Friday Cat Blogging… Desdemona
Happy Belated Birthday to Us
Yesterday was our third birthday.
Happy birthday to us. And hearty thanks to all of our readers, without whom none of this would matter.
B.S.
Here’s Neo-neocon, once again draping herself in her pre-9/11 hairshirt, offering further insight into why she wasn’t outraged by Chappaquiddick until four planes descended from the sky and shattered her world:
But a much greater favorite [childhood book] was Ferdinand the Bull. Ah Ferdinand, Ferdinand, he of the fragrant flowers under the cork tree. I didn’t know the word “pacifist” (nor is it mentioned in the book), but the idea of opting out of struggle and strife into a simple life of non-aggression and nature was remarkably appealing. . . .. . . I wonder how many people never grow past the fairy tale notion that evil will disappear if we would just sit under that cork tree and smell those flowers long enough. As one of the Amazon commenters points out, in a real bullfight Ferdinand’s lack of ferocity would cause him not to be shipped off to pleasant pastures, as in the book, but to be killed–which is the almost invariable fate of bulls in that activity anyway.
[Neo-con tells us a lot of stuff about bull-fighting, mostly to the effect that sissy, girly bulls like Ferdinand get an extra dose of humiliation when they're killed.]
Ferdinand is a lovely story, and I wish it well. But it’s not much of a guide to war, I’m afraid—or even to bullfighting.
Yes, it’s a shame that children’s books are so useless at sorting out real-world problems. When I bought Rotten Island for my daughter, for example, I was expecting William Steig would be able to help us both understand a little more clearly how to deal with the bellum omnium contra omnes toward which the world is currently sliding. Alas, Steig seems to think that everyone loses in war — which is nonsense, because only losers lose wars. Rotten Island dodges that fact and ultimately hands the “island” over to a bunch of stupid birds.
Similarly, when my copy of Drummer Hoff arrived in the mail, the Tax Deduction and I opened it with great enthusiasm; we’d been vexed for weeks by the problem of how to assemble an 18th century field cannon, and by the looks of it, Barbara and Ed Emberley had written the definitive layperson’s account. There again, though, we were terribly dismayed by the book’s dark conclusion and its inability to consider that sometimes, if the West is to survive, Sergeant Chowder really does have to bring the powder, and Major Scott really does need to bring the shot, and everyone on the sidelines needs to support the troops — no matter how goofy they look — and drink a nice big mug of shut-the-fuck-up. Did the Emberleys, as they wrote their anti-war screed in 1968, have the slightest understanding that by subtly advocating for the withdrawal of the United States from Vietnam, they were consigning millions to the fires of communism?
Please don’t get me started on the ideological demerits of Brave Potatoes (hint: it’s not about making a decent stew) or Farmer Duck, which I judge to be a poor guide for anyone looking to keep their livestock in a condition of supplicating fear.
Art of the Possible
Put me squarely in the Meyerson camp:
Many of my antiwar friends were furious at Democratic congressional leaders last week for their failure to attach withdrawal deadlines to or cut funding from our occupation of Iraq — a failure chiefly attributable to the simple fact that the votes weren’t there for either option. What they should recall, however, is that the much more heavily Democratic Congress that hastened the end of the Vietnam War during Richard Nixon’s presidency did so by passing a series of incremental measures, each of which constrained Nixon’s warmaking powers a bit more than the last. In succession, Congress banned the use of funds for military actions in Laos and Thailand, then (after Nixon ordered the invasion of Cambodia) banned the use of ground forces in Cambodia. Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, one of the Democrats’ foremost doves, three times introduced an amendment that would have ended U.S. involvement in Vietnam within nine months of enactment, but it never passed.It took the Democrats, and their dovish Republican allies, four full years to pass a cutoff of funds for U.S. ground forces in Vietnam, by which point Nixon had already pulled all ground forces out (though the legislation kept him from putting those forces back in, which was not a mere academic possibility). That hardly means that Mansfield betrayed the cause of peace, any more than Nancy Pelosi’s failure to shut down the war last week means that she sold out to the Bush administration. Mansfield put one antiwar bill after another to a vote, winning more and more support each time around, leaving Nixon with fewer and fewer options. Pelosi is steering the same course, for a war even more reckless and absurd than Vietnam.
Right. It’s all well and good to point out that Bush and the war are politically unpopular, but while doing so we can’t forget that we live in a Madisonian anti-majoritarian system that privileges the status quo. Combine that with a two party system that has only weak incentives for party discipline, and the ability of a small Congressional majority to change the course of a war becomes quite limited. Frankly, I’m impressed that Reid and Pelosi did as well as they did in resettling the Democratic Party in Congress firmly on the side of withdrawal, and I see little point in excoriating them for not doing enough.
Ever More Falklands Blogging
David Axe has the story of the Santa Fe, an Argentine diesel-electric submarine that fought off a swarm of British helicopters before succumbing:
Cut off and incommunicado, the Santa Fe’s crew fought back against the swarms of Wessex, Wasp and Lynx helicopters, using only the firearms they had on board and some ancient anti-tank rockets belonging to an embarked commando team. “They prevented the helicopters from flying right over us,” Bicain recounts.But the Santa Fe was cornered. In addition to the depth charges and torpedoes, the British choppers fired anti-ship missiles and even their machine guns. An AS-12 missile punched right through the sub’s hull without exploding, taking off one sailor’s leg. The Santa Fe slowly sank while desperately steaming towards land and safety. Finally it struck the shallow seabed. The frigates that had launched the helicopters were soon within sight. The jig was up, and at 5 p.m., Bicain surrendered.
Slappy
He’s a real class act:
The setup: Yankees winning, 7-5, two out and two on, top of the ninth. Jorge Posada pops up to third. Howie Clark camps under it. Rodriguez trots by and yells “Ha!” (according to him). Clark thinks it’s the shortstop, John McDonald, calling for the ball. He backs off, the ball drops to the turf, the inning continues, and the Yankees score three more runs.
Even thirteen-year olds know this sort of thing is bush-league. Next time the Yankees are in Toronto, I would hope that A-Rod’s first trip to the plate ends with one pitch and a slow, painful walk to first base.
Deal Breaker
The U.S. Attorney had to know he was in trouble with the Bush administration. What was his offense, you might ask? Corruption? Refusing to prosecute serious crimes? Hitting on Laura Bush? No, it’s much, much worse than you could imagine:
For more than 15 years, clean-cut, square-jawed Tom Heffelfinger was the embodiment of a tough Republican prosecutor. Named U.S. attorney for Minnesota in 1991, he won a series of high-profile white-collar crime and gun and explosives cases. By the time Heffelfinger resigned last year, his office had collected a string of awards and commendations from the Justice Department.
So it came as a surprise — and something of a mystery — when he turned up on a list of U.S. attorneys who had been targeted for firing.
Part of the reason, government documents and other evidence suggest, is that he tried to protect voting rights for Native Americans.
Yes, it’s hard to imagine anyone keeping their job after such scandalous behavior. For shame.
Tucker Territory
I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that Glenn Beck’s Headline News ratings are in the rubbish bin, but I would have thought that at least 200,000 people across the country were falling asleep — or succumbing to demon rum — in front of the TV before his show begins. Or do people actually have to be conscious for their viewership to count? I’m no expert on these things, but it seems to me that your average cable-access show would earn a larger audience than this. After all, it appears that Beck is just as crazy as the guy whose anti-Masonic rants sustained me through many a difficult night in grad school. Here’s what Beck offers on his “Perfect Storm” page, which collates stories about the various apocalyptic perils facing America:
We are at a crucial time in not only our nation’s history, but also in the history of the entire Western world. There are powerful forces at work that, when looked at individually, are still quite serious but each seems somewhat manageable. However, when we examine these events and the possibility that they could happen collectively, well–then my friend, we’re facing something I like to call The Perfect Storm . . . .Remember that scene [in A Beautiful Mind] where Russell Crowe has pasted up a number of newspaper stories and is making associations and drawing connections between them by running strings from one story to the next, and then that story to another, and so on? You could easily do the same with the stories here. It’s not a great leap to see a certain synchronicity between them.
You read that correctly — Glenn Beck believes schizophrenia is a methodology. I must admit that this makes me just a little more eager to actually watch his show now.
Justice Brennan’s Evil Twin
The small band of people arguing that Sam Alito would be anything but a catastrophe for liberal constitutional values had very few arguments available to them, given the overwhelming evidence that he would be (including the extremely high esteem in which Alito is held by those who despise the achievements of the Warren and early Burger Courts.) One strategy, favored by Ann Althouse, was to assert that liberals “may discover that there are varieties of judicial conservatives, just as there are varieties of political conservatives, and that Samuel Alito is not Antonin Scalia” without citing a single area of law where Altio is likely to be more liberal than Scalia. (The reverse, conversely, is quite easy.) Obviously, this is not worth taking seriously. The other strategy — favored by the likes of Akiba Covitz and Stuart Taylor — was to claim that Alito would be to the left of Scalia because he was more “congenial” and less prone to the broad pronouncements and acerbic rhetoric of Scalia. This is both true and entirely beside the point. Yes, his strategy is to avoid Scalia’s culture warrior posing and rather — like a bizarro world William Brennan, gone over to the dark side — to cobble together precedents while subtly pushing them towards his ideological preferences, with an extra soupcon of bad faith.
His opinion yesterday in Ledbetter is a classic case in point. Alito, before citing a precedent, blandly asserts that Ledbetter’s “argument is squarely foreclosed by our precedents” and that “It would be difficult to speak to the point more directly.” But the precedent cited — which involves a case in which a woman resigned because if a discriminatory policy, and then sued for back pay after being hired several years later — is hardly a “square” or “direct” analogy (or, as Alito claims, “basically the same” argument.) That case dealt with two discrete acts, with the potential discrimination of the first resignation more more transparent than relative pay discrimination between employees. The precedent is a point in the company’s favor, but nothing more than that; it’s hardly controlling. The Morgan case cited by the dissenters — which involved non-discrete, ongoing discrimination — is at least as relevant, and it seems to me much more so. Alito’s bland rhetoric conceals characterizations of precedents that are tendentious in the extreme.
So, yes, Altio’s measured tones don’t have any of the quotable “Kulturkampf” rhetoric of a Scalia opinion; there’s nothing about gender discrimination being a glorious American tradition or something. This doesn’t make him better than Scalia to people oppose gender discrimination, however. It makes him even more dangerous.
Atheist Guide to Kentucky
Media Czech has finished his Atheist’s Guide to the 2007 Kentucky Elections. I understand that he is preparing a similar document for the Presidential primary field…
Dobbs
The Times’ Dave Leonhardt does a pretty decent job today of surveying Lou Dobbs’ fact-free mental landscape (though it should be noted that
nothing Leonhardt has to say couldn’t have been discovered three weeks ago at Orcinus — see Dave Neiwert’s posts here and here).
Taking Dobbs’ disgusting leprosy fables as a starting point, Leonhardt explains why this case is emblematic:
For one thing, Mr. Dobbs has a somewhat flexible relationship with reality. He has said, for example, that one-third of the inmates in the federal prison system are illegal immigrants. That’s wrong, too. According to the Justice Department, 6 percent of prisoners in this country are noncitizens (compared with 7 percent of the population). For a variety of reasons, the crime rate is actually lower among immigrants than natives.Second, Mr. Dobbs really does give airtime to white supremacy sympathizers. Ms. Cosman, who is now deceased, was a lawyer and Renaissance studies scholar, never a medical doctor or a leprosy expert. She gave speeches in which she said that Mexican immigrants had a habit of molesting children. Back in their home villages, she would explain, rape was not as serious a crime as cow stealing.
Leonhardt is certainly correct as far as all this goes — it takes about five minutes of viewing to realize that Dobbs’ ears ooze with whatever offal remains in his head after his mouth stops moving. But this point continues to miss the larger, more consequential one. As I think Neiwert is right to argue, Dobbs is a venal, race-baiting blowhard who doesn’t simply outsource his arguments to white supremacy sympathizers but instead allows the fantasies of geniune white supremacists to guide his program content. Moreover, he’s the worst kind of American populist — waving his thick fists incoherently about the corporate overlords while devoting three times as much energy to fighting the weakest, most vulnerable and most despised fractions of society.
Domestic Consumption
Hilzoy points to another in the endless series of empirical studies and professional testimonials indicating that torture is useless for the purpose of intelligence-driven interrogation. There’s no value trade-off here; torture is both bad and useless. So why do Republican presidential candidates have such a hard time condemning the practice?
Torture is domestic Green Lanternism. Foreign policy resolve is normally invoked as a value because a perception of strength changes the behavior of foreign countries. If the Chinese understand that we’re tough, the story goes, then they won’t mess with us. But torture doesn’t really have that foreign policy effect. Nations that don’t torture are appalled by the fact that we do, and nations that do torture aren’t notably impressed that we’ve joined the club. Indeed, torture has only negative foreign policy effects. Domestically, however, torture conveys the appearance of will. Support of torture signals to a politician’s base the will to do grievous harm to some random person in order to preserve a sense of security. Apparently, some significant portion of the US electorate finds this willingness impressive. Until that changes, questions of effectiveness are simply moot.
Cross-posted to TAPPED.
