Shot In The Dark - Politics and Current Events in Minnesota and Beyond

Saturday, March 30, 2002

Bring Out the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch! - Attack Rabbits are now for real.
posted by Mitch Berg 3/30/2002 07:20:57 AM

The Dull Sword swings Both Ways - The presidency of Bill Clinton may well have been saved by "scandal fatigue" - Americans' weariness with more and more news about scandals. Democrats crowed about it on the surface - and, I think, gave a muted sigh of relief about it when it finally worked.

But for those Dems pinning their hopes on Enron being the scandal to rock the Bush administration (which it's not, but work with me here), it seems the phenomenon didn't end when the administrations switched.
posted by Mitch Berg 3/30/2002 07:19:28 AM

Blah - Started a new job the week before last. That and my home life have constricted some of my time available for this sort of thing.

Which really means I'll be doing more of this on the weekend than I'd heretofore figured...
posted by Mitch Berg 3/30/2002 07:15:23 AM

Thursday, March 28, 2002

Berry, Redux - Anne Coulter dissects Halle Berry's self-serving Oscar acceptance speech.
posted by Mitch Berg 3/28/2002 08:31:49 PM

Deep Kimchi - The coddling and pacification of the Clinton years may have finally borne fruit; North Korea apparently has nuclear weapons.

Critics of the military, especially liberals, like to spout the simple bromide, "the military always trains to fight the last war". As we've seen in Afghanistan, our special forces are perfectly adept at fighting this war - but the pacifist left is pretty obsessed on the past. Suddenly, says the looney left, all future terrorist attacks will involve box cutters and airliners - as if the extemporization sIf the terrorists of September 11 added an insujlt to grave injury, it was that they gave ammunition (as it were) to those short-sighted liberals who believe the notion of missile defense is itself obsolete.

If the reports are correct, Pyongyang is one missile booster away from being able to cure that misconception. Wonder how many dead Angelenos or Seattleites it'll take before the left becomes obsessed with missile defense (and ignores unconventional warfare in turn)?
posted by Mitch Berg 3/28/2002 08:25:29 PM

Wednesday, March 27, 2002

Dawkins Retires - Frogtown's ultraliberal senator Andy Dawkins is finally retiring from the Senate, and will finally officially live in the same house with his wife, ultraliberal Ellen Anderson.

I met Andy Dawkins on my old KSTP talk show in 1986. He was just back from a commie-coddling junket to Nicaragua for a leftist lawyers's group, and he spent two hours arguing Central American politics with me. He was a great, personable guy who was as easy to talk with as his and his wife's politics were noxious. It was an interview that ended up on my audition tape.

The best thing about Dawkins, though, was his infamous pledge to keep his ponytail until tax fairness was achieved. It lasted eighteen months, and he finally cut it off. The delicious irony? The ultraliberal crypto-Maoist Dawkins clipped off his 'tail because tax rates had fallen due to tax cuts and a surging economy - products of a free market that he and his wife have done their best to scuttle.
posted by Mitch Berg 3/27/2002 06:42:39 AM

Start with the Baloney - DFL legislators began a short, painless "hunger strike" yesterday, over potential welfare cuts.

This is worse than those idiotic squatter camps that well-to-do college students set up to "draw attention to homelessness". Now, not only are special interests vying for the "most victimized" title, but it's now chichi to be an "honorary victim", as it were, at the Capitol.

This state embarasses me sometimes.
posted by Mitch Berg 3/27/2002 06:35:17 AM

Zero Brain - As part of the "drug war" - and especially after the Columbine massacre - "zero tolerance" became the latest cliche in the nation's bottomless library of catch phrases.

My son was sent home from school last year - because he had five little soft-plastic pellets in his pocket. No problem - except that when asked, he told the principal that they were from a toy gun, ergo violating the schools' "zero tolerance policy" on "weapons". (Had he lied and told them they were from a "fill the holes" game, he'd have been just fine, of course)

Catherine Seipp writes an excellent article on how zero tolerance rules can be bad for kids' health. That may well be true - but I'd suggest that their main effect it to teach kids that authority is really just not that bright.
posted by Mitch Berg 3/27/2002 06:27:22 AM

The Culture War, at your local Bookstore - Stanley Kurtz writes an excellent article about how the culture wars are reflected on the best-seller lists..
posted by Mitch Berg 3/27/2002 06:21:38 AM

Whew - Eight people were killed by a mad gunman in Paris yesterday.

Good thing France has stiff gun control laws, huh? You never know WHAT might have happened!
posted by Mitch Berg 3/27/2002 06:16:59 AM

Monday, March 25, 2002

Bush + Rice, 2004? - Andrew Sullivan speculates on a GOP ticket I've been dreaming about for 2004 - Bush with Condoleeza Rice.
posted by Mitch Berg 3/25/2002 06:05:21 PM

Sunday, March 24, 2002

Conservatives on Campus - I went to an exceedlingly sleepy little college out on the Great Plains, where students were generally too busy trying to learn how to earn a living that didn't involve repairing tractors to bother with politics too much. For what it was worth, I was a McGovern democrat until sometime my sophomore year, when a combination of Aleksandyr Solzhenitzyn, Fyodor Doestoyevskii and P. J. O'Rourke started me on the conservative path I'm on today.

As much as I love playing the underdog, I almost wish I were in college today, as a conservative. The odds conservatives on the campi of major universities seem almost melodramatically daunting. In other words, fun.

But are things changing?
posted by Mitch Berg 3/24/2002 08:52:41 PM

The Insanity Continues - The national abomination that is "the war on drugs" continues, with a Supreme Court case with some awful implications.
posted by Mitch Berg 3/24/2002 08:22:17 PM

Berg's Law of Liberal Iraq Commentary:

In attacking the reasons for war, no liberal commentator is capable of addressing more than one of the justifications at a time; to do so would introduce a context in which their argument can not survive