Saturday, December 8, 2012
Friday, December 7, 2012
So they were right?
Chait is, in fact, a well known liberal pundit.
Here he says it's a point in favor of this noble plan that it will force people 65 to 67 years old onto the market for private health care, assuming they aren't working.
And that's swell because then they'll appreciate how wonderful Obamacare is, and so its opponents among them will turn to defenders.
I am not kidding.
That's what he says.
It just never occurs to him that they might be really pissed off at the Democrats for even considering such a thing.
Especially if the Republicans endlessly remind them in campaigns to come that, hey, it was the Democrats' idea to throw them under the bus.
You know, a lot of elderly people opposed Obamacare because they feared it would come somehow at their expense.
And soooo . . . .
Who speaks for the people?
A handful of sad and lonely guys like Krugman whom everyone ignores.
Or me, whom nobody reads, at all.
The people in DC just don’t give a shit about the ordinary folks of America.
Least of all those who are, thanks to the lingering disaster the rich and the powerful made, unemployed.
Even the lesser evil could be a lot better, thanks.
You might even say democracy is not working out quite as it should.
JR discovers fire
Oliver Stone’s Untold History
He discovers Ollie is a red, at least metaphorically.
JFK wasn't enough to convince him.
Or anything else in Stone's entire career, up to now.
Gee.
And what nonsense JR writes about Spain!
You would think he was writing for the Falange, or at least for Franco's Nationalists.
And what claptrap about the World Wars!
Am I the only anti-warrior able and willing to admit we could and should have stayed out of our wars though we were, in fact, and from time to time, on the right side?
And that, in those cases, this fact was and is clear as day?
Or at least that we fought with shocking and unacceptable means, though ordinarily they combine that accusation with the other.
It doesn’t matter what he knew or when he knew it.
Never.
Just like Wilson, before him.
Needless to say, Americans were not interested in a vast war effort in the Pacific to put paid to the Japanese, either, merely because they had begun building their empire beyond China – and they had been in China since forever – at the expense of the empires of the British, French, and Dutch.
But JR is perfectly right about “the court historians” – nearly all of them, whether liberal or conservative, after the war and up to this very day – celebrating FDR for dragging the American people, by hook and by crook, into a war – actually, two wars, one each across two oceans – they wanted no part of.
For the liberals it was “the Good War” because it avenged six million of Europe’s Jews and saved the rest, probably saved millions of Slavs from a programmed death, and probably saved millions of other Slavs from racial helotry under the Germans for however long the Third Reich might have lasted had Hitler won.
They are right about that much, I think.
And they are right, I think, in supposing what Hitler would have done to the Slavs is much worse than what Stalin actually did do to them.
The specific plan may well have been a secret, but the aspiration certainly was not, having been presented by Hitler quite frankly in his Mein Kampf.
Blood-curdling.
But I am not aware much of this was actually known to the US by December, 1941.
And all the same, it in no way means we should have joined in the war even if, as I think is plainly contrary to fact, it would have been lost if we had not entered.
And this is all too true.
[T]he myth of the "sneak attack" on Pearl Harbor is a pillar of the "Greatest Generation" narrative that is the foundation of our interventionist foreign policy.
That storyline goes something like this: we "saved" the world from the Axis powers, overcoming our "isolationist" inclinations, and went on to create a "world order" in which we established, forevermore, our duty and destiny to police the four corners of the earth and stand up for Goodness, Justice, and Fair Play.
We have been paying for that myth, ever since.
Yeah. And remember the Lusitania. And the Maine, too.
Booman reverently remembers the dying vets.
My father went, and all my uncles.
They never got over themselves and they never stopped hating the 60s generation for refusing to go obediently to Vietnam, no questions asked, as they and their fathers had gone obediently to Europe for Democratic presidents who had promised them otherwise, twice.
They never met a war they didn't approve, in many cases just being dogs in the manger about it.
"We had to go. Now you have to go."
Bloody Archie Bunkers, all of them.
Communists in a good cause
Even during the cold war, many outright communists supported and helped out in important struggles.
Politics makes strange bedfellows, and those who are enemies in one connection can be allies in another.
And it remains a delusion that much of Marx can be “rescued.”
All the same . . . .
This guy has become a joke at his own expense.
Missed this, right after the election.
SNL could not possibly do a more extravagant send-up than he has done of himself.
Talk about moaning from the alienated, “professional left.”
It’s all about this.
Liberals, by voting for Barack Obama, betrayed the core values they use to define themselves—the rule of law, the safeguarding of civil liberties, the protection of unions, the preservation of social welfare programs, environmental accords, financial regulation, a defiance of unjust war and torture, and the abolition of drone wars.
Not to quibble, but when did environmental accords (a reference to treaties concerning global warming, I think – though the actual chief concern of liberals in these matters seems to be wealth transfers and not stopping or slowing climate disaster) and “the abolition of drone wars” get to be “core liberal values”?
And was it really such a betrayal of them to go with the lesser evil, as Mr. O undoubtedly, unmistakably was?
Oh, my.
And what a load of moralistic codswallop he is dumping!
Oh, and blaming the liberals for the collapse of Weimar is just soooo bizarre.
Not the reds, who refused to make common cause with the Social Democrats?
Not, for that matter, the Nazis, themselves?
And this ludicrous finger-wagging is just laugh out loud stuff.
The liberal establishment’s inability to defy corporate power, to stand up for its supposed liberal beliefs, means its inevitable disappearance, along with the disappearance of traditional liberal values.
This, as history has amply pointed out, is the road to despotism.
And we are further down that road than many care to admit.
And so on, and so on.
I had to stop reading there.
Life is too short.
Kind of a surprise they still have this posted for all to see, over at Truthdig.
Told you they’d whine
See?
It is a liberal war on Christmas.
As for us, our shopping is nearly done and this weekend we'll order photos on line and print address labels for the Christmas cards.
For those of you who are not Christians, get over it, for cryin' out loud.
Repudiate the treaties
Oh, boo hoo.
And ask yourself what happens to cemeteries, anyway, over the passage of time.
Better yet, look it up.
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