I Hate What You Just Said

I discovered this bit of wisdom while trolling the official website of Pat Robertson. On a page entitled “Bring It On: The War on Terror,” one of Pat’s viewers wrote in with this fantastic question:

I hear so many people saying that Jesus would just turn the other cheek in terms of Iraq. Is Jesus a pacifist? I know He turned over the tables in the Temple, but do you believe that Jesus would ever go to war?

Pat’s Response is illuminating:

Read the rest of this entry »

It is about time for IHWYJS (that’s what the cool kids call ihatewhatyoujustsaid.com), to make a contribution to our long-awaited “national conversation on race.”

As you already know, the Clinton campaign has already weighed in. Wow. And there’s more. Also this.

But for our money, there is no one quite like Patrick J. Buchanan when it comes to clear-eyed, no-nonsense thinking on the subject of race. Ever the thoughtful commentator, Pat is offering America, and the world, exactly what it needs right now: white paranoia. How could the guy who gave us the culture war be wrong?

Here’s Pat, in all his glory, in his post titled “The Way Our World Ends” (and I swear I am not making this stuff up. Go look at his website! He actually wrote this, and so much other inanity besides):

An Augusta, Ga., group, The National Policy Institute, has meshed the figures on fertility rates with the continents and races on Planet Earth — to visualize what the world will look like in 2060.

In 1950, whites were 28 percent of world population and Africans 9 percent, a ratio of three-to-one. In 2060, the ratio will remain the same. But the colors will be reversed. People of African ancestry will be 25 percent of the world’s population. People of European descent will have fallen to 9.8 percent.

More arresting is that the white population is shrinking not only in relative but in real terms. Two hundred million white people, one in every six on earth — a number equal to the entire population of France, Britain, Holland and Germany — will vanish by 2060.

The Caucasian race is going the way of the Mohicans.

White people! Vanishing! (Actually, I guess I’ll be one of those white people who vanishes by 2060, too. But Buchanan will also have vanished by then. So, you know, there’s an upside to all of this).

More Buhcanan-y goodness:

By 2050, a fourth of all the people of Eastern Europe will have vanished. Ukraine will lose one-third of its population. Russia, 150 million at the breakup of the Soviet Union, 142 million today, will be down to 108 million. Such losses dwarf what Hitler and Stalin together did to these countries.

Now I think I must be drunk. Because I could have sworn that PJB just compared falling birth rates based on free will and individual choices to the holocaust and Stalinist repression. (And hey - did you notice? More “vanishing”).

Man - this stuff is really killing Pat:

…Western Europe’s populations are being sustained by immigrants from the Maghreb and Middle East, Asia and Africa — and the baby boom among these black and brown peoples is lifting and changing the face of the Old Continent forever. Islam is returning to Iberia, Italy and the Balkans. The Third World is coming to colonize the mother countries.

It is Pat Buchanan’s worst nightmare coming true: vanishing white people, and booming brown people. And finally:

Hopefully, the peoples of Asia, Africa and the Middle East, who are about to inherit the earth as we pass away, will treat us better than our ancestors treated them in the five centuries that Western Man ruled the world.

Otherwise, we all go out with a bang.

Precious.

Thanks, Pat, for giving us the big picture. In part II, we’ll examine Pat’s take on the more immediate racial politics of the day. In the meantime, if you are reading this and you happen to be white, be forewarned that you may vanish at any moment.

Apparently, the Yankees really do suck.

It appears that the US Congress is so outraged by the NFL and New England Patriots head coach, Bill Belichick, that they demand an investigation.  But why are they so upset?

It’s called “spygate.”  Turns out that Belichick has been taping his opposing teams’ defensive signal calls since 2000, when he took over as head coach of the Patriots.  After the story broke, the NFL impounded all the evidence; however, for reasons that are unclear, the organization destroyed Belichick’s tapes and notes after fining the disgraced coach and penalizing the team its first round draft pick.

Now Congress demands to know why.

In a hearing yesterday, Republican senator–and Philadelphia Eagles fan–Arlen Specter criticized the NFL:

“[The teams] are enormous role models for everybody,” Specter said. “If you can cheat in the NFL, you can cheat in college, you can cheat in high school, you can cheat on your grade-school math test. There’s no limit as to what you can do. I think they owe the public a lot more candor and a lot more credibility.”

Left unchecked, the transitive property of cheating could spiral out of control–like a pass from Ryan Leaf.

As a former attorney, Specter also sought to place “spygate” within the framework of US jurisprudence.  Drawing on the natural law that inspired our Constitution, Specter argued that Americans “have a right to have honest football games.”  And he further asked, “What if there was something on the tapes we might want to be subpoenaed, for example? You can’t destroy it. That would be obstruction of justice.”

I, for one, applaud Senator Specter’s solemn concern for our rights and the rule of law, especially since it involves illegal surveillance, destroying evidence, and obstruction of justice.

After they return integrity to the game of football, I wonder if Congress might consider working on some related problems:

C.I.A. Destroyed 2 Tapes Showing Interrogations

The Central Intelligence Agency in 2005 destroyed at least two videotapes documenting the interrogation of two Qaeda operatives in the agency’s custody, a step it took in the midst of Congressional and legal scrutiny about its secret detention program, according to current and former government officials.

The videotapes showed agency operatives in 2002 subjecting terrorism suspects — including Abu Zubaydah, the first detainee in C.I.A. custody — to severe interrogation techniques. The tapes were destroyed in part because officers were concerned that video showing harsh interrogation methods could expose agency officials to legal risks, several officials said.

Or this:

Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts

Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible “dirty numbers” linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications.

Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.

If you are concerned at all about the 2008 presidential election, you will want to watch this video over at Gawker.

(By the way - if you’re not concerned at all about the 2008 presidential election, what the hell is wrong with you?)

An old friend (and a man of decidedly philosophical bent), after “several” pints, once described the foundational problem of democracy this way:

“What are you gonna do about the stupid people, man?  What about the [expletive] stupid people?”

Hmm.

Luckily, the mainstream media is doing a superb job of analyzing the truly important issues facing our nation: flag lapel pins, Rev. Wright, and the voting tendencies of elderly, Catholic, ethnic, working-class, heterosexual, right-handed, male, pet-owning, bipedal, dentist-fearing, mid-size sedan-driving Led Zeppelin fans.

But there are still some busybodies out there, like Eza Klein over at The American Prospect, who insist on rambling on and on about trifling side issues, like the major candidates’ positions on health care.

Klein’s analysis is here.

McCain’s position? He wants to use the magic of the market (which has served us so very well), rather than the power of government and the concept of shared risk to cure what ails us. The effect? People will have access to health care. Just, you know, less of it. Less access to health care.

Of course, this isn’t necessarily true for everyone. If you are lucky enough to have full health care coverage, say from the government, you’ll be fine. Like if you’re as lucky as er, Senator McCain.

Less access to health care. Because that’s what America needs. America - number one in Hummer limousines, number 43 in infant mortality rate. Take that, Faroe Islands!

Huzzah!

Remember intrepid journalist and master contrarian, John Stossel?  He’s the man committed to helping you accept that “Everything You Believe is Wrong.”  For example, you’d be wrong to criticize people who exploit the victims of natural disasters in order to reap record profits:

Townhall

If you want to score points cracking down on mean, greedy profiteers, pushing anti-”gouging” rules is a very good thing.

But if you’re one of the people the law “protects” from “price gouging,” you won’t fare as well.

Consider this scenario: You are thirsty — worried that your baby is going to become dehydrated. You find a store that’s open, and the storeowner thinks it’s immoral to take advantage of your distress, so he won’t charge you a dime more than he charged last week. But you can’t buy water from him. It’s sold out.

You continue on your quest, and finally find that dreaded monster, the price gouger. He offers a bottle of water that cost $1 last week at an “outrageous” price — say $20. You pay it to survive the disaster.

You resent the price gouger. But if he hadn’t demanded $20, he’d have been out of water. It was the price gouger’s “exploitation” that saved your child.

It saved her because people look out for their own interests. Before you got to the water seller, other people did. At $1 a bottle, they stocked up. At $20 a bottle, they bought more cautiously. By charging $20, the price gouger makes sure his water goes to those who really need it.

The people the softheaded politicians think are cruelest are doing the most to help. Assuming the demand for bottled water was going to go up, they bought a lot of it, planning to resell it at a steep profit. If they hadn’t done that, that water would not have been available for the people who need it the most.

Take heart, Chinese earthquake victims, your country has embraced the free market!

In 10 years everyone will wax nostalgic over the good ol’ days of the Cold War:

WaPo

At least 40 developing countries from the Persian Gulf region to Latin America have recently approached U.N. officials . . . to signal interest in starting nuclear power programs, a trend that concerned proliferation experts say could provide the building blocks of nuclear arsenals in some of those nations.

At least half a dozen countries have also said in the past four years that they are specifically planning to conduct enrichment or reprocessing of nuclear fuel, a prospect that could dramatically expand the global supply of plutonium and enriched uranium, according to U.S. and international nuclear officials and arms-control experts.

Much of the new interest is driven by economic considerations, particularly the soaring cost of fossil fuels. But for some Middle Eastern states with ready access to huge stocks of oil or natural gas, such as Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the investment in nuclear power appears to be linked partly to concerns about a future regional arms race stoked in part by Iran’s alleged interest in such an arsenal, the officials said.

A troubling NY Times article exposes an effort by the Pentagon to shape the media narrative using a bevy of “military analysts” whom they control:

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.

Glenn Greenwald has a detailed and deeply troubling analysis of the Pentagon’s document dump regarding the “military analysis program.”

UPDATE 1:

Greenwald reprises the story again today with extensive evidence of a planned, illegal, domestic propaganda effort.

UPDATE 2:

A detailed legal analysis of this domestic propaganda.

Unless Cheney, Rice, Ashcroft, Powell and Rumsfeld concluded this meeting with an insane sportfuck orgy on the conference table, I fear nobody will be impeached and nobody will care:

Bush administration officials from Vice President Dick Cheney on down signed off on using harsh interrogation techniques against suspected terrorists after asking the Justice Department to endorse their legality, The Associated Press has learned.

The officials also took care to insulate President Bush from a series of meetings where CIA interrogation methods, including waterboarding, which simulates drowning, were discussed and ultimately approved.

A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the meetings described them Thursday to the AP to confirm details first reported by ABC News on Wednesday. The intelligence official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to publicly discuss the issue.

Between 2002 and 2003, the Justice Department issued several memos from its Office of Legal Counsel that justified using the interrogation tactics, including ones that critics call torture.

“If you looked at the timing of the meetings and the memos you’d see a correlation,” the former intelligence official said. Those who attended the dozens of meetings agreed that “there’d need to be a legal opinion on the legality of these tactics” before using them on al-Qaida detainees, the former official said.

The meetings were held in the White House Situation Room in the years immediately following the Sept. 11 attacks. Attending the sessions were Cheney, then-Bush aides Attorney General John Ashcroft, Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA Director George Tenet and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.

Here is the ACLU’s legal reasoning for a special prosecutor.