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

Saturday, June 07, 2003

NPR Bias Alert - NPR News covered the killing of a US solder in an ambush in Iraq today. As part of the coverage, the reporter said (I'm closely paraphrasing here): "The ambushed happened in an area of Iraq populated by conservative Sunni Moslems sympathetic to Hussein's regime..."

"Conservative?" Haven't we been down this road before?

Hussein was no Conservative either politically (he was a pure Stalinist) or theologically (his regime had nothing to do with conservative Islam, Sunni or otherwise).

Let's step back through history to put this bit in some context:
NPR called the Communist Party remnants in Eastern Europe "conservatives" when they advocated rolling back free-market advances in the nineties.
The Tienanmen Square massacre was ordered by - yep, "conservative" Chinese hardliners.
The Iranian Mullahs - the ones that utterly radicalized Iranian society? Yep. "Conservative". I'm trying to find the definition of "conservative" that involves "radical uprooting of all the institutions of society".
Mark my words - if Castro keeps killing and imprisoning journalists and dissidents, the current revulsion that some of the more honest leftists currently feel for El Jefe will culminate, someday, in an NPR reporter referring to Castro as "conservative".

And when that happens, Castro will be in real trouble; his lefty patrons in the US will officially dump him.
posted by Mitch Berg 6/7/2003 06:14:04 PM

Stand By Yer List - Now, I love all music. Or, I should say, I love the top 5% of every genre of music there is. It doesn't matter what - classical, opera, punk rock, bluegrass, jazz, folk, rock and roll, bagpipe music...

...and yes, Country and Western. I worked at the first of my two Country radio stations when I was a 19-year-old punk rock guy (at KDAK, in Carrington, ND), and I learned five fundamental truths about Country/Western Music:
When it's great, it's great.
When it's bad, it's horrible.
When it's mediocre, it's horrible.
The twangier, rootsier, more traditional it is, usually the better it is. Conversely, the slicker and more "crossover" it is (think Kenny Rogers' incarnations from '76 to '91), the worse it is.
Emmylou Harris is essential.
I caught this on Powerline the other day; Country Music Telelvision just released its list of the Top 100 Country Music Songs Of All Time. And while the whole thing is worth some dissection, we need to start with one big, showstopper problem right up front.

No Emmylou.

Now, Emmylou's big problem is that she bucked the Nashville establishment - the dozen or so Music Row moguls that control most of what gets written, produced and played on the air on country radio, coast to coast. Ergo, she gets almost no airplay.

And who owns Country Music TV? Yep. The same people who own everything else that comes out of Nashville.

But the notion that you can have a Country Music 100 without Easy From Now On or Boulder to Birmingham or To Daddy - a song that still kills me every time I hear it, and may be the ultimate Country song - is too absurd for the English language to convey.

But OK. With that line drawn in the sawdust floor, let's go through their list:
1. "Stand by Your Man" by Tammy Wynette
OK. Hard to argue here.
2. "He Stopped Loving Her Today" by George Jones

3. "Crazy" by Patsy Cline, Willie Nelson

4. "Ring of Fire" by Johnny Cash

5. "Your Cheatin' Heart" by Hank Williams
So far, so good.
6. "Friends in Low Places" by Garth Brooks
I agree! Maybe not #6 out of the Top 100, but still way up here. Garth Brooks may not have made twangy, rootsy country music popular, but he made it possible for popular country music to be twangy and rootsy, which is nothing to sneeze at. The wave of C'nW that came along with Brooks' wake in the early nineties - Clint Black, Dwight Yoakam, Kathy Mattea, Carlene Carter, Marty Stuart, Travis Tritt and any number of others - may not have gotten country music back to its roots, but they got it a lot closer than it'd been since the Outlaws ruled the charts
7. "I Fall to Pieces" by Patsy Cline

8. "Galveston" by Glen Campbell

9. "Behind Closed Doors" by Charlie Rich
Now, I know my country - sort of. And I was ready to write this one off with a snide rejoinder...

...until I read Big Trunk's very articulate defense of Rich's music a bit ago. Point, Trunk; Set, Rich.
10. "Mommas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys" by Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson

11. "Blue Moon of Kentucky" by Bill Monroe

12. "Amarillo by Morning" by George Strait

13. "Coal Miner's Daughter" by Loretta Lynn

14. "The Dance" by Garth Brooks

15. "Forever and Ever, Amen" by Randy Travis

16. "I Will Always Love You" by Dolly Parton
Right artist, wrong song. Dolly Parton is an amazing singer. If you like great roots Country, find a copy of any of her early albums. Oh, "I Wil Always Love You" is a good song - bastardized by Whitney Houston, which kills it for me - but holy cow, people...
17. "Hello Darlin'" by Conway Twitty

18. "Country Roads" by John Denver

19. "Hey Good Lookin'" by Hank Williams

20. "I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow" by Foggy Bottom Boys

21. "Okie from Muskogee" by Merle Haggard

22. "Wide Open Spaces" by Dixie Chicks
This is a good song. But should it really be sitting at #22, ahead of "Folsom Prison Blues" and "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry? I think not.
23. "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain" by Willie Nelson

24. "The Chair" by George Strait

25. "Folsom Prison Blues" by Johnny Cash

26. "The Gambler" by Kenny Rogers

27. "Fancy" by Reba McEntire

28. "Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning)" by Alan Jackson

29. "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" by Hank Williams Sr.

30. "I Hope You Dance" by Lee Ann Womack
This is so wrong. The song - and Womack - are about as country as a day at the Edina Galleria. If it weren't for the background singer with the Arkansas accent, this song could be a Mandy Moore tune.

Worse? It came in ahead of...
31. "I Walk the Line" by Johnny Cash

32. "Rhinestone Cowboy" by Glen Campbell
"Galveston" deserved its' #8. But I'm sorry - this is crossover pop. Its most redeeming value as Country Western is that it sold a lot of records. Which is what this list is all about, of course...
33. "Always on My Mind" by Willie Nelson

34. "Harper Valley PTA" by Jeannie C. Riley

35. "D-I-V-O-R-C-E" by Tammy Wynette

36. "Will the Circle be Unbroken" by Carter Family, Nitty Gritty Dirt Band

37. "King of the Road" by Roger Miller

38. "Breathe" by Faith Hill
I suppose if Britney Spears does a song and refers to a pickup truck and says "y'all" a couple of times, and it sells five million copies, CMT will call it "country", too.
39. "Make the World Go Away" by Eddy Arnold

40. "Hello Walls" by Faron Young

41. "Sweet Dreams" by Patsy Cline

42. "El Paso" by Marty Robbins

43. "Delta Dawn" by Tanya Tucker

44. "When I Call Your Name" by Vince Gill

45. "Guitars, Cadillacs" by Dwight Yoakam
Thank You, CMT.
46. "Desperado" by the Eagles

47. "Don't Come Home A Drinkin' (With Lovin' on Your Mind)" by Loretta Lynn

48. "Boot Scootin' Boogie" by Brooks & Dunn

49. "I Can't Stop Loving You" by Ray Charles

50. "Independence Day" by Martina McBride

51. "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels" by Kitty Wells

52. "On the Other Hand" by Randy Travis

53. "Walking the Floor Over You" by Ernest Tubb

54. "Coat of Many Colors" by Dolly Parton
I'm going to switch this and "I Will Always Love You". Shhhhh. Don't tell anyone.
55. "Act Naturally" by Buck Owens

56. "Mama He's Crazy" by the Judds

57. "If You've Got the Money, I've Got the Time" by Lefty Frizzell

58. "Kiss an Angel Good Morning" by Charlie Pride

59. "Family Tradition" by Hank Williams Jr.

60. "Go Rest High on That Mountain" by Vince Gill

61. "Lovesick Blues" by Hank Williams

62. "Don't Rock the Jukebox" by Alan Jackson

63. "Tennessee Waltz" by Patty Page

64. "When You Say Nothing at All" by Alison Krauss
Emmylou Harris getting shut out is a bad thing. This takes a little of the sting off.
65. "God Bless the USA" by Lee Greenwood

66. "Green, Green Grass of Home" by Porter Wagoner

67. "It's Your Love" by Tim McGraw with Faith Hill

68. "There Stands the Glass" by Webb Pierce

69. "Devil Went Down to Georgia" by Charlie Daniels

70. "Chiseled in Stone" by Vern Gosdin

71. "Don't Toss Us Away" by Patty Loveless
You like Patty Loveless' version? Dig up a copy of the original Lone Justice album. As great as Loveless is (and she is great), Maria McKee's version could strip chrome off a trailer hitch.
72. "A Boy Named Sue" by Johnny Cash

73. "You Are My Sunshine" by Gov. Jimmy Davis

74. "Flowers on the Wall" by Statler Brothers

75. "Strawberry Wine" by Deana Carter

76. "Good Hearted Woman" by Waylon Jennings

77. "You're Still the One" by Shania Twain
Still the one, perhaps - but still not country.
78. "My Home's in Alabama" by Alabama

79. "Is There Life Out There" by Reba McEntire
Reba is like Garth Brooks - very misunderstood. Great singer. She did many songs much better than this, though.
80. "She's in Love With the Boy" by Trisha Yearwood
This one came out long before Yearwood became a huge star. It was one of the brighter spots at my last C'nW radio job.
81. "Smoky Mountain Rain" by Ronnie Milsap
In the mid-eighties, most country artists were trying follow Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers to the pop charts. Ronnie Milsap was saved from being the worst example of this only because Eddie Rabbitt existed.
82. "Should've Been a Cowboy" by Toby Keith

83. "Rose Garden" by Lynn Anderson

84. "Please Remember Me" by Tim McGraw

85. "Blue" by LeAnn Rimes

86. "Before the Next Teardrop Falls" by Freddie Fender
Si! Muy Perfecto
87. "Passionate Kisses" by Mary Chapin Carpenter

88. "Have I Told You Lately That I Love You" by Gene Autry

89. "Here's a Quarter" by Travis Tritt

90. "He'll Have to Go" by Jim Reeves

91. "Seven Year Ache" by Rosanne Cash
Roseanne, and her ex-husband Rodney Crowell (who wrote "Ache"), along with Dwight Yoakam and Cash's half-sister Carlene Carter and George Strait, kept Country from becoming a complete arid wasteland of pop crossover pap in the eighties. That alone was a reason this song should have been in the top twenty on this list.
92. "Sunday Morning Coming Down" by Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson

93. "Take this Job and Shove It" by Johnny PayCheck

94. "Something in Red" by Lorrie Morgan

95. "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" by Flatt & Scruggs

96. "I'd Be Better Off in a Pine Box" by Doug Stone

97. "Amazed" by Lonestar

98. "Faded Love" by Bob Wills

99. "Back in the Saddle Again" by Gene Autry

100. "Killin' Time" by Clint Black
Again - any such list without Emmylou Harris is more or less invalid.

Hm. Maybe I'll do my own someday...
posted by Mitch Berg 6/7/2003 06:13:15 PM

Fair Enough - Hennipen County District Judge Marilyn Brown Rosenbaum yesterday handed both sides a victory in the battle over implementing the Minnesota Personal Protection Act.
Rosenbaum said a section of the law requiring verbal notification and dictating the size and wording of signs to prohibit guns in churches and other private places, such as businesses, forced the churches "to violate their sincerely held beliefs. . . . and the loss of First Amendment freedoms, for even minimal periods of time, unquestionably constitutes irreparable injury."

She denied requests for orders that would have allowed the churches to ban guns from their parking lots, and release them from the law's requirements in their roles as employers, landlords and operators of child-care facilities.
She issued a restraining order allowing churches to use non-state-approved wording, typeface and print size in advising worshippers not to bring guns to church. This was the tempest that the Edina Community Lutheran Church (which numbers, among its many well-heeled DFL worshippers, former US Attorney and DFL Gubernatorial hopeful David Lillehaug, who was back at work doing the party's bidding in this case) yanked out of the teapot.

The funny part? Listening to the spin (especially from the unctuously smug and sanctimonious churches involved), you'd have thought this was going to be the first step in the repeal of the MPPA.

The results reflected what more rational minds have thought all along. In many ways, I'm happy about the whole ruling; I wasn't really comfortable with requiring churches to use state-mandated signage, either. And the judge refused to allow churches to bar legal firearms from the trunks of cars in the parking lot, which I think would have been a disastrous precedent along with being really lousy law.

Above all, though, I think it cuts the legs out of under the anti-MPPA movement (of which more below). Where do they go from here? The parts of the law that actually pertain to firearms have been tested in courts, over and over again. They haven't a leg to stand on in most cases.

The next battlefield for this law will be when local governments try to supercede the law on their own property or in their own city limits. I'll be following these attempts very closely.

Paging Gloria Swanson - I saw my first "Repeal Concealed Carry" bumper sticker yesterday. It was on (what else?) a Volvo, while I was driving through (where else?) Mac-Groveland.

And in other forums - on the radio, in the coffee shops, on Minnesota political discussion groups - I've heard various pundits saying "this law is going down! There's no way the people will let this go on!

Now, if you remember back a year or so (and I'd link to the posting if my permalinks worked), I was saying that Concealed Carry was a bellwether issue for the DFL in Minnesota; if the DFL couldn't win on this issue, which is so utterly anathema to the party's philosophy and beliefs, it coudn't win anything. I heard on person comment "I'm seeing so many No Guns signs, I can't help but believe that this thing is doomed". I pointed out to this person that he lived in one of the strongest DFL-cum-Green districts in the Twin Cities; the sentiments there were very unlikely to be echoed in Grand Rapids or Rochester, or even much of Eden Prairie and Oakdale.

Indeed, this issue has loudly brought out something that's been in evidence (if quietly) on so many others. The Metro DFL reminds me of Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard.

You know the movie - Swanson plays a washed-up star from the Silent Movie era. In her mind, she still thinks she's on the A-list, still can get the best table at Elaine's. She still thinks she has all the clout she had 25 years earlier. She feels that if she just flashes that smile, or stomps her feet hard enough, people will cower and bow and scrape the way the used to.

And it's no wonder - when you've hit the highest high, it's hard to be back in the gutter scrapping for nickels again.

The Metro DFL - and the "moderate" Republicans who were for so long their lapdogs - used to run the show, absolutely and without question. But last November changed all that.

And it's on the Concealed Carry issue that the DFL will probably get their first real taste of what it's like to be ~~all washed up~~ the minority. Like Norma Desmond, they will cajole, and holler and stomp and kick, expecting to get their way the way they did for most of the last 40 years in this state. And they won't.

And it makes me all tingly!
posted by Mitch Berg 6/7/2003 05:01:25 PM

Friday, June 06, 2003

D+59 - Excellent piece in the WashTimes on D-Day, which was 59 years ago today.

America's view of war has undergone wild gyrations in the last 70 years; from unthinkable, to a national duty, to unthinkable again, to an evil to be avoided at all costs, to today, where it's something we dominate like no other nation in history and can do faster and relatively cheaper (in human lives) than anyone in history.

But it wasn't always this way:
In this era when we Americans have come to expect almost instant millitary victory with comparatively little of our own blood shed, it is hard to convey to those who did not live through World War II what it was like then.
Today, the 59th anniversary of D-Day when the Allies stormed the Normandy shore, is as good a time as any to make the effort.
Triumph � the unconditional surrender of Germany and Japan � I think seems inevitable to folks who know of the war as only a matter of history. For those of us who experienced it, that was far from the case.
In the opening months, we had suffered through a long string of defeats starting with the bloody surprise of Pearl Harbor. Guadalcanal had been a long and bruising campaign in what seemed to most of us the middle of nowhere.
We and our Allies � eventually including the Free French � had successfully invaded Africa and then Sicily. But that campaign seemed to have turned into a bloody stalemate halfway up the Italian boot...
...So when the D-Day landings took place, the war's outcome was still very much in doubt, and it was far from a sure thing that we were going to secure an area large enough to serve as a springboard for a sustained offensive and a drive to eventual victory.
For hours, we listened to cryptic bulletins on the radio.
It was not until my father came home from work on the evening of June 7, about 48 hours after the initial landings, that he told the family he thought the Allies had carved out a big enough beachhead for the invading force to feel somewhat secure. And then he went back to his job with Bureau of Economic Warfare.
It's illustrative to look at how very different war was back then. In Iraq, we lost 11 tanks, with one tank crewman dead. In 1944 and 1945, the US Third Armored Division - just one of 40-odd divisions in France and Germany - suffered 10,000 casualties (2,000 dead) and lost 600 tanks to enemy action.

So remember D-Day.
posted by Mitch Berg 6/6/2003 03:45:57 PM

Bazaam - I've been looking for this one.

Back during the Senate's final debate on the Minnesota Personal Protection Act, Wes Skoglund (Liar, Minneaoplis) along with the likes of Linda Berglin (DFL, Internationale) brought up details of a Violence Policy Center study claiming that Texas concealed carry permit holders were arrested for more crimes, especially violent ones, than non-permit holders.

I wanted to jump to my feet and refute him on the spot, then and there - but that would have violated a number of rules, and gotten me ejected forthwith.

So I couldn't do it there. But I can here:

This "study" is about a year old, and has been debunked frequently.

First: The "study" lists *arrests*. Arrests are, in and of themselves, meaningless in determining the risk to the general population of a concealed carry law - because after ANY homicide, and after most shootings of any kind, an arrest is pretty much standard procedure; the determination that the homicide was justifiable comes AFTERWARD. Example: a woman can shoot someone who charges at her, knife in hand, pants down around knees,
wearing a "Rape Inc." T-shirt - but the police will still arrest her. The key point is, *will she be convicted*? The answer? No - not if it was justifiable. The kicker is, the "Violence Policy Institute" knows that arrests are a meaningless metric. They released this "study" to try to get material out into the Spin Wars on the subject, knowing how many people (and reporters, and legislators) are too misinformed and/or stupid and/or intellectually lazy to know the difference.

But the real kicker here is the actual analysis of the conviction figures provided by the Texas Department of Public Safety.

Read the table. Note the pink column on the far right; any number greater than 1.0 is one where the ratio of convictions, *per capita*, favors carry permit holders.

The overall figures? Texas' 220,000-odd permit-holders are less than a third as likely to commit ANY crime - and if you leave out convictions unrelated to the permits themselves, it's more like one-fourth. Texas permit-holders committed absolutely no robberies or kidnappings. But for one murder (the first in several years), the carry-permittee's record would be as close to spotless as 220,000-odd humans can get.

The simple fact is, the numbers of concealed carry permit-holders that commit crimes are so incredibly low that statistics really aren't useful for much, except to show that there just is no problem!

I may print up copies of this to distribute to stores that display "No Guns" signs.
posted by Mitch Berg 6/6/2003 03:16:00 PM

Blogs and Raines - Andrew Sullivan on the Blogosphere's part in the changing newspaper business - especially the NYTimes:
Only, say, five years ago, the editors of the New York Times had much more power than they have today. If they screwed up, no one would notice much. A small correction would be buried days, sometimes weeks, later. They could spin stories with gentle liberal bias and only a few eyes would roll. Certainly no critical mass of protest could manage to foment reform at the paper. And the kind of deference that always existed toward the Times, and the secretive, Vatican-like mystique of its inner workings kept criticism at bay. But the Internet changed all that. Suddenly, criticism could be voiced in a way that the editors of the Times simply couldn't ignore. Blogs - originally smartertimes.com, then this blog, kausfiles.com and then Timeswatch.com and dozens and dozens of others - began noting errors and bias on a daily, even hourly basis. The blogosphere in general created a growing chorus of criticism that helped create public awareness of exactly what Raines was up to. Uber-bloggers like Drudge were able to take that to the mainstream media; and reporter-bloggers like Seth Mnookin picked up the baton. This media foodchain forced transparency on one of the most secretive and self-protective of institutions. It pulled the curtain back on the man behind the curtain. We did what journalists are supposed to do - and we did it to journalism itself.
Sully's probably earned the right to gloat just a bit.
posted by Mitch Berg 6/6/2003 07:37:04 AM

Hillary! - The new book by Hillary! Clinton apparently contains strident denials that she knew anything about her husband's affair with Monical Lewinsky - or much of anything else.

Dick Morris pimp-slaps that train of thought in this NRO article:
For Hillary to pretend injured innocence at this point has only one motive: She needs to somehow justify her strident public defense of her husband.

She can't admit the truth: that she defended him because she didn't want him forced from office � ending both their political careers � because he'd been unfaithful to her.
The article goes into Morris' career as an enabler of Clinton's behavior, which is itself an interesting read.
posted by Mitch Berg 6/6/2003 07:20:43 AM

Wotta Day - First, my son was sick. Or, should I say, "sick". Oh, he had a little fever early in the day, but by noon it was clear that he was really just sick of one of his Teachers' Assistants.

Then, my ISP's servers started acting up; this site became very slow to load, and I couldn't send (but COULD receive) emails. My ISP was undergoing an upgrade - at least, I hope that was the upgrade. If there's more downtime coming up, I'm going to be miffed.

I'll be working more on the Hatch story today. It's interesting - I haven't done this sort of thing in a long time.

And speaking of which - I have another story to work on...

Does Tom Swift Know About This? - Recently, a court forced a school in New England (I think - I can't find the link) to allow pro-life groups to distribute literature on their campus, after a parent noted that pro-"choice" groups were allowed to freely distribute their literature. After he was barred from getting "equal time", he filed suit - and won.

Both of my kids go to the Saint Paul Public Schools. Unlike some conservatives, I'm not a reflexive trasher of public schools; a motivated kid can get a decent education there (and an unmotivated kid is going to be poorly schooled no matter where she goes). But the parent has to be ready to ride herd, endlessly, on teachers, administrators, and the hordes of apparatchiks at the SPPS' hulking fortress of an administrative office at 360 Colborne.

And I am going to start the herd-riding process today.

My daughter goes to a school that has a more-liberal-than-usual staff. They've labelled themselves a "peace site", or some such. College kids who'd been to Iraq (before the war) lectured the kids on how unjust the upcoming war was, with no expat Iraqis or Kurds to give the little impressionable minds any perspective (although my daughter, bless her little budding conservative heart, did manage to question a few of them).

But if my daughter isn't stretching things, they may have gone to far this time.

She tells me that Code Pink has been allowed to hand out anti-Concealed-Carry literature.

So I'll be talking with the principal today to try to get to the bottom of this. More as events warrant.

(By the way, if anyone has a link to that story, I'd be much appreciative if you could send it to me. It'll be fun to show the principal).
posted by Mitch Berg 6/6/2003 07:15:33 AM

Thursday, June 05, 2003

Busy - My son is home sick today.

Between taking care of him and doing some long-deferred housework, I'm making some phone calls, reading some transcripts and sending some emails about the Mike Hatch and the Strib piece we talked about yesterday. I want to make sure everything I say is fairly airtight; this will not be an opinion piece or a blog polemic.

I'll do some normal posting tonight, too - after everyone's in bed...
posted by Mitch Berg 6/5/2003 01:33:21 PM

Wednesday, June 04, 2003

WMD Go Round - The CIA is releasing the goods on Iraqi WMDs, according to Powerline:
Liberals have been viciously attacking both President Bush and Prime Minister Blair for some days now, advancing the absurd claim that they "lied" about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction as a pretext for war. This strikes me as another in a series of desperate moves by the Left. Everyone believed (correctly, I am sure) that Iraq had such weapons. That was the basis for the 1998 Congressional resolution on regime change; it was the reason for the various U.N. resolutions and the inspection program; and Iraqi officials threatened to use them against our troops. Moreover, it seems virtually certain that the Administration will be able to piece together a compelling picture of Iraq's weapons programs, based on interviews it is now conducting with Iraqis, analysis of documentary evidence, and discoveries of banned weapons, some of which have already been found. Will the liberals then apologize to Bush and Blair? I suppose not. But it is hard to see how they think they can come out ahead on this issue in the long run.
The big question to me is "why?" It seems like a position that can only backfire in the long run. Is it a sign of desperation?

The next year should tell.
posted by Mitch Berg 6/4/2003 11:14:26 PM

Ugh - Lileks covered this bit this morning. I wanted to find the story before I blogged it.

The Sydney Morning Herald reports on mas graves full of Kurdish children.
A MASS grave containing the remains of 200 Kurdish children has been discovered in the northern Iraqi province of Kirkuk, the Kurdish newspaper Taakhi reported today.

"Citizens discovered on May 30 a communal grave close to Debs, in Kirkuk. But this is different from other mass graves discovered since the fall of Saddam Hussein's terrorist regime because it contains the remains of 200 child victims of the repression of the Kurdish uprising" in 1991, the paper said.
So what is the US media leading with?

Mothra Farging Stewart.

I could scream, sometimes.

Go ahead. Tell me that the only important thing is that we "win the peace". Tell me that not finding WMDs invalidates the whole invasion. Better yet, tell the fathers of the victims that we've been uncovering - alive and dead, in dime lots and now in big pits in the ground.

I dare you.
posted by Mitch Berg 6/4/2003 08:21:03 PM

Tempest in An Oilcan - Del Simmons' excellent Freespeech.com covers the Guardian's misreading of Paul Wolfowitz' comments comparing Iraq and North Korea.
posted by Mitch Berg 6/4/2003 07:45:47 PM

Winning The Peace - They've been wrong about everything so far.

Liberals, that is. They were wrong about the importance of Al Quaeda. They were wrong about how to deal with Al Quaeda (letting the leadership slip out of countless traps, then trying to "solve" the problem with a pair of Tomahawk missiles). They were wrong about Afghanistan. They were wrong about the UN, Hanx Blix, Weapons of Mass Destruction (oh, we have to prove that one again. And we will). They were wrong about whether the war would turn into a quagmire - twice (once before and once during the war). They were wrong about whether we had too many troops, then wrong about whether we had too few. They were wrong about Baghdad and Basra becoming new synomyms for Stalingrad. They were wrong about the hidden resolve the the Iraqi military, and a few dozen things in and among all of those that I've forgotten.

So the left's last-ditch bleat - even among some who are otherwise reasonable - is that we're going to "lose the peace".

Mark Steyn's been there. He disagrees.

On the Hugh Hewitt show a few minutes ago, he reported that "19 out of 20 Iraqis are very, very happy with things. And in this article, in the Telegraph - part of a long series of pieces available on his website, he further assails the notion that Iraq is a steaming cauldron of discontent, ready to blow up in our collective face.

Too many money quotes to pick just one, but here's a good one:
In Ramadi, in another cafe, the maitre d', in honour of my presence, flipped the television over to BBC World. Some Beeb type was doing a piece about some Baghdadi who hadn't been paid since March. Now what sort of fellow hasn't been paid since March? A chap who worked for the toppled thug government perhaps? Might be a committed thug ideologue, might be just a go-along-to-get-along type. But, given that the new Iraqi government is never going to be as huge as the old one, maybe that chap should just stop whining to the BBC and look for a gig in the private sector. Ditto for the BBC reporter, come to that.

As usual, the piece wound up with the correspondent standing in the children's ward of the Saddam Hussein Medical Centre predicting more doom and gloom. By contrast, every medical facility I went to in Iraq was well short of capacity. The NGO types concede that Iraqis aren't exactly rushing the hospitals, but say that's because they know that there are no drugs and/or they're worried that they can't afford them. Might be that. Or it might be that they don't want to be stuck on a ward trying to get a moment's sleep under the blazing lights of round-the-clock CNN and BBC camera crews filming their reporter yakking away in front of a telegenic moppet whose acute tonsillitis is somehow all Rumsfeld's fault. These days, I always laugh my head off at BBC World reports. And, in that Ramadi cafe, I was touched to find that, even though most of them hadn't a clue what he was going on about, within half a minute, the rest of the crowd was roaring along with me.
Read...yep, the whole thing.

UPDATE: Midwest Conservative Journal has another excellent piece on the same topic.
posted by Mitch Berg 6/4/2003 06:34:48 PM

Movable Hype - The whole blog world is moving to Movable Type, it seems.

I know I want to make the switch. When I see the problems that Blogger is giving me with my permalinks and archives, I know I have to make the switch.

But try as I might, I can not seem to install Movable Type on my server.

I'm not a complete neophyte about software, even UNIX and LINUX software. I was a technical writer, and now I do GUI design and usability!

Part of the problem is the install guide, like most UNIX end-user documentation, is crap. Example (for all you technical writers out there): It gives you options to configure Movable Type to work with three different types of databases - but doesn't explain either what the default database is, or the pros and cons of any of them.

And configuring the installation - putting all the different settings into the configuration files - is an exacting, vital, and badly-explained process.

Third-party help is just as bad. Someone recommended a website. "Great, I thought - someone can help me with this file configuration stuff." So I started reading. It went something like this:
"1. Download the files from movabletype.com." So far so good.

"2. Put the files on your server. Check.

"3. Enter the proper values in your configuation files."

4. Go to your browser and click on your Movable Type page..."
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH

So I guess I'll resort to begging: If there's an MT guru out there, could I get some help? I can't pay a whole lot; I'm unemployed, still. But I can work something out.

Email me. This is getting ridiculous.
posted by Mitch Berg 6/4/2003 05:42:19 PM

The Class System - This article by Frederick Turner in TechCentral Station does something that's almost guaranteed to get an article onto my bookmark list; it amplifies and expands on a point I"ve been making myself for quite a while

Longtime readers of this blog know that I've been a supporter of concealed carry reform since...well, before it was an actual legislative initiative; I remember discussing it on my old KSTP talk show in 1987, when Florida's passage of a shall-issue law opened the floodgates on these reforms nationwide.

I remember making one of my few memorable observations in the whole history of that show; that while DFLers claimed affinity for the working class in their endless struggle against patricians, and while many were enthusiastic class warriors, when the subject of guns came up the roles were precisely reversed. Gun control was the ideological province of the urban elites (or would-be elites), while the typical (or stereotypical) NRA member and gun owner was blue collar, frequently rural. I giggled at the irony; gun control was the class war that the far left had been nagging us about, only they were the patricians enforcing a paternalistic system, and their opposition was the proletariat.

The observation has expanded over my years of living in Minnesota; the place is chock full of paternalistic institutions which, like gun control (I'm going to stretch this metaphor beyond its test limits) are imposed by a social elite on the rest of society, for society's own good.

Which is why the left in Minnesota is so threatened by things like concealed carry reform and "No New Taxes" pledges; it's not just an attack on criminals or taxes, or even gun control and the nannystate; it's an attack on them.

Go ahead - mention either issue to your DFLer friends. Watch their nose hair curl in rage (OK, most of them. Be quiet, Flash).

Turner's article explores this same idea to a logical conclusion.

It starts slowly:
I was at a party in the Northeast recently with the nicest people you could imagine. The conversation got on to Bush and Iraq, and at first it looked and sounded as if it was unanimously liberal. Bush was "scary," Texas was a dark and terrible place, the Iraq war was a catastrophe, it was all about oil, it boded the most terrible consequences for world peace. I started innocently asking awkward questions and citing awkward fact. At first people just tried to put me right, as if I hadn't understood. Then it looked as if the subject would be dropped; I had no desire to pursue it, preferring literary or scientific or philosophical questions anyway. I really didn't want to spoil the mood of the party, and people were beginning to look uneasy.

But then something odd happened. Somebody else started doing the same thing as I had, asking awkward questions, reminding people gently of facts they had forgotten; and then it turned out that this man's wife, who'd been silent, was quite fiercely in favor of the war and of free markets and democratic government. This couple had earlier struck me immediately as the most confident and intelligent guests present, though they were very quiet; and they were not yahoos at all, indeed they looked impressively Ivy League. The unease grew in the room. People shifted in their chairs and looked anxiously at the door.

Then another woman, who had been "going along" in order to be polite, turned out to have doubts of her own about the liberal agenda. The lovely mood of unanimity and solidarity was over. A couple of liberals slunk out into another room in order not to be contaminated. But then there was a real discussion, with fair expression of different arguable views on all sides - just as the Constitution intended.
I remember the day at KSTP back in 1986 that word came out I'd be doing a conservative talk show. One of the reporters - a fabulously attractive, intelligent and funny woman who oozed liberalism like some people ooze BO, with whom I'd had to that point a fun rappoire - looked at me and asked "You don't really believe that stuff, do you? It's all just an act, right?" She couldn't believe someone she actually knew would do such a thing.

Turner continues:
I had two reactions. One was a sudden recognition that more and more people had been "coming out of the closet" in the way that the three people had, who had been so bold as to support George Bush. Michael Kinsey had done it in Slate. Dennis Miller had done it on Comedy Central. But their recognizable courage implies a prior risk. Why the fear in the first place? I had noticed it before, but the question needed answering. After all, these liberals at the party were people with the equivalent of tenure, living in a free country with all sorts of protection of speech - not like the communist party or totalitarian racist South Africa in the old days. What were they afraid of?
I remember going on a date with a woman a while ago. She was smart, funny, attractive, a DFLer - but halfway through our first conversation she mentioned, furtively, that she liked to shoot. "I've been hunting with my father since I was a little kid", she said, sotto voce. "But", she hurried to add, "I'm not an NRA member or anything". She didn't want to think I'd think she was one of those people.

Turner's point is, roughly, that liberals fear conservatives because they feel that we want to deprive them of victims:
The class rationale for this odd paradox is complex. Karl Marx was right when he identified the phenomenon of a class having policies even when none of its members would necessarily recognize them - and the people I am talking about here are eminently nice, even good people, who would be horrified by the class motives they serve. But here it is: their class privileges are preserved by means of the continued existence and allegiance of a peon caste who will vote for the upper crust's leaders at home, and confuse and frustrate the great class enemy, the U.S. military, abroad. (If you want to "shock and awe" one of these folks, just mention that your son is in the Army. The look of horror is instantaneous, though it vanishes quickly.)

True liberators, as we can now see, would deprive the world of victims, and thus dry up the supply of peons that constitute the new class's constituency. This is why, even though the new class disliked Saddam Hussein, they hate Bush infinitely more. Just as Palestinian refugee camps justify the failures and secure the tenure of Arab despots, so the poor and downtrodden of the world justify the ascendancy of the new upper crust. At home, school vouchers are opposed in the teeth of the urban poor that want them, because decent education might help put an end to the urban poor who vote for upper crust leaders. The same goes for the inclusion of privatization in the Social Security portfolio, and any form of tax relief that might result in turning the majority of Americans into owners, and into people too proud to consider themselves victims. And without victims, where would Lady Bountiful be then?
As usual, you need to read the whole thing.

Then think - how does this pertain to your life in Minnesota? (Or wherever you are?)
posted by Mitch Berg 6/4/2003 06:27:50 AM

Tuesday, June 03, 2003

For The Children - I have two kids - Daryll, 11, and Sam, 10. They are, of course, the biggest thing on earth for me.

I was thinking about this today at the gym; if I could make absolutely certain that they kids could grow up with ten ideas front and center in their minds, these would be them:
10. Remember the Golden Rule - It truly is a great way to live life. And if you don't, even after I'm long dead, I'll come down from heaven and kick your butt.

9. You will never regret learning a musical instrument. - But someday, you'll regret not learning one. Don't just learn to saw away at notes, though; play in public. It can be in an auditorium, it can be for your family, but play music for others. It's good for them, and incredible for you.

8. "Honesty" Does Not Mean "Right To Be Cruel and Solipsistic" - People who confuse excessive, self-gratifying frankness for "honesty" are loathsome, sorry creatures indeed; people for whom their own satisfaction trumps all humility and empathy. Don't become one. Be honest - but remember your Golden Rule as well.

7.You'll never regret learning a foreign language. - It'll open your eyes to whole new worlds, on a subconscious level. It'll wire your brain for things you don't even know exist. And in my house, you have no choice. Hasta la vista, baybee.

6. Stay Kids - but Don't Remain Adolescents - You don't have to be in a hurry to grow up. And you never have to lose your childlike wonder at the world around you - in fact, it's a great thing. But you can shed your adolescent self-absorption on Graduation night, thank you very much.

5. You'll Never Regret Learning To Speak In Public - Take a speech class. Learn a lot from it.

4. You're Better Than That - Whatever it is; relationships with people who say you'll never find better; a boss who treats you like chattel; politicians who regard you as captive votes. Being a humble person doesn't preclude telling these people which dock they can knievel from.

3. Worry About What People Think Of You Only After You've Granted Them The Right To Have An Opinion - Grant that right very sparingly.

2. Respect Yourself - No, don't esteem yourself, it's not good enough; you have to have respect. And treat yourself like you mean it. Only then can you insist others do the same.

1. God Hasn't Forgotten You - Even though you may forget God. I have to remind myself of this daily; this last five months have been hellish. And yet it's all true. You wouldn't be here if it weren't. Remember - prayer is God's online help - unlike Microsoft online help, it is actually helpful.
I'm sure the list will morph in the next eight years, but for now it's my working draft.
posted by Mitch Berg 6/3/2003 08:29:55 PM

Follow The Money - Fraters Libertas beat me to one story to which a reader of both of our blogs has alerted us; the cozy relationship between Mike Hatch and the Strib, and how it may have affected a campaign finance issue in the last election.

The Fraters give a decent overview of the situation. I plan on writing a bit more on the story - as in making a few phone calls and checking quite a few facts - either tomorrow or the next day as time allows.

It's an interesting story. Stay tuned to your nearest Northern Alliance blog.
posted by Mitch Berg 6/3/2003 05:33:39 PM

"I'm a SEAL. Let's Get It On" - Former Governor Jesse "The Mind" Ventura was allegedly involved in a dust-up with local gadfly Leslie Davis:
Davis was protesting Ventura's use of the Twin Cities Public Television (TPT) studios in downtown St. Paul last Wednesday night for his upcoming MSNBC-TV show.

When the ex-governor walked out of the studios and saw Davis, he allegedly threatened him and destroyed a blown-up sign depicting the cover of Davis' book, "Always Cheat: The Philosophy of Jesse Ventura."
The former governor allegedly reminded Davis of his pedigree:
"When he came out, he said, 'I'm not the governor any more, I'm a Navy SEAL, let's get it on and see what you're going to do about it,' " Davis said. "Usually, he shakes my hand and acts like my buddy, but this time he lost it."

St. Paul City Attorney Manuel Cervantes declined to comment because police hadn't yet presented the case to his office for possible charges.
Former governor.

Former governor.

I could sit and repeat it to myself all day.
posted by Mitch Berg 6/3/2003 04:18:05 PM

Great Observation - A DFLer acquaintance of mine said in a different (DFL-dominated) forum the other day about the rescue of Private Lynch "the soldiers were going up against no opposition!", as if that impugned the rescue effort.

I responded in my usual style - verbosely. My main retort; That's right, Mr. Armchair General. Special Operations go sooooo much better when you charge, Black Hawk Down-style, into a hail of gunfire.

The guys from Powerline say it so much more elegantly:
isn't it somewhat ironic that the same people who criticized the Pentagon for supposedly underestimating Iraqi resistance early in the war, when the offensive was supposedly "stalled," are now equally quick to say that the Army needn't have sent armed soldiers to rescue Lynch, but should have strolled up the hospital and rung the doorbell on the assumption that there would be no Iraqi soldiers in sight?
The DFL acquaintance - an anti-war activist from the sixties and as soft on Iraq as he is about his own middle these days - also referred to Private Lynch, a soldier in the US Army, as "Miss Congeniality". I tried to imagine what would have happened had a Republican said any such thing about a woman in any other field.
posted by Mitch Berg 6/3/2003 03:38:03 PM

Let's See Action - Among the most pleasant discoveries of the past year is finding that four of my favorite comics - Dennis Miller, Jackie Mason, Drew Carey and Larry Miller - not only skew to the right, but in fact are quite articulate about it.

Miller in particular has developed a healthy side-racket as a pundit - and a fairly good one.

This is a great article about America's attention span:
it's not just the pundits, it's all of us, and it happened so quickly, didn't it? One second we were arguing about whether or not the Turks were screwing us up in the North, and watching Baghdad Bob insist the sky was green. Next thing you know, we were all putting the kids to bed, strolling into the bedroom, picking up the remote . . . and not turning on Fox. ("Whatever you want, honey, just not one of those goofy decorating shows. Wait a minute, is this the one with the little Scottish blond? Okay.")

On Friday I got into the car after work and couldn't listen to any of the radio talk shows. I just couldn't. I tried one, then another, then another, then the first one again, and finally just turned the thing off. They all felt so . . . shrill. Redundant. Reaching too hard. Even NPR was so boring I couldn't get angry at it.
America does seem to trend toward the next big thing; war is so March and April.
Of course, this curious period of detachment may be temporary for all of us, and things in the world can shift in a flash. Everything in the Middle East may fail spectacularly again, or another terrorist attack may occur, or we may again start seeing Hans Blix walking away from the camera in a tight suit. Two of these will instantly re-focus the nature of good and evil, and one of them will make us all go on The Zone. But how should we describe what is happening now? Doldrums? Disengagement? Regrouping? Mass self-involvement? I don't think it's apathy, but who knows? It's here, though, and it sure happened fast.

Here's a good way to sum it up. Two weeks ago, a reporter who strolled into any bar in America and said, "Yeah, I was embedded with the army," could drink for free all night, and have any woman in the place, or at least a good shot at them.

Today, I'll bet you the same guy would be lucky to get an extra bowl of peanuts.

Hell, never mind that. The poor sap would probably find himself drinking with Jayson Blair.
The article reads like one of Miller's standup routines - which, given Miller's choppy on-stage style, isn't necessarily good news for prose. But it's worth a read.

(Via Yale Diva)
posted by Mitch Berg 6/3/2003 08:25:55 AM

"I Shouted Out 'Who Killed Paul Wellstone', When After All..." - Anyone who didn't see this one coming? Show of hands, please?
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- When federal investigators released a report last month about the plane crash that killed Sen. Paul Wellstone, some members of Congress hoped it would dispel talk that his plane was sabotaged.

It didn't.

In Internet chat groups, political Web sites and the published reports of several leftist academics, conspiracy theories about Wellstone's death last October maintain a life of their own, particularly in northern Minnesota.
I've heard some of these. During the welter of pro-Hussein protests last spring, I saw lots of signs with the Wellstone picture and a simple caption: "Accident?"

In one story, Karl Rove hired a marksman to shoot down the plane with a "high powered rifle". You know the rumor comes from up north; had it originated in the Metro, the story would say "handgun carried by a permit-holder".

But I digress:
In one nasty exchange, a retired prosecutor from Duluth has threatened to take legal action against a University of Minnesota-Duluth philosophy professor who espouses the belief that the Bush White House had a hand in Wellstone's demise.

The former prosecutor, Thomas Bieter, alleges that the professor, Kennedy-assassination theorist James Fetzer, has committed "criminal defamation" by publishing articles suggesting a government coverup of the crash investigation.
Where does one contribute to this lawsuit?

The Strib continues:
When a prominent political figure dies suddenly, it isn't uncommon for rumors and speculation to spring to life....In Wellstone's case, suspicions surfaced within days of the Oct. 25 crash near the Eveleth-Virginia Municipal Airport that killed him, his wife, Sheila, their daughter Marcia, three staffers and both pilots operating the chartered Beechcraft King Air A100 airplane.

In an Oct. 28 article published on an alternative journalism Web site under the title "Was Paul Wellstone Murdered?" Buffalo State College journalism professor Michael Niman wrote, "There is no indication today that Wellstone's death was the result of foul play. What we do know, however, is that Wellstone emerged as the most visible obstacle standing in the way of a draconian political agenda by an unelected government. And now he is conveniently gone."
Except that while he was a visible obstacle to the putative "draconian agenda", he was far from the most effective. Outspoken as he ws, he was a fairly marginal legislative voice. Had Tom Daschle or Barbara Boxer or Charles Schumer's planes crashed, that would have been another entire matter.

Killing Paul Wellstone would have been like passing on Adolf Hitler to rub out Ernst R�hm instead.

Of course, most Democrats are rational enough:
Rep. Jim Oberstar of Duluth, the top Democrat on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, said the joint FBI and NTSB investigation has raised enough questions about the two pilots' approach in low cloud cover to put aside the theories of "conspiratorialists."

"Every allegation regarding sabotage was fully investigated, and the NTSB came up with no evidence of that," said Mary Kerr, Oberstar's press aide.
I said most:
But the cause of the crash is still far from settled in articles and Internet discussions involving Fetzer, the Duluth philosophy professor who won a $100,000 McKnight Foundation grant in 1996 for his work in the philosophy of science.

Fetzer, an ex-Marine who has published several books and papers about the JFK assassination, opened the first of six articles in the Duluth Reader Weekly about the Wellstone crash by saying, "Conspiracies are as American as apple pie."

Discounting weather, pilot error or mechanical problems in Wellstone's flight, Fetzer's articles have seized on the possibility of sabotage brought on by a futuristic electromagnetic pulse weapon that he said could have disabled the plane's computerized components.

Evidence for this, he said in an interview, was the absence of any distress call from the pilots and the odd cell-phone experience reported by St. Louis County lobbyist John Ongaro.

Ongaro, who was near the airport when Wellstone's plane went down, has dismissed the significance of his experience, in which he said his cell phone made "strange" sounds and then disconnected.

"It's not unusual for cell phones to cut out, especially in northern Minnesota," he said.

Fetzer's articles rely less on hard evidence of any kind of murder plot than on arguing that the investigators' findings don't add up.

More provocative than Fetzer's theories about how Wellstone's plane went down are his conclusions about who was responsible.

"When I suggest Republicans may have been involved," he wrote in the Reader, "I do not mean the average GOP voter. I mean the troika that runs the government, consisting of Dick Cheney, Karl Rove and Donald Rumsfeld."

A White House spokesman said he had no comment about Fetzer's allegations. Fetzer's theories do not implicate Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., who was running against Wellstone when he died. Two Coleman aides dismissed Fetzer's accusations privately but declined to make any public comment.
One wonders why Fetzer is alive to tell the tale.
Fetzer said he has not spoken out about the Wellstone death as a university professor but as a private citizen.

"This is not done off the top of my head," he said. "I'm not just interested in stirring up some . . . storm. I'm interested in the truth. If I can become convinced that I am mistaken about this, I will gladly accept that and sleep easier at night. Because, believe me, the implications of this are profoundly disturbing."
Yes. Kids going to UM-Duluth are in profoundly disturbed hands.

Here's the real story; Paul Wellstone was more than a political leader. He was a messiah. To his fiftysomething Highland Park followers, he was their lost youth, a one-man time-machine back to the Summer of Love, when All You Needed was Commitment. To his hordes of birkenstock-clad college supporters, he was walking proof that their entitlement-level sense of idealism never had to die. To the chattering classes, he exemplified their collective vision of what politics in Minnesota was supposed to be (which is itself an ironic juxtaposition; grassroots support for big institutional government). And to his supporters outstate, he was an example of applied idealism; he promised the pork, and delivered on plenty of it.

Wellstone, of course, protested his lionization. But he also took advantage of it; recreating Bobby Kennedy's "Poverty Tour" during his brief exploration of a run for the presidency ('96, if memory serves) was hardly a random, coincidental notion. Recreating the sixties was to Wellstone was exhuming the seventies is for KISS.

But for whatever reason, he was a secular messiah, imbued by his followers with all the attributes of He Who Has Come To Save Us.

Which is what's behind all the harebrained conspiracy theories. Because ones' messiah can not die of mundane causes; he must be sacrificed to atone for our sins, if your faith is fundamentally otherworldly; if your faith focuses on the here and now, your messiah must go out like Gandhi, or Joan of Arc, assassinated by the evil benighted enemy, those evil Bengalis or English - or Karl Rove.

Having your messiah meet a bigger-than-life end makes your own life, by association, bigger than life; you were there when they crucified your lord. You marched with Mohammed. You sat at the Lord's feet. You got on the Green Bus.

Having your messiah check out due to pilot error is like having your anointed one die by choking on a sandwich.
posted by Mitch Berg 6/3/2003 06:32:47 AM

Monday, June 02, 2003

A Perfect Day - My daughter's piece appears in the Strib's "Mindworks" column today.

But in case you missed it:
I would have to say I would go back in time with a magic wand and make my dog, cat and bird immortal. I would make sure Saddam Hussein never went into office. I would cure cancer, AIDS and diabetes. I would put Osama bin Laden in jail. I would buy two horses, plus tack and feed. I would also buy two dogs, two cats and some bunnies, plus food and accessories. I would make it so Wellstone's plane crash never happened, even though I disagree with some of his ideas. I would try to make peace between Kuwait and Iraq, and North Korea and South Korea. I would go back in time and make sure Pearl Harbor never happened and I would make sure my great-uncle Chet never died. I would close all the puppy mills and I would find a cure for the West Nile virus and that would be my perfect day.

Daryll Berg, 11, St. Paul

[deleted] Magnet School
Awwww...
posted by Mitch Berg 6/2/2003 12:19:49 PM

Grnxfxlvx - Been working most of the night on a contract project.

Will be working a good chunk of the day.

Heaven help the first anti-shall-issue editorialist who crosses my path when I'm done.
posted by Mitch Berg 6/2/2003 06:49:48 AM

Back To Work - It was a long weekend. I'm back and ready to blog up a storm.

But first? Sleep. I'm not worth a darn without at least three hours a night.
posted by Mitch Berg 6/2/2003 12:21:19 AM

The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves - Tocquevillian has this unbelievable story - which, unfortunately, happens to be utterly believable.
A local Texan, who has a Mexican-American surname...called the office of one of the renegade democrats to lodge his complaint - intending to say that the lawmaker had shirked his sworn duty as a mature and responsible elected official.

At first, the office operator was happy to take his call because of his Latino surname; but when the details of his complaint began to come out, the operator quickly went on the defensive and offered several alibis for this renegade's malfeasance...after several additional inane excuses were given - with each being effectively debunked by the caller - the operator asked quite snidely if the caller was a registered Democrat. When the caller told her he was a Republican, the operator was nonplussed.

"I don't believe you," she said. "You're just a trouble maker. We never get calls from Mexican-Americans who are Republican."

The caller then dropped the other shoe. "I'm not Mexican-American," he said. "I'm an American".
Read the whole thing.
posted by Mitch Berg 6/2/2003 12:15:51 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