Jonathan

The Left supports flexibility when its goals are unpopular — e.g., using the courts to override elected legislatures that won’t support gay marriage or abortion on demand or other holy causes. But let voters threaten the influence of the political class, as with the California recall, and lefties are suddenly for interpreting procedures in the strictest, most literal manner conceivable.

Ignore the words and watch the behavior. It’s all about power.

CORRECTION & UPDATE: Rereading this post I see that its argument is illogical, since in the first paragraph I impute different responses by the Left to essentially identical political situations. I think it would be better to argue that the Left is consistent in using any means at its disposal to oppose challenges to the power of the political class.

-Added two more Chicago boys to the blog header. Also linked the photos there, so now you can click and learn more.

-Reorganized slightly the “Frequently Viewed” links.

-Updated my photo links with a bunch of new images, organized in Photoshop galleries that are easier to look at than my home-made html pages. I also re-edited some of the better pics in the archives, most of which I initially posted before I knew anything about Photoshop. I’ll probably eventually re-edit more of these older photos.

-Made a change in the blog’s style sheets, in response to a suggestion, to make the blog easier to look at in Netscape 6X and 7X. I initially coded the blog’s template by kludging together a lot of stuff without really knowing what I was doing. So if you see anything that could be easily improved, I would be grateful if you would share this information with me.

Thanks, and thanks for reading.

Holy cow! No wonder the world is falling apart. The above quote and many similar bons mots are found in this steaming pile of verbal dung (thanks to Jay Manifold for alerting us).

Chicago routinely trained me and numerous other students to become ruthless and unprincipled Machiavellians. That is precisely why so many neophyte Neo-con students gravitated towards the University of Chicago or towards Chicago Alumni at other universities. The University of Chicago became the “brains” behind the Bush Jr. Empire and his Ashcroft Police State. Attorney General John Ashcroft received his law degree from the University of Chicago in 1967. Many of his “lawyers” at the Department of Injustice are members of the right-wing, racist, bigoted, reactionary, and totalitarian Federalist Society (aka “Feddies”), which originated in part at the University of Chicago.

Although miseducated at Yale and Harvard Business School, the “Ivies” proved to be too liberal for Bush Jr. and his fundamentalist Christian supporters, whose pointman and spearcarrier in the Bush Jr. administration was Ashcroft, a Fundie himself. The Neo-cons and the Fundies contracted an “unholy alliance” in support of Bush Jr. across the board. For their own different reasons, both groups also worked hand-in-hand to support Israel’s genocidal Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, an internationally acknowledged war criminal. Strange bedfellows indeed.

According to his own public estimate and boast before the American Enterprise Institute, President Bush Jr. hired about 20 Straussians to occupy key positions in his administration, many holding offices where they could push American foreign policy in favor of Israel and against its chosen enemies such as Iraq, Iran, Syria, and the Palestinians. . .

The Left once again demonstrates that the art of self-parody is alive and well.

They are both mainly about accountability. Sure, there are plenty of problems in the new Iraq. But such issues are secondary to the main goal of our invasion, which was to depose Saddam Hussein. We understood that making Hussein accountable for his threats and depredations was the key, not only to pacifying Iraq but also to reducing the threat (by increasing the expected cost) of aggression by North Korea, Iran and other hostile opportunists.

Similarly, recalling CA Gov. Gray Davis isn’t mainly about finding a replacement with better policy ideas. It’s about making Davis accountable for his incompetence and thereby encouraging elected officials to behave better in the future. It’s unfortunate if Arnold Schwarzenegger (assuming he’ll be Davis’s replacement) doesn’t have a good program but that’s secondary to punishing Davis. CA voters who support the recall in large numbers seem to understand this, as do members of the political class who oppose it.

In situations like these, often the fastest way to figure out whether to support a particular course of action is to look at who opposes it. You can’t go far wrong with a foreign policy whose opponents are mainly dictators, anti-American European politicians and leftist whackos. Nor as a rule will you go wrong backing domestic policies that are opposed by incumbent pols, establishment journalists, unions and big-business go-along-to-get-along types.