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

Friday, August 30, 2002

Sig File Fodder - This is from an old James Lileks screed, and it's wonderful on its own:
Discontent: the sign of a Serious Person. If you’re Deep and Real and Concerned with the way things are, you’re pissed off. Unless you’re angry about taxes, race-based government policies and the inefficiencies of the public education system, in which case you are an Angry White Male who has to pick gravel out of your knuckles every night. Remember: the Right is full of people who are Resentful and Angry, but the Left is Pissed and Discontented, which is ENTIRELY DIFFERENT.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/30/2002 01:32:36 PM

Where is the Anger? - I'm not the first pundit to ask this. But I'll join the chorus.

Where is the anger?

As we creep up on the first anniversary of the attacks, the picture of America you see in the media is...what?

Solemn? Still in deep mourning? "Coming to grips" and "seeking closure" with the events of a year ago? We've got sorrow, oh, yes. Some of it is intense and important - Springsteen's The Rising is incredible - and much of the rest is mawkish and self-serving, and in between there's every other shade, from poignant to absurd. It's also natural - except that it is everywhere!

Wnere is the anger, indeed?

We were attacked! 3,000 Americans and people from other places who regarded America highly enough to come here to live and work, died. They - bond traders, junior high children going on school outings, Hollywood producers, firemen, cube inmates - were immolated, thrown 1,200 feet to their deaths, crushed - by people whose sole goal was to cause terror to further their goals; erasing Israel and turning the entire Middle East into an islamo-fascist commune.

But if you use the American media to gauge perceptions, you'd never know that that still angered any of us. In fact, the US media seems to be doing its best to stop the anger, to curb any urge for retribution - also called Justice - in this country. They will apparently not broadcast the images of the planes striking the World Trade Center. They will apparently not broadcast anything that could tap into the anger that people in the hinterlands (anything west of the Hudson) feel, still.

And the National Education association, as reported in this space a while ago, has told teachers to not merely skim over the notions of anger and retribution - but to equivocate about the causes of the attacks; to share the blame!

This space will have nothing to do with that. I'm no media figure, and I know that phone calls to the media, the school board, the institutions that control who hears what, all will go into the great void. But I'm going to do all that, anyway.

And on September 11, this space will be done mourning. It'll be about justice, and revenge, and yes, anger.

My blood still boils, a year later.
posted by Mitch Berg 8/30/2002 10:57:14 AM

Casus Belli - George Will on the case for war and the need for Congress to be on board.

While I'm with most conservatives on War Powers, I think that Will makes the point as well as anyone. Here's the money graf:
The administration has arrived at an unprecedented yet defensible policy but has not committed itself to seek the sort of sustaining ratifications that are particularly vital when acting beyond precedents. It should remember Secretary of State Dean Rusk's warning. Sadder but wiser after Vietnam, he said that any important foreign policy decision made without Congress is inevitably in the subjunctive mood. That is no mood in which to make war [emphasis is mine].
So then, let us set an imperative mood.

And Senators Wellstone and Dayton, and Representative McCollum, here is my imperative to you - vote for the declaration.

Suicide Mission - According to an upcoming BBC documentary, on the morning of September 11, when only 14 aircraft were on air defense duty in the entire US, NORAD actually considered ordering unarmed training aircraft to close with and, if necessary, ram hijacked aircraft in areas where no armed interceptors could reach.

Management Day - Thoughts on the evolution of American labor, as this Labor Day weekend begins.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/30/2002 10:07:05 AM

Talkin' Baseball- There's a chance baseball's owners and players can avoid mutual suicide.

Any bets?
posted by Mitch Berg 8/30/2002 09:36:44 AM

Pearl Harbor - the Local Connection- A U of Hawaii research team has apparently found the Japanese submarine long reputed to have been sunk by the American destroyer USS Aaron Ward, early on the morning of December 7, 1941.

The local connection? The forward ("A") four-inch gun on the Ward that sank the submarine was manned by a crew of Minnesota Navy reservists.

And that same gun currently sits on the grounds of the MN Department of Transportation building, just southeast of the Capitol, in the park area east of the MNDOT headquarters, just north of the Police Memorial.
posted by Mitch Berg 8/30/2002 09:03:50 AM

Back in the Saddle? - Al Quada is apparently again capable of conducting offensive operations against the US.
posted by Mitch Berg 8/30/2002 08:58:13 AM

Ask The Person who Is One - Camille Paglia on the moral and intellectual decline of the Left.
posted by Mitch Berg 8/30/2002 05:39:47 AM

Thursday, August 29, 2002

The Saddam Bomb - Word from the London Times - the "Times" that is actually up-front about its biases - about Hussein's nuke program.

Apparently, they have all the expertise they need - they just lack fissile material.

And those in the know are warily eyeing all of that badly-secured former-soviet uranium and plutonium, guarded by soldiers that are paid less per day than you can find behind your couch cushions right now.
posted by Mitch Berg 8/29/2002 11:49:26 AM

Bush and Churchill - Donald Rumsfeld is comparing Bush to Churchill, in re the upcoming war.
posted by Mitch Berg 8/29/2002 11:45:00 AM

Kudo! - Among the big winners at the state fair Children's Art contest was 9 year old sculpture prodigy Sam Berg.

We're related, yes. Why do you ask?

OK. I'm proud of him!
posted by Mitch Berg 8/29/2002 10:41:30 AM

Why, oh Why? - I've been pondering the great immutable questions of life lately:
Why does Katherine Lanpher have a big job at MPR? She's perhaps the most unlistenable talk show host since Jim Klobuchar. She handles calls badly (endless spaces when she's not cutting people off in mid-sentence), has the shrillest, tinniest voice this side of Babs Carlson (without the nearly-redeeming camp value), and apparently (according to sources inside MPR) believes her own press - the reams of sycophantic, fawning articles in the City Pages and Minneapolis St. Paul Magazine that declare her the Twin Cities' Radio Diva, or the cities' most elegible bachelorette...blah!
Why do women say they want to meet new people, "make friends", learn new things - and then turn up their noses like Klansmen at the Apollo when they hear you're conservative? As Dershowitz said, "Diversity, to you, is someone in a skirt or with different-colored skin that thinks exactly as you do". Double blah.
Joe Grushecky is an obscure Pittsburgh special ed teacher/underground rocker, the former leader of the Iron City Houserockers, the greatest band you never heard of. He labors in obscurity, one of America's great rock and rollers. On the other hand, John Mayer is a star. Where is the fairness?
Why is "Twilight 2000" is out of print, but "Warhammer" still lives on? (Only game geeks need ponder this - although the ramifications of this question affect all of our society, though you may not know it yet).

I'll get right to work on all of these.
posted by Mitch Berg 8/29/2002 10:40:16 AM

Wednesday, August 28, 2002

Springsteen vs. Toby Keith - Two musical looks at September 11, according to Stanley Kurtz.

This is a great article.
posted by Mitch Berg 8/28/2002 10:09:59 AM

Tree-Huggers with Teeth- Jerry Taylor reports from the Earth Summit on why the west is not the enemy of the Earth.
posted by Mitch Berg 8/28/2002 09:38:20 AM

Isn't the Real Problem, here... - that you're irrelevant?

Phil Donahue hits the lowest Nielsen number possible - a .1. Lower even than CNN Headline News.
posted by Mitch Berg 8/28/2002 09:28:07 AM

Life is What Happens... - when you have no time to blog.

Sick kids, crazy job - agh. Well, I'll try to get up to speed again today.

Yes, yes - assuming that what I regularly do has "speed".
posted by Mitch Berg 8/28/2002 09:26:19 AM

Monday, August 26, 2002

Clearing the Air - MPR's insufferable Katherine Lanpher devoted an hour to the Earth Summit - the great environmental Kangaroo Court - this morning.

In the one-hour chat with "sustainable development" talking head Tom Tietenberg, one theme that kept popping up - "we have to examine what it is that separates the haves from the have nots". The usual suspects - SUVs, two-car households, large suburban ramblers - were cited.

Never mentioned by either Lanpher or Tietenberg was "totalitarian dictatorships that stifle the people's ability to succeed, and/or utopian socialist megalomocracies that inhibit the ability to create wealth".

posted by Mitch Berg 8/26/2002 04:25:48 PM

Case for War, Part IV - Cheney makes the case for a "pre-emptive strike".
posted by Mitch Berg 8/26/2002 04:16:36 PM

Oldie but Goodie - The Wall Street Journal reruns a 1945 WSJ editorial about the liberal record of appeasing dictators.

In light of the New York Times' ongoing campaign to sabotage the effort to depose Hussein, it seems all the more prescient now...

Speaking of the NYT - Even the liberal-but-fairly-balanced NPR show, "On the Media" is taking note of the New York Times' obvious, dishonest slant on the issue. Yesterday's installment featured a long, involved interview with Mickey Kaus - who's been dogging the Times ever since the story about the story broke.

The transcript will be available here, soon. You can also hear the segment via RealAudio, although I can never get that to work.

posted by Mitch Berg 8/26/2002 01:33:10 PM

Fair Weather Philanthropy? - Ted Turner has reneged on his pledge of a billion dollars to the UN, due to the stock market plunge.
posted by Mitch Berg 8/26/2002 11:00:00 AM

Live Long, and Poll Well - Trekkie nerds are no doubt going gaga over the entry of Kate Mulgrew's husband into the Ohio Gubernatorial race, with all the attendant appearances by other fossilized Star Trek casters.

For those who care, Mulgrew was "Captain Janeway" on "Star Trek: Voyager".

And the only reason I, a committed non-trekkie, know this is that it came on after "Blind Date" every night.

Your observations about that fact that I know this are both gratuitous and probably accurate.
posted by Mitch Berg 8/26/2002 10:58:09 AM

Sunday, August 25, 2002

First to Fight - for diversity... - Ann Coulter has a theory - while liberalism is endemically hostile to the military, the left has no problem deploying troops all over the world...

...as long as there's no crucial US interest in doing so.
posted by Mitch Berg 8/25/2002 10:30:08 AM

Protection - A lawsuit by families of the September 11 terror attack victims alledge that the Saudi government has paid hundreds of millions of dollars to Al Queda.
posted by Mitch Berg 8/25/2002 10:24:14 AM

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