The Illiterate

Will someone please give Trent Lott his fifteen cents?

Here’s Lott, defending his record on race last Friday:

But you know, there are a number of issues that I have voted for and supported over the years.

Share

Israeli Troops Shoot Dead Palestinian Militant
–Reuters headline, 12/11/02

At least they’re thorough.

Talk about targeted advertising. In the latest issue of the Seattle Stranger, the normally staid Bon Marche runs a full page ad featuring one of those young greek god types in his tighty whities, stretched out on a bed, with the tag line “Less wrapping More package.” As JSW pointed out, it’s doubtful that we’ll see this ad on the sides of any buses this Christmas season. Do you think the Bon believes that it can run these ads in the Stranger without their more conservative customers finding out? Is this ad in the Weekly, too?

Camille Paglia once infamously stated that she wouldn’t care if Pablo Picasso had gunned down a crowd of grandmothers–it wouldn’t diminish his artistic achievement in the least. The same can be said in the other direction: it doesn’t make any difference how nice and good a person was to their family, small children, puppies, etc.–if the work of their life was essentially evil, dedicated to diminishing, belittling, or destroying the lives of their fellow men, then that’s how they should be remembered. That goes for Karl Rove, who is shown in this month’s Esquire (excerpt here) to be a wonderful all-round nice guy with children at Christmastime and such, but whose ultimate legacy will most likely be the undermining of the White House policy apparatus and the flagrant sabotaging of a number of worthwhile government programs. And it definitely goes for Strom Thurmond, who has reach the wizened, crippled, near senile age of 100 in a blaze of warm remembrance of his glory days as one of the most racist politicians to grace the halls of Congress since the dismantling of reconstruction. Though most people don’t like to admit to such seemingly disrespectful thoughts, there are some people that the world is or would be better off without–Hitler, Saddam, Kissinger, John Denver. This country would be a better place if Thurmond had never reached 30.

Taxes Shmaxes

How slow a news day must it be when both the Seattle Times and the Post-Intelligencer devote half their front page to the same non-story? As they both point out, for over thirty years now nearly everyone has agreed that Washington’s tax system is regressive and unfair. But they also agree that nothing can be done about it until somebody manages to convince the general public that a state income tax would actually save them money and improve the state’s budget at the same time. Gary Locke has already said that he’s not going to propose an income tax, and no one in the legislature will do it either, so the results of this panel are meaningless. No doubt we’ll hear complaints about the panel itself being a waste of taxpayers money any time now. If only someone could convince Tim Eyeman that the tax would save him even more on his car tabs…

More Semantics

Timothy Noah (in defense of Al Gore) and Andrew Sullivan are bickering about the use of the term

Christopher Hitchens has made a couple of suggestions towards finding a word to replace the term

Watching your tax dollars at work watching you

Courtesy of the Department of Defense: not the scariest web site in the world, but certainly one of the most unsettling.

Andrew Sullivan links to the same story on Afghanistan that we did yesterday, but he only seems interested in beating that old, dead liberal horse with it: “See how wrong the liberals were about invading Afghanistan! See how grateful the people are!” Well, sure, Andrew, but try reading a little further down and getting to the real news in the story: without more international support, it’s likely that Afghanistan will fall apart again, and though that might still be better than life under the Taliban, a chaotic Afhganistan will continue to serve as a hiding place for terrorists. The only sure way to combat terrorism is to create stable, open government in as much of the world as possible. That’s why, though I support the overthrow of Saddam by whatever means become necessary, there’s also the need for a thorough follow-up and a committment of whatever aid and support is required to create a stable, democratically based (or at least leaning) government. To do anything else would be immoral. The real story in Afghanistan is how we, and the rest of the world, aren’t doing what’s necessary to guarantee that its people won’t come under the control of terrorists, or their supporters, yet again.

Afghanistan is a disaster waiting to happen again, and no one seems to be doing anything abut it.