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Virginia: Still Sucks

In case you ever needed another reason not to live in Virginia (and you didn't, really, did you?), Radley's got a pretty entertaining horror story.

Now, people give me shit for living in the ghetto, but notwithstanding the occasional salsa dance party at 8:00 am on Sunday or getting offered drugs now and again (I plain think that's cordial), it's a bloody pleasure.  Especially compared to machete-ridden, obsessively anti-gay, rabid dog-attack, gangster-neighbor, manically policed Virginia.

More on Malkingate

Julian has more.  Snark factor?

Maybe depressed kids who engage in cutting are also likely to be drawn to sad music, but that's a little like saying Die Walkure promotes Anschluss.

High.

I Weep for the Future

People generally think of conservative types as pretty good at raising kids.  Values, discipline, what not.  But sometimes, one of them says something that is just so flippin' inane, you weep for their kids.  Via Adrienne, I'm reminded of a particular item I wanted to blog.  Michelle Malkin is shocked (*shocked*) to hear of the "new youth craze":

Have you heard of "cutting"? If you're a parent, you'd better read up. "Cutting" refers to self-mutilation -- using knives, razor blades or even safety pins to deliberately harm one's own body -- and it's spreading to a school near you...There is even a new genre of music -- "emo" -- associated with promoting the cutting culture.

This is just so goddamned gobsmackingly stupid that it defies explanation.  Rarely does someone demonstrate her abject ignorance of the world around her as this.  Maybe if Michelle Malkin didn't have her nose pressed into the binding of National Review all throughout high school, she would know that this phenomenon has existed since at least her high school days, and that "emo" has been around for, oh, 15 or 20 years, and is not "associated with promoting the cutting culture."

You know Michelle, you might want to pull your head out of the sand, for your children's sake.  It's a big, scary world out there, but you'd do well to learn a bit about it so that when your own children bump into it, you aren't caught off guard.

But at least she'll be able to tell them all about the virtues of internment.

Crap.

Reentry

Sick of all my ranting about how much the war sucks?  Go read Brooke, who's rejoined the blogosphere after a brief hiatus.  Snark, social security commentary, and, well, more snark.

Go read.

Freedom Is Another Word, For...Wearing the Hijab

The CW these days seems to be that the involvement of women in Iraq's politics will tend to have a moderating effect, and protect women's rights.  Then we get this from the Christian Science Monitor:

BAGHDAD – Covered in layers of flowing black fabric that extend to the tips of her gloved hands, Jenan al-Ubaedy knows her first priority as one of some 90 women who will sit in the national assembly: implementing Islamic law.

She is quick to tick off what sharia will mean for married women. "[The husband] can beat his wife but not in a forceful way, leaving no mark. If he should leave a mark, he will pay," she says of a system she supports. "He can beat her when she is not obeying him in his rights. We want her to be educated enough that she will not force him to beat her, and if he beats her with no right, we want her to be strong enough to go to the police."

[...]

In the nearly two years since the regime of Saddam Hussein fell, pressure has grown for women to conform to stricter Islamic standards. "The Baath Party, with all the things many believe they did wrong, [still ensured that Iraqi] women had the most rights in the region," says Rime Allaf, an associate fellow with the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London, where she is researching women's status in Iraq. "Now, a lot of women are being very careful about how they dress. They are being told by perfect strangers, 'You need to cover your hair ... [and] your arms.' "

Sounds like moderate sharia is a lot like being kinda pregnant.

Where IS the Bottom?

Wonkette points to this Lloyd Grove column, in which Grove tells us a bit about why Dems are angry at Swift Vet author Jerome Corsi's next tome:

"Atomic Iran: How the Terrorist Regime Bought the Bomb and American Politicians."

The book - which Nashville's Cumberland House Publishing won't release till next month - claims Democratic pols are being corrupted by Iranian money and helping the nuke-seeking mullahs in Tehran.

Jesus, now this is really plumbing the depths.  You'd hope that even some of the Fox News crowd would think this is a bit much.  (After all, there's no election at stake.)

Also, if Corsi thinks that the Dems are in bed with the mullahs because they aren't opposing Iran hard enough, what on earth would he think of me?  I'm in favor of Iran getting the bomb.*  What am I, the Spawn of Satan or something?  UBL's second cousin?

* - For those keeping score, the let-Iran-get-the-bomb piece was nayed by Foreign Policy, but I'm preparing the proposal to be shopped elsewhere.

At Least They're Honest

In the course of doing research on the Internets, sometimes you bump into genuinely odd stuff.  (Not that kind of stuff.)  But check out the Expansionist Party (newer site here).  A few of their ideas (platform here):

The United States is the world's sole superpower. We must not sit on that power while the world rots. We must instead use our power to transform this planet for everybody's sake. We must unite all Earth and shift resources freely from where they are in surplus to where they are in desperately short supply. We must STOP starvation, STOP war, STOP ecological devastation and then reverse it. We must reduce poverty, reduce infant mortality, increase life expectancy, cut population growth and then reverse it. We must increase socioeconomic justice, no matter what forces are arrayed against it. And we must pursue all these goals in the clear certitude that civilization requires us to do so, and that our version of "civilization" is what by far most people want for themselves everywhere on this benighted planet.

The United States is an infinitely expansible club that can admit new members — states — on a basis of equality with old any time it wants. We can admit all the poor countries of the world to our Union and make them as rich as we are. We don't even need to annex other rich countries — tho doing so would certainly ease the task of developing the world by sharing the burdens and increasing the workforce of educated people able to spread modern knowhow. To change the world, all we absolutely must have is confidence in our society, in our language, in our democratic goals and egalitarian aspirations, and the courage of our convictions.  We must be willing to defend our efforts by all means necessary, and instill fear among the monsters who would keep the bulk of people of this planet in darkness and poverty.

Their stand on drugs is innovative:

Drug abuse in the United States can be virtually ended by making literal, military war on the farmers in Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Pakistan, and elsewhere who grow the drug crops, and on the laboratory technicians who process those crops into drugs. Napalm the fields and houses of these monsters and strafe those who come rushing out from the flames, and the drug problem will disappear, without the cumbersome uselessness of trying to arrest them abroad, extradite them to the U.S., then try them in our overcrowded and ineffective courts. Declare war on Colombia and other drug-producing countries, and kill every single drug farmer, technician, and pusher who dares target the United States for poisoning.

Strangely, though, they want to cut the defense budget.  Their founder runs a blog here, and is a self-proclaimed gay-rights activist who purports to have coined the phrase "gay pride."  Oddly, he seems not to like the New York Post.  (This may be because "the U.S. must end all support for the violent, racist 'State' of Israel" and "we will finally achieve peace in the Middle East the only way it can be achieved: by ending Zionism.")

Portrait of Our Rulers

David J. Rothkopf plays Bob Woodward in the latest, not-yet-online issue of Foreign Policy magazine, taking a gander into the inner workings of the Bush NSC.  Much of this is well-worn stuff, but there were a few interesting tidbits:

The acrimony between the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) and other agencies has become legend.  According to one individual who served on the Bush 43 NSC staff, they were "just out of control, an endless nightmare."  Another NSC staffer from George W. Bush's first term said that "OSD was nuts... We would say they were out of their fucking minds both from a policy perspective and from a process perspective.  In effect, [Rumsfeld] said, 'I don't give a shit what the NSC staff says, I am going to do whatever I feel is in my right to do as the chain of command to the president.'  He was like his own venture capitalist.  He liked to dabble in different areas and throw things here and throw things there... We would characterize Rumsfeld as Secretary Strangelove."

[...]

Some are puzzled by the vice president's emergence in his current role, especially those who saw him as a professional but nonideological cabinet secretary during the administration of George H. W. Bush.  "You know, the big mystery to me is Dick Cheney," says one senior Republican who has known him since the Ford years.  "He instinctively started from the conservative base, but if you made a compelling rational argument he was not an ideologue...and I don't know whether it is because he is an extraordinarily powerful vice president, more powerful than any in our history, and nobody talks to him and says... 'Dick, you're full of shit, you know?'  Or whether he's only now able to let his true feelings come out or whether there was some kind of shift."

Like I said, a lot of the article will be familiar to foreign policy watchers, but the thing's probably worth a read.  I, too, find the Cheney angle interesting, particularly given his comments after the first Gulf War on why we didn't want to press into Baghdad.  I always figured him for a pretty icy, bloodless technocrat, so his ostensible transformation into bleary-eyed, purple-fingered democracy advocate was always perplexing to me.

And jeez those poor reality-based NSC staffers must be masochists.  The article also has a pretty funny graphic that plays "Two Degrees of Henry Kissinger," tying Kissinger to 12 current or former NSC officials by no more than two degrees of separation.

Bush's Moral Hazard Problem

A piece I submitted a while back on the moral hazard of Bush's inaugural is up at Reason.

Reality Is Whatever I Say It Is Redux

Again via Yglesias (and about a gazillion other people), we learn that the CPAC crowd got treated to this little gem from Republican Representative Chris Cox:

"America's Operation Iraqi Freedom is still producing shock and awe, this time among the blame-America-first crowd," he crowed. Then he said, "We continue to discover biological and chemical weapons and facilities to make them inside Iraq." Apparently, most of the hundreds of people in attendance already knew about these remarkable, hitherto-unreported discoveries, because no one gasped at this startling revelation.

The reality-based faction of the right wing continues to twitch its last dying pangs of agony...