Brooks explains it all

David Brooks writes:

Apparently, as it turns out, there is a bigger threat to world peace than the use of poison gas in Syria; even bigger than the Islamic atomic bomb that will be ready in three weeks from whenever Ayatollah Khamenei gives the word, which could be any second. It's the fact of Islam being divided into different sects, with different beliefs, and adherents that really don't like each other very much, killing each other.  This could get big! [jump]

Image from bigfreefun.

Cheap shots: Sometimes a cigar is only a cigar, sometimes it's not

Robert Dudley dancing the lavolta with Queen Elizabeth I. Possibly by Marcus Gheeraerts, ca. 1580. Wikipedia.

Armed and dangerous:

A state senator who is advocating for arming teachers in the aftermath of the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, accidentally shot a teacher with a rubber bullet during a training course, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reports. [jump]

Bias confirmation

Hard to imagine myself saying this about a New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief, but I really like Jodi Rudoren; she doesn't particularly deviate from any party line that you might suspect her of hewing to, but she's just a good writer, with a curiosity about people tangential to the beat, and surprising insights:

The retired men who parse politics on Monday mornings over cappuccino at the Hadar Mall here have watched all manner of war, uprisings and chaos. To them, the chemical attacks to the north in Syria and the military crackdown against Islamists to the south in Egypt are almost comforting, a confirmation of a common Israeli view that their Arab neighbors are unready for democracy, while also offering a diversion from their own conflict with the Palestinians.

What a beautiful way of capturing the conservatism of simple people in a quick brushstroke—the emotional frame that confirmation bias hangs on. What people long for isn't peace and goodwill, they want to know that we are still the good guys and the other guys are still bad.

Journalistic scruples compel her to say "almost comforting" but I would lose the "almost".

Funny—I'm looking for a picture of old guys in a Jerusalem coffee shop and this is the only good one I can find. Baumers Abroad, 2011. Anyway Rudoren would be talking to them too, for a different article.

Wormtongues

A bag of nightcrawlers unearthed by BooMan: A letter by self-denominated "foreign policy experts from across the ideological spectrum" running in the Weekly Standard urging the president

not only to ensure that Assad’s chemical weapons no longer threaten America, our allies in the region or the Syrian people, but also to deter or destroy the Assad regime’s airpower and other conventional military means of committing atrocities against civilian non-combatants.  At the same [jump]

Royal Selangor Wormtongue wine flute.

Down, Wisconsin!

Best I could do. All the pictures of black leather briefs were short ones, and mostly on male models. Via Magnificent Bastard.

Is this by Howard Kurtz (via Media Matters) the worst-written sentence you have ever seen?

Her new profile picture, in a Swiss-cheese bra that leaves little to the imagination and long black leather sleeves and briefs, is so revealing that it drew a torrent of breathless comments.

Something about those hyperventilating comment torrents has an almost Lovecraftian doomed majesty. Kurtz leaves a lot to the imagination. Now how do I turn it off?

Update
Beautiful, by the way, from Erik Wemple:

Kurtz himself refrains from alleging that the pictures go too far. He merely asks if they go too far, which means he thinks they go too far, but by asking the question, he gets to claim that hallowed middle ground he’s spent his entire career clinging to.

Reminds me, if I may say so, of me on Kurtz & Milbank. 

David Brooks's secret message

Protest marcher. Prophet Amos, from Pueblo de Dios Lutheran Church.

The Yale Professor of Humility, with that uncanny ability he has to root out little-known facts, has learned that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was a well-regarded Christian theologian. And not only that:

It’s also worth remembering that while today we take marches and protests for granted, the tactics of the civil rights movement had deep philosophical and religious roots.

Moreover, King and A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin were not liberals.

The leaders rejected the soft meliorism of more secular activists, the idea that significant progress could be made through consciousness-raising and education campaigns, through consensus and gradual reform. As Rustin put it, African-American leaders like him looked upon “the middle-class idea of long-term educational and cultural changes with fear and mistrust.”

The conclusion is obvious: indeed, so obvious that Brooks leaves it unstated, with his usual sophistication (also known as chronic dishonesty): King was a conservative!

Just like Tolstoy and Gandhi. And St. Francis. And the prophet Amos.

Or maybe just old Mr. Buckley, who had such a high regard for Dr. King, and set the standard for explaining his thinking by distorting what he said.

Heritage tomatoes

2010 Vancouver Tomato Festival.

Heritage Foundation boldly steps forward to correct some PolitiFiction:

• PolitiFact’s objections to the characterization of Obamacare as government-centered medicine ignore conclusions from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office that a mandate for all Americans to purchase health insurance, like that in Obamacare, is “an unprecedented form of federal action,” or analysis from the non-partisan Congressional Research Service that “the precise number of new entities that will ultimately be created” by Obamacare is “currently unknowable.”

Heritage is correct on this one: PolitiFact should have described the phrase "government-centered medicine" as inherently meaningless.  What, if it referred to anything, would it refer to? The terms "doctor-centered" and "patient-centered" refer to categories from the analysis of videoed consultations showing the behavior of doctors and patients respectively (in the context of research on Britain's National Health Service!). You might as well complain about referee-centered soccer (one can and must complain about the conduct of the referee but we don't expect the officials to bow out and allow the market to decide who fouled). Anyone who has studied logic knows that a nonsensical statement is neither false nor true, an option the Truth-O-Meter fails to provide for.

• PolitiFact’s objections to the characterization of Obamacare putting bureaucrats before doctors and patients ignore Obamacare’s expansion of pay-for-performance programs—which will reduce Medicare payments to doctors who do not follow guidelines defined by federal bureaucrats—as well as the board of 15 unelected officials created by Obamacare who will make rulings reducing Medicare spending.

Only seconds ago government was in the middle, now it's in first place! But there's a mixed-metaphor hazard just ahead... Really, the point seems to be that it's wrong to ask physicians to be accountable. That's only for working-class folk like teachers.

• PolitiFact’s objections to talk that Obamacare relies on reduced Medicare spending to fund its coverage expansions ignore comments from Nancy Pelosi—that firebrand conservative—who admitted that Democrats “took half a trillion dollars out of Medicare in [Obamacare], the health care bill, already.”

Yes, when Pelosi shows up on CNBC it's like the Pope speaking ex cathedra: it makes her infallible. Then again maybe you could have looked at—sorry—Politifact.

Swift, but not swiftest

Good night, peeps.

@iboudreau @ArrogantDemon No she doesn't. http://t.co/WFIOF5u5Sb
— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) August 27, 2013

Emoprognosis: Will end in tears

Getting stoned before it was mainstream. Sorry, that's pretty cheap. Uncredited image (20th-c. Greek?) from some larcenous Christian's blog.

On Saturday came the stately March On or About Washington, the first of two commemorations of the 1963 March On Washington, an often moving ceremony, and a bizarre Internet storm around a series of Tweets from David Sirota, who wanted to tell us how Dr. Martin Luther King would have felt if he had been able, like Tom Sawyer, to attend the service, which quickly degenerated from dumb to dreadful as he stumbled into lecturing black people on the subject of what black people think.

You get the feeling that if MLK was around now and slammed a Dem POTUS like he did LBJ, much of the left would criticize him as an "emoprog"
— David Sirota (@davidsirota) August 24, 2013

Playing at the positives

Cute Finnish girl Pilar O'Flaherty and her equally adorable mom Baroness Olga von Augenstein from Ghana.

Watched by Mr. Pierce, so I don't have to:

DAVID BROOKS: Well, let me play at the positives, because I want to ask you something Congressman Labrador just said. We are still an amazingly talented country. You go to schools, you've got kids named Juan Hernandez Goldberg floating around there, mixtures of all these different ethnicities. We're really tolerant compared to other countries. And we still have these fantastic stories. I just had lunch with a woman named Katie who was from a not great family, she's homeless, spends part her time homeless, decides she's going to enlist in the navy, the enlistment officer says, "No, you shouldn't enlist in the navy, you should go to Annapolis." She graduates this year number one academically in her class, she gets a Rhodes Scholarship, she runs track, she's a Marine. You run across these stories all the time and they still are endemic to the way we live.

Jan van Eyck, Ghent Altarpiece:
 Angel musicians with positive organ, 15th
century. Wikimedia Commons.

Wow! Like my zayde used to say, only in America could a Jew be mayor of Dublin! Or could you become a track-star Marine at Annapolis (this turns out to be real—I had no idea the Marines didn't have their own academy—but why don't they, are they too working class?).

Only in America could The New York Times find an Italian named Jonathan Wajskol, a Brazilian named Carla Greeb, a Colombian called Alain de Beaufort, and a German called Xiaoning Wang who all decline to become US citizens because permanent residency is enough (though a couple of subjects relented so they could vote for Obama, sorry Brooksy).

It's because we're so tolerant, of the not-great and the part-time homeless. And that kind of thing is endemic, if not quite epidemic yet. What did Congressman Labrador just say? I have a banana in my ear.

Airborne elephant watch: Egypt is still there, over to the left

Photo by Gregory Colbert.

Did I tell you? Did I tell you? Not here, perhaps, but over at BooMan's place, where the elevated tone often inspires me to non-snark: The "Egyptian military" consists of more than one phenomenon. The generals, who gladly threw Mubarak's person under the bus when he was no longer able to rule, continue to espouse his ideology, which [jump]

Le monocle de mon oncle

Image by Heart-Eating Mermaid.

It's easy for people to hate the New York Times, but how many of you can drip with contempt for famed journalist of the Edwardian era Steven Erlanger, still miraculously alive and serving as the New York Times London bureau chief? Or get through a first paragraph, for that matter, without drifting into a dreamland populated by Proustian mustaches and monocles?

Yesterday Erlanger showed his American stuff by going to Paris in August, like nobody in history who has ever hoped to speak to a French person in a good mood, to [jump]

The Anti-Person Movement

Sunday morning spirituality:

Occurred to me listening to a beautifully done NPR story on the desire for death from the point of view of a hospice director: the "pro-life" movement in its coherent Roman Catholic form (opposing also death as a punishment for crime, as opposed to the incoherent redneck Protestant version which is only about punishing women) is really an anti-person movement, valuing the abstract property of "life itself" over the concrete living human.

Thus it doesn't just give preference to the fetus, an organism incapable of love or judgment hooked up to a natural feeding tube, over the woman carrying it; but also to the "livingness" of the person over the person him- or herself, regardless of whether it is of value to that person or not. The pro-life movement doesn't care how much you're suffering—it cares about whether God would be insulted by your making the decision for Him.

Boceto para la Muerte de San José. Francisco Goya, ca 1787. Wikipedia.

And it's of a piece with the great exception to the Catholic reverence for life, which is in the conduct of your "just war". Human life must take a back seat to something more abstract still, the lives of states (and states in turn should yield to the greatest corporate entity of the Church, the "mystical body"—i.e., not a real physical body—of Christ).

It's a coherent view, but it's wrong. And creepy. And informed not by charity, caritas, but contempt.

The Empire Strikes Out

That's Chris ("Count") Chocola joining in by holographone.

Looks like the wunderkind economics genius Paul Ryan (Ultramontane-WI) has put away the things of a child and left his old comrades the Young Guns in favor of a new pop culture exercise referred to as, believe it or not, the Jedi Council: meeting weekly in Jeb Hensarling's office with Tom Price, Jim Jordan, and more recently Steve Scalise of the Republican Study Committee. The boys claim to have arranged the parachute drop off the edge of Fiscal Bluff at the beginning of the year and they're currently trying to get a new show on stage. Good luck!

Tuffy the parachuting koala (who is not a bear). Photo by Anthony Thyssen.

Beware the poison Goldfarb...

A classic little bit of involuntary McCarthyism:

J Streeter, Alleged Sexual Harasser Resigns as San Diego Mayor http://t.co/LPBi05D5hu via @sharethis
— Michael Goldfarb (@thegoldfarb) August 23, 2013

Clearly J Street must be a front for fondlers, huh? Actually, as a congressman Bob Filner took considerably more money off Colorado's Iranian-American Community. Why not say "Anti-Ayatollah, alleged sexual harasser"?

Because Colorado's Iranian-American Community isn't worthy to be a target of the Free Beacon's, and Goldfarb's, hatred.

From EarthLife.

Cheap shots and medical advice

He's just asking on behalf of a friend:

.@DrPhil asks: "If a girl is drunk, is it OK to have sex with her?" then deletes the tweet later pic.twitter.com/1sVDMaghI3
— BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) August 20, 2013

Depends on what kind of drunk. If she's passed out, you should see a doctor. No, for yourself. Also, how does she feel about you when she's sober? If she thinks you're a faux-feminist rodeo clown, you might be Dr. Phil. [jump]

White House Fool Report: National conversation

White 89-year-old WW2 vet beaten to death by two black teens. No urgent TV specials. No national conversation. No O identifying with victim
— MATT DRUDGE (@DRUDGE) August 23, 2013

Fuck yeah, Mr. P! Matty's right. The man's been dead since Wednesday night, and you still haven't said a word! Why, when Trayvon Martin got himself killed you were out there with your national conversating inside of 18 months! What's wrong with you? You don't care when elderly people get killed? Or is it just elderly white people?

What I suggest is that you need to get out in front on this one, pronto, before it does you any more damage with the all-important Drudge community.  I won't tell you how to begin and end your speech, but somewhere it needs to contain some verbage like the following:

You know, folks, if I had a grandfather he might look a lot like Delbert Belton. In fact, back when I used to have grandfathers, one of them looked a lot like Delbert Belton; he was a white World War II vet, too, and came from the American heartland, but because we believed in our old people in those days, he was able to move to Hawaii and die of natural causes. Which is as it should be.

Too many people nowadays look at a man like Delbert Belton and say, uh-oh, there he goes with his World War II stories. Maybe I should cross to the other side of the street, or roll up the car window, or maybe just whip out my gun and shoot him.

But Delbert wasn't threatening to bore anybody. Delbert wasn't lurking in the dark wearing a hoodie or talking on a cell phone. He was just quietly collecting his Social Security which Al and Erskine have decided you young folks can't have because people insist on living on it instead of investing it in stocks. And is that why he died? 

Ladies and gentlemen, the thugs who killed him didn't even have a gun! And one of them was a non-Hispanic white guy! But that doesn't mean what they did was right.

So, as I say, we need to have a national conversation about this. We need to ask ourselves if we've valued black teenagers too much and given too little attention to our older white citizens, the ones who vote in every single election and buy the products advertised on CNN, thus keeping our nation going. Do it for Delbert, people. God bless.

It'll take courage, given the power of the special interests, the cronies, the anti–old white person lobby in our country. But you need to do the right thing.

Don't bring pain, bring pizza! Ossie Davis and Spike Lee, 1989.

Redline update

Pale Blue, Red Line. Mary Didoardo, 2011-12.

Just a quick note: I've noticed people have started writing it as one word: "Redline".

I've been baffled by the importance assigned by Obama in the first place and the rest of the world behind him to the question of whether the Syrian regime is or isn't using chemical weapons. Given the scale of the killing, what on earth difference could it make? Like "OK, I'll let you go this time, but don't you dare kill anybody whose name starts with an F."

My theory was the president had just meant to draw a line between reality and a decision he didn't want to go near, assuming Assad never would bring out the chemical weapons—that Assad and his thugs couldn't be as crazy as they have regrettably turned out to be.

But the use of chemical weapons has a real-world meaning that I've just understood for the first time, thanks to BBC (can't find the specific story online): because of treaty obligations, Russia cannot ignore it at the Security Council and it may make a resolution possible. FWIW.

Protest

Some even say Afghans are people of color too.
Farzana Wahidy/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

I promised notorious Zoroastrofascist Trita Parsi (right-wingers say he's an agent of Ayatollah Khamenei but the truth is even worse: plotting to restore the ancient Media, which is not the mainstream one) that I would register my protest against the mistreatment by UK authorities of David Miranda, who was detained and harrassed for nine hours at Heathrow Airport, London, en route between Berlin and Rio de Janeiro.

I had noted to Trita that what happened to Miranda was not exactly the same as what happened to Anna Politkovskaya, and he had replied, more or less, that [jump]

Monitor wizards

Crocodile Monitor Lizard, San Diego Zoo.

Peter Cunningham, former apple-cheeked something or other in the Department of Education under Arne Duncan, writes on the subject of Diane Ravitch:

Over the years, her criticism of the administration became more and more strident. It was increasingly clear that she was not interested in a genuine conversation with us but rather was interested in driving her anti-administration message, even if it meant resorting to tactics that are beneath someone of her stature: ad hominem attacks on [jump]