Something strikes me as truly weird about this story. See if you agree:
The Dyersburg Youth Minister accused of raping a 14 year old girl has resigned from his position as Youth Minister of Music at Springhill Baptist Church.
44 year old Timothy Byars submitted his resignation to the church’s pastor over the phone. Byars was released from jail in Knoxville Sunday November 19, 2006 on a $50,000 bond.
The teenage girl claims Byars raped her while she, Byars and three other young girls were attending a track meet in East Tennessee.
While the investigation continues in the case, Springhill Baptist Church Pastor, James Branscum says he and the church members will pray for Byars.
Police say Byars may have also raped another young girl in Nashville.
See what I mean? Pastor Branscum says he and his church members will pray for the accused rapist. And that is very Christian of them, I”m sure.
But I think they forgot someone else to pray for. Maybe two someone elses…
A 14-year-old girl said Coach Timothy Byars, 44, raped her while at a tournament over the weekend in East Tennessee.
Knoxville Police said the attack happened in a parking lot, as Byars, his two daughters, the victim and her older sister slept in his SUV before a track meet. The girl text messaged her parents after the attack happened.
Her parents flew to East Tennessee to get their daughter. Soon after, Knoxville Police arrested Byars for rape.
A 19-year-old also accused Byars of inappropriate behavior, and said he touched her inappropriately as she drove the team van through Nashville.
“It was not a situation of it occurring just for a second or two. She said the inappropriate contact occurred for a time as they were on I-40, we believe in Nashville,” Metro Police spokesperson Don Aaron said.
This little detail leaped out at me:
In Dyersburg, people found the allegations against the father of seven hard to believe.
Sounds like maybe we got one of those staunch, pious Quiverfull patriarchs the press has been fawning over recently.
A perverse question. Let’s say the girl was in fact raped and becomes pregnant. Do you think Byars could win if he sued to prevent an abortion? After all, the rightwing has been shrieking for years on the subject of the father’s rights in re: abortion.
Like I said, a perverse question, but it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if someday it happens, even if not in this case.
Atrios links to this post by Robert Reich in which he says that McCain wants higher troop levels in Iraq because it will raise morale. Ok.
But he also says something else that I think is important and have been meaning to discuss:
I think McCain knows Iraq is out of our hands – it’s disintegrating into civil war, and by 2008 will be a bloodbath. He also knows American troops will be withdrawn. The most important political fact he knows is he has to keep a big distance between himself and Bush in order to avoid being tainted by this horrifying failure. Arguing that we need more troops effectively covers his ass. It will allow him to say, “if the President did what I urged him to do, none of this would have happened.”
This is obviously his plan. But from what I’m reading there is likely to be a plan that will do exactly what McCain wants and if it’s implemented it’s going to screw him good.
The Pentagon’s closely guarded review of how to improve the situation in Iraq has outlined three basic options: Send in more troops, shrink the force but stay longer, or pull out, according to senior defense officials.
Insiders have dubbed the options “Go Big,” “Go Long” and “Go Home.” The group conducting the review is likely to recommend a combination of a small, short-term increase in U.S. troops and a long-term commitment to stepped-up training and advising of Iraqi forces, the officials said.
I do not want to see anybody sent into that meat grinder and I’m not sure they can do it. But if they do, it will stab St. John right in the back. His rationale for winning in 2008 hinges on his calling for more troops and the Bush administration not listening. (Whoever wins the Republican nomination in 08 must run against both Bush and the Democrats.)
McCain made a tactical error when he asked for a specific number recently. If they give him what he wants and it fails, which it will, his rabid support for the war becomes a huge liability:
Mr. McCain contends that the war in Iraq is worth fighting and is worth winning. He has said consistently from the start of the conflict that the only way to prevail is to send enough soldiers to do the job. His current proposal is to send 20,000 additional troops in hopes of bringing Baghdad and the restive western provinces under control.
The alternative, he said, is humiliation for the United States and disaster for Iraq.
He’s going to be left with no option but to call for even more escalation going into ’08 if they do this. I can’t help but wonder about the political implications. Perhaps it’s just a coincidence that the number is the same and that Abizaid famously said recently that the extra 20,000 weren’t necessary. If the Bush administration now “gives” McCain exactly what he’s asked for they are effectively passing off the war to him. McCain is positioning himself to be Lyndon Johnson in this thing without even becoming president.
I will confess something. About halfway through this brilliant, eloquent takedown of Bush’s remarks in Vietnam, my eyes teared up and I could barely continue. I remembered the horror of opening up Life Magazine, over 35 years ago now, I guess, that famous issue of photos of one week’s dead soldiers in Vietnam. You turned those pages of pictures with a combination of grief at the loss and fury at the sheer senselessness of it. Then my mind turned back to the rising death toll in Iraq. No matter how many times I’ve read about about the latest casualties, it still hits me in the gut, each and every time. And the same with the spotty coverage of the Iraqi dead, stories of the most horrific atrocities, all triggered by the lunatic orders of a sociopath who lied to his people, a people, terrorized by 9/11, who were all too willing to trust him. Atrocities for which all Americans, even those of us who devoted enormous effort to prevent the war, will be blamed by the communities Bush brutalized.
The tired question all of us have been asking for years now about America is, “Where’s the outrage?” Well, watch Olbermann, who can barely restrain himself. There’s the outrage.
I hope Olbermann’s comments spread like wildfire until every last person in this country hears them. Don’t miss this video.
Reading Digby’s recent post finally jogged my memory. All this talk about compulsory breeding being good for the race – the race being “Christians” these days – where had I heard that before?
General ‘Buck’ Turgidson: Doctor, you mentioned the ratio of ten women to each man. Now, wouldn’t that necessitate the abandonment of the so-called monogamous sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned?
Dr. Strangelove: Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious… service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature.
Ambassador de Sadesky: I must confess, you have an astonishingly good idea there, Doctor.
It’s a somewhat different solution to the problem than the quiverfulls, but the desired outcome is the same. And in this case, as the General points out, rather than forcing one woman to endure a lifetime of pregnancy, it is the man who would have to sacrifice the most, by giving up his monogamy.
It’s time, given the rise of islamofascistliberalvegetarian immigrant-type people, to have a serious, thoughtful discussion of the Dr.’s ideas. Not to be willing to do so just shows that liberals are truly small-minded and unwilling to entertain refreshingingly unusual ideas.
The price for being a Christian…. in Indonesia…and soon to be Malaysia (allegedly reported in the local daily news yesterday and today.)
Death for abandoning (lapsing) Muslims and for Christians who preach in Malay.
Indonesia. An Islamic democracy. Is Islam compatible with democracy? These pictures were forwarded to me from a friend who knows a Christian in Indonesia……I cannot reveal too much or I will jeopardize the lives of those that smuggled these pics out. I am running them beneath the fold as they are too graphic to run on the main page. I am running them so the world will know and see that Indonesians are NOT the friend of anyone who is not Muslim.
The problem, as commmenters point out, is that the pictures have been on the internet for years and they depict tribal and ethnic violence that is only peripherally related to religion. If you read the whole post she goes into a total hysterical meltdown right on the page. Repeating over and over again
****THESE ARE GRAPHIC ********VIOLENT PICS*******WARNING WARNING WARNING**********
and then this:
UPDATE: I will have more details on these pics shortly. There is enormous fear in those I communicate with. Will post soon
Finally today, she acknowledges that the pics are from the early 90’s (no explanation about the “smuggling” or the “enormous fear”) but finds new evidence of Christian beheadings and writes this:
So what follows are photos from the late 1990s before the US went into Afghanistan and Iraq. Here we have Christian girls beheaded in Indonesia late last year. And here we have more Christian girls beheaded last week with the promise of more. It’s the jihad.
[…]
These pictures depict the cruel, oppressive existence that non Muslims live under in Islamic countries. No matter how the left twists and squirms to rationalize, this is the ugly truth. And the barbarism continues before the US intervened and after.
Hoookay. It’s the jihad.
Her followers are certainly convinced:
Atrocities like these will be commonplace in Europe probably within the next five years, and certainly within the next ten. 2012 will be a watershed year.
Normally, this wouldn’t be worth mentioning — just another slightly deranged rightwing blogger, right? Dime a dozen. But Atlas conducts long interviews with people like John Bolton and Benjamin Netanyahu. Shouldn’t their security people be a little bit concerned about this?
A Republican-led legislative panel claims in a new report on illegal immigration that abortion is partly to blame because it is causing a shortage of American workers.
The report from the state House Special Committee on Immigration Reform also claims “liberal social welfare policies” have discouraged Americans from working and encouraged immigrants to cross the border illegally.
The statements about abortion, welfare policies and a recommendation to abolish income taxes in favor of sales taxes were inserted into the immigration report by the committee chairman, Rep. Ed Emery.
All six Democrats on the panel refused to sign the report. Some of them called the abortion assertion ridiculous and embarrassing.
“There’s a lot of editorial comment there that I couldn’t really stomach,” Rep. Trent Skaggs said Monday. “To be honest, I think it’s a little delusional.”
All 10 Republican committee members signed the report, though one of them, Rep. Billy Pat Wright, said Monday he didn’t recall it connecting abortion and illegal immigration.
Emery, who equates abortion to murder, defended the assertions.
“We hear a lot of arguments today that the reason that we can’t get serious about our borders is that we are desperate for all these workers,” Emery said. “You don’t have to think too long. If you kill 44 million of your potential workers, it’s not too surprising we would be desperate for workers.”
National Right to Life estimates there have been more than 47 million abortions since the Supreme Court established a woman’s right to abortion in its 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling. The immigration report estimates there are 80,000 fewer Missourians because of abortion, many of whom now would have been in a “highly productive age group for workers.”
As I wrote earlier, we have the DLC hiring crackpot sociologists to write articles about liberals outbreeding the conservative movement, David Brooks talking about “natalism,” Newsweek writing respectful articles about the Kooky Quiverfuls and now state legislatures connecting immigration to abortion and suggesting that the white women aren’t breeding enough. Anybody feeling the hot breath of a new conservative meme on their necks?
Good luck with that. Women are going to make their own choices and there is nothing these throwbacks can do about it. If some of them want to have 14 children it’s their right. Nobody’s going to stop them. (As long as they are white and married of course. Singles or women of color are just whores and parasites and must be stopped, the workforce be damned.) I have a feeling that this anti-birth control and brood-mare-for-Jesus thing isn’t going to catch fire.
I do have a good idea how these people can lead by example, however. Every woman who belongs to the forced childbirth movement should sign a contract agreeing to birth at least four snowflake babies and homeschool them. This way they could assure that each woman fulfills her patriotic duty by raising at least four children (more if she wants to pass on her own very special genes) and the nation will have a nice homegrown uneducated workforce to exploit with low wages and bad working conditions. They wouldn’t even have to fuck, which I’m sure would be a great relief for all concerned.
Oh, and in case anyone’s wondering, Ed Meese, one of the Horsenuts of the Apocalypse, explicitly says in his GQ interview that Roe is not the problem. It’s Griswald. I’m not sure why exactly, but recent wingnut “science” suggests that when females hang their “floozy-patch” out there for all to see, pick up strange men and get drunk on oxytocin they lose the capacity to love a good man. Or something.
Pandagon has been discussingthis issue in detail and has lots of info on what is obviously a new front for the forced childbirth movement.
In casting himself as the reluctant but critical-for-these-times candidate, the former history professor is looking back to 1860, and the wildfire support for Lincoln’s candidacy touched off by a series of speeches…. “I was fascinated by Holzer’s portrait of Lincoln spending three months at the Springfield state library, putting together the definitive argument about the Constitution, the Founding Fathers and slavery,” Gingrich says.
“He turns it into a 7,300-word speech – gives it once in New York, once in Rhode Island, once in Massachusetts, once in New Hampshire. Then he goes home. I was struck by the sheer courage of the self-definitional moment that said, ‘We are in real trouble, we need real leadership, and if that’s who you think we need, here’s my speech’,” Gingrich says, suggesting he intends to do the same thing.
So can we look forward to the 21st version of such immortal phrases as “the mystic chords of memory,” or “a house divided cannot stand,” or “the last best hope on earth?”
Well, Newt gives us a preview. When asked if he is running for president, Gingrich replied:
‘I’m going to tell you something, and whether or not it’s plausible given the world you come out of is your problem’ …. ‘I am not ‘running’ for president. I am seeking to create a movement to win the future by offering a series of solutions so compelling that if the American people say I have to be president, it will happen.’
What command of the language! What magnanimity of spirit! What perspective on his own ambitions!
Now if he’d only grow a beard, lose 250 pounds, buy those shoes with humongous soles teenage girls wear to make him 6’5″ – what else would he need? A brain and a heart, you say? Oh, don’t be snarky.
Sigh. It truly is amazing the slime that has access to the mainstream discourse these days.
(Btw, simply because Gingrich totally mangled Lincoln at Cooper Union, don’t prejudge the book. I read it when it came out and as I recall, it’s actually very good. )
Watching all these neocon rats racing to fling themselves off the sinking Republican ship is an amazing sight to see. On Blitzer’s show yesterday they were all over the place, blaming everyone but themselves for the disaster in Iraq.
Ken Adelman is heartbroken to find that the administration is dysfunctional and incompetent. David Frum just wishes the president had followed through on the words David Frum had put in his mouth. Michael Rubin throws Condi under the bus and then backs up over her:
ADELMAN: Well, I think, when you look at the record, Wolf, it’s a record that has a lot of mistakes. You can’t read a book without, you know, realizing that.
George Packer’s book, “The Assassin’s Gate,” Michael Gordon and Bernie Trainor’s book on “Cobra II,” Bob Woodward’s book on “State of Denial,” Tom Ricks’s book, “Fiasco” — they all have different episodes but the same sad, story.
And you have to ask yourself, how did this happen? And all them attempt, and all of them are serious works and all of them full of facts and figures and episodes. And to tell you the truth, it just breaks your heart.
BLITZER: Does it break your heart, David Frum, to see how this situation unfolded?
Because in the Vanity Fair quotes that were released — the whole article has not yet been published, but in the quotes — I’ll read one of them from you, and you’ll tell me if this is accurate: “I always believed, as a speechwriter that if you could persuade the president to commit himself to certain words, he would feel himself committed to the idea that underlay those words.”
And the big shock to me has been that, although the president said the words, he just did not absorb the ideas. And that is the root of, maybe, everything.
FRUM: Yes, that is an accurate quote.
BLITZER: It is accurate?
FRUM: Yes. And it reflects a lot of what I’ve been saying for the past year and a half.
When the president gives these speeches, every speech is the result of a battle for the president’s heart and mind, as has famously been said about the speech-making process.
So different people try to persuade the president to say different kinds of things. And he considers and deliberates. And George Bush committed himself to a series of propositions.
One, he was going to stop Iran and North Korea from acquiring these terrible weapons. And two, that in Iraq, he was going to put his trust in the future of Iraq in a democratic process.
Instead, what happened in Iraq, for example, was the United States became an occupying power almost immediately.
That even before the invasion of Iraq, the decision was made not to have any kind of an Iraqi face on the future government, on the next government of Iraq, because…
BLITZER: Was that Paul Bremer who made that decision, who was the provisional authority representative, the proconsul, as some people say he was? Or was that a decision made by Rumsfeld or Cheney?
FRUM: Paul Bremer was the result of it. But the reason there was a proconsul was because a decision was made not to have an Iraqi provisional government. And that came about because the administration fought itself to a standstill. I mean, there were people who — there were a number of Iraqis, each of whom had patrons in the administration.
BLITZER: A lot of people would say, that was, Michael Rubin, a huge blunder. You were there. You worked for Paul Bremer. Who came up with that idea of a U.S. military occupation as opposed to trying to let the Iraqis take charge?
RUBIN: Well, I’d second what David said, that that decision, Paul Bremer was the result of that decision. What there was was a debate within the administration about, you have the Iraqi opposition. You had, I believe it was seven key figures. And the question was whether to allow them to become a provisional government. They had already been self-selected through a number of conferences. Or whether there would be some sort of American presence first.
The real debate in Washington was whether we would have more influence before liberation or after liberation. And ultimately, it was the National Security Council, the national security adviser which made the decision to go with an American occupation presence.
BLITZER: That was Condoleezza Rice?
RUBIN: That was Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley.
BLITZER: The deputy national security adviser…
RUBIN: At the time, yes.
BLITZER: … who’s now the national security adviser. And Condoleezza Rice, of course, is the secretary of state now.
RUBIN: That was the compromise that came out of interagency debate, when again, as David said, the State Department, the Pentagon and the others fought themselves to a standstill.
BLITZER: And you think that was a blunder?
RUBIN: I do believe it is one the greatest blunders we have made. The Coalition Provisional Authority and Paul Bremer did a lot of good, but nothing they accomplished which was good couldn’t have been accomplished without an immediate transfer of sovereignty. And the fact that we labelled ourselves an occupying power, unlike in Bosnia, unlike in Kosovo and elsewhere, really put — it justified all the insurgent rhetoric against us. And it turned our allies from those creating a democracy into collaborators.
Frum and Rubin are both saying that they never backed an occupation but rather instead wanted to put “an iraqi” in charge of the country from the get. Apparently temporary viceroy Bremer was the compromise. Tim at Balloon Juice, seeing Richard Perle’s similar explanation in yesterdays WaPo, and concludes:
Arguing about Iraq often gets stuck on what exactly our original exit strategy was supposed to be. Rumsfeld clearly planned to get in and out rapidly, which can only mean that we intended to knock over the top tier of leadership and hand over the country to somebody. Who, exactly, is often the sticking point.
The top candidate was always Ahmad Chalabi. A serial fabricator, forger, convicted embezzler and the charismatic leader of a ragtag group of Iraqi exiles Chalabi clearly owned the hearts and minds of neoconservatives. Now that we know the rest of his story (no support inside Iraq, a likely double agent for Iran) the appeal to incredulity fallacy seems so tempting that even I want to write it off on the grounds of a basic faith in humanity. Nobody can be that dumb, etc. Sadly one cannot deny that the Chalabi handover makes more sense than any other explanation for the Pentagon’s prewar behavior. Handing Iraq over to one of Saddam’s liutenants seems improbable in light of the dewy-eyed humanitarianism displayed by early war supporters. Saddam had killed off homegrown opposition leaders and Ali al-Sistani wasn’t offered the job (too close to Iran). It would be Chalabi, or…who?
I have no problem saying they would have been that dumb. The neocons for all their brilliance have serious and fatal blindspots and one of them is a terrible, immature romanticicm. I can’t say whether the pentagon really went in with a light force because they were planning to do a quick handover to Chalabi (although it makes as much sense as anything else — and they did pay him more than $30 million.) I do know, however, that the starry eyed neocons believed that Chalabi was going to be the George Washington of Iraq. (It’s hard to believe now that they could be this absurdly naive, but they were.)
Chalabi was hailed in some circles, especially among the neocons at AEI, as the “George Washington of Iraq…” After the Republicans regained the White House in 2001, many of the neocons took top national-security jobs. Perle, the man closest to Chalabi, chose to stay on the outside (where he kept a lucrative lobbying practice). But Wolfowitz and Feith became, respectively, the No. 2 and No. 3 man at the Defense Department, and a former Wolfowitz aide, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, became the vice president’s chief of staff. Once the newcomers took over, the word went out that any disparaging observations about Chalabi or the INC were no longer appreciated. “The view was, ‘If you weren’t a total INC guy, then you’re on the wrong side’,” said a Pentagon official. “It was, ‘We’re not going to trash the INC anymore and Ahmad Chalabi is an Iraqi patriot who risked his life for his country’. ”
So maybe Rummy and Dick truly agreed with Perle and company that they could roll into Iraq, topple Saddam and quickly turn it over to their pal Ahmad and then build some nice, permanent air-conditioned bases in the middle of the desert. Within a year or so it would be just like Germany, only hotter and without the good beer.
From what Rubin says, Condi and Hadley were whispering in Junior’s other ear telling him that Chalabi was a bad choice. And Junior, being the braintrust he is, decided to split the difference and go in with Rummy and Dick’s light force but do Condi’s occupation — without any planning, of course, just the knowledge that his “gut” told him it was the right thing to do. (Oy — why didn’t they just consult Nancy Reagan’s astrologer?)
It’s possible. Sometimes it keeps me awake nights wondering what it would have been like to have a real president when all this came down — you know, one who had enough brains to sift all this advice in a coherent fashion and who had the experience and maturity to actually lead instead of flip a coin or read the pattern in the bottom of his morning frosted flakes for signs of what to do. If this doesn’t prove that it really does matter who’s in charge, I don’t know what will. This conservative committee of “grown-ups” fucked things up royally.
Meanwhile, just becaue the neocons are running for the exits doesn’t mean they don’t continue to be wrong about everything. It is their most distinguishing characteristic. Right now, however, their brand is very damaged so they are beginning to distance themselves from their “movement” in a most clumsy and amusing fashion:
BLITZER: Ken, I’ll start with you. The Iraq Study Group…I see ten very influential, prominent guys, but I don’t see one conservative, neoconservative, Ken Adelman. What do you make of that?
ADELMAN: Nothing, to tell you the truth. I’m not a neoconservative. I was always a conservative. While the neoconservatives, I guess, were Trotskyites in campaigning in some nefarious manner in 1964, I was campaigning for Barry Goldwater. So I think it doesn’t matter all that much. It’s an academic exercise. Because I am conservative and all that. But I think it’s a very good group, and I’m interested in what they have to say.
BLITZER: Are you concerned, though, about the membership of this Iraq study group, David Frum, given their histories, the so-called realist as opposed to the neoconservative, the idealist school of thought?
FRUM: I think it is — I’m with Ken. I’m not sure how helpful any of those terms are.
It’s certainly not helpful to David Frum and the rest of the neocons, is it?
But they aren’t going anywhere, not really. They are always wrong but they always find ways to rationalize their dizzy incompetence. And they truly do represent the intellectual wing of the conservative movement, such as it is. Without them, the Republican party would no longer have a foreign policy. Poppy and Jim Baker aren’t going to last much longer and Pat Buchanan is going to be tied up down at the border taking potshots at “Jose” for the forseeable future.
So, this is what we are going to be dealing with in right wing foreign policy from now on. Here’s Rubin again, spelling it all out:
BLITZER: To bring in the regional powers, including Iran and Syria and to start a dialogue. The Iraq study group of James Baker and Lee Hamilton, they’re already doing what Bush administration refuses to do. They’ve been meeting with high-ranking Iranian and Syrian officials.
RUBIN: Actually, the Bush administration doesn’t refuse to do it. On May 31st, Condoleezza Rice offered to have direct talks with Iran in the context…
BLITZER: But they laid out certain conditions?
RUBIN: The only condition was that Iran suspend uranium enrichment during the duration of the talks.
BLITZER: But Baker-Hamilton didn’t ask for that suspension.
RUBIN: But you know what? Four days later, Ayatollah Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, got up in response to Condoleezza Rice’s offer and said, why don’t you just admit that you’ve lost? Why don’t you just admit that you are weak and your razor is blunt?
That was Iran’s response.
Yes. It was quite the zinger, wasn’t it? Let’s nuke ’em back into the stone age.
Rubin and friends think that insults and bluster are real and that great nations should react in anger when some bombastic fool says something stupid. (But then, they always thought we should invade the Soviet Union because they were rude to the US too. Somebody forgot to tell them about the sticks and stones thing when they were kids.)
In this sense they’ve got an awful lot in common with al Qaeda — they both have an outsized sense of “pride” which is really insecurity. It’s not a good idea for the world’s most powerful nation to react to a street corner diss. We should set the agenda, not some blowhard who is trying to impress his followers.
It is a cosmic joke that we had a terrible combination of vain, hubristic neocons and a brand name in an empty flightsuit in charge when militant Islamic fundamentalism made its big play. These guys always lose their heads when somebody taunts them and they overreact. There’s a lesson in that somewhere.
A year from now, we could end up in the middle of a full-blown civil war costing a thousand American lives a month. We could end up taking sides in a shooting war against Turkey, a NATO ally. We could end up fighting off an armed invasion from Iran. We could end up on the receiving of an oil embargo led by Saudi Arabia. Who knows?
Possibly.
Or suddenly tomorrow, the scales could fall from al-Sadr’s eyes, and from Maliki’s, and from everyone else’s, and they would realize that after the horror of the Saddam years, it is simply crazy to fight amongst themselves for control of such a potentially wealthy country like Iraq when there are plenty of petro-dollars (or petro-euros) for everyone.
Or maybe tomorrow Osama bin Laden will get on tv and say, “Mein Gott, what a schmuck I’ve been. After deep study of Torah, and after discovering the joys of matzo ball soup, I’ve decided to convert and become a Lubavitcher. As for my ex-friend Ayman al-Zawahiri, the heretic! He’s renounced all religious belief and become Richard Dawkins personal physician and valet.”
Hey! Y’never know.
Let me put this another way, to make the point clear. I’ll ask, and answer, a rhetorical quesion or two.
Are any of Kevin’s scenarios even remotely plausible?
Yes, mathematically, they are. They could conceivably happen.
Are the scenarios I proposed even remotely plausible?
Yes, mathematically, they are. They could conceivably happen.
Are they of equal plausibility?
No, of course not. Kevin’s scenarios are far more likely than mine.
What is the approximate probability of one of Kevin’s scenarios happening? Of mine?
Roughly 10% to 65% for Kevin. As for mine, roughly .000000000000000001% to .00000000000001%.
Using everyday language, how would you best summarize these probabilities?
It”s somewhat possible, to likely, that one of Kevin’s scenarios may actually turn out to be an accurate prediction. As for you, tristero, it’s never ever gonna happen. Give it up.
How come so many people, including Kevin Drum but more importantly, far more influential people than he, literally thought something close to the exact opposite in 2002/03? How come people believed for even one second that positive outcomes to Bush/Iraq that could never possibly happen (do I really have to add “colloquially speaking” to qualify that assertion?) might happen? Or that a good outcome, however defined, had – at the very least – equal probability to all the tragic scenarios that were somewhat possible to likely?
Beats me. I will be spending the rest of my life trying to answer that question. Maybe someday I’ll learn the answer.
Old CW: First woman Speaker will be Rayburn redux. New CW: Botox bumbler blows first play.
This particular Mean Girlz theme didn’t spring from nowhere. It’s coming directly from Frank Luntz:
LUNTZ: I always use the line for Nancy Pelosi, “You get one shot at a facelift. If it doesn’t work the first time, let it go.”
This must have focused grouped well among their target wingnut pigs because, as I previously noted, Queenbee Dowd generously shared this one with the whole world today (before she went off on a sexist rant of her own):
Ted Olson, the former solicitor general and eloquent Republican lawyer who argued the Bush v. Gore case before the Supreme Court, was warming up the rabidly conservative Federalist Society crowd for John McCain with a few sexist cracks about Botox.
The new Congress could amuse itself, he said, by “searching for any sign of movement in Speaker Pelosi’s forehead.” The Senate, he added, would be entertained by “the expressionless, Pelosi-like forehead of Senator Clinton.”
I just have one question for these fine fellows who think this is appropriate: do they really want to start getting into discussions of looks? Because I don’t know who told them they looked like George Clooney and Brad Pitt but whoever it was was either drunk or blind.
This is very dangerous ground for these extremely plain looking middle aged men to be walking on. Dennis Miller ruined a comedy career doing conservative “humor” like this. (And perhaps Liddy Dole and Kay Bailey Hutchinson and Arnold Schwarzenegger should have a discrete talk with them before this gets out of hand and starts to blow back in some unfortunate directions.)
Luntz gave the game away. This kind of derisive babble is not simply a bunch of overgrown frat boys ‘n sorority girls disrespectfully talking about these women’s looks. It’s designed very specifically to trivialize them. It’s right out of the Spring 2000 Earth Tones catalogue.
And the Kewl Kidz, anxious as ever to prove their sophomoric Spite Girl bona-fides, are more than happy to “pass it on” as that snotty little CWitem proves.
Newsweek cleverly puts this disclaimer at the bottom:
The CW is not NEWSWEEK’s opinion, but an informal distillation of the ever-changing thinking of Beltway pundits and the chattering classes.
I don’t doubt it for a minute. And the fact that the RNC’s most famous focus grouper openly admits that he’s pushing the line is purely coincidence.
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