Conservatism ...

Comforting the comfortable, afflicting the afflicted, and speaking power to truth.

All You Need to Know About Sarah Palin

Her kids: Track, Bristol, Willow, Piper, Trig

Real traditional conservative, there.

Definitions

We need new definitions for "Liberal" and "Conservative". The traditional definitions don't seem to mean much; we have "liberals" working for balanced budgets and "conservatives" pushing overseas military interventions.

The best current definition I've heard is

• Liberals move wealth *down* the wealth pyramid.
• Conservatives move wealth *up* the wealth pyramid.

Interestingly enough, the "wealth pyramid" seems to be such a part of the common culture that there doesn't seem to be a readily available description of it. Someone should do a Wikipedia entry.

"The Original Maverick"

So McCain is billing himself as "the original maverick". Uhh ... no. A "maverick" is supposed to be independent. When has McCain ever voted against Georgie? On anything? I don't remember any. He has mildly criticized a couple of things that Georgie did, but when the time to vote came, he was right there. When he was there at all -- McCain has the worst attendance record in the Senate.

Besides, those of us Of A Certain Age know the real "original Maverick" -- as played by James Garner.

Does McCain really want to identify himself with a professional gambler with no fixed address and dubious morals? The pic shows Bret Maverick gambling, with a gun and money on the table. Maybe this really is the "maverick" that McCain thinks we want. Unfortunately, McCain lacks Bret Maverick's intelligence, charm, morals, and sense of humor.

The most important thing, of course, is that Bret Maverick is a fictional character. He always won (or at least survived) because the writers wrote the script that way. Those of us in what is laughingly called "the real world" don't have that advantage.

You Know Your Campaign Is In Trouble ...

... When you lose a battle of wits to Paris Hilton:

Video from Funny or Die

See you at the debates, bitches!

— Paris Hilton

Witness

liz_marcs went digging for some references to "the stuff everybody knows" and got a surprise. No, "everybody" doesn't know it. Not even professional historians. Things drop into the cracks; folks don't like to admit, even (or especially!) to themselves, things they've done in bad situations.

In this case, it's a holocaust story. There was a brothel at Auschwitz, with women taken from the camps. Supposedly, the Nazis stocked it only with non-Jewish women. liz_marcs' story was an account of a Jewish woman who was forced to work in the brothel. Seems simple enough; the inmates of the camps were mostly Jewish, so it would make sense to take the women that they already had. Apparently, the Nazis not having Jewish women in the brothels is a big point for some.

Anything touching the Holocaust is so loaded with emotion that it's hard to deal with. A few years back, I saw an emotional on-line argument about the Nazis' use of diesel engines to produce carbon monoxide to kill Jews. Diesel engines supposedly don't produce enough CO to be deadly. Nobody brought up the obvious answer (and No Way was I going to post anything to that site!) — whoever reported the diesel engines wasn't an automotive engineer. Unfortunately, anybody who suggested the tiniest change in the Official Story (ie, perhaps they were actually gasoline engines?) was accused of being a Holocaust denier. I can't figure out Holocaust deniers — where do they think the Jews (and Gypsies, etc.) went? Flying saucers? Pellucidar?

The first step in "the scientific method" is "Observe. Gather data. Measure." If we let "what we wished we did" replace "what really happened", we pollute our data. Any conclusion based on polluted data is questionable, at best. Stories like liz_marcs' are tiny pieces of the large and very ugly picture that is the Twentieth Century. Soon, there won't be any more Holocaust survivors or WWII veterans, and all we'll have is their stories. Yes, memory is unreliable, but it's all we have. Put together enough stories and hopefully, the inaccurate parts will cancel each other out. WWI, Nazism, Communism — we don't want to go through anything like that, ever again. We need know, first, just what did happen.

A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.

— Joseph Stalin

It's easy to gather statistics — This many dead, that many wounded, so many buildings destroyed. Stories like liz_marcs' drag us out of the realm of statistics and back into the realm of tragedy. Consider what was going through the mind of Interesująca Kobieta, who had plenty of food, plenty of soap and water, cosmetics and perfume, watching the thousands in the camp being marched off to their deaths, and knowing that she could rejoin them any time she didn't satisfy a Nazi officer. I simply can't imagine it. I'd think that this would be far worse torture than anything physical the Nazis could have done to her.

Jews ask themselves "What did we do wrong?"
And the answer that comes back is the most terrifying one possible:
"Nothing."

Speaking of Suckers ...

I've mentioned this film before; unfortunately, the link I used is dead. Fortunately, it's back. The title is Don't Be a Sucker. It was made by the War Department in 1947, and it's about as subtle as a jackboot in the face. It starts out like one of those embarrassingly awful "avoid card sharks and attractive women in bars" films, and morphs ...

It's still the best film on what we now call "diversity" I've ever seen. Go watch; it's about 17.5 minutes long.

Self Promoter

Wired magazine has a poll to find "The Greatest Self-Promoter of All Time". Most nominations went to familiar media figures like Donald Trump and Paris Hilton. I nominated Ahmed Chalabi, as the guy who talked the Bush administration into invading Iraq.

Self-promoter? Con man? Whatever.

"Put me in charge of Iraq" he said "The Iraqi people will acclaim me as their leader, and I will turn Iraq into a true paradise of Democracy, give the US all the military bases it wants, sell off Iraq's oil, and recognize Israel."

So we did. And we found that his description of his popularity was, ahem, a bit exaggerated. The vast majority of Iraqis had never heard of him, and those who had, hated his guts.

And here we are, five years later, with an unwinnable quagmire. Near as I can tell, there are no good answers.

According to Brigadier General Mark Scheid *, Donald Rumsfeld told his strategy group to stop working on plans for the Iraqi occupation -- and he'd fire anybody he caught working on them. Now, with the military, this means that somebody else is working on it, and that those particular people didn't have a "need to know". Nothing sinister, just standard OPSEC.

But we've never seen any evidence for any planning. Supposedly the State Department had been working on plans for occupying Iraq for years. They were trashcanned as "not suitable". All we saw was "everybody sit down and don't move until we have this figured out". They did, however, manage to guard the oil ministry. Figures.

And that lack of planning is, IMHO, the biggest war crime of the whole Iraq mess. There comes a point where stupidity becomes criminal, and this is 'way past that point.

There's an old saying that "you can't swindle an honest man." Your friendly average swindler plays on one of the great human desires -- the desire to get in on the inside of a crooked game. Chalabi told the Administration exactly what they wanted to hear, and they fell for it like a ton of bricks. Makes those guys in Nigeria look like rank amateurs.

* I couldn't find an original source, so the link is to a moderately right- of- center blog run by some very well respected legal types. It's a sad commentary on current journalism that blogs are a better resource than the mainstream media for historical (2005) information.

Alternate Universe

Another traditional SF theme is the Alternate Universe. What would things be like if some historical event happened just a little bit differently? It's a fun area of speculation; two of my favorites are Too Many Magicians, by Randall Garrett (Richard III didn't die at the siege of Chaluz) and 1632, by Eric Flint (small town in West Virginia gets dropped into the middle of the Thirty Years War. Alternate History ensues).

Now, folks in the Administration have come out with statements about American and World history that range from wrong to hallucinatory. Assuming they're not just Making Stuff Up, what Universe are they from? Greg Cochran has an article in American Conservative that puts all of the pieces together. By golly, they all fit! So, our current ruling politicians are, quite literally, from another world. A not very nice one, it seems.

The question, of course, is what to do about it. Greg suggests:

Of course this means that we need to corral some or all of these visitors for study and experimentation. Such experiments would, I suppose, interfere with their civil liberties, if they had any, but they’re obviously not citizens of these United States. Technically they’re illegal aliens. Gitmo’s a-waitin’.

Hey, it's their laws!

"Pro-Life"? Bunk.

So the Supremes uphold the ban on the medical procedure "intact dilation and extraction" (IDX), misnamed "partial- birth abortion". What other specific medical procedures have been banned by name? I can't think of any. Misnamed? IDX is almost never used on a viable fetus. I say "almost" as a safety measure; I've never heard of it being used on a viable fetus, but I'm no expert.

IDX is a method of getting a dead or dying fetus out of a woman's body. Just how, exactly, is banning it "pro-life"? In its absence, a woman is supposed to wait for a "spontaneous miscarriage", which will hopefully happen before she dies. Often, it doesn't.

Yeah, IDX is icky. Note that "icky" is neither a medical term nor a legal term.

So we are going to have women dying to keep doctors from doing an icky procedure. Shows ya how much the "pro-lifers" value women.

The so- called "pro- life" types cleave naturally into two camps. The true pro- life folks are the ones who push sex education, provide prenatal and neonatal care for poor women, work with adoption agencies, and in general try to see to it that the people who get born have as good a chance as possible. Do they want to ban abortions? Some do, some don't. Most see it as a necessary evil. Legal abortion may be bad, but illegal abortion is a lot worse. I have really nothing to say to the true "pro- lifers"; it's a respectable position.

The "anti- choice" contingent is a lot simpler. Keep 'em barefoot and pregnant. It's not about "life", it's about control. Simplistic way of telling who's who — "pro- lifers" are women; "anti- choicers" are men.

The anti-choicers are the ones who make most of the noise — to the extent that a lot of pro-choicers I've talked to don't seem to think the "real pro- lifers" really exist. They do; they just tend to be quiet.

I could get into all sorts of things like the bogus theology that the anti- choicers throw around — St Augustine and Original Sin and the Immaculate Conception and the Scofield Bible, but that would bore most people to distraction. I could document that the most fanatical anti- choicers have real Issues with (ie, are terrified of) women, but that's pretty obvious.

I'll just say that this nonsense is going to kill people.

There's a Word ...

So Georgie made a fool of himself at the G8 summit in St. Petersburg, Russia. I've not seen any speculation as to why Georgie acted this way, other than the usual and unhelpful he's a jerk.

Nobody else seems to have said this, so I will. Looks to me like he was drunk.

Time to Drop Anchor

So the DLC is saying that Democrats should move to the right; tringulate, to use their term.

Wrong.

Voters are polarized, to the point that any more movement to the right will lose significant numbers of votes on the left. They may vote for Ralph Nader or just stay home; either way, they're lost. And, because of the degree of polarization, you're not going to pick up any appreciable numbers of voters from the Republican "base", either.

Time to drop anchor. The Democratic Party needs to dig in its heels and not let itself be dragged any further from its own principals. Remember, you never really compromise with a fanatic — you move, the fanatic doesn't.

So what should the core principals are we talking about? Well, let's see:

• Start with Civil Rights. This means everybody's civil rights — white, black, Hispanic, Christian, Muslim, atheist, straight, gay, whatever. Everybody.
• War on Terror: Get the bastards. But make sure we're going after the right bastards. We don't need more Iraqs. Also, this will involve more diplomacy (ie, twisting Saudi arms) than military action. Essentially, this is police work with soldiers backing up the cops.
• Foreign policy: We can't be the World's Nose Wiper. Yeah, there are Bad People in the world. Unfortunately, there's nothing we can do about most of them. Iraq was an attempt to do so; see how well that worked.
• Fiscal policy: Wants are infinite, resources are finite. Work toward a balanced budget and paying down the national debt. Yeah, this means raising Paris Hilton's taxes.
• Energy: Start prying the House of Saud's fingers off of our throat. At the same time, we can work on lowering greenhouse gas emissions.
• Healthcare: While true universal health care is not an option in the next election cycle, we have to start looking toward it. A good start would be to move public programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and their state and local equivalents in the direction of a "single payer" system. The current system is a nightmare; it wouldn't be hard to improve it a lot.
• Honesty, openness, accountability, and competence. Easy to promise; hard to deliver, and the Republicans' biggest weakness.

Some minor points, and implications of the above:

• Abortion: Pro-choice all the way. Siding with the anti-choicers in a misguided attempt at "triangulation" will just lose votes from the base.
• Stem cells: Ditto. The vast majority of voters on all sides are in favor of stem cell research.
• Iraq: Start working on digging ourselves out. It ain't gonna be easy — the choices I see range from disasterous to catastrophic.
• Guantanamo, secret CIA prisons, torture, and "extraordinary rendition": They all stop. Now. If this means high-level spooks and generals walk out, so be it.
• Gun control: Let it drop. The arguments on both sides are all heat and no light.
• Social Security: It ain't broke. Don't screw with it. Point out that the "privatisers'" numbers don't add up.

Some tactics:

• Run against Bush. His popularity is down about to the Yellow Dog level. The slogan "Rubber Stamp Republican" is good here. Congressional Republicans have gone along with just about all of Bush's harebrained schemes; call them on it.
• Yeah, the press is against you. Deal. Likewise, the Republicans are going to be spewing large amounts of slime It's all they have left. Plan for it; have responses ready. Don't get Switboated again.
• Learn to use numbers effectively. Know when raw numbers are better and when percentages are better. Use familiar analogies — credit cards, car loans, etc.
• Lose the fruitcakes. We're not going to outlaw SUVs, confiscate guns, disband the military, tear down the suburbs, or commit any other form of ritual suicide. Anybody who wants to is Outside the Tent. Let 'em piss in; you're known as much by who your enemies are as by who your friends are.
• Lose the DLC. They're the Neocon wing of the Democratic party — and financed by the same foundations that fund the Republican neocons. They're the ones pushing the line "We're just like Republicans, only better". If there was ever a guaranteed loser of an attitude, that's it.
• Lose the Big Bucks Consultants. They're the ones who have been consistantly losing elections for the last 25 or so years. They also suck enormous amounts of money.
• Make damn sure everybody knows you're going to fight tooth and toenail over any suggestion of vote fraud, especially anything involving electronic voting machines. And carry through after election day. Don't be afraid to raise a fuss.

Above all, keep in mind that we're in this for the long haul. We don't want to just win this election; we want to force the Republicans to cough up the Neocon - Theocrat furball permanently, like the Democrats threw out the Communists and the white-sheet crowd. This means plan for the long haul, and don't just assume that the NTs, or whatever other group that wants to drag us back to the rule of the Priest-Kings can be ignored just because they're ridiculous.

LATER — Avedon has another tactical suggestion, via American Microphone. Learn how the Republicans run their "big tent". Do it. When somebody is willing to work with you, don't insist that they agree with you on every tiny little detail. My "lose the fruitcakes" comment above refers to either people who try to hijack the party for their own personal crusades (uhh ... jihads?) or who are so far out on the fringe that nobody wants to deal with them I'm lookin' at you, Ward Churchill and Noam Chomsky. Nothing wrong with the granola crowd if they're willing to go along with the program and not claim that, for example, the Democrats will outlaw SUVs. Yeah, I've heard this one.

The Center

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world ...

— William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming, 1919

The Common Wisdom in politics is run to the center. Supposedly, Bill Clinton was the master of triangulation; moving enough to the Center to get what you want by giving the other side some of what they want. This used to be called compromise, but that word seems to be out of favor now.

Mathematically, opinions are usually on a normal distribution — the familiar bell-shaped curve. In this situation, the candidate that's closest to the center of the curve will get the most votes. Undecided votes are considered to be in the center.

Note that I said usually. If everybody pulls back into their own side of the argument, the opinions become polarized. This is represented by two overlapping bell curves. If they are far enough apart that there's a dip between them, moving to the center will lose votes.

Currently, it looks to me like our polarized curves are not only far apart, they're in different universes. The one on the left is the traditional Liberal-Conservative distribution while the one on the right might be thought of as the Neocon-Theocrat axis. There's simply no way to appeal to both. Unfortunately, right now, the N-T axis is controlling the terms of political discourse and attracting a good chunk of the right-hand side of the left (L-C) curve.

Yo! Democrats! Stop moving to the Center (which doesn't really exist) and you can pick up the whole left-hand curve — practically everybody. Your friendly average "conservative" (yes, they really do exist) has no interest in massive deficits, giveaways to Halliburton, foreign empire building, gay bashing, or Christianism.

"Them" and "Us"

One of my first blog posts was about Them. The point of the post was that everybody has a Them, and everybody's Them is different.

This post is about Us, as opposed to Them. In normal social/business activities, it's pretty easy to tell the difference between Them and Us. After all, They are Them because they're Not Like Us. Now, as the groups get bigger, it gets harder to draw the line. It's easy to tell who's one of Us in a bowling league; it's a lot harder with, say, a religion or political party. By the time we get up to the State or National level, the concept of Them isn't useful any more — it's all just Us.

From an anthropoligical point of view, the strongest sanction that a group has available to it is expulsion from the group. This converts one of Us to one of Them. Nowadays, on a State or Federal level, the only way to "expel" somebody is to kill them. The alternative of exile is not available any more, as there are no real State controls on movement, and even the most backwater countries has passport control. Jails? Prisons? They're still here. Prisoners may be isolated from non-prisoners, but they're still here. Their "Us" is now other prisoners. Eventually, most prisoners are released and go back to being one of Us, although a lot of people seem not to like this.

What brought this up was a video (via) dated 1947, from the War Department, talking abot what we would now call "diversity". It simply points out that the US is one big Us, and anybody who tries to break us up into little warring cliques is up to no good. The example used (from those carefree pre-Godwin days) is the Nazis. Remember, this was 1947, and the memories of the horrors of WWII were still very fresh.

Another thought on this fine (until it storms again) Fourth of July is the idea of Tolerance, which goes hand in hand with Diversity. Some claim that Tolerance is self-defeating, because it means that the Tolerant have to be Tolerant of the Intolerant, who can then do anything they want to the Tolerant. This is based on a bad definition of Tolerance.

Tolerance is a two-way street. The only way I can "tolerate" you is if you "tolerate" me. If you don't tolerate me, the proper phrase for what I'm doing is "putting up with", or "trying to ignore", or some such. The reason to put up with the hate-spewing Dividers is simply that most folks recognize the tricks and ignore them. Helps that the groups that the hatemongers are trying to drum up support against (gays, Muslims, Democrats) are too big to be safely charactertured. It's very easy to work up a good hate against a group that you don't know any members of. When you say "they're talking about my friend Charlie", you've taken the first vital step to seeing through the hate. Now you can ask the question, "Why are they saying that?". This way lies freedom.

So go out this Independance Day and enjoy the burgers and beer and fireworks with all your wild, crazy, and, yes, Diverse Fellow Americans. Let's hear it for Us!

UPDATE -- that link for the War Department video is dead. Another one is here. Go watch!

The War is Over

You can do anything with a bayonet except sit on it.

— Talleyrand

The War is Over. We won.

Which war? The one in Iraq, of course. Remember "Mission Accomplished"? That's as good a point as any to declare the war "won". The Iraqi army had been completely smashed, Saddam Hussein was in hiding, and the US military controlled the entire country.

But aren't we still fighting? Well, yes, but we aren't fighting a war. We're conducting an occupation. Big difference.

Isn't it just a matter of semantics? Well, it's certainly a matter of semantics; I question the "just", as if semantics don't matter.

War is active. Fight battles, capture territory, force the enemy leaders to surrender. An occupation is passive. Keep order, prevent the old enemies from regrouping, try to return the occupied territory to a semblance of normalcy. The aim is to turn the place over to a "legitimate" local government.

An occupation is essentially an administrative matter. There's no "won" or "lost"; it's all a matter of definitions and degrees. Did you make your quarterlies? It's generally pretty miserable for people in the occupied territory. Battles are generally fought Somewhere Else; the occupation is here.

Right now, we have the most powerful army in the world, running around Iraq, waiting for Rommel to show up. He ain't gonna. Treating the situation in Iraq as a "war" leads to messes like Falluja. American soldiers are terrible as occupation or peacekeeping troops. Fighters, yes. Occupiers, no.

So if we pull the troops out of Iraq now, we're not "losing" anything. We're not "cutting and running", except to get out of the way of a low-intensity civil war with about a zillion different sides.

So What *Is* a Liberal, Anyway?

For years now, since Reagan got elected, we've been hearing rants from the Right on the evilness of Liberals. Listen to Limbaugh or his ilk, and you'll get the idea that Liberals are all a mixture of Jimmy Hoffa, Jessie Jackson, Noam Chomsky, and Hubert Humphrey. You'll note that these are completely incompatible. To the Right, "Liberal" is just a "hate word" — its only real meaning is "I don't like it". Just the thing for a two-minute hate, but no good for a real discussion.

So what are we really talking about here? Well, let's see what one of the more famous American Liberals had to say about it:

What do our opponents mean when they apply to us the label "Liberal?" If by "Liberal" they mean, as they want people to believe, someone who is soft in his policies abroad, who is against local government, and who is unconcerned with the taxpayer's dollar, then the record of this party and its members demonstrate that we are not that kind of "Liberal." But if by a "Liberal" they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people -- their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties -- someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a "Liberal," then I'm proud to say I'm a "Liberal."

But first, I would like to say what I understand the word "Liberal" to mean and explain in the process why I consider myself to be a "Liberal," and what it means in the presidential election of 1960.

In short, having set forth my view -- I hope for all time -- two nights ago in Houston, on the proper relationship between church and state, I want to take the opportunity to set forth my views on the proper relationship between the state and the citizen. This is my political credo:

I believe in human dignity as the source of national purpose, in human liberty as the source of national action, in the human heart as the source of national compassion, and in the human mind as the source of our invention and our ideas. It is, I believe, the faith in our fellow citizens as individuals and as people that lies at the heart of the liberal faith. For liberalism is not so much a party creed or set of fixed platform promises as it is an attitude of mind and heart, a faith in man's ability through the experiences of his reason and judgment to increase for himself and his fellow men the amount of justice and freedom and brotherhood which all human life deserves.

I believe also in the United States of America, in the promise that it contains and has contained throughout our history of producing a society so abundant and creative and so free and responsible that it cannot only fulfill the aspirations of its citizens, but serve equally well as a beacon for all mankind. I do not believe in a superstate. I see no magic in tax dollars which are sent to Washington and then returned. I abhor the waste and incompetence of large-scale federal bureaucracies in this administration as well as in others. I do not favor state compulsion when voluntary individual effort can do the job and do it well. But I believe in a government which acts, which exercises its full powers and full responsibilities. Government is an art and a precious obligation; and when it has a job to do, I believe it should do it. And this requires not only great ends but that we propose concrete means of achieving them.

Our responsibility is not discharged by announcement of virtuous ends. Our responsibility is to achieve these objectives with social invention, with political skill, and executive vigor. I believe for these reasons that liberalism is our best and only hope in the world today. For the liberal society is a free society, and it is at the same time and for that reason a strong society. Its strength is drawn from the will of free people committed to great ends and peacefully striving to meet them. Only liberalism, in short, can repair our national power, restore our national purpose, and liberate our national energies. And the only basic issue in the 1960 campaign is whether our government will fall in a conservative rut and die there, or whether we will move ahead in the liberal spirit of daring, of breaking new ground, of doing in our generation what Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman and Adlai Stevenson did in their time of influence and responsibility.

Our liberalism has its roots in our diverse origins. Most of us are descended from that segment of the American population which was once called an immigrant minority. Today, along with our children and grandchildren, we do not feel minor. We feel proud of our origins and we are not second to any group in our sense of national purpose. For many years New York represented the new frontier to all those who came from the ends of the earth to find new opportunity and new freedom, generations of men and women who fled from the despotism of the czars, the horrors of the Nazis, the tyranny of hunger, who came here to the new frontier in the State of New York. These men and women, a living cross section of American history, indeed, a cross section of the entire world's history of pain and hope, made of this city not only a new world of opportunity, but a new world of the spirit as well.

Tonight we salute Governor and Senator Herbert Lehman as a symbol of that spirit, and as a reminder that the fight for full constitutional rights for all Americans is a fight that must be carried on in 1961.

Many of these same immigrant families produced the pioneers and builders of the American labor movement. They are the men who sweated in our shops, who struggled to create a union, and who were driven by longing for education for their children and for the children's development. They went to night schools; they built their own future, their union's future, and their country's future, brick by brick, block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood, and now in their children's time, suburb by suburb.

Tonight we salute George Meany as a symbol of that struggle and as a reminder that the fight to eliminate poverty and human exploitation is a fight that goes on in our day. But in 1960 the cause of liberalism cannot content itself with carrying on the fight for human justice and economic liberalism here at home. For here and around the world the fear of war hangs over us every morning and every night. It lies, expressed or silent, in the minds of every American. We cannot banish it by repeating that we are economically first or that we are militarily first, for saying so doesn't make it so. More will be needed than goodwill missions or talking back to Soviet politicians or increasing the tempo of the arms race. More will be needed than good intentions, for we know where that paving leads.

In Winston Churchill's words, "We cannot escape our dangers by recoiling from them. We dare not pretend such dangers do not exist."

And tonight we salute Adlai Stevenson as an eloquent spokesman for the effort to achieve an intelligent foreign policy. Our opponents would like the people to believe that in a time of danger it would be hazardous to change the administration that has brought us to this time of danger. I think it would be hazardous not to change. I think it would be hazardous to continue four more years of stagnation and indifference here at home and abroad, of starving the underpinnings of our national power, including not only our defense but our image abroad as a friend.

This is an important election -- in many ways as important as any this century -- and I think that the Democratic Party and the Liberal Party here in New York, and those who believe in progress all over the United States, should be associated with us in this great effort.

The reason that Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman and Adlai Stevenson had influence abroad, and the United States in their time had it, was because they moved this country here at home, because they stood for something here in the United States, for expanding the benefits of our society to our own people, and the people around the world looked to us as a symbol of hope.

I think it is our task to re-create the same atmosphere in our own time. Our national elections have often proved to be the turning point in the course of our country. I am proposing that 1960 be another turning point in the history of the great Republic.

Some pundits are saying it's 1928 all over again. I say it's 1932 all over again. I say this is the great opportunity that we will have in our time to move our people and this country and the people of the free world beyond the new frontiers of the 1960s.

— Sen. John F. Kennedy, acceptance of the New York Liberal Party Nomination, September 14, 1960.

Now when right-wingers talk about how bad liberals are, just ask them exactly what part of this they disagree with.

Clinical Insanity

There's a common theme in SF, where the human race evolves into Something Better; some type of Group Mind, where everyone's talents contribute to the Common Good. Naturally, the something tends to be some variation of the author's prejudices as to social and religious philosophy. I've had a theory for some time that this has already happened -- our larger institutions (corporate and governmental, and, in the case of the Catholic Church at least, religious) are behaving less like collections of individuals and more like independent entities. It seems like these organizations have their own agendas and proceed on their way, despite anything the people in them do to change it. These agendas do not seem to benefit the people that come up with them, nor the people who have to implement them. Individuals have no more effect on them than your body (or even brain) cells have on you.

This old idea came back the other day, thinking about the Democratic Party and its current woes. (The trigger was a post by twistedchick, who is far more knowledgeble on matters political than I am. Basically, the DCCC phone bank people were so rude that she ended up writing a nasty letter to the Democratic Powers that Be. Their behaviour was so out of line that some of the commenters on this post speculated that this was actually a Republican disinformation operation. Editorial comment — they're not that smart)

Thinking about the Democratic Party as a Higher Being, it looks like it's clinically insane. So, in a completely different way, is the Republican party.

The Republicans are easy. They are allow no criticism, insist on winning every tiny little battle (think of their renaming Washington National Airport to Reagan National Airport, ticking off just about everybody in the area just to prove they could do it.). Anything that doesn't go exactly their way is a Conspiracy; fact that they have absolute control of two of the three branches of the US Government and are working on the third. They whine about a hostile media; choosing to forget the way the media treated past Administrations.

Paranoid schizophrenia. Could serve as a textbook example. Heavy dissociation from reality.

The Dems are just about the opposite. Since FDR, they've been the banner carriers for the so- called Progressive Agenda, which says, roughly, that proper Government action can really improve the life of the average person. Now, this was just fine until about the mid 1970s. Progressivism was the order of the day. Richard Nixon (may he rot in a Fundie Hell) was more liberal than any serious Presidential candidate since Jimmy Carter or perhaps Walter Mondale.

But things have gone downhill. Reagan got elected, more out of disgust with Carter's ineptitude than approval of Reagan's policies. Since 1994, they've been going downhill at a pretty steady rate, to the point that in 2004, they lost the Presidency to an obvious moron and lost every Senate race that was competitive. What are the doing about it? Focus groups. Run to the Center. Bland Establishment don't rock the boat candidates. Response to outrageous actions like the mass disenfranchisement of poor black voters in Florida (2000 and 2004) and Ohio (2004) seems to be to sit back, contemplate their collective navel, and worry what am I doing wrong? Repeat the same formula that has failed for the last 12 years.

Clinical depression. Again, a textbook example. With a bit of obsessive- compulsive disorder thrown in.

So what to do about it? Neither the sensible Republicans (McCain) nor the fire- breathing Democrats (Dean) seem to have any effect at all on their respective parties.

What's lithium or Prozac for a political party? Neither will fit on the couch ....

"Call Us Nutty"

It seems that BushCo doesn't want people representing it who might have donated money to Kerry. Now, I have done a fair amount of work with international standards organizations (mostly the IEEE and ISO, with a few excursions to ANSI and a few other minor groups), so I have some insight into what's going on here.

I just had a look at the "standards committee" in question, the Inter- American Telecommunication Commission. It's an intergovernment organization under the auspices of the OAS. In other words, it's a committee where representatives of various governments get together to thrash things out on a high level.

Usually, organizations like this start with the "local" standards and then thrash our differences. The technical content is minimal. The technical stuff gets thrashed out on the lower levels, where the qualification for admission is the ability to show up and pay the (quite modest) conference fees.

White House spokesman Trent Duffy is correct when he says that "We wanted people who would represent the Administration positively". This is a government operation, after all. However, saying "and--call us nutty--it seemed like those who wanted to kick this Administration out of town last November would have some difficulty doing that" is absolutely outrageous.

What we're dealing with is called professionalism — doing the best job you're capable of despite your own feelings on the matter. Saying that someone is incapable of representing the policies of the Government if he disagrees with those policies is saying that he is incapable of fulfilling his responsibilities as a professional. Doctors treat people they don't like. Lawyers represent murderers. Teachers teach brats. Cops enforce laws they disagree with.

And some of the people that BushCo bounced from the delegation had been US representatives for years. Pros.

The Bush administration judges everybody else by their own standards.

I Feel a Draft

I've been saying for a long time now that, if Georgie Bush was re- elected, we'd have a draft by May 2005. My assumptions that led to this were:

• The war in Iraq would continue to be a quagmire
• The Neocons running our foreign policy really, really want to invade more countries.
• Our “allies” wouldn't supply us with cannon foddertroops.
• Military recruitment and retention would not keep up with demand.

Well, how are we doing? Quagmire? Check. Sabre rattling? Check. Allies? Check. Recruitment? Check.

Now, I've heard any number of arguments that a draft won't work because it takes too long to turn out a modern infantryman. This is true, but in Iraq, we don't need prime combat troops, we need occupation troops and logistical support. Six weeks of basic should do it ....

Of course, BushCo are as butt- ignorant of the realities of running an army as they are of everything else. This will turn Iraq into an even bigger disaster, as nervous, poorly trained troops shoot more civilians and get blown up by more roadside bombs.

And if you think that a draft is impossible, well, so is trashing Social Security. Doesn't seem to be stopping BushCo from trying.

Reductio ad Absurdum

One way of doing a mathematical proof is to assume the opposite of what you're trying to prove. If you can show that it leads to a logical contradiction, then you've proven the original statement. If you can't show a contradiction, then the statement is false. It's called reductio ad absurdum; reduce to an absurdity.

This isn't done much in political argument. Usually, you try to show that some action will lead to Horrible Consequences. However, you could show that doing the exact opposite of the action will not result in HC.

What brought this up was the suggestion of replacing the income tax with a "consumption tax", ie a national sales tax. Its proponents say that we could replace the income tax with a sales tax of 20% - 24%. The numbers are bogus, of course; the "real" numbers range from 45% - 100%, depending on assumptions. The claimed advantage is that it would shift money from consumption to investment. Now, this seems odd to me; on one hand, you have to sell what you produce, and on the other hand, there's no shortage of investment capital floating around.

The big disadvantage, of course, is that if you're poor, you're going to spend all your money and invest very little if any. If you're rich, you're going to invest a lot and pay a much lower percentage of your income in tax. That's why sales taxes are the prime example of "regressive taxation"; taxes that hit the poor hardest.

The proponents of the "consumption tax" say no problem, we'll just give a tax rebate to poor people. This has two gaping holes: (1) you have an enormous job in keeping track of what everybody earns and (2) poor people don't have any financial reserves (duh!). Saying "you'll get the money back next April" doesn't help a bit right now.

OK, it's not a good idea. But now let's try reductio. Let's exempt consumption from taxes and tax only investments. What happens now?

Well, poor people don't pay any tax. Rich people pay a one- time tax on money they invest; if they take it out and spend it, they don't pay tax. It'll stimulate the economy; people will buy more stuff. Instead of every retail establishment in the country keeping track of the tax, it'll be collected by banks, stockbrokers, and so forth, who have to do a boatload of paperwork anyway. Interest? Capital gains? Details, details (:-).

The point is, not only is it not absurd, it actually looks better than the original idea! Poor pay low taxes, check. Rich pay higher taxes, check. Stimulates consumption, check. Easy to collect, check. Minimum paperwork, check. No funky rebates, check. "Supply side stimulus"? No, but I haven't seen a real economist who believes in "supply side economics" anyway.

Or, we could compromise. Ignore both and just tax income.