Denialism

Who Needs Denialism When You Have Censorship & Sycophants to Enforce It?

—

by

Chris
in

Peter Baker of the Post reports on a White House policy manual (PDF) detailing how President Bush’s advance team should prevent anyone from saying or doing anything that might not be in total agreement with our President’s policies:

The manual offers advance staffers and volunteers who help set up presidential events guidelines for assembling crowds. Those invited into a VIP section on or near the stage, for instance, must be ” extremely supportive of the Administration,” it says. While the Secret Service screens audiences only for possible threats, the manual says, volunteers should examine people before they reach security checkpoints and look out for signs. Make sure to look for “folded cloth signs,” it advises.

To counter any demonstrators who do get in, advance teams are told to create “rally squads” of volunteers with large hand-held signs, placards or banners with “favorable messages.” Squads should be placed in strategic locations and “at least one squad should be ‘roaming’ throughout the perimeter of the event to look for potential problems,” the manual says.

“These squads should be instructed always to look for demonstrators,” it says. “The rally squad’s task is to use their signs and banners as shields between the demonstrators and the main press platform. If the demonstrators are yelling, rally squads can begin and lead supportive chants to drown out the protestors (USA!, USA!, USA!). As a last resort, security should remove the demonstrators from the event site.”

Comments

  1. S.H.A.M. Scam Sam

    Chris,

    It says “Those invited into a VIP section on or near the stage”, which isn’t being extreme at all. I’ll ask again:

    Are you guys honest brokers or not?

    Is this a science blog or not? Why is it on scienceblogs if you’re doing political commentary? And always left-leaning anti-government commentary?

    I’m starting not to trust you guys any more than the friggin’ gurus,…

    Reply
  2. plunge

    As I noted over on Dispatches, aside from the “try to use security to remove them,” and aside from the fact that this has a presidential seal on it (instead of being in a campaign manual), this stuff is pretty pedestrian for both parties. Rally squads? Blocking out “enemy” banners with your own? That was SOP on all the Democratic campaigns I worked on.

    In a way, it’s just sort of a childish game. We come to their events and waste their time, and then they come to ours and do the same. The main reason for trying to block the views is to keep them out of local press photos and video: no sense in giving opposing campaigns and organizations extra free earned media by piggybacking off an event that you planned and set up.

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  3. Vagueofgodalming

    But, plunge, isn’t that the point? Presidents are elected to govern, not to just carry on campaigning.

    It’s very dangerous for Bush (and, by extension, the USA), because it weakens his grip on reality when feedback is filtered this way.

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  4. Ex-drone

    S.H.A.M. Scam Sam writes:

    Is this a science blog or not? Why is it on scienceblogs if you’re doing political commentary? And always left-leaning anti-government commentary?

    Yikes! Sorry for engaging in worthwhile discussion, but I guess Mark and Chris should be more considerate of your feelings. Scienceblogs has two categories Culture Wars and Policy and Politics that each contain hundreds of postings. Nevertheless, Mark and Chris, start deleting. You’re offending Sam’s feelings.

    Reply
  5. Ted

    This just indicates that they want to manage the image and use political shock troops to do it.

    Why be surprised that counter-operations (such as seeding supporters) go on? It’s just a part of political messaging and manipulation of the remote participants that make up the base of the electorate. Shaping the message doesn’t occur with Democrats? They let it all hang out, right?

    Look, the president gets trotted out by the trilaterals to push some policy point, and they don’t want the message to be watered down or distracted. It’s economy of effort. The President certainly doesn’t step out onto the stump to communicate with Joe Average as much as to manipulate (or parry political opposition) with a specific goal in mind.

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  6. Argonaut

    Scam Sam – why here? See blog headline. This is a ‘denialism’ blog, and as the astute Rachel Maddow pointed out, one of the many effects of this policy manual is to keep the preznit himself from seeing opposition demonstrators who have been corraled waaay down the street and out of the way. In other words, the preznit can’t be in denial when he doesn’t know there are two sides, and in his particular case, I am reminded of Ray Stevens’ immortal lines, “You’ve heard of people who are so dumb they don’t know nuthin’? He’s so stupid he don’t even *suspect* nuthin’.”

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  7. Chris H

    I don’t think this can be explained away w/ a “dems do it too” argument. I don’t remember Clinton’s rallies being as mechanistic and controlled. I had been to several where no tickets were required, for instance. And Clinton would do things like go running on the Mall, where he could have had chance encounters with people who disagreed with him.

    But I guess the overall point–how this fits in with Scienceblogs–is that it is another data point on how this administration can’t have dissenting voices. We’ve seen this in science over and over, with the SG, with the yahoos appointed to the stem cell ethics panels, etc.

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  8. Ted

    I don’t remember Clinton’s rallies being as mechanistic and controlled.

    That’s probably true to some extent but I have attended many rallies as support staff and they are all mechanistic and controlled; I just attribute the less heavy handedness to the general media competence of the Clin-ton’s subtler staff and the willing whoring of the media machine.

    But I gave up on the veracity of the Clin-ton administration watching the daily NATO reports emanating from the state department and Brussels and the hired talking heads to bolster the message. One had to be genuinely brain dead to accept the daily frame. Of course, in a general sense, Clinton needed less of that management because the spin cycle was better at insulating him from those opposing his views.

    And, I don’t consider the Clin-ton administration’s woes with Whitewater, Vince Foster, Gennifer or Monica as substantive — it was salacious tabloid fodder more than anything else; it didn’t require the same sort of counter-action that Chimpy’s incompetents implement.

    And Clinton would do things like go running on the Mall, where he could have had chance encounters with people who disagreed with him.

    Lets be fair though, the blogosphere in Clin-ton’s day wasn’t anything like today. Yes, Drudge was there, but the consumers of blog outputs were in a primitive stage to do anything about it. It’ll be interesting to see how accessible Hillary is after the election. Will she take down the imperial cordon that protects the White House of the post-911 world? Or build on it to, once and for all, smash the vast right wing conspiracy threatening the Republic. 😛

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  9. plunge

    It really depends on the venue.

    And I also think it’s a big, big mistake to think that any of this has something to do with not wanting to “hear” contrary opinions. To exaggerate things for effect: the idea that Bush would have been a great president except that he didn’t get to see a particular homemade “No Blood for Oil” banner is incredibly silly: it’s the sort of thing only a whacktivist (as we call them) could believe. Protest drum circles on the fringes of their rallies do not make politicians rethink things, and they probably aren’t even going to make any of the attendees rethink anything either.

    A large point of these sorts of rallies (not every event, of course, and less so in the primaries) is earned media. The people who attend these events by and large don’t just show up out of the blue: we “crowd build” them by phone banking through lists of the sorts of people we want to show up. This is especially so for Bush. Think of these events are nothing more than elaborate staged plays for local media consumption. These tactics are all about controlling images in the media, not about preventing the President from hearing things he doesn’t want to hear. It’s not like a bunch of slogans on a sign or chanting is the same thing as an interesting discourse on anything.

    I wasn’t around for Clinton’s era of campaigning, so I can’t comment on what was done back then, but it was a radically different environment in many ways. Honestly, if you can believe it, the game of going to each others rallies to astroturf some “pushback” probably just wasn’t as big a deal as it is now.

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  10. plunge

    Oh, and I should add that it’s probably true that Bush _doesn’t_ want to hear or see dissenting opinions (which is why he never pops out of his throne room for a burger). I just don’t think that’s the fundamental basis for these sorts of strategies.

    Of course, any comparison to Clinton is missing the point that that guy was one of a kind when it came to talking to people. No joke, but I once saw that dude basically stay awake pretty much for several days on end at a Democratic Convention: I got barely any sleep as it is, and yet he was up and chatting it up with every Tom Dick and Harry when I went to bed and still doing it when I woke up. I don’t even know how it was humanly possible for someone to get that little sleep.

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  11. Ted

    I don’t even know how it was humanly possible for someone to get that little sleep.

    And that, right there, should have alerted you to the possibilities.

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  12. Jason M

    This sort of stuff started with Reagan. The big reason for these guidelines isn’t to make sure that only people who agree with you are around, it’s to make sure people who disagree with you don’t get to disrupt events. During the 1984 presidential campaign, Reagan had all kinds of wonderful rallies showing large numbers of people loving the president. Mondale had rallies including all sorts of disruptions, particularly when he entered and while he spoke. Guess which one used a system like this?

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  13. S.H.A.M. Scam Sam

    Ex-drone,

    My “feelings” aren’t hurt – as I said, my sense of trust is bothered. There’s been a lot of talk about why no one listens to scientists, and how scientists have no dog in this-or-that ideological fight (like GW) but that’s hard to swallow when you’re obviously stuck in a left-wing viewpoint that you can’t see something like this for what it is: basic politics, nothing more.

    One of the reasons I left the Dems is because they’ve moved so far to the left there’s no “extreme left” left anymore. Getting all knee-jerk about something like this is a perfect example: anything Bush, or the Republicans, do is suspect – whether it’s normal politics or not – while anything the Dems do is O.K., whether it’s crass, or effective, or not. Excuse me, but I expected more from so-called scientists, and does leave the whole “denialist” thing looking pretty suspect if Mark and Chris are as ideologically driven as the people they criticize for being, supposedly, extreme.

    All christian politicians are suspect but Hillary’s channelling gets enough of a pass that, so far, I’ve seen nothing here saying she’s a nut case – even with Deepak claiming her as a “follower” – will that ever happen guys? Or are you so committed to the Left that she, and Bill “higher state of conciousness” Clinton will be left alone? Aren’t they “denialists”? Obama has a page on his site for The Secret – and he campaigned, specifically, to the Maharishi’s followers – are you going to call him on it? Aren’t he, and the Clinton’s, denying reality? I’m a fellow atheist asking: Where are science’s big guns when they’re not pointed at organized religion? Or is Richard Dawkins being left alone in doing the heavy lifting for the Enlightenment because you guys are so desperate for a left-wing presidential win?

    There’s a lot of talk about the Right suppressing science but, from what I can see, there’s not much reason for trust, if this is what you guys believe being fair and unbiased is.

    Reply
  14. S.H.A.M. Scam Sam

    BTW, for anyone that cares, my blog, The Macho Response, is back up:

    http://www.themachoresponse.blogspot.com

    I’ll be writing about a lot of stuff, including, eventually, my opinions of the science community and (what I see as) it’s obvious biases.

    Reply
  15. minimalist

    Man, I know, and I even voted for John Kerry too. He’s a Catholic, don’t you know. A Catholic! All the intolerance of Christianity plus holdover beliefs from Roman-era pagan virgin mother/divine son cults. I am so ashamed!

    The issue isn’t whether candidates have nutty personal beliefs. They all do, as far as I’m concerned, if they claim to be religious. First, a whole heck of a lot of it is butt-kissing and campaigning: look at the public behavior of many politicians (particularly the “religious right”) and contrast that with their stated beliefs. Many may be sincere in their religion but weak and corrupt, but I’ll bet a significant proportion are laughing behind their hands at the “rubes” they fooled.

    Same goes for new age nonsense, I’ll wager. Obama I’m not so sure about, but Hillary is enough of a political animal that there’s a good chance it was a calculated move, like her disastrous attempt to play “housewife” during the 1992 election. And seriously, you had to reach back HOW far for the “channeling” thing? Chalk it up to a “youthful indiscretion”, yutz. If it worked for Bush’s drinking problem…

    But the second and important thing is whether these patterns of thought will directly influence their decision making. All evidence suggests that even if they do, it won’t be nearly to the unprecedented extent of the current administration. I’ll deal with a little Oprah-level dumbshittery if the Democrats aren’t going to get us into any disastrous faith-based wars or dick over non-billionaires.

    All votes are compromise. There isn’t a single candidate out there who represents all my views. The only one would be me, and I’m not particularly comfortable in front of cameras. So I’ll vote for the person who comes closest to representing them, in terms of policy and just plain sense. Democrats are far from perfect, but they’ll do. And as soon as a better Republican comes along, I’ll vote for them. That’s how I roll.

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  16. minimalist

    And finally, the bit about the Democrats moving “far to the left” has me in stitches, particularly with the ascendance of the DLC. And the voting in favor of unjustified wars, unconstitutional wiretapping programs, and basically rolling over for absolute power for the executive. And hey, remember which President made NAFTA happen, or Social Security reform?

    We didn’t exactly need more proof that you’re crazier than a bag of greased weasels, but that would be a good one to throw on the pile.

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  17. minimalist

    Sorry, the above should read “welfare reform”, not Social Security.

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  18. Ted

    …the bit about the Democrats moving “far to the left” has me in stitches,

    Yeah, that struck me as odd too.

    Who the hell are these far to the left Democrats and what are the odds of their being mainstream viable? Is Mumia running for office? Have they been renaming streets in his honor? Again?

    Minimalist, it’s a shame that you’re going to roll with the Democrats, because I’m going with the Republicans and I shore do hope they get that California split electoral votes initiative passed. Nothing would satisfy me more — in an evil, shadenfreudian, insanely cackling in the dark way — than having the Republicans get at least another four years. If anything, they haven’t driven ENOUGH people to the far left YET to make much of a difference. People will be screaming for socialism after another four years of Republican rule.

    Please, guys and gals (think of the children and sacrifice) — consider voting the Republicans into the office for one more four year term, and while you’re in that booth, having your rendezvous with destiny, vote a Brownback/Santorum/Allen back into senate to take some pressure off of Joe Lieberman. That pore man’s working overtime. Plus, there’s at least 2-3 more supreme court seats that could be stuffed in the next five years.

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  19. S.H.A.M. Scam Sam

    Um, Deepak, according to The Enemies of Reason, currently – currently – lists Hillary as a follower. And there’s the whole bio-electric shield thing with (major woo) Cherie Blair, or, as I said, does that all get a pass?

    And, like I said, your not as hot when it’s not christianity: where’s the venom for Oprah like the venom for Jesus?

    And you’re leaving out the major difference between Reps and Dems: Reps know what men do and believe wrong should be punished – not accepted as status quo.

    As far as “faith-based wars”, Bill Clinton was the one who said regime change in Iraq was United States policy. And after the first Gulf War, the Left-wing stab in America’s back was that we didn’t keep our promise to free the Iraqis – just re-watch “Three Kings” (George Clooney, Ice Cube, Marky Mark, Spike Jones) for the pop culture indictment. (What’s wrong with keeping our word? Anyone? Anyone?) And, finally, I gather you have a problem with getting rid of a dictator, changing the face of the Middle East, and freeing the Shia from centuries under the Sunni boot?

    Oh yea – I forgot – the executive branch lost power after Nixon: why should the office continue to be weakened? What you guys call growing it’s power is, actually, restoring it to what it’s supposed to be.

    Problem?

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  20. minimalist

    And, like I said, your not as hot when it’s not christianity: where’s the venom for Oprah like the venom for Jesus?

    And like I said, it’s all the same to me whether you think you’re talking to Jesus or Ramtha. There’s no “venom” here, I give it all a pass as long as I agree with their actions. Don’t project your hate on others.

    And you’re leaving out the major difference between Reps and Dems: Reps know what men do and believe wrong should be punished – not accepted as status quo.

    HAHAHA, yeah,unless they’re Republicans, or friends of Republicans, or dictators that Republicans like. Just to name the most recent, and blatant, examples, how about the total commutation of Scooter Libby’s sentence (for lying to federal investigators and obstructing justice), which even most conservative commentators agreed was inappropriate? Or Mike McConnell, who just effectively admitted that illegal wiretapping was going on by saying that he and Bush were pushing for legal immunity for telecom companies that went along with it?

    As far as “faith-based wars”, Bill Clinton was the one who said regime change in Iraq was United States policy. And after the first Gulf War, the Left-wing stab in America’s back was that we didn’t keep our promise to free the Iraqis – just re-watch “Three Kings” (George Clooney, Ice Cube, Marky Mark, Spike Jones) for the pop culture indictment.

    Clinton supported a policy of regime change from within by supporting internal dissenter and reformist groups. This is because anyone with a sensible view of foreign policy (that is, one not derived from Hollywood movies, you frigging dope) knows that regime change is strongest when enacted from within, by the gathering of popular support within a nation. Not by going into a part of the world that highly mistrusts the US, guns a’blazing, and propping up a puppet without popular support.

    Plus, you know, the decision not to march on Baghdad was made by Bush the First, and defended by Dick Cheney in that infamous video you’ve no doubt managed to miss.

    And, finally, I gather you have a problem with getting rid of a dictator, changing the face of the Middle East, and freeing the Shia from centuries under the Sunni boot?

    1) Yes, I do rather have a problem with the US acting as the world’s policeman, particularly if the results are going to be as incompetently executed as this. Funnily, this used to be a true conservative position as well (see Pat Buchanan among many others), until BushCo ramped up the rhetoric to convince vegetables who get all their “news” from Fox differently.

    2) There are lots of dictators in the Middle East, most of whom had more to do with 9/11 than Hussein did. There are many more dictators all over the world, and much worse things going on (see Darfur) that we have not seen fit to interfere militarily in.

    3) I am all for regime change from within. Iran, for instance, has long had a progressive, leftist, intellectual movement that is deeply opposed to the Ayatollahs and their repression. This movement could have been befriended and nurtured; instead, we got shrieky “AXIS OF EVIL!!1” posturing, which made the Iranians fearful that they’d be “next”. This creates a climate of fear wherein potential American allies are afraid to speak up, fence-sitters are converted to a more defensive stance, and a nutter like Ahmadinejad is put in power because he’ll “protect” them from America. In other words, the US created its own current problem there, as it sis in so many other areas.

    This is basic, basic, BASIC foreign policy knowledge (and psychology, and common frickin’ sense), and the failure of your type to grasp anything more complicated than HURRR SHOOT BAD MAN WITH GUN is exactly what got us into this mess. Not any fictional “stab in the back” from “the left”.

    And, finally, I gather you have a problem with getting rid of a dictator, changing the face of the Middle East, and freeing the Shia from centuries under the Sunni boot?

    Uhh, guy, I think the Founding Fathers would like a word with you.

    As soon as they’re done rotating in their graves at light speed.

    But congratulations on being able to unthinkingly spew yet another right-wing talking point I’ve heard a million times before. Ho hum.

    Seriously, what do you think they would think of illegal domestic wiretapping? Torture? Signing statements to the effect of “the President reserved the right to ignore this law if he damn well wishes”, or the Attorney General saying nobody has the right to habeas corpus anymore?

    Not to mention that distrust of federal power, again, used to be the true conservative position. Not that you’d know that, having no grasp of anything resembling the real world.

    You are, in short, a pathetic specimen: a heaping helping of bigotry and ignorance in equal measure; uneducated and ineducable. You are Bush’s dwindling base, completely unable to grasp where things went wrong because you have no interest in history, people, or any aspect of the world outside your deluded mind. I’d pity you if you weren’t part of the problem. Get help or go away. And for pity’s sake, never vote again.

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  21. minimalist

    Oops, that last quote should have been the “restoring federal power” bullcrap Shammy spewed.

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  22. S.H.A.M. Scam Sam

    “And like I said, it’s all the same to me whether you think you’re talking to Jesus or Ramtha. There’s no “venom” here, I give it all a pass as long as I agree with their actions.”

    That’s a cop out. I’ve been on these blogs: Santorum – get him. New agers – make jokes.

    “how about the total commutation of Scooter Libby’s sentence,…?”

    Scooter Libby didn’t give up Valery Plame’s name – Richard Armitage did, and said so openly – so Libby going to prison for a disagreement over remembering the contents of a phone call (with Tim Russert) is all that was about. It makes no sense.

    “Mike McConnell, who just effectively admitted that illegal wiretapping was going on by saying that he and Bush were pushing for legal immunity for telecom companies that went along with it?”

    Nice word – “effectively” – doesn’t mean true.

    “anyone with a sensible view of foreign policy (that is, one not derived from Hollywood movies, you frigging dope) knows that regime change is strongest when enacted from within, by the gathering of popular support within a nation.”

    First, I said it was a pop culture reference (who’s the dope? And spiteful too,..) and just because something is difficult doesn’t mean it wrong. As a matter of fact, sometimes, the harder the better: Shows character, something I don’t see other nations having.

    “Plus, you know, the decision not to march on Baghdad was made by Bush the First, and defended by Dick Cheney in that infamous video you’ve no doubt managed to miss.”

    That was in 1991. And you seem to be saying Cheney knows what’s good for the country – sweet. Considering he backs the current program 100%. (I repeat: who’s the dope?)

    “I think the Founding Fathers would like a word with you.”

    Yea, just like they’sd want a word with us about WWII.

    “I do rather have a problem with the US acting as the world’s policeman, particularly if the results are going to be as incompetently executed as this.”

    D-day: most of our guys dropped in the wrong places. Battle of the Bulge: our guys, fighting in the snow with hardly any equiptment or weapons. Shall I go on?

    “There are lots of dictators in the Middle East, most of whom had more to do with 9/11 than Hussein did. There are many more dictators all over the world, and much worse things going on (see Darfur) that we have not seen fit to interfere militarily in.”

    Saddam was a strategic problem.

    “I am all for regime change from within. Iran, for instance, has long had a progressive, leftist, intellectual movement that is deeply opposed to the Ayatollahs and their repression. This movement could have been befriended and nurtured; instead, we got shrieky “AXIS OF EVIL!!1” posturing, which made the Iranians fearful that they’d be “next”. This creates a climate of fear wherein potential American allies are afraid to speak up, fence-sitters are converted to a more defensive stance, and a nutter like Ahmadinejad is put in power because he’ll “protect” them from America. In other words, the US created its own current problem there, as it sis in so many other areas.”

    Ahh, a CIA supporter: they’ve been doing well, haven’t they?

    Face it: you’re a coward (with all due respect)

    Gotta go – I’ll be back.

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  23. minimalist

    That’s a cop out. I’ve been on these blogs: Santorum – get him. New agers – make jokes.

    Except unlike most new-agers, Santorum had the power to enact regressive laws and policies based on his primitive superstitions. And aspects of newage crap that strongly impinge on the real world, like alt-med or HIV denial, have come in for criticism here too. Again, your selective memory is showing.

    Scooter Libby was convicted in a court of law of lying to federal investigators and obstructing justice. This was a fair conviction in a fair trial. You and the defendant (always trustworthy! “that bloody knife just jumped into my hand, honest!”) can claim it was a “memory loss” all you like but the judgment stands.

    Of course, it’s a hallmark of the new right to simply ignore laws and judgments they don’t like, as though they can wave away reality.

    just because something is difficult doesn’t mean it wrong. As a matter of fact, sometimes, the harder the better: Shows character, something I don’t see other nations having.

    That is the most submoronic reasoning I have seen in a long time, and that’s saying something. For one thing, my point was that it’s utterly the wrong way to go about regime change, not that it was “hard”; it’s downright impossible, and bad policy. That doesn’t show “character”, it shows STUPIDITY.

    “Hey guys, we could have toppled Saddam without sacrificing our troops, and throwing the entire region into chaos, but we decided to do it the HARD way because it SHOWS CHARACTER! WOO-HOO, U-S-A! U-S-A!”

    You really are a simpleminded SHOOT=GOOD dope, aren’t you? The Macho Response, indeed. All dick, no brain.

    That was in 1991. And you seem to be saying Cheney knows what’s good for the country – sweet. Considering he backs the current program 100%. (I repeat: who’s the dope?)

    Still you, apebrain. Cheney, in that video (1994), outlines a whole host of logistical reasons for why supplanting Hussein was a bad idea. Would require a massive commitment of troops, the ethnic fracturing, etc. The invasion, as enacted in 2003 — and here’s the important part — ignored all of these things. 9/11 may have changed perspectives in the US, but it didn’t change those realities. And the invasion, as enacted, ignored each and every one of those realities Cheney outlined in 1994.

    I don’t pretend to know why Cheney decided to up and ignore his own words a decade before. I can make guesses but I’m no mind reader. Maybe he went insane, 9/11 made him irrational, or he finally decided a few fat no-bid contracts for Halliburton (and oil control) were worth thousands of lives. The point is, he ended up doing exactly the wrong thing, to the detriment of the US, Iraq, and the world for decades to come.

    See, that’s something somebody with your mindless authoritarian mindset will never comprehend: I treat each idea and situation separately, based on their merits. People can be right and wrong. Cheney being right in 1994 doesn’t excuse his being hideously wrong in the 2000s, nor does it obligate any thinking human to agree with everything he does or says.

    Yea, just like they’sd want a word with us about WWII.

    Such a clumsy dodge.

    D-day: most of our guys dropped in the wrong places. Battle of the Bulge: our guys, fighting in the snow with hardly any equiptment or weapons. Shall I go on?

    Please do, it only further demonstrates your ignorance.

    Which side won those battles? How long did we spend fighting WWII, and how long have we been in Iraq now? Answers on a 3×5 card!

    Saddam was a strategic problem.

    Noooo, he was an “imminent threat”, remember? WMDs! Smoking gun! 9/11! al-Qaeda!

    Even now, Bush is still pushing the “al-Qaeda” angle at every opportunity.

    Oh, not to mention that the focus on Iraq has drained resources and attention from Afghanistan (remember them?) so that our mission there is failing as well as the Taliban regains control and once again provides a haven for al-Qaeda — the real al-Qaeda, not the posers in Iraq who swiped the name.

    If Bush has a “strategery” at all, it’s far from a siccessful one.

    Ahh, a CIA supporter: they’ve been doing well, haven’t they?

    Ahh, someone who doesn’t know anything about diplomatic solutions to real-world problems. Typical for someone who thinks everything can be solved with guns.

    Hint: As much, if not more, of what I said can be accomplished over the table by the State Dept. than with cloak-and-dagger stuff. A big part of it, for instance, is not giving speeches that deliberately antagonize them.

    Face it: you’re a coward (with all due respect)

    “Hey, go over there and punch that guy in the face. What? He wasn’t doing anything to you? Do it anyway! No? COWARD!”

    So being unwilling to make uninformed, stupid decisions makes me a coward? So be it. We’ve seen where your sort of “bravery” has gotten us.

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  24. S.H.A.M. Scam Sam

    “This is basic, basic, BASIC foreign policy knowledge (and psychology, and common frickin’ sense), and the failure of your type to grasp anything more complicated than HURRR SHOOT BAD MAN WITH GUN is exactly what got us into this mess. Not any fictional “stab in the back” from “the left”.”

    Um, my friend, I served in the United States military during the Iranian Hostage Crisis (1979-1983) so, when it comes to our foriegn policy, regarding this area and these players, I’d say it’s safe to say I’ve probably been following this closer – and longer – than you have. You sound like an armchair general who’s never been in so much as a fist fight, much less had your life in danger, while I’ve been in both, many times, and I’m still here.

    “Seriously, what do you think [the FF] would think of illegal domestic wiretapping? Torture?”

    In wartime? Against an enemy that’s (more than likely) here already? I think they’d want us to win. What do you think they’d want us to do? Weaken the president as much as possible and whine us to death? I seriously doubt it.

    “Not to mention that distrust of federal power, again, used to be the true conservative position. Not that you’d know that, having no grasp of anything resembling the real world.”

    Boy, you really are sounding like a doofus now: we’re at war. I’m not gonna nit-pick my government in a war. Is that what you do when your friends get in fights? Stand on the sidelines, holding their arms while screaming, “You can’t do it, man! I’m just making it fair!”?? Loser.

    I trust my government, as far as I have to (nothings written in stone that I can never do so, and especially duing a war – that’s just silly – being so ideological I kick my own ass: brilliant.)

    “You are, in short, a pathetic specimen: a heaping helping of bigotry and ignorance in equal measure; uneducated and ineducable. ”

    “Bigotry”? Where’d that come from? At least I’m not so trapped in ideology that I make no sense and start defending my ideological enemies, like you already did with Cheney.

    “You are Bush’s dwindling base, completely unable to grasp where things went wrong because you have no interest in history, people, or any aspect of the world outside your deluded mind.”

    Where things went wrong? It’s a war. Things went wrong when it started, as all wars do – they’re tragedies – and for someone with “no interest in history, people, or any aspect of the world outside your deluded mind.” I seem to be the one who knows the battle field (I’ve even been there) care to rescue the oppressed (the Shia) and want to defend my own country as well – not weaken my president. Man, you have one twisted mind. If you’re typicle of scientists, then we’ve got a bigger problem than I thought. Like I said, you guys might not be trustworthy at all.

    “I’d pity you if you weren’t part of the problem. Get help or go away. And for pity’s sake, never vote again.”

    Liberal to the end: Agree or “go away” is your answer. And may I remind you, despite the last election, what you call a “problem” is you getting your hat handed to you continually in the voting booth – even with what you think is an “idiot” in charge.

    Face it: it’s you that have no connection to reality. You get control of the Congress and the Senate, claiming to end the war, and we get a “surge”. You claim the president’s unpopular, compared to you, but you can’t ever beat him – at anything. All the major countries that were against us now have leaders (like Sarkozy, Merkel, etc.) who want to play nice. Elections are the thing in the Middle East. Your potential first lady’s a verified nut case who (I think) is gonna lose – big – in the next election because the Reps are merely holding their fire for the convention. And then comes the blooper reel of 8 years of Left-wing screaming, hair-pulling, over-reaching, and slandering, of the president, the country, the military, and everything’s that good in the world:

    Be prepared to lose – again – Shleprock.

    As Bugs Bunny says:

    What a maroon!

    Reply
  25. S.H.A.M. Scam Sam

    I can’t anser you until I get home but I loved this:

    “Hey guys, we could have toppled Saddam without sacrificing our troops, and throwing the entire region into chaos”

    WE “threw” the Middle East into chaos?

    Is that the same Middle East I went to? The same one I’ve seen blowing itself up – without our help – for the last 25+ years? Really?

    Like I said:

    What a maroon!

    Reply
  26. minimalist

    Yes. I am indeed talking about the Middle East on Planet Earth, the one that has had plenty of our help “blowing itself up. The Shah of Iran? Unwavering, uncritical support for Israel and its aggressive settlers? Selling arms to both Iran and Iraq?

    Terrorism wasn’t just born because they hate freedom, you know — it’s in large part due to resentment over interference like this. And as long as idiots like you cling to easy answers devoid of any historical context, we’ll continue to have them.

    One wonders how someone as ignorant as yourself feels entitled to be so arrogant. It’s not a very charming attribute.

    Reply
  27. Kagehi

    Hell yes we are going to question policy changes that effect the basic protections and freedoms we have in war time, that is when they are most easily subverted, distorted, lost or denied. And most of them have done, according to real experts, not just arm chair generals, not one damn thing to make anything **safer**. The few that have, have done so only by apparent accident, while instead helping other agencies and interests gain access to information previously protected, who where being denies access to that information for bloody good reason. Right now, some special investigation group could find out your shoe size and if you went to the **right** church 10 times faster than legitimate agencies could catch the next bunch of terrorists. Why? Because all the information is being collected in ways, from people, and through measures which other countries haven’t felt the need to implemented at all. They have, in some cases, stopped **several** additional plots. We have so far only managed to antagonize civil rights lawyers, undermine basic protections and piss off a few legitimate visitors. I prefer not to think about what the total lack of *visible* results we have means about who could have gotten through our mostly worthless fumbling attempts to find them, or what they might do again.

    Reply
  28. vagueofgodalming

    Amid the sound and fury, I think this is the interesting quote:

    And you’re leaving out the major difference between Reps and Dems: Reps know what men do and believe wrong should be punished – not accepted as status quo.

    A hundred years ago, there would have no way for anyone to verify a statement like this. People believed that systems of reward and punishment worked, or that kindness and second chances do (or, more usually, some rather arbitrary combination of them). But all that’s been changing over the last few generations. We have the ability now to understand anthropology, sociology, psychology and economics as sciences, and formulate polcy based on them. We will always have disagreements and debates about desirable outcomes, but debates about means should become obsolete.

    The trouble, as I see it, is that policy-making elites haven’t yet caught on to this (nor has the press and the electorate, so they don’t hold the to account for evidence-based policy). They still think they can rely on intuition and gut feeling, and that, if they turn out to be wrong, at least nobody else could have done any better, except by luck. That gives cover for the venal ones to feather their own nests and the partisan ones to make loyalty a touchstone, because they don’t think there’s an objective basis for evaluating their actions.

    Reply
  29. S.H.A.M. Scam Sam

    Minimalist,

    “Yes. I am indeed talking about the Middle East on Planet Earth, the one that has had plenty of our help “blowing itself up. The Shah of Iran? Unwavering, uncritical support for Israel and its aggressive settlers? Selling arms to both Iran and Iraq?”

    Sigh. The Middle east is a big place – bigger than Iraq and Iran – with a long history. It’s never been quiet – with or without us – and, obviously, having no respect for the sweep of history – like our connections to Israel and their fight for survival in a very hostile place – or the needs and ambitions of your own country, you’ve still managed to open a book or two and found the usual few talking points to bad mouth us when, obviously, every country in the world is “playing for keeps” and we’ve been better than most – by a looonnng shot.

    What do you think: we’re evil while everybody else was laying out gum drops for humanity? We’re only 250+ years old, Vs. societies that are thousands of years old – we haven’t even had the time, much less the heart, to be as corrupt as they have. Remember this phrase? “You naive Americans”? Think about what that means, man, and then get back to me when you grow up. You’re really sad.

    “Terrorism wasn’t just born because they hate freedom, you know — it’s in large part due to resentment over interference like this. And as long as idiots like you cling to easy answers devoid of any historical context, we’ll continue to have them.”

    “Interference”? We were first invited there, numnuts. Because of us, many parts of the Middle East, like say oh, I don’t know, Saudi Arabia, have the highest standard of living that part of the world has ever seen. (Who are you fooling, man?) Now we want them to be able to enjoy it – not spending all their time rioting because they can’t (scratch that) couldn’t petition their governments. You know nothing of history – or the Middle East, or the actions of America, the country that (supposedly) educated you so you can be such an ungrateful little prick – you’re a tool, man. A really pathetic tool.

    “One wonders how someone as ignorant as yourself feels entitled to be so arrogant. It’s not a very charming attribute.”

    And you, my friend, have never served this great land – greatest in all the world – so friggin’ great people are willing to die to come here for a better life. People in the Middle East, right now, send their kids here to go to school, and they stay here, unharmed – in wartime. (Or remember 9-11? Richard Clarke giving permission for the bin Laden’s to leave?) That’s where my arrogance comes from. From knowing, in a harsh world, we’re the good guys. The ones who changed the whole thing for the better. “The New World” (Another phrase for you to ponder.) Now – how about yours? What was the horrible defining event that let you decide to diss the place you live in such a horrid manner? “Charm”? You wouldn’t know it if it bit you on the ass.

    Do you think, if you go to France, and someone says “Viva le France!” that there’s a crowd of assholes around to complain? Or does everyone raise their glass and say “Viva le France!”? Or Germany? Or anywhere else? I’ve lived in France, and traveled elsewhere, and, man, let me tell you: they drink a lot of wine and do a hell of a lot of toasting – to themselves. Your desire to kill a fellow citizen’s love of his own country would seem perverse outside of these borders. Actually, it’s perverse inside of these borders – especially when talking about this country – the beacon of hope to the world. (“What are we gonna do about Darfur?” you slimeballs cry as you hypocritically diss us,…) What’s wrong with you? Do you need a rap soundtrack of “Is L.A. in the house? What about Phil-ly?” to be happy in your own country? Seriously: you’ve been taught to hate yourself, man. And that’s what’s not becoming – and why you can’t get any political traction.

    Kagehi (AKA Tool #2)

    “Hell yes we are going to question policy changes that effect the basic protections and freedoms we have in war time, that is when they are most easily subverted, distorted, lost or denied.”

    “Question” all you want but “accusing” is another story – you go too far. It’s the difference between “possible” and “probable”. The difference, between me being investigated (a veteran supporter who openly loves his country) and you being investigated ( a trouble-making whiner with a chip on his shoulder because somebody with a copy of the Communist Worker got you all mixed up) is huge – and, really, not my problem. If the government wants to talk to you, then “Lucy, you got some ‘splaining to do” and you’ve got no one but your stupid self to blame: this is war, and – warning – war is for keeps, baby.

    But I’m not worried for you: This is also America. And while, yes, bad things happen – yes, even here – attacking our own citizens is only something Democrats do. What’s the old joke?

    Q: What’s the difference between a Dem and a cannibal?

    A: Cannibals eat their enemies.

    Vagueofgodalming,

    “Amid the sound and fury, I think this is the interesting quote:
    And you’re leaving out the major difference between Reps and Dems: Reps know what men do and believe wrong should be punished – not accepted as status quo.

    A hundred years ago, there would have no way for anyone to verify a statement like this.”

    Bullshit – it’s who we are – and have been from the beginning:

    “It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.”

    – James Madison (A Conservative)

    This isn’t rocket science – no need for anthropology, sociology, psychology and economics – the Founding Fathers had us (human nature) nailed from the start. It’s the mob, and always has been the mob – exemplified by my adversaries here – that have never understood the wisdom, and the inherent good of the land they live in, when compared to what’s outside of these borders. They think the answer to (possible) corruption is to trash the joint, which is stupid, and self-defeating. It’s always been that way.

    I, too, have got a lot of things to bitch about (new age, etc.) but government – this government – isn’t one of them. And especially not now. As a matter of fact – as usual – it’s probably our only hope for a better future.

    Especially with these bozos hanging around.

    I gotta go.

    Reply
  30. minimalist

    Stupidity, fury, ignorance, insanity, conspiracy theories… you’re the whole package, aint’cha, Shammy?

    Of course I left a whole lot out of my brief list of western interference in the ME. (One embarassing oversight was leaving out the supplying of weapons and training to Afghani rebels who’d later turn out to be — whoops! the Taliban.)

    But really, that’s just the stuff with the most proximal effects on the current ME situation. The roots of western interference run much deeper, to the colonial era at least — gee, how did the Iraqi borders get drawn with such a volatile mix of ethno-religious groups, I wonder?

    No, it’s never been quiet, but there have been very few, if any, positives from our constant meddling — and need I remind you, the phrase vomited forth from your addled mind was that they were “without our help” blowing each other up. A ridiculously stupid comment, even from a dolt like you, considering how trivially disproven it is simply by pointing to our playing both sides in the Iran/Iraq conflict.

    They think the answer to (possible) corruption is to trash the joint, which is stupid, and self-defeating.

    “Vote Republicans out of office and prosecute the guilty” = “trashing the joint”? Oh, Shammy, what won’t you say!

    See, many of us are able to easily separate “America” (its ideals and structure) from “the jerks currently in charge of it”. Being an authoritarian loon, you cannot. But don’t project your damage on us, jack.

    (You might, for instance, want to consider the overall point of that Madison quote, which is that government itself is made up of men, aka “the mob”, and therefore can be misled or corrupted and should be subject to oversight by both itself and “the mob”. Something you are vehemently arguing against in your defense of out-of-control federal power: again, something that would appall the Founding Fathers. You dodge that issue again and again though.)

    It’s your biases on display here, not ours. Hard to say whether you’re ignorant because you’re crazy or driven crazy because of your invincible ignorance, but either way you’re useless, and you’re well outnumbered by the sane members of society who recognize the assholes in charge for what they are. Enjoy being in the same percentile range as people who believe the Sun mmoves around the Earth.

    Go play with your poop and rant about vaginas, nutcase, I’m done hammering your nonsense into the ground.

    Reply
  31. Ted

    Still you, apebrain. Cheney, in that video (1994), outlines a whole host of logistical reasons for why supplanting Hussein was a bad idea. Would require a massive commitment of troops, the ethnic fracturing, etc. The invasion, as enacted in 2003 — and here’s the important part — ignored all of these things. 9/11 may have changed perspectives in the US, but it didn’t change those realities. And the invasion, as enacted, ignored each and every one of those realities Cheney outlined in 1994.

    I don’t pretend to know why Cheney decided to up and ignore his own words a decade before. I can make guesses but I’m no mind reader. Maybe he went insane, 9/11 made him irrational, or he finally decided a few fat no-bid contracts for Halliburton (and oil control) were worth thousands of lives. The point is, he ended up doing exactly the wrong thing, to the detriment of the US, Iraq, and the world for decades to come.

    See, that’s something somebody with your mindless authoritarian mindset will never comprehend: I treat each idea and situation separately, based on their merits. People can be right and wrong. Cheney being right in 1994 doesn’t excuse his being hideously wrong in the 2000s, nor does it obligate any thinking human to agree with everything he does or says.

    Well, let’s be fair. 2003 is not 1994 and a lot of things changed in the interim.

    1. Perhaps Cheney assumed that world pressure and sanctions would remove Saddam in the interim, he having lost the first gulf war so decisively. But the opposite happened — Saddam shifted the sanctions downward while he continued to rule. Most European countries were ready to drop the sanctions by 2001. And he was still sitting on the oil.

    2. Chimpy’s dad was supposedly targeted by Saddam’s intelligence services in the interim. Maybe yes, maybe no – but it was beyond Chimpy’s ability to separate personal animosity from geopolitics.

    3. The suicide bombers made headway since 1994 and Saddam was supporting them nominally. It became a priority to take off the table this idea that a suicide bomber negates technological superiority. We have asymmetric strength and use it to project policy; suicide bombers negate that. Of course, we went about it all wrong — rather than addressing root cause — poverty, social injustice — we spewed shrapnel. Ooops on that one.

    4. One of the main reasons that OBL articulated for the attack was the stationing of US troops in SA. So we quickly moved out of SA (like good Sir Robin, ran away) and needed to find a geopolitical area where we could build permanent bases, and where OBL wouldn’t be too offended. For all intents and purposes, Iraq looked like it might be a safe bet. The population was relatively educated. Relatively secular. Relatively pro-American (to the extent that the Shias actually had an uprising while we watched from the sidelines and that the Kurds were pro-American because we fed and protected them.) Who knew that the sunnies would get their panties in a bunch? We figured that our Sunnies (Egypt, SA, Pakistan) would pave the way for our acceptance there. The location of Iraq was great — it had oil so it could pay (us) for its reconstruction, it was strategically positioned next to Iran, it’s a stone’s throw from Russia and the former republics. Etc. It coulda been the new Germany, now that the old Germany took a turn to the left.

    5. Wars are fought differently now when contrasted to the first gulf war. In the early 90s, the pentagon made some profound changes that altered how wars are run and provisioned, and carried on the books. The most significant was the study that justified expanded use of contractors on the battlefield. Sure, they’re dumbshits now, in retrospect, but only from a certain angle — we are less effective as a fighting force, and our moral standing has been leached away, but that $600B went somewhere. Mostly it’s in the gated communities of the US. On one side you have 4000 dead, and 30K wounded, on the other — well, it’s been good for someone out there, so maybe the math is justifiable. Labor we got lots of.

    The point being many of these things could have come to pass if they were carried out with less general incompetence by someone else other than amateur political hacks (20-something-old young republicans in the provisional authority setting policy, for example). But, we fucked it up by the numbers, and right down the line and continue to do so to this day. I’d say that it this incompetence stems from the notion that Americans are a distinct race and are morally superior to other cultures — by default.

    But it’s not really all that valid to bring up 1994-Cheney because he’s not the same guy that is 2001-Cheney as if everything is the same, just Cheney changed his story. Sure, it’s amusing to watch Cheney, but things change geopolitically and the trilaterals have spoken.

    Reply
  32. minimalist

    All reasonable points as usual Ted, but #1, 2, and 3 still don’t address my main point which is that the invasion ultimately ignored all the problems and obstacles to a military occupation.

    #4 makes a reasonable case, but at best it was just as true in 1994, after the Shia uprising. If anything, America abandoning the Shia would have caused resentment and some lingering mistrust. This was pointed out, but ignored, in the run-up to the war.

    #5: Rumsfeld was certainly enamored of the idea of a leaner, more advanced fighting force, yes, and it panned out as well as could be expected in the invasion proper. The problem, again, is that a stable occupation would have (as predicted by Cheney) required a much larger force. This, again, was ignored.

    I suspect you’re right that this was primarily a moneymaking scam. Empire-building is, at heart, an exercise in moving public funds to private coffers. It’s never been a particularly efficient process, in terms of dollars or human lives, but that doesn’t really seem to matter.

    The point being many of these things could have come to pass if they were carried out with less general incompetence by someone else other than amateur political hacks (20-something-old young republicans in the provisional authority setting policy, for example). But, we fucked it up by the numbers, and right down the line and continue to do so to this day. I’d say that it this incompetence stems from the notion that Americans are a distinct race and are morally superior to other cultures — by default.

    I disagree with your conclusion, there; I think it just shows their goal never was to install a true democracy. They never intended to make a serious go at it, otherwise they’d have experienced people in charge of so many of the crucial aspects. And they’d have had some semblance of a postwar plan before they went in, whereas it’s painfully apparent they did not.

    The idea that Americans are inherently superior is really just the idea promulgated to motivate and manipulate young Republicans and vegetables like Shammy. The cynical fossils in charge don’t believe it, necessarily; they just feel Death’s cold hand ‘pon their brow, and want to get as much loot as they can for them and theirs before Reckoning.

    Reply
  33. Ted

    …1, 2, and 3 still don’t address my main point which is that the invasion ultimately ignored all the problems and obstacles to a military occupation.

    I think that it’s just that the cost-benefit equation changes over time.

    So it’s not that those factors are ignored, but they can be assigned diminishing values if you choose to assign personally attractive values to the rest of the equation.

    How much value should suicide bombers get? They caused about a trillion in economic damage (supposedly). How effective are contractors vs. warfighters on the battlefield, etc. These are all vague, soft numbers that change daily.

    I’m not disagreeing with you substantively, I just think that using Cheney’s video is more of an amusing lark because *I* expect people to be flexible and responsive to cost-benefit options as they change.

    On one side you have Chimpy that is predisposed to keep digging a deeper hole no matter what. On the other you have Cheney, that appears to be caught in a contradiction but at least (to me) it looked like he was doing a cost benefit — sure, it was mightily wrong, but (in principle) I appreciate a person that’s willing to consider possibilities and change their mind when necessary, to someone that demonstrates they’re a dogmatic bafoon, unyielding to the last breath.

    I disagree with your conclusion, there; I think it just shows their goal never was to install a true democracy.

    Like we have a true democracy? Lobbyists here interfere with true democracy, over there we just assumed that the lobbyist and political interference and influence would be squared or cubed and it would be to our advantage. There was no US government plan post-invasion because it was a given that think-tanks would provide the intellectual capital. Remember Jerry Bremer — I believe he was Kissinger’s managing director prior to the PA assignment. Ergo, imperialism by think-tank (or one could think of it as conservatives receiving privateering letter of marque.)

    It was always a kind of democracy we were shooting for because we qualified it with “seeding an incipient democracy” in the Arab world. Nominal in nature, like “The People’s Democratic Republic” is a democracy.

    Reply
  34. minimalist

    Fair points all, I see where you’re coming from. I just disagree that those issues you raise were foremost in Cheney’s mind. For one thing, I seem to recall that Hussein’s support for suicide bombers was pretty minor, and at any rate the supposed “trillions” in damage was directed against Israel, not us. I don’t recall Cheney necessarily being that beholden to Israel, but I could be wrong there.

    Similarly, the invasion wasn’t the problem so much as the occupation; given his fear (in 1994) of the fragmenting of Iraq, he had to know that some massive manpower and monetary investment would be involved. Even if he could save a few bucks going with contractors, the costs to the government would still be huge any way you slice it.

    As I say, I suspect that his motive was primarily to exploit the contractor system to simply funnel public money into private hands. It borders on a conspiracy theory I know (albeit one with very real, highly-evidenced connections between the criminals in charge and the corporations they favor), but it seems the most parsimonious to me.

    I don’t think we’re in any disagreement on the ‘democracy’ angle either, since it all amounts to an insincere claim to be “enlightening” them there primitive towelheads. At any rate there’s absolutely no support for Shammy’s tired right-wing talking point that we were there to bring democracy and reform.

    Reply
  35. factician

    One of the reasons I left the Dems is because they’ve moved so far to the left there’s no “extreme left” left anymore.

    Wow. I laughed out loud at that one. Whew! Thanks for that. You’re joking, right?

    Sam, have you ever been outside the U.S.? Even the Democrats are more right wing than many conservative parties in countries like Canada and the U.K. Germany and France have parties that are more right wing than the Democrats, but most of the political action there is to the left of the U.S. And don’t even get me started about Scandinavian countries…

    I have never found a political party that agrees with me. I don’t like the Democrats post 1996, and I really don’t like the Republicans circa 1992 and later. Good thing I’m a furriner, and I’m not allowed to vote. I wouldn’t know what to do with it…

    Reply
  36. Ted

    Minimalist,

    check out the premise here — because it’s funny in a perverted way and you may enjoy the irony. BTW, this website touts itself as “post-partisan” – transcending partisanship for the benefit of (is it economic?) goodness. Whatever it is, it certainly is monkeying with social laboratories on a national scale.

    1. It’s a good idea to privatize foreign policy.

    2. Because the private sector knows what it’s doing:

    As Middle East analysts and thinkers grapple with issues of democratic reform across their region, and Washington and Brussels contemplate policy options to promote democracy, a vital truth is worth remembering: The best hope for Arab democracy is the existence of a vibrant, economically strong middle class.
    […]
    The most valuable — and workable — idea floating around in development policy circles is the issue of mortgage finance. The idea is a simple one: create deep, long-term credit markets that will allow more people to own homes. With access to long-term mortgage loans, more Arabs can buy homes, offering them the dignity that comes with home ownership. But it goes beyond dignity. A vibrant mortgage market not only strengthens middle classes (as it did in America), but it also has enormous ripple effects on the economy, leading to increased demand for construction, cement, home consumer items and a whole array of home-related services.

    A vibrant mortgage market will also lift up the region’s banking systems and strengthen capital markets. As American scholars Walter Russell Mead and Sherle Schwenninger noted in their important work, Financial Architecture for Middle Class-Oriented Development, banking systems that rest on a diversified base of loans to individual home owners (such as the American system) are “inherently more stable” than systems characterized by a handful of loans to large borrowers (as in the Arab world). They write: “The U.S., for example, has what is widely considered to be the most flexible and best-developed capital market in the world. Yet mortgages remain the cornerstone of this market … The existence of this large, stable pool of finance … was absolutely critical to the development of U.S. capital markets.”

    Ah the halcyon days of sub prime mortgages. When you run out of rubes here, find them there. I’m not sure if the burden of mortgages was to keep the Arabs docile, or the 2/28 ARM to induce more of them to strap bombs to themselves in order to get out from under.

    Economic colonialism — ain’t it always the white man’s burden tho?

    Reply
  37. minimalist

    That’s marvelous. Nothing will engender good feelings in the Middle East like being perpetually indebted to western banks! And oh, once those savages get their two-car garage and private yard, they’ll be too busy having halal cookouts to think about enacting revenge for the US holding their brothers in secret torture prisons!

    To be fair, though, those guys actually have a few reasonable-seeming ideas, such as ways to inform and protect students from high-interest private loans by steering them toward lower-cost federal options that are still available. Doesn’t really sound sharky to me. Of course, maybe their education people aren’t on speaking terms with the Randroids in foreign policy.

    Reply
  38. S.H.A.M. Scam Sam

    Minimalist,

    “One embarassing oversight was leaving out the supplying of weapons and training to Afghani rebels who’d later turn out to be — whoops! the Taliban.”

    But we didn’t do that – we gave money to the Pakistanis who did it. (“Oops” on you, indeed.) You really don’t know what you’re talking about, do you?

    “But really, that’s just the stuff with the most proximal effects on the current ME situation. The roots of western interference run much deeper, to the colonial era at least — gee, how did the Iraqi borders get drawn with such a volatile mix of ethno-religious groups, I wonder?”

    Mostly the work of the British. You condemning the whole Western World now? And how far do you want to take this? Who-had-what land, going all the way back to the beginning of man? (I told you you have no respect for the sweep of history.) Are you going to stew until everyone is back on the African continent? Or are you gonna get on the stick and, finally, decide America’s been the obvious force for good that so many – world-wide – know it is, which is why they ask for our help and, almost, no one else’s?

    “No, it’s never been quiet, but there have been very few, if any, positives from our constant meddling — and need I remind you, the phrase vomited forth from your addled mind was that they were “without our help” blowing each other up. A ridiculously stupid comment, even from a dolt like you, considering how trivially disproven it is simply by pointing to our playing both sides in the Iran/Iraq conflict.”

    If almost single-handedly bringing an entire region into the 21st Century is considered, by you, to be “very few, if any, positives” then I don’t know what to say for you.

    “”Vote Republicans out of office and prosecute the guilty” = “trashing the joint”? Oh, Shammy, what won’t you say!”

    I’m all for prosecuting the guilty but, first, you’ve got to show me some. You claim crimes that no one else sees. Bush isn’t in jail or impeached. Rove isn’t in jail. Rumsfeld isn’t in jail. Condi isn’t in jail. Cheney isn’t in jail – no one is – and, now, even the French want to help us (I just met a french couple, a few days ago, who actually apologized to me for the behavior of their country during the Chirac period. Whoda thunk it?) it’s just you – a citizen of the Untited States – clamoring to hurt yourself on the world stage so we can go back to the post-Carter malaise, when everybody wanted to use us as a punching bag for a decade or so. Great plan, man.

    “See, many of us are able to easily separate “America” (its ideals and structure) from “the jerks currently in charge of it”. Being an authoritarian loon, you cannot. But don’t project your damage on us, jack.”

    Funny but it’s those “jerks” – like me, and the prez (can’t forget him) – who are the only ones I see standing up for those ideals and structures you claim are so important. You’re definitely not – you see nothing but problems.

    “You might, for instance, want to consider the overall point of that Madison quote, which is that government itself is made up of men, aka “the mob”, and therefore can be misled or corrupted and should be subject to oversight by both itself and “the mob”.”

    Idiot. The Founding Fathers lived in constant fear of the mob – they’re looking for “men” – real men who uphold real ideals. Men who take this seriously, as you obviously do not, if sticking up for your own country in a dangerous world is alien to you.

    “It’s your biases on display here, not ours. Hard to say whether you’re ignorant because you’re crazy or driven crazy because of your invincible ignorance, but either way you’re useless, and you’re well outnumbered by the sane members of society who recognize the assholes in charge for what they are. Enjoy being in the same percentile range as people who believe the Sun mmoves around the Earth.”

    Boy, it’s sad what winning one election – in 8 years – can do to a person. Go on, puff out your chest, Little Big Man, like I said: I’ve been watching this movie for much longer than you obviously have:

    Conservatives, as a group, have only been around for 50 years and, in that short time, they’ve mopped the floor with your kind, to become the most powerful, dynamic, and influential political group in this country. You have neither the ideals, or the discipline, to do anything more than what you are doing: claiming to be “hammering your nonsense into the ground” when you’ve done no such thing and the history and influence of the conservatives in this country proves it.

    You were going to stop the war, and put Bush and Cheney in the stockade, right?

    Sure you were.

    Reply
  39. S.H.A.M. Scam Sam

    Factician,

    “One of the reasons I left the Dems is because they’ve moved so far to the left there’s no “extreme left” left anymore.
    Wow. I laughed out loud at that one. Whew! Thanks for that. You’re joking, right?”

    Nope. I first noticed it when Rove first got to work for W’s first election – when I was still a passionate liberal – and the gay marriage thing came up: Liberals lost their collective minds over nothing – a political feint – when they should’ve been laughing their asses off at the clumsiness of it. And fortunately, or unfortunately (depending on your point of view), they haven’t been able to get it together since. It’s like the whole game of politics has escaped them. They don’t understand what’s important, how to choose battles – where the battle field even is – nothin’. Anyway, that was the first time I started thinking I might be with the wrong crowd. I was reading Master of the Senate (the Pulizer Prize winning LBJ story) at the time, which probably had a lot to do with my disgust as well.

    “Sam, have you ever been outside the U.S.?”

    Yep. This is a partial list but I’ve, most recently, lived in France for a year (hated it) though I’ve been there 5 times – great place to visit. I’ve also been to England, Spain, Germany, Sweden, Amsterdam, (good times) Luxembourg, Thailand, Singapore, Canada (touring with a band the long way, from Montreal to Vancouver, three times – even got to talk with some political bigwigs that Billy Bragg introduced me to there) the Philippines, Hong Kong, and all over this great land of ours. Ours is the best, by a long shot.

    “I have never found a political party that agrees with me. I don’t like the Democrats post 1996, and I really don’t like the Republicans circa 1992 and later. Good thing I’m a furriner, and I’m not allowed to vote. I wouldn’t know what to do with it…”

    The Republicans are alright. (Better than I was expecting before I made the switch.) The christian wing is goofy, of course, but checkable.

    For me it’s about values, ideals, and country – and not always in that order. Basically, do you seriously want to make the U.S. and our lives in it – and, as much as we reasonably can, even the world – better or not?

    For instance, all the Rep candidates for Prez will defend our country – that’s clear – but I might not be able to vote for the adulterers (like Rudy) because I know what that means (liar) and the corrosive hurt it causes, unintentionally or not. It matters to me. Hillary actually said “There are worse things than adultery” when Bill cheated on her – actually parsing his evil – then went on to do more evil by attacking every woman he ever slept with. Actually trying to drive some of them crazy, like Monica. That’s the kind of BS I just can’t endorse. It sickens me, like most other Reps. She has no values – even as a feminist – so there’s not a chance in hell I’ll ever get behind the channeler.

    The fact the Dems won’t deal with that issue – like San Francisco’s mayor, Gavin Newsom (Grusome Newsom) having a 75% approval rating after sleeping with his best friend/campaign manager’s drunk wife (the guy that was burning the midnight oil for him) along with an outrageous murder rate, a filthy city, no housing or decent paying jobs, cults flourishing, and an exodus of black people – from the country’s so-called most liberal city – just says to me there is nothing, on the Left, that they’ll respect besides political expediency. Oh, gay rights – they’re 100% behind that, while blacks watch the freak parade, and wonder what happened to them. (That’s not homophobia guys but fact: gays, generally, don’t march for black civil rights but everyone else – women, gays, trannies, hispanics, everybody – expects to get to the front of the line they started.) It’s all just a bunch of lip service and nipple piercings. I’ve lived here, since 1979, so don’t start: I love the parade. But I want more than talk and symbolism. And the Left is nothing more than that. I know:

    I was part of it for most of my life.

    Reply
  40. S.H.A.M. Scam Sam

    Factician,

    I re-read my post and just want to clear up a few things:

    Master of the Senate:

    I loved the book and, still, love LBJ. He was everything today’s dems aren’t: rude, crude, smart, compassionate, ballsy (he’d even show his own) and a master politician like few will ever see again.

    The christian wing is goofy, of course, but checkable:

    I’ve been insisting the Left should do the same thing with the new agers – shut ’em down. You’ll never be credible with their influence. Hillary can keep trying to sell her religious creds but no one believes her – she’s a feminist occultist – and I (and the christians) know it. That’s probably why her negatives are so high: church groups.

    You stay up, you furriner, the conservative wing of the U.S. A. has got your back!

    (That should piss the wusses off pretty good.)

    Reply
  41. minimalist

    But we didn’t do that – we gave money to the Pakistanis who did it. (“Oops” on you, indeed.) You really don’t know what you’re talking about, do you?

    So if we pay someone else to be the go-between, it’s like we never did it at all! Cool!

    You utter poltroon.

    Funding and training the Mujahadeen was entirely initiated by the US, via the CIA. What I said was fundamentally true. But whatever, I’ll grant you that, for once, you’re right about one nitpicking detail I neglected for the sake of brevity. Even a blind pig finds an acorn now and then. Congratulations, piggy.

    Mostly the work of the British. You condemning the whole Western World now? And how far do you want to take this? Who-had-what land, going all the way back to the beginning of man? (I told you you have no respect for the sweep of history.) Are you going to stew until everyone is back on the African continent? Or are you gonna get on the stick and, finally, decide America’s been the obvious force for good that so many – world-wide – know it is, which is why they ask for our help and, almost, no one else’s?

    Look.

    Guy.

    Take your medication, concentrate real hard, and read what I am saying.

    I am not saying the west is entirely responsible for the ME problem. What I am saying is that every time some ignorant interventionist twat decides to overtly stick his fat face into ME politics, we inevitably screw it up entirely.

    We can be a force for good, through diplomacy, trade, and encouraging human rights reform. We cannot do that by causing ill-conceived wars, funding multiple sides of a conflict, getting involved in tribal conflicts we don’t even understand, and violating human rights ourselves. Anyone who does the latter cannot lay any honest claim to wanting to “improve” the Middle East. Period.

    If almost single-handedly bringing an entire region into the 21st Century is considered, by you, to be “very few, if any, positives” then I don’t know what to say for you.

    Kemal Ataturk would like a word. As would the many ME nations that are still effectively living under medieval dictatorships, except maybe with some computers here and there — for the elite oil barons and not the people living in slums, anyway. Dictatorships either propped up or winkingly left alone by the US. 21st century living, indeed!

    Cheney isn’t in jail – no one is –

    Well, not now that Scoot-Scoot’s sentence was commuted, no. His convictions still stand, however, and you can’t wave those away no matter how much you try to stamp your little feet and scream “NUH-UH!”

    The administration has owned up to carrying out wiretaps that were illegal under the current FISA laws, which is why there was such a big panicky push to grant retroactive immunity during the recent revisions of the law. Gonzales’ testimony — when he claims to remember anything at all — is clashing all over the place with other witnesses. The Democrats’ cowardice in being unable to push for prosecution doesn’t mean these things haven’t happened.

    Funny but it’s those “jerks” – like me, and the prez (can’t forget him) – who are the only ones I see standing up for those ideals and structures you claim are so important. You’re definitely not – you see nothing but problems.

    Yeah, I should stop being so negative about torture, loss of civil liberties, trumped-up wars, and corruption, and just be glad somebody’s doing something/i>.

    “Sure that guy went on a ten-state shooting spree, but what a go-getter! You don’t see that sort of initiative in this day and age, so stop whining!”

    Your defenses become ever more puny, mewling, and lacking in substance.

    Idiot. The Founding Fathers lived in constant fear of the mob – they’re looking for “men” – real men who uphold real ideals. Men who take this seriously, as you obviously do not, if sticking up for your own country in a dangerous world is alien to you.

    “a government of laws and not of men” – John Adams

    Think about what that quote means, and the rule of law. Cretin.

    Conservatives, as a group, have only been around for 50 years and, in that short time, they’ve mopped the floor with your kind, to become the most powerful, dynamic, and influential political group in this country.

    HAAAAhahahah. You are precious, little “man,” precious. Who enacts the long-lasting changes? Progressives. Reformers. “Liberals.” For all your supposed mopping of floors, the backbone of the New Deal still stands. Abortion rights still stand, even after a few years of conservative control of two branches of government. Civil rights? Social justice? Protecting the vulnerable members of society? Liberals own those issues, and have defined those dialogues for generations — that’s far more powerful than any temporary office-holding.

    It’s easy to be “powerful” when you spend all your time sucking up to the wealthy and influential, but conservatives have no ideas that aren’t recycled from the Gilded Age. In the long run they never prevail because people prefer progress to regression.

    Conservatives can’t even live up to their own goals; look how Reagan and Bush II “shrank” the government and the budget. The lack of movement to outlawing abortion. The failure to back any sort of faith-based initiatives. The unnecessary military adventures.

    You’re being played, little man, in so very many ways, and you’re too busy tilting at your loony little windmills to notice. Enjoy scrabbling at the edges of your blinkered world.

    Reply
  42. Fox1

    And the Left is nothing more than that. I know:
    I was part of it for most of my life.

    Why even make this claim? No one who’s spent any moderate amount of time on the web will a) buy it or b) give your words any extra weight even they did.

    You’ve given no indication that you even understand what the current, US-centric, socio-political definition of “liberal” is, let alone the old dictionary one. You’re a concern troll. It’s not an endangered species, we’ve all seen them in the wild.

    Um, my friend, I served in the United States military during the Iranian Hostage Crisis (1979-1983)

    Wow, now THERE’S a qualification. Frankly, I’m tempted to believe you on this one, though, because, honestly, who gives a shit? “During the Iranian Hostage Crisis?” That’s what you’re using to claim expertise? That you were in the military when an event occurred in the country next to the one we’re talking about? More than 20 years ago? That puts you right up there with, geez, somebody who read a book! Or talked to a guy, one time!

    Ma’as Salama.

    Reply
  43. NBPat

    I remember President Clinton embarassed by HIV demonstrators. It was an important part of democracy, Mister Clinton had made promises that the Congress was not delivering. The demonstration was an embarassment to the president but it had positive results.

    Imagine if there had been a “Manhattan Project” to fight HIV, how different would the world be and what scientific results would have come out?

    Is the subject of “people skills” science? I would say so. And roving cheerleaders to shout “USA USA USA” is a way for a politician to cover up weakness.

    Reply
  44. S.H.A.M. Scam Sam

    “I’ll grant you that, for once, you’re right about one nitpicking detail I neglected for the sake of brevity. Even a blind pig finds an acorn now and then. Congratulations, piggy.”

    Oink?

    Acorns? What are you talking about acorns for? In case you haven’t heard, my fellow Sightless Sirloin, the well-conceived war is the main dish around these parts now. And still, despite that change, you can rest assured that this much ain’t: I been looking. And you gonna be looking too.

    They’s got to be one ’round here somewhere, right?

    Don’t turn your snout up like that! Those congratulations can still be in order since we did locate a long string of “tribal conflicts we don’t even understand” which we blind pigs (or maybe I should say we American blind pigs) absolutely “neglected for the sake of brevity” to find before.

    It’s just impossible for a blind pig to find anything these days. Ever. Being blind. Blind pigs. The two together. We can’t find anything.

    Except computers “now and then”, which we’ve continually found and mastered to the point where you can track some other pig, or at least those who (“I’ll grant you”) seem to care less about saving our bacon vis-a-vis human rights.

    It’s almost a crime – a crime – nobody else could be expected to try and find wars in a nicer way than a blind pig. That would make the whole “looking for a fight” aspect easier. Well maybe the British Bulldogs do, sometimes, but even then it’s not for very long. (We like each other too much, so the competition is always kinda half-hearted, reducing eventually from a fair amount of rooting out terrorists to more good-natured belly-rubbing than should symbolically be expected.)

    But whether it’s us or them, I’m sure, the idea of doing a lot more to find “medieval dictatorships” by not being where they are won’t appeal to either. We’ve tried that: That’s “looking in the wrong place”. Doesn’t work. And now many of us got piglets? I don’t know ’bout that. Doesn’t sound kosher. Might got to figure how to spin it back home.

    Speaking of home, about this so-called Pig Empire: Sure, we’re a BP (“Big Porker”) by definition, but a reluctant one – being blind – and by now we’ve proven we’ll stand up and pull a pig’s fat out of the fire. That’s why other pigs clamor for our help – and why they die trying to get it. I personally dragged pigs feet out of the water, floating in counter top-sized pickle jars, having eaten the string that ties the feet together, hoping an American pig will see them – because we’re the ones looking – even though we can’t see.

    And that pig, Richard Armitage, revealed Miss Piggy’s real name – Valery Plame – not Scooter look-at-my-tail-turn Libby. And that pig prosecutor knew it. All the pigs did. You’ll note that not even the most rabid one a Dems – the pigs that claim they can see – none of them are trying to find Armitage.

    Why not if there’s trouble there? Because despite his obvious mistake and the damage it’s done to the pig president in wartime (which has really smoked and salted him) all following his openness regarding reservations about whether the blind should even try to find trouble in Iraq, everybody knows Richard Armitage’s U.S.A.-loving, flag-waving, integrity-freak, patriot pig character. He’ll never once face the axe. Not after he had to face Libby, turning on Joe Wilson’s spit, which is punishment enough if you ask me. Wilson made Libby a target in our political shooting gallery, even glancing a bit off that potato, Tim Russert, and that’s no reason for a blind pig to go to prison.

    Wiretaps, to get the wolf within, are an obvious need: We blind. Screaming “illegal” for something obvious, like that, is just tying our pigs feet. Here, repeat after me: They’re here; we’re blind – we’re going to find ’em. (Repeat)

    “Yeah, I should stop being so negative about how sausage is made, loss of “free range” civil liberties, blind pig claims of finding trumped-up wars, and Hawaiian Pizza, and just be glad somebody’s doing something.”

    Why not? You blind too. Oh – excuse me – I forgot you one a Dems. [The blind pig starts whistling nervously,…] FADE TO BLACK.

    Cue Pig music and the Pig Announcement – “We’ll be right back to The Pig Movie after this!” – and ‘cut’ to commercial:

    ‘A breakfast of sausage and not of ham” – Jimmy Dean

    I’ve thought about what that quote means and I’m getting hungry!

    Change the channel, from CPS to NPC, past APC, to finally settle on an old super hero movie on PPS – MANBEARPIG starring Al Boar – and the villian speaks:

    “OIIIInnnnkkk. You are precious, little “pig,” precious. Who enacts Washington’s Tong-tasting pork products? Progressi-pigs. Reporkers. “Liber-hogs.” For all your supposed slopping of floors, the backbone of the New Squeal still stands. Aporktion rights still stand, even after a few years of conserva-pig control of two mud holes. Little Bites? Sausage justice? Protecting the vulnerable pigs on the farm? Liber-hogs own those issues, and have defined those dialogues for boars — that’s far more powerful than any temporary place in the stye.

    It’s easy to be ‘powerful’ when you spend all your time sucking on a spare rib, but conserva-pigs have no ideas that aren’t recycled from the Pickle Jar. In the long run they never prevail because pigs prefer progress to pork chops.
    Conserva-pigs can’t even live up to their own goals; look how Piggan and Piglet II ‘shrank’ the mud hole and the scraps. The lack of movement to outlawing aporktion. The failure to back any sort of faith-based initi-pigs. The unnecessary chinese dishes.
    You’re being played, little pig, in so very many ways, and you’re too blind to notice. Enjoy scrabbling at the edges of your pen.”

    Decide to turn off the T.V.:

    There’s nothing on.

    Reply
  45. S.H.A.M. Scam Sam

    Fox1,

    1. Concern troll’s hide their views. I’m doing no such thing.

    2. Yes, serving in the military does give you better perspective than civilian life on world affairs – people tend to focus more on an issue when it can kill them directly – and that whole thing about “discipline” tends to help in this field as well. And, yea, 20 years following a story – notice how it got veteran’s attention when the Prez of Iran was identified as “that guy”?

    4. Being a snarky little shit doesn’t qualify you for anything. Why don’t you guys know this stuff?

    Reply
  46. S.H.A.M. Scam Sam

    Fox1,

    1. Concern troll’s hide their views. I’m doing no such thing.

    2. Yes, serving in the military does give you better perspective than civilian life on world affairs – people tend to focus more on an issue when it can kill them directly – and that whole thing about “discipline” tends to help in this field as well. And, yea, 20 years following a story – notice how it got veteran’s attention when the Prez of Iran was identified as “that guy”?

    3. Being a snarky little shit doesn’t qualify you for anything.

    It’s early – brain fart.

    Reply
  47. Fox1

    1. Not necessarily. Sometimes, the ones who aren’t really trying that hard, and think everyone’s going to be bowled over by their clever, 17 paragraph screeds, simply couch the same old opposition talking points in a thin layer of “oh, I am/used to be on your side” or “I disagree with everything your faction or organization believes in, but hey, you can trust me, I’m not with those OTHER guys who disagree with you across the board.”

    2. Bologna. There are thousands of current and former motorpool, admin shop and assorted REMF veterans across the country who are no better informed or qualified to comment on this or any other foreign policy issue than the average citizen. Hell, it’s entirely possible to be a deployed grunt and still come back an ignorant asshole, if you try hard enough. If your time in motivated you to learn and study and follow this area, impress us with the knowledge you gained from that, but don’t throw down your bullshit purple heart and expect special privilege.

    3. Well, I was “in the military during 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq” but, I’m only going to claim that this gives me the ability to call you on your unwarranted boasts of special knowledge.
    Oh, and my MOS training contained almost 2 years of intensive Arabic culture and language study, but, whatever.

    Oorah.

    Reply
  48. vagueofgodalming

    Sam mentioned that Obama has a page on his site for The Secret. In an act of supreme sacrifice for the sake of science I actually waded into the sewer of sycophancy that constitutes the average presidential campaign site and found this:

    http://my.barackobama.com/page/group/TheSecretBelieversforPresidentObama

    It looks to me as though this is an enthusiastic supporter who wants to rally fellow Secret-followers in support of the campaign, so it probably doesn’t say much about what Obama himself thinks. However, I can’t tell more without actually registering and joining, and my gag reflex is getting in the way (and no doubt it would put Obama in breach of some obscure law about getting support from a Foreign Power or something). Maybe an American can take up the torch where I drop it.

    I will go back to contemplating a world in which the notorious colonial revolutionary Madison counts as a conservative.

    Reply
  49. minimalist

    Hahahaha. I would say I broke Shammy’s tiny mind, but that ship sailed long ago.

    Mission accomplished. Bye.

    Reply
  50. LanceR

    Ha! Good job, Minimalist! I think you made his widdle head pop!

    Typical conservo-bot. How do you even have a discussion with someone who believes that “Conservatives, as a group, have only been around for 50 years”? This is so typical of the ditto-head mindset. Nothing before about 1950 has any relevance, except maybe World War II. Those who do not remember history…

    LOL!

    Reply
  51. S.H.A.M. Scam Sam

    “Typical conservo-bot. How do you even have a discussion with someone who believes that “Conservatives, as a group, have only been around for 50 years”? This is so typical of the ditto-head mindset. Nothing before about 1950 has any relevance, except maybe World War II. Those who do not remember history…”

    Man, for a bunch of scientists, you guys are dumb – from Wikipedia:

    “Prior to National Review’s founding in 1955, some conservatives believed that the American Right was a largely unorganized collection of individuals who shared intertwining philosophies but had little opportunity for a united public voice.”

    “In 1953, Russell Kirk published The Conservative Mind, which sought to trace an intellectual bloodline from Edmund Burke to the Old Right in the early 1950s. This challenged the popular notion that no coherent conservative tradition existed in the United States. A young William F. Buckley Jr was greatly influenced by it.”

    “National Review aimed to make conservative ideas respectable, in an age when the dominant view of conservative thought was expressed by Lionel Trilling in 1950”

    “National Review promoted Barry Goldwater heavily during the early 1960s.”

    Reply
  52. S.H.A.M. Scam Sam

    Fox1,

    Thank you for practically making my points for me:

    “Not necessarily” does not mean “wrong” – having just learned what a concern troll is, by someone hurling it at me on another thread, and then having Mark knock it down – as a definition of me – really puts things in perspective.

    Conclusion: You’re wrong.

    There are “thousands” of vets – out of the millions who serve – who don’t know squat? Really? Well shut me up. (You obviously support the troops.) I guess Bush just talks to those veterans groups because of how little they know about the wars we fight. And, obviously, all those civilians screaming “Baby Killer” know more about the military – which is made up of their normal everyday friends and neighbors – than the people who served and know the extent we go not to hurt anyone. My mistake. No – wait.

    Conclusion: You’re wrong.

    You got “2 years of intensive Arabic culture and language study” but you agree with mini-mind that “we don’t even understand” the culture over there? Here, let me teach you a couple of words: cognitive dissonance. Look it up. You’re a vet: they usually know how to read.

    Conclusion: You’re wrong.

    Vague,

    You left out Oprah’s two-day endorsement of The Secret, her delivery of The Secret to Obama, his aping of new age speak – all followed by Oprah’s total backing of Obama – along with The Secret page, on Obama.com, not a site that some fan made. And don’t forget his campaigning for Maharishi votes as well.

    Those are facts, my friend. Not “It looks to me”, and “probably”, and the definitive “I can’t tell” – facts.

    Still, I’m glad you looked – it proves I’m getting to you.

    Mini-mind,

    I love how you wank off by patting yourself on the back. Never seen it done that way before. I hope you’re getting off because, surely, you’re not winning. But, as a Democrat, don’t expect to: Just keep it up with the symbolism.

    BTW – guys – this post is the sound of my widdle head popping.

    I’m gonna go talk to some adults now. You guys stay up.

    Reply
  53. Fox1

    Conclusion: you didn’t address a damn thing I actually said.

    Fine, you know what, I’ll drop the concern troll charge, since you’re going off the deep end attempting to dispute the definition of what is, at best, a neologism.
    You’re just a regular old troll. You win.

    I guess Bush just talks to those veterans groups because of how little they know about the wars we fight. And, obviously, all those civilians screaming “Baby Killer” know more about the military – which is made up of their normal everyday friends and neighbors – than the people who served and know the extent we go not to hurt anyone. My mistake. No – wait.

    What the hell does that have to do with what I said?

    You got “2 years of intensive Arabic culture and language study” but you agree with mini-mind that “we don’t even understand” the culture over there?

    I do? When, precisely, did I say that? Again, what element of what I said are you addressing? Oh, and I do mean “I” in reference to myself as a single entity, not like, a reverse royal “we” where I’m assuming the identity of everyone on earth that you disagree with, at once.

    Yeah, my issue was with your completely unwarranted claim of expertise based simply on military service around the time of an event in that general area of the word. It dilutes what expertise militarily trained personnel DO have when every Tom, Dick and Gomer Pyle try to use the fact of their service to set themselves up like an little internet David Petraeus.

    Oh, and

    Yes, serving in the military does give you better perspective than civilian life on world affairs and that whole thing about “discipline” tends to help in this field as well.

    is just stupid. What does “discipline” have to do with foreign policy?

    I’m guessing you were AF or Army, because sailors don’t generally spout that much illogical gung-ho BS, and there’s no way you could have been in the Corps and manage to not bring it up yet. I’m torn after that, though, there are more poseurs in the AF, but more douchebags in the army.
    Hmmmm….

    Reply
  54. S.H.A.M. Scam Sam

    “You win.”

    Let’s see: That’s one concession, from mini-mind, and now one from you. Reason and Locic: I love this game!

    As for the rest of your post – dude, it’s a thread – clarity may not come through the first time. Relax.

    And look, if I mention my service – in good faith – you should assume I’m not just spouting off. But I know – you’re a Democrat – so you assume no one acts in good faith and deserves to be kicked to the curb, and ridiculed, for ever daring to speak at all. And you wonder why Democrats can’t seem to win over the America public. Here’s a hint: You’re too friggin’ cynical!!!

    And, finally, what does discipline have to do with foreign policy? That’s easy: The ability to follow a story line over long periods of time, the highs and the lows, and still see the reality on the ground is critical to assessing our position, on the battlefield, and in the world.

    Civilians cry about every mistake or miscalculation that happens, while military people know they’re going to happen, and can still see their way to clarity – or a win. That’s why Iraq doesn’t shake the military. They’re winning – everyday. A truck bomb blowing up isn’t a lost battle – it’s just a newspaper headline and Film At Eleven to me. But to my friends – who’ve never served – it’s practically the end of the friggin’ world. Everything is. (“France doesn’t agree with us!” Like we take are marching orders from France,…)

    That’s why civilians bitch about the war so much: They’ve got no frame of reference. No one that’s studied The Battle of the Bulge can tell me The Iraq War is lost because mistakes were made – mistakes are always made – Big ones. The first being that a reason for war occurred in the first place. (Thanks Saddam. Thanks Obama.) War is tragedy, writ large. It takes discipline to see the horror, put it in it’s place, and come away from the day’s events with a realistic picture of what’s what. Not hyperventilating because “soldiers” are in danger (How silly can you get?).

    Discipline, my friend, foreign policy takes discipline.

    Reply
  55. S.H.A.M. Scam Sam

    I meant to say “Thanks Osama” but I think I just discovered/revealed another reason why that guy shouldn’t our president,…

    Reply
  56. LanceR

    My gosh! I never realized that one magazine (National Review) was the beginning of conservatism! Gee, I guess Edmund Burke, the “Father of Conservatism” (1729-1797) wasn’t a conservative? Benjamin Disraeli? Thomas Jefferson? Daniel Webster? John C. Calhoun? Abraham Lincoln? Grover Cleveland?

    My god, I guess all these history books are useless! Oh! And Obama rhymes with Osama! Wow! That has to be meaningful!

    Idiot.

    Reply
  57. S.H.A.M. Scam Sam

    What part of “a largely unorganized collection of individuals” don’t you understand? We were talking about conservatives as a group.

    Reply
  58. minimalist

    Fox1:

    I do? When, precisely, did I say that?

    For that matter, where did I?

    Oh right, in Shammy’s head.

    Hard to imagine what Shammy’s perception of this thread is, in his deranged mind, but I think it’s rather like a puppet show.

    Reply
  59. LanceR

    Believe what you want, Scammy my boy. I know it is important for you to believe that conservatism only started in the 50s, and is not simply a rehash of fascism and outdated, obsolete, morally bankrupt ideas that came before. Conservatism has been a part of humanity since the first societies. Edmund Burke is the “Father of Modern Conservatism” and founded the first Conservative Party in the late 1700s as a reaction to the excesses of the French Revolution. The Tory party in America was decidedly conservative, and much of the conflict over the Constitution was conflict between conservative groups and more liberal ideas. Ever heard of the Federalist Papers?

    C’mon. Crack a history book and shut off Faux News or shut up.

    Reply
  60. S.H.A.M. Scam Sam

    “Conservatism,…is,…simply a rehash of fascism”

    Wow. It’s no wonder you “scientists”, who claim to be honest brokers, are so whack. Do you really believe that? I can say a lot of things about Dems, and the Left, but nothing that silly or over-the-top. (Sure, I say they have a religion – new age spirituality – that’s as damaging as the fundamentalists, and should be attacked with the same venom, but that’s about it. BTW, I don’t say they ARE the Occult, or even that I believe in it, which is impossible for an atheist to say, but that they BELIEVE IN the Occult – big difference.) But you? You actually believe the GOP are fascists? Like I said: Wow. You are trip-ping, my friend, just stripping everyone you don’t like of their humanity because, well, you don’t like them. That’s convenient. And let’s follow that logic:

    So you (good guy that you are) will, naturally, do anything to defeat fascists, right? (Who wouldn’t?) And, since the government is a Republican one now – fascist or not – you’ll go to any length, in wartime, to defeat them, right? Which means, because your views are so cynically radical, they have to start watching you, which only re-enforces your view of their fascism, right?

    Yes, yes – a very reasonable position you’ve taken there – one that’s sure to make us all feel better about the results. I know I will anyway.

    I just read this review yesterday, in Spiked, that I agree with, totally, after hearing you:

    http://tinyurl.com/2ugvcr

    “The overwhelming popular feeling about the war is one of cynicism and defeatism. But this is nothing to celebrate. The fact that widespread opposition to the war never translated into a coherent critique, let alone a credible movement, is testament to the poverty of contemporary politics on all sides. [The author] is good at describing the weakness of the Western political elite’s claim to the legacy of the Enlightenment, but he is far too generous to the so-called ‘global justice movement’,…the ‘clowns and anarchists’ he invokes,…as champions of Enlightenment,…like the recent Heathrow protesters who displayed a banner demanding ‘Make Planes History!’ (or does championing the Enlightenment mean going back to the technology of the 1750s?). In that respect, [the author] is not that different from the radical socialists who go along to demos and hand out placards to environmentalists, Muslims and sundry small-c conservative malcontents, and then half-shut their eyes so they can pretend it’s the revolution,…The environmentalist agenda currently being advanced in the name of science is certainly repressive, with demands for austerity on the part of individuals as well as corporations and, not least, underdeveloped nations. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a powerful political body that shapes the research agenda. Critics of this agenda, whether they suggest alternative scientific theories or simply object to environmentalist policies, are dismissed as irrational ‘deniers’. But [the author’s] brief references to climate change suggest that he believes sinister corporations are the only parties capable of distorting science in this field: in his worldview, this is the only kind of politicking that computes.”

    It’s pretty obvious, after being on a few “science” blogs awhile, that scientists share this simple-minded extreme-Left view: They can’t be part of the problem because scientists are “pure as the driven snow” – and, in their own minds (I’m talking to Mark and Chris here) that means they’re the only one’s worthy of driving. I hate to say it but, personally, I think you scientists need to grow up:

    “I have seen the enemy – and it is us.”

    See? Even Pogo was smarter than you.

    Reply
  61. LanceR

    No, you’ve never said anything “extreme” about the “Left”… not you…

    Read a book. Look up fascism. Look up conservatism. Tell me what part of fascism doesn’t fit. Can you even define either of those words?

    Moron.

    Reply
  62. minimalist

    *sugh*, yes, Shammy, very good, you found an article that vomits your own conspiracy theory of eeeevil envrionmentalist scientists repressing the poor, poor corporations. But where’s the evidence? Where’s your evidence? Like your posts, that review contains baldfaced assertions with not a scrap of support. But you buy right into it because it falls neatly into your addled little worldview.

    Like it or not, Mark has assembled and demolished a small collection of distorted and plain false claims from the AGW-denier crowd, and linked to sites with many more. There are paper trails a mile wide linking the bogus ‘experts’ on that side to the tragically maligned industries who may just be trying to weasel out of any accountability. You, and the bozo who wrote that review, cannot even begin to point to anything comparable on the scientific side; small wonder that you don’t even try.

    (Actually, I can believe that you don’t even try because you seem to think that simply bellowing something enough times, with enough flying spittle to soak an elephant, makes it true.)

    PS: When that book review slammed Dawkins, did your head explode again? Just curious how you handled that dissonance, since you accept things on an authoritarian basis, rather than on evidence and independent thought.

    Reply
  63. S.H.A.M. Scam Sam

    You’re, both, beyond contempt as far as being regarded as thinkers:

    Evidence? “Make Planes History!” isn’t enough? And “accountability” for what? The invention of the combustion engine? Something tells me they ain’t gonna buy it.

    And I loved this: “you seem to think that simply bellowing something enough times, with enough flying spittle to soak an elephant, makes it true.”

    This, when I’ve got two concessions – one by you – on this very thread: What you got?

    I swear, your cynicism renders your educations worthless.

    Reply
  64. minimalist

    Yes, evidence. Evidence that the science is bad. Evidence that the deniers have anything other than distortion

    Some retarded protestors who go too far with the rhetoric don’t invalidate the science. How many actual climate change scientists were there? How many members of the IPCC? How would it invalidate the data even if they were holding that silly banner?

    See, that’s what your nutty ass will never comprehend about the science, however much you rant and rave about real scientists like Mark: Motive doesn’t even matter if the data holds. And there’s a wide range of motives on the climate change side; hell, most climate change deniers foolishly try to claim von Storch as one of their own, even though he accepts AGW; he just disagrees with some of the more extremist conlcusions and is wary about the risks of extreme action. The only motive on the anti-side is denial, and they don’t even have data to back them up.

    When trying to determine benzene’s structure, Kekule was inspired by a rather mystical dream of a snake biting its own tail (the Uroboros), and yet benzene’s structure really is a ring.

    You have no data; nothing except your own selective biases.

    And what on earth did I “concede” in this thread, other than your being right on one unimportant nitpick (which I hadn’t even claimed otherwise in the first place)? Be specific. The voices in your head don’t count.

    Reply
  65. minimalist

    I’m bored and curious, so I found this:

    Hey, looks like they had scientists after all:

    Alice James is sitting outside the bright white Children’s Tent in the makeshift protest-city that has risen in an empty field next to Heathrow. The 26-year-old is a PhD student in atmospheric physics and she is watching her son bounce merrily on a trampoline as she explains, “We are trying to say to the people over there” – she points at Heathrow – “Do you know the connection between your flight and the hurricanes and the floods and the droughts we are seeing intensify across the world? Do you care?” She is drowned out by the roar of a cheap flight far above. Sitting later in my leaking tent, watching the Climate Camp bustle by, it seems like a surreal splicing of Glastonbury, a science seminar, and the civil rights movement. On every corner, people are discussing the nature of the warming world we are rapidly bringing to boiling point.

    At one end, Mayer Hillman, the 76-year-old climate-change campaigner, is saying to a crowd: “We are on a trajectory towards the extinction of life on earth. In the main, people have done this unwittingly, so it can be excused. But now we know what we are doing, and it cannot be excused.”

    Further along, hundreds more are discussing how Britain can claw back its emissions, whether it’s through a new, much better coach network or a Europe-wide electrical super-grid. These “unemployed layabouts” and “stupid hippies” (copyright Talksport Radio) must be the most scientifically qualified protesters in history, with every other person seemingly a science graduate.

    My my my, what unreasonable positions. Science chatter and heady discussions about viable alternatives to air travel? What a horrifying cult this is.

    Perhaps 83-year-old Ethel Bull is The Militant. Leaning on her walking stick, she says to me, “I’m going to be made homeless [if they build a third runway] and I want to know why. Where do you go when you’re 83?”

    She is one of the legion of locals from the surrounding villages of Sipson, Harlington and Harmondsworth who have embraced the camp as one of the last ways to save their homes. Derby Bahia, a mechanic, enthuses: “It’s fantastic. I’ve never seen anything so wonderful in my life. The only thing I’m worried about is the police. Why don’t they go and find some murderers instead?”

    How sad, those poor elderly people have been brainwashed by the enviro-feminist-newage cult into protesting the loss of their homes. Tragic.

    There is a division between people who believe the solutions have to come largely from governments imposing carbon rationing and investing in large renewable infrastructure projects, and more anarchist-minded protesters who think this is authoritarian and makes the protesters too complicit in existing power structures.

    Bemused at being attacked as pro-government, Mayer Hillman says to one anarchist: “You go down to Heathrow airport and tell them you want to build an anarchist grassroots society from the bottom up, now will you please give up your flight? They’ll tell you to fuck off.”

    So because the anarchist’s position offends you, obviously this means all the protesters are like him. And not like Monbiot and the others with him, likely the majority of the crowd, who are advocating regulation.

    The whole article is an interesting read, and adds a whole lot more information about these protests than just cherry-picking a single banner, taking it out of context and saying “lookit those stupid hippies!” You can find silly banners and signs at any protest; cherry-picking the silliest ones, especially if they don’t represent majority opinion, is a denialist tactic, and you gullibly fall for it again and again, thinking it constitutes “evidence.” Buffoon.

    If you believe change requires small steps, if you believe in acting at the local level first, this is a reasonable course of action. Very few seem to be advocating the complete elimination of air travel, just caps on unnecessary expansion when viable alternatives could exist.

    And, again, none of this even touches on why the data is invalid.

    Reply
  66. S.H.A.M. Scam Sam

    What did Steve Martin say about jokes? They’re all about ti-ming!:

    A Denier’s Confession
    Global warming is more alarmist than alarming.

    BY BRET STEPHENS
    Tuesday, August 28, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT

    The recent discovery by a retired businessman and climate kibitzer named Stephen McIntyre that 1934–and not 1998 or 2006–was the hottest year on record in the U.S. could not have been better timed. August is the month when temperatures are high and the news cycle is slow, leading, inevitably, to profound meditations on global warming. Newsweek performed its journalistic duty two weeks ago with an exposé on what it calls the global warming “denial machine.” I hereby perform mine with a denier’s confession

    I confess: I am prepared to acknowledge that Mr. McIntyre’s discovery amounts to what a New York Times reporter calls a “statistically meaningless” rearrangement of data.

    But just how “meaningless” would this have seemed had it yielded the opposite result? Had Mr. McIntyre found that a collation error understated recent temperatures by 0.15 degrees Celsius (instead of overstating it by that amount, as he discovered), would the news coverage have differed in tone and approach? When it was reported in January that 2006 was one of the hottest years on record, NASA’s James Hansen used the occasion to warn grimly that “2007 is likely to be warmer than 2006.” Yet now he says, in connection to the data revision, that “in general I think we want to avoid going into more and more detail about ranking of individual years.”

    I confess: I am prepared to acknowledge that the world has been and will be getting warmer thanks in some part to an increase in man-made atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. I acknowledge this in the same way I’m confident that the equatorial radius of Saturn is about 60,000 kilometers: not because I’ve measured it myself, but out of a deep reserve of faith in the methods of the scientific community, above all its reputation for transparency and open-mindedness.

    But that faith is tested when leading climate scientists won’t share the data they use to estimate temperatures past and present and thus construct all-important trend lines. This was true of climatologist Michael Mann, who refused to disclose the algorithm behind his massively influential “hockey stick” graph, which purported to demonstrate a sharp uptick in global temperatures over the past century. (The accuracy of the graph was seriously discredited by Mr. McIntyre and his colleague Ross McKitrick.) This was true also of Phil Jones of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, who reportedly turned down one request for information with the remark, “Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?”

    I confess: I understand that global warming may have negative consequences. Heat waves, droughts and coastal flooding may become more intense. Temperature-sensitive viruses such as malaria could become more widespread. Lakes may be depleted by evaporation. Animal life will suffer.

    But as Bjorn Lomborg points out in his sharp, persuasive and aptly titled book “Cool It,” a warming climate has advantages, too, and not just trivial ones. Though global warming will cause more heat deaths, it will also mean many fewer cold deaths. Drought may increase in some areas, but warming also means both more rain and longer growing seasons. Temperature changes will harm some wildlife in some places. But many species will benefit from a bit more warmth. Does anyone know for certain that the net human and environmental losses from global warming will exceed overall gains?

    I confess: Denial never solves anything. But neither does sensational and deceptive journalism.
    Newsweek illustrates this point by its choice of cover art–a picture of the sun, where the surface temperature hovers around 6,000 degrees Celsius. Given that the consensus scientific estimate for average temperature increases over the next century is a comparatively modest 2.6 degrees, this would seem a rather Murdochian way of convincing readers about the gravity of the climate threat. On the inside pages is a photograph of a polar bear stranded on melting ice. But the caption that the bears are “at risk” belies clear evidence that the bear population has risen five-fold since the 1960s. Another series of photographs, of a huge Antarctic ice shelf that quickly disintegrated in 2002, suggests the imminence of doom. But why not also mention that temperatures at the South Pole have been going down for 50 years?

    I confess: It’s easy to be indifferent to far-off and diffuse threats. It’s hard to work toward solutions the benefits of which will not be felt in our lifetime.

    Then again, if Americans are not fully persuaded of the dangers of global warming, as Newsweek laments, don’t chalk it up to the pernicious influence of the so-called deniers and their enablers at ExxonMobil and Fox News. Today, global warming is variously suggested as the root cause of terrorism, the conflict in Darfur and the rising incidence of suicides in Italy. Yet the 20th century offers excellent reasons to be suspicious of monocausal explanations for the world’s ills, monomaniacs intent on saving us from ourselves, and the long train of experts predicting death by overpopulation, resource depletion, global cooling, nuclear winter and prions. Also, hypocrites. When we are called on to bike to work, permanently abjure air travel, “eat locally” and so on, we expect to be led by example, not by a new nomenklatura.

    I confess: Though it may surprise those who use the term “denier” so as to put me on a moral plane with Holocaust deniers, I have children for whom I would not wish an environmental apocalypse.

    Yet neither do I wish the civilizational bounties built up over two centuries by an industrial, inventive, adaptive, globalized and energy-hungry society to be squandered chasing comparatively small environmental benefits at gigantic economic costs. One needn’t deny global warming as a problem to deny it as the only or greatest problem. The great virtue of Mr. Lomborg’s book is its insistence on trying to measure the good done per dollar spent. Do we save a few lives, at huge cost, as a byproduct of curbing global warming? Or do we save many, for less, by acting on problems directly?

    Some might argue it is immoral to think this way. Maybe they are the ones living in denial.

    Reply
  67. S.H.A.M. Scam Sam

    Oh, and I found this lovely exchange on a blog about homeopathy:

    “There is a sick correlation between the instruction level and the use of alternative treatments to standard drugs: twice as many people who completed high-school studies or got a bachelor have used alternative medicine than people who abandoned school earlier.”

    “Maybe not so sick. I suspect the population of those who left school early has a higher incidence of independent thinkers who won’t believe everything they’re told.”

    Yea – maybe that’s it. Sure seems like it around here,…

    Reply
  68. minimalist

    Wow, so in response to a thread excoriating you for using other people’s words without much comprehension… you post other people’s articles/words verbatim. Without comprehension.

    The OpinionJournal article you posted first is the usual round of bullcrap denialist tactics we’ve seen many times before. Off the top of my head, the usual diversions, in order:

    1.) 1934 may be the hottest year on record, yes, but only slightly — the difference between 1934 and 1998 (0.02 degrees) is well within the margin of error for measurement (0.1 degrees). But the more important thing here is that this does not invalidate the global mean (remember, this disagreement is over the US temperature), nor does it eliminate the overall trend. Temperature varies from year to year, it’s not going to be a linear progression. Anyone who collects data knows about ‘noise’ and variance. The important thing is the warming trend, which this does nothing to weaken.

    2.) Wow, the “No Problem” argument. “Eh, so what if warming is happening and we caused it? Maybe it’ll be a fun candy ride!” Never mind that many models are predicting seriously bad consequences — it’s hard to imagine an upside to sea level rise, other than “hey, people living inland may see their property values rise due to “ocean view”! — but the idea that there are many upsides at all is purely speculative. It’s wishful thinking on Lomborg’s part, with no basis in any rigorous study, modeling, or predictions. There is far more reason to prepare for the worst than to just be a Pollyanna and trust that good things will come of it.

    3.) ‘Why not mention that temperatures at the South Pole are decreasing?’ Actually, it does get mentioned in the scientific literature quite often — indeed, it’s an active area of study. The ice sheets there seem to be stable due to a slightly increased snowfall, for one thing; it’s interesting. But again, this does not discredit the global trends. Focusing on the “negatives” in the Arctic is a reporting technique that uses a dramatic example in one area to illustrate a global problem. You may argue that this is lazy reporting, and you’d have a point, but the OpinionJournal piece takes it further, by implying that because things are “better” in one place, that global warming is not well-supported. That’s nonsense, it’s wrong, and it’s dishonest.

    4.) He used the “global cooling scare” myth again. That is supremely dishonest because there never was such a scare. He deserves a square kick in the nuts for even thinking he could trot that one out for the millionth time.

    5.) “Today, global warming is variously suggested as the root cause of terrorism, the conflict in Darfur and the rising incidence of suicides in Italy.” Who the hell says that? I’ve seen the Darfur one, I think (warming causing a dearth of resources), but the rest is idle speculation and again, as I keep trying to drill into your rock-hard skull, this has no bearing on the validity of the underlying science.

    In other words, the same old boring nonsense intended only to validate the biases of uncritical readers like you. Nothing even resembling a valid criticism, nothing even approaching contrary evidence, nothing I haven’t seen a million times before.

    Reply
  69. MarkH

    Ditto.

    I’m disappointed in you Sam, We’ve already discussed the McIntyre bit and how it is meaningless, and like other anti-AGW cranks you’re recycling it repeatedly.

    There are few signs of instant intellectual dishonesty in the discussion of AGW. One is the “It’s warmer here” or “cooler there” arguments – reflecting an absence of knowledge of the most basic aspects of the science. The second is the use of repeatedly and thoroughly debunked nonsense like McIntyre’s correction of one year of one country’s record and pretend like it’s such an enormous shift. All it does is expose you complete and total ignorance of the science and that you are just regurgitating crankery from elsewhere on the web.

    Have you been to Realclimate yet?

    Reply
  70. S.H.A.M. Scam Sam

    No, Mark, unfortunately I haven’t (I’m honest, right?) but when a person, like minimalist, claims Republicans = Fascism, and no one else says anything but me, I wonder if I should bother: you guys seem to be as compromised (if not more) as the people you despise.

    Say what you want about the WSJ article but one thing that came through, for me, was the writer’s integrity – he means what he’s saying. His humanity is apparent, too, whether you agree with his conclusions or not. (Talking about loving his kids as much as the next guy) That’s more than I can say for the people here.

    I might come off weird but I’ve, admittedly, been through a lot. (Death, divorce, etc.) What’s minimalist’s excuse for his cruelty? His lack of humanity? His unwillingness to think of people – whatever their political party – as human beings whose thoughts deserve serious consideration? He’s merely a bomb-thrower, no matter what the person he’s launching it at has been through, or says. And, though I like you Mark, we’ve already been over the “denialist” tag.

    In my opinion, you guys are science’s own worst enemy, because you look down on other people – without valid reasons – and once you strip away (or refuse to acknowledge) another person’s humanity, they’ll want nothing to do with you,…or your high-minded ideas.

    Take care.

    Reply
  71. minimalist

    when a person, like minimalist, claims Republicans = Fascism

    Will you please get the voices in your head straight, that wasn’t me.

    Not that I necessarily disagree with LanceR, at least as applies to modern “conservatism”. Classical conservatism has lofty goals, if naive. “Conservatism” as practiced by the modern GOP is fond of torture, spying on its own citizens, denial of civil rights, flouting the Geneva conventions, amassing power solely to the Executive, exploiting terrorism (and fears thereof) to political advantage, divisiveness, and scapegoating. Sound familiar?

    I have no quarrel with classical conservatives; by and large, they’re people with principles, albeit ones I disagree with.

    But you, by your own words, you support policies such as the above. You have no idea what conservatism even entails; to you, it’s what Preznit Bush or Fox News tell you it is at any given time. You will support any policy, no matter how failed, no matter how morally abhorrent, as long as it’s decisive. As long as it shows “resolution.” As long as it’s “macho.”

    Let me tell you why I’m throwing the bombs I do: I find that monstrous. It is a total abnegation of your moral responsibility as a human being. Time and again you have shown that you are completely unwilling, or unable, to look the facts square in the face and analyze them for yourself. You let opinion pieces do the thinking for you, but only as long as the conclusions are ones you agree with a priori.

    Listen to yourself. You can’t address any of the factual inaccuracies I addressed, you just lamely think that because he can pen some sob story about how he loooves his kids, so automatically that makes his facts right? Please. You don’t think the Heathrow protestors were thinking of their children, and the environmentally-wrecked world they’ll have to inherit? Wacko, please.

    I’ve tried not to be angry with you, because it’s plain that you’re mentally ill. And I do have a measure of sympathy for that, don’t get me wrong. But I will not abide anyone, sane or otherwise, who supports torture and wars of choice, especially for the stunningly illogical reasons you’ve provided.

    Plus I am just goddamned sick of you swanning into every thread and vomiting out a few paragraphs about how the new age feminists are everywhere and want to steal your penis, or whatever the hell it is you believe. There are far, far worse things to worry about in thi8s country; like the people actually in power.

    Reply
  72. LanceR

    I never said that Republicans = fascism. I said that modern conservatism is a rehashed form of fascism. There is a difference.

    Granted that the 19th century was the century of socialism, liberalism, democracy, this does not mean that the 20th century must also be the century of socialism, liberalism, democracy. Political doctrines pass; nations remain. We are free to believe that this is the century of authority, a century tending to the “right”, a Fascist century.
    -Benito Mussolini

    Classical conservatism has its points. Modern “conservatism” is nothing more than a backlash against the perceived flaws of the progressive movement during the first half of the twentieth century. There is nothing there except a rabid hatred of everything from Roosevelt forward.

    Seriously, get some help. They make medication for your sort of problems now. I might suggest Olanzapine or Bifeprunox. Ask your doctor! <grin&rt;

    Reply
  73. S.H.A.M. Scam Sam

    Mussolini now? Like I said, “Wow”. (You’re incredible.) Here, let me try:

    The Democrats, for most of their history, used to be known as the “Dixiecrats” – essentially the KKK – and didn’t vote for LBJ’s Civil Rights act in as large numbers as the Republicans. The Dems haven’t done much, if anything, for black people since they started claiming the civil rights mantle – except for paying it lots of lip service – and any group that’s openly racist – and then does nothing for their victims after they’ve claimed to turn over a new leaf – is essentially the same racist group it’s always been.

    Now they’re running an “inexperienced” black senator for president. Easy to control. He’s been on the stump for a year and, obviously, has no ideas – which is what the Dixiecrats want – and expect: political cover.

    Man, I’ll tell y’all, I can see now why you do it: once you start, this thinking cynically-thing really works!

    Reply
  74. LanceR

    You really are delusional, aren’t you?

    “The Democrats, for most of their history…” You are aware that the Democratic party split from the Democrat/Republican party in the 1820s, right? The “Dixiecrats” you refer to were a force in the 1960s. There is more to history than the last 50 years, you know. The “Dixiecrats” were never the majority of the Democratic party, and are rapidly disappearing as they age and retire from public life.

    Shall we get into the comparison of the relative racist components of today’s political parties? I’m sure the Republicans would come out *ever* so much better in that comparison.

    I also find it fascinating that you assume everyone who disagrees with you is a Democrat. Or cynical. Or stupid. Projection, anyone?

    Again, I challenge you: look up fascism. Look up conservatism. Read a book. Tell me how conservatism differs from fascism. It’s not enough for you to blather on about how wrong I am. You must *show* how I’m wrong, or you’re just another denialist crank.

    Waiting patiently,

    Reply
  75. minimalist

    And in addition, what happened to many of those “KKK Dixiecrats,” Shammy? Like, oh I don’t know, Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond?

    Why did LBJ say “we have lost the South” upon signing the Civil Rights Act, a prediction immediately proven by Southern voters switching allegiance to the GOP? Do you know what Nixon’s Southern Strategy was?

    It helps to get your history from actual history books, rather than Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter.

    Reply
  76. LanceR

    What? Open an actual <shudder> book? Oh, the horror!

    Reply
  77. S.H.A.M. Scam Sam

    Damn it:

    I stick my head in, to see what Mark and Chris are talking about, and there you two still are, kicking that dead horse. (Gotta love it.):

    LanceR,

    “Shall we get into the comparison of the relative racist components of today’s political parties?”

    No – because I was parodying you guys.

    “I’m sure the Republicans would come out *ever* so much better in that comparison.”

    Under that definition, I’d agree with you, but, as a man who loves freedom, I’ll take the Republicans over the Dems anyday.

    “I also find it fascinating that you assume everyone who disagrees with you is a Democrat. Or cynical. Or stupid. Projection, anyone?”

    Nope. I’m hardly cynical. I’ve tried to coax you guys away from such a position many times, to no avail. And the more I tell you new agers aren’t stupid, the more you guys seem to insist they are, so who’s projecting? And, as far as the Dem charge, I don’t see anyone here attacking the Dems the way you do the Reps, so, as Steve Martin says: EX-CUUUSE MEEEE!!!

    Mini-mind,

    “What happened to many of those “KKK Dixiecrats,” Shammy? Like, oh I don’t know, Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond?”

    They produced stupid black kids who won’t stay out of our business – like Al Sharpton.

    “Why did LBJ say “we have lost the South” upon signing the Civil Rights Act, a prediction immediately proven by Southern voters switching allegiance to the GOP? Do you know what Nixon’s Southern Strategy was?”

    Because Americans don’t like hand-outs (they like a good fight) and Nixon’s Southern Strategy was ‘a winner’. (Both hands in the air, peace signs, head down and glowering)

    “It helps to get your history from actual history books, rather than Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter.”

    Naw, they’re funnier than books – or you.

    “What? Open an actual book? Oh, the horror!”

    See what I mean? (Lame-O)

    You guys can go back to your horse now,…

    Reply

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