Politics
stcynic | August 22, 2004Is there anything more fun than watching Alan Keyes campaign? He's like a carnival barker with a PhD. He gets so fired up and on such a verbal roll that I imagine him waking up some mornings, looking at newspaper reports from the day before and saying, "I said THAT?". First, his excuse for why he's not a hypocrite for doing what he said he "deeply resented" when Hillary Clinton did it in 2000:
Well, I think I have addressed the issue of the very deep differences between what I am doing and Hillary Clinton. She used the state of New York as a platform for her own personal ambition.
I had no…
stcynic | August 22, 2004One of the truly valuable voices in the world on military issues belongs to David Hackworth. Hack is one of our most highly decorated military veterans, from his days as an underage merchant marine at the end of World War II through Korea, where he was the youngest captain in the Army, and Vietnam, where he was the Army's youngest colonel. In 1971, having spent 5 years in combat in Vietnam, Hack returned to the US and, as an active senior military officer, publicly told the truth about that war - that it was a war we could not win and it was time to get out. Since that time, he has been a war…
stcynic | August 19, 2004Is there anything more fun than watching Alan Keyes campaign? He's like a carnival barker with a PhD. He gets so fired up and on such a verbal roll that I imagine him waking up some mornings, looking at newspaper reports from the day before and saying, "I said THAT?". First, his excuse for why he's not a hypocrite for doing what he said he "deeply resented" when Hillary Clinton did it in 2000:
Well, I think I have addressed the issue of the very deep differences between what I am doing and Hillary Clinton. She used the state of New York as a platform for her own personal ambition.
I had no…
stcynic | August 15, 2004Found this interesting site that lists all of the presidential candidates, not just the major parties. There are a lot of parties out there I'd never heard of.
stcynic | August 6, 2004Bruce Walker of the inaccurately titled intellectualconservative.com has an amusing little essay up virtually begging conservatives to help convince Keyes to move to Illinois and run for the senate against Barack Obama. And you've just got to love this beginning:
Black conservatives are treated abominably by the Left. Dr. Thomas Sowell is the most brilliant social thinker and one of the best writers alive today. Where are his Nobel prizes?
Um, Bruce....what would you like him to get the Nobel prize for? Sowell is an economist, so he might be qualify for the Nobel Prize in Economics, but only…
stcynic | August 5, 2004In 1995, Alan Keyes said this of the Republican party in a 1995 speech:
This Party was born on a clear commitment to principle. This Party was born of those who had the courage to stand before the American people and in the face of the threat of a greater division than we'll ever face, insist that we had to respect the principle that make us great, the principles that make us strong, the principles that make us free.
Time and time again, Keyes has cast himself as a man of character and principle, as opposed to those who sell out their principles for the sake of winning and gaining power. In a…
stcynic | July 30, 2004I'm curious to see how some of the folks whose views I respect are reacting to the Democratic National Convention, so I'm doing a little roundup of some that I've read from other bloggers. First, Brian Leiter:
Let us put aside the chauvinistic masturbation that travels under the heading "patriotism"; the cheesey "feel-good" pop psychology about America's "can do" spirit; the implicit, and sometimes explicit, condescension to all other nations and all other peoples of the world; the romanticization of the last great immoral and criminal war by the United States--one also based on lies--in…
stcynic | July 19, 2004As everyone who reads this blog knows by now, I am both strongly libertarian on matters of individual freedom and strongly pro-gambling (though I only consider poker to be partially a gamble). Well here's an opportunity to support both of those views. Before the Congress right now there is a bill called the Unlawful Internet Gambling Funding Prohibition Act (H. 21 in the house and S. 627 in the Senate). It's a bill that is so ill-conceived that even without any consideration for individual rights at all, it would still be monumentally stupid.
This bill, which would require every U.S.…
stcynic | July 14, 2004Cara from Shut Up Already has an interesting post up about John McCain's sellout to George W. Bush after the vicious campaign that Bush ran against him in 2000. I tend not to post much on partisan politics because I just don't really care about either party, but I was wondering if I was the only one who remembered the incredibly unethical campaign tactics that Bush used against McCain in the last election and I'm glad to see someone else remembers.
Karl Rove, Bush's campaign manager and political adviser, is famous in political circles as the master of "push polling". Push polling is a…
tlambert | July 10, 2004 The cover story in the Spectrum section of the Sydney Morning Herald is Paul "Magic Water" Sheehan's review of Fahrenheit 9/11. Fahrenheit 9/11 isn't opening in Australia until July 29, and Sheehan appears not to have seen it. So how does he write the review? Easy---he cuts and pastes from reviews by other people. Here is Sheehan:
Perhaps the most egregious factual error is the bald and absurd claim that Iraq under Saddam had never attacked, killed or even threatened any American.
And here is Christopher Hitchen's review (he calls this an "…
stcynic | June 29, 2004Well it took less than a day to find out what any perceptive person knew anyway, that the turnover in power from the US to the interim Iraqi government is purely symbolic, a paper move only. Only the breathtakingly naive would view it as anything other than that, and here's a perfect example of why:
Iyad Akmush Kanum, 23, learnt the limits of sovereignty on Monday when US prosecutors refused to uphold an Iraqi judges' order acquitting him of attempted murder of coalition troops.
US prosecutors said that he was being returned to the controversial Abu Ghraib prison because under the Geneva…
stcynic | June 28, 2004When Arnold Schwarzenegger was running for governor of California, I spent a great deal of time laughing at the reaction of the conservative rabble to his campaign. It was hilarious watching so many of them swoon at the thought of Ahnold as a Republican governor, and even more so watching them defend him for the very same thing that they accused Clinton of (and rightfully so in both cases, I might add). Anyone with an IQ over room temperature would know that if you changed only a single thing about the situation - have Schwarzenegger declare as a Democrat instead of a Republican - and those…
stcynic | June 10, 2004I just went to my local grocery store to pick up a few things for home and there were 2 women outside the store canvassing for signatures on a petition. As I walked out of the store, one of them asked me if I would sign their petition to "restore voting rights to the people of Michigan." I said I wasn't aware that our voting rights in Michigan had been taken away. She said that the state government had passed a law to take away our right to vote on the issue of gambling casinos, which meant the state could put a casino anywhere they wanted and we wouldn't be able to stop it.
I said, "I have…
stcynic | June 6, 2004On my recent trip to Denver to see my brother's graduation ceremony, my father and I talked a lot of politics, as we always do when we're together. My father is a lifelong Republican who has, to my knowledge, never voted for anyone but a Republican in any race above the local level. Nonetheless, he told me that he thinks the Bush administration is the single most corrupt administration in history (pretty incredible, given the last one!) and that he will be voting for anyone but Bush this fall.
Probably the biggest reason why he thinks that is the Valerie Plame/Joseph Wilson affair. Joseph…
stcynic | June 3, 2004David Horowitz, who has made a career and likely a fortune as well out of his conversion from left-wing nutcase to right-wing nutcase (a giant step sideways, in my book), has a blog. It includes this little gem, about the death of Archibald Cox:
Archibald Cox died over the weekend. Cox was a spear-carrier for the Kennedys who led the only real political coup in the last half century when the Kennedy clan toppled Richard Nixon in the infamous Watergate episode. Eight of the 11 special prosecutors were men who had worked for the Kennedys. The agenda was to reverse the 1972 election and deliver…
stcynic | April 7, 2004The Baltimore Sun's article on the Bush administration's anti-pornography efforts begins with this:
Lam Nguyen's job is to sit for hours in a chilly, quiet room devoid of any color but gray and look at pornography. This job, which Nguyen does earnestly from 9 to 5, surrounded by a half-dozen other "computer forensic specialists" like him, has become the focal point of the Justice Department's operation to rid the world of porn.
And ends with this:
Nguyen, father of a 2-year-old girl, and his co-workers spend their days scouring the Internet for the most obscene material, following leads sent…
stcynic | March 9, 2004From Brian Caplan, the Libertarian Purity Test. I scored 35, which makes me solidly libertarian, but I tend to agree with Tim Sandefur (who scored 96, making him a hardcore libertarian) that the test tends to assume that only anarcho-capitalists are "true" libertarians.
Joe Carter is compiling the results from bloggers, as is Tim Lambert.
stcynic | March 7, 2004Ryan Boots, of the Soundfury blog, has decided to vent his spleen about gay marriage. Basically, he doesn't like it one bit. And typical of those who oppose gay marriage, his arguments against it run the gamut from the outright false to the profoundly silly. He begins by saying:
I am weary of having of having to defend the institution. Marriage existed before any of the institutions we know today were created.
I'm always amazed that people think that they're defending the institution of marriage by preventing some people from participating in that institution. If marriage is such a good thing…
stcynic | March 1, 2004Rusty from New Covenant has replied to my post on the religious right lowering its expectations, but more specifically to a comment I made at the end. I ended the post by saying, "The culture war isn't going well for the religious right. Another victory for true decency." Rusty responds:
True decency?
Why is it that Darwinists continue to hold on to ideas such as decency, morality, justice, and rights? Actually, what I should ask is: Why do inconsistent Darwinists continue to hold on to such ideas?
Let me say a couple of things. First, I hate the term "darwinist". I am no more a "darwinist"…
stcynic | February 29, 2004Interesting article in this morning's San Francisco Chronicle titled Culture war being reshaped; Conservatives lower expectations. It points out that in the debate over gay marriage, the religious right seems to have pretty much given up on stopping the trend toward civil unions for homosexual couples:
Conservative activist William Donohue, the president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, says he believes Bush's proposal for a constitutional amendment is a "cultural tipping point" that will restore a "culture of restraint and decency."
The ban will not prevent the…