Sadly, No!

Max is speaking, y’all should be listening:

1. The liberal netroots are soft on Democrats in every issue area except Iraq.

2. The liberal netroots are tough on Iraq, but narrow in their criticisms, since fundamentally the liberal netroots are soft on imperialism, if not completely oblivious to it.

3. The result is a kind of love-hate/manic-depressive posture regarding the Democratic Party. Democratic apparachniks treat the netroots as patsies, since on most issues they are. All the “people-powered” rhetoric marks them as naive, since their people-powering is mostly uncritical. The exception is the war; the netroots are frustrated with the Dems’ inability to stop the war, but all they can do about it is type faster.

4. People power rests in the ability to mobilize people and resources around some common, substantive agenda by turning them out for meetings and demonstrations (local and national), boycotting, petitioning elected officials, shutting down workplaces, and mounting campaigns to contest the seats of incumbents. It’s more than surfing the web, donating money and voting. It happens that the latter activities serve the needs of website commerce, and the prior ones do not. Everybody has to make a living, but it is not necessary to base a universal political philosophy on how you make a living.

Word.

I think the main problem that many in the “Netroots” movement have is that their end goal is electing Democrats. This in and of itself is not a bad goal- hell, I encouraged everyone to give money to Democratic candidates last fall, and I’m mostly happy with the results so far.

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As you can see, we’ve added a tip jar to the right side of the blog.

Believe it or not, maintaining this semi-entertaining blog takes a lot of work. So while we love keeping everyone up to date on Mark Noonan’s bird suit and Ace’s vagina hang-ups, it takes a good chunk of time out of our days (and because I have a real job now, I can only blog during my leisure time now, which is significantly less than what it was).

The point is, if you like our work (and since over 6,500 of you stop by here every day, I’ll assume that you do), please consider flipping us some change. Thanks, and peace 🙂

I’m not sure why someone bothered to write this column:

This Sunday, neighbors, husbands, and especially children should lift a glass to the mothers who have managed to get and stay married to the fathers of their children. For, despite the fact that single motherhood never seems to go out of style with the media, motherhood typically works best — for our nation’s neighborhoods, children, and even most moms — with a wedding ring.

Also, tacos works best with beer, if you’ve got any. Some things just aren’t really controversial.

The writer goes on to cite a whole bunch of stuff that’s widely recognized by pretty much everyone (e.g., “two parents bring more social and economic resources to the parenting enterprise than does one parent”), with the stage-whispered implication that liberals think marriage is unnecessary because, like, um, the editors of the New York Times Magazine thought their readers might be interested in reading an article about rich white women who choose to silence their biological clocks with sperm donors instead of husbands, while leaving possible moral judgments, if any, to the readers’ discretion, instead of spoiling my wife’s brunch conversation and supplying those for her.

So what course of action does the writer recommend: Outlaw divorce? Mandate abortion for unmarried women? He never says, but he points out in the spirit of full disclosure that his own mom did a “wonderful job” raising his sister and him on her own, thankyouverymuch. Beyond that, the logic of his arguments adds up to present a flawed, if compelling, case for polygamy (spouse = good; ∴ more spouses = more good).

Above: W. Bradford Wilcox, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, is a fellow at the Witherspoon Institute.

Can we, can we, can we?

A majority of members of Iraq’s parliament have signed a draft bill that would require a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. soldiers from Iraq and freeze current troop levels. The development was a sign of a growing division between Iraq’s legislators and prime minister that mirrors the widening gulf between the Bush administration and its critics in Congress.

The draft bill proposes a timeline for a gradual departure, much like what some U.S. Democratic lawmakers have demanded, and would require the Iraqi government to secure parliament’s approval before any further extensions of the U.N. mandate for foreign troops in Iraq, which expires at the end of 2007.

“We haven’t asked for the immediate withdrawal of multinational forces; we asked that we should build our security forces and make them qualified, and at that point there would be a withdrawal,” said Bahaa al-Araji, a member of parliament allied with the anti-American Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, whose supporters drafted the bill. “But no one can accept the occupation of his country.”

Time to go, peeps. It’s not our country. It’s theirs.

Holy crap. Look at the op-ed that Fred Hiatt published this morning:

This in and of itself is not a bad title. The CIA certainly did fail America in the run-up to the Iraq war. The only way this editorial could possibly be bogus is if it were written…

By Richard N. Perle

Holy mother of God. If you guys could see me at my laptop right now, you’d see me literally frothing with uncontrollable rage. “RICHARD BLEEPIN’ ‘AN END TO EVIL’ PERLE??!??!!” I’m saying. “FROTH-LOGAETWRWWTE!!!!! LOOOHRQEGER!!!!” Reading this editorial makes me want to rip my shirt off, turn bright green, storm into Hiatt’s office, break his computer over my knee and yell, “BRAAAAAD SMAAAAAAAAASH!!!!”

If I owned fruity-arsed purple shorts, this’d be me right now.

Again, kiddies, read ‘er and weep:

How the CIA Failed America

By Richard N. Perle

George Tenet sets the stage in his memoir by recalling a conversation he claims to have had with me on Sept. 12, 2001: “As I walked beneath the awning that leads to the West Wing[, I] saw Richard Perle exiting the building just as I was about to enter. . . . Perle turned to me and said, ‘Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday. They bear responsibility.’ I looked back at Perle and thought: Who has [he] been meeting with in the White House so early in the morning on today of all days?”

But I was in Europe on Sept. 12, 2001, unable to get a return flight to Washington, and I did not tell Tenet that Iraq was responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks, not then, not ever. That should have been the end of the story: a faulty recollection, perhaps attributing to me something he may have heard elsewhere, an honest mistake.

So I was surprised when, having been made aware of his error, Tenet reasserted his claim, saying: “So I may have been off on the day, but I’m not off on what he said and what he believed.”

On “Meet the Press” last Sunday, Tenet argued that his version “seems to be corroborated” by a comment I made to columnist Robert D. Novak on Sept. 17 and a letter to President Bush that I signed, with 40 others, on Sept. 20. But my 10-word comment to Novak made no claim that Iraq was responsible for Sept. 11. Neither did the letter to the president, which said that “any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power.”

Shorter Richard Perle: Sure, I started pushing for Bush to lead us into a disastrous war just days after al-Qaeda attacked America, but not in the exact way George Tenet says I did.

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Above: Glenn Harlan Reynolds is Beauchamp Brogan distinguished professor of law at the University of Tennessee and creator of instapundit.com.

‘Can’t anyone here play this game?’

• Newspapers should follow my Instapundit business model: Hand a megaphone to the socially misinformed and stand back.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard.

Hmm.

The Party and the Candidates

NR readers have often taken me to task for my squishiness on abortion

[Lifts eyebrow] How ribald!

I am firmly pro-life — after the first ten weeks.

[Shifts in seat; long exhale] MMmm, you naughty boy.

O.K., that’s kind of lame. But it’s still better than the replies Rudy Giuliani offered, both at the debate and during a brutal battering by Laura Ingraham yesterday.

Good God. Now you’ve just ruined it for me. That’s unbelievably filthy even before I think that Rudy might have been in drag at the time, Ingraham was wearing her famous leopard-print skirt, and they probably networked their pagan tryst through Ingraham’s old match.com profile. I mean, ugh.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to watch Cumguzzling Monster Twats IV, whose producers are far more subtle with their eroticism.

Almost! We have but little to add to the James Lileks “controversy,” but Vodkapundit did manage to throw a little Kramer our way:

If the Strib had any institutional sense whatsoever, they’d make James the poobah-in-chief of their online division, and turn him loose. They’d have the best online paper in the country in less than a month.

Hellllllooooooo… La la la!

Kramer: Of course it’s a good idea, it’s my idea. I conceived this whole project two years ago.
Jerry: Which part? The renovating the restaurant you don’t own part or spending the two hundred million you don’t have part?

You think there’s a fortune to be made out of Gnat and Target observations? Go ahead and join the rank of wealthy online entrepreneurs. Or at least Tracts of Land Shrugs. *

Over at Pajamas Media (yes, our thoughts exactly) Jules Crittenden figures that the best thing to do when staring at an empty net is to shoot first and think later:

You [Sarkozy] pointedly said that France’s commitment to Afghanistan is not open-ended. That sounds dangerously like catering to terrorists, and dangerously like the beginnings of disengagement, where France has barely engaged.

Open-ended commitments, let’s rock:

“I have made it clear to the prime minister and Iraq’s other leaders that America’s commitment is not open-ended,” Bush said.

Anyone else?

A day after 180 people were killed in a series of bombings in Baghdad, the US defence secretary has told Iraqi leaders his country’s support is not an “open-ended commitment”.

How about The Donald?

U.S. troops are likely to remain in Afghanistan for many months, and not just to finish the job of destroying Osama bin Laden’s terrorist forces and his Taliban collaborators. […] Rumsfeld resists the idea of using U.S. forces for what some call “nation building” – the kind of house-raising, crime-chasing, checkpoint-monitoring missions that the Clinton administration committed the U.S. military to in Bosnia and Kosovo. Rumsfeld has criticized that open-ended commitment of military forces. [January 25, 2002]

The rest of the piece, if you’re scoring at home, is a mix of arguing that France is useless while calling for France to do more. Because nothing is more valuable than the actions of a worthless country (or person).

My neighbor’s toy poodle has been yipping incessantly for about two hours, which reminds me: I wonder what ol’ Mark Noonan’s been up to?

There is only one war, and only one set of facts about that war, and yet Republicans and Democrats are seeing two entirely different things.

This oughta be good.

Above: If not his truths, his blog posts go marching on. And on.

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