GREAT QUOTES IN POLITICAL HISTORY: AuH2O Edition

In your heart, you know he's right.

— Barry Goldwater's 1964 Campaign slogan; The Democratic Response: In your guts, you know he's nuts.

LOLPols: Ron Paul Effing Up Yer Caucuses

Source

GREAT QUOTES IN POLITICAL HISTORY: Sour Grapes Edition

I'd rather be right than be President!

— Henry Clay, failed candidate for President in 1824 (third behind Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams), 1832 (National Republican Nominee, lost to Jackson), 1840 (lost the Whig nomination to William Henry Harrison), 1844 (Whig Nominee, lost to James K. Polk), 1848 (lost the Whig nomination to Zachary Taylor). Clay died in 1852, preventing another run.

Programming Note

As I don't post much on the weekends, I'm going to try to fill them up with LOLPols. Check back tomorrow for another one!




Source

IF YOU LIVE IN OR AROUND ST. LOUIS

Please come to this event tomorrow. There will be beer, and I'm making vegetarian foods.

Our Unelected Dictator

Shockingly, I partially agree with something posted on the National Review, written by Jonah "Doughy Pantload" Goldberg:

Jonah Goldberg on Anthony Kennedy on National Review Online: "The Court, by assuming that responsibility, and the other branches of government, by surrendering it, have permanently damaged the constitutional order. Indeed, Thomas Jefferson believed that a judiciary with final jurisdiction over the constitutionality of presidential and legislative actions “would make the judiciary a despotic branch” of government.

Today, that despot has a name. It’s Justice Anthony Kennedy. Kennedy rules — thanks to his status as the court’s swing vote — as the true King of America."

See also, Sandy Says. I have a suspicion that after we win big this November, liberals will fondly recall when our biggest challenge seemed to be getting to 60 in the Senate. Damn near everything Obama and Congress do will have to be approved by Justice Kennedy.

Stupid People Think They're Smart

It has been brought to my attention that people are unaware of studies on the limits of intelligence self assessment, like this one:

There is another way in which people fail to have available all the information they need to provide accurate self-judgments – and this deficit in information may hit hardest those most in need of revising their self-views. Often, to judge one's own or another person's choices, one needs to know the proper way in which a choice should be made. For example, suppose one were asked to judge whether another person's conclusion is logically sound. To provide an accurate judgment, one would have to have a pretty good grasp of the rules of logic. But what about those who fail to have such a grasp? Can they adequately judge?

Kruger and Dunning (1999; see also Dunning, Johnson, Ehrlinger, & Kruger, 2003; Ehrlinger, Johnson, Dunning, Kruger, & Banner, forthcoming; Haun, Zeringue, Leach, & Foley, 2000) suggested that people who do not have such expertise cannot judge accurately – either themselves or another person. Specifically, Kruger and Dunning argued, with data, that people who suffer from a deficit of expertise or knowledge in many intellectual or social domains fall prey to a dual curse. First, their deficits lead them to make many mistakes, perform worse than other people, and, in a word, suffer from incompetence. But, second, those exact same deficits mean that they cannot judge competence either. Because they choose what they think are the best responses to situations, they think they are doing just fine when, in fact, their responses are fraught with error. Indeed, if they had the expertise necessary to recognize their mistakes, they would not have made them in the first place.

Or to put it another way, stupid people don't know that they're stupid.

I think we could probably imagine a set of skill, like using a computer, that it's pretty easy to know if you're any good at or not. And we could imagine another set of skills, like a sense of humor, that are notoriously difficult to self-assess. Stuff like driving a car, doing math problems, and recalling people's names falls into a spectrum between those two examples.

People vary, but probably the greatest indicator of whether or not someone is very stupid is if they aren't funny but think they're hilarious, or if they have awful taste. So, you are not wrong to screen dates based on whether they prefer George Carlin or Larry the Cable Guy.

Politics, which made me think of this, is a horse of a different color though, as there are fact/value distinctions. It's possible to imagine a person who completely understand the Republican agenda, for example, and still favors it on the merits, but this person's values are just going to be different than most people's (Dick Cheney, for example).

Most people, of course, don't really take the time to analyze every single thing their politicians do. Most people have one or a few issues that they really care about, pick the party that agrees with them on the things they "know", and then trust that party to be right on the stuff they don't know (even if they don't realize this is happening). And this is why pro-lifers support the party that has spent the last five years reigning death on innocents in Iraq. Now these people are in a very difficult position, having no real knowledge or understanding of foreign policy (foreign policy is very hard to understand, I might add*), so they end up making very stupid arguments advancing their position. And because of the way humans self-assess, they don't even know how stupid they are.

FYI

TODAY IS FRIDAY. TODAY IS A DRAGON SHIRT DAY. ROAR.

GREAT QUOTES IN POLITICAL HISTORY: LBJ Edition

I have concluded that I should not permit the Presidency to become involved in the partisan divisions that are developing in this political year.

With American sons in the fields far away, with America's future under challenge right here at home, with our hopes and the world's hopes for peace in the balance every day, I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office -- the Presidency of your country.

Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.

— Lyndon Johnson, dropping out of the Presidential race in 1968, after it became clear that he would lose the Democratic Nomination.

The War Party's Philosophy

A majority of Democratic voters supported a view of foreign policy generally refered to as "Liberal Internationalism" in 2000, and 2004. Democrats are supporting a similar, although more robust, version of that philosophy in 2008.

One of the lingering problems for theories of voter choice is that the Republican party, on the other hand, completely switched gears in between 2000 and 2004, going from Neo-Isolationism to Neo-Imperialism. McCain is looking to continue the Imperialist model, but to be fair, he was already on board with it in 2000.

What the retreat-from-the-world and dominate-the-world models have in common is their disregard for the world. The foreign policy of the Republican party, in its declining stupid phase, is just pure Nationalism.

I'm reminded of this, observing this early phase of the McCain/Obama race, because of the sheer stupidity of the arguments. It doesn't matter that conservative commentary about Iraq focuses on Al-Qaeda, even though AQI is a nuisance at best, because these arguments aren't directed at people who know anything about the situation. It doesn't matter that McCain doesn't seem to know the difference between Sunni and Shia, because his voters don't either. In fact, these schmucks can get away with anything, as long as they sell it as blindly pro-American.

I love this one, in particular:

I guess they're hoping that people are going to assume that McCain wants WAR for another 100 years. That isn't what he wants. He wants us to have a presence in Iraq--for 100 years, or less, or more, whatever it takes for it to be stable there.

See? McCain doesn't want a 100 years of war, he just wants us to keep fighting until Iraq is stable, even if it takes 100 years! That's totally different!

By the way, I think McCain's Iraq position requires graphical representation.



Get on anywhere you like, but you can't get off!

Added to my Amazon Wishlist

Eight hundred minutes of George Carlin. - By Joshua David Mann - Slate Magazine: "The future scholar of comedy who sets out to publish The Complete Works of George Carlin had better be prepared for a multimedia endeavor. A truly comprehensive collection of the comedian's work would have to include his Grammy Award-winning albums, his best-selling books, and a transcript of his argument before the Supreme Court in defense of his immortal 'Seven Words' routine. In the meantime, mourners of Carlin, who died of heart failure earlier this week, can make do with the recently released George Carlin: All My Stuff. The retrospective box set, weighing in at more than 800 minutes of material, is comprised of 12 HBO specials, beginning with a 1977 performance at USC and ending with 2005's Life Is Worth Losing."

I haven't seen much of the older stuff, but I think You Are All Diseased is my favorite.

Question of the Day

What would happen if the constitution had said "Potable water, being necessary to the livelihood of a nation, the right of people to drill and own private wells shall not be infringed."

I'm pretty sure we'd have people suing to protect their right to drill the sidewalk.

Drinking Liberally

Just a quick reminder that we're getting together tonight at The Royale (3132 S. Kingshighway) beginning at 6PM. Come by and take Planned Parenthood ADVOCATES' "kNOw John McCain" challenge and share a drink with your Liberal friends!

See you tonight!
-Vanessa, Angie & Jason

I'll be there, and if you're in the STL area, so should you.

Obama and the Court

From TAPPED:

BARACK OBAMA, PANDER-BEAR?

Well, this seems like a naked pander to me: Barack Obama says he disagrees with yesterday's Supreme Court decision striking down the death penalty for child rapists. The Wall Street Journal reports:

“I disagree with the decision. I have said repeatedly that I think that the death penalty should be applied in very narrow circumstances for the most egregious of crimes,” Obama told reporters at a press conference in Chicago.

The expected Democratic nominee said he believed the rape of a child “is a heinous crime” that fits the circumstance, siding with the four conservative justices who sit on the court, Chief Justice John Roberts, and Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas.

Alito's reasoning in his dissenting opinion, though, was quite flawed, as Scott explains so ably. Alito wrote that child rape evidences a depravity deeper and far more disturbing than that of, for example, a guy who holds up a convenience store and stands by while his accomplice shoots the clerk. Therefore, Alito wrote, the child rapist should be subject to the death penalty, just like the robber. But as Scott points out, couldn't this also mean that the robber shouldn't be subjected to the death penalty? Secondly, Alito argued that the fact that several states allow the death penalty for child rapists proves the practice is backed by public consensus. But at the time of Brown v. Board, or Miranda, or Loving v. Virginia, dozens of states allowed practices that the Court deemed unacceptable.

If Obama has a separate, deeper reasoning for opposing the Court's decision yesterday, he should have out with it. Otherwise, I'll be forced to believe this is a pander. After all, about two-thirds of Americans support the death penalty.

Well, there are any number of reasons to oppose the decision. Firstly, you might agree with Obama's stated reason: Hey, I don't like the death penalty that much, but as long as we're killing people, child rapists probably deserve it.

More broadly, one could feel, as John Stuart Mill did, that the Death Penalty is a tool government ought to have, and that this decision basically bans the death penalty for all non-capital cases. The court certainly seems to be heading in the direction of a complete ban in incremental steps. While I oppose the Death Penalty on pragmatic rather than theoretical grounds, I'm not going to cry if they get rid of it because of theory.

A third reason could be a growing realization on Obama's part that the Court is a conservative institution, historically biased against executive power. The court almost undid the New Deal; although we remember most vividly decisions like Roe and Brown, Liberal courts are rare — President Obama will almost certainly prefer a quiet court that lets him do what he wants.

My suspicion is that Obama actually opposes the death penalty, for reasons similar to my own: it doesn't work as a deterrent, it mainly effects poor minorities, and there are too many mistakes to believe anything close to justice is being achieved. But he also probably doesn't oppose it in theory, meaning that he could agree with the outcome of the court's decision, while disagreeing with their reasoning, and therefore honestly oppose the decision. In other words, the perfect pander. After all, about two-thirds of Americans support the death penalty.

GREAT QUOTES IN POLITICAL HISTORY: Rahmbo Edition

Now that my kids are gone, I can say this: WE FUCKED THEM!

— Rep. Rahm Emmanuel, chair of the 2006 Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, at the victory party

A favor for a friend

I wrote this in response to this bit of crazy.

Sure, point by point, why not:

1. Why in the world wouldn't we want to negotiate with other nations? The United States does generally have a policy of negotiations with other countries -- the only country with which we haven't negotiated with for almost 60 years has been Cuba, and that's been bloody stupid.

But more to the point, we really ought to be engaged with Iran, especially since we don't have any divergent interests from them. Maliki meets with the Iranian leadership as often as he meets with us -- we both support the same guy in the country, for pete's sake! The only people who don't want to negotiate with Iran are people who really like war and are afraid negotiations will succeed.

2. Well, this is just daft: "Barack Obama’s Iraq policy will hand al-Qaeda a victory and undercut our entire position in the Middle East, while at the same time put a huge source of oil in the hands of terrorists." If you think the problem in Iraq is because of Al-Qaeda, as opposed to a homegrown civil war in a country rife with ethnic strife, then you really haven't been paying attention.

Obama's position on Iraq has been consistent and is the only sensible and moral position to take: a careful, quick withdrawal of our occupying army is the best course of action for both our countries, but his team will decide the exact timetable after taking stock of the situation in January. Events on the ground change things, so Obama's been careful to not give too precise a promise with this.

Of course, these loons on the right still think we should be in Vietnam, so sensible and moral options are kind of off the table with them.

3. Obama made a mistake in a speech, which his campaign quickly clarified. WTF is the problem here?

The deal is Obama was saying "I don't want Jerusalem partitioned off like Berlin" and that was interpreted as "I support crazy people's notion to drive the Palestinians out of Jerusalem". So the campaign clarified. Why the fuck does an obscure remark about Israel rank as their third highest mark against him, anyhow? It's almost like these people want the foreign policy of the United States determined by the interests of the state of Israel...

4. Eh, the NAFTA thing was a stupid primary pander. Better men have done worse.

As far as Campaign Finance goes, the problem with money in politics isn't the money, it's the favors. And it's hard to see how Obama's going to be in hock to corporate interests when his donor pool is so large and diverse. This is just opportunistic whining from the other side. To be expected, but not granted any credence.

Of course, John McCain is CURRENTLY BREAKING THE LAW. He signed a LEGAL DOCUMENT to abide by spending limits for the primary, and then used those matching funds to secure a loan for his campaign, and to achieve automatic ballot access for the primaries. The only reason he hasn't been busted by the FEC is because they're currently missing a few members. The DNC is suing the McCain campaign over this, so, we'll see.

5. I think Obama's handling of the Wright situation was superb. He gave a moving speech explaining his inner conflicts -- a lot of the basic sentiments contained in his two books, by the way. When Wright decided to go on a press tour that seemed calculated to embarrass his former congregant, then Obama broke from him. Again, anyone following the story closely could see that he acted in good faith with the American people.

Ayers? Please. He lives in the same neighborhood as Obama and they've seen each other once or twice. Why in the world would you think their political views are similar? He's not on the campaign in any capacity.

Or put another way: Do you want to be responsible for everything that I do, given our long association?

6. Terrorism is criminal behavior, not clash-of-civilizations stuff. Or to put it another way: Al-Qaeda is more like the Mafia than the Soviet Union. The Bush administration's behavior isn't making us any safer, the "whack the hornet's nest" theory of international relations is bloody stupid.

Just go read Richard Clarke's book if you actually care about the subject.

7. Also crazy. Just compare the Clinton administration's job record with Bush's.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/11/job-creation/

Conservatives have some pretty nutty views about the economy that really haven't changed since Hoover.

8. Midwestern Senator supports ethanol. Also, dog bites man.

Ethanol's kinda stupid, but it's not the worst thing in the world. Lowering the gas tax, on the other hand, is really fucking dumb.

I will give them the windfall profits tax one, though. That is a stupid policy! I even wrote a blog post about it: http://mattschmidt.blogspot.com/2008/06/obamas-bad-idea.html

On the other hand, Obama's support for Cap-and-Trade and investments in metro transportation infrastructure are necessary to bring us into the twentieth century. And save the world.

9. Eh, I'm not familiar with the details of that particular bill, but I suspect some sort of strategic voting. In reality, Obama, like every other Democrat to run for President in our lifetime, is a fairly standard pro-choice liberal.

10. National Journal's rankings are a sham. Here's a better ranking system: http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/06/liberal-conservative-rankings-done.html

McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Lit 101 Class in Three Lines or Less.

You don't read McSweeney's enough.

McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Lit 101 Class in Three Lines or Less.: "1984

WINSTON: Don't tell the Party, but sex is way better than totalitarianism.

EVERYONE: Surprise! We're the Party.

WINSTON: Oh, rats."

I'm pretty sure Weston wrote that.

Bill's New Friends

Nice of them to summarize the indictment...

The Raffaello Follieri Indictment: The Best Bits: "Back in 2005, Raffaello Follieri was introduced to supermarket magnate Ron Burkle by Doug Band, the adviser to former president Bill Clinton. Follieri was very charming and solicitous and he told them all about his plan: He would use his family's v. v. close ties to the Vatican in order to purchase Roman Catholic Church properties in the U.S. at low prices, flip them, and sell them. Everyone thought this sounded like a great idea, and Burkle invested a bunch of money. Follieri was in like Flynn. The former president publicly praised the Follieri Foundation's work vaccinating children in Honduras, and they all even hung out on vacation in the Dominican Republic this one time."

Something that was never brought up in the primary campaign was all the Clinton's dirt.

I mean, everybody with any sense realizes that the Clintonites bitching about the press is total bullshit, because nobody ever brought up Bill's zipper problem (until that Vanity Fair article near the end). This was something we all knew but just sort of decided not to talk about, although you can be sure the Republicans wouldn't have been so nice as the Obama team.

But what most people don't know is that the Clinton's have become very rich only after leaving the White House, and Bill's been living it up. If Hillary had gotten the nomination, stories like this, which highlight Bill's monstrously bad judgement in areas of personal finance, would have been added to the adulterous mix.

We really dodged a bullet.

Question of the Day

I once met a guy selling Communist Party USA Platforms at a protest (SOA, Fort Benning, GA). I'm all like "Hey, neat, a commie", because I've met a few commies in my day, and most of 'em have turned out to be garden variety Democratic Socialists who haven't quite grasped that the USSR ruined the word. But this guy, this guy was something else.

I remember him vividly declaring to me "We need to re-organize this country, based on Maoist Principles!"

I thought to myself, "What, do you want to outlaw modern agriculture so we all starve, or heavy industry to collapse the economy?"

It turned out he wanted all of us to go on a really long march to Washington. Or something.

So my question is: Has anyone else ever met a real, live, Maoist?

I suspect, for some reason, that Mr. Mank has.

New Rolling Stone Interview

Barack Obama: The Stevie Wonder Geek Returns to the Cover of Rolling Stone : Rolling Stone : Rock and Roll Daily: "“If I had one musical hero, it would have to be Stevie Wonder,” says Obama, who grew up on Seventies R&B and rock staples including Earth, Wind and Fire, Elton John and the Rolling Stones. “When I was at that point where you start getting involved in music, Stevie had that run with Music of My Mind, Talking Book, Fulfillingness’ First Finale and Innervisions, and then Songs in the Key of Life. Those are as brilliant a set of five albums as we’ve ever seen.”"

Obama, of course, was the first candidate that Rolling Stone ever endorsed in a primary.

Blast from the past

Man, I was an intemperate youth.

GREAT QUOTES IN POLITICAL HISTORY: VP Edition

This job ain't worth a bucket of warm piss.

—John Nance "Cactus Jack" Garner, FDR's first Vice President

Green Bean Casserole

See, I don't post much on the weekends, because I'm busy going to all of the fabulous Blogger Picnics.

More on our Energy Future

To follow up yesterday's musings on the Volt: Four Billion Cars in 2050?

It seems to me that we could have avoided a lot of present pain if we'd made more serious energy and transportation investments over the past 10-20 years. It seems equally obvious that things are going to get a lot worse in the future.

GREAT QUOTES IN POLITICAL HISTORY: Black Nationalism Edition

So it’s the — it's the ballot or the bullet. Today our people can see that we’re faced with a government conspiracy. This government has failed us. The senators who are filibustering concerning your and my rights, that's the government. Don’t say it’s Southern senators. This is the government; this is a government filibuster. It’s not a segregationist filibuster. It’s a government filibuster. Any kind of activity that takes place on the floor of the Congress or the Senate, that's the government. Any kind of dilly-dallying, that’s the government. Any kind of pussy-footing, that’s the government. Any kind of act that’s designed to delay or deprive you and me right now of getting full rights, that’s the government that's responsible. And any time you find the government involved in a conspiracy to violate the citizenship or the civil rights of a people, then you are wasting your time going to that government expecting redress. Instead, you have to take that government to the World Court and accuse it of genocide and all of the other crimes that it is guilty of today.

— Malcolm X, The Bullet or the Ballot speech, April 12th, 1964; I once mentioned segregation to an old black man in a bar, and he corrected me, "Don't call it that. Call it what it was: White Supremacy."

Add it to the Resume!

So, these days I work in an office staffed primarily by women. A "co-worker" I've spoken to perhaps twice before just came into my office and asked me to open a jar of salsa for her. Matt Schmidt, of girl-handed fame, was able to open it with minimal effort.

By the power of Grayskull...I have the power!

Perspective on the Volt

I hate to piss in the punchbowl, but it doesn't seem like things like the Chevy Volt, GE's proposed electric car, are anything close to a meaningful solution to our energy/transportation problems.

Things like the Volt (and the Prius) fall into the low-end luxury car market. They're too expensive to replace our insane internal combustion society overnight, and the manufacturing costs make any gains negligible. And they're still way more inefficient than a good public transportation network.

The Volt is likely to be a neat toy for the iPhone set, but it doesn't represent serious thinking about energy use for the future.

George Carlin, Dead at 71

America has lost one of its heroes today, but more importantly, it has lost a fountain of good advice:

You know what we don't talk about enough anymore?

Pussy Farts.

— George Carlin, RIP (Rest in Pesci)

GREAT QUOTES IN POLITICAL HISTORY: Gore Edition

Now the U.S. Supreme Court has spoken. Let there be no doubt, while I strongly disagree with the court's decision, I accept it.

— Al Gore, 2000, conceding the election to GWB

The only good thing to come out of this? GoreBeard: