I’ve probably written at least 100,000 words trying to explain Palin-hatred. The rest of the right side of the blogosphere has babbled on and on in the same attempt. But James Taranto explains it all, elegantly and succinctly, here.
Absolutely brilliant.
[Hat tip: commenter “Bill West.”]
It’s merely symbolic, but nevertheless it’s still nice to hear that the House has resoundingly repealed Obamacare, 245-189 on a party line vote plus three Democrats.
I take it back—no, not of the day, of the week. Maybe of the month. Oh heck, maybe of recorded history.
I bring you:
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Note the colorful and sensuous prose, as well as the double entendre of “straight seize your rss feed to remain abreast.”
Until now, I was unaware of the existence of LDS (Lieberman Derangement Syndrome). But Emily Bazelon certainly demonstrates it in her farewell letter to Lieberman, published in Slate.
It ain’t no Valentine. Bazelon begins with the following admission:
My corner of Connecticut was covered in ice today, until news broke of Sen. Joe Lieberman’s impending retirement. Magically, a warm glow spread. It was a delicious feeling: the end of the reign of the politician I despise most.
Why do I loathe, loathe, loathe my 68-year-old four-term senator? My feelings are all the stronger for being fairly irrational.
Then why, why, why, oh why, should anyone care what she says? On a blog, perhaps; many blog readers like to read the personal feelings of their hosts, and the more rabid the better. But how is it that a supposedly serious journalist, Slate editor and legal expert, writer for such formerly august publications as the Atlantic and the WaPo, is indulging in this irrational venting of spleen and expecting us to respect her for it?
Just to give you the flavor of the piece, Bazelon approvingly quotes a friend’s unsupported statements that Lieberman’s observance of Jewish law has been more politically opportunistic than sincere. Funny, I hadn’t noticed that observing the Jewish sabbath is a sure ticket to election, even in Connecticut, but who needs to use reason when you’ve got hate?
It gets Bazelon’s goat that Lieberman denounced Bill Clinton over the Lewinsky affair, although I’d lay money on the fact that, had Clinton been a Republican having sex (or not exactly having sex) with Lewinsky, Bazelon would have been one of the first to condemn him. Her problem with Lieberman was that he stuck to principle above party loyalty, because his siding against Clinton was “a gift to the president’s enemies.” Reason enough to hate a person, don’t you think?
Another source of Bazelon’s ire seems to have been when Lieberman took the stand that Catholic hospitals not be compelled to offer the morning after pill to rape victims, and his pointing out that in Connecticut it’s not a long trip to get to a hospital that does.
And what does a phrase like the following mean coming from a person who purports to be a serious journalist, “Lieberman’s unrequited, unquenchable love for the Iraq war?” It not only suggests that Lieberman advocated the war because he’s a bloodthirsty lover of killing, but it makes me wonder how love for war could be ever be “requited.”
Bazelon is unrepentant, and hardly alone in her LDR. In a telling moment, she quotes a friend as referring to “many rounds of playing the peculiar Connecticut liberal cocktail party game ‘I hated Joe Lieberman before you hated Joe Lieberman.'” That may just be the key phrase in the entire piece, because I think what’s happening here is that Bazelon is continuing that liberal cocktail party game among her friends at Slate.
It’s not a pretty game, but it seems like fun to play. As best I can recall, the first time this sort of tone was aired in a supposedly reputable periodical was back in September of 2003, when TNR’s Jonathan Chait came out of the closet with his confessional column that began with the famous line, “I hate President George W. Bush.”
Chait’s piece was curiously like Bazelon’s, or maybe it’s the other way around. Like her, he freely admitted that his hatred had springs that were not altogether substantive:
I think his policies rank him among the worst presidents in U.S. history. And, while I’m tempted to leave it at that, the truth is that I hate him for less substantive reasons, too…He reminds me of a certain type I knew in high school–the kid who was given a fancy sports car for his sixteenth birthday and believed that he had somehow earned it. I hate the way he walks–shoulders flexed, elbows splayed out from his sides like a teenage boy feigning machismo. I hate the way he talks–blustery self-assurance masked by a pseudopopulist twang.
It goes on, but I’ll stop there—except to say that journalists such as this have no reason to complain about invective in public discourse.
CNN’s John King has apologized for guest Andy Shaw’s use of the now-forbidden word “crosshairs” in describing the Chicago mayoral race.
Bravo! Let’s just ban all non-literal speech, metaphors and colorful language of any kind. Let’s ban not only guns, but even the word “gun.” Better safe than sorry.
Let’s have a competition in who is holier-than-thou in making sure that his or her words could not possibly inflame a single human being to even think of violence. Because we all know that violence comes from people hearing words such as “crosshairs.”
While we’re at it, Allahpundit makes a good point:
Am I hallucinating or didn’t this same network [CNN] once have an entire show devoted to heated political debate called ”¦ “Crossfire”? With a crosshairs logo? How did the republic survive while it was on the air?
CNN might reply that now it’s doing it’s mea culpa for that sin. It might also reply that it was really William F. Buckley, a conservative, who started it all with “Firing Line,” which was on PBS for decades. The term “firing line” refers, of course, to battle, to “the line of positions from which fire is directed at a target.” It also has a secondary meaning, “the forefront of an activity or pursuit.”
“Crosshairs” is an even more eclectic word. It indeed describes the scope in a firearm, but it actually refers to any optical device with that sort of sighting marker. The more general word is “reticle“—next on the banning list?—of which “crosshairs” is the most common and simple type.
Let’s learn what crosshairs actually means before we kiss it goodbye:
A reticle is a net of fine lines or fibers in the eyepiece of a sighting device, such as a telescope, a telescopic sight, a microscope, or the screen of an oscilloscope. The word reticle comes from the Latin “reticulum,” meaning “net.” Today, engraved lines or embedded fibers may be replaced by a computer-generated image superimposed on a screen or eyepiece. There are many variations of reticles; this article concerns itself mainly with a simple reticle: crosshairs.
Crosshairs are most commonly represented as intersecting lines in the shape of a cross, “+”, though many variations exist, including dots, posts, circles, scales, chevrons, or a combination of these. Most commonly associated with telescopic sights for aiming firearms, crosshairs are also common in optical instruments used for astronomy and surveying, and are also popular in graphical user interfaces as a precision pointer.
The word “crosshairs” has been widely used in politics till now. But it’s been newly-banned due to the MSM’s and other politicians’ need to differentiate themselves from the heinously coldblooded Sarah Palin, the only person who’s ever used it before (“we have always been at war with Eastasia”) and who obviously inspired the demented Jared Loughner to gun down 20 people in Tucson.
What the rest of us drone on about seriously and far more tediously, Iowahawk skewers with wit.
[Hat tip: commenter “expat.”]
I don’t like to link to Sullivan, so I’ll link instead to Ann Althouse’s post about him, which alerted me to the following passage representing his new attempt to talk about his béªte noire Sarah Palin while taking the high road of civility in order to “make strong and lively points without demonization” [emphasis mine]:
…[T]here is no conceivable way in which, in my judgment, her presence on the national stage can improve our discourse, help solve our problems or improve public life. But that does not forbid one from noting the great example she has shown in rearing a child with Down Syndrome, whatever his provenance, or noting her effectiveness as a demagogue, or from admiring her father’s genuineness or her skill in exploiting new media. I’ve consistently tried to do this without undercutting my still-raw amazement that an advanced democratic society could even contemplate putting such an unstable and irresponsible person in a position of any real power.
There is actually no conceivable way (note Sullivan’s use of that highly appropriate word) that anyone newly-committed to making “strong and lively points without demonization” can doubt the provenance of Trig Palin, as Sullivan continues to do in his ever-so-pompous (give me a break: “provenance?”) aside.
“Unstable and irresponsible,” thy name is Sullivan. At least he’s not in a position of any real power.
It seems that nearly everyone who came into contact with Jared Loughner during the past year or two sensed that he was weird, perhaps even crazy. Nor did the form his oddity took seem harmless, although as far as we know he never directly threatened anyone.
Nevertheless, scads of people perceived him as a threat and as imminently very very dangerous. Of all those who had encountered this guy recently in daily life—and especially his teachers and classmate, and the former friends with whom he broke off relations (we don’t know much yet about his parents)—there seems to have hardly been a dissenting voice to the view that this guy was going to do something frightening and destructive to others.
But our justice system is act-oriented, not person-oriented. You can’t put someone in jail for being crazy and giving people a very uneasy feeling, especially in the absence of threats, although you used to be able to put that same someone into a mental institution for that very reason—sometimes for a short while, sometimes for a long while. We are now far more libertarian and restrictive about such things, and perhaps we should be; I’m a moderate libertarian (is that an oxymoron?) myself.
But something about a situation in which the consensus is so powerful makes one pause and wonder what could, would, and should have been done with a Jared Loughner, and who should have done it.
His parents seem to have had the highest responsibility, but maybe they tried and failed; after all, he was not a minor, although he still lived with them and one would think they had some leverage there.
His friends? The college? The police who escorted him out of school? It is unclear whether anyone had the power and inclination to change this although many were able to foresee it or at least something like it—if not in its details (who, what, where, how), then certainly in its general outlines.
The following is not a digression, although it may sound like it: about twenty years ago, when my husband and I were married and our child was small, we had a smallish dog. What a wonderful dog he was—friendly to all creatures, and usually very quiet. No yappy little dog was he. He never met a person he didn’t like—until one day, an old acquaintance of my husband’s came to visit.
My husband hadn’t seen him since high school, which had been a long time earlier. He called to tell us he was in town, and when he came to the door and we opened it, our dog growled.
I mean really growled. Snarled and bared his teeth and barked and barked and never let up. We had to put the dog in another room and close the door, and only then did he calm down. But it soon became apparent what had been going on with the dog, because it soon became apparent that our guest was unhinged.
Our visitor wasn’t dangerous. At least, he didn’t seem so to us; I’m not sure the dog, who clearly had methods beyond ours, shared our perception.
Who knows what it was the dog was picking up on? The whiff of madness? I think of the collective response to Jared Loughner as the equivalent of hundreds or even thousands of those dogs, all too polite to bark and snarl, but all sensing the same dangerous offness and the skewed mind that alerted them to the presence of danger.
[ADDENDUM: I didn’t read yesterday’s excellent post of Dr. Sanity’s until just now, but it’s highly relevant and well worth reading. Dr. Sanity has been in the trenches for decades, trying to predict the dangerousness of troubled and/or insane people, and she’s got a lot to say about how difficult it is.]
I’d heard this excerpt from the LBJ audio tapes before, but I forgot about it till Ed Driscoll reminded me.
Here’s a man who pay attention to detail. So folks, does this qualify as civil discourse?
Put This On: LBJ Buys Pants from Put This On on Vimeo.
A new report has been released by HHS Secretary Sebelius as part of the Democratic campaign to convince people that the HCR bill they have grown to loathe will actually help them. This, by the way, is a completely separate issue from two others that plague the bill, and are hotly debated: the effect it is likely to have on the budget and the deficit, and whether it is constitutional.
The report states that up to half of Americans under 65 have pre-existing conditions that might serve to disqualify them from health insurance under the old system. That ignores the reality that most such people have insurance and will always have it, because group insurance bought through an employer takes all comers.
I don’t know what percentage of those people will actually ever be forced into the individual market, but it certainly would be a far smaller group than half of all Americans under 65. Even people who lose jobs temporarily are eligible to be covered through Cobra for quite some time (usually 18 months), and although Cobra is expensive, nevertheless some people manage to use it. What’s more, many states already have high-risk pools for individuals with pre-existing conditions, and although premiums are high relative to group insurance, it is certainly possible to get coverage even with pre-existing conditions.
In addition, not all the conditions listed in the report are enough to plunge a person into the high-risk pool. For example, controlled high blood pressure or high cholesterol does not usually do so unless it requires many medications or there are other complications. The real reason so very many Americans fall into these categories is not that we are sicker, but that “high” is defined differently than it used to be, and medication to treat the newly-defined conditions is used much more freely and earlier.
Here’s the hype, and the language used by Sebelius in trying to sell this report and HCR itself:
“Americans living with pre-existing conditions are being freed from discrimination in order to get the health coverage they need,” HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a statement. Repealing the law, she argued, would leave such people unprotected.
Note the use of the loaded term, “discrimination.” One hears it again and again from proponents of HCR. One would think they were describing some capricious hate-mongering on the part of insurance companies, akin to racism or anti-Semitism or all the other vicious isms that we deplore.
At this point, why call our health insurance companies “insurance companies” at all? Might we not invent a new name to take into account the fact that they forbidden to operate in the traditional manner of insurers, who cover people for future catastrophic events, and are allowed to take into consideration such basics as risk factors?
Ross Douthat thinks the Palin/press war is a cycle of violence.
He appears to equate the perpetration of baseless attacks with defending oneself against them; they both keep that cycle going, don’t they? Best to turn the other cheek in silence.
And did you know that Ben Stiller has more Twitter followers than Palin? Stiller for president!
…even try to explain this:
Nothing much has changed, except that Jay is old enough to not be a prodigy any more.