Archive for August, 2007
The beer hunter has died
Leave the poor Senator alone
All right, enough. We’ve had our fun. It’s time to drop the schadenfreude and turn the spotlight away from Larry Craig’s men’s-room dealings. The Senator is a hypocrite (I repeat myself), but that’s no reason to fixate upon the salacious details — which are none of our fucking business. Craig’s hypocrisy — the man’s a strong supporter of anti-gay legislation, including the Defense of Marriage Act — is indeed newsworthy. What he chooses to do with consenting adults in the debatable privacy of an airport men’s room is not.
And yet: all over the Democrat blogosphere, gleeful partisans write hit pieces slamming Craig’s “wrongdoing” in that Minnesotan airport.
“Wrongdoing”? What the fuck?! Since when is getting laid a bad thing?
Witness, for example, this piece from Daily Kos contributor “mcjoan”:
With the Senate Republican leadership calling for an official investigation of the Craig incident, this announcement comes as a surprise. He’s going to try to continue the line that the only thing he did wrong was to plead guilty. That’s not really flying with anyone in Idaho, whatever his new legal counsel might come up with. As Jeffrey Toobin said on CNN, this is one of the most bizarre statements made by a U.S. Senator ever–he was framed but pleaded guilty anyway?
As a matter of fact: yes, the only thing that Craig did wrong in Minnesota was plead guilty. What Craig does with his pecker is not my business, it is not your business, and it surely is not law enforcement’s business. Craig was not framed — he did nothing wrong in the first place. Therefore, he had a moral obligation to plead “not guilty” and fight whatever reprehensible law Minnesota has against gay men hooking up in public bathrooms.
And y’know, some of us still haven’t moved beyond “gay” as a playground insult. The eponymous “kos” s/h/itself graces us with this wit:
To me, it’s pretty obvious that every conservative anti-gay extremist is gay. If you’re not gay, you don’t sit around obsessing over gay sex. If you sit around obsessing about gay sex, then you’re gay. It’s that simple.
I always thought that being gay had more to do with which sex you find attractive than sexual obsession — but then, I’m an individualist, not a Democrat presented with a golden opportunity for public name-calling. Sexual orientation is nothing more than sexual obsession? That sounds almost — dare I say it? — neoconservative. Yeah, these Democrat partisans may like to think of themselves as open-minded, but give them the opportunity to influence a Senate race and they’ll shout “faggot!” as loud as Phelps and his gang.
There are two major issues here:
- Craig’s hypocrisy, for which he should lose his Senate seat.
- Just why the fuck does a Minnesotan police department care what consenting adults consent to in men’s rooms?
Note the absence of anything resembling “Senator Craig did something icky!” in the list above. I am appalled by the hate, disdain, and vituperation directed against Craig — by those who purport to be champions of social liberty — for the way in which he chose to get his rocks off. I am disgusted by the fact that this perv-bashing is being perpetrated under the banner of gay rights, by people who purport to be open-minded about sex.
On the other hand, I love the irony. It’s not every day that the Democrat blogosphere throws its robes aside and reveals the full length and girth of its hypocrisy. In that department, kids, you’re just as well-endowed as the Republicans!
Fortunately, we have Reason magazine’s Nick Gillespie to bring us back to reality:
- Get government out of the bathroom (LA Times)
You know, the more I hear about Barry Goldwater, the more I wonder why Boomers didn’t like him:
To Goldwater, the state was inefficient at best and predicated on violence and coercion at worst. As much as possible, he argued, individuals should be left alone to pursue their happiness as they saw fit, whether in the workplace or the home. A longtime proponent of reproductive rights, Goldwater was an outspoken defender of gays and lesbians, noting during the original gays-in-the-military debates of the early 1990s that “you don’t have to be straight” to serve, “you just have to shoot straight.”
“[V]iolence and coercion”, eh? You mean… like planting moles in men’s rooms just in case someone tries to get laid? Hmm.
Well, at least it made some Democrats happy.
From Bruce Schneier’s blog:
As regular readers of this blog already know, I don’t think that surveillance cameras deter violence. Well, it turns out that they don’t help solve violent crime cases, either:
The 178 video cameras that keep watch on San Francisco public housing developments have never helped police officers arrest a homicide suspect even though about a quarter of the city’s homicides occur on or near public housing property, city officials say.
Nobody monitors the cameras, and the videos are seen only if police specifically request it from San Francisco Housing Authority officials. The cameras have occasionally managed to miss crimes happening in front of them because they were trained in another direction, and footage is particularly grainy at night when most crime occurs, according to police and city officials.
What, you mean we have to watch camera footage?
Better luck next election, folks.
You might’ve heard about the runners who sprinkled flour on an IKEA parking lot and — that’s right — “caused a bioterrorism scare”:
(Hat tip: Bruce Schneier)
NEW HAVEN, Conn. – Two people who sprinkled flour in a parking lot to mark a trail for their offbeat running club inadvertently caused a bioterrorism scare and now face a felony charge.
The sprinkled powder forced hundreds to evacuate an IKEA furniture store Thursday.
(What’s this? Are these single-sentence paragraphs? Why, this must be an Associated Press story! Fuckin’ illiterates.)
I’m at a bit of a loss as to how sprinkled flour can force people to evacuate an IKEA store. Even those badass multigrain flours, while high in protein and such, aren’t animate. It’s far more likely that freaked-out managers (or cops) “forced hundreds to evacuate” because of the scary white powder. Nevertheless, as you might suspect: the freaked-out authority figures are grass-eaters, and are therefore prohibited from assigning responsibility to any human being.
That’s not to say that they aren’t ducking the blame and trying to pin it on someone else:
Mayoral spokeswoman Jessica Mayorga said the city plans to seek restitution from the Salchows, who are due in court Sept. 14.
“You see powder connected by arrows and chalk, you never know,” she said. “It could be a terrorist, it could be something more serious. We’re thankful it wasn’t, but there were a lot of resources that went into figuring that out.”
[...]
New Haven ophthalmologist Daniel Salchow, 36, and his sister, Dorothee, 31, who is visiting from Hamburg, Germany, were both charged with first-degree breach of peace, a felony.
(Would you look at all those fucking commas! How does this shit get published?)
This whole clusterfuck comes from feeble-minded dipshits passing the buck. The first dipshit couldn’t get past those lingering doubts of “you can never be too careful these days; what if it’s something scary?” and called it in — passing the buck to “the authorities”. The second dipshit couldn’t muster the stones to tell the first dipshit “it’s just flour, you feeble-minded dipshit” and evacuated the store just in case — passing the buck to “the administration”. The third dipshit couldn’t dredge up the intestinal fortitude to admit that New Haven’s finest had wigged out over a pile of flour and pressed felony charges — passing the buck to the Salchows.
This is what happens when we buy into the War-on-Terror security-state myth that everything is scary, terrorists are everywhere, only the Government can save you from their eeeville clutches: we lose the ability to evaluate threats rationally. We start to think that we can depend upon someone else (namely, Leviathan) to keep us safe, and having lost the ability to deal with anything we find fear in everything. Naturally, because we’ve passed the terrorism buck to the government, whenever we come across something scary we call Big Brother.
Of course, it can get much, much worse. Look at Britain: not only have the Brits passed the terrorism buck to Leviathan — they’ve passed the courtesy buck!
That will not end well.
Of course, we don’t just pass the buck on security:
- It’s For the Children! and other lies my government told me (Functionalism In Action)
Yep, we’re doing it with parenting, too. As Ian Conrad writes:
What is amazing to this author, however, is the fact that this national coddling represents less and less individual parental responsibility, while simultaneously representing a greater and greater outrage by society at the failures of society as a whole (in this case, read that as “the Government”) to achieve in lieu of parents taking care of their own kids: we demand excellence, but can’t be bothered to produce it ourselves, apparently.
Go ahead, read the whole article.
We’ve been persuaded, in fact, to pass the buck to purported experts on just about every issue imaginable — except whatever we claim to do expertly, where we gather up everyone else’s passed bucks and deal with them (or pass them further up the chain, where they disappear forgotten into an endless bureaucracy). We don’t cook: we pass that buck to the “hamburger-preparation specialist” at McDogfoods or whatever set of industrial robots assembles frozen dinners for Lean Cuisine. We don’t maintain our cars: we take them back to the dealership for “expert service”. We don’t form our own opinions: we read — yeah, right; we watch Nancy Grace or Ann Coulter or Jon Stewart or Michael Moore and cherry-pick whatever tidbits cause us the least cognitive dissonance. We don’t sharpen our kitchen knives: we buy cheap ones, and when they dull we throw them out and buy more. We don’t build our own furniture: we buy cheap bookshelves from IKEA (and presumably let someone in a uniform chase us out of the store when someone spills flour in the parking lot). We buy cheap shit that doesn’t work very well, then we throw it out and buy more.
We have people to cook for us, people to fix our cars, people to think for us, people to raise our kids, people to keep us secure, people to clean our houses, people to groom our yards — even people to walk our fuckin’ dogs. This is the myth of upper-class luxury, ladies and gentlemen, and we’ve all bought in. Leftists may tell you that they respect the dignity of the proletarian, and rightists may tell you that they support down-home blue-collar values, but let’s not kid ourselves: we all want to fuck off to a big house in the suburbs or a big condo in a trendy downtown neighbourhood and live like good old-fashioned peasant-fucking royalty… with an omnipresent rich uncle (that’s the government, of course) to bail us out if we pass more bucks than we can afford.
The problem, of course, is not with people delegating in the first place — some things, like surgery or bridge design, should be delegated. The problem isn’t even with people delegating (every once in a while) things that they can reasonably be expected to do themselves. The problem is people delegating pervasively, and thereby losing their capacity to control their own lives beyond paying other people to do shit for them. (And, of course, loudly demanding that someone else — usually the government — do for them whatever they no longer feel able to do for themselves… but you knew I was going to mention that, didn’t you?)
A human being should be able to
- change a diaper,
- plan an invasion,
- butcher a hog,
- conn a ship,
- design a building,
- write a sonnet,
- balance accounts,
- build a wall,
- set a bone,
- comfort the dying,
- take orders,
- give orders,
- cooperate,
- act alone,
- solve equations,
- analyze a new problem
- pitch manure,
- program a computer,
- cook a tasty meal,
- fight efficiently,
- die gallantly.
Specialization is for insects.
-Robert A. Heinlein
Gonzales resigns
And it’s about fucking time:
- Embattled Gonzales Resigns (Washington Post)
(Hat tip: The Liberty Papers, although the whole ‘net’s been gloating today.)
Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out.
So here’s the thing: if you buy the idea that the Bush 43 administration is a particularly unpleasant aberration and that most American governments are basically decent (or at least will back away from odious behaviour, when given the opportunity), then the continuing disintegration of Bush 43 should lead to improvement — dismantling the invasive-”security” establishment, perhaps. Case in point: Congress has a certain amount of control over who replaces Gonzales, and if those who believe that the Dems are noticeably better than Rove’s Republicans are correct, we should expect them to reject any candidate whose views on things like, say, civil liberties are rather less abusive than Gonzales’s. Of course, by that theory, we should also have expected the Dems to peremptorily shitcan FISA-on-steroids, but that didn’t go so well.
I have a feeling that we won’t see any liberties restored or any federal powers diminished in the next year and a half. My cynical theory is that Pelosi, Reid, et al. are quite pleased to find their party the heir apparent to a substantially stronger federal government (and executive branch in particular), and are looking forward to abusing it in 2008 if (as seems inevitable) we elect a Democrat president. It’s churlish to complain: after all, it’s for our own good and we’ll thank them when we’re older.
In any case, I’ll raise a glass to Gonzales’s misfortune.
It’s the independents, stupid
Well, it sure looks that way.
Over on Salon.com, Glenn Greenwald is as upset about Congress as I am:
- Why is the Democratic Congress so unpopular (Salon.com)
He looks at that same Gallup poll, and concludes (properly, I think) that the Dems are in the shitter because they refuse to do what they said they’d do if only they got elected. However, he steadfastly attributes this disillusionment largely to Democrats alone:
[T]he only aspect of any of this that is unusual is that Democrats rate the Congress so low even though it is controlled by their own party.
[...]
The Democratic Congress commands such little approval for one reason only — because its own party is so disappointed with its performance.
[...]
If Democrats approved of their Congress even close to the rate that Republicans approve of Bush, then Congress’ approval ratings would be at a fairly average level, even high. But not only is Congress’ unpopularity due primarily to Democratic anger[...]
Thus, the only rational conclusion is that Congress is so unpopular, particularly among Democrats, because of their ongoing capitulations to the Bush administration, their failure to place any limits on his Iraq policy, and their general inability/refusal to serve as a meaningful check on the administration.
Occasionally, Greenwald mentions independents, but for the most part he focuses on the fact that (shock, horror!) a lot of Democrat fans are rather less than impressed with their party these days. He’s probably right to do so — that’s the interesting part of the story. When everyone else hates you, that’s politics, but when your own supporters hate you — that’s news, baby!
Still, that isn’t the whole story. If you believe Greenwald’s figures, 64% of Republicans support Bush, but only 8% of Democrats and 25% of independents. Party politics as usual? Yes, and that’s my point. If the Dems had won their majority in 2006 by converting disheartened Republicans to the Great Donkey Cause, you’d think that those figures would be a bit more balanced. But they didn’t: they gained the votes of a lot of independents, and it’s no coincidence that a lot of the new Democrat Congresscritters are much more conservative than Pelosi and company. Independents won Capitol Hill for the Dems in November 2006, and they’ll turn the tide one way or another in 2008 as well.
As far as I’m concerned, that’s a good thing. I’m sick of this soccer-hooligan approach to politics, where sticking to your guns party (can’t say “guns”, guns are scary) whether they’re wrong or right is considered a sign of integrity rather than insanity. Maybe if enough people “throw their votes away” on independents and small-party candidates in 2008, the major players will get the message — and if they don’t, maybe they’ll get a beating.
Remember how we all breathed a small sigh of relief last November? “The Dems have won a majority in Congress on an anti-war platform,” we told ourselves, “Maybe the madness will end.” As usual, it’s fun to revisit some early predictions. I wrote:
Nancy Pelosi scares me — not because of her politics, per se, but because of her body language. She’s been on the news a lot lately, and her head just seems to twitch bizarrely on her shoulders, as if she was some eldritch construct of a nameless race from beyond the stars that has almost, but not quite, perfected its transformation into human form.
Seems like I was dead right on that one. Her political leadership, like her body language, lately has borne the stamp of an almost-perfect mechanical reproduction of something human. This whole blocking-impeachment thing, for instance, makes very little sense to a mind restricted to the usual three Euclidean spatial dimensions. (More on that later.) I also wrote:
What’s next, small-government Democrats demolishing War on Terror posturing and restoring lost civil liberties? We can hope.
Could I have been more wrong? I’m sure it’s possible, but try as I might I can’t see how.
Between prolonging the agony in Iraq and breezily passing an enhanced FISA “by mistake”, this Congress has pretty much destroyed its goodwill. In fact, no Congress has ever been hated more than this one — at least, no Congress that Gallup can remember:
(Hat tip: The Liberty Papers)
A new Gallup Poll finds Congress’ approval rating the lowest it has been since Gallup first tracked public opinion of Congress with this measure in 1974. Just 18% of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing, while 76% disapprove, according to the August 13-16, 2007, Gallup Poll.
What a surprise. Republicans aren’t likely to appreciate a Democrat-dominated Congress — and according to Gallup, only 18% do. But Democrats and independents elected this particular pack of Congresscritters, and they don’t like ‘em any more:
The nine-point drop in Congress’ job approval rating from last month to this month has come exclusively from Democrats and independents, with Democrats’ ratings dropping 11 points (from 32% to 21%) and independents’ ratings dropping 13 points (from 30% to 17%).
That’s a pretty significant drop. And as you might expect, it hasn’t escaped the notice of our xenoconstructed Speaker — Pelosi’s office is busy sending emails to grassroots Democrat groups, trying to rebuild (by long-distance fiat) the same kind of support that put the Dems into the majority last November. The problem is, the same Democrat party that ran on an anti-war platform has, uh, funded the war and tossed away yet more liberty:
Writes Kathy Ember, a Democratic Committee member in Pennsylvania, and president of the Kutztown Democratic Club:
I am the president of a very active grassroots Democratic club just outside Philadelphia in PA. Recently, I got an email from Nancy Pelosi, asking all of us to help build the grassroots.
EXCUSE ME Nancy, but we have been working our butts off out here for years trying to do just that. WE are the ones that put that Democrats back in power in Congress. We’ve been there for you, but you have let us down by not holding the current administration responsible for their crimes.
Not only are you losing us…you are making it impossible for us to “build the grassroots”. Do you know how people look at you now when you ask them to join the Democrats? They laugh in your face. Why, they want to know, should we join or support a party that has done nothing toward getting out of Iraq or impeaching this president?
I am in contact with other Democratic clubs across PA. Some have recently changed the word “Democrats” in their name to a lower case “d”. Others have abandoned their association with the Democrats altogether and have formed instead “citizen action groups.”
As Doug Mataconis points out at TLP, you can’t win when you’re faced with two losing moves:
It’s not at all surprising that the Democrats have disappointed the public. After all, the leadership that came into power in January isn’t all that different from the people that were in charge back when Newt Gingrich’s revolution rolled through the country and brought Republican majorities in both Houses of Congress. In fact, in some case, the same people who were in charge back then are in charge again now.
That’s the problem with the “throw the bums out” idea. More often than not, it really means “throw the bums out and bring back the bums we threw out the last time.” In the end, very little gets accomplished.
And to think that I’m being chastized for “throwing my vote away” on flaky idealists.
