Dag, this guy’s on fire lately. I just quoted him the other day but here is Daniel Larison again from the American Conservative, with a quote that’s sure to be one for the ages. Here he is riffing on this quote from Warner Todd Huston: “What possible reason would a conservative have to attack Cheney instead of Obama?”
That said, we should not simply dismiss Huston out of hand. He and those like him are the political equivalent of Darwin’s discoveries on the Galapagos: strange, unusual creatures cut off from the rest of the world that deserve to be studied and understood as the weird evolutionary offshoots that they are. It is rare to find people who seem genuinely unaware that Cheney is deeply unpopular and also implicated in atrocious crimes, and rarer still to find people who know this and still think it wise to have him making the rounds on television serving as a leading Republican spokesman. Some might say that Huston is simply a pitiable product of the conservative cocoon, but I say that he can offer us evidence for the strange mutant varieties of conservatism that have developed in isolation from reality.
Just when you think that Republicans cannot possibly sink any further into self-caricature, along comes Victor Davis Hanson, who delivers this priceless nugget while dismissing the need for a torture investigation in NRO:
President Obama would not a want a putative President Palin to begin hearings on who ordered the targeted executions of two suspected Somali pirates, taken out in the middle of protracted negotiations.
My old town, Kent, Ohio, was in the news this week, thanks to a street party that turned into a beer-fueled, couch-burning riot.
Students on East College Street, just west of campus, began celebrating the end of the school year early Saturday. The party, advertised as College Fest, turned into a riot after police arrested one person. The crowd reacted to the arrest by throwing things at officers, who called for more officers, who were also pelted, Lt. John Altomare said at 3 a.m. in a news release.
The AP story on the riot includes this hilarious bit of college-student logic:
[Ben] Wolford said most students believe the violence probably could have been avoided.
“I think if they just blocked off the street, let kids have that road to party on for that night, it would’ve just been a party and people would’ve gone home,” he said.
Indeed. Maybe the police also could have gone on a beer run for the students, or been so kind as to see to their ‘herbal’ needs. Instead, they had to get all bogus and try to put out the bonfire of couches, doors, picnic tables, and electronic goods (including a flat screen TV) raging in the middle of the street.
In the aftermath, there are the usual charges of police brutality, but I’d say the cops were models of restraint. Watching the footage below makes me wish I could have shot these students with rubber bullets myself, or at least a water canon.
My sister (a proud KSU alum) claims she saw our old house on the news but I should like to remind her that we lived on the nice side of Willow, not couch-burning side. Now I will say that our original rental house on College Court looks like it was pretty close to the action, which seems to have been concentrated on E. College Avenue between S. Willow and S. Lincoln. It does take me back, though. Back in the day, I don’t mind saying that we partied pretty effing HARD, man, if by ‘party’ you mean root-beer-fueled marathon games of Risk and Monopoly.
Of course, it’s hard to get too homesick for Ohio when the UMASS students do so much to remind me of home.
Over at the Onion A/V Club, Nathan Rabin has determined that the best way to honor the passing of Bea Arthur is to dig up the most surreal piece of cultural flotsam he could find that starred the comedienne. In this case, it was her bone-jarringly wrong-headed cameo (along with an equally out-of-place Harvey Korman) as the barkeep at the cantina on Tatooine in the god-forsaken Star Wars Holiday Special, which was only broadcast once, in 1978, and has never been officially released on video. According to Wiki, author David Hofstede ranked the Star Wars Holiday Special at number one in his book What Were They Thinking?: The 100 Dumbest Events in Television History, calling it “the worst two hours of television ever.”
Rabin says of the Bea Arthur clip, “Like the special itself it really has to be seen to be believed. It’s a hypnotic, nightmarish trainwreck of surreal juxtapositions. It’s essentially Casablanca in outer space with a little Cabaret thrown in, with Bea Arthur in the Humphrey Bogart role. Only, you know, with space monsters and Harvey Korman pouring water into the top of his head.”
“One of the things that has kept me from saying much over the last week or so is my sheer amazement that there are people who seriously pose such questions and expect to be answered with something other than expressions of bafflement and moral horror. Something else that has kept me from writing much on this recently is the profoundly dispiriting realization (really, it is just a reminder) that it is torture and aggressive war that today’s mainstream right will go to the wall to defend, while any and every other view can be negotiated, debated, compromised or abandoned. I have started doubting whether people who are openly pro-torture or engaged in the sophistry of Manzi’s post are part of the same moral universe as I am, and I have wondered whether there is even a point in contesting such torture apologia as if they were reasonable arguments deserving of real consideration. Such fundamental assumptions at the core of our civilization should not have to be re-stated or justified anew, and the fact that they have to be is evidence of how deeply corrupted our political life has become, but if such basic norms are not reinforced it seems clear that they will be leeched away over time.”
Responding to this article about Obama’s latest attempt to wring actual, substantive budget-cutting suggestions from Republicans, John Cole’s nails the Republican response:
When asked for a budget with numbers, the Republicans said “We’ll get back to you.”
When asked for their plans for health care, the Republicans said “We’ll get back to you.”
When asked for their plans on energy independence, the Republicans said “Drill, baby drill and we’ll get back to you.”
When asked for their plans to revive the economy, the Republicans said “Tax cuts and we’ll get back to you.”
And now, after bitching about the most bloatedest budget proposal evah, after months of masturbatory tea parties and chants of porkulus, when asked what cuts the Republicans would like to make, the answer, as always, is “We’ll get back to you.”
This is government by frat boy smooth talk- there is no situation you can’t just bullshit your way through. Wreck dad’s BMW after doing 17 shots of Patron at the strip club? No problem, just call dad and the lawyers will get back to you.
Driving home from Cape Cod yesterday with three 13-year-old girls in the car, I was treated to an endless loop of this song, though they didn’t know all the verses so it was essentially an endless loop of a few key lines.
By the way, these ladies, along with two 11-year-old girls, dunked in the ocean almost every day last week. The water temperature of Cape Cod Bay is about 51 degrees and the air temperature was about the same. Typically the dunking was conducted in the late afternoon at low tide, so required wading out quite a ways to knee-high water and then laying down. Much squealing, thrashing, and general hilarity ensued.
Sorry is this post seems a bit schizophrenic for a humor blog, but I felt I had to note the publication of the Senate Armed Services Committee’s new report, “Inquiry Into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody,” which is now posted on the committee’s website. This thing is just heart-breaking. The report’s Executive Summary includes 19 Conclusions that matter-of-factly lay out the entire chronology of the program. Here are the first and the 19th conclusions, which effectively bookend this shameful period in our nation’s history.
Conclusion 1: On February 7, 2002, President George W. Bush made a written determination that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which would have afforded minimum standards for humane treatment, did not apply to al Qaeda or Taliban detainees. Following the President’s determination, techniques such as waterboarding, nudity, and stress positions, used in SERE training to simulate tactics used by enemies that refuse to follow the Geneva Conventions, were authorized for use in interrogations of detainees in U.S. custody.
Conclusion 19: The abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 was not simply the result of a few soldiers acting on their own. Interrogation techniques such as stripping detainees of their clothes, placing them in stress positions, and using military working dogs to intimidate them appeared in Iraq only after they had been approved for use in Afghanistan and at GTMO. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s December 2, 2002 authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques and subsequent interrogation policies and plans approved by senior military and civilian officials conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in U.S. military custody. What followed was an erosion in standards dictating that detainees be treated humanely.
[Props=Balloon Juice has the rest of the summary's conclusions]
I’m about halfway through Neal Stephenson’s new novel Anathem, which I am enjoying immensely. The novel is narrated by a young avout, a monk who lives in a concent, or monastery, only the monastery is not dedicated to religious study but rather the study of math, philosophy, and metaphysics. It is an ascetic life. In the passage excerpted below, which I came across earlier today, the narrator, Erasmus, for reasons I won’t disclose, is traveling for the first time in many years in the world outside the concent (what the avout call the Saecular world, or extramuros).
“So I looked with fascination at those people in their mobes [cars], and tried to fathom what it would be like. Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organizations where people were interchangeable parts. All of the story had been bled out of their lives. This was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy. But it would be easy to see a will at work behind this: not exactly an evil will, but a selfish will. The people who’d made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their employees came home at day’s end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing. The Powers That Be would not suffer others to be in stories of their own unless they were fake stories that had been made up to motivate them. People who couldn’t live without story had been driven into the concents or into job’s like Yul’s [sort of an extreme wilderness guide]. All others had to look somewhere outside of work for a feeling that they were part of a story, which I guessed explained why Saeculars were so concerned with sports, and with religion. How else could you see yourself as part of an adventure? Something with a beginning, middle, and end in which you played a significant part? We avout had it ready-made because we were a part of this project of learning new things. Even if it didn’t always move fast enough for people like Jesry, it did move. You could tell where you were and what you were doing in the story. Yul got all of this for free by living his stories from day to day, and the only drawback was that the world held his stories to be of small account. Perhaps that was why he felt such a compulsion to tell them, not just about his own exploits in the wilderness, but those of his mentors.”
Conclusions of the Senate Armed Services Report
April 23, 2009 · Leave a Comment
Sorry is this post seems a bit schizophrenic for a humor blog, but I felt I had to note the publication of the Senate Armed Services Committee’s new report, “Inquiry Into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody,” which is now posted on the committee’s website. This thing is just heart-breaking. The report’s Executive Summary includes 19 Conclusions that matter-of-factly lay out the entire chronology of the program. Here are the first and the 19th conclusions, which effectively bookend this shameful period in our nation’s history.
Conclusion 1: On February 7, 2002, President George W. Bush made a written determination that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which would have afforded minimum standards for humane treatment, did not apply to al Qaeda or Taliban detainees. Following the President’s determination, techniques such as waterboarding, nudity, and stress positions, used in SERE training to simulate tactics used by enemies that refuse to follow the Geneva Conventions, were authorized for use in interrogations of detainees in U.S. custody.
Conclusion 19: The abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 was not simply the result of a few soldiers acting on their own. Interrogation techniques such as stripping detainees of their clothes, placing them in stress positions, and using military working dogs to intimidate them appeared in Iraq only after they had been approved for use in Afghanistan and at GTMO. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s December 2, 2002 authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques and subsequent interrogation policies and plans approved by senior military and civilian officials conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in U.S. military custody. What followed was an erosion in standards dictating that detainees be treated humanely.
[Props=Balloon Juice has the rest of the summary's conclusions]
Categories: Scathing Social Commentary