Pot-au-feu

You can replace every mention of "Guantanamo" in Michael Gerson's article with "Bergen-Belsen" and you'll get a general sense of the type of individual its author actually is.

As a genre, these sorts of evil-but-necessary apologia are as predictable as the failure of the Pittsburgh municipal government to clear the PJ McArdle Roadway after snow and just as vexing. Now, I am not going to play the liberal hand-wringing game, bemoaning the betrayal of "our" values. The problem posed by Guantanamo and its even eviler brethren around the world is not that it is un-American, but that it is inhuman.

I am no great believer in natural law. The idea of a core of transcendent rights whose basic forms just so happen to correspond to the conventions of Western legal traditions strikes me as not only philosophically dubious, but essentially silly. And yet insofar as individual human consciousness seems to exist, conscience seems to dictate that we respect it. I admit this is not the most rigorous conceptualizing of the inviolability of the individual, but it strikes me as the most compelling despite its limitations. Only extraordinary necessity gives a human community the right to violate the autonomy of another human being, and the more intense the violation, the more extraordinary the required necessity. Gerson and his ilk argue that that is precisely the ethical calculation at play in their defenses of the concentration camps, but their arguments are self-refuting. How many times does Gerson mention "symbolism" and "symbols" in these little missives? "Symbolism, it turns out, can be costly, even dangerous." It's a statement entirely lacking in content. It doesn't mean anything. So . . . we don't want to send a symbol, because it is dangerous, because terrorists understand symbols, so we must symbolically maintain a different sort of symbol, which we cannot undo, for in the undoing is the dangerous kind of symbolism . . . The mind reels, the brain relents. This shit makes tautology look like the proof of the Poincaré conjecture. It's the opposite of moral reasoning. It's too stupid to be ruthless and too ruthless to be sentimental. It's mush, the soft and flavorless end of an empire turning into a boiled chicken.

Thomas Friedman . . .

is a khat.

Hagiography By Any Other Name Is Still A Hag

La Digs:

[Murtha] was a complicated political figure, but he will be remembered for something very brave: it's impossible to overestimate how important it was to have this conservative, ex-marine, super patriot Democrat step up on Iraq at a time when the country needed him. He led the way for the Democrats to finally find the courage to oppose Bush and I'm not sure it would have happened without him.

To which, once more, we offer a very loud, Hey Lady, Fuck YOU!!

The Labor Pains of a New Society

While I am sympathetic to labor and think that those whacky anarcho-syndicalists have contributed mightily and well to the doomed but necessary endeavor of freeing humanity from authority, I think it's also fair to note that labor unions as actually constituted in these United States run a narrow gamut between toadyism and gomerism. Long since defeated by their own callowness in the face of anti-Communism, they exist today as metastasized tumors on the rickety bones of America's dying industries, ever seeking a little more calcium, mindlessly contributing to the death of their hosts even as they self-delude themselves into believing they possess some autonomous life of their own. So, as Pittsburgh fails to dig out of a snow storm that my good friends in Buffalo and my own memories of the wintry Colorado vacations of my youth assure me to be No Big Deal, I feel it only right and proper to commend to yinz this minor hilarity:

Tweeting motorists weren't the only ones complaining. Pittsburgh Parking Authority meter readers who were told to shovel snow around public garages weren't happy about that, either.

"They are doing jobs that are to be done by facility operators from the Teamsters union," said Shawn Beck, union steward for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 2719.

"They're not getting the training that they need to be shown how to properly shovel snow. ... They're not getting trained in how to lift 50-pound bags of salt.

"One's already down ... with an injury," he said, "and I've got more wounded people coming in."

There weren't any shots . . . It was a heart attack . . . Call the medics, Dude . . . I'd go myself but I'm pumpin blood. Might pass out.

Rest easy good buddy. You're doing fine. We got help chopperin in.

Snow Day

Digging out. Back tomorrow.