Sadly, No!

I loves me some Carpetbagger Report, but I can’t let this stand:

Matthew Dowd, the chief strategist for the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign, recently broke ranks with his White House buddies and denounced Bush’s leadership. He said he sees a president who only hears what he wants to hear, from those who know not to challenge him with competing ideas. “I think he’s become more, in my view, secluded and bubbled in,� Dowd said.

But what about the rest of the White House? It’s one thing for an insecure leader to block out news that might upset him, but surely the president’s team knows not to insulate themselves, right?

Wrong.

Dowd’s assessment is shared by many Republicans in Washington. “Isolation is inevitable in any White House,� says a former Bush aide who returned to the West Wing recently to chat with former colleagues. Now that he is out of the bubble, the former aide says, he can see an isolation he didn’t recognize before. “People in the White House are talking only to each other, reconfirming each other’s and the president’s perceptions and judgments,� he says.

The groupthink is scary — but it’s also helpful in understanding why the Bush White House is so helplessly inept.

You know, it would’ve been nice if Matthew Dowd had thought to tell the rest of the country about this back when it would have mattered. You know, back in 2003.

But being the clever rat that he is, he decided to abandon ship only when he knew it was truly sinking. In a pathetic effort to save his “career,” he’s now trying to remake himself into a sensitive moderate who was taken in by the dastardly preznit Bush and his magickal codpiece of freedom. What’s more, he’s counting on becoming a legitimate figure again by having moderates and libs repeat and give creedence to his sad tales of woe.

“To hell with that!” I sez. The fraudulent bastard deserves to be locked in the stocks and have fruits and vegetables hurled at him for the next 50 years. NO PRISONERS!!!!

We really should leave this to teh experts, but I’m feeling a trifle Gandalf-y about this column by Bob Frantz in today’s San Francisco Examiner.

You know, “You. Shall. Not. Pass.” Then Frantz flicks his fiery whip of dumbass and it wraps around my leg, pulling us both down into the abyss as the MacArthur Maze crashes down on top of us. (I picked Gandalf because that’s what nerds do. More on this later.)

Here’s Boom-Frazzy, kicking off his column with a rehash of the closing seconds of Game 7 between Houston and Utah:

The Rockets let more than eight seconds tick away before fouling, inexplicably allowing the game, the series and their season to end. Why? They had to wait for one of Utah’s white guys to get the ball. Fouling a black guy would be racist.

I sense Bob Frantz is going somewhere with this. Somewhere stupid and passive-aggressively bigoted.

About the only thing more ridiculous than two Ivy League schools discovering that a league comprised of roughly 80 percent black players would have more fouls called on black players than white ones is the fact that it took them 13 years to do it.

This was quite possibly the dumbest thing printed in a major metropolitan area daily today, May 7, 2007. I really couldn’t say, because I don’t read a fraction of such dailies, but I’d encourage commenters to supply clips of anything dumber.

Frantz is talking about a study by a University of Pennsylvania professor and a Cornell University graduate student that, as reported by the New York Times, “says that, during the 13 seasons from 1991 through 2004, white referees called fouls at a greater rate against black players than against white players.”

Now, really. Is the phrase “at a greater rate” really that difficult to understand? Is it possible for anyone to read the above explanation and come away thinking, as Frantz apparently does, that the study only showed that more total fouls were called on black players than white players?

The study actually breaks down foul calls by all-white officiating crews, majority-white crews, all-black crews and majority-black crews. It controls for player position, “star status”, playing time, calls against home teams vs. visiting teams and more. The methodology behind the study was found to be sound by three independent academics contacted by the Times.

Controlling for all the above, the study found that all-white and majority-white crews call more fouls per-minute played on black players than on white players. All-black and majority-black crews call more fouls per-minute played on white players than on black players, but not by as significant a margin as the first group.

In short, this is by all accounts a pretty meticulous, smart and thorough look at racial bias in NBA officiating. And Frantz reduces it to a gag about nerdy stat-loving dorks:

This just in, courtesy of two pocket-protector-wearers from Princeton: More penalty strokes are assessed against female players on the LPGA Tour than male players.

Numbers are gay and geeky! And if you understand them when they’re expressed in the plainest of language, you’re a big gay geek! Choke on a slide rule, ya math fag!

What can I say? This guy puts all of us to shame:

I propose that we raise the minimum age of consent to participate in pornography to 65.

I think by 65 a woman has finally attained the maturity necessary to weigh the pros and cons of participating in pornography. Since she will most likely be retired or on the way to retirement by that age, there is little danger that such images will come back to haunt her in her career.

Requiring that porn stars be elderly would open up new career opportunities for senior citizens, which would be an excellent way for them to supplement their retirement and social security incomes.

Teh awesome. Absolutely, 100% teh awesome. Read teh whole thing.

Above: Morgan Fairchild

‘Banal Outrage’

• Bloggers and sitting U.S. senators are entitled to their opinions, of course, but David Broder is more entitled to his.

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

Just lovely:

More than one-third of U.S. soldiers in Iraq surveyed by the Army said they believe torture should be allowed if it helps gather important information about insurgents, the Pentagon disclosed yesterday. Four in 10 said they approve of such illegal abuse if it would save the life of a fellow soldier.

In addition, about two-thirds of Marines and half the Army troops surveyed said they would not report a team member for mistreating a civilian or for destroying civilian property unnecessarily. “Less than half of Soldiers and Marines believed that non-combatants should be treated with dignity and respect,” the Army report stated.

Have I ever mentioned before that the “We-have-to-invade-to-free-the-Iraqis” rationale for this war always struck me as the most blatantly fraudulent argument I’d ever heard? Our invasion of Iraq was not an act of self-defense, nor was it a humanitarian intervention. Rather, it was an imperial action.

The architects and boosters of this war were quite clear about this from the outset. Josh Trevino and William Kristol and Max Boot and Jonathan Last don’t try to hide the fact that they’re old-skewl-the-sun-never-sets-style 19th century imperialists. They state quite explicitly that the world is in dire need of “the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets.” They make no bones about the fact that they “endorse doing cruel things in war,” and that success in Iraq might require taking similar actions as those taken in the Boer War, “in which a fractious, semi-fanatical culture was slowly ground into submission by an occupying force — several years after the seeming success of the initial invasion.”

Needless to say, I think imperialism is a very, very bad thing. George Will, of all people, most accurately described what imperialism is all about in the wake of Abu Ghraib:

So, forgive the lawyer’s language. But note what it betokens: a flinching from facts. Americans must not flinch from absorbing the photographs of what some Americans did in that prison. And they should not flinch from this fact: That pornography is, almost inevitably, part of what empire looks like. It does not always look like that, and does not only look like that. But empire is always about domination. Domination for self-defense, perhaps. Domination for the good of the dominated, arguably. But domination.

Where Will is wrong, of course, is that domination is never for the good of the dominated. Never. It doesn’t matter how crappy their previous circumstances were (and in the case of Iraq, life under Saddam was really crappy), imperial conquest and domination are never good for the people being dominated.

I had hoped for a while that the imperial mindset had been thoroughly discredited by the collapse of European empires in the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s, as well as by America’s imperial blunders in Vietnam. But some bad ideas never die, I guess, and it seems imperialism still has quite a bit of life left in its bloody hands.

UPDATE: OMG, I didn’t even get to the very, very best part of this article before I posted on it:

Maj. Gen. Gale S. Pollock, the acting Army surgeon general, cast the report as positive news. “What it speaks to is the leadership that the military is providing, because they’re not acting on those thoughts,” she said. “They’re not torturing the people.”

Teh awesome. This woman has a future ahead of her as a White House press secretary.

Following a few drinks, one link takes us to another which eventually leads to Gates of Vienna and this:

Archonix — who is British — responded as follows:

First, the EU economies are not substantially better than they were in the 90s. Many are at the same level, others are worse.

Many are at the same level? Others are worse? How about simply Sadly, No! on both counts? For those who prefer PDF files, there’s always this. This is likely bound to be purely rhetorical, but why do some people seemingly feel compelled to assume that whatever they like to believe is necessarily true? Especially when the evidence is pretty clear and easily available? Or has the EU blocked access to the internet in Britain?
Read the rest of this entry »

If he weren’t making so much money as one of the nation’s top opinion-makers, I’d really feel sorry for the guy here. Getting slapped around like this by a bunch of sarcastic jerks such as myself can’t be much fun.

An Incomplete Field: First impressions of the GOP’s 2008 candidates

Above: Wants to live like common people, wants to do whatever common people do

• Why must the media persist in comparing every Republican presidential candidate to Ronald Reagan? There is no Ronald Reagan among those feckless contestants!

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

What is it with this compulsion right-wingers have to assure us that their preferred presidential candidates are hunky dreamboats? It seems like only yesterday that lady voters were mucking up the Wall Street Journal opinion page, distracting me from Paul Craig Robert’s bitching that taxing rich people is worse than slavery with their nattering about how “George Bush in a pair of jeans is a treat to watch.” (Those were back in the golden days of Bush’s presidency, when the most interesting thing about his carrier landing was that you could see his tackle through the flight suit, not that he was declaring an end to the war that would in fact drag on indefinitely and turn an whole country into an abattoir.)

Now, just when I’m getting the taste of “Hot? SO HOT!!!!! THAT UNIFORM!” out of my mouth, along comes Butt Propulsion Laboratories to remind me that the lay-teez love Mitt.

Above: “And then you take your other index finger, and you stick it…”

Commenter ‘American Pi’, after complimenting the Mitt for his keen grasp of “the medical issue (stem cell),” notes that he is “incredibly good looking,” not like the “esthetically painful” experience of looking at Sam Brownback, and severely underestimates the savagely repressed homosexuality of Hindrocket and his mates by “guessing that most of you on this debate blog are male, and might not be paying attention to this important, uh, nuance.”

Scoffing at the notion that women will vote for a candidate who understands women’s issues rather than one who is a cutie patootie, ‘American Pi’ concludes that “Hillary Rodham is dreaming if she thinks she is getting the ‘female’ vote, unless she means those not particularly interested in men generally.” So, there’s your candidate, man-hating bull-dyke ‘females’! The rest of us will be pulling Mitt’s firm, rigid lever!

Seriously, between this sort of nonsense and the ongoing obsession with calling John Edwards a fruit because of his haircut, one begins to suspect that the chattering classes of the American right are not so much trying to steer the ship of American politics as they are trying to impress all the cool kids who ignored them back in seventh grade…

What the hell is wrong with me? Why do I click over to Blogs for Bush every day? I’d be better off drilling a hole in my head, sucking out my brains through a straw, and replacing them with Slush Puppy syrup. Just look at this:

Would you like to know what the Democrats’ greatest fear is? An endless series of victory parades for returning US troops starting next summer. They fear that like the plague – especially since, as it happens, the leading Democratic Presidential candidates would have to show up and have to speak praises to the troops for their victory…and each word making their statements of 2007 look more and more foolish and destructive. The Democrats are completely invested in American defeat, and they are going all out to try and secure it lest their political plan for 2008 be derailed. Never in human history, I think, has there been a more pathetic event in politics – a Party attempting to force its nation into defeat just so their talking points will remain valid 12 months hence.

Let’s re-work that paragraph a bit:

Would you like to know what the Democrats’ greatest fear is? An endless series of victory parades cheering me on as I soar about the crowd in my newly-fashioned bird suit.

They fear that like the plague – especially since, as it happens, the leading Democratic Presidential candidates would have to show up and admit that I’ve gained the power of flight simply by strapping two plastic wings to my back and jumping off a twelve story building… with each word making their past statements mocking my bird suit plan look more and more foolish and destructive. The Democrats are completely invested in my flight failures, and they are going all out to try to keep me grounded lest their political plan for 2008 be derailed. Never in human history, I think, has there been a more pathetic event in politics – a Party attempting to ruin one man’s dream of flight just so their talking points will remain valid 12 months hence.

Yep. It sounds about as crazy. I think the bird suit plan has a better chance of working, though…