Author: VD

Dust in the Light points out the inevitable dishonesty in the Republican drag queen’s latest hissy fit: In short, Sullivan is now tarring the Cornerites with the ridiculous equivalence that he, himself, introduced to the issue.

What else is new? Andrew Sullivan chose to render himself irrelevant some time ago, when he wrote that a right to privacy trumps conflict of interest when it comes to ethical journalism. Well, isn’t that interesting! Once my new company rolls out, I’ll be sure to write glowing reviews of it without telling anyone to whom it belongs and be comfortable in the knowledge that Mr. Sullivan considers me a paragon of journalistic ethics. After all, what’s a few bucks compared to your life? I’m ethical, you’re ethical, we’re all ethical relativists now.

On April 22, 2002, I wrote: [Sullivan], like Parkinsons’ victim Michael Kinsley, has taken the astounding position that suffering from a life-threatening illness grants him the right to argue for political action of direct and vital benefit to him without considering it evidence of bias or a conflict of interest. He even writes of Kinsley: “the right to privacy – especially about medical matters – would have and should have trumped that conflict of interest as a factor in ethical journalism.”

I’ve paid zero attention to Mr. Sullivan ever since. He’s a bright guy and not completely clueless, but I simply have too much contempt for his shameless intellectual dishonesty. And since that time, various blogosphere discussions of his wild Clintonian spinning on queer nuptuals would seem to indicate that I was quite right to tune him out. Everyone is wrong, from time to time, but to throw logic and truth out the window every time it violates your personal inclinations is just gauche.

Joseph Farah points out: symbolism is a two-way street. And when a symbolic partner decides to leave the coalition under pressure, that symbolism is more destructive than its original commitment was constructive.

Jonah Goldberg said the same thing yesterday, but it’s an important point worth repeating, ad nauseam, until the nation understands that multilateral is just another word for surrender.

Two 8-year-old boys and an 11-year-old schoolmate were arrested after they buried a loaded handgun in a playground sandbox and plotted to shoot and stab a third-grade girl during recess, authorities said Thursday. Sheriff Tim Fulton said the boys told investigators they intended to harm the young girl because she had teased two of them. The plot was uncovered Wednesday morning when another student alerted school officials, said Michael Hayworth, the Rosebud County attorney. The gun, a .22-caliber revolver, had two bullets in it, Hayworth said. School Superintendent Dave Shreeve said a box of bullets also was found nearby.

If only these children had attended a public school, where they would have been properly socialized and learned how to relate to other children….

The Original Cyberpunk observes: I’ve run into this so often lately that I’m beginning to call it the Minneapolis Mindset. It works like this: talk to someone from Minneapolis about the Iraq war, and they’ll tell you the war was completely unnecessary and we should have given the economic sanctions and UN inspections more time to work. Talk to them about terrorism, and they’ll tell you that the answer is not more violence but understanding and removing the root (social) causes of terrorism. Talk to them about _concealed carry_, and suddenly they’re in an absolute and unreasoning state of panic and babbling on about shootouts in the streets.

Ergo, my question: What kind of cognitive dissonance is required to believe that proven homicidal dictators and mass-murdering terrorists will become reasonable people if given half a chance, while simultaneously believing that your friends, relatives, and neighbors, whom you’ve known all your life, will become bloodthirsty killers if given half a chance?

The answer is simple. Perceived personal security trumps all. They believe – wrongly – that their personal security will be enhanced by leaving totalitarian murderers free to amuse themselves by butchering their foreign victims while fearing their government doing anything that might bring them, personally, to the attention of said murderers. This may be true in the short term, it is definitely false in the long term. They also believe – again wrongly – that concealed carry will likely lead to shootouts and whatnot in their immediate vicinity, and therefore must be prevented as they imagine it could put them about personal risk. It’s all about the vicinity. If the terrorists ever go to work in their vicinity, they will, of course, scream for precisely the very sort of thing that they’re opposing so vehemently now. The ME generation strikes again.

You don’t have to have a graduate degree to think like this, but it helps. It’s certainly not logic that anyone comes by honestly. I heard a CEO say the other day that if everything else is pretty equal, he’ll always hire the guy without the degree. His words, as I recall them: “I don’t know what they’re learning in college these days, but a lot of these guys with degrees are useless when it comes to basic sales and marketing, doing the real work.”

It is, after all, the start of March Madness. But the news of the possible capture of a big bad was too ironic to ignore, given the nature of the immediately previous post. Not that I consider it to have been causal, you understand. But I’m coming up for air this afternoon, so I’ll post a bit more later.

I heard back from Mr. Farah himself on next week’s column, he rather liked what is a somewhat experimental piece. I’ll be interested to see what you all make of it. Bane, in particular, will no doubt have a comment or two to share with us.

From Debka: Bin Laden’s “success” owes less to his superior craft than to the laxness of US and European counter-terror authorities. The names and descriptions of all the members of the Moroccan network which perpetrated the worst terrorist outrage since 9/11 were in their possession, handed over by Ramzi bin al Shaiba after he reached US custody in September 2002. All that time, none of the Moroccan terrorists named were detained, although their network is directly controlled by bin Laden himself and despite the fact that they lived mostly in Madrid or Tangiers. This intelligence failure is further magnified by the ease with which the terrorists were able to carry out their attack. They had no need of aircraft, suicide bombers, wads of cash or even box-cutters – only very simply to buy Spanish-manufactured explosives, stuff them into ten ordinary bags and leave them on the targeted trains.

This sort of thing doesn’t do anything but lend credence to Umberto Eco’s old notion – written in the day of the Red Brigades – that the world governments are not interested in fighting terrorists, but in maintaining a symbiotic relationship with them in order to excuse their continued infringement of individual rights and liberties. Is it true in this case? Did the US intentionally leave the Moroccan terrorist network operational? I’m not in a position to know, but it cannot be denied that Israel has left Arafat and Sheik Ahmed Yassin of Hamas untouched for decades despite both men waging a violent war against them. Given those facts, it is conceivable that the Bush administration is leaving bin Laden free to wage war against America for purposes of its own. It’s an ugly thought, to be sure, and I certainly hope it is not the case, but it is not entirely impossible.

One thing I have come to appreciate over the years is that the more I learn, the more I find that for all my natural skepticism with regards to what everyone “knows”, I am not anywhere nearly cynical enough.

JN writes: Please help me out with the definition of, omniderigence. As best I can determine you are the only one on the web using this word, and I can’t find it in the Oxford English Dictionary.

I suppose it would be hard to find in the OED, considering that I simply made it up. I am an inveterate user of words that don’t necessarily exist, although not on the Douglas Adams level. Speaking of which, was anyone else tremendously disappointed with The Meaning of Liff? I just didn’t find the words to be very amusing.

Anyhow, I was simply searching for a word which would describe the concept of an all-acting God, a puppet master, of the sort envisioned by some Christians – relax, Manatee, I’m not reopening THAT debate – who conflate being all-knowing and all-powerful with being all-controlling in the active sense. An omniderigent deity is one who not only knows the number of hairs on your head, but actually pulls them out, one by one, or alternatively, turns each of them grey at his specific command. An omniderigent deity is one who not only comes up with a plan for your life, but forces you to walk every step of it. I couldn’t find such a word, although one may exist, so I invented this from the Latin root of the verb “to guide”.

Regardless of what you believe.

Jonah Goldberg shuts down his brain and writes: Supporters of the war say the reason al-Qaida is trying – and, alas, succeeding – to tear apart the coalition is that they cannot afford to see democracy win in Iraq. A stable and prospering Iraq will transform the Middle East, over time, into a region where the bloody fanaticism of bin Laden has no appeal.

Jonah’s column is otherwise fine, if somewhat limited to pointing out the obvious, but this is just a horrible howler of logic. The battle is not between democracy and anti-democracy fanatics in Iraq. The fanatics actually want democracy in Iraq, for the same reason they wanted it in Algeria. They will win any fair and open elections. Bremer has been very forthright about the fact that the Coalition occupation will not permit a democratic constitution – not that I support such a thing either – so to portray the battle as being one over democracy isn’t just ignorant, it’s stupid.

And, of course, neither the US nor its allies are democracies in the first place. Sure, you can argue that it’s just semantics, in which case I can argue that you’re a fish. Someday, I’d like to see every political pundit in America write out their definition of democracy. I think in many cases, it means something like “country with mostly white people that doesn’t make me feel uncomfortable.”

From Drudge: Former Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean said yesterday that President Bush’s decision to send troops to Iraq appears to have contributed to the bombing deaths of 201 people in Spain. A growing international investigation is focusing on Islamic militants possibly linked to Al Qaeda as those responsible for the Madrid train bombings on Thursday. European intelligence agencies are trying to identify a purported Al Qaeda operative who claimed in a videotape that the group carried out the bombings to punish Spain for backing the US-led war in Iraq. Dean referred to the videotape when asked whether he was linking US troops in Iraq to the deaths in Spain. “That was what they said in the tape,” Dean said. “They made that connection, I’m simply repeating it.”

So, maybe those Democratic party elders who sabotaged the Dean campaign aren’t complete idiots. I’m just a little disappointed that everyone’s favorite nutcase politico didn’t try to also work in a little blame for expelling Boabdil from Granada in 1492. I mean, the tape alluded to that too. And then there’s the small fact that Dean and the lunatic American Left has been insisting for months that the multi-nation Coalition is unilateral, and that there is no connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq. The sad thing about Dean not winning the nomination is that we’re not being treated to these sort of comments on a nightly basis. He doesn’t even try to make sense. But we’ll be forever grateful for that wonderful battle cry. YEEEAAAAGGH!

I wasn’t even aware that the American president commanded deployment of Spanish troops. Well, you learn something new every day.

John Whitehead writes: Clearly, sex trafficking should demand as much, if not more, attention than drug trafficking and other similar crimes. For whatever reason, it does not.

The answer is pretty simple. Cracking down on sex slavery doesn’t give the federal government an excuse to take rights and liberties away from law-abiding citizens. Furthermore, there’s no money in it for the police; they have no interest in seizing a crack house, it’s the mansion with a pair of pot plants in it or the Mercedes with a bag of coke that they want to auction off.