Month: January 2008

Dissent Of The Day

A reader writes:

What’s all this beard stuff? Those of us amongst the beard impaired are plenty impressed with Robert Plant’s. I can’t grow a beard to save my life.  Once I was on a cruise for a week and thought I would try to give up shaving.  The result was a scraggily, greasy patch of silliness more at home on a high-school greaser than a 30+ gentleman like myself. Anyway, I’m not sure why you beard-able people need to lord it over us beard impaired folks with all of this hirsute frollicking cricketer stuff and awards and the like.

30+ ? Heh.

The Limits Of Non-Interventionism

Dave Schuler, who has opposed most US wars in the last quarter century, still worries about a humbler foreign policy:

There are perfectly good reasons to argue against our present willingness to intervene militarily in the absence of a specific threat to our own security. The reasons include moral ones, national sovereignty, and the expense but I don’t think we should kid ourselves into believing that we’ll make friends by not intervening. We won’t.

But we may not make as many enemies. I’ve found myself seriously re-visiting my own inclination to support US intervention, as I have, unlike Schuler, for much of the last quarter century (the exceptions being Somalia, Darfur and Haiti). The issue seems to me to be the kind of intervention and the type of enemy we face. Islamism is not easily overcome by occupying Muslim countries. If we haven’t learned that from Iraq, we’re dreaming. Even Rumsfeld came to see that flypaper has its limits if it also generates more flies.

“Hathetic”

A reader writes:

What the hell does hathetic mean? If you do a Google search for the word, it just comes back with your blog. I thought it was a typo the first time, but then you used it again. Please post a definition!

Hathos, a noun. Hathetic, an adjective. Coined by Alex Heard. Meaning: something so unpleasant you can’t help but be riveted by it. As in Lou Dobbs, Bill O’Reilly, Hugh Hewitt and the smell of one’s own farts.

Romney’s Optimism

A reader comments on this weirder-than-usual Romney quote:

Romney’s optimism is indeed loopy, but I am not sure how "super-Mormon" it is.  After all, Mormons believe that God handed a new revelation to Joseph Smith less than two centuries ago. What does Romney think is going to happen in the next ten years that would match that?

Losing A Spouse

Or a country – one of many such stories:

After being kidnapped three times in his native Colombia, my partner was denied asylum after his case was pending 6 years in the United States. He left Christmas Day. Although he learned English, and got a GED just to become acculturated (holds a Master’s degree), we don’t want him here. Bad immigrant I guess. Can’t imagine what a good one might be, though. But unlike everyone else who has been highlighted in the “America won’t let us live here” series, I’m not so sad about leaving and joining him there. America is not who she claims to be. Regular readers of your blog will understand. I don’t hate my country. I love it. But for what it promises, not what it has become.

Sad when an American is embracing a Third World country because it offers greater liberty and opportunity. I can’t be the only one who feels this way.

He’s not. Here’s a site devoted to love exiles, denied the right to marry and thereby immigrate.

Predicting Obama

Iowa Independent sees a wave building:

The national media and pollsters don’t live where I do (Carroll, Iowa). When the story is told on Thursday night, the narrative will be a remarkable one: Obama will cobble together western Iowa counties with ivory towered college towns and eastern cities within the shadow of his Illinois. What’s more, while he is running a tight race with U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton and former U.S. Sen. John Edwards with traditional voters, Obama will pull ahead with new people, not just the young, but the never-before caucus-goers. I see their faces in the crowds. They are the woman I went to high school with who stunned me by appearing, waving a Barack Obama sign, no less, at one of his events in Carroll. Surely, she must have an "American Idol" re-run to watch, I thought. No, she’s caucusing for Obama.

Here’s another reason Obama will do well in western Iowa (and win the whole thing): Democrats listen to their Republican friends and family. They know who has the best shot against the Republicans in a general election — an instinct a recent Zogby Poll bears out by showing Obama beating all GOP presidential candidates.

Barack Clinton

Almost funny its so shameless:

I guess it’s because of the polls, but it looks like Hillary’s trying to trick us into believing she is, in actuality, Barack Obama. Twenty minutes after Ben Smith posted that she’d stolen the "Fired up, ready to go" line, Howard Wolfson went on Hardball and said that the great thing about Iowa was that Iowans were getting a chance to "check under the hood…kick the tires." Chris Matthews told him with a smirk, "You stole that line directly from Obama."

They’re like my high school students, staring at their neighbor’s test and hoping we can’t see their eyeballs.

When you have no inner core, it’s sometimes easier to borrow others’. God knows her husband did.