Politics
stcynic | September 16, 2004Julian Sanchez has a post about the recent outing of Congressman David Dreier, and he approaches it from a more practical perspective. While saying that he doesn't really have a moral problem with it, he offers this analysis:
But I'm increasingly thinking it's a counterproductive strategy. First, Dreier has at least recently been one of a number of Republicans who've pushed back against a Federal Marriage Amendment; now seems and odd time to blindside him with this. But more generally, it's unclear what this is supposed to accomplish. Assume elected gay officials are not, by and large, self-…
stcynic | September 16, 2004The new classified National Intelligence Estimate on the situation in Iraq, according to sources in the government, is very pessimistic about the outcome of our policies in Iraq:
The estimate outlines three possibilities for Iraq through the end of 2005, with the worst case being developments that could lead to civil war, the officials said. The most favorable outcome described is an Iraq whose stability would remain tenuous in political, economic and security terms.
"There's a significant amount of pessimism," said one government official who has read the document, which runs about 50…
stcynic | September 15, 2004BlogActive, the blog that is busily outing conservative Congressmen who are privately gay while publicly anti-gay, has now sets its sights on David Dreier, the conservative Congressman from California. A few weeks ago, they outed Ed Shrock, a Congressman from Virginia with a nearly perfect score from the Christian Coalition, who is married and has kids but lived a secret gay life that included trolling the Washington DC gay phone chat lines. I have mixed feelings about this.
On the one hand, I loathe these men. They are the worst kind of hypocritical trash, voting against gay rights at every…
stcynic | September 15, 2004Jason Kuznicki declares:
The Libertarian Party is a badge of shame upon an otherwise reasonable branch of political thought.
I wish I could say he was wrong, but with the nomination of Michael Badnarik, there's not much of a retort at this point. Jason links to this article by R.W. Bradford in Liberty magazine that points out how Badnarik's website was quickly edited to remove some of his loonier ideas after he won the LP nomination. I got a peek at some of those positions before they were edited out, and believe me, they were whacko. I wrote about them here. Timothy Sandefur likewise has…
stcynic | September 10, 2004After reading all the blogs and watching the chat room screaming and yelling today, I'm just laughing about the absolute certainty on both sides that the Killian memos are either forgeries or not forgeries. The fact is that everyone is speculating at this time. If they are forged documents, that should be quite easy to tell for those who actually determine such things. CBS says they had them exhaustively authenticated, and at some point I'm sure the types of authentication that they did will be revealed. It's not too hard to surmise.
If the arguments about IBM selectrics not being able to…
stcynic | September 10, 2004Not satisfied with having his spokesperson lie for him, Dick Cheney has decided to jump into the fray and lie on his own behalf:
"I did not say if Kerry is elected, we will be hit by a terrorist attack," Cheney told the newspaper, according to a story prepared for Friday's editions. "Whoever is elected president has to anticipate more attacks. My point was the question before us is: Will we have the most effective policy in place to deal with that threat? George Bush will pursue a more effective policy than John Kerry."
No, Dick, you're lying again. Let's replay your actual words:
"It's…
stcynic | September 9, 2004My position on the whole Vietnam war/draft dodging issue is this: I don't begrudge anyone for trying to avoid service in that horribly misguided war except those who supported the war and refused to go and fight in it. For those who were against the war and avoided service, whether it was through conscientious objector status, going to Canada, getting deferments, faking health problems, or just plain burning their draft cards and refusing to go, thereby risking arrest, I admire their commitment to principle. For those who went and fought, regardless of how they felt about the legitimacy of…
stcynic | September 8, 2004First, Cheney comes out and says that if you vote for Kerry, the terrorists will attack us:
"It's absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on Nov. 2, we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we'll get hit again and we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States," Cheney told supporters at a town-hall meeting Tuesday.
Breathtaking, isn't it? If you vote for Kerry, the terrorists will hit us again and hit us even harder. Never mind that the last time they hit us, it was when Bush was in office. But…
stcynic | September 3, 2004From his speech three days ago:
Twenty years of votes can tell you much more about a man than 20 weeks of campaign rhetoric...For more than 20 years, on every one of the great issues of freedom and security, John Kerry has been more wrong, more weak and more wobbly than any other national figure...As a senator, he voted to weaken our military.
From his speech 3 years ago:
My job tonight is an easy one: to present to you one of this nation's authentic heroes, one of this party's best-known and greatest leaders - and a good friend...John has worked to strengthen our military, reform public…
stcynic | September 3, 2004I think it would be fun to make a side by side comparison of the empty rhetoric delivered by Bush and Kerry in their respective campaign speeches.
Now, because we have made the hard journey, we can see the valley below. Now, because we have faced challenges with resolve, we have historic goals within our reach and greatness in our future.
We will build a safer world and a more hopeful America, and nothing will hold us back.
But we're not finished. The journey isn't complete. The march isn't over. The promise isn't perfected. Tonight, we're setting out again. And together, we're going…
stcynic | September 3, 2004Like Jason Kuznicki, I didn't watch Bush's speech last night, but read it this morning. One of the charms of reading the speech in text is that you get to laugh knowing that such an inane speech was interrupted by applause approximately 14,873,994 times (the other advantage is that when you read one of Bush's speeches, as opposed to listening to it, the word "terrorist" has all three syllables in it). It would be absurdly easy to fisk the speech, take it apart claim by claim and show all the oversimplifications, lies by ommission and hypocrisies in it, and one could of course do it just as…
stcynic | September 2, 2004As a follow up to my previous post about Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert's insane comments about George Soros, you need to read Jack Shafer's column on Slate about both Hastert's initial statement and his utterly dishonest defense thereof. Soros wrote Hastert a letter demanding an apology and Hastert replied with this letter, packed with baldfaced lies.
His first lie is that he was referring not to "drug cartels" but to pro-legalization groups that Soros funds. Shafer nails this lie perfectly:
Hastert states in a Sept. 1 letter to Soros that he never referred to drug cartels on Fox News…
stcynic | August 31, 2004I think I've made it pretty clear that I loathe political conventions and campaigns in general, with their tired litany of empty language and meaningless cliches. Rarely does anyone even attempt to address a real issue in real terms. Today one of my favorite actors, Ron Silver, gave one of those brief little hoorah speeches at the Republican convention, and it was full of mostly tired cliches as usual, but there was one statement in it that stood out to me because it provides at least a glimpse of a real and larger issue that I think we must address one way or the other. He said:
Even though…
stcynic | August 31, 2004Just look at this transcript from Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace, an interview with Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert:
HASTERT: Well, you know, that doesn't do any good. You know, but look behind us at this convention. I remember when I was a kid watching my first convention in 1992, when both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party laid out their platform, laid out their philosophy, and that's what they followed.
Here in this campaign, quote, unquote, "reform," you take party power away from the party, you take the philosophical ideas away from the party, and give them to these…
stcynic | August 29, 2004And the flip flops just keep on coming. It seems that our Man of Principle has discovered that there are a lot of farms in Illinois and decided to backpeddle on some of his rhetoric from an earlier presidential campaign. The AP reports:
On his first campaign trip into Illinois farm country, Republican Senate candidate Alan Keyes said Thursday he no longer favors abolishing the U.S. Agriculture Department.
Keyes in 1996 had called the department an "expensive top-heavy bureaucracy that was not actually contributing to the good of the farmers." But he said Thursday things had changed under…
stcynic | August 26, 2004I'm curious to know if any of my readers has seen the new documentary Outfoxed, about the Fox News Network. I've found the Fox News phenomenon fascinating since I first came across the network unwittingly a couple years ago. I remember very clearly flipping channels on cable and coming across Bill O'Reilly as he was giving a "when we come back" teaser. I'd never seen the show, or the network that I could recall, but I had a vague recollection of O'Reilly as having hosted one of the syndicated tabloid TV shows. And here he was again, but instead of telling us to stick around to see an…
stcynic | August 24, 2004Once upon a time, I was an interdisciplinary social science undergrad. What does that mean? It means I spent 3 years studying political science, political philosophy, and history, then dropped out to become a stand up comic. Political scientists are a strange breed. In large part, they study voter behavior in all its aspects. What different types of voters are there? Obviously there is a range, from the highly committed partisan to the typical undecided voter. What motivates them, where they get the information that shapes their eventual choice of who to vote for, how coherent are their…
stcynic | August 24, 2004After the last entry, I feel like I should at least point out the few people who actually are making an effort to find the truth about statements made by the politicians. There are two websites that come immediately to mind, both of which I link to under news sources on my sidebar - Spinsanity and FactCheck.Org. Both sites are non-partisan and both of them take the ads and pronouncements and talking points of the two major party candidates and check them for accuracy.
Kerry's claim that Bush enacted a "far reaching ban on stem cell research"? Flat out lie.
The Swift Boat Vets for Truth?…
tlambert | August 23, 2004 Scott Campbell has a go at the Australian Historical Association, somehow managing to misread Cathie Clement's proposal that historians should not publicly attack their colleagues' integrity as a proposal that historians should not publicly disagree. Campbell has a fine old rant about how silly this idea is, even wondering "why anyone would think it's a good idea". Well, nobody actually thinks the straw man Campbell attacks is a good idea. Ken Parish has a nice exposition on why a rule like the one that Clement actually proposed would encourage civil debate.
Campbell then opines…
stcynic | August 23, 2004Nick Gillespie from Reason's Hit and Run blog has an interesting post about the hullaballoo surrounding John Kerry's military service and he finishes with this statement:
You've got to hand it to the Democrats. They enter a presidential race against a guy who clearly worked to evade active service in Vietnam and manage to nominate a multiply decorated vet whose service record somehow becomes the focus of attention. Yes, there is an orchestrated attempt by the GOP to throw questions onto Kerry (a process he's abetted with his changing Cambodian story, among other things). But if anybody is…