Month: June 2007

David Friedman is onto something:

At least in my observation, the people and departments most inclined to favor "diversity" in the conventional sense are among those least likely to want to hire professors whose viewpoints differ from the consensus. What they want are people of the desired gender or skin color who agree with them.

"The only thing worse than an al Qaeda attack would be a gay man stopping that," – fired military linguist Stephen Benjamin, summing up the core of the Republican position on military personnel policy in the terror war. Full Colbert clip here.

A small nugget from the file:

"Despite the pressures of his personal and professional life, Scooter consistently cares about his friends. For example, our eldest child was on an externship in Ghana during the tragic events of September 11th. Upon learning this (and of our concern), despite the enormous pressures of state facing Scooter, he researched the situation in Ghana and called us at 11 pm (having just gotten home from work) to discuss what he had learned."

Perjury? He’s our friend. We only prosecute perjurers when they’re little people. Or Democratic presidents.

Bears on the battlefield! And I don’t mean hot guys with beards. Get your Colbert fodder here.

Matt reviews a new book revealing more grisly details of the Bush administration’s torture regime in Iraq. These are American soldiers, you keep reminding yourself. This is what this president has turned this country into.

Not so fast, says the Cunning Realist:

Whoever sits in the Oval Office on Inauguration Day 2009 is going to own Iraq just as Nixon owned Vietnam after 1968. To be sure, the extent of that ownership — in both the public’s mind and the history books — will depend on what happens in Iraq after 2008. But those hoping for a dramatic change in policy may be disappointed. Occupations tend to be  self-perpetuating. And remember, Nixon had huge anti-Communist credibility but still felt compelled to prove his toughness once in office. If Hillary wins, will she have any less to prove as a Democrat and a woman?

Follow-up here.

A reader writes:

I think you did capture the essence of the truce and what makes the U.S. so great, bar one sentence:

"Given the huge differences between, say, a born-again evangelical in Georgia and a pot-smoking post-boomer in Seattle, no single cultural strait-jacket can ever hold America together."

Change "pot-smoking post-boomer in Seattle" to "pot-smoking post-boomer in Atlanta" and you really capture the U.S. – born-again evangelicals living in the same friggin’ city (Atlanta) and working with and shopping with pot-smoking post-boomers. Hell, I was just wished "A blessed day" on the elevator by a complete stranger. 

What other U.S. city has simultaneously hosted the Southern Baptist National Convention and a Gay Pride of 300,000 attendees on the same weekend with a parade on the same street on the same day (June, 2005)? Granted, they both started at Civic Center and the Southern Baptist Parade went south on Peachtree and the Pride Parade north on Peachtree, but within a 20 block stretch on a major American city you had over 100,000 born-again baptists and 300,000 gay men and women with no major conflicts.

Yep: that’s the dream. Equality under the law – and a million different ways to live. Why are so many so afraid of this?

The cognitive dissonance on display gets a useful airing by Ralph Peters in the New York Post. In a sign of obvious desperation, Glenn Reynolds linked yesterday. Read the whole thing. On the one hand, according to Peters, Arab culture is obviously permanently incapable of constitutional self-rule. On the other, we have to stay in Iraq indefinitely to ensure a success in Arab constitutional self-rule. Elegantly self-refuting, isn’t it? Here’s the regional analysis:

Look at Gaza, at the orgy of self-destructive savagery, the macho idiocy, the junkyard-dog religion and the murder-suicide cult sweeping Arab civilization. Then note that, barring a few fringe players, only two sides are fighting in the Gaza Strip. In Iraq, we have foreign terrorists fighting everybody, Sunni Arabs fighting Shia, Shia fighting Shia, Sunni fighting Sunni, Christians and other minorities persecuted by Sunni and Shia, Kurds struggling to preserve their patch of civilization, with American troops and our allies in the middle . . . on a quiet day. Of course, not only the Arabs are to blame: We went to Baghdad with a fantasy instead of a plan; Israel tried to compromise with genocidal killers; media commissars abetted terrorists, and our generals placed more emphasis on ducking blame than on defeating our enemies. But for all that, it’s the Arabs who failed themselves, again and again and again.

When Lebanon tried to achieve a semblance of democracy, Syria embarked on a killing spree that, to this day, has had no tangible consequences for the Assad regime. When elections came to the Palestinian territories, the Palestinians voted for terrorists. When elections came to Iraq, the Iraqis voted for ethnic separatists or demagogues.

Get the picture? Now what would be the logical inference from this powerful critique of Arab culture for our current policy in Iraq? Obviously: withdrawal.

You can’t organize these people; you can’t trust them; their sectarian hatred will always triumph over democracy; their local loyalties will always trump any notion of liberal constitutional politics. But naah. In a classic – and utterly incoherent – Instapundit-style move, Peters deduces from this that we merely need to kill and bomb more people more brutally in order to create a non-violent democracy in Iraq. Actually, that sumary is a little too sophisticated for the piece. It ends with a weirdly desperate assertion that the U.S. military only now wants to win in Iraq. Like they didn’t for the past four years? Then this:

We’re stuck in Iraq, and it sucks. But were we to leave in haste, far more blood than oil would flow in the Persian Gulf. The disaster in Gaza’s just a rehearsal for the Arab-suicide drama awaiting its opening night in Iraq.

I don’t get it. Is Peters saying that keeping the flow of oil is the real reason to throw more young Americans into the Arab meat-grinder? Is he saying we should leave but not in haste? Or is he simply blathering incoherently like everyone else arguing for the indefinite occupation of the "ungrateful volcano."

We may be seeing the total intellectual collapse of neoconservatism. If that happens, it will be because history has proven their analysis of the Arab world correct.

… in Texas! I wonder if the GOP has any idea what may be about to hit them. Marc has more campaign crack here.