Month: March 2011

Exum reveals what he's reading. Among his picks:

[O]ne of the best pieces of investigative journalism I have read in quite some time is this article in the Washington Monthly on the lucrative and poorly regulated terrorism counsultancy business. We basically have a cadre of yahoos running around the country teaching our police forces to fear any and all Muslims, which, if you're trying to radicalize your Muslim population, seems like a damn good way to go about doing it. Very few of these yahoos have any formal training or education in radicalization or currents of thought in political Islam. 

INTEGER VITAE

The best and decent life, Gaddafi,
doesn't call for fighter jets,
nor guns or tank or rockets
tipped with mustard gas.

No matter where he goes,
Libya or Pakistan,
the upright man fears nothing
in Tunisia or Iran.

For as I wandered out unarmed
I sang of Liberty,
and from inside my border,
a wolf began to flee,

and what a wolf he was,
as bad as Ben Ali,
Mubarak or the other thugs
nursed by official policy.

So put me on the open plains
where summer parches trees
or on that slice of Earth
choked by clouds and gloomy days,

you can set me right beneath
Apollo's SUV,
and still I'll love her, and her laugh,
free spoken Liberty.

By Dish alum Christopher Van Buren, with apologies to Horace.

(Photo: A smouldering copy of the "green book," written Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi, was burned by residents of the north-central Libyan town of Benghazi on March 02, 2011. By Robert Schmidt/AFP/Getty Images)

Andrew Romano makes the case for and against the New Jersey governor:

Right now, he’s that straight-shooting, truth-telling, union-busting character from the YouTube videos. Over time, however, he would become, thanks to his Republican rivals, the candidate who accepts Roe v. Wade, who supports New Jersey’s strict gun-control laws, who isn’t particularly tough on illegal immigration, who favored the ground zero mosque, and who endorsed a few RINOs in 2010. It isn’t hard to imagine Christie’s 27 percent support shriveling up some, much like Giuliani’s in 2008.

This is the latest data on whether marriage equality should be legal from the the 2010 edition of the General Social Survey. Analysis here and here. I'm proud to say it must represent one of the most successful political, social and cultural movements in history.

Even their skewed polling sample finds that Scott Walker has over-reached.

Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, 9.45 am

Wilkinson recently compared the Wisconsin protests to the tea parties. Douthat doubles down on the parallel:

[T]he partisan mind sees what it wants to see. Somehow it’s always easier to insist that the other side’s crazy posters and Hitler analogies and intimations of violence (or even banalities about “saving the Constitution” and “taking back” the country) are evidence of crazy insurrectionist eliminationist madness that threatens to drown the republic in blood, whereas your own side’s excesses are just, well, excesses — the work of a few bad apples, no big deal, nothing to get excited about, and probably blown out of proportion anyway. Somehow there’s always a reason why your side’s counter-majoritarian maneuvering is the very essence of democracy, whereas when the other side does it it’s a sign that American government is hopelessly broken.

There have been rhetorical and visual excesses in Madison from the hard left. But the difference is: they are essentially backing the status quo, whereas the Tea Party wants a radical change. Democratic leaders seem constantly trying to distance themselves from their more, er, enthusiastic supporters. Republican leaders often embrace the rhetoric and imagery of their fringe. I think that makes a difference. No one, for example, with the extremist rhetoric and worldview of Sarah Palin would make it to the veep slot in the Democratic party. Imagine: Obama-Sharpton 2012! Or Obama-Sanders! And if they did, they would lose votes, whereas Palin almost certainly increased the performance of the GOP ticket last time around.

On the Rush Limbaugh radio program, Donald Trump discussed his presidential aspirations, prompting this wonderful exchange:

Trump: I notice that the White House they give a lot of balls for people, and some should have balls! I mean, if you look at Britain, if you look at certain places, they've come through and they've been good allies, and we should have balls for them. As you know, 'cause you're in Palm Beach, I have the greatest ballroom probably in the world.  I built it five years ago, and it's one of the great ballrooms of the world.  It's at the Mar-a-Lago Club. And I see that the White House – the White House, Washington, DC – when a dignitary comes in from India, from anywhere, they open up a tent. They have a tent. A tent!

RUSH:  Yeah, I've noticed that.

TRUMP:  A lousy looking tent.

RUSH: Yup.

TRUMP: An old, rotten tent that frankly they probably rented, pay a guy millions of dollars for it even though it's worth about $2, okay? So they have a tent for a dignitary that comes in.  So recently, a couple of months ago, I called up the White House.  I said, "Listen, I'm really good at this stuff.  I will build you a magnificent ballroom.

We'll go through committees. You know, you have all sorts of things with committees. We'll go through committees; we'll pick the one they like. We'll pick the architect everybody likes. We'll pick something that works. We'll do ten designs. You'll pick the one that's the greatest with the greatest architecture.  I will build it free." So that's anywhere from 50 to hundred million-dollar gift.  I will give that, and I mean, I'm talking, Rush — it's the first time I've said this. I'm talking to the biggest person, one of the biggest people at the White House.  I'm not talking to a low-level person.

RUSH:  Right.

TRUMP:  One of the most important people. "I will build the White House a ballroom.  So when the head of India comes to town we can give him a five-star dinner in a magnificent ballroom, befitting of this country and the White House," right?  They never got back to me.  It's a hundred million-dollar gift.  They never got back to me.

RUSH:  Of course not!  They think you're a Republican.

TRUMP:  Well, but they never got back to me, Rush.  When whether I'm a Republican or an independent or a Democrat, they never got back to me.  If I was a Republican they should do it anyway! They should say, "Trump's gonna give us a hundred million dollars? He's gonna build the ballroom? It's gonna be magnificent?" Why wouldn't they get back to me?  That's the problem with this country.  It's like no common sense.

What better to unite the Tea Party and establishment Republicans than the insatiable need to show the world that America has the biggest, best balls of all.

Walter Kirn takes a Wittgensteinian approach to Charlie Sheen:

At a time when few of us know firsthand exactly what Total Self-Gratification would constitute if our means and our access to party supplies were infinite, we are left to infer from Sheen's aftermath appearance — from the graven lines around his mouth and the very small holes in the center of his pupils where the "twinkle" used to go — what it's like to do everything you want to anyone you want to do it to in a safe and luxurious environment while you're the highest you can be. It's fun to imagine what Sheen felt, that is, and what it felt like (at one time) to be Sheen. It's a way to connect with our orgiastic selves. It's a way to not have to pretend that cocaine feels bad and that meaningless sex, by meaning whatever we want it to, isn't in fact the most meaningful sex of all.

Every time I find myself ready to write this whole thing off as yet another ratings and pageview stunt, or as an example of "drugs are bad, mkay," I'm struck by the honesty of the addict determined to resist intervention. The truly rich can do this – think of Michael Jackson's descent into pharmaceutical madness – without real sanctions. But Sheen has had sanctions. He has lost his lucrative career, while also damaging the lives and careers of his colleagues. And yet he still places pure pleasure over self-control.

Part of this is obviously a function of how some drugs shut down the super-ego and eventually the ego as well. But part is also a useful admission that these drugs make his life more fun in the short term. People do drugs for a reason. That reason is often intense pleasure to which they become addicted. Acknowledging that side of the equation seems to me to be the first step in fighting for moderation. Anti-drug campaigners who insist that recreational drugs make people miserable miss this. They can make them miserable in the long run, if they abuse them or have no control over them. But in the short run, wheeeee! I have to say it's refreshing in some respects to see someone who will publicly make this point, even as their self-destruction instantly undermines it.

Marty Beckerman gets it:

Yes, he’s a self-styled decadent rock star on par with Keith Richards, and it’s always fun to giggle at an addict. But something deeper is going on; he’s clearly an intelligent man with vivid self-awareness and greater discipline than most of us can muster. Sheen isn’t cool because he did a bunch of drugs over twenty years; he’s cool because he did a bunch of drugs over twenty years, stopped cold turkey to make money — to prove a point — and then refused to apologize, to define himself as a slave, to honor the typical recovery narrative. He blasted Alcoholics Anonymous as a “cult” for convincing its adherents of their own powerlessness; he proclaimed that his decades-long bender was “radical” and “magic.” In a world that wants men to apologize for simply existing, Charlie Sheen is a man with zero regrets.

Matt and Trey get it too, of course.

(Image by Casey Barteau via Kris Kimlin)

A disturbing video of one group of Americans vilifying other Americans because of their religious faith.