I thought this review was interesting as a sample of flawed political discourse. Also fun for those who want to hear about how Happy Feet is a dangerous, offensive movie, but I’m gonna shine a flashlight on the clever rhetorical trick. Or, in this case, probably not a clever rhetorical trick — it’s probably just a guy who doesn’t realize exactly what kind of hyperbole he’s engaging in.

The trick is this: you take someone generally considered to be offensive on your side of the political spectrum, and you take a behavior you disapprove of on the other side of the political spectrum, and you say “it’s OK to disagree with me, but that behavior is exactly like this offensive person!” It gives you this veneer of reason, cause you’re being all rational and bipartisan and admitting there are slimeballs on your side of the fence. However, it also irrationally conflates what may be perfectly reasonable behavior with behavior that is generally accepted as slimy.

E.g., Pat Robertson:

Calling this Liberal is like those people that call Pat Robertson a conservative. Real conservatives cringe at that statement. No, he is an ultra right wing Christian neo conservative who teaches the word of Christ out of one side of his mouth and then calls openly for the public assassination of the democratically elected leader of a sovereign nation out of the other. No. Real conservatives stand as far away from that scary goon as humanly possible.

Aw, that’s awesome. He’s condemning a guy who calls for assassination! That shows he’s rational.

Happy Feet is the Liberal Pat Robertson.

Well, there you go. Happy Feet might as well be calling for public assassination. Wait…

Happy Feet is liberal like that unwashed hippie wearing the Look to the skies T-shirt that climbs and handcuffs himself to a tree to prevent someone from knocking down a forest on their own land.

You can have mixed opinions about the morality of people who cuff themselves to trees, sure. However, I think it is reasonably clear that calling for assassination is somewhat lower on the morality scale than tree-cuffing. Cause one involves death, and the other does not.

The review goes on to explain that Footloose is evil because the hero doesn’t believe that God forbids dance — um. Wait. No. That’s the plot of Happy Feet, in this case, but it’s definitely evil. Maybe it was evil in Footloose, too, I dunno. He’s pretty convinced that there’s something clearly wrong with it here — “Still not making up a single word.” After that there are a lot of spoilers, so I won’t keep going, but wow.

This shows up all the time on political blogs. Not quite as often in movie reviews. Good trick to recognize when you see it.

• Posted by Bryant at 01:53 PM | Comments (0) | Followups (0)

Not in the least to my surprise, Lieberman is now suddenly willing to think about caucusing with the Republicans. Way to go, Joe!

• Posted by Bryant at 11:55 AM | Comments (1) | Followups (0)

You guys catching this Keith Olbermann stuff? Oughta be.

• Posted by Bryant at 01:36 AM | Comments (0) | Followups (0)

Blah blah blah, Joe Lieberman’s web site went down. Lieberman said it was a DoS attack. Maybe it was something else. The quick Daily Kos response was that it was due to cheap hosting.

Now, that response makes no sense. On the one hand, Kos says the server was overcrowded. But MeetNed.com, which Kos says was hosted on the same servers, was up. So OK, not an overcrowded server. The hosting provider’s own site is down. Obviously some kind of technical screw up, probably not a DoS attack, but the blithe snarky “this could be fixed in an hour by a competent sysadmin” crap… nah. Kos doesn’t know what’s going on and there’s no obvious explanation.

Meanwhile, Jamie at Firedoglake goes nuts with glee when he finds out Lieberman moved his site to GoDaddy. Which, OK, is kinda funny considering Lieberman’s got the whole anti-smut thing going, but…

“When I was hosted with GoDaddy, it cost me $3.99 a month and is still that price today.”

Dedicated servers starting at $87.18 a month and going up from there. I mean… do some research.

• Posted by Bryant at 11:00 PM | Comments (0) | Followups (0)

I’m blithely reading Daily Kos, and there’s another post on a Congress race that’s looking like it might be competitive for the Dems. Not unusual this year. Huh, that name rings a bell for some reason. Wait. Darcy Burner?

That’d be the same Darcy who I knew at Harvard; who filled the co-chair spot at HRSFA after I stepped down; and who was one of my four roomates at the House on the Borderlands back in whatever year that was. (And then I bumped into her again while I was working at Alexa, which is not a very interesting company unless you know that the non-profit side of Alexa was the Internet Archive before Alexa was bought by Amazon.) Well, cool. She’s an awesome person and I have a huge amount of respect for her.

• Posted by Bryant at 10:51 AM | Comments (0) | Followups (0)

Let’s take a quick trip back to my criteria for Bush’s success, shall we? He already missed the 2004 Iraqi election goal by a slim margin. And now it looks like Iran may get nukes. Having enriched uranium doesn’t count, but that does put Iran closer to the Bomb than they were in 2004.

Still no new draft!

• Posted by Bryant at 05:55 PM | Comments (0) | Followups (0)

Let’s turn it around. Let’s say a 78 year old lawyer shot Dick Cheney in the face while hunting.

Think it would have taken an entire day before the news was released?

Think the lawyer would have had at least made a statement within a couple days of the incident?

Think the lawyer would be able to skip being interviewed by the police until the morning after the incident?

It’s kind of an unfair comparison; you have to be a little more careful when someone shoots an elected official. Still and all, it’s not as if Vice Presidents shoot people that often. You can probably treat such incidents as serious — rather than “sure, we’ll come back tomorrow and talk about it” — without placing an undue burden on the institution of the Vice President.

• Posted by Bryant at 08:27 AM | Comments (0) | Followups (0)

Rep. Boehner was elected House majority leader. This is kind of the most amusing outcome; it’s both a validation of the assertion that the Republican members of the House were too corrupt and a demonstration that the right-wing blogs aren’t much more effective than the left-wing blogs when it comes to Capitol Hill.

Intriguingly, Shadegg dropped out after the first ballot, throwing his support to Boehner. Thanks for campaigning for him, bloggers: looks like he was basically playing kingmaker rather than really running. You could view that as a win in that he’ll have a chunk of influence, I suppose.

Boehner is the guy who handed out campaign checks from the tobacco industry on the House floor in 1995. I’m sure he’s gotten a lot more serious about reform since then, of course. He’s only got… 14 former staffers working as lobbyists, which is almost three times as many as both Blunt and Shadegg combined.

• Posted by Bryant at 02:35 PM | Comments (0) | Followups (0)

Bush said we shouldn’t make man/animal hybrids; like a lot of people, I was wondering what he meant. I was pretty sure there was some kind of scientific research going on that involved gene therapy, possibly stem cells. It smelled like something prompted by the religious right.

Yep.

• Posted by Bryant at 07:58 PM | Comments (0) | Followups (0)

The liberal blog community just had the limits of its power defined. I expect the argument about whether the Alito cloture vote represents an improvement over the Scalia vote or an embarrassment will continue for some time. Either way, a lot of it was about the 2006 and 2008 elections.

Meanwhile, over on the other side of the aisle, the conservative blog community has decided to set up their own power-defining moment. The Republican members of the House vote for their floor leader on Thursday; it’s a three way race between Roy Blunt, John Boehner, and John Shadegg. Shadegg is the reformer. RedState wants Shadegg, Glenn Reynolds is making non-endorsement endorsements, and so on.

It’s an interesting narrative, since endorsing Shadegg is a tacit admission that DeLay was corrupt and that he represented a corrupt culture. It’s going to be more interesting to see if Shadegg wins. I really don’t have any predictions; I don’t have any sense of how influential the conservative blogs are. (Or vice versa; RedState is run by professional Republican political operatives, and cannot be honestly characterized as a grassroots blog.)

• Posted by Bryant at 10:59 AM | Comments (0) | Followups (0)

Everyone and their cousin is gonna be linking to this, but here’s the Newsweek article on the internal struggle over presidential powers in the Bush administration.

It’s a blatantly biased article. Illustrating an investigation of internal debates with a picture of an Iraqi being tortured? It’s my bias, though, and I find the article strokes the pleasure centers of my political brain.

• Posted by Bryant at 10:50 AM | Comments (0) | Followups (0)

Speaking of sports — actually, first, a note on my previous. When your favorite athlete thanks God for the win? That’s probably not a casual reflex. Read this piece on sports as an avenue of proselytization.

Anyway. Dr. Z writes a column for Sports Illustrated on the NFL. Fun, breezy writer; well respected, he’s been around forever. Here’s a throwaway comment from him this week:

“Come in Mike H. from Wellington, New Zealand, do you read me, over? No, he doesn’t read me because I’m speaking to a piece of paper with writing on it, which shows how much I’m slipping. One more word, before I get to his question. Can you exert any influence to get the Flaming Redhead and me citizenship papers, plus help in opening an account at the Bank of NZ? If they ask what I can do, tell them I can cover rugby and do a really snappy column about the great NZ wines. Last I heard, New Zealand is a country where they don’t torture people, right?”

Just a data point.

• Posted by Bryant at 09:34 PM | Comments (0) | Followups (0)

Pat Robertson said that God was punishing Sharon by sending him a stroke. We are, of course, horrified. What a cruel thing to say!

Then again, it’s in the same logical category as something that’s said every day, broadcast on TV regularly, and so on. “… and I thank God for helping us win this game.” Which is equivalent to “I thank God for making sure my opponents lost the game.” Which means God’s making choices about who wins and who loses. He’s gotta choose sides there.

Maybe it’s more reasonable to claim that God is making choices about relatively unimportant things like sporting events. But… the culture accepts the idea that God reaches down and affects the outcome of everyday events. We don’t object when an athlete makes that claim. We ought not be surprised when that claim shows up in other arenas.

• Posted by Bryant at 10:02 AM | Comments (0) | Followups (0)

So Tom DeLay had to appear at the courthouse for a mug shot last week. Now, let’s say you’re a politician in some degree of trouble, and you gotta have your mug shot taken. I’m thinking it’s not too much of a leap of brilliance to say “I better not look like a criminal in the photograph.”

Or maybe that takes “a freaking political genius”. And maybe taking care to look good in your mug shot completely disarms one’s adversaries. I mean, that’s it — he looked good in his mug shot, so the trial might as well be over now.

This is an awfully low bar for political excellence, if you ask me.

• Posted by Bryant at 06:40 PM | Comments (0) | Followups (0)

Oh, Ann Coulter.

It’s a great column. I mean, you get the usual “liberals are the devil” stuff which of course only coincidentally resembles the rhetoric of extremists who really would like to see liberals dead. You don’t get an Ann Coulter column without that; they don’t have anything without glossy intellectual hatred in it.

But you also get the pit bull going after Bush, a fine spectacle indeed. It’s worth it for that aspect alone. Don’t stop! There’s more.

“I know conservatives have been trained to hate people who went to elite universities, and generally that’s a good rule of thumb. But not when it comes to the Supreme Court. … Being on the Supreme Court isn’t like winning a ‘Best Employee of the Month’ award. It’s a real job.”

There you have it. You shouldn’t hate people who go to elite universities when they’re doing real jobs. Mind you, I just elided two and a half paragraphs to produce the quote, but nobody’s perfect.

• Posted by Bryant at 07:23 PM | Comments (0) | Followups (0)