Sadly, No!

Michael Ledeen, apparently seeking cheap hits from hilariolized left-wing bloggers, rolls out this this slow-moving kickball:

Who would have thought that one could have a serious scholarly discussion of fascism on The Corner?

Above: Public intellectual in da hizzouse

Who, indeed? (And who says that’s what transpired?) Ever since the president legitimized the viral marketing term “Islamofascism” that emerged in the damp fever swamps of the right-wing blogosphere, those same emboldened bloggers have been scrunching other words together, in the German style I so admire, hoping to rebrand everything they see – but coming off more like PR flaks naming their fantasy football teams:

We are struggling to come up with a term that (1) accurately describes the network of ideologies and movements that have risen up with the “Muslim world� (I hate that phrase) and which seek to defeat America and its allies, a term which also (2) clearly conveys to the average person in the West that this is an enemy who must be taken seriously.

What, is “suiciders” too played out? Or are you looking for something a little more, you know, outside the box?

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This YouTube group just went up an hour ago, and invites went out immediately. All the original members are new to YouTube, and the group owner looks like a found picture of some chick with boobs.

Democrats assemble here and share videos

Huh. It would certainly be interesting if the right-wingers were to start howling about ‘Democrats’ posting montages of US troops being killed, and calling the USMC ‘losers’ and ‘scum,’ and doing lots of graphics with swastikas, and baiting Jews, and all that. (Don’t tell them we linked or anything. Let’s just see what happens.)

…Not that such an effort hasn’t already started.

UPDATE: Yup, they’re busted. Check out this ‘pro-immigration’ video.

Are the Democrats finally getting smart? If this is any indication, then yes:

Under assault from Republicans on issues of national security, congressional Democrats are planning to push for a vote of no confidence in Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld this month as part of a broad effort to stay on the offensive ahead of the November midterm elections.

That is an excellent idea. Rummy has come under attack not just from THE LEFT!!!!11!, but from several former generals and even a couple of neocons. Forcing the GOP to stand by such an obviously unpopular favor will show the public how subservient they are to the will of President Bush.

Bring it, peeps.

Atrios is on fire today. I can’t access the rest of the column, but what he quotes from Tom Frank’s column in the Times is just fucking awesome:

What we have watched unfold for a few decades, I have argued, is a broad reversion to 19th-century political form, with free-market economics understood as the state of nature, plutocracy as the default social condition, and, enthroned as the nation’s necessary vice, an institutionalized corruption surpassing anything we have seen for 80 years. All that is missing is a return to the gold standard and a war to Christianize the Philippines.

Damn skippy! And though we new William Jennings Bryans haven’t noticed labor being crucified on any Crosses of Gold, we new Mark Twains have indeed noticed that the war to “democratize” Iraq looks suspiciously like the 21st Century version of the Philippine Operation — all the way down to our boys torturing the brown folks with novel uses of water. Hell, we’ve even noticed that Joe Lieberman is perfectly playing the Albert Beveridge role of the Democratic Party’s token imperialism-apologist, and noticed that a multitude of Talibangelical figures like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell have solemnly taken on the divine mission of Rev. Josiah Strong. More happily, we’ve also noticed that the Andrew Carnegie role of Conscientious & Appalled Wealthy Activist has also been filled — by one George Soros.*

Historically, liberalism was a fighting response to precisely these conditions.

Progressivism. This has also been noticed. Ronald Reagan tried with some success to roll back the New Deal mentality if not the accoutrements of that battery of policies itself. It’s been obvious since then that the wingnuts would next try to rollback the Progressive Era; and under Bush, they’ve had some success.

Look through the foundational texts of American liberalism and you can find everything you need to derail the conservative juggernaut.

Yes. Because all the “new” ideas the vaunted wingnut think tanks come up with are actually cleverly rephrased old and discredited ideas; Gilded Age ideas, updated with rattier prose and contemporary references, and cheerfully paid for with Scaife and Coors money.

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Doop-doop-doop, I like surfing on the Internet.

Wow, Michelle’s really putting on some weight.

Maybe a shorter haircut would look good. Oh well.

Doop-doop-doop…

Hey wait, what’s this?

[…!?!?]

The equilibrium of the universe is hereby restored:

L-R: Couric ‘before,’ Couric ‘after.’

Now the right-wing dorkosphere will have nothing to obsess over for like two and a half minutes. Dunno about you, but I plan to catch a sweet little nap before the klaxons start roaring again.

[AROOO! AROOO!]

Cripes, what now?

Apropos Sebastian Mallaby’s stupidity and lack of empathy, Atrios sez:

I’m not going to claim to have a deep understanding of living life as a member of the working poor – and, no, years of being a relatively impoverished grad student don’t really qualify – but I do know the experience of someone in that situation is exactly like Mallaby’s… not. To eat and feed their kids – let alone keep their insurance if they have it – they’ll have to keep working as much as possible in jobs which require a bit more physical activity then flicking fingers across a keyboard, and a bit more contact with other people than a telecommute.

Clueless pundits.

Mallaby: epitome of technocratic, little-glasses ‘realism’

Now this is in the context of Mallaby’s “centrist,” sneering, sociopathic positions on health insurance. But the objections work just as well against Mallaby’s “centrist,” sneering, and sociopathic positions on trade policy. To wit:

Sebastian Mallaby lives in Dupont Circle and all his friends are writers, software engineers, economists and advertising executives! So what if South Carolina has lost 17% of its blue-collar manufacturing jobs since January 2001 and North Carolina 22% — the two states most affected by Chinese textile and furniture exports. Sebastian Mallaby saved $10 at Pier 1 this month!

But at least Mallaby recognizes that China’s low-wage manufacturing economy is putting an end to the hopes from Central America and Africa and South Asia of climbing the development ladder via textiles. After all, getting the retail price of that Wal-Mart shirt down from $8.63 to, say, $8.58, is worth shutting down plants in coddled over-wealthy Bangladesh, not to mention in Columbus, GA.

Just as insurance company- and HMO-whores will eventually end up on the right wing where they belong, so too, I think, will the Tom Friedman and Sebastian Mallaby types who have steadily advocated economic war on the working class via Free Trade. Mallaby and Friedman are to trade policy what Joe Lieberman is to foriegn policy. Wherever General Glut‘s at now, he has to be happy that there are signs that a “heightening of the contradictions” is in effect: the consensus of the bullshit “center” is breaking down and purveyors of fake Third Ways are increasingly seen as the de facto wingnuts that they are. “Liberal” laissez-faire will go the way of “Liberal” Hawkery, which is just-so, for the former position is untenable on the grounds that it is actually Libertarian just as the latter is untenable because it is actually batshit-wingnut.

Check out this quote about blogging and vacation time from the Instaperfesser in the WSJ:

Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee, experienced a similar blow this month when he took a weeklong break from his site, the popular political blog InstaPundit. Unique visitors fell to 115,000 from around 150,000, according to Site Meter.

Even so, Mr. Reynolds is glad he took the week off. “I need a vacation more than I care about the traffic,” he says.

I’ve got a simple solution, Glenn: it’s called the “heh”-bot. Basically, program a bot to link to any new post from Confederate Yankee/Patterico/Powerline/Malkin/Jeff Goldstain/Ace and then add a “heh,” “indeed,” “feh,” “read the whole thing,” “more crushing of dissent,” or “fake but accurate” to the end. No one would notice you’d left.

OK, Dems, it’s crunch time. The White House has thrown down the gauntlet, and you need to get out there and punch them right between the eyes:

President Bush and his surrogates are launching a new campaign intended to rebuild support for the war in Iraq by accusing the opposition of aiming to appease terrorists and cut off funding for troops on the battlefield, charges that many Democrats say distort their stated positions. […]

Pressed to support these allegations, the White House yesterday could cite no major Democrat who has proposed cutting off funds or suggested that withdrawing from Iraq would persuade terrorists to leave Americans alone. But White House and Republican officials said those are logical interpretations of the most common Democratic position favoring a timetable for withdrawing troops from Iraq.

“Fake but accurate,” as the Ole Perfesser might scoff.

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Since it’s again fashionable to quote the Master, I offer this oldie but goodie, still very relevant in an age of crackpot libertarians, wingnuts, Randroids:

Publicly, no American politician can admit that we have anything to learn from the experiments of another society. The ritual dialogue between office seeker and electorate is one of mutual congratulation, and to suggest that perfection has another home is treasonable. But privately our more conscientious legislators do ponder other countries’ penal reforms, medical programs, educational methods. From his book and speeches I suspected [Barry] Goldwater had done little or no homework. He was firmly against socialized medicine, but he seemed to know nothing about how it worked in Scandinavia, West Germany, England.

Goldwater was honest. No, he didn’t know much about European socialism. “But I did meet this Norwegian doctor, matter of fact her name was Goldwater, which is how she happened to get in touch with me. She said the thing seemed to work all right, but that being assured of a certain income every month from the government kept her from feeling any real urge to study harder — you know, keep up at her profession. There was no incentive.” I asked him if he thought that the desire to be good was entirely economic in origin. He said of course it was. I then asked him to explain how it was that two people as different as ourselves worked hard, though in neither case money was the spur. He was startled. Then he murmured vaguely and slipped away from the subject.

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