"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler
A suspicious similarity between Obama’s speech announcing U.S. strikes against Libya and George W. Bush’s speech announcing the Afghanistan invasion:
“The senior White House official said ‘any similarity is coincidence,’ adding that neither Obama nor his speechwriters reviewed Bush’s remarks from Oct. 7, 2001.”
I’m thinking “senior White House official” must be a pretty cool gig. You just lie through your teeth and reporters publish whatever you say.
“I warn my brother do you let these wicked demons move you in a direction that will absolutely ruin your future with your people in Africa and throughout the world. . . . You can’t order [Qaddafi] to step down and get out. Who the hell do you think you are?”
— Louis Farrakhan, Friday, March 18, WVON-AM
The first Tomahawk cruise missiles hit about 3 p.m. ET today:
Military strikes by the U.S. and its allies against targets in Libya Saturday have “severely disabled” Libyan leader’s Muammar al-Qaddafi’s air defenses, a U.S. official confirms to Fox News. . . .
The Pentagon says 112 Tomahawk cruise missiles have been launched from U.S. and British ships in the Mediterranean, hitting more than 20 Libyan targets along the Mediterranean coastline.
Criticism of Obama from neocon racist right-wingers Michael Moore:
Moore, a frequent critic of President Bush for launching the Iraq War, unleashed a string on tweets comparing the U.S. military’s mission in Libya to Iraq and Afghanistan, using a mantra coined by Charlie Sheen:
It’s only cause we’re defending the Libyan people from a tyrant! That’s why we bombed the Saudis last wk! Hahaha. Pentagon=comedy
And we always follow the French’s lead! Next thing you know, we’ll have free health care & free college! Yay war!
We’ve had a “no-fly zone” over Afghanistan for over 9 yrs. How’s that going? #WINNING !
Khadaffy must’ve planned 9/11! #excuses
Khadaffy must’ve had WMD! #excusesthatwork
Y’know, I had been skeptical of U.S. involvement in Libya, but if Michael Moore is against it . . . well, this might be a Change We Can Believe In.
More at Memeorandum, with blog commentary from Weasel Zippers, Protein Wisdom, Left Coast Rebel, Ann Althouse, Legal Insurrection, Pundit & Pundette, American Power, Just One Minute and The Lonely Conservative.
UPDATE: Instapundit:
Hey, it’s exactly 8 years to the day since Bush started bombing Iraq! If you voted for change, this is the change you voted for.
Meanwhile, The Rhetorican:
What’s missing? The ubiquitous sense of outrage in every nook and cranny of Leftie-dom that we couldn’t stop hearing back in 2003, before troops even started packing for Iraq.
True: The outrage is not “ubiquitous,” but what are lefties like Michael Moore going to do? They got nowhere to go. They backed the most left-wing nominee in the Democratic Party’s history — yes, Obama is further left than McGovern or Dukakis — and actually managed to get him elected. And the result is . . . ??
We’re still in Iraq and Afghanistan. Guantanamo is still in business. Bradley Manning is stripped naked in solitary confinement. Now, another military adventure. You’d think that people who’d been so blatantly screwed over, bamboozled, sold out, ripped off and stabbed in the back would eventually wise up.
But then again: They’re liberals. Continue reading OPERATION ODYSSEY DAWN: U.S. Launches Attacks on Targets in Libya →
“After LA lost the aerospace industry during the Clinton Administration, we lost a half million aerospace workers, voters and donors.”
— former California GOP Chairman Shawn Steel
That quote reminded me of the 1993 movie Falling Down starring Michael Douglas as a laid-off Los Angeles aerospace engineer trying to make sense of a world falling apart. And it seems to me that the California Republican Party’s response to its 15-year decline has been scarcely less counter-productive than Douglas’s actions in that movie.
More from Joe Fein’s interview with Sean Steel:
The first question was: How to win Los Angeles in 2012?
Mr. Steel answered by saying, “The formula for winning Los Angeles is 60% Asian, 40% Latino and 55% Caucasians,” He continued, “When we battle, we [in RPLAC and CAGOP] must use the 40 – 55- 60 rule.”
Really? I mean, really? Instead of talking issues, message, organizing and campaign strategy, the first thing that pops into your mind when you’re asked about a plan for victory is demographics? And please explain how you think the GOP is going to get 60% of the Asian vote or 40% of the Hispanic vote when it can only get 55% of the white vote?
When I visited California I was struck by the fatalism of the state’s Republican officials, who simply write off most Democrat-held districts as unwinnable and passively accept the idea that huge swaths of the electorate are immune to GOP appeals.
Go read the rest of Joe’s coverage of this weekend’s California GOP convention. Maybe there’ll be some glimmer of hope.
Or else conservatives everywhere can get an object lesson in how not to run a Republican Party.
The quote is from a New York Times story about the decreasing use of the telephone for, y’know, talking:
“I literally never use the phone,” Jonathan Adler, the interior designer, told me. (Alas, by phone, but it had to be.) “Sometimes I call my mother on the way to work because she’ll be happy to chitty chat. But I just can’t think of anyone else who’d want to talk to me.” Then again, he doesn’t want to be called, either. “I’ve learned not to press ‘ignore’ on my cellphone because then people know that you’re there.” . . .
When Matthew Ballast, an executive director for publicity at Grand Central Publishing, began working in book publicity 12 years ago, he would go down his list of people to cold call, then follow up two or three times, also by phone. “I remember five years ago, I had a pad with a list of calls I had to return,” he said. Now, he talks by phone two or three times a day. ”You pretty much call people on the phone when you don’t understand their e-mail,” he said. . . .
As James Joyner says, “Even though everyone above the age of 6 seems to carry a phone around with them experts say that the phone call is a relic of the past.”
This is especially true for younger people (who constantly text, rather than talk) and people with 4G devices who use their Blackberry or iPhone to check e-mail from the time they wake up in the morning until they fall asleep at night. You see these people all the time in Washington: Dinners and receptions are less social because everybody is habitually checking messages.
Adler’s comment about his mother’s “chitty-chat” phone calls is on-point: Retirees have more time for talking on the phone, and women in general seem to enjoy talking on the phone than do men. (My wife has lonnnggg conversations with her sister, etc.) But the phone call as a means of business communication seems to be lapsing into disuse.
That people now view e-mail as the essential mode of communication is disturbing to me because I sometimes go an entire day without checking my e-mail. One of Jerry Wilson’s rules at Goldfish & Clowns is “Answer your e-mail every time all the time.”
But I usually get hundreds of e-mails a day. If I attempted to answer every one, I’d spend all day answering e-mail.
In an age of digital information overload, we are losing the human touch — and even, now, the human voice.
by Smitty
BAGRAM A.F.B., Afghanistan — Today we passed 6 megahits with a Click Heard Round The World. I’m fairly sure it wasn’t a rocket impact. Or an aircraft cracking up in the distance.
Da-duh, duh duh, da-duh, duh duh. . .
Is it fair to call this blog’s eclectic mix of caffeine, politics, social commentary, nicotine, patriotism, sophomoric humor, spirituality, abrasive gonzo hijinks and news bionic? Maybe not.
Nevertheless, in a world that seems like a test pilot doing an impression of a crumbled beer can rolling through the credits of a 1970’s TV show, the blogosphere has been an essential outlet for me. Wombat, too, I hope. (Get better, man.)
Da-duh, duh duh, da-duh, duh duh. . .
One is motivated by a deep love of liberty and country, which is a bit different than Stacy’s fundamental interest in eating. Our non-approach to a working relationship is an anti-chemistry that manages not to explode despite itself. I flatter myself that I’m a better writer for all this fun.
And then there is the cast of thousands in the blogosphere. Not only do our readers make the blog itself worthwhile, but they restore faith that the country isn’t completely shot. It’s not important that one agree with everyone on everything.
No, we’re just one more unit in the Army of Davids, striving against Socialist odds to answer the Franklin challenge:
“A Republic, if you can keep it.”
And, as an added bonus, corny sound effects:
Da-duh, duh duh, da-duh, duh duh. . .
Previously:
“Christian Socialism, as it has taken root in the last few decades among countless followers of all Christian churches, is merely a variety of State Socialism. … Agriculture and handicraft, with perhaps small shopkeeping, are the only admissible occupations. Trade and speculation are superfluous, injurious, and evil. … It is the duty of legislation to suppress these excesses of the business spirit. …
“In the economic system which they have in mind there is no entrepreneur, no speculation, and no ‘inordinate’ profit. The prices and wages demanded and given are ‘just.’ …
“[Christian socialists] have anxiously avoided drawing the logical conclusions of their premises. They give one to understand that they are combating only the excrescences and abuses of the capitalist order; they protest that they have not the slightest desire to abolish private property; and they constantly emphasize their opposition to Marxian Socialism. …
“It can be seen at once how the Christian Socialism of today corresponds to the economic ideal of the medieval Scholastics. The starting point, the demand for ‘just’ wages and prices, that is, for a definite historically attained distribution of income, is common to both.”
— Ludwig von Mises, Socialism (1922)
This is something I had been meaning to cite since Friday, when the subject of Althouse-hating Madison radical Jim Shankman’s “distributivism” came up in Dan Riehl’s interview. Shankman’s particular species of opposition to market capitalism is nothing new under the sun. Indeed, as Mises shows, it is a fundamentally medieval concept.
Yet reading Mises is a challenging task: Socialism is more than 500 pages long, and not written in a glib or entertaining style. So it is hardly surprising that, among the many who have read The Road to Serfdom by Mises’s disciple F.A. Hayek, only a comparative handful have gone on to tackle Socialism (my copy of which includes a foreword by Hayek, written in 1978).
In 21st-century America, of course, the language of politics is much different than it was in early 20th-century Europe. When Socialism was first published, the Bolshevik takeover in Russia was only four years old, and various socialist parties were popular and influential. Whereas here and now, any attempt to analyze the American Left’s agenda must avoid the term “socialist,” which is always rejected and condemned as an outrageous accusation by the Left, no matter how socialistic their agenda may actually be.
Nevertheless, the rhetoric of “just” wages and “fair” prices, along with the condemnation of “excess” profit and so forth, has a clear political pedigree and Jim Shankman’s Facebook references to Dorothy Day and Rerum Novarum connect Shankman’s ideology to the “Christian Socialism” that Mises analyzed so astutely nearly 90 years ago.
PREVIOUSLY:
by Smitty
No Sheeples Here deftly trumps the President’s brackets:
The Second Annual March Madness Sweater Puppy Contest was officially launched today. Enter early and often for your chance to win a magnificent trophy suitable for placement in a prominent place in your man cave or your website and for some therapeutic breast staring. Enjoy boys!
I’ll let Little Miss Attila decide if we should pry the last two words apart with a comma, but I’m still not asking or telling.