Your Weekly Rush

Well, as we all know, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has thrown his hat in the ring out in California. While many Republicans are happy at having a name like his on the ballot, Rush is here to remind us that it's not whether you win or lose, but how slavishly you adhere to the conservative line.

"The American Prowler's George Neumayr detailed Arnold's politics in his article "Here's Arnold!" Quote: "[H]e spoke in generalities and banalities about his plans for the state. To the extent that he said anything, he sounded not like a fiscal conservative but a moderate Democrat. He said that he wanted businesses to come back to California so that the state government could collect enough tax revenues to provide social programs. This is the sort of obtuse comment middle-of-the-road Democrats always make, forgetting that businesses are leaving the state because they are tired of paying high taxes for those big government social programs."

More: "He has told the press he is 'very liberal' about social programs, supports abortion and homosexual adoption, and advocates 'sensible gun controls.' His entree into politics last year was a proposition Democrats endorsed because it raised state spending for what amounted to state babysitting - before-school and after-school programs that cost the state up to $455 million a year. He has complained openly about the party's conservatism.... Talk magazine described him as 'impatient' with the religious right....
[H]e expressed disgust with the Republicans who impeached Clinton. 'That was another thing I will never forgive the Republican Party for,' he said. 'We spent one year wasting time because there was a human failure. I was ashamed to call myself a Republican during that period.'"

Actually I'm surprised Rush cares about California at all. It's never going to be sufficiently Conservative for him.

At any rate, Arnold does sound like an interesting candidate and not the monster I'm hearing he is from the left.

On the Side of Men

"There are people who love masculinity -- with all its undeniable untidiness, rudeness and mayhem, and those who don't. Roughly speaking, those in the former category are known as conservatives and the latter as liberals."

This is from Ms. Mona Charen today, and of course it's true. Some conservatives do prefer an antiquated version of masculinity that involves expressing your opinions with your fists and subjegating all others below you.

In the 21st century though, many conservatives have realized that it might be valuable to temper the negative side of masculinity, a side Ms. Charen herself recognizes, by quoting Harvey Mansfield. "Manliness can be heroic. But it can also be vainly boastful, prone to meaningless scuffling, and unfriendly. It jeers at those who do not seem to measure up, and asks men to continually prove themselves. It defines turf and fights for it -- sometimes to protect precious rights, sometimes for no good reason."

So maybe moving beyond some aspects of primordial masculinity might not be such a terrible thing. On the other hand, I do want everybody to know that yours truley is manly man. I move my own furniture and kill my own spiders. I haven't beaten anybody up yet, but I'm sure that's coming soon.

Ann Coulter and the History of China

Ann Coulter's latest article is a bit of a complaint about a bad review of her work. But she uses the opportunity to spring into saying further nutty things from the McCarthy era.

"Democrats lose entire continents to totalitarian monsters, lose wars to bloody tyrants, lose countries to Islamic fascists, and then insist that everyone recite the liberal catechism: "No one lost China," "Vietnam was an unwinnable war," "Khomeini's rise to power was inevitable." (Conversely, Ronald Reagan didn't "win" the Cold War; it just ended.)

At the time, the State Department even issued an 800-page "White Paper" purporting to prove the communist takeover of China was inevitable. Despite these heroic efforts, a Gallup poll found that a majority of Americans did not buy the "inevitability" excuse."

OK, lets start with the end first. Are we really to believe, Ms. Coulter, that we should accept the opinion of the majority of Americans over those who have studied the situation in depth and who have the best information? Yes we are. Because in Ms. Coulter's world the State Department was full of traiterous liberals.

One of those traitorous liberals, Dean Acheson, described the China situation thusly. "Our military observers on the spot have reported that the Nationalist armies did not lose a single battle during the crucial year of 1948 through lack of arms or ammunition. The fact was that the decay which our observers had detected in Chungking early in the war had fatally sapped the powers of resistance of the Kuomintang. Its leaders had proved incapable of meeting the crisis confronting them, its troops bad lost the will to fight, and its Government bad lost popular support. The Communists, on the other hand, through a ruthless discipline and fanatical zeal, attempted to sell themselves as guardians and liberators of the people. The Nationalist armies did not have to be defeated; they disintegrated. History has proved again and again that a regime without faith in itself and an army without morale cannot survive the test of battle."

It is one of the conudrums of history that McCarthyites of the time and Ms Coulter today seem absolutely certain that a few Liberals in the State Department lost us a country of over a billion people, but they seem incapable of suggesting what they would have different.

And of course the great crime of those liberals in the State Department; analyzing the situation and predicting what would happen. They saw the Nationalist Chinese as having lost the support of the people, of having been totally unmotivated, leaderless. They saw the Maoists as being agressive and disciplined. So who did they think was going to win? But in the ideologically driven world of Ms. Coulter all information is to be judged not on its merits but on its adherence to Conservative Dogma.

I have more to say on this subject, but unfortunately have to get on the road--have a nice day.

Not For the Faint of Heart

This is a strange story--but well worth reading. Actually I'm familiar with the gender bending aspect of the Shamanic tradition.

Link from Counterspin, which I am going to add to my list of links over there.

Defacing Starbucks

Apparently there has been a rash of vandalism at Starbucks out in California. According to the LA Times, reprinted at Commondreams, "Police say as many as 17 of the Seattle-based chain's stores were vandalized — windows clouded with glue, "For Lease" signs pasted on their facades and some of their locks jammed.

The pranksters also posted a notice on faux Starbucks letterhead regretfully announcing the closure of "thousands of retail locations worldwide."

Now this is put in the news section of Commondreams, a selection of stories from around the world. It was presented without comment. But this is clearly stupid. Vandalism in the pursuit of justice is nonsensical BS; and whoever did this juvenile stunt diminishes the efforts of real activists.

Is Howard Dean a Liar?

Brent Bozells latest article makes this claim. "It's also not promising that Dean can make "factual" statements about Team Bush that cannot be located in the realm of reality. In one answer to Newsweek, Dean claimed that Bush's "environmental record is widely understood to be probably the worst in most people's lives." Would anyone try to argue against the facts and say that, for instance, air quality is worse than 1970? Newsweek had no space for corrections. Bush also apparently "massed trillions of dollars' worth of debt" -- not yet he hasn't -- as if Bush is the only politician in Washington in favor of loading up the federal budget. Newsweek doesn't put an asterisk by that whopper, either."

So let's look at these two lies Mr. Dean is proported to have told. Apparently he claimed that President Bush has the worst environmental record in most people's lives. But that can't be true because air quality was worse in 1970. Is it too much to ask for Mr. Bozell to have even the most basic grasp of environmental science? Yes, because that would conflict with his conservative worldview. At any rate, environmental damage is usually an incremental damage. The bad air of the 1970s was caused by the 1940s, the 1950s, the 1960s, and the 1970s.

President Bush has proven that he will put the interests of corporate polluters over the interests of the American people. One obvious example was his decision to weaken the Superfund program. Under Superfund, corporations are taxed in order to clean up the toxic landfill they make. Some of the cost came out of the general revenue (and thus from the American tax payer; in 1995 this amounted to 18% of the revenues for site clean-ups. Under President Bush's leadership, the American taxpayer will pay 54%. For more information, see this article by the Sierra Club. But making you pay for corporate polluters is only one piece of President Bush's environmental record. I think Mr. Dean was on pretty solid ground when he made that statement.

The second lie Mr. Dean is proported to have made is that President Bush has plunged us trillions of dollars in debt. Bozells weak response is that it hasn't happened yet, and that President Bush would really really like to cut spending so it doesn't happen. Well why doesn't he Mr. Bozell? Why hasn't President Bush made shutting down government programs to save money a priority?

At any rate, every sensible analyst, liberal or conservative, acknowledges that President Bush's economic policy will plunge us into debt. Granted there could be factors that come into play that keep us from debt. Say, Superman showing up and doing that thing where you turn Coal into Diamonds? Or Santa Clause actually making his Christmas run for once instead of leaving it all up to the parents, and putting several trillion dollars in President Bush's stocking. Anything is possible.

If this is the quality of attacks that are going to be leveled at Dean, perhaps he has a better chance than previously assumed.

Lieberman

Obviously if you place the Democratic Candidates in relation to where they stand politically, Lieberman stands all the way on the right--nearest the center. He supported and still supports the war on Iraq, although he has criticized President Bush for not committing enough troops to get the job done. He has been very critical of Bush domestically, but from a more centrist position than most of his competitors.

Still he does have an image problem, as William Saletan at Slate Magazine points out. "One of the comedies of the 2004 campaign is watching all the candidates other than Dean claim to be angry when they clearly aren't. Lieberman just happens to be the least convincing of them. I share the anger of my fellow Democrats, he croaks faintly. The impersonation is miserably weak. If you got into a fender bender with Dean, and he got out of his car and started walking toward you, you'd be afraid he was going to hit you. If, on the other hand, you looked up and saw that the guy approaching your car was Lieberman, you'd ease up and roll down your window."

This is a problem, and one of the reasons Kerry or Edwards has a better shot at being the moderate counter to Dean. Still it's a litle early; other candidates have blossomed on the stump; perhaps Lieberman will join their ranks.

More Carping on President Bush

Well, we have an article from Bruce Bartlett today comparing President Bush to former President Nixon. He references Rush Limbaughs take on this issue, which Rush presented last week, and which seems largely identical.

The argument is that Nixon was a moderate conservative who passed a lot of liberal measures. He gave us the EPA for example, and apparently he raised taxes as well. Well, conservatives are claiming that due to the education bill (passed last year sometime), and the campaign finance bill conservatives have had enough. I mean if this is what he did last year right now, imagine what he will have done last year a year from now.

Bartlett poses this fascinating question at the end of his piece. "But conservatives still need to ask themselves: to what end? Do we want another Taft or Nixon, who imposed liberal policies no Democratic president could achieve as the price for keeping a Republican in the White House? It is a question worth asking."

Indeed.

Business Proposal

I was looking at the Wall Street Journal today, as I often do. There was a front page story about price fixing in the world of Modeling. Apparently this is a problem. Anyway the story made me realize that perhaps now the time was right for my greatest business idea, perhaps the greatest business idea of all time.

Discount Model Safari.

Yep, see models as they are in the wild from the safety of a range rover (or whatever car you happen to own). I know that this may seem like a radical idea, but I think it's an idea whose time has come.

Stealing the Language

Conservatives have come up with a neat new trick. For years, Democrats and Liberals have suggested that Republicans and Conservatives may be Motivated by racism. In some cases, this accusation may have had a ring of truth, but in many others the accusation was a foolish waste of time and distorted the real issues.

Well, Conservatives picked up on that particular accusation. As we documented here, they tried valiantly to make the word NeoCon synonymous with Jew, in order to suggest that anybody who opposed the belligerent foreign policy of Paul Wolfowitz was anti-Semitic.

They have also tried, although perhaps more in jest than in reality, to suggest that opposing the nomination of Miguel Estrada was based on a prejudice against Hispanics, instead of a bias against his extreme beliefs.

And now they have suggested that their opposition to William Pryor is based on the fact that he is a catholic. Of course it isn't. The New York Times provided a list of Pryors previous troubling actions. "It is no great mystery why the nomination is in trouble. Mr. Pryor has urged Congress to repeal a critical part of the Voting Rights Act. He was the only state attorney general to ask the Supreme Court to strike down the Violence Against Women Act. "

However, lets turn to Republicans chief charge. Pryor opposes abortion. The Catholic Church opposes abortion. Could Pryor as a good catholic not serve on the bench, just because he oppose abortion? The answer is of course not. Pryor can enjoy any religious belief he likes and still be an honorable and just judge. But it is when he is willing to legislate his religious belief from the bench that one has to question his capability to be a judge. Incidently, as one writer pointed out over the weekend, the Catholic church also has a pretty strong opinion on the subject of capital punishment, and I suspect that if Pryor were willing to follow that line, we wouldn't be debating this issue. That isn't my point--I read it somewhere over the weekend, but can't remember where--if you know, email me.

At any rate, all this harkens back to the great scam that failed. You know back when conservatives would say that the most persecuted group in America was the White Male. Yep, white males have it so hard in this society (and I should know as a white male). It's just terrible. Thank goodness we basically run everything or else we'd really have nothing.

New Quote

Posted a new quote up there at the top, and updated the Quotes Page. Hopefully have more for you in a bit.