Month: January 2008

Dissent Of The Day II

A reader writes:

I share your opinion of Romney, but I’m afraid the graphic showing the relative net worth of  is a classic example of how to mislead with graphics.  The chart purports to show the net worth using the height of the candidates– a simple bar graph where the bars are replaced by images of the candidates.  In this case, Romney  is 7x the net worth of his nearest competitor.  However,  the images are two dimensional, so the *area* of the Romney image is 7 times 7 = 49x, giving the impression that Romey’s worth is 49x larger.  Furthermore, humans infer that other humans are three dimensional (even Romney!), thus we intuit that Romney’s net worth correlates with his *volume*, which is 7 times 7 times 7 = 343x larger.

Moore Award Nominee

"Who wouldn’t like to see an end to the vicious, violent partisanship of our times? (I’ll tell you who: the ignorance-worshipping sociopaths of the Far-to-the-Nth-Degree Right who created that violent partisanship–utterly deliberately, I believe, for the express purpose of taking over the government and imposing their wingnut sociopathology on the rest of the country. Which come to think of it, they’ve done.)," – keninny.

The Clintons Regroup

They’re cornered; and when they’re cornered, they lash out. Is a wave of Obama-smears about to emerge via 527s? Or are they smarter than they are infuriated that someone has dared to challenge their power in the Democratic party? If you have followed them closely over the years, you wouldn’t bet on their restraint. The one thing they care about is their own power. The ugliness may have just begun.

Obama and the Right, Ctd.

The University of Chicago Law School is a key. A reader writes:

The Law School is a notoriously conservative place, famous as the home of Chicago School of legal analysis (i.e., law and economics).  While there are certainly progressive students and professors there, anyone at the law school would have to confront conservatism on a daily basis.  As such, Obama had to hone his arguments to the conservative environment in which he taught.  That is not to say that his time there turned him conservative – rather, it helped him to articulate his progressive arguments in such a way that he could convince conservatives.

Go check out his debates with Alan Keyes. Really riveting.

Ron Paul Responds

It’s the right response to this:

“The quotations in The New Republic article are not mine and do not represent what I believe or have ever believed.  I have never uttered such words and denounce such small-minded thoughts.

In fact, I have always agreed with Martin Luther King, Jr. that we should only be concerned with the content of a person’s character, not the color of their skin.  As I stated on the floor of the U.S. House on April 20, 1999:  ‘I rise in great respect for the courage and high ideals of Rosa Parks who stood steadfastly for the rights of individuals against unjust laws and oppressive governmental policies.’

 

This story is old news and has been rehashed for over a decade. It’s once again being resurrected for obvious political reasons on the day of the New Hampshire primary.

When I was out of Congress and practicing medicine full-time, a newsletter was published under my name that I did not edit. Several writers contributed to the product. For over a decade, I have publicly taken moral responsibility for not paying closer attention to what went out under my name.”

I’m very glad to hear it. Taking moral responsibility is the right thing to do. But I should say I think less of Ron Paul after reading this article than I did before. Much less. I am not persuaded he is a bigot (like Jamie, apparently), and I remain impressed by the message and spirit of the campaign he has waged. My take on the newsletters here.

Malkin Award Nominee

"Conversely, I remain immune to Obama’s appeal. Who’s writing his speeches? Rob Reiner? How such utter empty gas-baggery could sound to so many people like the second coming of Pericles utterly baffles me. And yet evidently it does thrill millions of people, not only the Beatlemaniacs in the liberal blogosphere, but (much more importantly) the still-powerful custodians in the big media, who have decided that any criticism of Obama no matter how well founded is out of bounds. (See negative reaction to Hillary Clinton’s rebuttal, as above.)  …

There’s an irony here: I think it was Mort Sahl who said of Barry Goldwater that he had always suspected that the first Jewish president would be an Episcopalian. It’s even weirder that the first African-American president should have no African-American relatives! Maybe that’s why he plays so well in white America: Obama too learned about slavery and segregation from books," the ever-classy David Frum. (My apologies to JPod to whom I ascribed this originally by mistake.)

Ron Paul Exposed?

It took a while to get through to their server but I was finally able to read Jamie Kirchick’s review of the various newsletters sponsored by Ron Paul in the 1980s and 1990s. They are a repellent series of tracts, full of truly appalling bigotry. They certainly seem to have no echoes in his current campaign, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be taken seriously (Dave Weigel saw the story coming months ago.) At best, Paul was negligent in having these things published under his name – although Kirchick has not been able to find a single by-lined piece of hate actually attributed to Ron Paul himself. In fact there are almost no by-lines in any of them. I should also say that many of the quotes really don’t sound anything like Paul. Here’s one passage:

In 1990, one newsletter mentioned a reporter from a gay magazine "who certainly had an axe to grind, and that’s not easy with a limp wrist." In an item titled, "The Pink House?" the author of a newsletter–again, presumably Paul–complained about President George H.W. Bush’s decision to sign a hate crimes bill and invite "the heads of homosexual lobbying groups to the White House for the ceremony," adding, "I miss the closet."

Do these sound like Ron Paul to you? I’ve listened to him speak a great deal these past few months and either he has had a personality transplant or he didn’t write this.

Paul’s spokesman, Jesse Benton, responds:

Paul had granted "various levels of approval" to what appeared in his publications–ranging from "no approval" to instances where he "actually wrote it himself." After I read Benton some of the more offensive passages, he said, "A lot of [the newsletters] he did not see. Most of the incendiary stuff, no." He added that he was surprised to hear about the insults hurled at Martin Luther King, because "Ron thinks Martin Luther King is a hero."

I don’t know enough about the arrangements behind these pamphlets to tell if this is a plausible defense or not. But there is a simple way to address this: Paul needs to say not only that he did not pen these excrescences, he needs to explain how his name was on them and disown them completely. I’ve supported Paul for what I believe are honorable reasons: his brave resistance to the enforced uniformity of opinion on the Iraq war, his defense of limited constitutional government, his libertarianism, his sincerity. If there is some other agenda lurking beneath all this, we deserve to know. It’s up to Ron Paul now to clearly explain and disown these ugly, vile, despicable tracts from the past.   

Did Obama Waffle On Iraq?

That’s Bill Clinton’s claim. Here’s an old NYT piece outlining the facts:

A review of Mr. Obama’s statements on Iraq since 2002 shows that he has opposed the war against Saddam Hussein consistently, calling it ‘dumb’ and ‘rash.’ Yet when it came later to hypothetical questioning about how he would have voted on the 2002 Iraq war resolution, Mr. Obama has been more circumspect.

… Indeed, reporters asked Mr. Obama about the Democratic presidential ticket throughout the 2004 campaign, because Senators John Kerry and John Edwards had both voted for the Iraq war resolution. In an interview with The New York Times in July 2004, he declined to criticize Mr. Kerry or Mr. Edwards over the Iraq vote, but also said that he would not have voted as they had based on the information he had at the time.

"But, I’m not privy to the Senate intelligence reports," Mr. Obama said. "What would I have done? I don’t know. What I know is that from my vantage point the case was not made."