I like to study memes and conventions and assumptions in our social reality, and I often take the radical critique. It borders on condemnation at times. I see nothing wrong with this and think, instead, that there’s a lot of value to it. But that’s because there is something deeply wrong with me. I don’t think everything is okay. I’m not going to pretend it’s all good, and I’m not going to live not caring what other people think. It’s because I’m not sane. I’m not a mainstream American. But I am a patriot. The people who call and style themselves as patriots are among the most unthinking, callous people on the planet, of any nation. People of the personality type that cares for nothing more than power and domination are a threat to any country’s welfare and future.

As for my patriotism, love of country is not fear of foreign lands and peoples. Fear of the irrational kind projected onto a concern for national domination is the cancer of our times. It is, to use the proper lexicon, jingoism. A barbarian wearing the clothes of a patriot is not a patriot; it only adds insult to injury when the hated decent people who work for patriotic values and ideals are thrown a traitor’s rags and a tyrant’s crown. There are nationalists in our midst, totalitarian to the core, who despise the Enlightenment and everything it represents, our civil liberties and the constitutional pillars of our democratic republic included.

To the decent, humane, enlightened people of my country, I ask this: are you willing to defend your homeland? We revere veterans of military service in far-off lands, at the half-chained service of interests that see their human needs as little more than the logistical matters of ordnance and ammunition. We hate today’s official satan. America “has no permanent enemies,” to quote the current secretary of state. Indeed our enemy is always changing; yesterday it was Sunni dead-enders, today it is Shiite triumphalists. Yesterday it was Khomeini, today Saddam; yesterday, Qaddafi, today Noriega. And on and on all the way back. What is truth when you cannot find your friends? Or what is justice when you find a new enemy at every corner? We need to take a good hard look in the mirror. I already dread what we’ll see, if we care to open our eyes. Happy July Fourth. Let the bombs burst in air.

“I’m an outsider by choice, but not truly. It’s the unpleasantness of the system that keeps me out. I’d rather be in, in a good system. That’s where my discontent comes from: being forced to choose to stay outside.”

“Scratch any cynic, and you’ll find a disappointed idealist.”

1937-2008
R.I.P.

R.I.P. Tim Russert.

“The right questions were asked. I think there’s a lot of critics—and I guess we can count Scott McClellan as one—who think that, if we did not debate the president, debate the policy in our role as journalists, if we did not stand up and say, ‘This is bogus,’ and ‘You’re a liar,’ and ‘Why are you doing this?’ that we didn’t do our job. And I respectfully disagree. It’s not our role.”

—David Gregory, NBC News correspondent, 9 June 2008 (as quoted by Scott Ritter, here)

The “right questions” are those, as Gregory implies, that do not question the basic assumptions behind the enterprise; that would be irresponsible. Journalists are not supposed to “debate the policy” or, God forbid, debate the Commander in Chief. Forgive me if I cannot help but picture Pharaoh’s scribes.

“We cannot say with certainty whether Mr. Bush lied about Iraq.”

— New York Times, 6 June 2008 (June 2008!)

What an irresponsible, ultra-liberal newspaper. (The report from the Senate selective-intelligence committee here.)

From the “minority opinion” — written by Orrin Hatch, Saxby Chambliss and Chris Bond, a fine trio of dissenters: “Ultimately, these [Senate] reports reveal a dubious agenda of vainly trying to prove the often quoted, but false, absolutely partisan, slogan, ‘Bush lied and people died’” (p. 166). They’re right: over 4,000 Americans are still alive, safe with their families, in one piece — and not one dishonest word ever escaped the President’s mouth.

They’re very right. Far-right, one could say.

“Kick ass! If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them! We must be tougher than hell! This Vietnam stuff, this is not even close. It is a mind-set. We can’t send that message. It’s an excuse to prepare us for withdrawal. There is a series of moments and this is one of them. Our will is being tested, but we are resolute. We have a better way. Stay strong! Stay the course! Kill them! Be confident! Prevail! We are going to wipe them out! We are not blinking!”

— President Bush, as quoted by Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez (ret.) in his new tell-all memoir Wiser in Battle: A Soldier’s Story, shortly after insurgents in Falluja murdered, hacked and strung up four contractors in April 2004 (Sanchez cited by Michael Abramowitz, in the Washington Post, 2 June 2008, A11); Falluja was extensively bombarded and invaded that November (including the use of white phosphorous), an assault that wiped out hundreds of civilians and ended any hope of pacifying Iraq

“At the risk of repeating myself, this is the crucial difference between patriotism and nationalism: patriotism is love of one’s country and defensive, while nationalism is expressed typically through contempt and fear of other nations and a will to power over other nations. The Iraq war was made possible by a propaganda campaign by the government, the exploitation of public fear and anger, the warmongering of nationalists and the twisting of patriotic sentiment into support for a war of aggression by casting the war dishonestly as one of self-defense.”

— Daniel Larson

If such real-early polling can be relied upon, given that the general election is only, oh, about half a year away, it appears that 11 states are in play and that, if held today, Obama would quite likely beat McCain very, very narrowly. Remember, Obama is that radical Black nationalist Islamic fundamentalist far-leftist right? (More like super-centrist corporate-friendly pacifier... oh now I sound like Paul Street!)

Every so often you encounter some real gems. Keep these in mind for Memorial Day:

“Americans know in their gut that, as pathological and silly as Americanism can be, it’s knit into the fabric of all our lives, so much so that even staunch critics of America have absolutely no desire to jump out of America’s skin. No American really wants to replace America. They just want a better America, a more truly American America.”

— James Poulos

“What kind of culture defines ‘maturity’ as the time when young men and women sacrifice principle to prudence, when they pledge allegiance to the boss in the name of self-promotion and ‘realism’? What kind of culture defines adulthood as the moment when the self goes underground? One answer might be a military one. The problem is that while unthinking loyalty to one’s commanding officer may be necessary in war, it is disastrous outside of it. Why? Because loyalty, by definition, qualifies individualism, discouraging the expression of individual opinion, recasting honesty as a type of betrayal. Because loyalty to power, rather than to what one believes to be true or right, is fatally undemocratic, and can lead to the most horrendous abuses.”

— Mark Slouka

“Although there has been a great deal of discussion of the problems that await Obama among white men should he win the Democratic nomination, this analysis suggests that while McCain certainly has a strength among this group, it is no more of a strength against Obama than it would be against Clinton. Clinton’s slight advantage among blue-collar white men is offset by Obama’s advantage among white-collar white men.

The bigger issue appears to be Obama’s problems among white women, when compared to how Clinton would perform among this group. Obama loses to McCain by nine points among white women, while Clinton wins by three points. Clinton does better than Obama among both blue-collar and white-collar white women.

All in all, although both Democrats are to a degree handicapped against McCain among white voters, Clinton would perform better than Obama in a general-election matchup among non-Hispanic whites. Combining white voters of both genders, the current analysis shows that McCain wins over Obama among whites, 53% to 38%, and beats Clinton by a considerably smaller 51% to 42% margin.

It is important to note that Obama runs about as well vs. McCain as Clinton does, and both Democrats currently maintain a slight advantage over McCain in general-election trial heats. So any weaker relative performance for Obama vs. McCain among a demographic group (such as white women or lower-educated voters) is made up for by a stronger relative performance among another group (such as blacks or higher-educated voters).”

— Gallup, today

QUOTATION OF THE WEEK:

“I wonder if Obama’s and [Ron] Paul’s amazing web success is a harbinger of a more libertarian and self-empowered political culture — because the web does not reward obedience, submission, or authoritarianism. It saddens me a great deal to see conservatism in America increasingly lean toward top-down, authoritarian, fear-based politics. In its best incarnation, conservatism is about self-government, individual freedom and hope-based politics. It’s about trusting people, not corralling them. In this, the web is the right’s natural ally, and it’s a very telling sign of American conservatism’s decadence that it doesn’t get the Internet as effectively as others.”

— Andrew Sullivan, 9 May 2008

Sullivan is my favorite conservative commentator and thinker, pretty much by far; these days it seems “conservative” has become practically synonymous with belligerence and douchery. So it’s good to see such a decent and intelligent voice.

C’mon, you ungrateful Araboushim! Dance and celebrate!

Amid the flurry of news about the North Carolina/Indiana primaries, there is a whole world out there: over 20,000 are dead in Burma from a cyclone. Maybe you missed it.

“Every Palestinian is a militant because everyone (sooner or later) wants Israel off their land, out of their lives, and forgotten like a horrible dream. It is for this reason that they are all equal targets: none of them is intelligent enough to understand that their land isn’t their land, their lives are not their lives, and their horrible dream is their present and future. Have no pity on those who don’t get it.”

— Jennifer Loewenstein (clearly a self-hating Jew!)

MoveOn can be disrespectful at times. I personally think that, for some reason, a carrot just might be totally useless as leader of the free world.

“…nothing in the region would be so difficult to solve except for the underlying cause of the unrest and dissension that exists there—that is, the Arab-Israel quarrel. This quarrel seems to have no limit in either intensity or in scope. Everybody in the Moslem and Jewish worlds is affected by it. It is so intense that the second any action is taken against one Arab state, by an outsider, all the other Arab and Moslem states seem to regard it as a Jewish plot and react violently. All this complicates the situation enormously.

As we began to uncover evidence that something was building up in Israel, we demanded pledges from Ben-Gurion that he would keep the peace. We realized that he might think he could take advantage of this country because of the approaching election and because of the importance that so many politicians in the past have attached to our Jewish vote. I gave strict orders to the State Department that they should inform Israel that we would handle our affairs exactly as though we didn’t have a Jew in America. The welfare and best interests of our own country were to be the sole criteria on which we operated.”

— President Eisenhower (November 2, 1956)

What an anti-Israel extremist. [Sighing sarcasm.]

I don’t trust you.

Remember our suffering. Not theirs, at our hands. Sorry if I am bitter.

“Palestinians will bring upon themselves a bigger holocaust because we will use all our might to defend ourselves.” (Matan Vilnai, Israeli Deputy Minister of Defense, 29 February 2008)

Due to cutoffs in fuel, the UN refugee relief agency cannot deliver food to one million Gazans. There are about 1.5 million people living there. (I feel so ashamed.)

A few uncomfortable facts from the Land of the Free™: we have the highest incarceration rate on the planet. We imprison more of our population than any other country. Over half of inmates in federal prisons in 2006 are there for drug offenses. These data come from a report in today’s New York Times, mirroring the earlier work in February of the Pew Center for the States which found that for the first time in US history over one in 100 American adults are in prison or jail. Proud to be an American...