Politics

t.rev is cranking out some excellent stuff in the comment thread below. In a war, you have a large set of actors and a much larger set of actions taken by said actors. Some actions will be heroic, some will be atrocities, many will be just grim violence, and the vast majority will be mind-numbingly tedious. Some actions will be essentially unobserved (no one will survive them), most will be observed by a handful, and a tiny fraction will be observed and communicated on a wider scale. ...

Remember: commemorating Pat Tillman and his death is OK. Commemorating soldiers who didn’t give up millions of dollars to fight is wrong. Also, photographs of anonymous coffins are an invasion of privacy in some fashion that does not apply when you’re talking about former NFL players. Finally, the people of America must be protected at all costs from the evil liberal media, which wishes to use the deaths of soldiers in Iraq for political gain. The people of America, sadly, are not capable of thinking for themselves. They are so damned emotional that the liberal media can play any tune it likes on their heartstrings. ...

Arlen Specter won the Pennsylvania primary (original) over Pat Toomey by a very narrow margin. This is a loss for the hard right wing of the Republican Party. It may or may not translate into a boost for the Democratic Senate candidate; 48% of those who voted against Specter said they wouldn’t vote for him in the general election, but a lot of those people are going to come back to the fold. ...

Fifty years from now, the caricatures of Islamic extremism denoted by the term “Islamofascist” is going to look about as bad as the caricature of Japanese militarism displayed in this poster (original) and this poster (original). The parallel extends in all kinds of directions, in my book.

A while back I mentioned the anti-immigration attempt to take over the Sierra Club. Followup: the white supremacists lost (original). Good times.

I was irked that John Kerry wasn’t releasing his military records, but he fixed that. The difference between Bush’s definition of releasing and Kerry’s definition of releasing (original) is pretty substantial. Kerry put his military records up as PDFs on his web site, and anyone can see them. Bush showed his records to reporters and gave some of them 20 minutes to review some medical exams. In all fairness, I don’t see Kerry’s military medical records on his web site, and I think they should be there. I still believe there’s a difference between handing your records out to a small group of reporters and making them available online for anyone to see. Someone at the Kerry campaign gets the Internet.

In Pennsylvania, Pat Toomey (original) is running against Arlen Specter in the Republican Senatorial primary. Toomey is a hard-right conservative who currently serves in the House of Representatives. Specter is a center-conservative Senator who fails many hard-right litmus tests, most noticably by being one of the handful of prominent Republicans who supports abortion rights. Both Bush and Rick Santorum have endorsed Specter. This is one of those wedge issues — Bush’s hard-right supporters can’t be pleased that he endorsed someone so centrist, particularly since he differs with the Republican Party on such a hot button issue. Run, Roy, run!

I really haven’t had a lot to say about the Iraqi insurgency. Or, if you prefer, rebellion. Or terrorism. Or uprising. Me, I’ve been thinking of it as “the Iraqi disaster,” but I must admit that’s a somewhat loaded term. I think in retrospect I’m a little wary. There’s this great debating tactic: when someone posts about problems in Iraq, and says “this is the sort of thing I was worried about; this is the sort of thing that proves my point” you go over and say, at the top of your lungs, “Look! She’s happy that American soldiers are dying!” It’s not a great tactic because it convinces people. It’s a great tactic because it reinforces the convictions of the people who use it, and allows them to feel all morally superior. ...

From last night’s press conference: “The report itself, I’ve characterized it as mainly history. And I think when you look at it you’ll see that it was talking about a ‘97 and ‘98 and ‘99. It was also an indication as you mentioned that that bin Laden might want to hijack an airplane, but as you said, not to fly into a building but perhaps to release a person in jail. In other words, serving as a blackmail. And of course that concerns me. All those reports concern me.” ...

Glenn Reynolds finds the differences between the popular reaction to Senator Chris Dodd’s statements and the popular reaction to Senator Trent Lott’s statements " particularly disturbing." I’m not entirely sure why, as the two cases aren’t all that similar beyond the initial foolhardy statements. OK, OK, I am sure why. There’s a rapidly spreading meme which makes Lott look a lot better, and it goes like this: “Lott suffered for saying nice things about Strom Thurmond.” There’re also a lot of right-wingers who don’t know why Senator Robert Byrd, former KKK member, gets a free pass for his history. There are times when I’m not sure either, just like I wasn’t sure why Strom Thurmond got a free pass. ...