But part of the reason for the coarseness in political rhetoric is the coarseness in the culture. After all, if truman had used that Anglo-Saxon transitive verb there would have been a public outcry. Now, if anything it’s cool.

It may be third grade level rhetoric but I do remember my mother telling me that profanity showed an uncreative mind. The other objection is that it’s meaningless. I have a friend who is a lawyer…she’s tall, slender, has a very soft voice. She is careful about her language partly because she is careful about how she speaks, partly because she’s a church goer and takes it seriously, but also because when on rare occasions she says “goddamnit” people pay attention.

When it’s every other word out of your mouth it loses any real effect.

> They always had the duel as a recourse

Oh, don’t be ridiculous. By the times of Victoria duelling was virtually unheard of. Even in the “rough and ready colonies” dueling was generally discouraged sometime after 1810-1820. They may, very, very occasionally, have occurred after that, but not a lot. And that’s NOT in “Victorian England”, which is ca. 1830-1900. I suspect you would be hard-pressed to identify a single duel between upper class individuals when Victoria was in power. A list of five such would be virtually impossible.

> But there’s something to be said for propriety, especially in public life. Now Joe Biden, in an article in the 3/21/05 New Yorker by Jeffrey Goldberg entitled “The Unbranding,” is quoted as saying, “What is so transformational in the last four years is that these assholes who wouldn’t give President Clinton the authority to use force” have now become, he said, moral interventionists. “Give me a fucking break.”

All comment to the coarseness aside —

I’d point out, of course, that the difference between what was desired by Clinton in Bosnia and what was desired by Bush in Iraq is:

Bosnia was not, in any way, a threat to the USA, could not, in any way of significance, harm the USA, did not, in any way, encourage, fund, train, or otherwise assist the enemies of the USA.

The same could not be said of Iraq. It is not a proven thing, but Saddam operated what was, in 2000, three of the six known terrorist training camps in the world. This included the only one with an intact airframe specifically for the purpose in training terrorist takeovers of planes. It is rather hard to believe that the 911 hijackers did NOT take advantage of this. There’s no proof, but it’s one of Thoreau’s “Trout in the Milk” things.

Further, Saddam openly rewarded the families of the hijackers with millions of dollars. Had he remained in power, this would provide an obvious encouragement for others to find similarly spectacular ways to attack the USA.

He had openly declared his intention to obtain ABC weapons to use against his enemies — Israel and the USA (as well as internal ones like the Kurds). He was misusing funds derived from humanitarian aid stolen from his own people to bribe corrupt UN officials for the sole purpose of removing the sanctions and restrictions which made his ability to create and stockpile ABC weapons difficult, if not impossible.

I think, furthermore, that there were, indeed, some moral reasons for intervening in Iraq but not Bosnia.

Bosnia’s problems are an ethnic clash between two “clans” which are bound and determined to strike at one another. As long as such attitudes remain in effect, there will be no cessation of the hostilities OR the sort of reprisal-counter-reprisal and even downright genocides which are endemic to such (and, for much the same reasons, it is questionable about the wisdom of getting involved in Darfur. We should just drop guns and ammo from the sky in a wide swath across the countryside and let the people themselves deal with the warlords and oppressors)

Iraq, however, was much more a single individual, along with his supporters, preying on a collection of people. While there was clearly some of the “tribe-v-tribe” problem, it is clear from the results of only five years of real effort in Iraq that their people are not devoted to slitting the throats of their enemies, even if they die themselves in the process. The depth of hatred in the Iraqi people clearly does not overrule their innate common sense.

In summary — comparison of intervention in Bosnia to intervention in Iraq is a defective comparison when made with the kind of flip equation that Biden made (such a lack of functional reasoning is hardly atypical for liberals, however).

The differences between moral intervention in Iraq and Bosnia are legion.

and i have argued till i am blue in the face as to how so many social ills and quite a few problems are easily avoidable if one follows such things. Most screech about it without understanding it, but usually what it denies, isnt worth having anyway. finding out before you have it is often better.

“Perhaps Miss McKay objects [to accompanying you to the opera] on moral grounds.”

“What?”

“Perhaps she subscribes to the belief that [end of paraphrasing; rest is direct quote, I’m pretty sure] for a man to court a woman in his employ is nothing more than a serpentine attempt to turn a lady into a whore.”

Now, you could argue that “whore” is coarse – yup. It would’ve been MUCH more in character, speaking in Kate’s presence as he was, for Leopold to use a euphemism, but the statement is still as straight-up as it could possibly be: He was defending a lady’s honor against someone out to dirty it.

I love Miss Manners on the subject of how to respond to both coarseness and insult. She maintains, always, that in such circumstances courtesy does not require Christian turning of the other cheek; instead, she reeducates her readers on how the courteous person retaliates publicly. The last step before inviting the insulter to step outside is “a ringing ‘How dare you?'” When the response is to an insult, NONE of the earlier steps require passivity; they just use language, including body language, effectively as if they were a glove across the face.

The key, though, seems to be confidence in your moral position – something that moral relativism makes difficult. Oh, and eye contact.

But it’s silly to believe that in, say, Victorian times people of manners had no recourse against coarseness or insults.

Still More Outrageous ACORN Sleaze: San Bernardino

In the latest in their astounding series of exposés, James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles introduce us to San Bernardino, California ACORN employee Tresa Kaelke, who not only is eager to help them use taxpayer money to set up a brothel specializing in child prostitution – just like the ACORN folks in Baltimore, in DC, and in Brooklyn – but also boasts that she used to be a prostitute herself, and even that she murdered her husband.

tune in tomorrow when…
heck anyhthing i would make up wouldnt do justice to the extremity of the disconnected class.

Even my jaw dropped at the straightforward, not-an-eyeblink acquiescence that the ACORN staffers showed to the proposition of sexual trafficking in minors.

We are through the looking glass, people.

That old saw only works on third graders and not very well….

“Profanity proves ignorance.”