No Man Takes What's Mine!

When last we encountered a cinemization of an Ayn Rand tome, it was King Vidor, unheralded, uncredited director of the Kansas scenes in The Wizard of Oz (which should tell you something right there) turning The Fountainhead into 114 howling minutes of weirdness, with Gary Cooper throwing Patricia Neal on the bed and Robert Douglass as collectivist Ellsworth Toohey telling us all, "I play the stock market of the spirit and I sell short." Fuck. Yeah.

Now, evidently, Albert Ruddy of Godfather fame and Angelina Jolie [!!!!!!!!!] are going to get to work on Atlas Shrugged. One of the great appeals of libertarianism, for me anyway, has been its simplicity. Less is more. Do what you like. Don't hurt people. It's a political philosophy gloriously free of all the compensatory et ceteras of more "realistic" politicial ideologies, which is why I always found myself puzzled by the appeal of this crazy ex-Russian, who took a very basic (though incorrect) idea about A being A and blew it up into the longest series of whacky monologues since the Mahabharata. It's really a science fiction novel, Jules Verne with Capitalism! No hero in an Ayn Rand novel ever takes a shit or even possesses an anus so far as I can tell, and she was the last living human being to use the word slattern. Her women get shot full of more cum than a pre-AIDS bottom at a Castro gangbang, and yet they do not conceive.

Still, I hope the film gets made. I hope it does well. I hope, because so long as Angelina's lips still pout and hips still shake, there remains a gloriously silly future of virginal high school dorks masturbating furiously to the mantra, "Who is John Galt? I'm John Galt baby!"

Hat to Katherine Mangu-Ward at Reason.

Chanson de Martin

Every time The Singer Sewing Machine writes about the so-called peace process in the Middle East, I sense an undercurrent of genocidalism that you'd think would embarrass such an exemplar of self-proposed Jewish urbanity. If they're so fucking irredeemable, why not just shoot them all like dogs in the streets, eh Marty?

And will someone please tell Roland Peretz that the Moors already retreated?

Anal

Ygelsias writes that the war in Afghanistan was a mistake, even if it was grounded on firmer premises than the war in Iraq. And then he says:

Now, if a pollster ever calls me and asks "was the war in Afghanistan a mistake" I'll say "no" because I understand how these things are interpreted.

Here you see how false narratives become normative. Here too you see how a man who may be the singularly most astute liberal voice on American foreign policy would willfully misrepresent his true interpretation of events so as not to discredit the idea of foreign intervention. (That's a lot of reading into a hypothetical answer to a hypothetical poll, I know.) Don't take my word for it. Take his:

If by "the war in Afghanistan" we mean something like the general idea of a war aimed at deposing the Taliban leadership and killing or capturing key al-Qaeda figures then, no, the war wasn't a mistake. If, however, by "the war in Afghanistan" we mean the actually existing war in Afghanistan then it clearly does look like a mistake. After all, to a remarkable degree the administration managed not to accomplish its objectives. Most al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders survived, they continue to enjoy safe haven in portions of Afghanistan and Pakistan (albeit smaller portions than they once did), and for a couple of years now the Taliban has been successfully reasserting itself in its core areas while the Karzai government is failing to stabilize or control any substantial portion of the country.

Why don't I hear you making that argument about Iraq, killer? "If by 'war in Iraq' we mean something like the general idea of a war aimed at deposing Saddam Hussein, de-Baathifying the country, and securing any extant or potential nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons, then no, the war wasn't a mistake."

I don't hear that argument for two reasons. The first is that the magnitude of the catastrophe and human toll in Iraq is so much greater, and the second, related reason is that those reasonable goals for "the general idea" of Iraq have been shown as fictitious, unattainable, inconsequential, or as achieving the opposite of their desired effect. But I think Yglesias would agree that it's a hoary moral calculus to turn the task of naming disaster into an excercise in actuarialism: amortize this many deaths over this many months, or some such. As for any goals set out for our Afghani invasion, they too, have failed, if not in so spectacularly (and spectatorially) a manner as in Iraq. Nor were they ever really attainable in Afghanistan. We like to flatter ourselves and believe that we didn't suffer the Soviet fate there, but hell, that country had not yet begun to recover from handing that very fate to those very Soviets. It had gone toe-to-toe for a decade with the second most powerful nation in the world; it had consequently descended into nearly-failed-statedom; it had gone through internal conflict; the Taliban had achieved momentary dominance in large part because the imposition of order, no matter how repressive, often seems to beat the hell out of violent, post-war civil anarchy.

Into this much-weakened and battle-weary state we wandered, and in our hubris we believed that we were just that good, rather than they truer they were just that tired. The Afghanis, meanwhile, have been kicking ass and taking names for thousands of years. Hell, even Alexander had the good sense to marry into a tribe there, rather than bleed out his armies in the mountain passes. This, when Europeans were still painting themselves blue and worshipping twigs and breezes.

So to the question of the validity of the idea of fighting a war in Afghanistan to topple the Taliban and break up some training camps, I say that the only reason to support it is to keep an ever-slipping grip on the idea that there is an efficacious military solution to either the existence of repressive and/or anti-American governments or an efficacious military solution to the problem of stateless terrorist or insurgent activities. There may be military responses, but there are no solutions. The attacks of September 11, 2001--the apparrant casus belli for the Afghanistan invasion--were carried out by Saudis trained in mobile camps in a foreign country. That it occured in Afghanistan under a government that gave aid or shelter is really immaterial. There are any number of governments that would let any number of people do any number of things for the right kinds and amounts of kickbacks. The idea that deposing a government, bombing some encampments that--by video evidence at least--seem constructed entirely of canvas tents and jungle gyms, and propping up some marginally more friendly ethnic group as a new government serves materially to decrease either the capacity of non-state actors or to mitigate against their intentions is foolishness. And the inevitable outcome in Afghanistan, which we see clearly now, is that there will once again be internal strife until this or that group establishes dominance, or until several achieve equilibrium, and then everyone will go right on herding goats and growing poppy and firing off an occasional celebratory round or two on the old Kalishnikov. As it is, was, and ever shall be.

An American military is a mighty nice thing to have around just in case the Dominican Republic mounts a land invasion, or something. But armies are made for fighting wars with other armies, and while it is possible to conquer and rule (albeit decreasingly so), it isn't possible to conquer and set free. As we've seen. And will continue to see. It does not work. It cannot work.

So when Yglesias says that he would tell a pollster that the war in Afghanistan was or is good because he understands "how these things are interpreted," what he's really saying is that he isn't yet prepared to lend his voice to the small but growing choir singing that lovely old madrigal, "Foreign Interventions Won't Succeed on Their Own Terms, Let Alone on Honest Ones." He probably feels pity for whole miserable swaths of Central Asia or sub-Saharan Africa and believes that there is some military endeavor, limited in scope, that could help lift the yoke of suffering and oppression from these people's necks. He probably believes that if only smart liberals like himself were in charge, rather than the Tumbleweed Mafia currently fucking things up for us all, then such well-intentioned foreign adventures would have at least a modest chance to succeed, do good, lift up, open the gates of freedom, whatever. He's wrong on that count, and it's irrelevant anyway because smart liberals like himself aren't ever in charge. Crazy old reptiles like Kissinger, hyperfertile egomaniacal automatons like La Nan Pelosi, gaping bastards like Joe Lieberman, and stentorian drunks like Hairpiece Biden are the sorts of people representing sanity in the annals of politics. And if there's one thing to say about the annals of politics, it's that never has that double-N seemed like such a damnable impediment to the word we'd rather pronounce.

The Charge of the Lightweight Brigade

President Bush was at his best tonight: serious, detailed, and above all, resolute.

If I were Hugh Hewitt, I'd have written, "President Bush was the hotness tonight."

His first commenter disagreed:

Dear Mr. President,

I AM a supporter who has voted for you twice.

With all due respect, your speech SUCKED!

That must be this civility I keep hearing about. And this from a supporter. Everyone else over there just wants to get "medieval," a descriptor derived, so far as I can tell, exclusively from Ving Rhames turn as Marsellus Wallace in Pulp Fiction, which should give you a good line on the seriousness of that argument. Imagine President Ponyboy getting up in front of the nation and letting loose with a drawly: "I'm prepared to scour the Earth for that motherfucker. If Moqtada goes to Indo-China, I want a nigga hidin' in a bowl of rice ready to pop a cap in his ass."

Canon to the right of me! Canon to the left of me!

No: at present, I prefer not to make any change at all

Where are the Gordon Smith's in the Democratic Party? Where are the conviction politicians willing to spend political capital to lead a citizenry which has decided overwhelmingly that this war is crazy? Where are the institutions of media power with the courage to say the emperor has no cowboy boots, no jeans, no garments at all — just a hideous, stubborn smirk that is literally making this country ill and squandering our reputation around the globe?

There's Dennis Kucinich, and needless to say, he ain't gonna bring the boys back home. The above quote is from Terry Michael, via Nick Gillespie at Reason.

The Democrats were a lousy gang of piss-drinking submission fetishists when they were out of power, and now that they're in power, they still get off to the warm splash and the sexy feeling of the leather boot pressing down on the small of their back. In their most forceful moments, they manage only to imitate Bartleby the Scrivener: to every task the same response: "I would prefer not to." You can primally scream all you want, in other words, but in the end there is only one solution. Abandon them. Let the police drag the crazy bitches off. Watch them slowly starve to death, and be left forever wondering just what it was exactly that would cause such strangeness, such passive self-destruction in a man.

The Wheeeee! Generation

The President's accent was always an affectation, and as with any characterological affectation practiced for too long by a person too willing to believe his own press releases, it hardened into a tic, then followed a path of natural decline until, at the President's speech last night, it seemed to me for the first time that he has a true speech impediment, a tendency toward the sh sound where none exists, exacerbated by his proximity to sensitive microphones. Before I was beautiful, I had a trainwreck of a mouth in desperate need of orthodonture, and in the Inquisitional years of braces, retainers, and medieval headgear (thankfully worn only at night), I acquired a similar impediment as well, and had to work mightily and consciously to correct it until the metal finally came off my teeth. I'm not certain what this signifies in el Presidente, but I'm that certain it's nothing good.

As for the contents of the speech, I can only say that this ratfuck of a war looks more like Vietnam every day, not necessarily for conditions on the ground in Iraq, but for our perfectly predictable response of Escalate and Invade the Neighbors. That was precisely our strategy the last time we got bogged down in an unwinnable land war, and it will meet with precisely the same failure, if not the same particular failures. As for the Donkle majority, I give you the the wise words of J.S. Paine:

Does anybody remember, a couple of months ago, we were being told how important it was to the future of humankind for the Democrats to re-take control of Congress? Well, they did re-take it -- and the current Punch-and-Judy show on the Hill is leading up to conclusion that whoops, we spoke too soon, we need the White House too.

In fact, without the White House we are nothing. The unitary prez, like a Stuart king, can thwart the majority will of the people. A united Democratic nation, saddled with a divided gubmint, can be flummoxed at the whim of the executive.

The Donkle's party line at the moment has something to do with holding hearings and voting for non-binding resolutions to "show the president that he is isolated politically." Yeah, that'll help. This guy can't get within a hundred yards of a history book without hitchin' his britches and drawling a McArthurian "I shall return!" A note to Democrats: He's just not that into you. Or as a particularly narcissistic ex told me during the break-up of our very brief, late-college relationship: "This isn't all about you, you selfish little bitch, it's all about me!"

Fashion. Turn to the Left. Fashion.

The Gap sucks.

About a year ago, feeling tired of the show business grind and a little short on libertarian principles for working at a non-profit (and boy do they mean it), I was offered a position at American Eagle. Not a shopper myself, being an endless snob about such things, but they'd just topped $2 billion in sales, and they were offering a lot of money. So there I was. Third interview. Sitting in an office with the corporate recruitrix and the VP, Operations. This was to be my primer on company organization, strategic plans, and finances. It's a bad sign when they hand you the same gaudy stack of bullshit that they distribute as prospecti to their jackass shareholders and rubber-stamp board. "If you turn to page three . . ." The guy's office had no windows. The door to the hall was open. American Eagletrons clad in their enforced casual attire strolled by in goddamn flip-flops and cargo shorts. Now I like the casual office, and I'm a jeans man myself, but who wears cargo shorts that isn't playing frisbee on the quad at lunch. (True story: American Eagle employees . . . play frisbee on something very much resembling a quad at lunch.) This was all a terribly eye-glazing experience, but I did manage to absorb a little bit of information, and then Veep asked, "So . . .?" trailing delicately into the question mark. I told him as noncomittally as I could that their revenue numbers looked good but that they probably had too many stores, too much square footage, too much overhead, too many over-saturated markets in near suburbs of mid-sized cities. He nodded, then:

"That's why we've got this new concept."

It's called Martin + Osa, and as you can clearly see, it sucks balls the way I suck balls when they're attached to a nineteen-year-old gogo boy who wants a little oral before he'll give up the other side. It is, as best I can figure, an attempt to sell slightly nattified Land's End gear to the unfashionably fashionable junior associate lawyer and his PR manager wife, who live beyond their means in a loft not quite so many steps beyond Ikea as they imagine, the husband an experiment in pseudo-grungy metrosexual revanchism and the wife pretty. Just pretty. This is all wrapped in a crystalline gauze of post-material environmentalist hack chic, with skis and dogs and mountains and a 2-year-old Beemer and "Everyday Life Adventures" and, lord knows, a host of other post-yuppie lifestyle-but-not crapola spun up for people who once picked up an issue of Nylon, once went to Vail, and otherwise do indeed just shop at the mall and enjoy a post-shopping dinner of ratty Lo Mein at P.F. Chang.

A nightmare beyond all nightmares, and doomed to failure, because this person does not, in fact, exist. This couple does not, in fact, exist.

And that, my friends, is the sad tale of the second tier fashion industry. It's doomed to failure because taste is fickle, affluent consumers don't want it, kids cna't afford it, and running 150 retail stores costs too much fucking money. They Gap and Banana Republic will not recover. American Eagle will soon be on the decline. Americna Apparel has a shelf-life as long as Williamsburg hipsterism, which means that it's got another year or two.

And that's why it's a goddamn shame about the department stores.

Hey Tigger! STF!

My favorite hooker on the corner, John Podhoretz, makes a funny:

Want a little tough truth with your morning coffee? McCain can do this, and Rudy can do that, and Romney can do the other thing. But if tonight's speech doesn't herald the beginning of a serious turnaround in Iraq that is plain to see by spring of next year, the Risen Christ could be the Republican nominee in 2008 and He wouldn't be able to win against Al Sharpton.

Translated into the common speech from Republicanese, the Pod is explaining to his Republican cohorts that unless the dauphin can pull a serious fucking rabbit from his hat, Diamond J himself would get stomped all over Red America by a nigger with the hair of a backup vocalist for Otis Day and the Knights. Fine. Funny.

There's a more substantive point lurking there as well, which is that you can throw men overboard all day, but if the hole in your boat is big enough, you bitches are going to sink.

Here, however, is the thing: It was not George W. Bush alone who thrust the American military phallus into the Mesopotamian jaws of death. John Podhoretz, for one, spent several years wandering through the Hundred-Acre Woods sucking on any pot of honey handed to him, and now his tummy hurts? Too bad, brother. Fair-weather fandom is every man's prerogative, but at the end of the season, if your team still sucks, your team still sucks.

Hannitized!

Oh. Jesus. Read this. Now.

Via Dave Weigel.

Who. What. Where. When. Why. How.

"I am angry," biology teacher Ahmed Weli Mohamed, 37, said in a telephone interview. "I am very, very angry. Even if there are terrorists, there are maybe two or three people, but hundreds are killed. . . . Americans don't respect us as human."

That's from the Post account. The Times tells more or less the same story. There are better sources out there in the international press, but the semi-official US press is so good at replicating the fog of semi-official confusion over what, precisely, happened, over to whom it happened, over where, when, why, and how it happened.

Frankly I thought we'd worn out the "al-Qaeda training camp" excuse several years ago. Well, an oldie but a goodie, as the saying goes. The narrative that emerges to me from the clearing smoke is that someone in the so-called transitional government ("internationally recognized!") fed bogus info to some American military liason, who, in that inimitable American style, had no means of independently verifying this information, but who trusted it implicitly because it accorded with all the York Harding he's been reading. So he called in the airstrikes, which in all likelihood blew up nothing more or less than a village sympathetic to the Islamic courts, or perhaps just a political rival among the factional warlords. Civilians were killed. "Anti-Americanism" spikes. The dust clears. And suddenly, the United States government can't quite remember what was actionable about the intelligence, let alone intelligent about the action. The Post:

Two days after the United States launched an airstrike against alleged al-Qaeda terrorists in southern Somalia, U.S. officials declined yesterday to provide details of who, or what, was hit.

In Mogadishu, the Somali capital, reports circulated that as many as 50 people, many of them civilians, were killed in the attack by a U.S. Air Force AC-130 gunship. U.S. officials said they are fairly certain that at least one targeted individual was hit; they said they had no information about civilian deaths in the strike along the Kenyan border.

As is the case in Iraq, where our principle function is to serve in a usefully idiotic capacity as enablers of the currently--but not for long!--ascendent sect, it seems that in Somalia also we've become hit men in a conflict whose indigenous roots we totally fail to understand or even acknowledge. It's all Pro-West vs. Islam to us, all true kings and usurpers, as if geopolitics can finally be understood as nothing more or less than a particularly vicious soccer match played between the opposing camps of Richard III.

The War Nerd gives a good primer on the real deal in Somalia and Ethiopia.

"Commitment to a progressive vision of government includes the belief that governments should have the tools to do the things they need to do."

Robert Farley, who is not fond of libertarians, avers:

I just don't care for the argument that we ought to structure our military around the fear that a government will use it unwisely rather than around a careful analysis of national values and interest. As an empirical question, I'm not sure there are any good examples of "wagging" in the sense that having military capabilities caused a state to eschew a better diplomatic option in anything but the most obvious sense. The development of military capabilities follows aggressive intent, not the other way around.

Here, I think, is your basic failure of the liberal political imagination, not to mention a concise primer on why this animal, this liberaltarianism, will never, ever work. Aside from the fact that you would be terribly hard-pressed to find a single example of our government using the military based "around a careful analysis of national values and interest" in the last sixty bloody years, which is a pretty titanic fact to set aside even for argument's sake, there's a broader philosophical failure here. That is the failure to understand that the entire American republican experiment was predicated upon a firm conviction that any and all governments in any and all capacities will act unwisely, corruptly, tyrannically, and venally the majority of the time; that it is the inherent nature of governments to abuse those powers granted to them; that the more power granted to the government, the greater the potential for abuse; and that in order to forestall the inevitable outcome of abuses, government had to be divided against itself.

As for the sentences that follow: they engage a familiar chicken-and-egg sort of casuistry, and don't bother to address the more fundamental issue that nations with powerful militaries like to wage war, and whether desire precedes capacity or capacity precedes desire is pretty irrelevant. Even were it true (and I'm wholly unconvinced) that aggressive intentions are the catalysts for military development, then there would really be only one possibe conclusion: that the United States of America is the craziest, most aggressive, most warlike, most vicious motherfucking empire in the whole history of vicious motherfucking empires on this vicious motherfucking earth. That's not necessarily a proposition I'd argue with, by the way, but it certaily sits at odds with the idea that America's historical use of its vast military powers has been marked by judicious consideration--not even if all we're considering is that hoary old euphemism, "national interest." When we libertarian types titter mordantly about managerial liberal types, this is the sort of thing we have in mind. Here is a pwoggy Donkle whose "vision of government includes the belief that governments should have the tools to do the things they need to do," by which he presumably means something other than prosecute insanely aggressive wars against foreigners for incoherent reasons and uncertain goals. Yet in his zeal to empower government to make whites and blacks and women and men and fags and straights munch hay together like the Kingdom Come of the Meshiach, he isn't willing to draw the obvious cautionary conclusions about massive standing armies: that they are not good and do not do good.

We Didn't Call 9-1-1 Because We Were Deliberating

Over at the House of Just BeKos, Senator Ted Kennedy is on his "way to the National Press Club in Washington in a few minutes to speak about a new bill. If passed, it will prohibit escalation in Iraq without express Congressional approval of a plan and budget." No. Really.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

Section 1. Prohibition on use of funds for escalation of United States forces in Iraq.

Notwithstanding any other provision of law, no Federal funds may be obligated or expended by the United States Government to increase the number of United States forces in Iraq above the level for such forces which existed as of January 1, 2007, without a specific authorization of Congress by law for such an increase.

That's tellin' 'em!

Hey. Hey! Look. Look over there. Look there! Look at Somalia. Al Qaeda! Look! Turn around!

And thus does the playground foreign policy continue.

Those Paper Cuts Are Gonna Burn!

"I have the book on my file. I'll take it to bed with me tonight."

That's Marty Peretz talking about "Fouad Ajami's concise essay about Pervez Musharraf's memoir," a concise essay that, though purportedly a book review, doesn't really mention the book under review at all. Marty, nevertheless, plans to ply the tome with chocolates and brandy before taking her tenderly yet forcefully in what I can only imagine as a vast, four-poster bed swaddled in a hundred yards of blood-red velvet, lit by candles, attended by the siren strains of the US Marine Corps band.

Marty spends the bulk of his post, however, talking about how much old orators rocked and how much new ones suck. (Also, there is a difference between black people and niggers Gwendolyn Books and Fabolus.) Why, forsooth?

One difference is that in the early republic up through the mid-twentieth century, most of our public personages had the stern eloquence of the Saint James version in their heads. Now almost no one does.

Martin is a Jew (and don't you forget it!), but nonetheless, if you're going to laud the sternly eloquent, ecclesiastical roots of good modern oration, you might begin by recalling that it is not the Saint James, but the King James, as in the King James Bible, the KJV, the AV, etc. Stern, eloquent, and inaccurate--values surely dear to the heart of a Peretz, if only a Peretz knew their actual origins.

If you're going to make stentorian pronouncements involving transparent digs at the low-educated Clinton, these are the sorts of things you really ought to get right.

Pwogwesh

La Nan and Company now demand that the dauphin split the budget for the war in a manner most advantageous to the Donkle: the regular-supplemental war budget, and a surge budget. Their saavy plan is to reject the latter, seeing as how they're the not-quite-so-much-War Party, while not taking the "irresponsible" step of defunding the rest of the Iraqi enterprise "while troops are still in harm's way." I imagine they're having a good chuckle over that one in the rec room at White House West. Not even George W. Bush is dumb enough to fall for that sort of thing. We're going to escalate, and the Donkle, as is his (her?) habit, will grumble and go along.

But first the "100-hour" plan--student loans and minimum wage and medicare drug prices and such. It's an inauspicious start, to say the least, for the congress referred to by the sisters over at the FireDogLake nunnery as the "Fightin' 110th," to guarantee that burger flippers will make $7.25 and hour before they get around to the war we've still got on.

As Dennis Perrin wrote at Red State Son:

[I]t is telling that it takes a graphic like Red State's to push libs into confessing their real politics, which in many instances honors the same symbols while employing similar "patriotic" rhetoric.

Consider that sentence every time a Democrat groans, "Hey, we're real Americans too!" Consider it every time you hear the now-familiar Democratic contention that the root problem of our failure in war is an absence of "shared sacrifice," as if the dauphin sending his daughters into combat and asking the nation to save metal and grow victory gardens and acquiesce to ration stamps would somehow uplift our imperialism and stamp it with a Rooseveltian moral imprimateur.

You can see the image Perrin is talking about by following that link to his site. All you really need to know is that it conflates Democrats, the flight from Vietnam, and Communism! And Dems and Pwogs and Donkle all alike know one thing for sure: they ain't commies. Since Perrin and I share equal disdain for La Cage aux FireDogs, let me seriously recommend you read the post there entitled Why I'm a Liberal. It's by some kind of lapsed Catholic who sees in The Party of Acquiescence a struggle for the ideals of the Beatitudes. That would be laughable enough were it not for a shot across the bow of the much-hated establishment media, complete with a paraphrase of Chomsky!

To be honest, though I'm glad to know Nancy Pelosi is on Face the Nation this morning (yay, Speaker Pelosi!), I don't care a lot about Monsignor Tim Russert or his colleagues on the gasbag circuit. They try, continually, to manufacture consent and tell us What It Means To Have Values, but I don't buy it. I know what it means to have values, and it has nothing to do with behaving in a civil fashion while the wealthy and well connected take advantage of the marginalized and disenfrachised.

I suspect that ol' Noam would get a giggle out of that: a spirited defense of a corporate-mainstream political party against the depredations of a corporate-entertainment media entity presented as a subversion of . . . ah, hell. It's ridiculous, but not as ridiculous as the comments.

At comment 17, Perris says:

and the constitution . . . man, I love that document . . . it’s as if some aliens wrote it, it seems timeless, it seems like the authors were at times writing against themselves for the good of the country and her future.

Because nothing says "White land owners 'writing againts themselves' and their possession of human chattel" like the 3/5 clause. The Framers deserve their hossanahs, certainly, but let us speak of men with the knowledge that they were men. The silliness continues, and reaches its retarded apotheosis at comment 65, where Carmen writes:

I learned liberal values in Sunday School. I learned about social injustice in grade school after becoming intrigued by the underground railroad and the struggle of “colored people” to rise above being slaves. The stories of Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglas and Washington Carver filled me with anger at our country and a burning sense of the hypocrisy of our leaders.

The 60’s fed that sense of injustice and Martin Luther King, Jr. gave eloquent voice to the Christian responsibility to be politically active to fight against the institutionalized prejudice. I was inspired by MLK, the epitome of a true Christian, who was inspired by God and the suffering of his people to fight for truth and justice.

I’m an Episcopalian. There are many Repub’s in my church and over the years, I’ve been able to challenge many of their political views by referal to biblical passages. And, I have helped bring some to the light, to vote democratic for the first time in their lives.

I also understand Gandhi’s comment: I like your Jesus, I don’t care for your Christians. Jesus was a liberal and would be crucified again today.

Learning "liberal values" in Episcopalian Sunday School is probably all you need to know about the content of this sort of ersatz "progressivism," but it's hard to resist the raising of King and Ghandi (!) as exemplars of Liberalism! King advocated something he called Christian Socialism--unabashedly, I might add--and gave Johnson ulcers about uppity niggers and Vietnam. Ghandi's politics make less sense in the already nonsensical Western continuum, but suffice to say that I hardly see the values of asceticism, renunciation, and celibacy as Democratic Party values, nor yet nonviolence and nonresistance from the "Fightin' Dems" and "Fightin' 110th" as they whoop it up over a Strong Defense and better Homeland Security in order not to be accused of weakness or femininity.

My Libertarian Paradise™ doesn't much feature united Workers of the World. But insofar as dominant ideas need smashing before any arise in their place, I'll align myself with Dennis Perrin and Stop Me Before I Vote Again and other leftie howlers and agitators any day. They, after all, recognize the collossal fraud perpetrated by the parties and perpetuated by the seemingly endless squad of Donkle enablers, who in the reptilian stems of their brains oppose the bloody monster of the American bigfoot as it bashes up the globe, but who persist against all sense and evidence to lead the pep rally for a party of imperial nutjobs. Since the specter of Ghandi has been raised, let us note that for a couple of centuries British liberals also supported empire, thinking only that it would be better to coopt the sympathies of dusky elites and let them repress the natives that they better understood. Better them as proxies for British "troops in harm's way." Until the people who say they oppose the war stop propping up those who don't, their opposition to the war is just a synonym for support, isn't it?

And Uncle Tom Shall Go Free

My uncle's bar is pretty mixed racially for a pretty white town like Pittsburgh, and there is one older black gentleman by the name of Hollis who drinks rum and coke for hours every day--he's retired and I gather his wife is a bit of a nag--and delivers bits of hilariously inappropriate sagacity to the younger generation of black guys who also frequent the bar. My particular favorite, and I am not making this up, was his exhortation to "stop talking all that shit on the white man."

The white man was the best thing that ever happened to the black man. He brought us over here for free, and he gave us jobs.

That's a Pryor-like master of something or other, if you ask me.

In any case, I hadn't thought of that story in some time, but I recalled it when reading of the President's plan to turn Iraq into a nation of school-painting garbage men or some such this morning. That's the economic component of our escalation. I guess it's the corrollary of Colin Powell's long-passed "Pottery Barn Rule." You break it, you buy it, but the poor motherfuckers who work there for seven bucks an hour still have to clean it up while your drunk ass stumbles toward the next display case.