from him as if he had avian flu. Censure is clearly supported by the facts - Bush has broken the law, done so repeatedly, and not offered even a hint of contrition. Instead, he's shown the usual mix of spin and outright lies, pretending that what's really at issue is whether Al Qaeda should operate free of surveillance. The evidence that censure would be a political disaster is nonexistent, given Bush's very poor approval ratings. Even if censure is a bad political move, there are times to do the right thing and damn the politics. Democrats should be willing to stand up for the rule of law, even if there are negative political consequences. If they can't do so even when the consequences are likely to be neutral or favorable, what good are they? Glenn Greenwald is also critical of Kevin in a widely linked post. Monday, March 13, 2006
Epitaph on a Tyrant With the death in captivity of Slobodan Milosevic, it sems an appropriate moment to cite his epitaph, fortunately already composed. Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after, And the poetry he invented was easy to understand; He knew human folly like the back of his hand, And was greatly interested in armies and fleets When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter. And when he cried the little children died in the streets. W H Auden Thursday, March 02, 2006
There's been considerable excitement in left Blogistan over Bush's lowest-ever rating in this poll. We shouldn't read too much into that one number, particularly in this poll, which does oversample Democrats. It's also fun to point to Cheney's approval rating of 18% - actually lower than Nixon's when he resigned. But the really significant number here is the -33 rating for Congress: 28% approve, 61% disapprove. That's actually lower, though not by a statistically meaningful margin, than similar ratings in 1994. And it can't be attributed to any fault in the CBS poll; the next most recent poll rating Congress, by Diageo/Hotline, was much friendlier to Bush (-7 vs -25) but gave Congress essentially the same grade (-31 vs -33). It's a long time until election day, but these early numbers do have significance: for one thing, a lot of Republicans reading them have decided this isn't the year year to try for a seat in Congress, so it's been hard to recruit challengers for most Democratic incumbents. The black hats are having such serious recruiting problems this year that it looks like in the nation's 2nd most populous state neither of the top two Demo candidates, Clinton and Spitzer, will face an A list Republican. Our side's recruitment has been more successful, for Governors, Senators and the House. Note: the other side has also noticed the same number. They point out an interesting fact: in this poll, the lowest rating given to Congress (-46) came from independents. Republicans rated Congress at -26. Democrats gave Congress the least negative score (-23) of the 3 groups! |
