Vox Popoli

The Evangelical Outpost highlights a telling confession:

In a tribute to Hunter S. Thompson, “Kos” Zuniga makes a rather candid admission:
“One of my dirty little secrets — I read very few books. In fact, the only time I read books is when I’m traveling, at the airport and on a plane. There are only two authors I have ever gone out of my way to read everything they’ve written — Hunter S. Thompson and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.”

Can anyone really say they are surprised by this revelation? Imagine that. The most overrated, largely unread, and inconsequential blogger’s favorite authors are two of the most overrated, largely unread, and inconsequential writers of American letters.

I’ve always found it very amusing that so many leftists, who often consider themselves highly intelligent and intellectual, are so poorly read. It doesn’t surprise me at all that The Daily Kos is a irregular reader on the Grisham-King-Clancy level, as most people are. There’s nothing wrong with it, except that’s a very strange foundation from which to assert intellectual elitism.

No doubt there will be some cries of “good riddance” and tears of fear for the future with the departure of Randy Moss. While it’s far too soon to have any idea of whether this will be a case of “addition by subtraction” or not, it would be churlish indeed to fail to express my appreciation for being able to enjoy seven years of often spectacular, always entertaining playmaking.

Even though it didn’t end with the Super Bowl victory that has long eluded those of us who are porphyrogenitus, 1998 was the most magical of seasons. It was our first year living down south in a delightful little place on the beach, and spending Sundays at the sports bar with total strangers who happened to be die-hard Vikings fans was almost as fun, in its own way, as waving the sword and sounding the horn with the guys. And even as a number-three receiver wearing 18, Randy Moss was a huge part of that season.

It wasn’t just that Moss was so spectacular, but he brought a dangerous sense of explosiveness that pervaded the entire offense. The three-headed receiving attack was fantastic; I particularly remember the game against Tampa Bay that was their only regular-season loss that year. Randall Cunningham hit Jake Reed for a 49-yard TD bomb that was nullified by the oft-heard “false start on number 73 on the offense”, which is to say, Todd Steussie. On the very next play, Cunningham hit Reed for a 54-yard TD running precisely the same fly pattern as before. You couldn’t stop them, only Denny Green could contain them.

What was breathtaking about Randy Moss was the way that the entire Metrodome would suddenly fall silent when he went deep and the ball was in the air. The stadium would then erupt in a thunderous roar as the ball approached, and most of the time, he brought it in. Other than Jerry Rice, I’ve never seen a receiver who was capable of single-handedly striking such fear into a defense.

But football is the ultimate team sport. The Vikings learned that they can win without Randy’s involvement, and after seven years they have quite reasonably concluded that the team as it is currently constituted will not be winning Super Bowls with him. Nate Burleson and Kelly Campbell on are the verge of breaking out; the addition of a third receiver in free agency would allow the Vikings to spend two first-rounders on selecting defensive players to play with Napoleon Harris, their new linebacker.

I’ll miss the occasional antics, the good-natured war with the Packer fans and seeing defensive backs backing up ten yards off the line of scrimmage. And I certainly wish Randy Moss all the best in Oakland as Al Davis attempts to revive the legacy of Daryl Lamonica and old school Raidess football. In summary, one can only say: thank you for the funky time, Mr. Moss.

Don Banks writes on SI:

Tennessee: Now that the Super Bowl window of opportunity has slammed shut for this particular Tennessee team — which was decimated by the news this week that six of its premier players would be cap cuts — the franchise faces a full-blown rebuilding project for the first time since leaving Houston. With the Titans expected to have little to no profile in free agency, getting the draft right will be more important than ever.

I seem to recall writing something similar… in what, week three?

Il bello Vittorio non ha letto la storia in fondo:

what about Greek alliance at Maratona? And the European one at Lepanto?

What alliance at Marathon? The Lacedaemonians (Spartans) didn’t show up until after the fighting was done and while the battle was of tremendous historical significance, given the likelihood that the Persians would have swept away both the city-states of Greece as well as the young Roman Republic, (established only 19 years before), the Greek forces were almost entirely Athenian. Only the city-state of Plataea, (near Thebes), sent any forces to the aid of Miltiades, the Athenian commander. They numbered 1,000 men, thus representing around nine percent of the Greek forces. The West does owe them a great debt, however, as Creasy presumes their arrival to have greatly lifted the spirits of the outnumbered Athenians.

One might think to make a better case for Lepanto, given that a genuine alliance was involved, but the fact that the Ottomans were able to repair their fleet and reassert their naval supremacy within six months makes it of questionable historical import. Nor was the Holy League a historically daunting alliance militarily; the tendency of its members to regularly break off and war on each other would alone be enough to disqualify it.

Now, if Vittorio wants to pay me back by correcting my Italian, I’ll deserve it.

While I don’t always agree with Paul Craig Roberts, I do suspect that his condemnation of conservative media whores may prove prescient. When conservatives finally figure out Bush’s true globalist colors and realize that much of the so-called conservative media is in fact indistinguishable from big government Wilsonian Democrats, they will either flee from the Republican party or there will be a decades-long interparty political war that will see the neocons return to the Democratic fold.

The conservative media will never recover from its role as Chief Sycophant for the Bush administration. Journalists who demanded that Clinton be held accountable for a minor sex scandal (Monica Lewinsky) and a minor financial scandal (Whitewater) now serve as apologists and propagandists for the Bush administration’s major war scandals….

Conservative journalists and Republican politicians not only lie through their teeth, but also seek to destroy everyone who utters a word of dissent or truth. For example, Tom Frank of The New Republic (once considered to be part of the hated “liberal press”) recently expressed his thoughts in that unfortunate magazine. Frank wrote that dissenters from Bush’s gratuitous war should be beaten and even killed….

[From a previous column] The Bush administration is not establishing any democracies. It is starting a war that will last a generation. That is the neocon plan. They have put their intentions in writing just as Hitler did. It is no protection that their plan is detached from reality. Robespierre was detached from reality, and that did not stop him. So were Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. People with power in their hands who are detached from reality are the most dangerous people of all. The delusional quality of their rantings disarms people from taking them seriously: “Oh, they couldn’t mean that.” But they do.

One would think that the mere fact that The New Republic supports the Bush administration so strongly would give conservatives pause. But the word “liberal” was claimed by the Left two generations ago and I think we have witnessed the word “conservative” being subsumed by it as well. This is the inevitable result of compromise and the decision to pursue pragmatism instead of principle. Sure, you may win elections, but what is the use of winning elections when you govern precisely as your ideological enemies were governing fifty years ago? The modern pro-Bush “conservative Republican” is now almost ideologically indistinguishable from the pro-FDR “progressive Democrat”.

Perhaps people are fine with the president being a liar as long as he’s a Republican. There are numerous regulars here who have stated outright that they have no problem with him lying to the American people about his intentions in the Middle East. I don’t know why anyone would even doubt that President Bush lied in the lead-up to the current conflict and is continuing to lie, simply because every American president has demonstrably lied to the public about his martial intentions prior to every war but one dating back to the Spanish-American War. Lincoln, for all his faults, is the exception, as he was fairly forthright about his desire to keep the Union together by force.

Remember, when you read about the inevitable Republican electoral domination, that triumphalism often marks a peak of sorts. Reasons for the subsequent decline are often quite clear, but only in hindsight.

As for Ward Churchill, I don’t understand the outrage myself. I have no doubt that he’s a wild-eyed, intellectually dishonest leftist prone to telling ahistorical lies; he is a college professor after all. But mendacious leftists in academia are hardly news, I mean, didn’t Ben Shapiro ferret this out and explain it to a stunned American public in last year’s groundbreaking book, BRAINWASHED?

I hope Roberts is not correct but I am increasingly concerned that he might be. The prophets who warn of those who play the “order from chaos” are seldom heeded before it is too late.

From the Sports Guy’s chronicles:

The Sports Gal drives me to LAX and starts the token “Fight on the way to the airport,” as required in Rule 43B in the “Code Of Females” guidebook.

What is that about, anyhow? Can any of the women here explain this? The Perfect Aryan Male once asked me why none of his married friends ever leave the house, and I explained that I have yet to met the couple that can get it together to go somewhere without engaging in minor hostilities at some point along the way.

Before too long, it just becomes easier for the male half to stay home and fire up “Total War: Aliens vs. Vice City” while the female half watches “Survivor: Desperate Sex in the Real World of Idol American Housewives” or whatever the show di giorno happens to be. Adding children into the mix only adds to the potential for conflict, even if both parties could use a break from the pitter-patter of little feet, the thump of little bottoms hitting the floor and the full-throated cry of little lungs.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m quite happy to stay home attached to my electronic umbilical cord. /positive feedback/ The Borg Mother loves you, little one, she loves you the most of all…./end feedback/ But, like the Sports Guy, I do often wonder what it is about a car that seems to inspire such negativity in women.

TPAM should have been able to figure this one out on his own, though. I seem to recall the Bolivian Bombshell starting fights with him when picking him up at the airport. Needless to say, he was not inclined to discover whether marriage would solve this problem or worsen it.

By the way, this is appropos of nothing, but made me laugh out loud. From the same column:

10:35 a.m. — Just spent the last hour plowing through USA Today and the annual S.I. Swimsuit Issue, which has been diluted significantly by Maxim, FHM and everyone else. It used to be the seminal event of February for every guy between the ages of 13 and 35 … now it’s something that keeps your attention for about 12 minutes in an airport. How the mighty have fallen. Pretty soon, they’ll be giving us a Venus Williams photo spread.

10:36 a.m.– Wait a second …

Why doesn’t ESPN just give the keys to this man? Why? The people demand it!

You have to be kidding me! Only a few weeks after Maureen Dowd discovers that men don’t like bitter, controlling women, Michelle Malkin discovers that some teenagers think it’s cool to harm themselves. Were both these women locked in time warps for the last TWENTY years? Seriously, I’ve been in regular attendance at CGDC and I’ve been a syndicated columnist, and there’s absolutely no doubt that the op/ed writers, regardless of ideology, are far more clueless and socio-culturally out-of-it than the computer game developers.

Which brings up an interesting idea. Upon reflection, one realizes that Michelle Malkin is the conservative media’s Maureen Dowd. Both women leap from today’s hot item to tomorrow’s without pause, both are considered more attractive than they are, both are drama queens, and both often indulge in a breathless, Fox News Break writing style. True, Dowd is snarkier and less substantive, but then, she’s a left-liberal Democrat, so allowances must be made. So, if Malkin = Dowd, what other trans-ideological pairs fit together nicely?

I think Paul Krugman and Thomas Sowell are a good match, as both are economists, both are engaging writers whose text flows freely, and both are untroubled when their assertions prove unfounded. I’m far more sympathetic to Sowell, of course, and he’s far less hysterical than the Bearded Dwarf of Princeton, but the similarities are there beyond their chosen profession.

Molly Ivins and Doug Giles both abuse the language more than anyone on their respective sides, Ivins with her dreadful Texas cornponisms and Giles with his inability to resist a metaphor, no matter how cringe-inducing. I had to quit reading his most recent column because his “Taco Bell Grande-size rewards” stopped me in my tracks in the very first sentence. Giles writes like a dominatrix with a short-term memory lapse; he lays on the strokes without mercy until the reader suddenly realizes with horror that the whip-wielding maniac has forgotten the safe word again.

Ann Coulter and Eric Alterman are both successful without operating entirely within their respective media infrastructures. Alterman, for all that his premises are fatally flawed, at least attempts to build his case in a reasonable manner. Both are Hedgehogs in Berlin’s famous formulatio and both are focused on media influence, but the tragedy of Alterman is that his One Big Idea – the media being conservative – is completely wrong.

It took me a while to figure out with whom Jonah Goldberg matched up, until I realized that Frank Rich is a clown prince too, just an inadvertant one. Both men have no trouble whatsoever leaping in and opining on subjects of which they know nothing; the difference is that Goldberg knows this and sticks to a light-hearted approach that is entertaining even when there is no real substance there. Frank Rich, on the other hand, amuses by his very failure to realize his own cluelessness.

Ben Shapiro = Bob Herbert. Neither ever writes anything that one can remember five minutes later, yet both men’s work inexplicably appears all over the place. And Thomas Friedman, of course, is the Left’s George Will. The vast depth of experience and seemingly-effortless erudition revealed in their columns always promise to be informative so long as one’s eyes don’t glaze over before the 750-word mark.

Anyone else have any suggestions worthy of note?

ST wonders about NATO:

I heard a Bush snippet on the radio this morning talking about how NATO was the greatest alliance in the history of man. Of course my BS detector went off immediately, but I was curious if off the top of your head what you would think the greatest military alliances of all time would be?

It depends on how you define greatest. If you define it as a percentage of the total military power available on the planet, I think you’d have to go with the Allies of WWII. The Soviet Union and the USA were the two greatest powers, with Britain a solid number four behind Nazi Germany.

If, on the other hand, you are thinking of the historical significance of the alliance in terms of the long term effects of the foe it defeated, it would be hard to count out NATO given the global reach of Communism from 1950 to 1989. A serious candidate, however, would be the Roman-Visigothic alliance that defeated the Attila-led Hunnish forces at Chalons in 451. Had the Huns not been defeated, the entire history of the world would likely have been very different as the West’s Greco-Roman heritage would have been swept away by the pagan Asiatic heritage of the Huns.

It is interesting to note how each of these three alliances have largely consisted of nominally Christian nations combining defensively against a violent, bloodthirsty, pagan or secular expansionary force. This points to a larger historical truth; Christianity has tended to spread by largely peaceful means while other ideologies expand by force and violence.

I don’t think NATO was the greatest alliance in the history of Man, and its lack of a signature battle or even conflict will likely reduce its stature in the eyes of future historians, but Bush’s description is certainly a reasonable one given the bounds of political rhetoric.

This assumes, of course, that the fall of the Soviet Union is not mere masquerade, a theory which is looking less and less likely as time goes by, but cannot be entirely dismissed.

From the Washington Times:

TOP STORIES

Bush, Chirac tell Syria to leave Lebanon

End of story for Hunter Thompson

Group justified by report on Soviet POWs

Virginia Senate panel kills House prayer measure

The time is now to start on your taxes

That last one sure sounds more like an editorial than a news story on the front page of the business section, doesn’t it? But while the legacy media – and I include the Washington Times – may harbor pretensions of objectivity, they reveal their true character on a daily basis to those who bother to pay attention.

It probably shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that I am opposed to the Bush administration’s plan to reform Social Security, just as I am to the concept of school vouchers. Now, this is not to say that I support the existing Ponzi scheme anymore than I support the public schools, it’s just that the history of government reform teaches that such reforms are better described as expansions. The problem with both vouchers and the Bush administration’s proposed “privatization” of Social Security is that the reforms are designed to maintain government control over resources that are otherwise on the verge of escaping it via systematic breakdown.

The only true privatization of Social Security is its abolition. The clueless blatherings of those who simply dial back the clock and compare what they had to what a mythical investment in the Dow would have been fifty years ago proves nothing except that they do not understand how the stock market works. The fate of an individual stock cannot be compared to an index because all of the major indices are changed – the preferred term is “rebalanced” – regularly. The rise of the markets since the October 2002 low meant absolutely nothing to those holding Enron and WorldCom stock, for example.

Nor would investing in index-matching funds change anything. I’m not exactly sure how the concept of having trillions of dollars pegged to a much-smaller underlying basis of dynamic investment valuation would work out, but I have no doubt that massive scandals resulting in huge losses to investors would eventually be the result.

Finally, there is no money to be invested. The “trust fund” is nonexistent and has already been spent. The incoming funds are already allocated for spending and that money will come from somewhere, most likely the inflationary thin air from which the Federal Reserve daily spins our collective delusion. “Privatization” and school vouchers, like government-sponsored “free trade” are ships flying under false flags of freedom.