One of my left-wing classmates this morning was blaming the federal credit downgrade on the Tea Party, describing Tea Party-ers as worse than 19th century Know Nothings and referring to them as “Talibanic zealots.” He attacked the patriotism of the Tea Party movement, and predicted that the American masses would wake up when the New Deal safety net began to unravel. All this, he said, made his stomach churn.

I replied:

It is grotesque in the extreme to find political Philistines, oblivious to the philosophic foundations and the Constitutional intent of the founders of their own country, a group of reactionary ideologues clinging to outdated, historically-refuted late-19th-century Utopian visions of heaven on earth and equality of economic results between the provident and the reckless, the educated and the uneducable, the law-abiding and the criminal, the industrious and the idle achieved by the rule of scientism through the medium of socialism and collectivist statism, referring to people with a far more sophisticated and accurate understanding of economics, political philosophy, and America history as primitive zealots.

With a very special kind of irony, we find today all the patriots who stabbed their own contemporaries fighting for freedom overseas in the back, the same people who waved North Vietnamese flags and chanted “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh…,” the patriots who are always telling us how disgraceful American history was until they came along, now waving the flag and demanding that we support their fiscal excesses out of patriotism.

The safety net constructed since collectivism’s heyday in America is already unraveling. It was always a Ponzi scheme and it has arrived at the inevitable endpoint of all such schemes. Demographics is no longer working on its side. It was only in the imaginations of ideologues that all this was ever permanently sustainable. Reality has refuted the left’s theories again.

You can pray aloud and whistle in the dark and spout this kind of nonsense about the masses “awakening” to agree with your own insanity, but the reality is that the apolitical, pragmatic mass portion of the country has already had its rude awakening. They elected the second leftist president in our adult lifetimes, and his regime has succeeded in surpassing the debacle of his predecessor. What you are going to get is a landslide election that will consign Obama, the democrat party, and the welfare entitlement state to the rubbish-heap of history to repose discarded beside the rest of the entire collection of intellectual dead ends and political mistakes. Well might your stomach churn.

Cartoon via Theo.

Democrats have always had teenager’s approach to household economics. Someone else provides all of the money, and while they may have a vague understanding of how that happens, their primary focus is sparring over how it gets distributed and spent. These issues should be decided by who has the best ideas and who can build the most compelling and emotional stories — but Dad, EVERYONE has a car. It’s not FAIR! Think of all the good things I could do with it! Little thought is given to how it affects Dad’s ability or willingness to bring in more money or what might happen if he were to get sick or lose his job. Because, well, that’s HIS responsibility to us, isn’t it? And if he doesn’t come through, we’ll just scream “I hate you” and tell everyone how mean he is.

Except that in the real world Dad’s interest and ability to keep funding the family is affected by how he’s treated and how the kids spend his money. You simply can’t go on spending sprees, pile up debt, waste money on unproductive pork projects, vilify and punish the very people you’re depending on to produce the money you’re itching to spend. Economic growth and government growth are simply inversely correlated. I know that’s inconvenient, but it’s reality, and eventually people aren’t going to keep lending you more money when you ignore that. The other economic reality is that increasing taxation inhibits growth as well, so the circle of spending and taxing is counterproductive as well. The only way you succeed is with high levels of growth – which requires making it attractive to earn and invest and not spending money on satisfying, but unproductive things. Screaming at Dad, telling him he’s not being fair, and making life difficult for him might make you feel better, but it’s not going to get you where you need to go.

and, mocking the Obama federal spending freeze:

When I opened up my Visa statement, I discovered that my wife had charged a record amount on it last month. “Not to worry,” she told me. “I promise not to spend any more than I did last month – except of course what I have to spend on clothing, restaurants, groceries, home improvements, shoes, things for the kids and travel. My spending on cosmetics and aspirin will be absolutely frozen. Starting a year from now.”

Don’t you liberals recognize that you’re wasting your time? Barring some remarkable unexpected development, we’re headed for another democrat debacle.

Face it. People who think like you have wildly different opinions, perspectives, life-styles, and values from the great majority of ordinary Americans, whom you don’t like very much anyway. The democrat party identifies with all sorts of craziness, so it shouldn’t really be surprising, I suppose, that it has internalized some of that craziness. Your party’s primary system is fatally flawed. The democrat party’s method of picking candidates is not democratic. (Obama won, though Hillary had a larger total of popular votes.) And it’s strongly biased to favor selection by your nutroots base of birdwatchers, tree huggers, malcontent pseudo-intellectual slackers, trustafarian bolsheviks, granola-crunching enviro whackjobs, and communists. The people who pick your presidential candidates don’t look like America. They look like the crowd at a midnight showing of Rocky Horror Show. Is it any wonder that you keep getting hosed?

Last time, you nominated an extremely liberal Eastern senator, who was a St. Paul’s nose-in-the-air snob, and a traitor, who proceeded to try running as a war hero. He managed to provoke every single officer he ever served under to come out publicly to denounce him, and an overwhelming majority of the men from his former naval unit collaborated on producing a book and a series of television commercials opposing his candidacy. He’s so lovable that, if John Kerry’s mother had still been alive, she’d might have been making Bush commercials, too. Frankly, I’m not sure my cat couldn’t have beaten John Kerry.

So, it’s back to the old drawing board. And, with a bit of aid from Hurricane Katrina, GOP Congressional scandals, and the MSM, you’re sitting pretty. It’s your year. And what do you do? You run out and nominate an exotic ultra-left Senator, the single most leftwing member of the Senate, who has not even served a single full term, because he’s pretty and gave one good speech. How could someone like that possibly lose?

Hillary tried nationalizing the health care system back in the 1990s, and the result was the first Republican Congressional Majority since the Korean War. You people are convinced Americans want another New Deal. It keeps coming as a shock every time we vote you down. You think Americans want their guns confiscated, and their kids taught political correctness and instructed on how to put condoms on cucumbers. You think America should lose in Iraq, and that our government should apologize and suck up to foreign countries. The vast majority of Americans want none of the above. The democrat minority thinks that people like themselves are wiser and better than everybody else, when the truth is they are still the weirdos, a minority of obnoxious egotistical misfits that nobody liked during high school, and nobody likes now.

One of my liberal college classmates was recently ranting about the terrible growth of Inequality over the whole post-Reagan period of the ascendancy of Conservatism in American politics, which roughly coincided, interestingly enough, with most of our own real, post-age-30, adulthoods.

Another classmate effectively rebutted those assertions of declining middle-class economic well-being by pointing out how much had changed with respect to lifestyle and expectations in America during that time, as well as over our own lifetimes. We approaching-age-60 adults can remember not only a world with no personal computers, no cell phones, and no multiple family automobiles. We can remember the time of no televisions, no air conditioners, party-line telephones, and a lot of people owning no automobile at all.

One can see the dramatic impact on human life of the economic growth produced by the free economy just by looking at antique artifacts of everyday life. Those charming collectible pieces of folk art being sold at auction for high prices to serve in future as decorative art not so terribly long ago were practical tools.

Take the charming, somewhat primitive, stark and streamlined decoy above, found in Nova Scotia, going on the block at a Guyette & Schmidt Auction later this month. Someone will be proudly displaying it soon in his living room or den but, less than a century ago, it was bobbing in some cove or inlet along the shore as a hunter was trying to shoot… a loon.

The common loon, Gavia immer, is protected today, and most people would find the idea of shooting one of these iconic symbols of the Northern wilderness sacrilegious and the idea of cooking and eating one even less appealing.

Loons are pretty much the lowest evolutionary form of waterfowl, the most primitive and the boniest, featuring the toughest flesh and the fishiest taste. No one would eat loon if he could get coot or even merganser.

Loons were so renowned for their lack of gustatory appeal that a whole genre of loon recipes taking roughly the following form are traditional jokes.

PLANKED LOON
Catch a Loon Duck. (Black Lake Loon’s are best). Pluck and clean. Boil well. With sharp knife, split duck down the belly. Splay it on a well soaked hardwood plank. Nail it good and wire it securely. Place upright on plank in front of hot coals on outdoor fireplace. Cook well for about two hours. When done, throw that fishy duck away, and eat the plank!

But, in the old days, people really did hunt loons in order to eat them. There would be periods of the year when the more migratory waterfowl were not present and available in the North Country. Ducks and geese would have flown South, but you could still find loons.

Even in Nova Scotia, I expect it’s been a long, long time since anybody was reduced to dining on loon.

Since I’m in sabbatical, I may—may—get up at 7 so I can wait in line
at 7:45 (when doors open) to hear Barack Obama on the Tulane Campus
(a few blocks away from me.)
I may…
I am skeptical about Obama—hugely.
But I understand he will be dropping a lot of g’s and I thought I’d collect some…
Hillary is more like a very familiar annoying relative you have to include because she’s family.
McCain.. he’s grandpa by the fireplace telling war stories…
Ron Paul is a nutty uncle… Huckabee is like a door to door salesman
who ends up not only selling you a vacuum cleaner but sponging a meal.
Romney is clearly not of the human species, & I wonder if there’s a way to replace his batteries.

O America I love you but how did we get here…

Barack Obama and all his rivals have done an excellent job of getting Americans on both the left and the right sides of the political spectrum to get beyond their differences and share nearly identical low opinions of the available candidates this year.

Having attributed Hillary’s win in New Hampshire to her crying [that was crying?] and showing that she had human emotions [apparently previous to this voters in New Hampshire did not know she was human], the CNN pundit invoked the “one-cry” rule, and pontificated that she cannot cry in any other state.

Conservative classmate:

It’s her party and she’ll cry if she wants to.

Classmate Scott Drum today (on the class email list today) wished our class’s lefties:

A Happy Dependence Day!

I think I should pass along those wishes to the American left as a whole.

First of all, it operates in an ahistoric context. There is no history. WWII never happened. Thus, it is possible to believe that “planetary morality is the only answer. Force alone is a tool to patch things temporarily, but in the 50-100 year perspective, finding some common ground for coexistence is essential.” Because no one can possibly conquer and subdue, then remake his adversary’s culture by force. “We can’t impose it.” The fact that we did impose it, i.e., democracy, on two peoples a lot tougher than the Arabs mysteriously disappears from the world inhabited by the liberal.

Secondly, with liberalism comes a lack of confidence, a self doubt, which Hamlet could envy. The liberal cannot fight for his own cause and defeat his enemy. He has to have his enemy’s permission. And he can only undertake any effort in the midst of a coalition, a coalition including all of his own rivals and all the states making profits via illegal arms trades with the enemy, too. It would just be too scary to go it alone. The liberal cannot simply make war. Any military operation cannot be for his own country. It must be a philanthropic exercise benefiting the enemy. The Marines will storm their beaches, and then improve their infrastructure. The 82nd Airborne will drop in behind enemy enemies, and build a power plant and a school. If the US invasion fleet steamed up to Normandy in our time, and the Germans in the bunkers on the beaches failed to hold up “Welcome to France – Thanks for Liberating Us!” signs, our liberals would believe we were obliged to turn around, and simply steam away.

What I want to know is: how come this kind of thinking doesn’t apply to domestic conflicts with conservatives and Republicans?

John Bolton delighted Richard at EU Referendum with his combative performance in an interview conducted by snidely superior BBC “presenter” John Humphrys.

BBC radio 18:48 interview

Liberals confuse a consensus of journalists, celebrities, and do-gooders, combined with activist science, with something meaningful. If they lived in the 1920s, they’d be championing eugenics. If they lived in the 1880s, they’d be worried about sex as a health threat and the rising tide of inferior races. These kinds of consensi are always wrong.

Sophisters, calculators, and economists have cooked up models and projections based on various kinds of data, but we really know perfectly well that mankind does not understand the typical duration and causes of climate cycles and periods of glaciation, and cannot accurately predict weather more than a week in advance.

The theory of Global Warming is ultimately based on nothing more than the unavailability, post-1980, of a continuing pattern of cooler weather. When it had been getting colder for a few years, the same kinds of authority were projecting a new Ice Age, brought about by mankind’s hubris in creating industrial civilization with attendant contamination of pristine Nature. The vital remedy was more taxes and greater regulatory restriction of American productivity and energy consumption. When temperature trends reversed, curiously enough, the causes and the cure remained exactly the same. The only change is that the media and the left went from agitating over Global Cooling to agitating over Global Warming without missing a beat, and essentially the same agitprop has simply increased in volume and alleged urgency for years.

What depresses me is the fact that Americans can emerge from 16+ years of education still capable of falling for this kind of ridiculous nonsense. To believe in Global Warming, I’d say, you have to be basically unconscious of the highly limited state of human knowledge of the earth’s past. We know that there were periods in which the planet’s climate was considerably cooler than at present, and we know that there were periods when it was considerably warmer. We do not have anything like exhaustive knowledge of the climate throughout earth’s geologic history. Nor do we now why periods of different climate occurred.

The rise of modern science of geology goes back roughly two lousy centuries. Continental drift, a fairly basic factor in geologic matters, was not even accepted before the 1960s, within many of our lifetimes. When that bozo on the evening news starts describing today’s temperature as an all-time record, what kind of records do you suppose he’s working with? Exactly how meaningful is anything of the sort? What can 20+ years of slightly warmer weather signify?

I attribute this lunacy to a combination of too much city living and Hollywood. There has been an endless stream of horror movies about Godzilla rising from Tokyo Bay, giant ants, mutated this, or catastrophic that, all attributable to the wickedness of mankind’s pursuit of material gratification. Today’s citified Americans all believe that they are the absolute center of the universe, and that the world and man’s position in it resembles the old New Yorker cartoon of the view from 9th Avenue. If I dropped all the liberals somewhere west of the Missouri and they had to walk out, their view of man’s centrality in the universe would be changed mightily.

Almost everyone in Washington understands, even if they don’t say it, that there is no real solution to what now seems to be the most disastrous foreign policy decision in American history. It’s now a matter of how to bring America’s involvement to an end with the fewest bad consequences. Despite all the studies and reports and amendments, events in Iraq itself will likely define the outcome.

US deaths in Iraq have amounted to 3064 over nearly four years.

Grant’s attack at Cold Harbor, June 3, 1864, which cost the lives of 10,000 Union soldiers (from a population of 26 million) in twenty minutes was a disaster. The loss of three thousand citizens of a nation of 300 million, a country which loses 26,000 lives annually in traffic accidents, over the course of nearly four years is something very different from Cold Harbor.

Iraq has not been a military disaster. US forces have suffered no battlefield defeat. Our troops are not demoralized. And there is no possibility whatsoever of our enemies achieving victory by military means.

Their only hope for victory, for bringing about the disaster of US withdrawal which has not yet occurred, is via the cowardice, defeatism, and disloyalty of our own chattering class elite.

A century ago, when England sent the youth of its urban clerical classes to fight the Boers, they were found generally to be unable to shoot a rifle, ride a horse, read a compass, make a fire, or survive in situations of deprivation in the out-of-doors. Baden-Powell created the Scouting Movement, and a host of late Victorians embraced “muscular Christianity,” in the hope of doing something to diminish the excessive impact of the domesticating impulses of modern urbanism and the modern bureaucratic corporate society. They obviously failed, disastrously.

Sean Connery was the wrong physical type, too large, too hirsute, and the wrong-eye color, but was such an agreeable actor to watch working that no one much minded
the transformation of Bond into a somewhat hulking Glaswegian Geordie.

The Bond films long ago lost any real relationship to the original character or the books, becoming instead a strange, spectacularly vulgar, and American (in the worst sense) thing all their own: extended exercises in elaborate special effects, supplying PG-level sex and violence accompanied by comforting repetitions (with new elaborations and surprises) of the same cliches.

I thought Daniel Craig was less two-dimensional than any previous Bond, but he is even further removed from the original character than even the braw Scots Sean Connery or the Las Vegas lounge lizard Roger Moore. Bond was, after all, a thoroughgoing U Englishman, an orphan from an artistic sort of background perhaps, with languages and Continental education, but still—underneath it all—a sound public school chap (even if he was sent down, a one biographer contends), a gentleman, and (as Marlow would say) “one of us.”

Daniel Craig is no gentleman at all, only a half-civilized, arriviste thug, straight out of London gangland, if not Borstal itself. His motivation to rise in the ranks of MI6 to the point of becoming that organization’s most conspicuous and short-lived species of cannon fodder seems perfectly mysterious.

I thought it very strange indeed to have the long-abandoned skeleton of the first Ian Fleming novel disinterred, and used with the most insolent anachronism imaginable, yet still more accurately used as the movie’s framework than any of the original novels have been used in forty years. How Ian Fleming would have howled, if he were alive, to see Baccarat replaced by Texas Hold ‘Em as the locus of Bond’s battle of wits and nerve with Le Chiffre. The destruction of Venice would surely have proved comforting though.

Le Chiffre was commendably cast.

Watching the film, I could not help reflect that there must be very, very few, some absolutely tiny number of people in the world, who are capable of designing and choreographing those amazing and elaborate chase and fight sequences. They certainly deserve their millions.

But it was depressing to see, fifty years on, just how much the world has grown stupider, shorter of attention span, less critical, and more vulgar. The hero of the mass audience is less the gentleman than ever, and James Bond is now played as what Britons would call a yobbo. I sometimes think that if we could live another century, we would see mankind reduced still further in grandeur and dignity, perhaps to some sort of quadruped.

Bush was incompetent at PR. The GOP got infiltrated by garden variety pols posing as conservatives.

You guys control the MSM, and when that hurricane provided impressive visual images to hang the media’s propaganda on, they finally sucessfully nailed Bush, convincing the general public that the President had failed to employ his god/king powers to still the fury of the winds, make the waters recede, overcome spectacular local incompetence and corruption, and cause vehicles and airplanes to travel successfully instantly over flooded roads and through hurricane winds to the disaster site.

There was far too much Congressional inertia and scandal. The MSM lovingly counted up every US casualty day after day, and Al Qaeda agreeably timed a Fall offensive to capture Congress. The Republican Congress deserved to lose. But your side only won by filling up your candidate team with conservatives. This Congress lost. Conservatism did not lose. You guys elected a lot of abortion and gun control opponents. I’m not sure we don’t have a better chance of killing the death tax, and confirming right wing judges now than we did before.

True, Bush is now certainly a lame duck, and we have to fear a degringolade in Iraq, if the House moonbats kill military funding. But after that happens, the terrorist bombs will go off in cities, and then there will be fewer liberals. C’est la vie.

But conspicuous public support of the troops is a consistent and studied policy on the part of the more sophisticated elements of the anti-war left. That particular maneuver allows them, when criticized for their antiwar activities, to say: “I’m patriotic. I’m not disloyal. I support our troops.” They’re only in favor of assuring the futility of all our troop’s efforts and sacrifices, the defeat of the United States, and the triumph of her adversaries.

The new military blog is part of Trudeau’s Slate site, which includes his well-known, currently humor-free and utterly tendentious leftwing cartoon, news, a debate forum, and a “Get Involved” bolshevik agitation site.

Despite its unwholesome associations, the new milblog has attracted some excellent contributions, and is definitely worth a read.

Four days ago, IvyGate (an Ivy League miscellaneous news and humor blog) linked a 6:46 minute YouTube video produced by Yale senior Aleksey Vayner to accompany the cover letter, resume, and research paper he was using to apply for investment banking jobs.

Mr. Vayner’s video (which showed the youthful job applicant lifting astoundingly large weights, skiing, playing tennis, ballroom dancing, and karate-chopping a tall stack of bricks) produced very much the opposite of what he had intended. No one called him for an interview, but amused NY bankers quickly began sharing his credentializing video’s link by email as the humor item of the week. That video soon went viral. Aleksey did not become any company’s newest AVP, but he did become the next Star Wars kid.

Dow Jones/AP:

Vayner, a self-described ``CEO and professional athlete,’’ submitted a cover letter and resume to UBS AG, describing his ``insatiable appetite for peak performance.’’ By Friday afternoon, both the cover letter and resume—which includes a link to the video, titled ``Impossible is Nothing’’—had circulated among employees at Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Credit Suisse Group and Wachovia Corp., to name a few.

UBS spokesman Kris Kagel said the firm is looking into the forwarding of the e-mail. ``We’re looking at whether it did come from UBS and if so, we’ll take action,’’ he said. ``As a firm we obviously don’t circulate (job applications) to the public.’‘

And it gets worse and worse.

One thing led to another. Curious viewers looked closely at Aleksey’s investment firm, charity, and book listed on his resume, finding major problems (like non-existence, misrepresentation, and plagiarism) with each.

The Yale Daily News joined the pack now barking at Aleksey’s heels, with other students supplying more stories.

Daniella Berman ‘07, who knows Vayner through the Yale Ballroom Dance Team, said she has heard “outlandish” stories about Vayner both from him and from other students. Among the claims she said she has heard is one that Vayner is one of four people in the state of Connecticut qualified to handle nuclear waste.

Berman said that while she thinks that kind of claim is fairly harmless, she thinks Vayner crossed a line by misrepresenting himself to a potential employer…

Vayner was profiled (as Aleksey Garber) in the Yale Rumpus in May of 2002 after visiting Yale as a prefrosh. The profile outlined Vayner’s many fabrications, including his claims that he was employed by both the Mafia and the CIA during his childhood and that he gave tennis lessons to Harrison Ford and Sarah Michelle Gellar.

Today, IvyGate returned for a final coup de grace.

A member of the Yale tennis team wrote in to dispute Aleksey’s claim that he competed on the Satellite tour: “I played for Yale tennis, and he tried to walk on the team. He got cut the second day. I had one conversation with him, and he claimed to have KILLED 24 people in the caves of Tibet.”

(Other great comments: “I too played for Yale tennis, and Vayner/Garber claimed that he has trouble flying on planes because he has to register his hands as lethal weapons each time he goes to an airport.” And: “The giveaway on the investment firm was that he said his firm specialized in “risk-aDverse” strategies. The other giveaway was that he’s fucking crazy.”)

We decided to not be too scared of the cease and desist letter Aleksey emailed us, given that he copied and pasted it from the first Google hit for “cease and desist letter,” right down to the “very truly yours” signoff. Attorney Ron706@aol.com, Esq., really earned his fee there.

At Yale, Aleksey has offered to treat sports injuries using various “Eastern” therapy methods, including massage and acupuncture. Before “treating” a “patient,” he sent them this letter. You simply have to read it in full. Somewhere in there he claims that his brother is “head of pediatrics at Columbian Presbyterian hospital in NYC.” A search on the Columbia Presbyterian Physician Network turns up no one with the last name “Garber” or “Vayner.” But our favorite part is this line: “I am not certified in any Western sense of the word, neither in Chinese medicine, Tui-Na, Shaolin trauma medicine, nor in acupuncture, all of which I practice extensively never-the-less.”

And, um, not quite so humorously, the SEC and dean of Yale College have been notified of Aleksey’s transgressions.

God, what theater. You cannot make this shit up. Unless, y’know, you’re Aleksey.

You can bet that Yale will now review this lad’s admission application materials, looking for discrepancies. Ouch!

Hat tip to Andrew Olson.

———————————UPDATE

Mr. Vayner has (not unwisely) gotten YouTube to pull the video, by claiming copyright infringement.

The vindictive IvyGate is defying him, and has placed the video in a new posting.
———————————-
UPDATE 10/16

He now has a Wikipedia entry.

Aleksey is being ridiculed by Gawker.

And poor Aleksey’s story, and some comments on this posting by classmates on my Yale College Class email list made the New Yorker.———————————-
UPDATE 10/18

There is now an Aleksey Vayner Repository web-site, where readers post suggested new claims and accomplishments for Aleksey. The order of precedence of new alleged Aleksey accomplishments is determined by reader votes.

And, we missed this earlier posting in which Bess Levin communes with Aleksey’s brain.

The poverty in America which liberals are always going on about is some kind of legendary myth, like the Loch Ness Monster. It has nothing to do with reality. Poverty in America exists occasionally as a temporary accident. (Or as a feature of merely being young and being a student. Students are always poor.) Those kinds of poverty can always be overcome with effort and persistence. There is plenty of opportunity in this country for those who will take it.

The other poverty, which does not go away, is really an epiphenomenon of a much more serious affliction. The real problem is a moral problem. Persistent poverty exists in America, not because of some unfairness in the system, or because of discrimination, or because of a lack of alternatives. It exists because some people will ruin their lives. Some people will not help themselves.

When I managed a real estate company in New York, I often walked through the East Village. I can recall passing the corner of 14th and 3rd Avenue, back in the 1980s one evening. As I looked around, I saw misery and squalor and degradation. There were prostitutes soliciting along the street. There were junkies and dealers trafficking. The buildings were filthy and decayed, and no one was lifting a finger to improve anything. I looked at it all, and thought what a hell on earth that corner was. And as I was feeling sorry for all the people there, along came a sixteen year old blond girl with a Midwestern accent to offer me a date. I could tell she had recently arrived from Minnesota.

And then the light bulb went off over my head, I realized that every single one of these people had come there from somewhere else. They had all chosen to be there. Nobody ever held a gun to their heads, and said, “You are condemned to be a junkie (or a whore) on 3rd Avenue at 14th Street.” There were no walls. There was no barbed wire. Everyone there could walk away, just as I was doing myself. And I stopped feeling sorry for them.

“No question hovered at the front of my mind more, reading through Altemeyer’s studies of authoritarian behavior, that, why are right-wingers often malicious, mean-spirited, and disrespectful of even the basic codes of civility? While the radical left has had its episodes of boorishness, the right has taken these tactics to an unprecedented level. Social science has discovered these forms of behavior can be rather easily explained as a form of aggression. Altemeyer discovered that the aggression of right-wingers seems to be not merely instrumental-that is, expressed for some political purpose-but engaged in for the pure pleasure of it.. Torture is an extreme example, yet apparently authoritarians can find even that enjoyable, as the Abu Ghraib photos tragically illustrate. But on a more pedestrian level, he found it difficult for most right-wingers to talk about any subject about which they felt strongly without attacking others. Right-wing authoritarians, as we have seen, are motivated by their fear of a dangerous world, whereas social dominators have an ever-present desire to dominate. The factor that makes Right-wingers faster than most people to attack others, and that seems to keep them living in an ‘attack mode,’ is their remarkable self-righteousness. They are so sure they are not only right, but holy and pure, that they are bursting with indignation and a desire to smite down their enemies, Altemeyer explained.

To which, I replied:

Authoritarian, baloney. More idiotic left-wing self-abuse consisting of the application of paranoid moonbat fantasy to domestic political opponents. If George W. Bush had a turban and beard, lived overseas, and was actively conspiring to blow you to Kingdom Come, you’d be telling us how he has legitimate grievances, is too commonly misunderstood, amd must above all be conciliated.

The current conflict is between responsible adults who believe in taking steps to protect the population of the United States from terrorist attacks on mass population centers, and a pathetic collection of opportunistic pols, old lady do-gooders, head-in-the-clouds moralizers, Utopian pacifists, sissies, and the perennially in-protest.

Torture? The list of alleged coercive techniques runs from keeping bad guys awake and making them stand in the corner to a few slaps. If those things are torture, just about all of us have been tortured. Circumstances have more than once caused me to stay awake for days. Children were commonly punished in my day by being forced to stand for uncomfortably long intervals. And even I have been slapped around a few times. More than once, in my boyhood, older and stronger and more numerous villains pinioned my arms, and slapped my face back and forth, attempting to persuade me to submit formally. It wasn’t so terrible being slapped in the face as all that, and I found it entirely possible to continue to resist.

The only technique actually provoking alarm is waterboarding, which seems alarming only in terms of its “rosy-fingered dawn” invariably-quoted description: “The prisoner is bound to an inclined board, feet raised and head slightly below the feet. Cellophane is wrapped over the prisoner’s face and water is poured over him. Unavoidably, the gag reflex kicks in and a terrifying fear of drowning leads to almost instant pleas to bring the treatment to a halt.”

I was thinking about this recently, and I began to wonder. It certainly sounds disagreeable to be tied to a board with one’s head lower than one’s feet. Obviously no one wants cellophane wrapped around one’s face. But if it is wrapped around one’s face, why does water poured over your head, which you don’t feel on your skin anyway, make you gag? What if you resolve not to gag? What if you do yoga breath-control? How do you breathe with the cellophane anyway? I don’t know how accurate that description really is. Perhaps water-boarding is not entirely everything it’s cracked up to be.

But supposing it is really awful, just like drowning, to be water-boarded? They waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, who sawed off the American journalist Daniel Pearl’s head with a knife. I saw the video. Pearl screamed as the sawing commenced. I’m not easily perturbed, but that video gave me bad dreams. Frankly, I think waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammad would only represent at best a good start.

WARNING

Do not dowload and watch this video, unless you feel you must know the worst about the crimes of our adversaries. It is unspeakably ugly and horrifying. Avoid this, if you possibly can. This is absolutely not something women or young people should see.

The video of the murder of Daniel Pearl can be found here.

A college professor classmate of mine opined today:

Osama is winning. I don’t know how to make it plainer. He’s winning not because there are Democrats in Congress but because the policy executed by the Bush administration has produced adverse results.

I replied indignantly (more or less – some editing is being done for more formal publication):

If one applied the principles of the liberals historically, the USA must have lost every war in history, since any action on our part always angered the enemy and provoked him to resist. Our acting at all always proved a blunder which merely confirmed his worst opinion of us, and inspired new enemies to rally to his side. Every wild Indian, every British redcoat, every Southern rebel, every Philippine Insurrectionary, and every Prussian grenadier we killed always inspired revenge, and caused two more volunteers to join the ranks of our opponents. We repeatedly made the mistake of invading the territories of our enemies, thus inevitably recruiting even more allies to their side. American excesses, like Sullivan’s Raid on the Iroquois homeland, Sherman’s March to Sea, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, always hardened the enemy’s resolve and ensured our inevitable defeat. And that’s why we’re all weaving Iroquois baskets, being ruled by the British Parliament, and lamenting the loss of the Southern Confederacy, while we struggle to learn better Japanese in order to converse with our conquerors.