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Losers:

A Catalan anarchist borrows zillions from banks, distributes the cash to the deserving, and disappears (featuring strange illustrations).

There is always a charge that socialism does not fit human nature. We’ve encountered that for a long time. Maybe that’s true. But can’t people be educated? Can’t people learn to cooperate with each other? Surely that must be our goal, because the alternative is redolent with war and poverty and all the ills of the world. — Frank Zeidler

The Gnome on '08

Let's Play!

Some other stuff...

here.

Why do the good always die young?

From a (quickly removed) version of Jesse Helms' Wikipedia entry:

He died on July 4, 2008, slitting his wrists in a washtub out back beneath the pecan tree and writing "I've been a bad boy" in his own blood. The skins of several children were found drying in his attic, swarms of horseflies going in and out of the eaves. His wife was quoted on CNN as saying "I always wondered about Jesse's collection of little shoes.

And now the musical accompaniment.

Inside the Bunker

"Most of his commentary is left leaning"

Unfortunately, Thomas Friedman has returned from some kind of voyage/professional hiatus. All good and decent people enjoyed his long absence from the pages of America's newspapers. Now his reign of terror continues.

Wikipedia describes Thomas Friedman as follows, "most of his commentary is left leaning. He is an outspoken critic of the Bush administration and in particular the Iraq War." Oh Really?

Here is what Friedman told Charlie Rose in May of 2003:

What we learned on 9/11, in a gut way, was that that [the "terrorism bubble"] was a fundamental threat to our open society...and what we needed to do was go over to that part of the world, I'm afraid, and burst that bubble. We needed to go over there and take out a very big stick, right in the heart of that world and burst that bubble...

And what they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house from Basra to Baghdad and basically saying, "which part of this sentence don't you understand? You don't think we care about our open society? You think this bubble fantasy, we're just going to let it grow? Well. Suck. On. This."

That, Charlie, is what this war was about. We coulda hit Saudi Arabia, it was part of that bubble, we coulda hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could.

The Planted Question

George Stephanopoulos was apparently prompted to ask his Bill Ayers "gotcha question" by Sean Hannity. Think Progress has the audio.

Those of us who watched the debate carefully could actually see Hannity inserting his hand into Stephy's anal cavity and playing him like a sock puppet. No gloves!

The Debate

Although David Brooks gave them an A grade, all decent and reasonable people agree that Charlie and the Greek Dwarf (a former Clinton staffer) disgraced themselves last night. Here's ABC's phone number: 212-456-7777.

For the commenters on the last post:

Stick to Cliff Notes

(Hat tip: Crooked Timber) Bloomberg reports that a charitable foundation associated with banking corproation, BB&T, is paying a historically black liberal arts college a half a million bucks to make Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged mandatory reading. Forcing black people to read Ayn Rand? Sounds like a hate crime to me.

Rand's aesthetically and morally repulsive novels have a huge following among corporate executives and right-wing youth organizations. A decent person cannot help but root for "collectivist"villains in Ayn Rand's fiction.

Of course, Ayn Rand deserves some respect as a bullshit artist. She was part of a venerable tradition of American charlatans that has included the likes of Mary Baker Eddy, L. Ron Hubbard and Werner Erhard. She built a remarkable political and cultural movement around her own person and her rinky-dink philosophy - a history described in The Ayn Rand Cult by Jeffrey Walker.

Yum

Portrait of an Opportunist

Terry McAuliffe, chairman of Hillary Clinton's campaign (left):

Click here to see more bet-hedging photo-ops. Notice he's still wearing the Hillary pin! The rats haven't fled a sinking ship, they're just perching themselves halfway down the gangplank.

Bobos in Paradise

Once again, David Brooks strays out of his depth. Brooks approaches his NY Times columns with a two-pronged strategy; half of his pieces advance right-wing talking points while the other half flatter and belly-stroke the Grey Lady's smug liberal readership. Today's column is a belly-stroker. According to Brooks, Obama's campaign represents a vindication of MLK and the early "good" sixties and a rejection of the later "bad" sixties. Like most of his professional colleagues, Brooks is peddling a false memory of Dr. King as America's favorite Negro.

The real historical King was a controversial and increasingly radical critic of U.S. policies; he widely reviled by editorial boards and much of the respectable liberal punditocracy. King described the American government as the "greatest purveyor of violence" in the world and he was an outspoken critic of American capitalism. For these subversive attitudes, King was constantly harassed and monitored by the Feds. It is rumored that his assassination was celebrated with champagne at the FBI headquarters.

The more disingenuous part of Brooks' argument is the implication that he would've supported the New Left before the scary people with Afro-picks took over. Are we supposed to believe that Brooks, like the Jeffrey "The Dude" Lebowski, would have been at Port Huron, drafting a radical manifesto? Would he have marched with Ella Baker and SNCC through Klan Kountry?

Y'all speak American?

Abu Muqawama is the nom de plume of a veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan who blogs on military policy. In general, he or she seems to follow a pretty lame, liberal hawkish line. Still, it's a pretty eye-opening site.

Last, week the U.S. backed the Maliki government and its allied militias in their ill-fated campaign against the followers of Muqtada al-Sadr. Before the adventure turned into a complete shit pile, the neocons celebrated this little war as a bold and necessary move against the Iranian-friendly Sadrists. In reality, government-aligned the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq has close or closer ties to Iran than Sadr's Mahdi army. Abu Muqawama explains that the U.S.'s preference for ISCI and its Badr militia over the more popular Sadrists was established because ISCI's top people speak English:

Historians studying Iraq decades from now will wonder why the United States allied itself with the Iran-backed ISCI instead of the popularly-supported Sadr movement. (Hint to those historians: it's because they dress well and speak English. This is what happens when you send smart but young Republican loyalists -- who only speak English -- to help run the CPA in Baghdad.) Once again, we have backed the loser...

And:

Why, some wonder, is the U.S. closer to the Iran-backed ISCI and Badr Brigades than it is with the Sadrites? Why does this make sense? Two Baghdad political veterans have ruefully pointed out to Abu Muqawama that while Sadr has more popular support, the ISCI crowd have something more valuable: they speak English. One former State Department veteran with whom Abu Muqawama spoke a few months ago pointed out that former Iraq honcho Meghan O'Sullivan was particularly vulnerable to falling under the sway of those politicians who didn't just speak in that confusing gutteral language where they write from right to left in co-joined letters. Ergo: they speak English, so they must be our friends! Hoo-ray, democracy!

Muppets

A Gallery of Horrors:

Right Wing News has a profile of six young conservative female bloggers on the dating market. It is quite unbelievable. One of them authored a book titled, The Thrill of the Chaste ... for real.

Gore Vidal provides a nice corrective to the flood of fawning William F. Buckley jr. eulogies:

Unknown to them and everyone else who might read that publication, my views on many matters do not conform to the tired hacks who’ve taken over Newsweek, a magazine that has convinced itself that Bobby Kennedy Sr. was a great liberal. They love throwing about misunderstood terms like liberal and conservative that seldom suit their superficial, not to mention malicious, standards. Recently, their words of mourning for the fallen “genteel” paladin were incredible. As my editor friend knew that I seldom read the wilder attacks on me, he deconstructs Newsweek’s obituary of Buckley:

Parenthetically, I should note that, back in 1968, ABC TV had asked me and Buckley to “debate” each other at the Democratic and Republican conventions. Although Buckley was often drunk and out of control, he was always a spontaneous liar on any subject that his dizzy brain might extrude. When we were in Chicago during the Republican convention, the Chicago police decided it would be fun to attack the young co-ed demonstrators in Grant Park, not far from our studio. It was one of the worst displays of police brutality I’ve ever seen, and so I said on air; he liked what the police had done; in no time, the whole country was as shocked as I, but not Buckley. On air he was hissing like a cobra against the young people in Grant Park because, he said, they were egging on the Viet Cong to kill American Marines. They were not, of course. Buckley was a world-class American liar on the far right who would tell any lie he thought he could get away with. Years of ass-kissing famous people in the press and elsewhere had given him, he felt, a sort of license to libelously slander those hated liberals who, from time to time, smoked him out as I did in Chicago, when I defended the young people in Grant Park by denying that they were Nazis and that the only “pro- or crypto-Nazi” I could think of was himself. He sued me and got nowhere. He sued Esquire, in which our words appeared. By then the coming right-wing surge was in view. And so Esquire cravenly agreed to settle with him for a few paragraphs worth of free advertising for his weird little magazine The National Review, hardly the great victory he claimed.

Danielle Pletka has the Freedom Gene

American Enterprise Institute "scholar,"Danielle Pletka, blames the failure of the Iraq war on the Iraqi people, who apparently lack the "freedom gene."

... It turns out that living under Saddam Hussein’s tyranny for decades conditioned Iraqis to accept unearned leadership, to embrace sect and tribe over ideas, and to tolerate unbridled corruption.

Thank God that we Americans, in this blessed country that is a light unto the nations, would never accept unearned leadership or unbridled corruption. As for "accepting ideas," I only wish the Iraqis had been more open to the idea of white phosphorous raining on their rooftops. Apparently, the strange customs of the Mohammedans forbid that sort of thing. It's kinda like their thing with pork.

...Some have used Iraq’s political immaturity as further proof the war was wrong, as if somehow those less politically evolved don’t merit freedoms they are ill equipped to make use of.

Some say (the cynics) that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are ill-equipped for freedom because they are dead now. Is Pletka calling for the civic involvement of corpses? Such is this woman's passion for liberty.

We would be better served to understand how the free world can foster appreciation of the building blocks of civil society in order to help other victims of tyranny when it is their turn.

When it's their turn? Who's next? Who's the lucky ducky with a golden ticket...

UPDATE: Researchers have associated the Freedom Gene with various congenital birth defects, including hackery, racism and general twatishness.

Centenarian Hates Bush, Loves Busty Women

Last week, an Iowa man celebrated his 100th birthday at Hooters. He owes his longevity to a diet of fried food and Canadian whiskey. He also hates George Bush's guts.

"Bishop! Bishop! Not true - false!"

For most sensible people, the Iraq-al Qaeda link was debunked years ago. But claims that the 9/11 hijackers had ties to Saddam's regime still have had their high-brow defenders, including drink-soaked Trotskyist popinjay, Christopher Hitchens. Well, the Pentagon has reviewed the evidence and (surprise, surprise) there was no connection. Chris Hitchens will have to slurp back his words.