Blogofascism

Go read the Poorman's take on, what is, bar none, the most dangerous phenomenon the universe has ever known.

: What is “blogofascism”?

A: Blogofascism is a violent online political philosophy and movement. It is characterized by:

-A cult of personality built around dangerously charismatic 2002 US Spelling Bee quaterfinalist and apple-cheek’ed nerd despot Markos “Kos” Moulitsas;

-A reactionary rejection of all standards of human decency and/or invitations to subscribe to The New Republic;

-Many other terrible qualities, TBD.

Q: Is blogofascism real?

A: Realer than anything you could possibly imagine.

Q: Is there any evidence for this?

A: The evidence is right there on your home computer. Open up Miscrosoft Word, and type “blogofascism”. Note that “blogofascism” - the most dangerous political movement in America, bar none - is not even in the Word dictionary! An oversight? Recall now that Bill Gates announced his intention to step down as head of Microsoft - the world’s most powerful computer company - just as blogofascism - the world’s most dangerous computer cult - has come into its own. Is Gates planning on turning Miscrosoft over to “Khairman Kos”, as part of a dastardly scheme to bundle “Halloween III”-style exploding novelty masks with every install of the long-anticipated “Longhorn” operating system? Connect the dots, people! We went through the looking glass a long time ago. We went through the looking glass, walked around the looking glass world for a while, and then went through a couple of looking glass looking glasses we found in there, and we’ve all been flipped inside out and upside down so many times we don’t know if we can believe anything anymore. What does it all mean? Fucked if we know, but if a chronically tardy bunny in a gold-button’ed waistcoat starts waving weird pills at you, for God’s sake, just say no!

Also, we are in the process of forging some really incriminating emails.

Q: How can I protect myself and my family from blogofascism?

A: Make sure your subscriptions to the New Republic are up-to-date, and make sure that you have at least one subscription for each member of your family, and for each room in your house. Give subscriptions to The New Republic as presents on Christmas, Presidents’ Day, birthdays, and un-birthdays. Make sure all your neighbors also subscribe to The New Republic; if not, sign them up for a free trial subscription and then make sure that the issue that comes with the “please cancel my free trial subscription” card mysteriously never reaches them. We’re not saying you should commit mail fraud, exactly - merely that you should do whatever is necessary to protect your family. Unless your local post office has been infiltrated by blogofascists, they should understand.

Learn. Be vigilant. Survive.

Derbyshire and Iraq (and Iggy et al.)

A week or so back, there was a really good piece on Crooked Timber that I hadn't caught until recently discussing Iraq war opponents and Iraq war supporters.

Among the supporters of war were people like Derbyshire, who wanted to reduce large parts of Iraq for rubble as revenge for the September 11 attacks (the absence of any proof of a direct link being, for many, part of the attraction), believers in the WMD threat who wanted to destroy the WMD threat and leave, militarists like Rumsfeld who wanted to use Iraq as a testing ground and permanent base for a new era of American military dominance, rightwing ideologues who expected to transform Iraq into a bastion of free-market economics and support for Israel, ruled by some pliant type like Chalabi, and “decent” leftists who who saw the invasion as a step towards a secular democracy that would bring the Iraqi left to power. While some of these groups might perhaps have reached a satisfactory accommodation, assuming a military victory, they could not all do so.

Of course, the opponents of war were a similarly disparate group, including isolationists and international realists who regarded it as an unproductive use of US state power, a large group (including most on the moderate left) who thought that the human costs of war would outweigh any benefits, opponents of a unilateral war carried out without UN support, advocates of national sovereignty, non-interference in internal affairs and those opposed to any military action by the US.

The crucial difference is that, while the opponents of war might have disagreed violently about their reasons for their position, these disagreements made no fundamental difference to the policy that they supported. In debates over wars of choice, peace is the status quo, and is a fairly unambiguous concept. (Perhaps not totally unambiguous – if the inspections had been allowed to continue and nothing had been found, differences would no doubt have emerged about what to do next, but peace leaves options like this open whereas war forecloses them).

By contrast, the supporters of the war were giving their support to very different kinds of war and assuming that their own preferred version would be the one that took place. But if they were honest with themselves (as Derbyshire has been, at least retrospectively) they should have looked at their allies and realised that there was no warrant for this assumption. Instead, they committed themselves to war with a whole series of implicit conditions. Many of them, in recanting, have blamed the Bush Administration for not delivering the kind of war they supported, or for mishandling the war in various ways that reflect entirely different assumptions and objectives. But, they had no reason to expect anything different.

The same asymmetry arises in predictions about the war. Opponents of the war variously predicted a military defeat for the US, a long and costly occupation, tens of thousands of civilian casualties, millions of refugees, the emergence of a new dictatorship, civil war on religious and ethnic lines, a stimulus to terrorism and so on. Supporters of the war derided all of these predictions and projected a variety of rosy scenarios including a quick military victory, roses and sweets showered on the liberating troops, and so on. Apart from the initial victory, not many of the optimistic predictions have panned out, but, as war supporters have pointed out, plenty of the anti-war predictions have failed too.

But this is the wrong test, and presumes a symmetry that isn’t there. War is doing harm, and only under very special conditions can it produce enough good to outweigh this. This is the point of what used to be called the Powell doctrine which allowed for discretionary use of force only with near certainty of success at low cost, clear and easily achieved objectives and a well-defined exit strategy.

Looking at the list of antiwar predictions, the realisation of any one of them would be enough to make war the wrong choice. As it is, several of them have been validated, and even some of those that seemed falsified, like the millions of refugees are now coming to pass.

I know I harp on the point made in the last paragraph a lot, but it still deserves to be made: whereas opponents merely needed to show that the war was a bad idea, supporters needed to show not only that the war was a good idea, but that it would be fought in the way--and for the reasons--that they advocated. Of course, they didn't do anything of the sort- they just projected onto Bush and Rumsfeld's little adventure everything they wanted their fantasy war to be.

This is the main reason I have trouble with Ignatieff supporters' talking points on Iraq; because they keep claiming (like most of the "liberal hawks" that supported the war) that the war wasn't fought in the way that they wanted. The question is, did they honestly expect that it would? The architects of the war were Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, for God's sake... who in their right mind would think that that trio would care in the slightest about the necessary pre-conditions to build a reasonably liberal and representative democracy in the middle east? They certainly hadn't demonstrated any such competence, nor were they making any plans that demonstrated it. Far from it, they seemed to be living in a fantasy world--one that too many American policymakers seem to live in--where every fight is WWII, and every opponent is Germany and Japan. The whole enterprise was doomed, and one's fantasies about a "perfect war" that were deviated from don't change that.

The war, over the war

There is a little blogwar going on right now between the New Republic (cheerleaders of war-thirsty "Liberal Hawks" worldwide) and DailyKos, over the charge that, supposedly, Kos accepted money from candidates in exchange for endorsing them on his weblog. This seemed unlikely at best to me, and Max Sawicky does a good job of rebutting TNR's wilder charges.

What struck me, though, is this bit in Sawicky's post:

Sectarianism by the way is not an uncommon trait. You could find the same thing in the Ralph Nader Adoration Society or the College Republicans. One always has hopes for 1) a liberal formation that 2) will transcend such weaknesses. On these counts, the Kos hive is oh for two. But they still don't deserve the fictions being served up.

As I think about it, oddly enough you could make a case that this is really about the war. Huh? After all, on most issues Kos is no big leftist. Mark Warner, for chrissakes. Where he really stands out is on Iraq. Where are the attacks mostly coming from? From supporters of the invasion, the current, disastrous occupation, and whatever military tomfoolery is next on the agenda. I can see Peter Beinart on the barricades now, speaking virtually of course.

I'd say they do not look forward to the positive evolution of the anti-war movement, quite possibly in the direction of a more left, radical critique of what Uncle Sam really wants in U.S. foreign policy.

I can't say I disagree. At this point, is there really anything left of TNR but increasingly-feeble attempts to attack anti-war Democrats? Hell, considering the domestic policies of Howard Dean, was there ever a basis for the DLC's "he's an extremist" argument except their pants-soiling terror that Democrats and Republicans might actually disagree about the utility of Bush's adventure?

Sure, it's not as if TNR is right--the public hasn't exactly rallied around the Republicans over the war, and the Dems are freely attacking the war as vigorously as the "Kossacks" were two years ago--but what else do they have, really?

Maybe it's a Walt and Mearsheimer thing, motivated by the worry that the Dems are going to take their anti-Iraq war position and turn it to advocacy of the Palestinian cause (which seems a little unlikely in this day and age). To be honest, though, it seems less about that and more about this fantasy that by embracing warhawk Democrats that never existed, you can somehow "neutralize" foreign policy. Hasn't worked, doesn't work, won't work, and it's just going to piss off the people that you're ignoring and marginalizing.

Or maybe Kos is right, and they're Republicans too afraid to call themselves that. It's quite possible. Maybe even likely. I think it's more likely, though, that they've been so terrified of the foreign policy issue that they're willing to say or do anything to make themselves appear "strong", not realizing how cowardly and servile they appear to everyone else.

Pity, that.

Intense Curiosity

Not that it matters in the grand scheme of things, but that's the emotion that was prompted by the posting from TDH Strategies' Jonathan Ross discussing why he supports Michael Ignatieff for leader. A juxtaposition:

On March 27, I wrote this as to why Mr. Ignatieff was not one of my favourites:

"...a fundamental disagreement with his stances on the Iraq war and the use of torture," and belief "that a man who has spent the better part of three decades outside of Canada is properly cut out to lead the Liberal party so soon after returning "home."

I resented his description of our country as a "well-meaning, herbivorian boy scout" back in 2002. I hated the fact that he had started to include himself in his pontifications on what it was like to be an American (using words like "we" and "our". I had confusion on his opinions on torture, the United Nations, and Iraq, and accused the candidate of being someone who "flirts with [an] issue masterfully, and yet always leaves himself an exit strategy to negate his critics."

That was him then. This is him now:

Well, like I have stated in the past, my opinions were formed with only a peripheral understanding of the man, and I now know that I didn't have all the necessary information. Because ultimately, despite the fact that I don't agree with all of Ignatieff's positions, I also understand that he is a guy that can step up to the plate and offer Canadians many of the visions that I have spent years promoting on this website.

I like the fact that he is willing to take positions that aren't necessarily popular or easy. If there is one thing that has become very clear to political observers is this country, it is the intense backlash against wishy-washy, "trying to please everyone" types of policies after the Paul Martin era. Why have Stephen Harper's five priorities been well received for the most part? Because a) every Canadian is able to find at least one that they can support b) they are decisive in branding who the government is and what they want to accomplish c) people are ready to be won over by leaders, not appeasers.

Supporting our mission in Afghanistan is the right thing to do, and there is no waivering in Ignatieff's stance, in spite of some Liberals' insistence that we MUST be different than Stephen Harper (how utterly silly that kind of stand alone criteria is). His support for the Iraq war and the ouster of Saddam Hussein is controversial and some might even say dangerous, but completely understandable because of his bond with the Kurdish people.

Now he's reciting Ignatieff-supporter talking points. ("Bond with the Kurdish people"? How does that justify an invasion in 2003, when the Kurds were more autonomous than they had ever been?) I mean, this is bog-standard stuff- no spark of creativity whatsoever. Long-in-tooth and long-rebutted.

But more importantly, get a load of all that "he holds his position without wavering" stuff. Aside from being talking points, doesn't that

a) mean that he still holds the contempt for Canada seen in the earlier quote

and

b) sound a HELL of a lot like a Republican trying to support George Bush in 2004? Down to the word? For those Canadians who maybe haven't been paying attention, consistency is not necessarily a virtue. Sometimes you make mistakes. Sometimes the situation changes. Sometimes you realize that there's a better option. Leaving aside the wisdom of the deployment in Afghanistan, this is a terrible argument, and it makes me wonder why the hell someone of Ross's seeming intelligence would mention it.

The other rather dim bit? Take a look:

These kinds of positions provide a nice transition into my next point - Micheal Ignatieff has more depth behind his opinions than just about any politician I have encountered over the past decade. In fact, it is that kind of knowledge base and experience which make him the atypical politician - a feather in his cap as far as I am concerned. Like I wrote last month:

"Rather than create a wedge with people, however, Ignatieff's long academic and journalistic careers have given him the uncanny ability to know how to identify with an audience. He was just as comfortable walking into a small room filled with wealthy socialites sympathetic to the plight of Israel as he was speaking to a large, semi-hostile Sunni Muslim audience celebrating Milad-un-Nabi. To say that he has been to mosques in Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan, to recant about trips to Israel, to understand the delicate balance of issues betwen the Israelis and the Palestinians...requires a broad base of experience in which to draw upon. And, Ignatieff has plenty in which to work with."

How refreshing...a candidate that can back up his words with academic credentials, global experience, and the incorporation and consideration of a wide range of opinions.

Ok, let's leave aside the "consideration of a wide range of opinions" (every politician does that to a certain extent, unless they're "holding a position without wavering")... what does having a background in foreign policy have to do with, for instance, knowing about a carbon tax?

Sometimes I think that people think that the "Professor" on Gilligan's Island is an actual true-to-life character, and that knowledge of one field means that you must be an authority on another. This, of course, is nonsense- there are any number of fields that Ignatieff is completely ignorant about, just as there are any number of professors who are completely ignorant about international relations and foreign policy.

Ignatieff's strength is in foreign policy, full stop. On that, he speaks authoritatively, although it's important to remember that someone with a Prof. beside his name is usually dead wrong on some issue in his field, and for every issue there's a Professor that's dead wrong about it. The thing about Ignatieff, though, is that it's precisely on the issue of foreign policy that he's been criticized most deeply and by the most experts in the field, and the "Prof." beside his name doesn't insulate him from those criticisms in the least.

If his foreign policy is a millstone around the neck of the Liberal party, it's a millstone. Full stop.

I also found this interesting:

I am very impressed by Ignatieff's intellectual honesty. This approach is a combination of not treating your audience like idiots, and having the resolve to call a spade a spade without walking on eggshells.

Yes, he's pretty good at "calling a spade a spade without walking on eggshells". So was Archie Bunker.

(Oh wait, that's right...it wasn't spades he was "telling it like it is" about, it was Ukrainians. Just calling a Slav a Slav, I suppose. I wouldn't call that "intellectual honesty", though.)

Me, I'm surprised that any Canadian could read this:

He believes that we cannot continue to live in this bubble of "boyscout diplomacy" and expect the world we live in to magically become safer. He says that a mature and diversified foreign policy must involve risk - a quality that we as Canadians are often so adverse to

...and not feel downright insulted. I guess calling the people you want to lead a mob of delusional children is the kind of diplomatic acumen that Michael Ignatieff brings to the table. Ross says "He is a breath of fresh air". He certainly does smell of something.

So kudos, Jonathan Ross, kudos, for joining the winning team:

Finally, aside from the content behind the candidate, the way I have been treated by the campaign, even in the past 24 hours, has been very impressive. I was welcomed on board by the national campaign director with a phone call yesterday. I have already been asked to make contributions, likely on national policy to begin with. I have had a lot of positive encouragement from so many of the individuals that form the collective core of Ignatieff supporters across the country. It is very nice to feel appreciated.

...and I'm very glad that Ignatieff's e-communications and blogger recruitment team worked so hard to bring you onside.

Judging by the talking points in this post, life is so much easier when you can have your opinions chosen for you.

In case anybody's wondering

My take on the North Korean missile issue is that it's a tactic, and it's quite likely N.Korea wasn't really intended to fire the thing.

Check out this piece, which describes how Kim Jong-Il is pressing for two-way talks with the United States:

North Korea said in comments published Wednesday that its self-imposed moratorium on testing long-range missiles from 1999 no longer applies because it's not in direct dialogue with Washington, suggesting it would hold off on any launch if the U.S. agreed to new talks.

Now, this isn't necessarily true, but it's certainly an argument that the North Koreans could employ even as all involved understand the real reasons why the missile test was scheduled.

And those real reasons? First, the N.Koreans want to sell the thing abroad, and so it's a demonstration. More importantly, though, they also want the US to think that they're within a hairsbreadth of taking out Los Angeles, so as to goad the US into negotiating a firm "nukes-for-security" agreement that ensures that Kim Jong-Il doesn't suffer the same fate as Saddam Hussein. Since that's the entire point of their having nukes to begin with (who else would they be deterring? China?) there'd be little reason for them to keep the things afterwards.

Wait a Sec...

Is Chuck Schumer seriously going to ignore the Connecticut primary and use Democratic money to support Joe Lieberman's increasingly likely run as an independent?

As Digby so ably points out, why even bother running primaries if you aren't going to abide by them? Does anybody seriously think that they're going to get around the anger in the Democratic base by playing these sorts of games? It goes against the very foundations of American democracy.

(Not quite as much as, say, calling primary voters "Democratic terrorists", but it's pretty goddamned bad.)

What is THIS Talking-Points-Repeating Joker Doing on Huffington's Site?

I'm all in favor of debate and inclusiveness, but I gotta wonder why, exactly, Ariana even bothered inviting Seth Swirsky onboard when the best he can do it recitation of hoary (and long-discredited) Republican talking points.

Case in point:

I voted for Al Gore in 2000. When he lost, I was disappointed, mostly in my fellow Democrats for thinking that the election had been "stolen" and in having forgotten their American history. The Electoral College has elected three other Presidents in our history: John Quincy Adams in1824, Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, and Benjamin Harrison in1888. The rush to judgment by the now conspiracy consumed Left put me off. Where, I asked, were all the "disenfranchised" black voters who would have given Gore a victory in Florida? No one could produce a single name. And how exactly were the voting machines in Ohio "rigged" in 2004? I now refer to the Democrats as the Grassy Knoll party.

What's ironic about this is that only a few posts away there's a discussion of 2004 that notes that the GAO concluded that it was possible and, indeed, relatively simple for electronic voting machines to be rigged, but that it was unprovable due to the impossibility of audit.

Probably not a good idea to be writing this after Kennedy's Rolling Stone piece regardless, and that "no one could produce a single name" bit was just goofy, but it gets better.

Still, I approached the 2004 primaries with an open mind. I was still a Democrat, still hoping that leaders like Sam Nunn and Scoop Jackson would emerge, still fantasizing that Democrats could constitute a party of truly progressive social thinkers with tough backbones who would reappear after 9/11.

What's this obsession with Scoop Jackson about, anyway? He was a hawkish Dem. Great. That doesn't make him Ben Franklin, although it DOES make him a useful tool for the reflexively fearful.

I was wrong. The Left got nuttier, more extreme, less contributory to the public debate, more obsessed with their nemesis Bush -- and it drove me further away. What Democrat could support Al Gore's '04 choice for President, Howard Dean, when Dean didn't dismiss the suggestion that George W. Bush had something to do with the 9/11 attacks? Or when the second most powerful Senate Democrat, Dick Durbin, thought our behavior at the detention center in Guantanamo was equivalent to Bergen Belsen and the Soviet gulags? Or when Senator Kennedy equated the unfortunate but small incident at Abu Ghraib with Saddam's 40-year record of mass murder, rape rooms, and mass graves saying, "Saddam's torture chambers have reopened under new management, U.S. management"? What Democrat could not applaud the fact that President had, in fact, kept us safe for what's going on 5 years? What Democrat -- even those who opposed the decision to go into Iraq -- wouldn't applaud the fact that tens of millions of previously brutalized people had the hope of freedom before them?

Hoo nelly. Look, Mr. Swirsky, I've got a bunch of unreleased pictures and videos of Abu Gharib, a sheaf of horrifying stories about Gitmo and one HELL of an anti-terrorist tiger rock that I'll give you in exchange for never, ever going near these here internets ever again.

Honestly, this argument is pure 100% grade "A" stupid, farm fresh and ready for the table.

What made me leave the Left for good and embrace the Right were their respective reactions to 9/11. While The New York Times doubted that we could succeed in Afghanistan because the Soviets in the '80s hadn't, George W. Bush went directly after the Taliban and Al Qaeda and crushed them in short order. Although many on the Left claim to have backed the President's actions, the self-doubt leading up to it, crystallized my view of the Left as weak and terminally lacking in confidence.

Seth? There are a growing number of dead Canadians who would wish to strenuously disagree with your contention that th Taliban was "crushed". Pity that they can't, being dead and all.

Oh, and your savior buggered up Iraq, too. A little "doubt" might have served him well.

No, seriously, is this a Kaufman-esque trick of some kind? There's even better crap I omitted about how much "liberal Jews" suck, but I'm not going to belabor the point. Considering this guy's a New York musician, I'm sure he'll be enjoying plenty of attention from his colleagues on this soon enough.

AL GORE IS HITLER!!!?!!1

So says the Republicans' Henchmen, according to a DNC email found on justiceblog:

Hurricane season has arrived -- and two fresh studies point to a link between global warming and an increase in the number and power of storms like Hurricane Katrina.

What are Republicans doing about it? They're smearing former Vice President Al Gore.

One right-wing pundit compared Gore to Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propagandist. Another right-winger, who's been on the payroll of corporate special interests, likened Gore's pursuit of solutions to global warming to Adolf Hitler's pursuit of genocide.

I'm sending Al a note this week telling him to keep fighting, to keep standing up for the truth no matter how vicious the attacks. I thought he might like to hear from you, too. Sign on to this note of thanks, and add your own note of encouragement here:

http://www.democrats.org/keepfighting

Ok, let's stop and consider for a moment. I'm not making the claim, but if there were fascists out there nowadays and they wanted to avoid being called such, wouldn't the best tool be to call other people "fascists" on such incredibly thin grounds? After all, when you're called on being corporatist (another term for fascist) as hell, you can say "well, the other guys are fascists too", and other people can say "can we avoid calling anybody fascist?" and you're pretty much insulated from the charge.

Is Al Gore "Hitler" for creating "An Inconvenient Truth" and not providing a soapbox for the purile apologists and ideologues that make up the "global warming skeptic"? Not even close. He's being called "Hitler" because the movie is effective, powerful, and judging by the per-screen grosses would be a logical candidate for wider distribution. They're trying to make sure that their fiction of a "debate" is maintained, and they'll smear however they can to do it.

Oh, and speaking of smears, Juan Cole lose the opportunity to teach at Yale due to another well-orchestrated smear campaign. Why? Well, when you're part of a conservative movement that enjoys control or domination of most sources of scholarship and information, it makes sense that you'd go after academe too. Mearshiemer and Walt were the canaries in the coal mine; it looks like Cole is the first asphixiated miner.

Not Afraid? No Doubt.

It's not news to anybody that Canada came face-to-face with a group of proto-terrorists who bought a lot of fertilizer in the hopes of building a bomb. Warren and (as can be seen on Cerberus) others are starting a "we are not afraid" campaign in response, similar to the British one.

The thing is, from what I've seen out of the Canadian media about Canadian reactions, the campaign is barely necessary. Canadians aren't afraid; far from it, they seem almost contemptuous of what many seem to think of as a pack of barely competent losers. This strikes me as the best way to demonstrate that Canadians aren't afraid- saying it only implies that it's even in question, whereas living it leaves everybody without a shred of doubt.

Certainly CSIS's star is shining brightly, though. If Canadians come away with this with nothing else, they'll come away with this with a renewed respect for their spy agency. That has both good and bad elements to it; the agency could use the support, but its past SNAFUs and the already weak polling numbers for civil liberties imply that it's important to subject it to scrutiny that Canadians may not be inclined towards.

Commonality among extremists

I think at this point pretty much everybody knows about the Canadian jihadists who were scooped in in a police sting on Friday night.

(There is some controversy over whether or not they would have been able to acquire the explosives in question were it not a sting; surely the massive amounts of fertilizer involved would have set off alarm bells, even if CSIS hadn't been tracking these guys for a good while now.)

What struck, me, however, was this backgrounder on the recruitment of "homegrown" terrorists: how they're usually young men angry at modern secularism who use snippets of religion and are recruited through a combination of societal radicals and extremist Internet writings. Sure, this fits the profile of an Islamist, but it also fits the profile of the kind of white kid who becomes a violent skinhead.

Go read the article: if you know anything about recruitment by racists, you'll see how striking similarity is.

(Does this mean that "Islamists" and "race warriors" share other similarities? Not really, and this post should not be taken as the kind of xenophobia that tends to infest this sort of discussion. What's striking is that this sort of thing seems to have little to do with the religion or ideology itself. They could be just as easily violent Hindus or Marxists or Shintoists or whatever.)

Looks like the Liberal Party leadership campaign just got nasty

Sure, Youth for Joe Volpe is funny. It's funny for a good reason; the whole scandal is not just "sketchy", but somewhat silly as well.

That said, it's going to be significantly less funny to the Liberals reading it when it's their candidate in the crosshairs. Ignatieff and Kennedy, for example, are both ripe for absolutely vicious satire- the former for his "I'm in favor of waterboarding, but not thumbscrews" take on torture, and the latter for seeming to want to live in every province in the country in order to show that he's not actually from Ontario.

(Of course, unlike Volpe, both of those candidates have their coterie of loyal bloggers. I doubt that will decrease the tension, though.)

Meanwhile, Stephen Harper's oppo research team just laughs and scoops it all up for the next election.

Christ Almighty...

I had missed this story earlier... are American soldiers in Iraq seriously NOT GETTING ENOUGH FOOD?

"I got a letter," says Karen. "And he had called me before that. He said, 'Send lots of tuna.' "

Nick told his mother that he and the men in his unit were all about 10 pounds lighter in their first few weeks in Iraq. They were pulling 22-hour patrol shifts. They were getting two meals a day and they were not meals to remember.

"He told me the two meals just weren't cutting it. He said the Iraqi food was usually better. They were going to the Iraqis and basically saying, 'feed me.' "

Karen started packing in that wartime tradition as old as mothers and sons. She packed a lot of the packaged tuna, not the canned.

She happened to mention her hungry son to people she works with at Greenwood Credit Union, where she is a teller and has worked for 30 years.

Pounds and pounds of food started showing up amid the daily business of loans and deposits and withdrawals. Marianne Barao, the branch manager, said it could be done, the credit union could become the place where people help feed hungry Marines who are risking their lives on a skimpy diet.

"We sent out 51 pounds this week," says Karen. "There are customers coming in saying, 'What do you need?' "

The credit union is paying the cost of packing and shipping.

What to say to this? I realize that the care and feeding of Halliburton executives and shareholders is a higher priority, but this is unacceptable. It's a betrayal of the soldiers that once again shows where the Bush administration really stands.

(Blaming Bush? Yep. Shit flows uphill.)

Hat tip: Rogers at Kung Fu Monkey, who included it in an excellent post about the difference between supporting the troops and the "bastards in suits", and Crooks 'n Liars.

Because he challenged me not to do it...

MORE WARREN!

This time, it looks like he's attempting to take shots at multiple liberal candidates. I'd permalink, but since that isn't possible, here's the quote for posterity:

Pithy, linkless declarations of belief about democracy:

The Senate should be abolished. It is an anachronism in a modern democracy.

The Canadian Senate is indeed an odd beast, consisting as it does of appointees by Canadian prime ministers. It doesn't appear to have an especially negative effect, though, and is actually somewhat of a progressive institution; the push for decriminalization of marijuana that briefly made Canada "cool" stemmed from that seemingly conservative body.

Odd, but it somewhat makes sense, in that the war on drugs is almost entirely a function of electoral considerations about being "tough on crime" and the common perceived connection between the drug trade and the same marginalized minorities that many conservative voters are already somewhat antagonistic towards.

Still, the problem is... what to replace it with, if you DO want a body of "sober second thought"? Simple elections would just replicate the house, and having a fixed number per province would increase the already-redlined level of provincialism in Canada. It'd also be another push hurtling Canada in the direction of Americanization and, eventually, being absorbed into the United States.

(What, you think that that isn't what this is about? If you turn Canada into the United States in all but name, the name will change soon enough as well. I haven't seen a single reason why Canadian conservatives, particularly the western variant, wouldn't make for ecstactically happy Republicans. They just don't want to leave the oilpatch.)

So the problem is, what DO you do with it?

Fixed election dates are great for political consultants like me, but not so great for democratic governance. Ask an American.

No argument here. That's the odd thing about this guy- as I mentioned below, were it not for his wholesale abandonment of liberals outside Ontario and his parroting of AIPAC talking points and fury at those who don't, he wouldn't be anywhere near as tempting to break down.

(Far more interesting than, say, Canadian conservatives, who are even more on-message and slavishly devoted than their American counterparts. Not surprising, as I think that were Harper not Prime Minister he'd probably be an especially loud and tendentious blogger.)

(Speaking of being on message...)

In any democracy, voters are indeed preoccupied with which special interests are paying which politician. Liberals who shrug about revelations concerning suspicious donations are making a big, big mistake.

Bloggers and the like demanded respect and more of a voice in our democracy, and they got it. As a consequence, they owe democracy a duty - such as disclosing which of them is being quietly paid by which corporation or leadership candidate. They'd demand no less of the mainstream media.

The former piece is a direct jab at Liberal candidate Joe Volpe, who (it was revealed) received rather a lot of money from Apotex, a generic pharmaceutical firm. Not exactly a big deal in the US (and, personally, I'll take generic manufacturers over patent jockeys anyday), but the specific means by which he did it goes against the spirit, if not the letter, of the campaign financing law that Jean Chretien enacted back in 2004.

(I won't get into the specifics; it honestly doesn't matter, except that it involves executives' families donating to a candidate in a sort of "bundling" scheme.)

Because it isn't against the letter of the law, the Liberals aren't investigating Volpe over it. Well, that and the simple fact that pretty much all of the candidates are almost certainly going to be using these sorts of tactics to get funding, as they do not enjoy the kind of grassroots financial support that Democrats (or, indeed, Canadian Conservatives) are focusing on. It's almost certain that Harper played the same kinds of games with his campaign financing, too, but (in typical Harper fashion) was closemouthed about it and trusted in the generally favorable media coverage he got.

Thus, this isn't really about Joe Volpe being exceptionally corrupt when compared to either Liberals or Conservatives; he just had the bad luck of being caught first and being a target of those candidates who are afraid of his--if several blog comments I've read are true--exceptionally strong on-the-ground campaign. Chief among them being Ignatieff supporters...

...which gets to Warren's other comment. I'd mentioned in a past entry that Ignatieff's supporters online are both numerous and slavishly on-message. If Warren's saying what I think he is, this isn't because they're devoted, it's because it's very lucrative to do so. That sucks, because it lessens the legitimacy and value of the online discussion and debate that should be at the core of the modern liberal movement. As Calgary Grit and his commentators note in this post, Ignatieff's foreign policy positions should be the spark of policy discussion, but it's not happening, primarily because Iggy's supporters appear constitutionally unable to even think about the idea that he was completely wrong on both Iraq and the torture issue.

For those arguing that their positions are legitimate: I could buy that if I ever saw some diversity in the positions. I haven't. There should be people who say "I don't like those things, but I like other things that he's about and that's enough for me to support him", but by and large that isn't happening. It's ALWAYS "no, see, you're taking his comments out of context, go read his book" (when the critic has done nothing of the sort) or "Iraq was a good idea because of the Kurds, which he started supporting when..." (tell that to the families of those people killed in Haditha, or the Arabs forcibly relocated by those selfsame Kurds) or some babbling variation on "coercion isn't torture and should be used when ticking time bomb terrorists 9/11 realism"...which, honestly, even Thomas Friedman is probably none too inclined towards these days.

These are almost certainly people who would have never argued anything of the kind a year ago, but now are parroting talking points. And they're doing it as bloggers. So on that, Warren's right.

The problem, though, is the same as with his attacks on pseudonymity (which, of course, this numbers among)... there are too many good reasons for people to be able to speak their mind pseudonymously for "disclosure" laws to make much sense. If it's fraud, it's fraud, but let's be honest- anonymous and pseudonymous commenting isn't going anywhere, and the best thing you can do is look at the poster and judge for yourself whether he's a shill or not.

(In the case of Iggy's crew, it really isn't hard.)

By the way, speaking of online support and Volpe, I am curious about one thing... why is it that there seems to be not a soul online who's defending the man? No matter the candidate, you always got some defenders in the American primaries of 2004, and I'm sure he has supporters or he wouldn't be worth "outing" in the first place. Are his supporters under a gag order or something?

(If they are, I have one suggestion for his campaign organizers: release that gag order. Your guy is getting ripped up badly on the Internet, and the Internet will almost certainly be the source of the small donations that must fuel any future electoral campaign. Even were Volpe to continue after this mini-scandal and win the leadership with that fabled on-the-ground organization, he still would have the general to think about.)

In any case, one final thought: still not a word from Warren on the National Post's Iran debacle. How much do you folks want to bet that there's a gag order there, too?

Funny thing about Kinsella

As you can see from his recent stories, he and I share a dislike for Ignatieff. In many respects, we're probably similar in our political position.

I guess it's just a pity that his views on middle-east politics seem to come from AIPAC blastfaxes.

Iggy's Divorce

No, not with his wife. If anything, this divorce is far more damaging, because it was between Ignatieff and his human rights community colleagues. I had previously noted the Toronto Star rebuttal by human rights expert Casper Melville to Ignatieff's cowardly pseudo-defense of torture. What I hadn't known was that there was an excellent piece on the issue in the New Humanist last year, prior to the Canadian Liberal leadership race, about much the same thing. An excerpt:

Even before the publication of The Lesser Evil, Ignatieff had attracted some powerful, if predictable, enemies. His justifications for the Iraq war had incensed many radicals. Michael Neumann, Professor of Philosophy at Trent University in Ontario, described the imperialist thesis as developed in Ignatieff’s Empire Lite (2003) as “a web of foolishness, error and confusion”. The argument that America was still the world’s best hope for the spread of liberal democratic ideas was “built on sand” and his proposals for nation–building when stripped of “claptrap” were deeply flawed. They amounted, Neumann wrote, to this: “The US should, having first consulted its own interest, occupy ‘failed states’ and suppress disorder. Then, over what Ignatieff repeatedly emphasises is a long period of time, Americans are to teach these little folks abut judicial procedure, democracy and human rights. Then Americans will help their apt pupils to create sustainably democratic institutions.”

But with the publication of The Lesser Evil in 2004, and a series of articles which expanded on aspects of the book’s arguments in the New York Times, he also began to incur the wrath of liberals and, perhaps more significantly, former colleagues in the human rights movement. The critics began to line up. In a 2005 article called ‘Exporting Democracy, Revising Torture: The Complex Missions of Michael Ignatieff’, published on the website openDemocracy, Mariano Aguirre concentrated particularly upon the seven pages in The Lesser Evil which dealt with the question of torture.

In this brief section, Ignatieff turns to the so–called ‘ticking–bomb cases’ where torture might be the only way to extract information from terrorists which could save human lives. He cites Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz, who had contended that “whatever we might think about torture in the abstract, the pressure to use it in cases of urgent necessity might be overwhelming. The issue then becomes not whether torture can be prevented but whether it can be regulated.”

Ignatieff rejects this argument — “as an exercise in the lesser evil it seems likely to lead to the greater” — along with other justifications for the use of torture by democratic societies. Nonetheless — and this is critical to the argument that was to develop — he does go so far as to suggest forms of duress that might be permissible. These include “forms of sleep deprivation that do not result in harm to mental or physical health, and disinformation that causes stress.”

Aguirre describes this style of argument as ‘and yet and yet’. Ignatieff is “absolutely in favour of the principles and the defence of human rights, and yet, and yet, if a terrorist has valuable information about a biological weapon that is going to explode in New York, then maybe the security forces could use some level of force on him. Thus, the director of the Carr Centre for Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy School of Government in Harvard University becomes a sort of Bruce Willis figure.”

This ‘and yet and yet’ approach, suggests Aguirre, is just what the US government needs as a justification for its current breaches of human rights. “Ignatieff considers himself a liberal, so sometimes he criticises the Bush administration. And he is an intellectual, so he has doubts about almost everything and airs them with the liberal readers of the New York Times. But in the end he shares the US government’s vision of the violent and compulsory promotion of democracy, the war against terrorism and the use of instruments, for example torture, which are apparently in need of revisionist treatment.” In these ways, “he has established a sort of rational framework for democratisation by force and also for the revision of our understanding of human rights.”

This is precisely the problem with Ignatieff, and I wish I'd known about that "and yet, and yet" description, as it perfectly describes the issues that Ignatieff's sleazy redefinition of "torture" represents. Not that this is going to turn away Ignatieff's supporters- at this point, they seem reduced to reciting talking points and taking foreign policy positions that, a year ago, they'd see as abhorrent.

(They think he's going to win, and they want to back a winner, so...)

But it should give the rest of us pause, both those who live in Canada and those who don't. I've said before that I think that the Canadian Liberal party has a good shot of being the heart of North American liberalism, because it can BE liberal without having to run away from it, like the Democrats do. It would be a shame if that heart was corrupted by these mealy-mouthed apologias for the inexcusable, but that's what seems to be in the offing if Ignatieff became Liberal leader.

That's not to say he'd be a worse Prime Minister than Stephen Harper, of course. Stephen Harper is a zealous market fundamentalist; a neoconservative exploiting a base of social conservatives to gain the kind of autocratic power that only a Canadian Prime Minister at the head of a majority government can enjoy. We've already seen that he wants to control the government from his own desk, and the only check on his ambitions is the reality that he only controls a minority government. That's why every single thing he's done since the end of January has been turned towards winning that majority; from budgetmaking, to speechmaking, to muzzling his ministers, all of it is aimed at gaining power. Nobody knows what Harper would do with that power, but I imagine it would be to do his damnedest to remake Canada in the image of Howard's Australia and Thatcher's England. Needless to say, anybody would prefer Ignatieff to THAT.

I'd just rather that Canadians, and liberals, didn't have to make that choice.

Hat tip: Politique Canadienne.

Bored? Conservative? Somewhat Dim?

You need to get to "decrypting" Muslims. It's the biggest thing around, and now Akram's Razor has a handy tool for doing so.

A sample:

Rule 4: Deep down, Muslims are always thinking about (and yearning for) violence.
Muslims are by nature warlike and inclined to violence, so physically harming other people is never absent from their minds, regardless of the topic under discussion. In cases where they endeavor to conceal this fact, you just need to dig deeper. Strap 'em down and break out the lie detector.

Thus, if a Muslim American student activist talks about his personal interpretation of jihad (literally, "struggle [in God's way]") as striving to integrate Islam's values of justice and service to ones neighbors into his daily life as a patriotic American, you can be sure that he is in reality trying to slip in a plug for terrorists who behead and kill plane loads of those same neighbors. Similarly, if some graduating students who are Muslim decide to add to their gowns green stoles that read in Arabic Rabbi ziddini ilm ("Oh Lord, grant me knowledge", a prayer from the Quran) on one side and the Islamic profession of faith or Shahada on the other, these provocateurs are obviously trying to turn the ceremony into a tribute to the Hamas suicide bombers (who are known for wearing black armbands emblazoned with the Shahada). Don't let the fact that Muslims use those prayers in the most mundane of situations--even before going to bed--throw you off the scent.

There you go. Already, you can start writing breathless posts about horrible Muslim university jihadists. If you're breathless and irrational enough, this guy will probably link to you, a bunch of lGF (or "lie gushin' fools") posters will follow, and soon you'll enjoy fame, fortune, and probably your own AM talk show!

IT'S JUST THAT EASY!

Order now.

Simpler Robert Spencer

"Muslims are all murderous bastards, and that's why we need to slaughter them down to the last man, unless they change the Koran. Which they won't, of course."

(Honestly, you can only read so many right-wing anti-Muslim sites before you realize that that's the core argument behind pretty much all of them. Not that they'll admit it, but if you argue "a" leads to "b", and "b" leads to "c", then you can't get away with screaming loudly that you never said that "a" leads to "c".)

Retraction

The National Post finally wrote a retraction of the Iran story. It's behind a subscriber wall, but if you hit Born With a Tail, you'll find it quoted in full.

I'm glad that they finally relented, and put away the "some claim it might be mistaken" BS and owned up. Derek at BWaT believes that the reporter didn't think it "passed the smell test" in the first place, and likely got pressured into playing it up by the Aspers. Considering past practices, that seems very much possible.

So, Warren... when are you going to leave aside the ludicrous twaddle that you've been distracting yourself with about the UAE, and own up to the fact that Zerb was right?

Steven, some originality, please

More Canadian hijinks:

Stephen Harper says that the media hate him, decides to "convince people directly". So, yeah, apparently the Canadian press and the Canadian government are now at war.

Honestly, if you're going to rip off Dubya, at least be a little less obvious about it, huh?

In any case, considering how embattled the Republicans are right now, why follow their lead? You'd think that if one compared polling numbers, Hastert 'n Co. would be sending people up to go follow Harper around.

Ah well. As Calgarygrit notes, this isn't exactly a new thing, and at this point I'm becoming increasingly blase about the (seemingly bizarre) prospect of the United States soon having a much less conservative government than Canada.

Now this is getting silly..

Kinsella, still apparently smarting from the Iran debacle, is reduced to comparing traffic stats:

Pierre and I don't want to make, er, some corporate bloggers feel badly about themselves, or anything. We merely pass this along for her, um, your edification.

By "her", of course, he means Zerb, who has written a string of decent pieces on the debacle (look here, here and here), in addition to the original piece that apparently caught Kinsella's ire for daring to criticize the Mothership. All and sundry are, at least to my eye, excellent blogging: they're a good mix of citation, original commentary, and enough links to satisfy anybody. More to the point, not one mentions Warren Kinsella by name, thus providing no possible reason for Kinsella's absurd overreaction.

Forget the numbers. On this subject, at least, Zerb has proven herself a far, far better blogger than Kinsella, whose lustre is being more and more tarnished by the minute. Honestly, if his Daisy compatriots are smart, they'll either reign the guy in or at least get him to link to a plausible reason why he's engaged in this fruitless offensive.

(While they're at it, they could maybe get him to scrounge up a plausible reason for people to still believe that he gives a rat's ass about liberalism, considering the fawning postings he continues to write about Stephen Harper and what a Harper majority would mean to Canadian liberalism. The "Calgary Communist" seems to have more of Calgary in him than Communist these days.)

Edit: Ok, fair's fair, it's almost certainly a reaction to this entry about a "google smackdown" showing that Zerb's name has got more searches in google lately.

However, compare Warren's language above to Zerb's. She treated it like a joke, which makes sense; the number of google searches for your name isn't a useful metric of popularity. He's acting like it's at all meaningful that he gets more links in a reverse search on Google.

Sorry, Warren, but by that logic, I'm way more important than you are.

Bow down.