DJHJD
Saturday, July 05, 2008
The most appropriate
From the New Yorker
His earlier speaking ill of the not yet dead:
When a "colorful" celebrity has achieved some sort of sustained and nominally respectable worldly accomplishment (record sales, business success, public office), and has been around long enough to acquire the appealing vulnerability of old age, and has not been convicted of a capital crime, there's a powerful tendency to go all warm and fuzzy on him. So it is at the moment for Jesse Helms, the senior senator from North Carolina. With his announcement, last Wednesday, that he will not seek a sixth term next year, Helms became a certified legend—the feisty (but always courteous) conservative icon, the plainspoken Tarheel who never feared to be politically incorrect, the paragon of traditional values who always let you know where he stood and is destined to be remembered, as President Bush put it, as "a tireless defender of our nation's freedom and a champion of democracy abroad."
The strangest tribute came from Walter Russell Mead, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and normally a levelheaded (if chronically puckish) observer. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Mead described Helms as "one of a handful of Southern statesmen who ensured the triumph of the civil rights revolution"—and not, as you might suppose, by provoking disgust and indignation among the fair-minded with the crude racism that was his stock-in-trade (along with an "anti-Communism" that treated liberal reform and Soviet tyranny as indistinguishable). According to Mead, the decisive contribution of Jesse Helms was that "once the civil rights legislation of the 1960s was enacted"—over Helms's unremitting and demagogic opposition, by the way—"he accepted the laws and obeyed them." Also, in edifying contrast to his counterparts of a century earlier, he refrained from "being directly and openly involved in the murder of black political leaders."
Talk about lowering the bar! But Helms never bothered with the soft bigotry of low expectations. He has always preferred the hard stuff, undiluted by the branch water of euphemism. Many of the Helms retrospectives of recent days have dated his entry into serious politics to 1960, when, after having spent most of his thirties as a banking lobbyist, he began delivering nightly five-minute commentaries on a Raleigh television station and on something called the Tobacco Radio Network—the job that propelled him into the Senate, twelve years later. But as far back as 1950, Helms, then twenty-eight, helped run what the Duke University historian William H. Chafe has called "the bitterest, ugliest, most smear-ridden campaign of modern times," the race to unseat Frank P. Graham, the former president of the University of North Carolina and probably the most distinguished North Carolinian ever to sit in the United States Senate. "The Graham campaign is generally viewed as the most pivotal in modern southern history since it set the precedent for the race-baiting and red-baiting tactics that were later employed so widely by politicians like Orval Faubus, George Wallace, and Jesse Helms," Chafe has written. "Helms, of course, helped invent these tactics." Over the succeeding half century, Helms changed but little. His own campaigns have invariably been powered by appeals to prejudice, racial and otherwise. In recent years the focus of his bigotry has shifted increasingly toward gays and lesbians. But his disdain for people of color (exemplified by his "humorous" habit, in private, of referring to any black person as "Fred") continues to find ways of expressing itself. He is the Senate's most reliable opponent of any measure aimed at securing the rights or improving the conditions of African-Americans. In 1994, when Nelson Mandela visited the Capitol, Helms ostentatiously turned his back on him.
* from the issue
* cartoon bank
* e-mail this
To be fair, the snub of the South African President probably had less to do with race per se than with foreign policy, the field in which Helms, who since 1986 has been either the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee or its ranking Republican, has done his worst mischief. His vaunted anti-Communism was never based upon a principled belief in democracy. His support of the apartheid regime was of a piece with his enthusiasm for any dictatorship, no matter how brutal, that could plausibly be described as right wing. (He even supported the Argentine junta in the Falklands war with Britain.) He has crippled America's diplomatic corps, systematically starving the State Department of funds and capriciously blocking the confirmation of highly qualified ambassadorial nominees. But it is in his unrelenting hostility to international institutions that he has done his greatest and probably most lasting damage.
The gauzy story line of the past week requires Helms to have "mellowed," the main piece of evidence being his agreement, in 1999, to allow payment of some nine hundred million dollars of the $1.3 billion in back dues the United States then owed the United Nations. Never mind that it was he who had abused the rules of the Senate to hold up the payments in the first place, or that the United States was on the verge of being deeply embarrassed by losing its right to vote in the General Assembly. The real significance of the episode is that what was supposed to be legally binding has now been certified as volitional. A new "principle"—that the solemn obligations of the United States are subject to abrogation without notice by congressional ideologues—has become ever more entrenched. America's U.N. bill, by the way, remains unpaid; it now amounts to $2.3 billion, a record, thanks to the machinations of such mini-Helmses as Tom DeLay, the House majority whip. Helms's heirs now populate the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, too: the national-security apparatus of the Bush Administration is heavily salted with his former assistants. Little wonder that the Administration adds almost weekly to the long list of useful international treaties it proposes to reject, abrogate, or simply scrap. The retirement of Jesse Helms has been hailed (and mourned) as "the end of an era." If only that were true.
Dropping the Helmsman
Far too late for it to do anybody any good, Jesse Helms has died. He has done so on Independence Day, which, since he was born too late to own slaves and in too liberal an age to allow him to outlaw sedition, will forever be his only resemblance to Thomas Jefferson and John Adams.
It is rude to speak ill of the dead. Luckily, I did so ahead of time.
His earlier speaking ill of the not yet dead:
When a "colorful" celebrity has achieved some sort of sustained and nominally respectable worldly accomplishment (record sales, business success, public office), and has been around long enough to acquire the appealing vulnerability of old age, and has not been convicted of a capital crime, there's a powerful tendency to go all warm and fuzzy on him. So it is at the moment for Jesse Helms, the senior senator from North Carolina. With his announcement, last Wednesday, that he will not seek a sixth term next year, Helms became a certified legend—the feisty (but always courteous) conservative icon, the plainspoken Tarheel who never feared to be politically incorrect, the paragon of traditional values who always let you know where he stood and is destined to be remembered, as President Bush put it, as "a tireless defender of our nation's freedom and a champion of democracy abroad."
The strangest tribute came from Walter Russell Mead, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and normally a levelheaded (if chronically puckish) observer. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Mead described Helms as "one of a handful of Southern statesmen who ensured the triumph of the civil rights revolution"—and not, as you might suppose, by provoking disgust and indignation among the fair-minded with the crude racism that was his stock-in-trade (along with an "anti-Communism" that treated liberal reform and Soviet tyranny as indistinguishable). According to Mead, the decisive contribution of Jesse Helms was that "once the civil rights legislation of the 1960s was enacted"—over Helms's unremitting and demagogic opposition, by the way—"he accepted the laws and obeyed them." Also, in edifying contrast to his counterparts of a century earlier, he refrained from "being directly and openly involved in the murder of black political leaders."
Talk about lowering the bar! But Helms never bothered with the soft bigotry of low expectations. He has always preferred the hard stuff, undiluted by the branch water of euphemism. Many of the Helms retrospectives of recent days have dated his entry into serious politics to 1960, when, after having spent most of his thirties as a banking lobbyist, he began delivering nightly five-minute commentaries on a Raleigh television station and on something called the Tobacco Radio Network—the job that propelled him into the Senate, twelve years later. But as far back as 1950, Helms, then twenty-eight, helped run what the Duke University historian William H. Chafe has called "the bitterest, ugliest, most smear-ridden campaign of modern times," the race to unseat Frank P. Graham, the former president of the University of North Carolina and probably the most distinguished North Carolinian ever to sit in the United States Senate. "The Graham campaign is generally viewed as the most pivotal in modern southern history since it set the precedent for the race-baiting and red-baiting tactics that were later employed so widely by politicians like Orval Faubus, George Wallace, and Jesse Helms," Chafe has written. "Helms, of course, helped invent these tactics." Over the succeeding half century, Helms changed but little. His own campaigns have invariably been powered by appeals to prejudice, racial and otherwise. In recent years the focus of his bigotry has shifted increasingly toward gays and lesbians. But his disdain for people of color (exemplified by his "humorous" habit, in private, of referring to any black person as "Fred") continues to find ways of expressing itself. He is the Senate's most reliable opponent of any measure aimed at securing the rights or improving the conditions of African-Americans. In 1994, when Nelson Mandela visited the Capitol, Helms ostentatiously turned his back on him.
* from the issue
* cartoon bank
* e-mail this
To be fair, the snub of the South African President probably had less to do with race per se than with foreign policy, the field in which Helms, who since 1986 has been either the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee or its ranking Republican, has done his worst mischief. His vaunted anti-Communism was never based upon a principled belief in democracy. His support of the apartheid regime was of a piece with his enthusiasm for any dictatorship, no matter how brutal, that could plausibly be described as right wing. (He even supported the Argentine junta in the Falklands war with Britain.) He has crippled America's diplomatic corps, systematically starving the State Department of funds and capriciously blocking the confirmation of highly qualified ambassadorial nominees. But it is in his unrelenting hostility to international institutions that he has done his greatest and probably most lasting damage.
The gauzy story line of the past week requires Helms to have "mellowed," the main piece of evidence being his agreement, in 1999, to allow payment of some nine hundred million dollars of the $1.3 billion in back dues the United States then owed the United Nations. Never mind that it was he who had abused the rules of the Senate to hold up the payments in the first place, or that the United States was on the verge of being deeply embarrassed by losing its right to vote in the General Assembly. The real significance of the episode is that what was supposed to be legally binding has now been certified as volitional. A new "principle"—that the solemn obligations of the United States are subject to abrogation without notice by congressional ideologues—has become ever more entrenched. America's U.N. bill, by the way, remains unpaid; it now amounts to $2.3 billion, a record, thanks to the machinations of such mini-Helmses as Tom DeLay, the House majority whip. Helms's heirs now populate the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, too: the national-security apparatus of the Bush Administration is heavily salted with his former assistants. Little wonder that the Administration adds almost weekly to the long list of useful international treaties it proposes to reject, abrogate, or simply scrap. The retirement of Jesse Helms has been hailed (and mourned) as "the end of an era." If only that were true.
My very favorite Bugs Bunny cartoon (and my second favorite)
And one of the best wartime ones -
And the one that gives me my identity:
Friday, July 04, 2008
Bill Moyers, peaceful afternoons and distraction
A day alone at the house. I've listened to two of Keith Olbermann's recent broadcasts, and I've now listened to four of Bill Moyers' broadcasts - only another two to go to be fully listened up.
I was putting together bread dough, which I've done hundreds of times over the last 25+ years - and I was listening to the Bill Moyers' broadcast in which he puts on Phil Donahue and the focus of his movie "Body of War," and I was so distracted that I prepared the entire raw dough loaf WITHOUT putting the yeast into it. Never have done that before. What was it that drew my attention so far away?
I'm not sure whether listening to this broadcast does ME any good. I know this information; I've heard about it as it was coming on for years. It's upsetting at a deep level based on my personal world view. "Liberty produces wealth, and wealth squelches liberty."
I was going to wash and wax the car today; the thundershowers interfered with that. Hmph.
Had a terrific conversation with Dina last night about working together more closely in the future. Lots of things in reflection today.
I was putting together bread dough, which I've done hundreds of times over the last 25+ years - and I was listening to the Bill Moyers' broadcast in which he puts on Phil Donahue and the focus of his movie "Body of War," and I was so distracted that I prepared the entire raw dough loaf WITHOUT putting the yeast into it. Never have done that before. What was it that drew my attention so far away?
I'm not sure whether listening to this broadcast does ME any good. I know this information; I've heard about it as it was coming on for years. It's upsetting at a deep level based on my personal world view. "Liberty produces wealth, and wealth squelches liberty."
I was going to wash and wax the car today; the thundershowers interfered with that. Hmph.
Had a terrific conversation with Dina last night about working together more closely in the future. Lots of things in reflection today.
Thursday, July 03, 2008
I STILL love this guy..
Bill from Portland Maine writes in today's Cheers and Jeers
So true, so true
Dear Bill: Is there a method to winning a political argument online? S.L., South Bend
Dear S.L.: Try this:
You always You never You should You must You shouldn't You mustn't. Why can't you Why don’t you Why aren't you Why didn’t you How could you? You suck You blow You lie You have no idea. You ignoramus You jerk You Ass You partisan hack. You're lying You're cheating You're distorting You're asking for it. You're out of your mind You’re out of your league You’re out of your tree You're out of your gourd. You’re off your rocker You're off your meds You're off the reservation. You're wrong You're stupid You're ignorant You're mental You're full of shit. You're an automaton You're a bomb-thrower You’re a water carrier You're a Kool Aid drinker You're a hack You're a loser You're a prick. You've got blinders on You've got no sense You've got spittle on your chin You've got your head up your ass. You disgust me You repulse me You disappoint me You make me want to puke. You’re talking in circles You're talking in riddles You’re talking in gibberish You're talking trash You're talking like a two year old. You can go to hell You can kiss my ass You can leave You can take your shit to another blog. I'm warning you I'm telling you I'm advising you I'm this close to troll-rating you. I'm sick of your crap I'm sick of your attitude I'm sick of your comments I'm sick of your emails I'm sick of your purity. Mine's better, smarter, faster, more organized, more effective and more experienced than yours, whatever it is. I say so I know so I was there I heard it from the horse's mouth I saw it on the internet I found it on Wikipedia I have a friend who took a class I got it from Fox News I read a press release from my congressman. Knock it off Cut it out Get a clue Do your homework. Clearly you don’t understand Clearly you don’t listen Clearly you don’t get it Clearly you haven’t tried it Clearly you weren't old enough at the time Clearly you're out of touch Clearly you're running around with the wrong crowd Clearly you want us to lose. One more word One more peep One more comment One more outburst One more syllable and you'll regret it. Don’t give me that attitude Don’t play that card Don’t change the subject Don't act so surprised Don’t be so stupid. Go to hell Go pound sand Go back to your mommy Go screw yourself Go to Little Green Footballs. I'm sick of you I loathe you I hope you get what's coming to you, crybaby.
And then add: "With all due respect." Bingo---you win.
So true, so true
Wednesday, July 02, 2008
AlterNet publishes the "Bottom 10" list for Geo 43
The 10 most awesomely bad moments of the Bush presidency
It's worth reading, not just as a refresher, but as proof that even the ideologues that these folks are pursuing think that it's all screwed up.
It's worth reading, not just as a refresher, but as proof that even the ideologues that these folks are pursuing think that it's all screwed up.
Sunday, June 29, 2008
Unintended consequences
What if medical advances, considered to be without flaw, actually had consequences that are uncomfortable and undesirable?
What if the "sub-prime meltdown" was just the beginning?
What if our mess in Iraq had already happened once before, and we, who were unfamiliar with history, were condemned to repeat it?
What if you could avoid paying nearly any credit card or bank fees just by asking nicely?
What if Walnut Bend is my Manderlay?
What if the "sub-prime meltdown" was just the beginning?
What if our mess in Iraq had already happened once before, and we, who were unfamiliar with history, were condemned to repeat it?
What if you could avoid paying nearly any credit card or bank fees just by asking nicely?
What if Walnut Bend is my Manderlay?
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