The Commentariat -- May 19, 2015
Internal links removed.
Damian Carrington of the Guardian: "Fossil fuel companies are benefitting from global subsidies of $5.3tn (£3.4tn) a year, equivalent to $10m a minute every day, according to a startling new estimate by the International Monetary Fund. The IMF calls the revelation 'shocking' and says the figure is an 'extremely robust' estimate of the true cost of fossil fuels. The $5.3tn subsidy estimated for 2015 is greater than the total health spending of all the world's governments."
Julie Davis of the New York Times: "President Obama on Monday banned the federal provision of some types of military-style equipment to local police departments and sharply restricted the availability of others. The ban is part of Mr. Obama's push to ease tensions between law enforcement and minority communities in reaction to the crises in Baltimore; Ferguson, Mo.; and other cities.... Mr. Obama promoted the effort on Monday during a visit to Camden, N.J. The city, racked by poverty and crime, has become a national model for better relations between the police and citizens after replacing its beleaguered police force with a county-run system that prioritizes community ties":
... Sarah Wheaton & Ben Schreckinger of Politico: "The nation's largest police union is fighting back against a White House plan to restrict local police forces' ability to acquire military-style gear, accusing President Barack Obama's task force of politicizing officers' safety.... James Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, told Politico on Monday that ... in particular he objects to a measure that would require police departments to get permission from city governments to acquire certain equipment, including riot batons, helmets and shields, through federal programs." ...
... CW: Right. Because police departments should be armed, independent organizations unaccountable to civilian authority. Also because there's nothing wrong with this photo that accompanied the Politico story:
... See also Rand Paul's remarks, linked below. Looks as if he'll be holding Hillary Clinton responsible for all this. ...
... UPDATE: See Akhilleus' & D. C. Clark's commentary in today's thread on these things.
Jordan Fabian & Kristina Wong of the Hill: "President Obama's strategy in fighting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is facing fresh scrutiny after the militant group toppled government forces in the major Iraqi city of Ramadi. The city's fall represented the biggest military gain for ISIS this year. The White House on Monday acknowledged the seizure represents a 'setback' but signaled it is unlikely to alter its approach to combatting ISIS, which relies on U.S.-led airstrikes and training Iraqi security forces to fight the ground war." ...
... Nick Gass of Politico: "Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Tuesday that when it comes to the Middle East, he does not think the United States has a strategy 'at all.'"
Seung Min Kim of Politico: Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass) released a report Monday "that accuses both GOP and Democratic administrations of reneging on labor provisions in previous free-trade agreements -- dating to the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993." ...
... Michael Wessel, a Democratic trade specialist & former Congressional aide, in Politico Magazine: "I've actually read the TPP text provided to the government's own advisors, and I've given the president an earful about how this trade deal will damage this nation. But I can't share my criticisms with you. I can tell you that Elizabeth Warren is right about her criticism of the trade deal."
Jim Dwyer of the New York Times: "Immigrants are the pilings of the New York economy, the providers of low-cost, seamless comforts like 24-hour takeout food, cheap nail salons, all-night gas stations, nonunion construction workers. Some entered the United States legally; others did not. The ability of unscrupulous employers to steal wages can take your breath away."
Good Health Is a Terrible Thing. Rachana Pradhan of Politico: "More than 12 million people have signed up for Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act since January 2014, and in some states that embraced that piece of the law, enrollment is hundreds of thousands beyond initial projections.... The federal government is picking up 100 percent of the expansion costs through 2016, and then will gradually cut back to 90 percent. But some conservatives say the costs that will fall on the states are just too big a burden, and they see vindication in the signup numbers, proof that costs will be more than projected as they have warned all along."
Maureen Dowd: Justice Ginsburg presides at a wedding. ...
... MEANWHILE, Ted Cruz is pretty sure Dimmocrats are going to make you get hitched to a person who shares your chromosome set. What Steve Benen missed in the linked analysis is the fact that "mandatory" is a Tea-Party-approved scare word unless it appears in a phrase like "mandatory sentences for crack users" or "mandatory drug tests for lazy moochers." Because freeedom.
Alex Ronan of New York: "Tennessee representative Scott DesJarlais opposes abortion, has run repeatedly as a pro-life candidate, and routinely votes in favor of restricting reproductive rights.... DesJarlais just doesn’t believe anyone should get an abortion. Except for his wife and mistress.... The contradictions between his personal views on abortion and his public stance drew renewed attention last week, when he voted in favor of the 20-week abortion ban. But DesJarlais's behavior is indicative of a larger contradiction between pro-lifers' professed views and their personal behavior. ThinkProgress points to a statistically supported dynamic in which people who identify as pro-life frequently find themselves choosing abortion when confronted with reproductive decisions in their own lives."
Annals of "Justice," Ctd. Eric Schlosser of the New Yorker: A Sixth Circuit panel "threw out the sabotage convictions [of three peace activists], and their view of the government's arguments was scathing."
J. K. Trotter of Gawker: "Three weeks ago, a Nassau County Supreme Court justice ended a bitter three-year custody dispute between Fox News anchor Bill O'Reilly and his ex-wife, Maureen McPhilmy, by granting custody of the couple's two minor children to McPhilmy. Though nearly all documents pertaining to New York family court cases are sealed, Gawker has learned that the justice in the case heard testimony accusing O'Reilly of physically assaulting his wife in the couple's Manhasset home." ...
... Dylan Byers of Politico: "Bill O'Reilly says the allegation that he physically assaulted his ex-wife is '100% false.'" CW: And everything O'Reilly says is 100% true.
Krugman-Brooks Feud, Ctd. Brooks today: "There’s a fable going around now that the intelligence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was all cooked by political pressure, that there was a big political conspiracy to lie us into war." Krugman yesterday: "We were, in a fundamental sense, lied into war." ...
... Jonathan Chait: "The Bush administration's strategy from the outset has been to hide behind this failure of intelligence.... This is how the dodge works. Step 1: Prevent a Senate report from looking into whether the administration lied. Step 2: Ignore the existence of the report that did show the administration lied. Step 3: Pretend that an intelligence failure and a deliberate effort to cook the intelligence are mutually exclusive. It was a mistake, therefore it could not have also been a crime." ...
... CW: It is worth bearing in mind that all of the GOP candidates' dodges (except maybe Jeb's first three or four answers) follow Dubya's own strategy to rewrite/whitewash history. Jeb's flubs haven't instigated a new intraparty "candid discussion" of the Iraq War but rather continued the GOP coverup. And that nice David Brooks is still the company spokesman.
Presidential Race
Hillary's Shady Friend Sidney. Nicholas Confessore & Michael Schmidt of the New York Times: While Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, Sidney Blumenthal advised her "about events unfolding in Libya.... Mrs. Clinton ... took Mr. Blumenthal’s advice seriously, forwarding his memos to senior diplomatic officials in Libya and Washington and at times asking them to respond. Mrs. Clinton continued to pass around his memos even after other senior diplomats concluded that Mr. Blumenthal’s assessments were often unreliable.... While advising Mrs. Clinton on Libya, Mr. Blumenthal, who had been barred from a State Department job by aides to President Obama, was also employed by her family's philanthropy, the Clinton Foundation.... During the same period, he also worked on and off as a paid consultant to Media Matters and American Bridge, organizations that helped lay the groundwork for Mrs. Clinton's 2016 campaign. Much of the Libya intelligence that Mr. Blumenthal passed on to Mrs. Clinton appears to have come from a group of business associates he was advising as they sought to win contracts from the Libyan transitional government." ...
... Here's a related story by Schmidt. Looks as if even Secretary Clinton was skeptical of Blumenthal's "intel." ...
... Josh Gerstein of Politico: "The State Department is proposing a deadline of January 2016 to complete its review and public release of 55,000 pages of emails former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton exchanged on a private server and turned over to her former agency last December. The proposal came Monday night in a document related to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit Vice News filed in January seeking all of Clinton's emails." ...
... Sins of the Husband. Alexander Bolton of the Hill: "Republican presidential candidate Rand Paul says he will bash Hillary Clinton over her husband's record of putting 'a generation of black men in prison' if he is the nominee. Paul ... says he will compete with [Hillary] Clinton in Philadelphia, where Democrats have a 7-to-1 registration advantage, and other impoverished cities by highlighting his support for criminal justice reform." ...
... CW: Other than in a few areas like health care reform, in which Hillary was actively involved, how responsible is Hillary for Bill's policies? Sure -- just as Jeb has to answer questions about Dubya's horrible misadventures -- she should state her current position on policies that are now some two decades old. (Let me add here that most of us of a certain age would do some things differently than we did two decades ago.) But "bashing" her "over her husband's record" doesn't make a lot of sense to me any more than it makes sense to "bash" Jeb over Dubya's policies -- unless, um, he agrees with them.
Nick Corasaniti of the New York Times: "The quotations he posts, rarely pithy, are often sayings he thinks up in the shower. The photographs he puts up sometimes show him frowning, while others show him gazing oddly into the horizon. And he does not seem to care about the importance of videos. But somehow, Bernie Sanders, the 73-year-old senator from Vermont, has emerged as a king of social media early in the 2016 presidential campaign, amid a field of tech-savvy contenders."
Peter Beinart of the Atlantic: Knowing what he knew then, Dubya should not have invaded Iraq. Marco "Rubio's depiction of Bush as a guy forced to invade because he 'was presented with intelligence that said that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction' is absurd.... [But] Let's imagine that Bush had possessed irrefutable proof that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons. Those weapons would still have presented no grave threat to the United States.... By claiming that the United States was right to invade Iraq given what its leaders thought they knew at the time, Rubio and his fellow GOP candidates are making George W. Bush's radical departure from past American practice the new normal.... The toxic spirit of the last Bush presidency still thoroughly infects today's GOP."
Roger Simon of Politico: "Now that we know whether Jeb would have launched his brother's invasion of Iraq -- yes, I don't know, I'm not saying, and no -- I want to know if Jeb would have launched his father's campaign against Willie Horton.... The 1988 presidential campaign pitt[ed] George H.W. Bush against Michael Dukakis and use[d] ... race to transform a losing campaign into a winning one.... The Bush campaign was run by Lee Atwater and Roger Ailes...."
Charles Pierce: Uh oh, the Supremes decline to help out Scotty. "Where that will end up is anyone's guess but, for now, unlike, say, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Scott Walker remains under actual criminal investigation. Just thought everyone should remember that."
Live Free AND Die. "You can't enjoy your civil liberties if you're in a coffin." Scott Conroy of the Huffington Post: "Hours after delivering a hawkish foreign policy speech, in which he lambasted critics of post-Sept. 11 domestic surveillance tactics, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) ramped up his rhetoric further against those whom he derided as 'civil liberties extremists.'" Via Greg Sargent.
More Exciting GOP News. Jose DelReal of the Washington Post: "Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) on Monday formally launched a presidential exploratory committee, theclearest indication yet that he is gearing up for a White House run." ...
... Adam Weinstein of Gawker (who seems to be about the only public commentator who even noticed Jindal's planned exploration): "Presumably he'll be exploring outside the state he governs, because as much as Louisianans hate Democrats and Obummer, they hate Bobby more, a new poll shows." ...
... Even More Exciting News. Bill Barrow of the AP: "South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham all but confirmed Monday he will run for president in 2016, saying he believes he would be the best choice to serve as commander in chief amid continued unrest in the Middle East. 'I'm running because I think the world is falling apart,' Graham said in an interview on 'CBS This Morning.'" ...
... Dana Milbank: Apparently the CBS morning news producers thought a tweeting shark was more compelling teevee than Graham's announcement of his announcement.
Senate Race
Michael Finnegan of the Los Angeles Times: "With her U.S. Senate campaign off to a bumpy start, Loretta Sanchez refused Sunday to rule out the possibility of running instead for reelection to the House of Representatives. At a brief question-and-answer session with reporters, Sanchez (D-Santa Ana) first declined to elaborate on her apology to state Democratic convention delegates Sunday morning for making a stereotypical Native American 'war cry'; gesture in remarks to a crowd the day before." ...
... CW: This is the weird (and egregious) part. Finnegan: "Sanchez, the daughter of Mexican immigrants, made the controversial gesture Saturday while joking with a group of Indian Americans about confusing an Indian American with a Native American. [The "Indian American" who was the subject of the war whoop: Kamala Harris, California's attorney general & a candidate for Senate. Harris's mother is from India.] Video of the gaffe on Twitter and YouTube showed Sanchez tapping her hand to her mouth in an imitation of a war cry."
Beyond the Beltway/American Violence
Manny Fernandez, et al., of the New York Times: "The police charged about 170 people on Monday in the shootout among rival motorcycle gangs at a busy shopping plaza in [Waco, Texas,] on Sunday that left at least nine bikers dead and 18 others wounded.... The people arrested after the shootout at the Twin Peaks Restaurant, in south Waco, were charged with engaging in organized crime linked to capital murder.... It will be up to prosecutors and a grand jury to decide what charges they will ultimately face, but capital murder charges can carry the death penalty....
Bikers, their lawyers and other supporters say that the constitutional rights of many club members are constantly under assault by law enforcement authorities, whom, they say, harass them because they are such a visible presence and because they are conspicuous in their disdain and distrust of the police and officers with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the main federal agency that monitors biker organizations.
... CW: Yup, they're the victims. Because freeedom. ...
... ** Karoli of Crooks & Liars writes an excellent piece pointing out how officials, police & the media are treating the above-mentioned "victims" differently from the way they treat & cover minority protesters. ...
... Charles Pierce noticed the same thing. But he's totally optimistic! "I am sure that, when the dust settles, and the 200-odd (!) people who were arrested get arraigned, we will hear a great deal from the usual suspects about the cultural pathologies inherent in white society that are at the root of episodes like this one. David Brooks will notice that white people -- many of whom wear ponytails and mullets -- also tend to fk without his approval, and Ross Cardinal Douthat will wonder whether we'd even have motorcycle gangs if Pius XII were still alive. Earnest pundits on television will agree that we must discover immediately how many of the assembled grew up in two-parent homes." ...
... Jessica Glenza of the Guardian: "as police worked to book and process the gang members, lawmakers in the state's capital debated whether to further expand firearm 'open carry' rights. One bill, HB910, passed the Texas house and was debated on Monday in a state senate committee. It would allow people to carry handguns and pistols in the open and would bar police from asking whether the person carrying the gun is licensed. Texans can already carry so-called 'long guns', such as rifles, in public. Another bill, SB11, would allow 'concealed carry' of weapons on college campuses. Hours after the shootout, gun lobbyists called the legislation 'great bills by great bill authors'... A spokesman for the National Rifle Association said that he didn't see a connection between Texas;s legislation and the outlaw gangs' behavior....
WESH Orlando: "The man accused of shooting at George Zimmerman bonded out of jail over the weekend and has surrendered his guns and ammunition to law enforcement, police said."
Way Beyond
Ari Shapiro of NPR: "Ireland could make history this week. Same-sex marriage is legal in about 18 countries around the world. In all of those countries, the decision was made by the legislature or the courts. Ireland appears poised to become the first country to legalize same-sex marriage through a national popular vote set for Friday.... Ireland is one of the most socially conservative countries in Western Europe. It has nearly the highest church-going rate on the continent. Abortion is still illegal. Divorce was outlawed until the mid-1990s. That makes Ireland a less-than-obvious place for same-sex marriage but the polls indicate the Yes voters are favored by a wide majority."
News Ledes
New York Times: "Happy Rockefeller, the socialite whose 1963 marriage to Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York, soon after both had been divorced, raised a political storm in a more genteel time and may have cost him the Republican presidential nomination in 1964, died on Tuesday at her home \in Tarrytown, N.Y. She was 88."
Washington Post: "Iran's judiciary plans to open the trial next week of the Washington Post's bureau chief in Tehran after being detained nearly 10 months on charges that include 'espionage,' his lawyer said Tuesday."
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Reader Comments (17)
Yes, Rand Paul doesn't have _any_ close family members who have ever done anything that he might regret.
Glass houses...
Finally read a Warren Report all the way through..
Thanks.
If we've heard it once we've heard it many, many times:" Infrastructure is NOT sexy." I have always found this strange and asked, what does that mean exactly? When politicians use this phrase they seem to mean because infrastructure isn't "sexy" it isn't going to get anywhere on the long list of items Congress needs to address. One can then assume, I suppose, those items that do manage to arouse our legislators to act, ARE sexy? Here's John Oliver who takes the matter of infrastructure to a whole new level–––a really terrific job!
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/05/15/1383149/-Why-do-Republicans-really-oppose-infrastructure-spending?detail=email
Charles Pierce is also optimistic when he says that it's anybody's guess where the John Doe investigation of Scott Walker will end up.
Anybody who follows Wisconsin events can guess this: the four conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court justices (who have so far declined to recuse themselves despite having received millions of dollars from the parties bringing the case before them) will let him off. That's what "scot-free" means in Wisconsin.
I'm a wee bit concerned to learn that among the items taken off the law enforcement wish list by the president are grenade launchers and these things.
Appalling is the word.
What police unit needs...bayonets?
During a debate with the Romney Mechanism, who attacked the president for reducing the number of navy vessels, Barack Obama famously responded, "Well governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets." Apparently all those surplus bayonets were shipped to Officer Rambo.
If the mere fact that local police departments now have bayonets (not to mention grenade launchers!) at the ready doesn't give one pause, how about this: how much training do you think your average Barney Fife receives on the proper use of a bayonet? For that matter, what the hell IS the proper use of a bayonet?
Funny you should ask:
"The main focus of bayonet training is not to prepare Marines to 'go over the top' in a massed bayonet charge as in World War I or the Civil War. Bayonet training is a physical means of developing and reinforcing a combat mindset."
"Combat mindset". Got it. Great. Wonderful.
The Marines have a special course designed to teach bayonet skills on which they are "unleashed to bayonet everything in sight." According to a Slate article on cutting edge weaponry, "Learning proficiency in basic bayoneting techniques is part of qualifying for a tan belt, which is required of every recruit."
So even though the US Army has not made a bayonet charge since 1951 during the Korean War, the Marines still spend a lot of time training recruits in the proper use of these particular weapons which, "...in addition to potential use in hand-to-hand combat...are said to be useful for keeping prisoners under control and for 'poking an enemy to see whether he is dead.'" I suppose that last use would be valuable to some police forces after "containing" citizen demonstrations.
In a way it's not nearly as lethal in terms of inflicting death to many citizens quickly, as would a grenade launcher, but somehow the image of militarized police dressed in combat gear, advancing on American citizens with bayonets at the ready strikes me as a vision of a dysfunctional society far worse than you see in the "Walking Dead". At least the zombies can't help it. And, worse, using bayonets to instill a combat mindset pushes cops further and further away from "protect and serve" and closer to "kill, kill, kill"
Bayonets. Holy mother. What's next, mustard gas?
The National Guardsmen who carried out the Kent State Massacre had fixed bayonets, wore gas masks and full combat gear. The students were unarmed. Plus ça change...
Also read the Guardian article on fossil fuel subsidies--all the way through--and had these thoughts.
Seems that in the context of this report the "oil depletion allowance" and other direct tax subsidies to US oil interests are small potatoes. And from what I can see, the subsidies noted don't include the immense cost of the military resources used to protect oil interests...the trillions we have so far spent on Iraq, for an instance that should be harder to forget than it appears to be.
Related is this secondary consequence of "cheap" oil. The flood of cheap imported goods on which we have come to rely, the year-round "fresh" produce we expect in our markets, the overall headlong rush to a globalized economy with its many unforeseen consequences has been made possible by our deliberate distortion of the energy markets, which keep energy costs far below what a real market would set. If the true cost of shipping goods from one corner of the world to another far, far away were taken into account, shipping them wouldn't "pay." Of course we all do pay; we just don't all profit.
I'd guess, too, the far-seeing TPP negotiators have based their talks entirely on this ultimately--in ten? twenty years?-- unworkable model of cheap fossil fuels. Blinded by dollar signs, I guess.
One more instance of the stranglehold the energy boys have on us is today's NYTimes story on why we haven't acted to make oil trains safe. We could if'n we wanted to. Our local Democratic Congresscritter, says his hands are tied. Yeah, with gold bracelets.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/19/opinion/how-to-prevent-an-oil-train-disaster.
The Graham announcement may be further delayed as the exact right shade of shoe dye to match his after party gown is proving elusive.
And amidst all these important newsworthy items today I spy a Bill O'Reilly zinger and I say, Oh, Really? O'Reilly done gots hissself in another pickle? Pssh, I say and move on–––but then, the pull to learn more about this was too overwhelming and I succumbed. This sordid story is fascinating because it presents so well a man who evidently has been able to hold forth on ethics, morality, Christian piety, etc. while living a life fraught with domestic disputes and duplicitous dealings. He is the voice of Fox News–––will anyone stop him? Will anyone call him a hypocrite and a liar? When will that happen?
Diane,
Word is that Sen. Kill 'em has settled on a nice shade of "drone taupe", just the right blend of faux machismo and pantywaist puffery, the "half colors of quarter things" as Wallace Stevens might put it. He'll be the Belle of the Bull.
It's hard to believe that David Brooks actually subscribes to the benighted musings he offers up. Surely his true assignment is to provoke compelling commentary, in which case he is wildly successful.
Today's column, for example, absolving those who continue to justify the Iraq war, a column one reader deemed "wrong-headed in so many ways as to be astounding," but which is redeemed by the many thoughtful responses it provoked. Here's one, from a John Duggan, of Lisbon, Portugal, quoting Brooks and then nailing it:
"Finally, Iraq teaches us to be suspicious of leaders who try to force revolutionary, transformational change. It teaches us to have respect for trimmers, leaders who pay minute attention to context, who try to lead gradual but constant change. It teaches us to honor those who respect the unfathomable complexity of history and who are humble in the face of consequences to their actions that they cannot fully predict or understand."
Duggan: Mr. Brooks, you lost an opportunity to acknowledge the character of the current President of the United States.
PD,
Where to begin? "Loofah Boy: The not so good, the abysmally bad, and the really ugly" has all the makings of an HBO miniseries, or at the very least, a Lifetime movie.
It's interesting that O'Reilly hired someone so he didn't have to parent his kids while he and his wife shared custody. I guess all that lecturing of black families on the importance of a stable family life and a father present in the home made him want to see for himself what might happen if he deserted his kids and beat on his wife in front of them.
And don't miss O'Reilly's haughty declaration (no one does haughty better than O'Reilly
) that he isn't talking about the charges against him, such as attacking his wife, trying to get her excommunicated, siccing his Nassau County police buddies on his wife's new boyfriend, because he wants to protect his kids.
That noble gesture must not include the daughter who watched him grab her mom by the neck and drag her down a flight of stairs. Oops. Can this asshole be any more despicable? I suppose so. Hey, I wonder what Fox "News" is saying about this? This type of sordid mess is just their meat.
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Radio silence. Guess it's not newsworthy. Finally, Bill the Abuser sputtered to Politico that not a word of those stories of domestic violence and desertion of his own children are true. 100% false. That's why the judge took those kids away from Loofah Face and gave O'Reilly's former wife full custody. Because nothing happened.
Monoloco,
I have, in the main, given up reading Brooks. It's like confronting a koan written in pig Latin. It never made sense in the first place but the pig Latin is thrown in for its faux avitas-gray.
Like George Will before him, Brooks is prone to generalized pronouncements that come close to what philosophers call vacuous truths, statements that, while nominally true, offer no information of value about the real world, like saying a square has four sides. Yes it does, David, and thank you very much. Except he then goes on to further deep six his already torpid and pointless observations ("...men and women, 50 years ago, got married earlier in life...") by demonstrating that, for a guy who pretends to be so smart, he has never read nor understood the is/ought problem, sometimes referred to as Hume's Law ("...but now they don't which proves immorality is abroad in the world, due no doubt, to liberals. And hippies.").
He is forever going from is (the way things are) to ought (the way things should be, according to the Moral Rules of David Brooks), with not even a tenuous rope bridge to connect these two shores (or the necessary underpinnings to support his conclusions). Hume says it's not possible to do this anyway, and he's largely correct. People like Brooks and Will and Douthat are constantly attempting to draw moral conclusions from thin air, conclusions which come prefabbed and can easily be applied without any additional work to almost any situation, rendering their fairy tale morals dead on arrival.
And besides, all problems of the modern world, according to Douchebag Brooks, are the result of free love. And hippies.
And if you can't conquer the world with that knowledge, I just don't know what else to say.
Bayonet training? What more do you need to know when using them or knives or swords or Needles?
"You stick them with the pointy end."
The "Knowing what you know now" question is tricky for many from the Confederate ranks. First, they don't know much to begin with, most of them. I mean, try to get any of them to speak extemporaneously, to venture into unscripted territory, and its like listening to a Chatty Cathy doll on the fritz. They can only talk about things they've prepared, but once they're off script, as the commercial says "You never know what they'll say next!"
"Sure I'd invade Iraq"
"The world is only 6,000 years old!"
"Hillary is to blame for everything Bill did!"
"Union workers are just like Islamic jihadists!"
"Bush had no choice"
"I....er....I don't have a fucking clue so lemme just say this..."
One of the great pleasures during the early days of the first Obama administration, as well as a great relief, was having, at long last, a president who could speak in complete sentences fully aware of syntax and tense and who did not get that deer in the headlights look in his eyes when asked to speak off the top of his head. But it looks like we're back to feet planted firmly in mouths.
But there may be an out for the dimmer passengers of the Clown Bus, and that is the unwieldy number of them. When you have 17 people running for office, the amount of time that can be lavished on one or two is significantly diminished, thereby limiting the opportunity to be caught without one's script and lured into saying the two worst things for GOP candidates: the truth or something stupid.
I suppose if either of those outcomes obtain, the dunce of the day can play the "I didn't understand the question" card, thereby confirming both their dunce status and keeping the balls, at least a few of them, up in the air for one more day.
It's gonna be a loooooong campaign, boys and girls.
Back in the day when I was assigned to a basic training company, we didn't really think our trainees were were going to be making bayonet charges. We used to ask them "What is the Spirit of the Bayonet?" Answer: "To kill!"
The average civilian just off the street is reluctant to kill. They have to be trained to overcome this. I fail to see how this is necessary for the police.
@Ak: Your Chatty Cathy reference produced a loud guffaw as did the word "fritz." The former brought back memories of all these robotic-talking toys that surfaced years after I was a tot when we had to use our imagination and devise whole sentences for our dolls and other play things other than the later"just pull the string or push the buttons" to hear what a programmed whatever had to say. To envision a Chatty Cathy going haywire is pure delight.
The latter was a word that was used frequently by my mother––this or that was always on the fritz producing strong recriminations like "Charlie, (my father) I've told you a dozen times that refrigerator appears to be on the fritz, sends out an eerie squeaky sound every time you open the door so it's time to refurbish!" Charlie could have cared less, but hastened to my mother's "fritz" calls after the word became accentuated with menace.
Let's bring that word back into fashion––"fritz" it is when describing so many asininities that flood our political landscape lately.
P.S. Wasn't there a cartoon in the thirties featuring Fritz the cat that got into all sorts of trouble–-perhaps that's the derivation.