Happy Thursday.

William Jacobson has a smart post on skepticism when it comes to Snowden and Greenwald.

Democrats think a government shutdown might shake things up enough to put the House within their reach.

Gallup finds disapproval of Obamacare still outpacing approval. I'm more interested in the spike of "no opinion" people. That went from 4% to 11% in a month. Are they really people with no opinion or are they folks who have an opinion, but don't want to say it because they believe its unpopular?

The Mustache 2016? He's thinking about it.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:47 AM | Comments (383)
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Staff Sgt. Ty Carter. Medal of Honor. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

I do not believe in this Post Traumatic Stress Disorder thing that is tossed about so freely.

It is not a disorder.

Accounts of the battle describe an hours-long nightmare of machine gun and rocket fire, shrapnel ripping through the air, enemies penetrating inner defenses, buildings burning, 1-ton bombs exploding and soldiers bleeding. Another survivor has already received the Medal of Honor. Nine soldiers have received the Silver Star.

Much of CarterÂ’s personal trauma stems from watching helplessly for the better part of an hour as a mortally wounded fellow soldier struggled to crawl away from danger during the furious firefight.

Carter repeatedly volunteered to rescue Spc. Stephan Mace, but his sergeant insisted that he not expose himself to the intense fire. When finally permitted, he carried the dying man to medics at great personal risk – one reason he was recommended for the Medal of Honor.

Carter describes himself as devastated. “I couldn’t hold any emotions in,” he told the Associated Press. “I was a walking zombie.”

He credits a noncommissioned officer with urging him into PTSD treatment, and heÂ’s been in counseling ever since.

I have no medical creds. But it bothers me that this condition which is very real and so many of our young men and women who served are struggling with is called a "disorder". It is *not* a disorder.

If you suffer trauma, you will suffer stress. This isn't a disorder, it's normal. Violence. Rape. Battle. These are traumatic and it's wrong to say the resulting stress is some kind of "disorder". It's not a disorder, it's very normal. It's human. Sad and hard, but not abnormal.

So that's my little nit on PTSD. I just think it should be PTS.

We owe those who have suffered so much to care for them. To help them heal. They gave us all of them. Their paid us with their future lives. I pray we find the way to give them back themselves. For them and for their loved ones. They gave us themselves. They gave that much.

I want us to commit to give them their lives back. Somehow.

We really must do that.

Added [Drew]: Dave was kind enough to offer to let me add something to this important post.

When I read the draft of this my mind immediately went to this BlackFive post on the subject from 2007. If you know someone who is or has served and think they may be having these kinds of perfectly normal reactions to what they've been though, please consider sharing these links.

Added [ace]: Carlin's old "shellshock" observation. more...

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 06:24 AM | Comments (112)
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Public Morality and the Case for Neo-Realism

But American foreign policy cannot merely be defined by R2P [Requirement to Protect] and Never Again! Statesmen can only rarely be concerned with humanitarian interventions and protecting human rights to the exclusion of other considerations. The United States, like any nation-but especially because it is a great power-simply has interests that do not always cohere with its values. That is tragic, but it is a tragedy that has to be embraced and accepted.

And our national interest in Syria is....well mostly keeping Syria's troubles inside Syria.

And that leads us to the 'To Hell With Them' Doctrine which is pretty much where I'm at.

The sad reality is that in order for the Arab world to have a chance at any real peace, a whole lot of Arabs will have to die:

America forgets that it corrected the flaw in its founding by killing 30 percent of Southern men of military age during its own Civil War, so many that the Confederate Army collapsed for lack of manpower. There are numerous wars which do not end until all the young men who want to fight to the death have had the opportunity to do so. And of all of history's conflicts, none was so likely to end with this sort of demographic attrition as the present war in the Middle East. Compared to the young Arabs, Persians and Pakistanis of today, American Southerners of 1861 were models of middle-class rectitude, with the world's highest living standards and bright prospects for the future. The Europeans of 1914 stood at the cusp of modernity; one only can imagine what they might have accomplished had they not committed mutual suicide in two World Wars.

Today's Middle Eastern and South Asian Muslims have grim future prospects. The world economy has left them behind, and they cannot catch up. Egypt was at the threshold of starvation and economic collapse when the military intervened, bringing in subsidies from the Gulf monarchies. The young men of the Middle East have less to lose, perhaps, than any generation in any country in modern times. As we observe in Syria, large numbers of them will fight to the death.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:37 PM | Comments (644)
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Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:40 AM | Comments (228)
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Knockin' off time.

Here's one that's always good for 200 comments: Major studies are going to wrap up soon which may finally resolve the Calories/Carbs question.

John Ekdahl had a good response to BuzzFeed's daily hit whoring: No, the NRA isn't building a creepy turnkey police state datafile like the NSA has.

An old post by Elmore Leonard on his rules for writing.

He hates Adverbs.

Purple Avenger had a good post on Camille Paglia, knocking Anthony Weiner as a sexual basket case and demanding someone tell her just what it is exactly that Hillary Clinton ever accomplished.

Posted by: Ace at 04:04 PM | Comments (605)
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Blessed be the peacemakers, for they TAKE NAMES AND KICK ASS.

I'm actually just sort of assuming that Obama's all hot and heavy to get into Syria. I didn't read AllahPundit's piece. I've been in the comments.

But I assume he wants to go in there because he previously wanted to go in there and exactly one year ago, to the day, he gathered up what little manliness he had and told Syria that under no circumstances were they to use chemical weapons.

And exactly 365 days later, they appear to have done precisely that.

Via David Shor and Aaron Zelin, who was quick this morning in remembering that today’s apparent chemical massacre outside Damascus falls a year to the day from Obama issuing his empty “red line” threat. Is that why Assad did it, to show the world that he’s still alive, kicking, and defying the United States a year after O talked fake-tough about him? The “red line” comment backfired long ago by forcing Obama to take action, however feeble, in the name of protecting American credibility.

Video of Obama's Red Line Warning at the link.

Drew had a good post on this earlier. You should read it.

In short, even if this terrible massacre did take place (and there's a reasonable case to be made for questioning the timing of the story) it doesn't change the basic calculus for the US...do whatever it takes to keep the fighting going for as long as possible.

More dead Assad loyalists + more dead jihadis = US Win.

It's cold, it's uncaring and it's the reality of our interest in the fight.

Eh, I wouldn't go that far -- I don't think we need to "keep it going." I don't know that we need to do anything at all.

We have become so conditioned -- left and right both -- to think that every bomb that falls anywhere in the world is somehow An Important Matter for the United States Requiring Our Instant Action that we don't seem to ask the very important threshold question:

So what?

I don't mean "so what?" as in "Who cares if lots of people die."

I mean: What's this have to do with us?

No one elected us to impose a Pax Americana on the world, including the most important people who vote on such things, the American voters themselves.

Furthermore, the idea of a Pax Americana is folly. We don't have the manpower for it. And even if we did, I wouldn't waste those good men to save bad ones.

Bombing things and killing people is an act of extremely serious moral dimension. We should not even consider such things unless we are satisfied that one of the two is true:

1) That such action is so manifestly in our own selfish interests that we can be forgiven for taking the violent action.

2) That the action is so manifestly in the interests of general altruistic good we would scarcely forgive ourselves if we didn't take the violent action.

And ideally I'd like a good mix of 1 and 2.

So let's say we start bombing in Syria.

First question: Who do we bomb?

We could make a case either way.

And that means we probably shouldn't do it.

There should be no such thing as an Obligatory Bombing. A Thoughtless Bombing, a Rote Bombing. There should be no Muscle Memory Bombings, no Just To Keep Our Hand in the Game Bombings, no Well We've Got To Do Something and a Bombing is Something Bombings.

We need a pretty damn good reason for that.

What's our reason in Syria?

Posted by: Ace at 03:30 PM | Comments (201)
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Via @charlescwcooke, Let All Men Be Brought Low, so that we might all be equal upon our backs or bellies.

We shall all find equality in the dirt.

In Alabama, there's now a law that any student in one of the state's 78 failing schools may be permitted to escape to a non-failing school. $3500 is provided as partial (or full) payment of any costs that might be associated with such a move.

The Southern Poverty Law Center is suing the state to block this scheme.

Why? Well, actually, because they are simply creatures of the left and are doing a solid for the most important constituency of the left, Government School Union Teachers (and the bad ones, too, because the good ones have less need of union bargaining power).

But their stated claim is this: They found eight families who say $3500 isn't enough to get their kids the help they need and hence the law is "discriminatory," and ergo is unconstitutional.

So all children must continue to suffer with those eight.

Isn't politics a wonderful thing?

Posted by: Ace at 02:16 PM | Comments (177)
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Christine Quinn is a lesbian, childless city councilwoman trying to become mayor of New York City.

She's also a moonbat.

Maureen Dowd got an interview with the wife of one of Quinn's rivals. No, not Huma. The candidate is named De Blasio or something, and his his wife is named something else. I'll call her "the wife" because 1, I'm fundamentally lazy and don't feel like looking it up, and 2, I don't care what her name is, and 3, neither do any of you.

Now, the wife said something about Quinn seeming "inaccessible" to the public and not talking about issues important to women, such as child care or something something liberal.

Maureen Dowd seems to have detected in this a whiff of Lesbian Baiting, the idea that the wife was claiming Quinn couldn't understand the problems of "normal women" because she was not normal herself.

Now, the wife did not actually say that... One could, perhaps, find that in her quote, if one looked. And if one wanted to find it. And if one really really really wanted to extract a newsworthy OUTRAGE!!! quote from what was probably a pretty boring and useless interview.

So Maureen Dowd found the perfect quote she was looking for.

Alas... it was not the quote the wife actually said, and the wife can prove that, because she herself carried a tape recorder.

And unlike Maureen Dowd's selectively-insensitive tape recorder, the wife's recorder apparently worked throughout the duration of the interview.

Here is what Maureen Dowd alleges the wife said. Be on the look out for a Dog Whistle that Quinn is a Lesbian and therefore Does Not Get Your Heterosexual Female Issues.

She's not the kind of person I feel I can go up to and talk to about issues like taking care of children at a young age and paid sick leave.

Now you may say, "What? I don't get that Lesbian Dog Whistle thing out of that at all." Well, you're not supposed to; this Dog Whistle is pitched at an ultrasonic frequency such that only Leftist Bloodhounds Bred to Detect Intolerance can hear it.

And they did hear it. And Maureen Dowd heard it. The lefties heard it, which is all that matters for our purposes.

But while people may have heard it, it wasn't actually said.

Here's what was really said, thanks to the wife's own recording of the conversation:

Well, I am a woman, and she is not speaking to the issues I care about, and I think a lot of women feel the same way. I don't see her speaking to the concerns of women who have to take care of children at a young age or send them to school and after school, paid sick days, workplace; she is not speaking to any of those issues. What can I say? And she's not accessible, she's not the kind of person that, I feel, that you can go up and talk to and have a conversation with about those things. And I suspect that other women feel the same thing I'm feeling.

You can still even find a Dog Whistle there if you want -- and Quinn's supporters do want to find that Dog Whistle, of course -- but now one strains (even harder) to make the case.

So Maureen Dowd started with a nothing quote and wound up with a quote that got attention and plumped for who I assume is her favored candidate, Christine Quinn, and got mentioned in the media for the first time since Bill Clinton's ejaculate was entered into State's Evidence.

And she says this happened On Accident n Stuff.

Mm.

I'm always suspicious of things which happen On Accident n Stuff but just so happen to the benefit the person who did the thing On Accident n Stuff.

Here's a conspiracy theory for you: The mistakes we make that accrue to own benefit are not really mistakes.

When even archliberal H8r of H8 Kevin Drum says you've "twisted" a quote, you've done something wrong.

But here's the thing:

How wrong was it to do what she did?

Some conspiracy theorists say that reporters twist the quotes of most of the people they interview.

These conspiracy theorists are sometimes called "half of the people reporters interview."

Like Richard Nixon, Maureen Dowd just be one of the ones who got caught.

Maetenloch Suggests... that listening to the actual recording will dispel any doubts you might have that this was a deliberately cobbled, contrived "quote."

Mind.Blown. De Blasio's anti-lesbian sexual-racist dogwhistling wife is herself...

... a former lesbian. And black.

Someone said this in the comments and I thought they were making up a silly joke.

Nope.

Real.

This is like Inception except instead of a spinning top it's a black former lesbian.

Curiouser and curiouser, Alice said, and the strongly implied the March Hare dug on dick.

Posted by: Ace at 01:14 PM | Comments (308)
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For some reason. Personally, I don't see why.

Also slated to speak at the conference is the president of the John Birch Society, a fringe conspiracy-theorist group that was famously denounced by the late William F. Buckley.

In early September, the men are all scheduled to speak – along with a lengthy list of archconservative clergy, lawyers and academics – at a conference in Canada sponsored by the Fatima Center, part of the “radical traditionalist Catholic” movement, perhaps the single largest group of hard-core anti-Semites in North America....

The Fatima Center’s publications have published columns criticizing the Pope for “kowtowing” to the “Synagogue of Satan,” argued that Jews are attempting to undermine the Catholic Church on behalf of Satan, and claiming that “Zionist billionaires” have been “financially raping” the Russian people. The organization also promotes New World Order conspiracy theories.

Well, let me continue the theme of the last post: Conspiracy theories are the religion of the bitter. It's fundamentally a religious response to confusion, disorder, and disappointment.

Ron Paul occasionally makes sound points but he does so almost by chance. He's worried about so many, many hobgoblins that occasionally he worries about something real.

Posted by: Ace at 12:12 PM | Comments (296)
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Commenters, what would I do without them. I saw this bandied around in the last thread and, even if it is easy gimme pseudocontent, well, it's still kind of important.

The mentality here. It's incredible. The left is now expressly Anti-Enlightenment. Nothing is about actual government policy now; everything is expressly about Safeguarding the Privileges and Dignity of the Princeps.

When's the last time Chris Matthews actually cared about some issue that wasn't obviously a proxy for his cultish fanboy impulse to Praise the Lord Obama and Smite the Disbelievers?

Our politics have become retarded (again, I mean this in both the acceptable and unacceptable meanings of the word) by a religious mania not seen since... I don't know when.

I have long contended that man is a fundamentally religious animal -- and I don't necessarily mean that in a good way -- and that many people who consider themselves above religion are actually quite beneath it, and, rather than subscribe to a conventional religion in which their desire for transcendence can be more conventionally satisfied, instead channel their religious impulses into areas which are not by nature religious and which by nature must not be religious.

Our politics now is simply about a god, and I mean the god Obama. And even for those who may doubt the actual divinity of the Unaccomplished One --

Religious hysteria does not require a god. Religious hysteria only requires Dogma & a Devil.

We would be the Devil, here.

So here is noted paranoid and homoerotic political theorist Chris Matthews now speculating that people refer to "Obama" as "Obama" and not "President Obama" for the same reason that non-Christians might call Jesus "Jesus" and not "the Christ Jesus."

God knows we've never referred to previous presidents by their last name only. And God knows we've never refused to grant presidents we don't actually support the full Dignity of their Stately Titles.

On Tuesday, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews claimed that conservatives and Republicans are attempting to “delegitimize” President Obama by calling him “Obama” or “a liberal leader,” Matthews said.

“It seems there’s a very interesting compelling continuing effort to delegitimize this president,” he told “Bush’s Brain” author Wayne Slater.

“People on the right say he’s a disaster, which he’s not. Look at what he’s already accomplished,” he added, apparently oblivious to Obama’s record deficits, failed foreign policy and the overall state of the economy.

“But they first of all referred to him, not as the ‘President of the United States’ but as a ‘liberal leader.’ They refer to the health care act of 2010 as ‘a bill.’ They refer to him as ‘Obama.’ They don’t say the ‘the president.’ They don’t say the ‘a law.’ They don’t even speak the language we normally speak in civilized political debate,” he added, as though he would know anything about “civilized political debate.”

“They’ve changed it so much that he’s actually not really supposed to be there,” he continued.

Sounding more like a tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorist than a thoughtful political pundit, Matthews insisted it was all part of a concerted effort to create the conditions where history would regard Obama as an illegitimate president, Noah Rothman added.

“And I’m not paranoid,” he concluded.

“I think that’s right,” Slater said, agreeing with Matthews.

According to Slater, opposition to Obamacare stems from the name that has even been adopted by Obama.

“Get him off the record books,” Matthews added.

Video at the link.

More:

But Bush wasn't god.

I'd also note this idea comes from the same crowd who spent six of Bush's eight years saying, "My President is Josiah Bartlett." (The TV President on that stupid Aaron Sorkin show.)

more...

Posted by: Ace at 11:07 AM | Comments (454)
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