Politics

Show up at a Bush event with a Kerry/Edwards T-shirt: get thrown out. Show up at a Kerry event with a Bush/Cheney T-shirt: nobody cares. Same person, same day, same state. Edit: er, different state. Just very close.

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” (original). And maybe taking care to look good in your mug shot completely disarms one’s adversaries (original). I mean, that’s it — he looked good in his mug shot, so the trial might as well be over now. ...

Oh, Ann Coulter (original). 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. ...

Speaking of fractures in the Republican Party: Roy Moore, the Alabama Chief Justice who was removed from office for ignoring an order to remove a representation of the Ten Commandments from the state judicial building, will challenge Republican governor Bob Riley in 2006. Betcha he wins.

My initial read on the Miers nomination is that she’s the big business pick. She spent almost three decades as a corporate lawyer, eventually becoming a partner at one of the biggest law firms in Texas. She worked with Karl Rove on Texas tort reform back when Bush was governor. And, as has been reported just about everywhere, she’s tremendously loyal to Bush. It reads like she’s part of Bush’s Texas business-oriented crowd to me. This is one of the pillars of Bush’s support, alongside the social conservative bunch. Social conservative is perhaps an oversimplification here; I’m not sure I should be putting anti-government types like Grover Norquist alongside Rick Santorum. But close enough for now; they’ve got more in common than either of them do with Dick Cheney. More to the point, it’d have been possible to nominate a Justice who’d satisfy both Norquist and Santorum. ...

Sports journalism is often a pretty conservative field, especially when it comes to talk radio. Tank McNamara, the sports-themed comic strip — I say “the.” Maybe there’s another one, I dunno, but it’s the only one I know about. Anyhow. The current storyline is about Tank McNamara infiltrating the Minutemen, that charming anti-immigration group that’s walking the thin line between citizen activism and vigilante activity. Cause the biggest threat to the United States today is illegal Mexican immigration. ...

The Massachusetts Legislature rejected an amendment banning gay marriage by the resounding margin of 157-39 yesterday. The margin is partially because the extreme right voted no as well — the amendment would permit civil unions, and some of the reps think that’s wrong too. But it’s mostly because gay marriage hasn’t ended the world here in the Bay State. There’s been an election cycle between the court order allowing gay marriage and now, and gay marriage was an election issue. The opinion of the courts matches the opinion of the legislature, and the opinion of the legislature reflects the opinion of the people. Done and done, as they say.

Tacitus, when all is said and done, is honest. Do I disagree with him? Lots. Do I respect his integrity? Generally, yeah. He’s not perfect. Neither am I. Who is? The world needs more Republicans like him and John Cole, and more Democrats who can tell the difference between John Cole and John Derbyshire.

Baen’s taken that final step over the edge; they’re now publishing a book which goes beyond right-wing military fiction to embrace the Patriot movement. A State of Disobedience, by Tom Kratman, opens with a gem of a screed: For the Republicans, however, the Democratic dream was a nightmare: thought control through linguistic control, micromanagement of the economy by those least suited to economic power, social engineering under the aegis of the most doctrinaire of the social engineers, disarmament of the population and the creation of a police state to rival that of Stalin or Hitler, at least in its scope if not by design in its evil. ...

You must condemn X. You must condemn Y. “Islam is proven evil by the failure of mainstream Islam to condemn terrorism.” (Never mind that this is untrue to begin with.) The problem is fairly obvious; the question is how to get ouf of the trap. How do we avoid falling into the belief that failure to condemn implies approval? Everyone does it.