perfidy

I'm a pretty big fan of Howard Dean, and it frosts my cookies to see the Democratic Leadership Congress dismiss him as "unelectable," by which they mean "not on our payroll."

The New Republic recently ran this "agin' him" piece by Jonathan Chait. I thought it was a mildly foolish article that raises a few good points about the dangers posed by the Dean campaign and the potential for his nomination to candidate to go horribly awry (by "horribly awry" in this context I mean Bush winning in a stroll).

Then I forwarded the article to my friend Bootsy, and received in response this gentle fisking:

Prefaced by: I am a raging Deanite:
1. Dean's followers are NOT largely liberal. This is a fallacy perpetrated throughout the media. (resisting urge for conspiracy theory...)
2. Dean does not diametrically oppose Bush. He was opposed to the war, not opposed to all war. He makes a strong case for where we do need to use our military strength and where we do not. In fact, I really can see why Republicans can support Dean. A lot of the issues that the Republican party says they stand for but have lately ignored, especially fiscal responsibility and state's rights, are solid with Dean.
3. I think they underestimate the public's dislike for the Patriot Act.
4. Dean's positions are not unpopular. Fiscal responsibility, pro-choice, health care reform, education reform? Pretty mainstream to me.
5. As a vermonter, I take offense at their generalization of Vermont politics. This is a state with only two gun laws, civil unions, practically socialized school funding, and a very large libertarian element. It is diverse, not extremely liberal. Just ask the guys my dad has breakfast with about Hillary Clinton.

...all this "too liberal" bullshit is code word for "gay lover" and the DNC is just really disgusting me lately. Not only are they distancing themselves from their base but their strategy has proven that it does NOT win elections, I think they are too stubborn and power hungry to give it up.

All true. And all why I think Dean has a better shot than many people give him credit for at winning the primaries and the general elections. He's irascible, he's smart, he doesn't take or give any BS, and he consistently does his homework, thinks about what he wants to say, and admits when he doesn't have a firm answer to a question.

It's like he's from the moon or something.

(And I would like to say, Bootsy is dead on about the "too liberal" epithet.)

Brad Templeton has compliled a history of the word spam. Joe-Bob says, "Check it out."

Every news source in the world is reporting this, so I will randomly choose... ooooh, MSNBC:

"The likely death of Saddam Hussein’s two powerful and notorious sons, if confirmed, would represent a withering blow to Iraqi Baath Party loyalists who hope to wait out the American occupation and restore the regime to power.

That's great! It's taken Bush months to beat this level, and it's worse for him that he sometimes forgets to save his game. 

All that remains is the Big Boss Level. I hope Bush remembered to defeat the Tikriti Dragon and get the Spirit Key-- he's gonna need it! 
 

While I'm on an Instapundit kick, he excerpts a report from the Telegraph saying that Newsweek says that a joint congressional inquiry found that Saudi Arabia was deeply involved in the 9/11 attacks. (How's that for a chain of references?) The administration has apparently not released an entire section of the congressional report that has all the juicy details of how individuals working in Saudi consulates were intimately involved in the plot.

This, not to put to fine a point on it, is wrong. The administration should not be coddling the Saudis for at least ten reasons right off the top of my head, but certainly not if they were involved in the worst assault on America since the Second World War.

Though I have consistently defended the the decision to invade Iraq, and in general support the administration (I am a conservative, after all) I most certainly do not approve of this. This information needs to be disseminated, the American people (and everyone else, for that matter) need to know. There are good reasons for what we are doing in the war on terror. But it should not be me (God forbid) or the USS Clueless or other warbloggers pointing this out. The Bush administration should be out in public, letting us know and making the case for taking the fight to these terrorist sickos.

And while I'm on a roll, I hear that Adm. Buster Poindexter's TIA got its funding zeroed by the Senate. Good. The Patriot Act: I, II and N is a bad idea. Not increasing military funding or the size of the military when you're in a war is a bad idea. Not taking a really close look at how our intelligence system is working (and in terms of human intelligence, not working at all) is a very bad idea. There are questions, and I think the administration should be a lot more vocal about either answering them (if only to shut certain people up) or saying flat out that we don't know the answers yet. And with the Saudis, its time to call a spade a spade.

Instapundit is reporting that Reuters is reporting that American forces may have put the finger on Uday and Qusay Hussein. If true, this is very good news.

"There was a shootout in Mosul, and there is a number of dead people and a couple of them could be Uday and Qusay," the official said, but added it had not been definitively confirmed.

I think those two would qualify for just about anyone's pre-decease list. 

[Update] MSNBC has a bigger story, and mentions that sources believe there is a 90-95% chance that the two brothers have gone to their eternal reward.
 

In the news: Gephardt Attacks Bush 'Unilateralism'....

"Democratic presidential candidate Dick Gephardt on Tuesday issued a blistering criticism of the Bush administration's "chest-beating unilateralism" in its handling of the Iraq war, which he said weakened diplomatic alliances and squandered global goodwill following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

"Foreign policy isn't a John Wayne movie, where we catch the bad guys, hoist a few cold ones and then everything fades to black," Gephardt said in remarks prepared for a speech to the Bar Association of San Francisco. "No matter the surge of momentary machismo - as gratifying as it may be for some - it is shortsighted and wrong to simply go it alone."

Want to know how little I think of Dick Gephardt? I love what he said here-- I've said the same thing myself before-- and I still think he comes off like a jerk.

Also, the Democrats really need to find a way to move beyond the Uranium thingy (thingy!!) and join it up with other trenchant criticisms, because Uranium is like sooo last week.

Oh wait, sorry-- I forgot. Clinton took the party's brains and moral compass with him when he left office. They are currently in a U-Stor-It in Passaic, NJ and are in need of a good cleaning, having sat untouched for eleven years.

Because the constant focus on tests cripples education. Teachers teach to the test, not to the students, the material, or the community, and useless pursuits like art and music get cut from the curriculum in the scramble to raise test scores and win funding.

The No Child Left Behind Act was a mistake. The public education system is broken, and it is only making matters worse.

Because .org has that authenticity that .biz completely lacks. We want respect, damnit.

When, at the end of the week, the perfidy.org domain name comes out of the .org registry's bizarre purgatory - none of you better take it. We lost perfidy.com to a wacko in Md who is now using it for "monetization". If you steal what is rightfully ours, we will hunt you down and glare at you. Then, we will accept our loss like the powerless, whiny bitches we are.

Buckethead,

Having finished Steven den Beste's twenty-page post (man needs an editor), I need to take some time to ruminate and compose a brief response.

You are correct-- SdB does articulate almost exactly what you've been saying since we started our weblog and before. My difficulty comes not with the overarching structure of his arguments, but in the half-truths, omissions, and arrogantly stated howlers he sometimes tosses off as asides, and with his choice to address his post to America-hating liberals (though such a tone may be an appropriate response to Hesiod, sure). I am not one of the Children of Chomsky. I'm an America-loving centrist who does not question the existence or worth of the Anti-Terror Bus we are all riding, but instead wonders if we shouldn't take the bypass rather than the business loop, and whether the driver really knows if this is the road to St. Louis.

One thing SdB did do exceedingly well was to remind me that we are in the early stages of a long, hard campaign, and that many things are still fluid. It is easy on the internet to become shrill and blinkered (easy?? I thought it was required!!), and in the interest of maintaining my sense of perspective, I'm going to take a break from the big-picture and warblogging and return to the anklebiting that comes so naturally to me.