In a recent post Powerline makes note of falling poll numbers for Bush and the attempted resurrection of Katrina.
Of course we can thank not only the AP for their shameless of flogging of that dead nag Katrina, we can also thank the press and many pundits on the right for that matter for their inability to get the facts straight on the Dubai port deal. Now we are actually beginning to hear references to things like freight terminals rather than the hysterical and inaccurate "port takeover" nonsense that was leading many Americans to believe to the Feds were selling the coast line to AlQaida.
Add to that the incessant drum beat of bad news from Iraq as the press and terrorists in a sort of perverse symbiotic relationship feed off each other. It amazes me how willing they were to lie for Saddam and cover for him while he killed and maimed and tortured and starved hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, but now one car bomb is world news.
So now according to CBS Bush's numbers are down. Well... who cares?
I mean really, this is as obvious as that movie Gas Light. I think that was the title, the one in which Charles Boyer [boo.... hiss] tried to convince Ingrid Bergman that she was losing her mind. His tricks were really transparent and after awhile I just wanted to slap the silly girl and say Oh come on, the man is a dog, he is playing you honey.
Well now I feel like saying that to a lot of my fellow Americans. Oh come on, they are playing you. First the media lies about Katrina, they screw up, they cover their butts, they hide the truth and now they drag this video out courtesy a leak and in the end it means nothing.
I can still remember Bush going on TV two days before that hurricane hit and personally asking people to get out of the area. I remember hearing how Bush called Nagin and asked him to get people out. I remember people saying tens of thousands of people could die if it was a direct hit on NO. I remember getting up the next morning and seeing people in New Orleans celebrating because they thought they had dodged the bullet. There had been talk of levees being topped, but they had survived. Then disaster struck when the levees broke.
And then came about the largest emergency rescue mission in history. But all people can talk about today is that Bush screwed up. In order to punish Bush the media is willing to downplay and overlook the tremendous efforts of tens of thousands of emergency people to do the best they could to save lives.
I am sure that if Bush had it to do again, he would steamroll right over the locals and move the remaining people in New Orleans out of there, legal or not. But to deliberately drag this out again just keep up the steady drum roll of bad news for partisan political purposes can work both ways. Bush is not running again, but people like me have lost any faith in the fiction of objective reporting.
I would not buy a used car off these people.
15 comments:
knuck;
Hey, Ingrid is not too bright, not my fault.
Heh, I'm with you Terrye. I saw this news report last night on the "new video" and i couldn't figure out what the kernel of the new accusation was. I have some imagination, can even use if to imagine liberal left heresies, but i was just dumbfounded; they wanted us to see something where there was nothing. Why? because of a need, beyond reson, to regularly vent their BDS. (And why weren't they talking about GWB's India trip instead?)
I'm sure they aren't fooling many anymore, but it's like an unthinking religion where you need to go through the same old BDS ritual on regular occasions, less you lose the supposed basis for your faith. IN fact, i think BDS is a sign of a fast-eroding faith, the apocalypse of liberalism as some are calling it.
Now if you give some thought to the viable positions after the apocalypse, you get to see the problem of the old liberal elites. I see essentially three relatively stable political positions in the west:
1)hard-left conspiratorial, resentful anti-westernism, now often cut with a good dose of Islamist cant: "`The highest form of jihad is to speak the truth in the face of an unjust ruler' reads an impeccably authenticated saying of Prophet Muhammad." (A.G. Noorani, Islam & Jihad, 45)
2) Neoconservatism with its confidence in the potential to spread western values of democracy, relatively free markets, etc.
3) Anti-neocon or traditional conservatism - which takes on various stripes, more or less racialist, traditionalist, isolationist, etc. - in opposition to the assumed unreality of the neocon ambitions.
All three positions erode the liberal elites' claims to be nice paternalists, to uphold some kind of universalist secular morality against the entrenched interests of the military-industrial complex.
But the position of the liberal elites is fast-eroding for a number of reasons i won't go into now. If you are one of them, and you have made the mistake of painting the neocons as great enemies of everything you hold dear, when your elitist universalist position erodes, you are left without any satisfactory means to seek some compromise with the one remaining position (the neocon) that is closest to your old one. FUll of BDS and anti-neocon (often antisemitic) hate, some of the old elites will thus venture towards the hard left craziness, familiar from their youth, since the anti-neocon conservatives - dirty old white men - are yet more anathema than the alliance of Marxists and Islamists.
In short, the liberal elites have no where to go but more and more insane since they don't really know who they are except that they don't really like anyone else who is strongly other - they have sought a universal secular synthesis of all cultures, "multiculturlaism", despite this being unrealistic, because they have wanted a ground on which to embrace the others (a ground that does not offend their white guilt) whom they don't really like when they are too other. SO, nowhere to go, unless, that is, they make the move to be wholly born again as confirmed westerners, but that is perhaps the one idea they have made fun of all their lives.
Look's like an interesting article Knuck. I'll have to study it later. Perhaps the greatest crime of feminism has been its inability to properly conceptualize patriarchy. Defining it simply in terms of male domination of women, they miss the point that freedom for both men and women probably requires certain "patriarchal" principles in a culture. I see Islam (and associated tribalism), e.g., as just as much a matriarchal as patriarchal culture - in any case less patriarchal than Judeo-CHristianity. Many see this the other way around, simply because of the violence and oppression women suffer under Islam. But this is not such a straightforward matter - matriarchal worlds are no utopia - a complex subject i can only begin to get my mind around, precisely because no one talks about it very well or openly. You can probably count the number of serious, scholarly books on how women treat other women on your hands and toes.
knuck:
Oh yeah. Let me tell you if some smarmy Frenchman started telling me who I could and could not talk to and treating me like some loon I would not break down and weep hysterically the first time he let me go in public. I would divorce his ass.
Like I said, silly silly woman.
Yul Brynner said she was a cow.
She said Yul was a runt.
That exchange came about when he had to stand up on something for a closeup because she was taller.
Just remember this, a kiss is still a kiss....
I know, wrong movies.
Look's?
truepeers:
Well it is the distinction between enslaving someone and taking care of someone. For some cultures, they are one and the same thing.
Men are supposed to care for and rule the families in patriarchal societies.
FA,
Yep. Politics as actuarial science. The only Dem hope is for an economic disaster on the level of the Depression or so massive a terrorist attack that no one will ever again admit to being a Republican.
Aside from that, it's a long slide to nowhere unless they come up with, ya know, a positive program. Which they can't because too many of their constituencies are rentseekers obviously wanting a shot at the treasury. And yes, abortions skew against Dems and adoption skews in favor of Reps - the other side of the coin. It can't be proven through measurement but rentseekers don't become altruists in other areas and a good 30% of the Dems are rentseekers. Another way of looking at it is that DINKs are Donks.
Tracking down the sequence of events and understanding this story and others in full takes time and effort. The MSM is banking upon the harried lives that many live and the unwillingness, lack of time or else that most people experience about getting to the bottom of such things. People are busy. The MSM knows it and counts on it.
Terrye, I would say a patriarchal culture is one in which people know the value in loving the father (or similarly, a strong, principled mother) and emulating him/her, as much as it is anything to do with the father ruling the women. It is the choice between the moral principles ideally embodied by the father or mother in similar role, and the resentful values of the youthful mob, male and/or female. The distinction may also lie in the contrast between nuclear and extended families.
Patriarchy can often be very dismissive of women like myself who can not have children.
After all what good are we?
Well, slightly ot, but there is a baby boom going on in Calgary, and the usual suspects cannot fully account for it:
Like clockwork, nine months after the Calgary Stampede and the NHL playoffs, hospitals in this city prepare for a rush in the maternity wards.
But now, a year-round baby boom with no sign of ending has hit Calgary, crowding hospital rooms and nurseries as health-care officials consider sending city women to rural hospitals as they wait for more beds to be added to an overburdened system.
Globe and Mail
"I would say a patriarchal culture is one in which people know the value in loving the father (or similarly, a strong, principled mother) and emulating him/her, as much as it is anything to do with the father ruling the women."
The commandment is 'honor' both. Love is somewhat tenuous, emotionally rather than rationally bound. Honor reflects an assessment of either a mother's or a father's attention to duty. It is a prescriptive rather than proscriptive commandment, it is the only (by most accounts) prescriptive commandment and thus very unusual and it places the woman before the man - mother antecedent to father.
Modern concepts of "love" derive from one (or another) of the Greek usages and are artifacts of modernity. Love and marriage (according to Greek usage) are really not even relateable when eros is part of the calculation.
It's a shame that the commandments cannot be taught to and understood by more children. Either as Mosaic law or Christian doctrine - it doesn't make any difference. Reflection on their meaning would rid us of some the ridiculous assertions concerning patriarchy espoused by Hegelian rationalists.
knuck:
I read a long time ago that scientists felt Neanderthals had a cohesive society. They came to this conclusion because fossil remains indicated that someone took care of the injured and the old. When people take care of those who can not care for themselves, such as the sick and old and the children it indicates a need to keep a group intact and survive as a unit. That is society.
Have you seen The Return of Patriarchy in Foreign Policy?
Yeah, I was telling folks the same thing 35 years ago. Anyway, the article is fun but kinda fluffy and fact free, sorta Jared Diamond redux. When it comes to demographics nothing beats numbers and detail, 'cause it ain't a simple thing and needs honest to god investigation. Sounds like a job for Morgan ;)
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