Bryan Burwell says, "I like to have sex with donkeys."

You heard it here first. The Limbaugh-racist-quote-alleging journalist admits that he has proclivities that tend toward the ah, ungulate persuasion.

Powell v. Polarization

During the last election cycle, I was accused by a relative of being "mean" in my treatment of then-Democratic Presidential Nominee Barack Obama. This in itself was not a problem: it is accurate. I am mean. However, since this relative of mine leans a little, how shall we say, hard left, it is more than likely that she was right by accident--"mean" being a favorite pejorative of the left to sling at someone, much like the accusation of being "hateful" or "a gunslinging unilateralist cowboy." My reponse is always the same: tell me what specifically I said or did that was "mean." You can accuse anyone of anything, but that doesn't make it an argument. It's pure intellectual laziness--or worse, bankruptcy--to resort to namecalling without providing any kind of corroboration of your assertion.

Which is pretty much what Colin Powell pulled last night with Fareed Zakaria.

"I think the party has to stop shouting at the world and at the country,"Powell said. "I think that the party has to take a hard look at itself, and I've talked to a number of leaders in recent weeks and they understand that." Powell, who says he still considers himself a Republican, said his party should also stop listening to conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh. "Can we continue to listen to Rush Limbaugh?" Powell asked. "Is this really the kind of party that we want to be when these kinds of spokespersons seem to appeal to our lesser instincts rather than our better instincts?"

(Emphasis mine)
"[T]he party has to stop shouting at the world?" What is he talking about? This seems to me a rather general and vague condemnation of the Republican Party--much like lazily accusing someone of being "mean." Now, there could be some issue that he is specifically referring to that I am missing--everyone could get this except me. But if he is referring to a specific issue or policy or whatever, why doesn't he just come out and say it? If it's about abortion, come out and say it. If it's about gay marriage, come out and say it. If it's about affirmative action, come out and say it. Otherwise you aren't encouraging dialogue, you're just speaking in worn-out platitudes. Unless, of course, at some point Sarah Palin was literally standing at a podium shouting "NOW LISTEN UP WORLD, I AM SARAH PALIN, I AM A REPUBLICAN BY GOLLY SO YOU'D BETTER LISTEN UP!" and Powell takes offense to that. The same with accusing Rush Limbaugh of appealing to our baser instincts. Examples? Any? And the appropriate response is not "Well duh it's Rush Limbaugh he's a hatemonger," because you're still not furnishing anything to support that accusation. In short, I'm really disappointed in General Powell. Statements like the above do nothing except expose the speaker's intellectual torpidity.

Removed...

Yeah, I went ahead and removed Little Green Footballs from my blogroll. I didn't do it because I expect it to impact LGF in any way; it's simply a statement on my part...I don't really think I will be returning to that blog any time soon. It was something I found when I redeployed from Iraq, and I found it very useful for its uncompromising view of international Islamic terrorism, for a while. Charles is a smart guy and has a lot of stuff right, but the tone of the discussion on the blog lately has really turned me off...especially in the field of evolution vs. creation. Now, don't get me wrong, I am not a creationist or a proponent of intelligent design. You could call me a moderate Darwinist, inasmuch as I fully accept the scientific proposition of evolution as posited by Dawkins et al., I am simply not convinced that it precludes the existence of God (I seem to recall Lao Stinky saying something very similar). And I'm not accusing Charles of a witchhunt or a jihad (though he did ding me down for my criticism of Roger Ebert's criticism of Expelled) but I have had enough for the time being.

I wish everyone at LGF the best of luck moving ahead, I just won't be among you.

(And Charles, may I suggest the book Liberal Fascism by Jonah Goldberg, for further reading on the roots of modern liberalism and eugenics?)

Mea Culpa

It has been four or five months since I last posted, and I sincerely apologize: many things came up--the birth of a daughter, appointment to a clinic NCOIC position, maybe you decide you want to go Special Forces, you get removed from the NCOIC slot because you're a nurse, only making you want to go SF even more...like I said, a lot of stuff. And to be honest, after a certain amount of time has passed how do you go back and start writing again? I let a month pass and I could have gone back to writing, but by then, if you're going to take a sabbatical, go ahead and go all out on it.

I have been writing over at Someone's Been Snooping For Junkfood! in case anyone wants to see what I have been up to (well, not really, since that is an entirely fictional character).

So I basically missed the entire election cycle. Which is just as well, because God knows we needed another blog adding to the incessant noise. As it is, it wasn't the outcome I wanted, but I would advise against an overly dramatic approach at this point.

What is, is. And we will do what we can. (And I promise to post more often) (After WLC).

Cheap Shots: Ted Rall III

I felt like I needed to post something, since I haven't all week. So, forgive me once again for taking the easy road and ridiculing this silly, silly man.

TED RALL - THE CURE FOR HIGH GAS AND FOOD PRICES
Thu Jun 26, 7:58 PM ET

Vital Businesses Need Nationalization

SAN ANTONIO--The gas station attendant came outside. Wow, I thought, full serve! Ignoring me, she flung a magnetic price decal on top of the price per gallon. Regular unleaded had gone up 20 cents in the time it took me to drive from the curb to the pump.
"You're kidding me," I moaned.
"It's 3 o'clock," she shrugged. "Just got the new price."
There has to be a better way, I thought.
And there is.
It isn't drilling in the Alaskan wilderness. It sure isn't John McCain's plan to offer $300 million to the first person to come up with a longer-lasting car battery
Gas prices could hit $7 a gallon before long, Wall Street analysts say, but Americans--always optimists!--take a little comfort in the fact that Europeans have paid more than that for years. But a lot of foreigners are laughing at us even harder than we're laughing at the Euros.
Did you know that Venezuelans pay a mere 19 cents per gallon? It's 38 cents in Nigeria. Turkmenistanis might not have electoral democracy, but they only shell out $4.50 to fill a 15-gallon tank. Before we replaced Saddam Hussein with...with whatever they have in Iraq now, Iraqis paid less than a dime for a gallon of gas.

Well, at least he's not stringing you along: he comes right out in the byline and says it, "I'm a communist." It's not news, since he's never made any attempts to hide his desire for a state-owned worker's paradise (he's railed against "property rights-extremists" in the past, I will have to dig that one up) but it's still just...well, it seems so illiberal.

And he definitely knows what's important. Who cares how oppressive your government is? Who cares about standard of living? We're talking about oil prices here! What's a night in the rape room when you can have 10-cent gasoline!

One of the things that these countries have in common, of course, is that they're oil-producing states. Countries that export oil and gas have trouble explaining to their citizens why they should pay for their own natural resources--and most are smart enough not to try. Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Burma, Malaysia, Kuwait, China and South Korea are just a few of the countries that keep fuel prices low in order to stimulate economic growth.
But they also share something else: common sense. Strange it might sound to Americans used to reading about big oil windfalls, they consider cheap gas more of an economic necessity than lining the pockets of energy company CEOs. So they don't consider energy a profit center. To the contrary; government subsidies (Venezuela spends $2 billion a year on fuel subsidies) and nationalized oil companies keep gas prices low.

Well, of course, if we had any common sense we'd be an oil-producing state as well.

And Ted--way to offer up Burma as an economic dynamo! Not to mention, as we witnessed in the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis, that is one government that sure knows what it is doing!

Unlike corporations, governments don't care about turning a profit. They care about remaining in power. Their reliance on political support (or, if you're cynical, pandering) allows them to do things our much-vaunted free market system can't, such as make sure that people can afford to eat and buy enough gas to get to work.

There are other things that governments do that free markets can't, like systematically slaughter millions of people. But hey, who's counting?

Like the rest of the world, Venezuelan consumers have been squeezed by rising prices, and even shortages, of groceries. In 2007 Venezuela's socialist-leaning government decided to do something about it. First they imposed price controls on staple items. When suppliers began to hoard supplies to drive up prices, President Hugo Chavez threatened to nationalize them. "If they remain committed to violating the interests of the people, the constitution, the laws, I'm going to take the food storage units, corner stores, supermarkets and nationalize them," he said. Food profiteers grumbled. Then they straightened up.

So Ted is suggesting that we strong arm the suppliers of oil? What does he want us to do, go to war with an oil-producing nation in the Middle East and...oh...

Not even international corporations are immune from Chavez's determination to put the needs of ordinary Venezuelans ahead of the for-profit food industry. Faced with severe shortages of milk earlier this year, Chavez threatened Nestle and Parmalat's Venezuelan operations with nationalization unless they opened the spigot. "This government needs to tighten the screws," he said in February 2008, promising to "intervene and nationalize the plants" belonging to the two transnational corporations.
Miraculously, milk is turning up on the shelves.

And so that's how Venezuela got cheap oil? Did I miss something?

When it works, nothing is better at creating an endless variety of reality TV shows than free market capitalism. But when it doesn't, it isn't just that extra brand of clear dishwashing liquid that goes away. Businesses fold. Banks foreclose. People starve. And no one can stop it.

There it is, people, the only thing that capitalism ever bestowed upon humanity: reality TV. Not, like, I don't know, our standard of living, which is astronomical and unparalleled in history. No, that must have been for some other reason.

So, if I understand him correctly, capitalism is mediocre when it works and bad when it doesn't. Which still makes it preferable to communism, which never works at all.

The G8 nations met in Osaka last week to try to address soaring food and energy prices--a double threat that could plunge the global economy into a ruinous depression. But the summit ended in failure. "Any hope that the G8 meeting would result in coordinated monetary action--or concerted intervention in foreign exchange markets--to counter rises, principally in commodity prices, was dispelled by their failure to agree on the phenomenon's underlying causes," reported Forbes.
So the G8 ministers punted. "Due to the lack of consensus, they have stated the need for further study," wrote the magazine.

"Punted?" Stupid leaders, trying to identify the problem before they solve it. A real man just shoots from the hip and...why is it that Ted keeps coming off like some kind of unilateralist cowboy here?

The problem isn't the weak dollar or the non-existent housing market. It's capitalism. A sane government doesn't leave essential goods and services--food, fuel, housing, healthcare, transportation, education--to the vicissitudes of "magic" markets. Non-discretionary economic sectors should be strictly controlled by--indeed, owned by--the government.

Of course, sane people entrust these things to the vicissitudes of "magic bullet" government...

Unlike the market, where apparently all they do is sit around and wait for supply, or demand, or an invisible hand, or something, government is proactive! Smart people working to make your life better! Unselfish, brave people, not like the Jews I mean pigs on Wall Street! Government will provide! A house for every family! A job for every worker! A just machine to make big decisions! Programmed by men with compassion and vision!

Consider, on the one hand, snail mail and public education. The Postal Service and public schools both have their flaws. But what if they were privatized? It would cost a lot more than 42 cents to mail a letter from Tampa to Maui. And poor children wouldn't get an education.

Actually, left to the private sector they'd do something flashy like create a vast computer network and just send the letter electronically instead. And notice here how he can't argue that public schools are superior to private schools, but instead that "poor children wouldn't get an education." They could with vouchers, Ted, if the Democrats would let them have them.

Privatization, particularly of essential services, has always proven disastrous. From California's Enron-driven rotating blackouts to for-profit healthcare that has left 47 million Americans uninsured to predatory lenders pimping the housing bubble to Blackwater's atrocities in Iraq, market-based corporations' fiduciary obligation to maximize profits that is inherently incompatible with a stable economy whose goal is to provide people with a decent quality of life.

This is the guy who accuses the U.S. government of torturing people, kidnapping people, operating secret prisons...and he wants them to have more control over your life! Consistent, Ted. Damned consistent.

P.S. If you're reading this in Caracas, please mail me some gas.

Grovel all you want, Ted, in the end you're still just a fat American and that's all you'll ever be in their eyes.

Cheap Shots: Ted Rall II

And so we return to my favorite hobby, that is, ridiculing Ted Rall for his incoherent thought processes and utter lack of intellectual rigor. A little confession here, sometimes I check back on his columns from past months just to see what wasn't happening, whether it be crippling recessions or stunning failures in the Middle East. Enjoy, I sure do.

TED RALL - OOPS NATION

Tue Jun 17, 7:59 PM ET

A Superpower of Lazy Slobs

NEW YORK--Tens of thousands of innocent detainees have passed through Guantánamo, Bagram, Abu Ghraib, Diego Garcia and other U.S. torture facilities. Thousands remain "disappeared," possibly murdered. Some may be on one of the Navy vessels recently revealed to have been repurposed as prison ships. Dozens have been beaten to death or killed by willful medical neglect.

Oh, how cute, he's set it up like it's actual news, with a "dateline" and everything. But as usual, it's really just a poorly reasoned string of unsourced and unverified "facts." It's telling how, in his list of U.S. detainment centers (unsubstantiated claims of torture notwithstanding), he leaves out the single largest theater internment facility that our military operates. I'm not surprised, since the facility isn't well known, but the information is available for those who look (the site has its own wiki page and everything). But who am I kidding? Do you think he's actually going to spend even a fraction of a second actually finding out where U.S. detention centers actually are? This is Ted "Research and Die" Rall!

Oh, and regarding those "prison ships:" my English may be rusty (no, wait, it's not), but is "revealed" synonomous with "alleged by a random anti-death penalty activist organization?" Thorough, Ted. Damned thorough!

For seven years, the Bush Administration, the Democratic Congress and its media allies have denied "unlawful enemy combatants" (or, as Dick Cheney called them, "the worst of the worst" terrorists) the right to habeas corpus, the centuries-old right of persons arrested by the police to face their accusers and the evidence against them in a court of law.
Thanks to a 5-4 decision by the Supreme Court, America's latest flirtation with fascism is coming to an end. Parts of the infamous Military Commissions Act of 2006 that eliminated habeas corpus have been declared unconstitutional. Prisoners at Guantánamo and possibly other American gulags, will now be allowed to demand their day in court. Since the government doesn't have evidence against them, legal experts say, most if not all of "the worst of the worst" will ultimately walk free. "Liberty and security can be reconciled," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority.

Read over that first sentence again, Ted. "For seven years yadda yadda Congress, yadda yadda Cheney, yadda yadda habeas corpus, yadda...arrested by the police???" Seriously? Arrested by the police? Think about that for a second. Now, I know you are sketchy on that esoteric concept of "how things happened in reality" but do you honestly think that our military strategy against Afghanistan included deploying 4,000 cops in support of the Northern Alliance? Or was it something else, what was it...the military? That deployed in military operations? You think?

I just want the reader to ponder, for a moment, the staggering level of cognitive dissonance displayed in the last two sentences. "The 'worst of the worst' will ultimately walk free. 'Liberty and security can be reconciled...'" The only way you would assume that letting the "worst of the worst" walk free, would not create a problem for "security" is if you think that none, nada, zilch, zero, not a single "terrorist" we apprehended and detain to this day is actually dangerous. Khaled Sheikh Mohammad say what!?

In short: Oops."America is back," Barack Obama has said he will tell the world if he becomes president. Even if McCain wins, Guantánamo will probably be closed. Torture will be re-illegalized. Which is really, really great. But there's a problem. How do we give back the four years we stole from Murat Kurnaz?
In December 2001, Kurnaz was a 19-year-old German Muslim studying in Pakistan. He was pulled off a bus by Pakistani security services, who delivered him to the CIA for a $3,000 bounty. He was flown to Guantánamo concentration camp, where he received what The Village Voice's Nat Hentoff calls "the standard treatment: beatings, sleep deprivation, and special month-long spells of solitary confinement in a sealed cell without ventilation."
He went on hunger strike, and Kurnaz's tormentors apparently worried he might starve to death. After 20 days "they gagged me and shoved a tube up my nose, stopping several times because the tube filled with blood," Kurnaz remembers.

Yes! Yes! When you need hard information on U.S. detention centers, who do you turn to? The Village Voice, that's who. Because sometimes the New Yorker pulls its punches a little bit.

The "tube" they're describing here sounds an awful lot like a nasogastric feeding tube, something we use in the hospital for people who can't eat. No doubt a lot of therapeutic medical treatments seem ghastly when described without context.

What did this "worst of the worst" do to deserve such treatment? Nothing. But don't take my word for it. Six months into his ordeal, the U.S. military determined, there was "no definite link or evidence of detainee having an association with Al Qaeda or making any specific threat toward the U.S."
The U.S. government knew Kurnaz was innocent. Yet they held on to him another three and a half years.
Oops.

Of course, another side of the story is that there was evidence of his guilt, but it was classified and to reveal it would create security risks. I like how he put quotation marks around "no definite link..." without attributing it to anything or anyone. Rigorous, Ted. Damned rigorous!

In fact, it sounds like Ted got all his information from a March 2008 60 Minutes interview with Mr. Kurnaz himself. Ted Rall: regurgitating months-old TV shows for your edification!

It would be comforting if the torture of innocent men sold by self-interested bounty hunters were an aberration. It wasn't. A McClatchy Newspapers analysis confirms the horrifying results of a Seton Hall University study. "Only eight percent of Guantánamo detainees were captured by U.S. forces," reports McClatchy. "86 percent were turned over to the U.S. by Pakistan or by the Northern Alliance," a coalition of Afghan warlords. "The bounty hunters were often the source of allegations."

Is this horrifying? To expect that U.S. troops would somehow have the majority of security detainees in a campaign that was, by design, fought primarily by Afghan tribal coalitions is ridiculously unrealistic. Does that mean we should uncritically accept everything these allies tell us? Of course not. But I would give them credence equal to that afforded to the putative terrorists, instead of automatically assuming they are liars, and being "horrified."

Right-wingers say security matters can only be entrusted to the military. "The courts," writes Richard Samp of the pro-government Washington Legal Foundation in USA Today, "simply lack the expertise and resources to justify second-guessing military experts on such issues." Maybe. But the military is run by liars.
"The McClatchy investigation found that top Bush Administration officials knew within months of opening the Guantánamo detention center that many prisoners weren't 'the worst of the worst.' From the moment that Guantánamo opened in early 2002, former Secretary of the Army Thomas White said, it was obvious that at least one-third of the population didn't belong there."

And nearly two thirds have since been released. This is from the exact same article Ted is quoting from. It's one thing to accuse someone of being a liar, Ted. It's another thing entirely to be so intellectually disingenuous in the very next paragraph. And by that I mean, you are the liar.

At least six died at Gitmo. (The Pentagon characterized a spate of suicides as clever acts of "asymmetrical warfare.")
Oops.

Oh man, you'd be crazy to think that anyone would be willing to die to make a statement. Remember when Khaled Sheikh Mohammad was begging the tribunal to make him a martyr? No? Ha ha, oops.

Deranged leaders who carry out horrific acts of mass murder and oppression with the consent of the people are hardly new to American history, reminds Allen Weinstein, Archivist of the United States. "Begin with the Salem witchcraft trials of the 1690s," he told a commencement ceremony at Southern Methodist University. "Move forward to the Alien and Sedition Acts of the early Republic, and from there to the suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War. Turn then to the arbitrary political arrests of the First and Second World Wars, the many abuses of the Cold War McCarthy era, and from there the civil liberties climate in our time."

Where was mass murder anywhere in that list? Mr. Weinstein is a respectable, knowledgeable man, and therefore does not really deserve to be linked to Ted Rall this way. Also notice that nowhere in the quote (or the rest of the speech) is there any mention of the "mass murder[s]" that Ted has imputed.

So many oopsies! But those are temporary excesses, Weinstein reassures. "Self-corrective forces at work in American society"--lefties, liberals, a single swing vote on the U.S. Supreme Court--always pull us back before we careen off the brink. Disaster is avoided.
Which would be fine if it weren't for the problem that: (1) one of these days, Justice Kennedy won't be around to restore the rule of law. The other problem being (2): a lot of "witches" get drowned during our periodic episodes of madness.

Ah, but then Mr. Weinstein commits a cardinal sin: invoking American exceptionalism. Also, Ted Rall continues on here, blissfully unaware that the perpetrators of these "excesses" were often lefties themselves. Ever hear of Woodrow Wilson or Franklin Roosevelt, Ted? But then again, rhetoric is so much more satisfying when there aren't any pesky "facts" to get in the way. Which is why Ted avoids them so rigidly.

No one was ever held accountable for blacklisting actors or massacring Native Americans. Such tacit endorsement of villainy sets the stage for the next outrage committed during a future "temporary madness" driven by national security worries. Apologies are rare. Penance is scarce and stingy. The government stole the homes and businesses of Japanese-Americans and shipped them to concentration camps during World War II; decades passed before Congress cut them checks for a measly $10,000.

And guess who pushed the legislation through congress: Norman Mineta, a Bush-friendly Democrat, and Republican Alan K. Simpson? And signed into law by Ronald Reagan?? Say it ain't so! So these folks were unfairly imprisoned by liberal heavyweight FDR, and it was none other than conservative arch-villain Ronald Reagan who offers the U.S. government's official apology and makes reparations? Why would you even include this information, when it so utterly contravenes your flimsy argument?

The answer, of course, is that Ted was ignorant of these facts, and wasn't about to look them up. And who's the lazy slob here?

We think we Americans are good people who do bad things when we're not on top of our game. "Self-corrective forces," we pat ourselves on our collective backsides, always kick in before we go too far.
But that's not really how it is.
Some Americans are good. Other Americans are bad. And the good ones are often lazy, willing to let the bad ones get their way.

Here's where Ted pulls a total 180 and shockingly makes a valid point. Some Americans are good. Others are bad. He's just got his labels terribly, terribly crossed.

One hopes that "self-corrective forces" do indeed kick in before we go too far, and elect a doctrinaire liberal into the White House while we've got a Democratic majorities in Congress.

But hey, maybe it'll be okay: maybe they'll be lazy.

Iraq, Barack Obama, and Winnie the Pooh

Found at the UK Telegraph, via Jim Geraghty at NRO.com:

Richard Danzig, who served as Navy Secretary under President Clinton and is tipped to become National Security Adviser in an Obama White House, told a major foreign policy conference in Washington that the future of US strategy in the war on terrorism should follow a lesson from the pages of Winnie the Pooh, which can be shortened to: if it is causing you too much pain, try something else.

Mr Danzig told the Centre for New American Security: “Winnie the Pooh seems to me to be a fundamental text on national security.”

He spelt out how American troops, spies and anti-terrorist officials could learn key lessons by understanding the desire of terrorists to emulate superheroes like Luke Skywalker, and the lust for violence of violent football fans.

Proof positive that Senator Obama's campaign is pandering to the youth vote? To hell with K Street, it's the pre-K who run Washington! Are we going to see more tortured analogies like this in the future? "Aladdin should inform our domestic policy as Americans. Like many Americans, Aladdin was poor. But then he found a genie in a magic lamp and gained untold riches, not to mention a flying carpet and a smokin' hot princess with a freakin' tiger. If that's not the American dream, I don't know what is. So we, as Americans, need to get together and find that magic lamp!" Likewise, I would like to see the Supreme Court start presenting their majority- and dissenting opinions in the same fashion. "We drew upon the knowledge passed on to us by the Care Bears, and decided that these imprisoned enemy combatants should have the right to U.S. civilian courts, and also rainbows and hugs. The precedent set by Braveheart Lion, when he allowed Dr. Coldheart to go free after hypnotizing the children, continues here."

And, of course, it's only a matter of time before Winnie the Pooh is linked to suspect land deals, or preferential home loans, or is found to have made controversial racial statements in the past ("The U.S. government created heffalumps and woozles!") and Mr. Obama will have to disown him. This is not the Winnie the Pooh I knew.

And that will be a sad day.