There are always snipers on the roofs of DC for Presidential Inaugurals. I watched Clinton's inaugural from the roof of my store's building at 17th and PA NW with a buddy who had worked personnel for the Secret Service in years past and gotten to know some agents and officers. He pointed all the snipers out to me and noted that their rifles were "accurate up to a mile."
Now the riot police are another matter, as is the obsessive crowd-vetting.
1. Much of the Noreascon comparison table is not, you know, funny. It's labored, repetitious and overly familiar.
2. Nevertheless, uh, Patrick? It's just not feeling like a big deal somehow.
They knew ahead of time and failed to stop it.
I don't mean they didn't even try. They may well have. I mean they blew it.
What's stuck with me for two and a half years was how very quickly after the event they were able to name all 19 hijackers out of the hundreds (all the people on the planes) of potential suspects. I remarked on it at the time, and my wife, who listens to NPR so I don't have to, told me that this very thing came up as follows:
Anchorperson: Nina, how do they know so much already?
Nina Totenberg: [Anchorperson], somebody really screwed up.
And there the matter has lain since. WHO really screwed up? How? Apparently we must not, must not know.
Hey! I played Sam the sheriff! I think I was in tenth grade, though. Heck, it might have been 11th.
Patrick: I assure you that, like Gary Farber, you defy political pigeon-holing. You are Ellen De Generis's sibling, Sue E.
BTW, re Nader: he might really be on your side after all. Check the end of, of all things, Justin Raimondo's latest column, where he notes that spurning the Green Party nomination almost certainly means Nader will not be able to get on the ballot in states like, um, Florida: http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=2023
Also BTW, Bruce Baugh took me to task for saying that SF must use the methods of naturalism, citing certain authors whose manuscripts pass through your hands on the way to their readers. So I've been a little nervous about that claim.
Has anyone else mentioned Berlin 1989? (I am so often behind on these things.) There's no reason to think a genuine social revolution won't happen all at once. There seems to be something of the same incongruously sober party atmosphere that attended the smashing of that physical wall 15 years ago.
it's just kind of ironic that someone who is dependent on mass public transit to earn a living hasn't figured out that this is exactly why libertarianism doesn't work unless you are immensely, independently wealthy.
Good old Los Angeles public transportation goes on strike an average of every four years. Meanwhile the city outlaws jitneys. And it's libertarianism that doesn't work?
I'm short of money myself at the moment, therefore am reluctant to give in the first place.
Nor would Arthur make you, or even question your decision not to for any reason you did or did not bother to come up with.
Which reminds me of my standard response when someone demands to know my "sign."
"You tell me."
Sage? I kind of like that. "My blog is sage." However, my eyes work more like Ulrika's than Mary Kay's, which is why I've long considered myself part of the League of Extraordinary Sherbet-Colored Blogs with Ginger Stampley and Avedon Carol.
Yes, it sure is good to have Patrick back, eh? I would say we need a wise and caring federal program to regulate his absences for the good of all the countries working families.
Patrick and Digby: as to "despair" over electoral politics, I come at it (as a political extremist) a different way. My thinking was substantially influenced by a conversation I had with Eve Tushnet, who was talking about why, unlike some of her friends, she had chosen to be a writer rather than a party professional.
"I think politicians mostly do what they think they have to do," she said, "and the rhetorical climate is an important determinant of that." By writing, Eve feels that she's affecting the rhetorical climate in a way that is at least as powerful as "writing a check or walking a precinct" would. It may in many cases be one's ONLY option. Before the Rolling World War came along, my number one concern for the country was our insane system of drug prohibition. There I am unlikely to have "a candidate I believe in" to vote for at any level of the polity. If my candidate gets in, he is still unlikely to be able to sway policy, UNLESS someone has already tackled the bigger job of changing the rhetorical climate around drug policy. Same with the Million Mom War, where one party avidly seeks it and the other party is too cowardly to stand in their way.
First things first.
This is simply maintaining the cosmic balance - you're making up for all the places that list me as a "liberal blog."
FWIW, I'm not sure which page you were looking at, since, depending on which path I take to "libertarian personal pages" or "libertarian blogs," I end up anywhere from third to umpty-ump, while your site appeareth not.
Damn you for appearing higher than I do anywhere though. Be aware that the ONLY reason such a thing happens is your greater popularity. So there!
Ptrck, y gnrnt slt. (Pre-vowelectomized!)
I agree with you that our rulers are appalling, but that's as far as it goes. First, there's a huge issue of contingency here. Absent the September massacres, it's doubtful that the Imperial Wing of Bush's party would have had the leverage to sway him so completely to the side of millenarian fantasy. Without the carcasses on which the jackals of the Imperium pounced (Rumsfeld, Cheney and the PNAC crowd), liberals would be complaining chiefly about fiscal policy and cloning - serious policy matters, to be sure, but not issues that implicate the essence of the country in the same way as perpetual war and detentions without charge. You can't blame Nader voters for lack of a crystal ball.
Second, while I no longer believe Gore could have done worse, I'm still far from convinced how much better he would be. The Democratic Party has its own Imperial Wing, and Gore, with his connections to the New Republic, the DLC and the intervention-happy Clinton Administration, was arguably more plugged in, pre-election, than Bush was. He was part of an administration that pursued the policy of poking a caged Saddam Hussein with a sharp stick for twelve years, launching an average of 47,000 sorties a year and maintaining and defending the sanctions regime (and Arabian-based troop deployments) that made business so brisk at the al Qaeda recruitment office. By their fruits ye shall know them, and the fruits of the Administration in which Gore served were an unauthorized (by Congress or the UN) war, sundry other interventions and the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act.
Gore was never much of a civil libertarian, and, his criticisms of the Bush Administration since coming out of his post-election "shell" have not, from what I can see, overly stressed the threat to individual rights. And Gore has his own weakness for "central organizing principle" grandiosity. His Cross is simply Green. And we've established that under Clinton-Gore, the US government was just as willing to render its captives unto foreign torturers.
One can easily imagine a worst-case Gore scenario in which, instead of thinly-veiled attempts to link left wing war protesters to Saddam and Al Qaeda, the White House spin machine hammers tenuous or notional "links" between Al Qaeda and "the radical right," with an eye toward delegitimizing anyone to starboard of Joe Lieberman (akin to the actual practice of the post-OKC Clinton Administration). Ironically, one can also imagine the UN rolling over on Iraq - remember those Imperial connections - and making it EASIER for the (different) administration to immire us in a half-century's morass of occupation and retaliation. As it stands, the very arrogance and incompetence of the Bush, ahem, BRAIN TRUST may yet manage to scuttle the whole adventure - at great cost, sure, but nothing approaching the cost of actually going through with it.
Your jibe at the Nader voters is akin to the certitude of the people who know - for certain - just exactly how well things would have worked out if Chamberlain hadn't signed that document at Munich or Roosevelt had been stiffer at Yalta or GHWB had gone "on to Baghdad!" in 1991. We are facing a much, much bigger issue than the uncertain effects of the Democratic Party's inability to win over two percent of liberal voters three years ago.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2005 | 2 |
| 2004 | 5 |
| 2003 | 8 |
| 2002 | 18 |
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