By the way, these are the same Democrats who didn’t raise a whimper when Bill Clinton’s Attorney General Janet Reno sacked all 93 U.S. attorneys in one unclean sweep upon taking office. Previous Presidents had kept the attorneys in place until they could replace each one. That was a more serious abuse than anything known about these Bush dismissals.
Heh.
Public sector peculation:
In their favor-seeking, all of the lobbyists visiting Capitol Hill are bound by House and Senate ethics rules that cap most individual gifts at $50 per elected official or staffer, with an annual limit of $100 per recipient from any single source. But local governments, public universities and Indian tribes are exempt from the limit, so they are able to shower members and their staffs with such goodies as luxury skybox tickets to basketball games and front-row concert tickets.
Having members or their key aides attend such free events in the company of glad-handing university presidents and local government officials winds up costing taxpayers a pretty penny. Much of the explosive growth in earmarks has been directed to local governments and universities.
David Thompson on CAIR and related organizations:
These efforts to short-circuit realistic debate have proved all too successful, not least among those whose political outlook is premised on Designated Victim Groups and claims of collective guilt. It seems the word ‘Islamophobe’ – like its pseudo-synonym, ‘racist’ – has acquired the status of a declamatory WMD. Deploying the term, even by vague insinuation, can generally be counted on to shut down the frontal lobes of pretty much anyone on the left, like some rhetorical kryptonite.
Discredited wingnut Dinesh D’Souza has a point:
Consider a similar decision made by President Roosevelt. In the period leading up to World War II, a group of émigré German scientists warned Albert Einstein that the Germans were building an atomic bomb under the guidance of that country’s greatest scientist, Werner Heisenberg. Acutely aware of the dangers of Hitler possessing an atomic bomb, Einstein took this information in the fall of 1939 to President Roosevelt, who commissioned the Manhattan Project. The United States built the bomb, and later dropped two of them on Japan.
Many years later, Americans discovered that the Germans were nowhere close to building an atomic bomb. Their project was on the wrong track, and it seems to have stalled in its infancy. Some historians believe that Heisenberg was trying to thwart the project from the inside. Be that as it may, in retrospect we now know that the intelligence that led to the Manhattan project was wrong. But no one goes around saying, “Einstein lied†or “FDR lied.†They didn’t lie; they used the information they had to make a tough decision in a very dangerous situation.
Sinister cover-ups: Sandy v Scooter
Question: If an armadillo dances in the woods, and nobody’s there to witness it, will I still get pie?
Point: Debate Is Dead
Counterpoint: No, It’s Not
–John F*cking Kerry strikes again
Sort of like ‘anti-Semite’ or ‘anti-American’ is used on this blog.
No, not really.
We’re more ‘anti-idiot’ here, AJB. Please take that under advisement.
If you haven’t seen it yet, immediately go and watch
The Great Global Warming Swindle
Long, but worth the time.
Yep, kinda hate to say it but D’Souza does have a point there.
Incidentally, I’ve never bought the idea that Heisenberg was obscurely sabotaging the bomb project he headed. I think a big reason for the popularity of the theory is wishful thinking: A lot of people prefer to believe that a genius like Heisenberg wouldn’t really have given the Nazis a bomb.
Also, there’s retrospective analysis involved: We look back at how the Nazis went about their project and say, Whoa, that was obviously not the fastest or easiest way to get a bomb. Heisenberg was brilliant, therefore he must have known better, therefore he must have been sabotaging the program by taking the path he did. In research, of course, you don’t usually know you’re going down the wrong road until after the fact.
The point of making tough decisions based on shaky intel is all the more poignant when you consider the lengths the British and Norwegians went to to keep the Germans from getting all the heavy water their strategy depended on. The Germans had set up their plants in Norway, because they could have the abundant hydroelectric power they needed, and the RAF couldn’t easily hit them there. So British commandos and Norwegian soldiers in hiding teamed up to ski into the big plant and blow it up.
The Germans rebuilt. Another commando raid knocked them off balance, and this time they decided to ship all their heavy water back to Germany, and get on with things. The Norwegian resistance got wind of this, and snuck onto the ferry about to transport the heavy water tanks in its cargo hold. They planted timed explosives, and at the appointed hour the boat split in two, taking with it the heavy water, some German transport guys, and about a hundred Norwegian civilians.
I watched an interview once with one of the Norwegian commandos, 45 or 50 years later. They knew what they were doing. The calculus was that the risks of letting the Germans get the bomb were too high to let that ferry dock, and that there was no way to warn their doomed countrymen without warning the Germans.
So, in a sense it was an atrocity, and a pointless one since the Germans really never were that close. Yet given that: How could they have known? Is there anything but hindsight that allows us to say they could have afforded to wait?
Discredited wingnut?
Dan. Dude. You’re talking like a leftwing fuckstick.
It’s positively counterrevoltionary of reactionaries like yourself to speak of discrediting people.
Can D’Souza be said to be rehabilitated by your positive mention?
Or would you recommend he spend some time in a psychiatric hospital, or perhaps an agrarian collective?
Have you read his book? I have. I don’t agree with him because I think one of his premises – that super conservative Muslims don’t necessarily have to be on a collision course with the West – is gravely flawed.
If you can’t bluntly discuss the course we’re on in the GWOT without having to ‘discredit’ people who raise ideas which subsequently fail, then we probably are doomed to the course that BRD posited. Jeeebus. I’ve said some stupid things in my life – does that mean I’m discredited too?
TW: I prefer an educated CD or an ignorant 8 track, to a learned78.
The point is, Al, that I was talking like a leftwing fuckstick, not as a leftwing fuckstick. It was, I had thought, a dig at all those people who jumped on board to pitch him over the side without having read his book.
In a larger sense, it was a deconstruction of the expression “discredited,” which (with all due respect) generally means “I don’t agree with him, therefore he’s beyond the pale.”
Which is another funny expression, if you happen to be of Irish heritage.
It was also the genesis of the First Special Services Force, which was to be equipped with new-fangled snowmobiles to carry out the same mission over a long period of time.
And let’s not forget the valiant efforts of Col. Hogan and his men, who convinced the Germans the heavy water was a tonic, and disposed of it by having it drunk.
Robert Crawford:
Ruthless of them, wasn’t it? Nasty way to die, that.
My mistake, Dan. Your facetious impression of a left wing dingus was so credible, that for a minute there I thought you were turning into one.
Bravo! Bravo! Bravissimo! Fooled me…
Any chance you can do a impression of Ted Kennedy licking Jameson’s off the heaving bosom of an intern in Hawk & Dove? Now *that* would be an impression worth doing. I bet you’d be good at it