Mood Music Monday: Hysterical Fears Edition

I am not going to comment too much on the assassination attempt in Tuscon over the weekend, but the reaction to it has been predictably ugly. Suffice it to say that the blame placed on the Right--namely Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck--for this, directly or implicitly, is irresponsible and serves no purpose other than political point-scoring at the expense of free speech.

American politics is full of harsh rhetoric, as it has been and will continue to be. There are already calls to institute speech restrictions -- which will do no good whatsoever other than to quash dissent. It's already illegal to threaten the life of a congressman, or anyone for that matter, as well it should be--but saying "we're targeting this senator this election" is no more a threat than printing that senator's face on toilet paper. The time we live in certainly isn't the nadir of American political discourse--though the number of times this country has been goaded into pointless wars makes a singular nadir hard to pinpoint--but let's not pretend we've lost some sort of bygone civility from more genteel times.

The histrionics coming from the Left are unsubstantiated and unhelpful. It's just their most recent attempt at fear-mongering: the cheap and effective political technique used by pols of all stripes that requires little or no resemblance to reality whatsoever. And as Adam Serwer noted, the Republicans would, in all likelihood, engage in the same if Rep. Giffords were a Republican or the assailant was Muslim, Arab, or an immigrant. But that doesn't make the Left's behavior any less despicable--it just proves they are as boorish and loathsome as their counterparts.

Anyway, in the spirit of using media to create bogeymen and incite irrational fears of those whom you disagree, my MMM for this week is the man responsible for everything bad that happened to kids in the late 1990s:



It's the edited version, I still doubt it's "safe" for work. And yes, I just compared Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin to Marilyn Manson.

bellum medicamenti delenda est

Update: OH FOR GOD'S SAKE:  Some are actually blaming the music: "It's a sign of the shifting culture wars that little attention has been paid to Drowning Pool since the Arizona shooting on Saturday."

Just For Fun Friday

WOW.



Via @notjessewalker

Mitch Daniels: Yielding to 'Forces of Homosexual Extremism'

From a profile of Indiana's Republican governor, Mitch Daniels:

And then, [Daniels] says, the next president, whoever he is, “would have to call a truce on the so-called social issues. We’re going to just have to agree to get along for a little while,” until the economic issues are resolved. Daniels is pro-life himself, and he gets high marks from conservative religious groups in his state. He serves as an elder at the Tabernacle Presbyterian Church, in inner-city Indianapolis, which he’s attended for 50 years. In 1998, with a few other couples from Tabernacle and a nearby Baptist congregation, he and his wife founded a “Christ-centered” school, The Oaks Academy, in a downtown neighborhood the local cops called “Dodge City.” It’s flourishing now with 315 mostly poor kids who pursue a classical education: Latin from third grade on, logic in middle school, rhetoric in eighth grade, an emphasis throughout on the treasures of Western Civilization. “It’s the most important thing I’ve ever been involved in,” he told me. (emphases mine)

Bryan Fischer, the American Family Association's director of issue analysis, says,

"When you [call a truce], you're yielding the field to the forces of homosexual extremism."

Perhaps such purportedly callow surrender, as practiced by Mitch Daniels, is something more conservatives should consider instead of arming the circular firing squad now gathering outside of CPAC.

HT: Dara

Just for Fun Thursday

Man, sometimes the Onion just hits a little too close to home.


I'm Only Really Happy When I'm Writing, Or When I'm Having Lots Of Fun With My Friends And Family

Ouch.

Quote of the Day: Post-Racial America

"I was talking with some of the parents from leo high school, and the general consensus is that the busing of the harding students to our school is going to create a mass exodus of wealthy famillies from the area, as... well as many of us pulling our children out of the school and sending them to cantebury [prep school] and bishop luers [one of two local Catholic high schools], also auburn schools came up in the conversation. the long term effect of this will be the selling of homes to move to better school districts. It really sucks that i just paid $400,000 for a house in the best school district in northern indiana, only to have a bunch of saggy pant snoop dog wanna be's trucked into my neighborhood like cattle." (emphasis mine)

- A blog comment, supposedly from a Leo High School parent, discussing the closure of my poor, mostly black high school alma mater and the forced busing of its students to the rest of the mostly white district and specifically to Leo, the (overwhelmingly white) crown jewel of the East Allen County School system.


Welcome to post-racial America.


Via my friend Jamie Garwood.

Addendum: This is not to say I support the busing plan -- indeed, this battle has been raging since I was a student and I'm generally opposed for several reasons. I shared this for the characterization of the school and the students in it--not any tacit support of the plan. -jpb

An Impossible Dilemma

Ryan Grim, author of the informative and entertaining book "This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America," writes about the recent WikiLeaks cables about the corruption of Afghanistan:

President Hamid Karzai has repeatedly released well-connected officials convicted of or charged with drug trafficking in Afghanistan, frustrating efforts to combat corruption and providing additional evidence that the United States' top ally in the country is himself corrupt. (emphasis mine)

This is a tad too simplistic, I think, given the situation in which we have placed Mr. Karzai. This is not to apologize for Karzai, or even excuse the actions and pardons detailed in the cables, but comments like this are misleading outside the context in which they take place.

Afghanistan produces 90% of the world's illicit heroin and opium. It is less of a country than it is federalism ad absurdum and its meager economy is dependent on that illicit trade. Poppy farmers are, for the most part, backward, illiterate tribesmen who care nothing for national politics. (No, really, Afghans are the most dangerously ignorant people this side of Glenn Beck.) There is no viable economic alternative to what they do.

So, at the same time the U.S. armed forces are trying to establish rapport with the locals--i.e., opium farmers--our DEA is doing everything in its power to stop them from making a living.

Enter Hamid Karzai. He has to run this pitiful, fractious, not-quite-a-state. Every domestic political interest of note is tied to opium one way or another. In addition, he is expected to balance this with American demands for accountability, open democracy, functional government, and, um, drug prohibition. Oh, and the Karzai administration doesn't exist without explicit support from Washington.

Good luck with that. Maybe when Karzai is done doing the impossible in Afghanistan, we can put him to work on cold fusion.

I don't doubt that Karzai is corrupt. I don't doubt that his administration is corrupt. But the United States government's policy in Afghanistan is impossible to reconcile with itself. That we expect a man to run a establish a functional country made up of tribal drug peddlers, with no hope of legitimizing the drugs for licit medical use, is criminally absurd.

bellum medicamenti delenda est.

Quote of the Day

"But ultimately, what one thinks of Manning's alleged acts is irrelevant to the issue here.  The U.S. ought at least to abide by minimal standards of humane treatment in how it detains him.  That's true for every prisoner, at all times.  But departures from such standards are particularly egregious where, as here, the detainee has merely been accused, but never convicted, of wrongdoing.  These inhumane conditions make a mockery of Barack Obama's repeated pledge to end detainee abuse and torture, as prolonged isolation -- exacerbated by these other deprivations -- is at least as damaging, as violative of international legal standards, and almost as reviled around the world, as the waterboard, hypothermia and other Bush-era tactics that caused so much controversy."

-- Glenn Greenwald, discussing the inhumane conditions the U.S. government is imposing upon accused leaker Pfc. Bradley Manning.

Read the entire disturbing account here.