Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

On The Future Of Afghanistan

by tristero

In the comments to my recent post on Afghanistan, I wrote,

I have no idea what the Taliban’s future is, but I do know Afghanistan’s.

Violence bordering on sheer anarchy. Religious extremism. The oppression of women. Heartbreakingly-deep poverty.

In response, commenter gilpead wrote:

To paraphrase:

They’re a bunch of wogs who are, due to their backwardness, doomed to a future of misery. Afghanistan can never, ever join the community of nations because the country as a whole is a cesspool of violence and oppression and the poor savages are incapable of ever changing the way things are done”

I’ve decided to respond to this rather than ignore it and to respond in a serious fashion. *

Dear gilpead,

I’m afraid your paraphrase of my remarks is not accurate, both in the details about my remarks or in the intent behind them.

I have never used the term “wog” in my life. In fact, I don’t even know what it means.

I do not believe Afghans are “backwards” and never said so. I have no idea what you mean by that.

I believe that the future for Afghanistan is miserable, the future being defined as “over the next five years.” That is a realistic assessment based upon the instability of the present situation and the lack of a serious commitment by the US and the international community to assist the Afghans in overcoming very real, and very serious problems. No one can predict with any degree of accuracy where Afghanistan will be much beyond five years, but if you insist, I would side with those who feel that over the next ten years, the obstacles will make it excessively difficult for there to be much improvement over the present, and with tremendous potential for things to get a lot worse.

Afghanistan can never “join” the community of nations, because it already is a part of that community. The question is whether Afghanistan can join the community of nations which offers its citizens a life free of warlords, fundamentalism, chronic terrorism, and gut-wrenching poverty. Given the lack of interest on the part of other nations, including the US, to help in a truly serious way, the answer is “not very likely.” To hope that Afghanistan can pull itself up by its own bootstraps is to hope for the impossible. They need help. And they are not getting anywhere near enough.

Yes, the country (except within the circle of safety created by Karzai’s bodyguards) is rife with oppression and violence. I reject the phrase “as a whole” because it too vague, if not meaningless. I’m sure there are plenty of places that have not been scarred by violence. The same is true of Iraq. And Sierra Leone. The problem is that there is far more violence and oppression within Afghanistan’s borders than is compatible, in many, many places, with a minimum sense of safety.

I don’t know what you mean by the term “poor savages.” I have no idea what you’re talking about because I neither use such language or understand why anyone would.

Again, the Afghans require the determined, and sensible, longtime assistance of other nations to help rebuild their country. Without it, the situation will remain catastrophic and get worse. It is nothing in “the character of the Afghan people” that compels this. A United States in as bad a shape as Afghanistan would require an equal amount of help.

I have no idea what you mean by a phrase as vague and crude as “changing the way things are done.” A country is not a machine. Nor, as the world once again has learned, can any country be compelled into democracy by invasion, conquest, or coercion EXCEPT under very specific circumstances which were not the circumstances in either Iran or Iraq pre-invasion. For details, go to ceip.org and search for articles on nation-building, democracy after invasion, and the like.

LIke any sane human being, the Taliban and their ideas disgust me. But I fail to see where overthrowing the Taliban to replace it with anarchy, violence, poverty and slaughter that can -and will -be blamed directly on the United States is any improvement. The victims of the horrors may be slightly different, but the intensity, even if slightly lessened, will be laid at your feet, and mine.

Afghanistan fascinates me – the people, the culture, the architecture and music, and the geology. I would love to visit someday but I’m afraid I’ll never get there. That’s merely a personal disappointment, but the tragedy is that the greatness of Afghanistan has been so beaten up and battered that without serious, competent, help – which the Bush administration has proved over and over it is simply incapable of providing – that greatness will be beyond serious recovery for several generations or longer.

One last comment. I assume you will take what I’ve written here, caricature it, and proceed to refute the caricature. Doing so is your prerogative. Until George W. Bush, however, people who lived their lives within a cartoon reality usually didn’t hold places of serious influence within the US government. Sure, Cheney and Rumsfeld were paid with my tax dollars at an earlier time, but their boss knew better than to mistake their screwiest ideas as the products of rational deliberation on foreign policy.

To paraphrase, believe whatever you want. Just stay out of my government and take your hallucinating friends with you.

Love,

tristero

*A few words of explanation: I chose to respond not because I think gilpead had even an inkling of a good point, but because gilpead’s arguments are standard neo-conservative idealism of the sort Wolfowitz used to intimidate anyone who dared who talked reason to him or his fellows**, I thought it would be an interesting exercise to take those kinds of remarks seriously. Perhaps, some useful ways to debunk them might come out of it or better yet, spark someone else’s mind to come up with something far more effective.

Don’t get me wrong. I have no interest in “engaging” trolls, but I do have a lot of interest in developing arguments and rhetoric that can be used to refute the influential people from whom the trolls steal – men like Wolfowitz, Perle, Rumsfeld, Kristol, HItchens and even Packer (should he fall prey once again to the temptations of his narcissistic, naive idealism).

**Wolfowitz at Georgetown University October 31, 2003::

“We hate your policies. We are tired of being feared and hated by the world,” Ruthie Coffman (SFS201906) said, also calling Wolfowitz’s policies “deplorable.”

The killing of innocents is not the solution but rather the problem,” she said.

“I would infer that you would be happier if Saddam Hussein were still in power,” Wolfowitz responded.”War is ugly,” he said, “but the alternative is far worse.”

Afghanistan

by tristero

It seems that when the Taliban announced there would be “a new offensive this year,” they meant it:

Taliban militants launched a rare attack on a coalition base in southern Afghanistan Wednesday, killing an American and a Canadian soldier and sparking fierce U.S.-led retaliation that left 32 insurgents dead in the bloodiest fighting in months.

The attack came a day after at least 10 people were killed in two separate roadside bombings and reflected a growing intensity of militant assaults after the Taliban warned of a renewed offensive this year.

”Over the last five or six weeks there have been various proven attacks mainly at night by the Taliban on that base, but I think it is fair to say this is the largest we have seen thus far,” British spokesman Col. Chris Vernon told reporters in Kandahar.

The battle began hours after Taliban insurgents ambushed an Afghan supply convoy as it returned to the remote forward operating base late Tuesday, killing eight Afghan soldiers, Vernon said.

Odds and Ends

by tristero

Many of these come via the wonderful Cursor

Ken Mehlman thinks Republican candidates should align themselves with Bush. I agree. That way it will be that much easier to brand the entire Republican party “incompetent.”

No question about it: Scalia is losing it. First he had the lack of class to write a letter of complaint to the Boston Herald for reporting his rude gesture. And he wrote in part:

From watching too many episodes of the Sopranos, your staff seems to have acquired the belief that any Sicilian gesture is obscene – especially when made by an ‘Italian jurist.’ (I am, by the way, an American jurist.)”

In fact, the article called him an “Italian-American jurist.” [Scroll down. Original available only to susbcribers]Unfortunately for the country, his jurisprudence is just as sloppy and immature as his correspondence. [UPDATE: A commenter disputes my assertion that Scalia is sloppy (but not that he’s immature) because the Web version of the article reads as Scalia describes. In comments, at 3.30.06 2:37 am, I respond by examining Scalia’s letter in the light of this discrepancy. I argue that if we assume Scalia read only the online version, then a different part of Scalia’s letter is sloppy.]

[Update: Atrios posted the Boston Herald photograph of Scalia flipping the bird at the camera. When you look at it, remember: You are looking at a Supreme Court Justice. In a few moments, and while still in church, he will say, “Fuck you.”]

Does anyone other than your humble blogger find the headline “Brain drain hits Homeland Security” incredibly funny, in a “I-have-to-laugh-or-I’d-have-to-cry” kind of way?

Howard Kaloogian, he who can’t (or his staff who can’t), tell the difference between Baghdad and an Istanbul suburb, is quite an asshole.

Want to guess who is responsible for all the violence in Iraq? Wrong! It’s not the Clintons! Well, not yet anyway. But it’s only a matter of time before some wingnut will say that in fact, had Clinton invaded Iraq when urged to by PNAC, then the utterly incompetent Bush wouldn’t have been forced to screw up so badly.

[Update: Scalia’s deployment of exaggeration and straw man in his letter looks like a possible geoffy. Amazing how often Scalia seems to do this.]

Live Symphony Recordings On iTunes

by tristero

I don’t know how many other orchestras or other music groups are doing this yet, but this is just a great idea that’s long overdue. Live New York Philharmonic performances of the last three Mozart symphonies on iTunes. Ten bucks for all three.

By the way, if you folks know of similar live concert offerings, drop a note into comments with a link and I’ll post the first 25 here. In the interest Let’s limit the list to live classical music and jazz. You know, things like live La Scala concerts, Cleveland Orchestra, broadcasts of Kronos, Anthony Braxton.

Update below

Jeffie Alert

by digby

Bush just pulled a honker of a Jeffie.

Asked about his relationship with Pootie-poot, he rambled on about how he thinks it’s important that he can talk to him face to face. Then he said:

“Some say we shouldn’t go to the G8. I disagree…”

Has anyone heard of this movement to withdraw from the G8? I’ve heard people say that we should purge the G8 of cheese eating surrender monkeys, but this is news to me.

In fact his entire commentary is one long jeffie about “some” who have isolationist tendencies and “some” who want to withdraw within our borders and some who don’t think others can govern themselves. He’s on a roll.

“I’ll be unabash-ed [yep, he pronounced it that way — very Shakespearean of him] about trying to work for more free societies. I believe that’s the calling of the 21st century. I MEANT WHAT I SAID, when I said in the 21st century the goal of the US should be to end tyranny!”

He was really wound up by that point, hunched all the way over the podium, red-faced, pointing his finger at the audience. You know, the hectoring, drunken father bit.

This was good:

“China has recently read the book on Mao.(???) It’s an amazing history of a couple of things, one of which was how fooled the world was — and how brutal the country was.”

Sounds like five years into his presidency Junior finally cracked a high school history book. Good for him, seeing as he has a degree in history from Yale.

But civics was never his strong point. Nor economics. Clearly, the 7th grade primers they gave him got his mind all confused ‘n stuff:

“One of the most pure forms of democracy is the marketplace, the demand causes something to happen. Excess demand causes prices to go up and vice versa and that stands in contrast to governments that set prices and try to control demand.”

Reminder: this is the most powerful man in the world. Can anyone still say it doesn’t matter if the president is intelligent?

Update: Oooops. Apparently “some” have said the US should boycot the G8 becuase of the charge that Russia gave US war plans to Saddam. My bad:

Sen. Edward Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat, said on ”Face The Nation” that if it turns out to be true, the United States should review its relationship with Russia and whether to attend the G8 summit in St. Petersburg this summer.

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Progress

by digby

On Fox this morning:

Bill Hemmer just back from Iraq showing off awsome butch pics of himself all dressed up in uniform and lookin’ hot, hot, hot. (The barbie doll who “interviewed” him introduced the segment with “you got to hang out with the marines!”)

Lots of good news over there. Lots. He ran some tape of an earlier story that went something like this:

We’re in a “cop-shop” outside Falluja. A year ago, they went out on patrol for three hours. Later it was one hour. Then seven minutes. Now they can’t get them to go out at all.

But then again, the building wasn’t even here a year ago, so there is progress.

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Update below

Coincidence I’m Sure

by digby

Garance Franke-Ruta would be breaking her new rule against linking to (presumed to be corrupt) pseedonymous bloggers like me if she linked to my post from last night on Ramesh Ponnuru’s “Party Of Death,” but I can certainly link to her post from this morning which makes exactly the same observation more than twelve hours later.

It’s always possible that a reader just happened to have made the same extremely obscure observation at roughly the same time I did. It can happen. Or it could be that the observant reader read my post and did not credit me when he or she sent it to Franke-Ruta. Normally I would assume the second and let it go at that. Unfortunately, I can’t help but wonder now if Franke-Ruta believes her new policy allows her not to credit pseeudonymous work, which would make her little better than Ben Domenech. Let’s hope that’s not the case.

Disclaimer: I haven’t been paid by any political entity to write that or anything else. Ever. And my real name is Spartacus.

Update: Franke-Ruta forwarded an e-mail containing the tip, which made no mention of my post. As I wrote, it is entirely possible that someone out there came up with that exact obscure observation at the same time. Nothing is impossible. It’s also, considering the time of the e-mail, possible that the person read my post and didn’t credit it. It happens all the time.

My point, however, is that those of us who are pseudonymous are naturally going to have to be vigilant about such things with people who have a blanket policy of refusing to link to us. Psuedonymous or not, I have to protect myself. When someone refuses on principle to link to me and then publishes items that could be attributed to my work, I can’t just automatically chalk that up to coincidence as I normally would.

Franke-Ruta didn’t much like having her integrity called into question on this and I can’t say I blame her. I’m not too crazy about having mine impugned either.

Update II: The e-mailer had not read my post. In fact, he e-mailed me the same tip although I had already written my piece and posted it moments before, which he did not see. As it happens I informed him of the Garance Franke-Ruta connection in a return post, at which point he tipped her to the information.

So, Garance Franke-Ruta is in the clear, as is her e-mailer who independently found the same item that I did. It’s not pleasant being so suspicious of someone whose work I’ve been following for years and who has never shown the least tendency toward corruption. I hate when that happens.

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The Neurobiology Of The Right

by tristero

Something is very, very wrong with the cognition of far too many people on the right. I’m beginning to think seriously it may be organic.

Are there any neurologists or neurobiologists amongst you, dear readers? If so, I’d be very grateful if you could explain what causes the utterly weird correlation between rightwing ideology, pathological lying and geographical incompetence. True, correlation doesn’t necessarily imply causation, but really people, this is strange. And this goes way beyond a stupid lie. Like they thought no one would notice all the Turkish in the signs? No, something is wrong with these people.

Besides, Kaloogian isn’t the only Republican and/or rightwingnut who doesn’t know where things are. Don’t ever ask Richard Perle for directions. He thinks the UN is “the chatterbox on the Hudson” when it’s clearly on the East River (at least it was the last time I checked; I suppose they could have picked up the offices and moved them crosstown…). And Jeanne Pirro mislaid Pennsylvania. Then, of course, there’s Dan Quayle thrilled to be in “the great state of Chicago.” As for Bush’s awful ignorance of geography – remember the Grecians? – don’t get me started. Whoops! Hold on, wait a minute, wait a minute…A terrible thought.

Could it be – my God, it could! Could it be that the reason Bush invaded Iraq was simply because of an organic disorder that left him so geographically challenged he couldn’t distinguish it from Iran? “Iran, Iraq – there’s a difference? Don’t bother me with details. Just invade them, fer Pete’s sakes.”

And with that utterly awful thought rattling through our minds, consider this. Let’s agree, just for the sake, of argument, with Ambrose Bierce that “war is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.” Now if America is being run by people organically incapable of understanding geography… Oh. My. God… Truly scary.

So, to all you neurobiologists out there, riddle me this: assuming it’s organic, where is the problem located? Left brain? Right brain? Is it in the hippocampus (love that word)? Is it genetic? A virus? Do Republican nervous systems use Crisco oil instead of norepinephrine (another fave)? What? We need answers and fast:

What kind of anomaly could cause the unique cluster of symptoms – lying, hostile impulsivity, excessive religiosity, narcissistic delusions of exceptionalism, compulsive anti-social behavior including deliberate law-breaking and fraud, etc, etc, AND geographic incompetence – that characterize Repubican-Neuro-Cerebral syndrome or RNC-s?

[Note to rightwingers: I realize that your powers of comprehension lie closer to those of a hamster than to most of the world human community, so let me make it clear that the above is satire and not serious. Oh, if only your problem was merely organic! How easy it would be to understand and sympathize. And to treat! Doctors could create a tiny little pill that could keep you grounded in consensual reality for at least a few minutes a week. My goodness, a Republican with a mere three minutes of accurate perception a week! How much safer the world would be.

But that’s not possible. Your problems are, to use the jargon, characterological as much as they are physcial. Prognosis: negative.

I…sob…pity you.]

[Update: Typos fixed.]
[Update: Link To TPM’s “Busted!” post added.]

Misty Water Colored Memories

by digby

Here’s a little flashback to September 2001 when the country lost its mind and decided that the first thing we needed to do was throw away the constitution or we’d never catch the boogeyman. You can’t blame it all on Bush. He had plenty of help:

Big Brother No Longer So Scary

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 19, 2001; 9:30 AM

The clash was all but inevitable.

For decades, they have shadow-boxed their way through all manner of policy disputes, the champions of more aggressive law enforcement and the guardians of civil liberties.

The FBI wants to wiretap more phones or intercept e-mail communications? Civil libertarians complain about the loss of privacy. One administration or another wants to pare down the rights of accused criminals, junk Miranda warnings or allow the use of improperly seized evidence? The ACLU-types attack the proposals as unconstitutional. The battles are fought in Congress, in the Supreme Court, in the court of public opinion.

Sometimes the reformers have the upper hand, such as when the CIA runs amok and public sentiment supports new restrictions. Sometimes the prosecutors get their way, such as when there’s a public clamor for a crackdown on lawlessness.

From the moment terrorists attacked New York and Washington, it was clear that this age-old battle would be waged on a global scale. And there’s little question that momentum is on the side of those who want spies and investigators to have a stronger hand to hunt down those who are, or might be, involved in terror.

In short, Big Brother may no longer have such a menacing image. And the White House, not surprisingly, is seizing the moment.

Yes they did. I’m sure the government hasn’t been spying on Kurtz, though. But then they don’t need to. He’s already so far in the tank he’s probably spying on himself.

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Party Of Hacks

by digby

I think it’s awfully nice of Jane to offer her hand in friendship to conservative writer Ramesh Ponnuru, don’t you? Clearly this upcoming book tour is going to be very difficult for him, what with all the questions about his sleazy rightwing publisher and the 24 year old plagiarist editor they assigned him. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.

There is no word on whether Lil’ Benji Domenech is still editing away over at Regnery publishing, but it won’t make much difference. He’s just one of many GOP operatives given sinecures in the myriad conservative front groups out there. There’s always more where that came from.

But there’s no doubt that Regnery holds a special place in the organization. From Nicholas Confessore’s great article in TAP:

Regnery Publishing’s right-leaning corporate philosophy actually goes back to 1947, when the late Henry Regnery, Sr., set out to publish “good books,” as he wrote in the company’s first catalogue, “wherever we find them.” Works by Regnery’s friends among the nascent conservative intelligentsia soon followed, including Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind, William F. Buckley, Jr.’s God and Man at Yale, Whittaker Chambers’s Witness, and Barry Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative. Henry Regnery’s son, Alfred Regnery, who took over in 1986 and moved the company to Washington, D.C., has likewise been both a friend to and publisher of conservative authors. After stints in law school (where he roomed with American Conservative Union Chairman David Keene) and as college director of Young Americans for Freedom, Alfred Regnery was appointed head of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention by Ronald Reagan in 1983. While there, as reported by Murray Waas in The New Republic, he helped run Edwin Meese’s ill-fated President’s Commission on Pornography; disbursed generous grants to Jerry Falwell’s Liberty College, Meese pal George Nicholson, and professional antifeminist Phyllis Schlafly; authored, with then-Assistant Secretary of Education Gary Bauer, a much-ridiculed report called “Chaos in the Public Schools”; and in general cultivated an updated version of his father’s network of friends.

But by the time Alfred Regnery took over the family business, the firm had slipped into semi-dormancy. Regnery Publishing’s 1993 purchase by newsletter magnate Tom Phillips woke it up. Phillips, one of the Republican National Committee’s “Team 100” and a board member of the Claremont Institute, lavished both money and attention on his new acquisition. Leaving Alfred Regnery at the helm, Phillips folded the company into his Eagle Publishing division, an overtly political enterprise with a distinguished stable of conservative media: Human Events, a 56-year-old,ultra-right weekly newspaper; the Evans-Novak Political Report; the 75,000-member Conservative Book Club (founded in 1964 as “America was walking down Lyndon Johnson’s path to a socialist ‘Great Society'”); and a similar operation called the Christian Family Book Club. But perhaps most significant–given the central role direct mail has played in the conservative resurgence of recent decades–is Eagle’s list brokerage operation, which rents out Eagle’s own customer lists and those of organizations like Newt Gingrich’s GOPAC, Empower America, the Western Journalism Center, and the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation, not to mention Pat Buchanan’s American Cause and the Steve Forbes for President campaign.

By the time Phillips Publishing spun off Eagle last July, an entirely new entity had emerged: a company that treats publishing less as a media enterprise than as a form of political activism. With a new, almost Gingrichian sensibility, Regnery’s titles have begun to reflect the particular ideological and policy concerns of foundation-funded, third-wave conservative thinkers. Believe that the American family is in its death throes? Read Maggie Gallagher’s The Abolition of Marriage: How We Destroy Lasting Love. Worried that American higher education is overrun by radical feminists and licentious left-wingers? Pick up the late George Roche’s The Fall of the Ivory Tower: Government Funding, Corruption, and the Bankrupting of American Higher Education, or David Horowitz’s The Heterodoxy Handbook: How to Survive the PC Campus. Believe that corrupt teachers’ unions are the bane of the American education system? Read G. Gregory Moo’s Power Grab: How the National Education Association is Betraying Our Children. If you suspect that the Walt Disney Corporation is out to lead children astray with Miramax films and “Gay Day” at Disney World, have a look at Disney: The Mouse Betrayed, by Peter and Rochelle Schweizer. And if you wonder whether more assault rifles equals less crime, imbibe the pithy wisdom of Wayne LaPierre’s Guns, Crime, and Freedom.

[…]

Since 1996, Regnery has published no less than eight presidential exposés: Roger Morris’s Partners in Power: The Clintons and Their America, Bill Gertz’s Betrayal: How the Clinton Administration Undermined American Security, Edward Timperlake and William C. Triplett’s Year of the Rat: How Bill Clinton Compromised U.S. Security for Chinese Cash, Ann Coulter’s High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard’s The Secret Life of Bill Clinton: The Unreported Stories, Gary Aldrich’s Unlimited Access: An FBI Agent Inside the Clinton White House, and R. Emmett Tyrrell’s The Impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton: A Political Docu-Drama and Boy Clinton: The Political Biography. To date, five of these books have made various best-seller lists.

For all intents and purposes, the eight are interchangeable–with each other and, stylistically, with most of the other political books in Regnery’s catalogue. Each posits a nebulous conspiracy centered around the Clinton White House, a murky stew that typically blends one or more of the following ingredients: shady banking and land deals loosely grouped under the “Whitewater” rubric; the murder–or induced suicide–of Vince Foster; Filegate and Travelgate; dalliances with prostitutes and nymphets; rampant drug use; treason via Chinese spies; and an Arkansas-based, Clinton-masterminded drug-smuggling outfit.

And yet these character assassins are considered mainstream and legitimate by the political establishment. I think we can we all see now why Lil’ Benji Domenech’s “credentials” as an “editor” are so absurd and why so many of us immediately understood him to be a cheap ideological shill for the Republican Party. Believe me, he didn’t get the job at the WaPo because he was a founder of Redstate. He got it because he worked for John Cornyn, National Review and Regnery publishing — all jobs that would have led someone with any sense of how modern politics operates to look, very, very, …. very carefully at his past work. These are not jobs that should have given anyone in mainstream journalism confidence in his abilities. It should have made them suspicious.

But I digress. Regnery is publishing Ramesh Ponnuru’s new book “The Party of Death” this next month. Check out what Amazon has to say about it. I’m sure you’ll find it compelling. Here’s a little taste:

Ponnuru’s shocking expose shows just how extreme the Party of Death has become as they seek to destroy every inconvenient life, demand fealty to their radical agenda, and punish anyone who defies them. But he also shows how the tide is turning, how the Party of Death can be defeated, and why its last victim might be the Democratic Party itself.

Ponnuru’s editor Lil’ Benji wrote similarly (there’s a surprise) on RedState not long ago:

Some still hope, legitimately or not: “There must be some common ground.” But there is none. No one can make that case any more, not with a straight face. We are past that point. The Party of Death won’t accept compromise, and neither will those who oppose the taking of innocent life.

That post entitled “Do not Mourn” is quite the diatribe. If I were Ramesh Ponnuru, I’d check it thoroughly. With Lil’ Benji’s proven proclivity for lifting others’ work, I might be concerned that while he was “editing” my book he may have “inadvertantly” absorbed some of my writings.

It would seem that both Domenech and Ponnuru are ardent believers in the sanctity of “life” however. (One wonders if they spent time together watching “the greatest pro-gun movie ever” where “they actually show the jackbooted communist thugs prying the guns from cold dead hands.“)

Now Ramesh, ever the “reasonable” conservative, claims that he never meant “The Party of Death” to apply to the Democratic party. He wrote on NRO recently:

Franke-Ruta mentions my forthcoming book The Party of Death, which she describes as a “book on Democrats.” The book does have quite a bit to say about the Democrats, and it’s tough on them. But the book is about more than that, and the title isn’t meant as a pejorative term for the Democrats. I explain, mostly in the introduction, what I mean and don’t mean by the phrase. I’m not saying this to complain about Franke-Ruta. It was nice of her to mention the book, and her assumption was an easy one to make, partly because the Amazon page on the book is a bit misleading. (I’ve tried to get Amazon to change it a few times.)

Thank goodness it isn’t a pejorative term for Democrats. That would be quite ugly. But it’s odd then that the cover that’s shown at the Regnery web site shows a book called: “The Party of Death: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life.” Is he describing some sort of social gathering where judges, Democrats and media all get together and “party?” Or does the phrase more logically describe The Democratic Party? Interestingly, there is an alternate book cover that shows “The Party of Death: The Assault on The Sanctity of Life.” Odd, don’t you think? Has Ponnuru had second thoughts about spending every day for months defending that slanderous, scurrilous title?

Of course, the one thing that hasn’t changed about the title is “The Party of Death” part and I think we can be fairly confident that he isn’t talking about a fun afternoon with balloons and a pony. Let’s hope he doesn’t persist with this line that it isn’t about the Democrats because he is insulting the intelligence of anyone over the age of ten. Even some mainstream pundits might find that hard to swallow.

And anyway, it takes some nerve calling the Democrats The Party Of Death when you support a party led by a man who said this:

From: “Devil May Care” by Tucker Carlson, Talk Magazine, September 1999, p. 106

“Bush’s brand of forthright tough-guy populism can be appealing, and it has played well in Texas. Yet occasionally there are flashes of meanness visible beneath it.

While driving back from the speech later that day, Bush mentions Karla Faye Tucker, a double murderer who was executed in Texas last year. In the weeks before the execution, Bush says, Bianca Jagger and a number of other protesters came to Austin to demand clemency for Tucker. ‘Did you meet with any of them?’ I ask.

Bush whips around and stares at me. ‘No, I didn’t meet with any of them,’ he snaps, as though I’ve just asked the dumbest, most offensive question ever posed. ‘I didn’t meet with Larry King either when he came down for it. I watched his interview with [Tucker], though. He asked her real difficult questions, like ‘What would you say to Governor Bush?’ ‘What was her answer?’ I wonder.

‘Please,’ Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, ‘don’t kill me.’

I must look shocked — ridiculing the pleas of a condemned prisoner who has since been executed seems odd and cruel, even for someone as militantly anticrime as Bush — because he immediately stops smirking.

Call me crazy but it seems to me that the man who personally (and casually) signed 157 death warrants and sent the nation to an unnecessary, bloody war of choice might just have a greater claim to lead a Party Of Death. Somehow all this fretting about blastocysts and spilled sperm just doesn’t have much resonance when you look at this:

I’ll be looking forward to many more posts about Ramesh Ponnuru and his sleazy publisher Regnery as he goes about his book tour over the next few months. I’m tired of this nonsense.

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