He wasn't always a unilateralist, cowboy, illegal war monger.

What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.

What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income — to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression. That's what I'm opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics. Now let me be clear — I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power. He has repeatedly defied UN resolutions, thwarted UN inspection teams, developed chemical and biological weapons, and coveted nuclear capacity. He's a bad guy. The world, and the Iraqi people, would be better off without him.

But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history. I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaida. I am not opposed to all wars. I'm opposed to dumb wars.

Thanks to Slublog.

Oh and the UK Parliament voted down David Cameron's request for intervention in Syria. The last time that happened to a Prime Minister was in 1782 when Parliament decided against continuing the war against the American colonies. Historic!

Update: John Kerry's live speech on Obama's drive to war.

Thanks to RD for that link.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:53 AM | Comments (343)
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• Cameron First To Lose War Vote In Parliament Since 1782
  
• Germany Backs Out As Well
  
• Assad's Son Now Trolling Obama On Facebook
  
• Cory Booker Not Backing Down On His T-Bone Story
  
• San Bernadino 1, Calpers 0
  
• Teen Employment Hits Record Lows
  
• Virginia Is A Blue State
  
• I Would Love To Stab This Guy In The Face
  
• Who Says Romance Is Dead?
  
• Citizens Organizing Fast Food Boycott To Counter Union Strike
  
• Are Cable News Ratings A Harbinger Of Voter Turnout
  
• Hollywood, Babble On
  
• Goldberg: What's So Great About Coalitions?
  
• Obama's New Executive Order Would Effectively Kill The CMP
  
• Conservatives Ready Another Try To Unseat Lindsey Graham
  
• State Department Reveals Hillary Clinton Received 500k In Jewelry From A Saudi King
  
• Eric Holder's War On Private Schools
  
• Taranto: Common Mistakes When People Use Bad Logic
  
• Krauthammer: Shamed Into War?
  
• James Spader Cast As The Villain For Avengers 2
  

Follow me on twitter.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:25 AM | Comments (669)
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Holiday weekend Friday!

Yeah, this is gonna be a really productive day at work for Obama ... like any of the rest have been.

Exhibit A:

But, hey, they were talking about job creation or something.

Posted by: andy at 02:38 AM | Comments (358)
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Drunken Sex = Rape?

Apparently feminist types have been trying to sneak a new social rule in through the backdoor (heh heh heh 'backdoor') that any sex with a drunk girl is still de facto rape - even if she was conscious and willing. And now even daring to question this pronouncement from on high is AN OUTRAGE!!!! as Dr. Phil discovered to his dismay.

On his podcast, Adam Carolla asked female comedian Nikki Glaser what she thought of the new "law" that "drunk sex is rape." Blindsided, she chirped back, "I've only ever been raped! I just realized that." ("I've raped myself," Carolla put in.)

Science: Haters Gonna Hate

Haters aren't just gonna hate, they have to hate according to new research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. ...If you've ever read a comment chain on YouTube, then you already knew this to be true, but now it is confirmed

Why It's Time We let The Pandas Die Out

They're cute and all but also pretty much the underachieving non-hacking losers of the large mammal world. Rhinos would also be a contender except that they can and do kill people regularly so they have that going for them.

And pandas don't even seem to want to survive. In the wild, they're prone to inbreeding. In captivity, zoos are forced to use Viagra and animal-porn to encourage them to mate, or resort to artificial insemination. They're slow and lazy, and use their predatory teeth for nothing but eating bamboo-a plant that's also disappearing. "Look, Darwinism isn't for crybabies. And conservation requires making tough choices,' writes Lavin. "Pandas had a pretty good run for 3 million years. All that money is better spent on preserving diverse habitats rather than on a single hopeless species."

NJ Court: Texting Someone Driving Could Make You Liable For a Crash

"A New Jersey Appeals Court has ruled that both sides of a texting conversation which resulted in a car accident could be held liable. The ruling came as part of a case in which the driver of a truck received a text message shortly before striking a motorcycle carrying two passengers. The court ruled that while in this case, the person sending the text wasn't liable, they could be if the circumstances were a little different. '...a person sending text messages has a duty not to text someone who is driving if the texter knows, or has special reason to know, the recipient will view the text while driving.'"

I don't see how this could be enforced since it's virtually impossible to know ahead of time that someone will in fact view your text while driving. Plus you're still allowed to call people when they're driving without incurring liability. And don't drivers have the primary responsibility to not do unsafe things or are we now all legally considered child-like compulsive chat-bots who can't handle shiny things?

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:28 PM | Comments (617)
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Just got home from work. Apparently the season started. Tonight. Thursday.

OK.

South Carolina (6) and NC, underway.

Also @MikeTalley73 set up a couple of college football pickem groups if you feel like playing 16167 16172 16176 password is: paulanka Which was darn nice of him.

And now, some elbows.

OH. NFL games too. It is all upon us.

Man this has been a long week.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 03:57 PM | Comments (43)
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Cory Booker's imaginary pal T-Bone once crushed a lump of coal in his hand, and transformed in into a Dove.

Some other stuff:

From Instapundit, a mattress designed for better snuggling. Okay, so I clicked. My thought: That's stupid. So, so stupid.

But actually...

You can stick your hand underneath,
then pop it up and grab her boob,
like you're a Ghost!!!

A friend of mine talked about the 3 Arms of Comfort limitation. If two people lie together, one of the four arms must be very uncomfortable. (He was an engineer so he worked out the calculus.) Well, this would fix that. Though it does look weird.

Women probably don't even know about the 3 Arms of Comfort limitation. Yeah, that's because dudes have to take that hit.

An independent National Journal analysis finds, surprise, ObamaCare, like private school, is ruining everything.

Republicans have long blamed President Obama's signature health care initiative for increasing insurance costs, dubbing it the "Unaffordable Care Act."

Turns out, they might be right.

For the vast majority of Americans, premium prices will be higher in the individual exchange than what they're currently paying for employer-sponsored benefits, according to a National Journal analysis of new coverage and cost data. Adding even more out-of-pocket expenses to consumers' monthly insurance bills is a swell in deductibles under the Affordable Care Act.

Health law proponents have excused the rate hikes by saying the prices in the exchange won't apply to the millions receiving coverage from their employers. But that's only if employers continue to offer that coverage--something that's looking increasingly uncertain.

Wonderful.

Free Beacon offered a parody of that Slate article: If you use private transportation, you're a horrible, horrible person.

Meghan McArdle took the article seriously, and wrote a very interesting post about it. Trust me, it's interesting.

Popehat said this:

I'm not a Democrat or a Republican. I'm not a big-L Libertarian, although I have small-l libertarian leanings. If you asked me to summarize my domestic political outlook, you could do worse than this: I want to minimize the ability of people like Alison Benedikt, who tend to encrust government, to tell me how to raise my family or live my life. I believe in free expression, free worship, free conscience, personal responsibility, the rule of law, strictly limited government (and the strict limitation of people with clipboards and people with guns and badges, thank you very much), and that the best society is one in which free people make free choices, not one in which you allow the Alison Benedikts of the world to make the best interests of your children subservient to the best interests of a collective imagined by a smug self-appointed elite.

Now that I realize Cook and Benedikt have kids, I think I understand the reason for their anger on this issue. Were I to guess, I would say that they feel that their own kids may be disadvantaged by not going to private school, and hence seek to do what parents tend to do: Level the playing field for their kids. In this case, it involves taking an advantage away from other kids.

But this is part of what Popehat's mention of people who "encrust government" sort of means: People who "encrust government" use government, fundamentally, as a mechanism for rewarding themselves and disadvantaging others. Businesses attempt to hedge out competition; people making $60,000 per year want to tax the crap out of people making $85,000 per year.

Government is not holy. Government is a civil mechanism for coercing and disadvantaging other people in order to advantage yourself.

It is necessary, but it is a necessary evil, and it must be limited, so that people don't go looking for all possible ways to knock other people down (so that they are not "lower" by comparison).

John McWhorter on, yeah, Racist Miley Cyrus:

Many of the people clutching their pearls over Miley CyrusÂ’s gluteal gyrations at the MTV Video Music Awards on Sunday donÂ’t want the America they claim to want.

CyrusÂ’s sin was to engage in the dance move known as twerking....

And a white girl twerking on television is merely a symptom of what Leon Wynter, in a sadly underacknowledged book a while ago, called the “browning” of American culture....

That charge–that she is making fun of black people in the guise of entertainment–is, among other things, reductive. How do we know Cyrus isn’t sincere when she says she loves “hood” culture? Because she’s white? I’m afraid that’s a little 1955.

...

But then, black writings are replete with complaints that mainstream America doesn’t appreciate black women’s fuller figures. Cyrus gets up and does exactly that and she’s a recap of a slave seller? How exactly are we to celebrate black women’s bodies–in a sonnet? “It’s just a clumsy white appropriation of black culture,” says Salamishah Tillet at the University of Pennsylvania. Right–but let’s see how it would go if we decided blacks can’t “appropriate” white culture. Wait, it’s not the same thing because whites are the oppressors? But in which human culture, ever in the history of our species, have groups living together not borrowed one another's cultural traits? What is the point in decreeing that whites must suspend this natural urge regarding the specific case of descendants of African slaves in the United States, other than to have an endless source of underdog grievance?

Um, it's much simpler than that. It's a childish impulse to say "This is MINE, this is MINE, and my friends'. It belongs to MY tribe, not yours."

It's the same kind of racial grumbling that whites get castigated for, and it's time we stopped condescending to blacks on this point and castigated them for tribal, us vs. them, this is OUR sh*t racial grumbling too.

You know how people's eyebrows go up if Sarah Palin says "This is our country?" And they start saying "what do you think she really meant by that? Hmmmm?"

Well that is attempting to insert a stupid Dog Whistle narrative into the statement and claim that what she really means is "White people made this country, we originated it, it's ours."

And this is a bad thing, right?

So tell me how on earth it's a good thing when the typical racialists gather 'round to claim, "oh, Twerking? That's a black thing. Black people made twerking, we originated it, it's ours."

By the way, this particular thing? It is very sad to claim ownership of this like it's the ckufing Space Shuttle.

No, Miley Cyrus is not racist. She's crazy. But not racist.

And at some point the people who yell the loudest about setting aside racial bigotries, tribal loyalties, and genetic hatreds really ought to see about doing so themselves.

There's no such thing as "Collective Racial Ownership" of an idea or an advance. I hate to be racist here, but if we're going to play that game, personally, I'm claiming The Wonder of Electricity for my Tribe. Westinghouse, Maxwell, Tesla, Edison: Yeah, "White Culture."

Now shuddup already with the unending racial grumbling disguised as something elevated. It's not elevated. It's base. It reversion to pack animal instincts.

Get over it.

Oh, Sorry: Dave's college football thread below.

More on T-Bone: Per an old video, Booker reports that his mysterious friend "T-Bone" "just disappeared into the streets" after their adventure together, to never be seen again.

Yeah that sounds very familiar to me.

Posted by: Ace at 04:06 PM | Comments (452)
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The directors of US warmaking decisions are getting a peaceful, queasy feeling.

When I say they're "backing away," I mean they seem to be signalling this through their softened rhetoric, not that they've actually announced they were reconsidering.

The UK David Cameron has already climbed all the way back down the tree. He says he'll now be taking the case for war to Parliament.

There's an innovation we could stand to imitate, huh?

Meanwhile, AP sources say that even within the administration, people are saying the proof of the Syrian government's responsibility for the gas attack is "not a slam dunk."

Those words seem precisely chosen to mimic George Tenet's conclusion that the case for Iraqi WMD was a "slam dunk." Well, if that was a slam dunk, and turned out to be (we think) wrong, and this isn't even a slam dunk, well then, what is it?

The intelligence linking Syrian President Bashar Assad or his inner circle to an alleged chemical weapons attack is no "slam dunk," with questions remaining about who actually controls some of Syria's chemical weapons stores and doubts about whether Assad himself ordered the strike, U.S. intelligence officials say.

...

[M]ultiple U.S. officials used the phrase "not a slam dunk" to describe the intelligence picture — a reference to then-CIA Director George Tenet's insistence in 2002 that U.S. intelligence showing Iraq had weapons of mass destruction was a "slam dunk" — intelligence that turned out to be wrong.

A report by the Office of the Director for National Intelligence outlining that evidence against Syria includes a few key caveats — including acknowledging that the U.S. intelligence community no longer has the certainty it did six months ago of where the regime's chemical weapons are stored, nor does it have proof Assad ordered chemical weapons use...

A three-page report released Thursday by the British government said there was "a limited but growing body of intelligence" blaming the Syrian government for the attacks. And though the British were not sure why Assad would have carried out such an attack, the report said there was "no credible intelligence."

Sounds a lot like a "clear consensus" and "the science is settled" to me.

UPDATE: OBAMA, THE GREAT INTERNATIONALIST HOPE, SAYS HE'S WILLING TO GO IT ALONE IN SYRIA. We've come an awfully long way from The Global Test and the Wisdom of the International Community, huh?

President Obama is willing to move ahead with a limited military strike on Syria even while allies like Britain are debating whether to join the effort and without an endorsement from the United Nations Security Council, senior administration officials said Thursday.

He's also willing to go it alone without Congressional authorization or the support (or even the knowledge) of the American public, too, so I guess we shouldn't be surprised.

Posted by: Ace at 12:56 PM | Comments (634)
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This is the blogpost that everyone's talking about.

This appears in Slate's Frequent Dumb Offender ghetto "Double X Factor." That is where they let the girls write.

See, if Matt Ygelsias writes a stupid post, it's part of Slate's MoneyBox feature.

If a girl writes a stupid post, it goes into Double X Factor.

What this writer is writing about is not a "woman's issue." It's about education. It is no more a "woman's issue" than Matt Yglesias' article (which mentions protecting children from the brain-damaging effects of lead paint) was a "woman's issue."

But she's a girl, and this too dumb for the rest of the blog (and consider the implications of that), so into Double X Factor her dumb blogpost goes.

Because Slate is totally against the #WarOnWomen, guys.

This is something, by the way, they seem to be learning from the Daily Mail, which has been accused of deliberately embarrassing women in order to generate links. For example, that woman who said It's So Hard to Be Beautiful But Was Not In Fact Beautiful at all? The Daily Mail's leftwing critics asserted that the paper has long offered up such Sacrificial Lambs, always female, prodding them to write monstrously dumb articles in order to profit from Bus Crash Rubbernecking.

Provocative Title:

If You Send Your Kid to Private School, You Are a Bad Person
A manifesto.

Writer: Allison Benedikt. She is married to John Cook, who occasionally writes stupid things for Gawker.

Evidence of Trollish Intent: Read the headline again.

Other Evidence of Trollish Intent: Well... Let's look at the outcome. She trolled half the internet into linking her.

People like @danfostertype are now begging everyone else to stop talking about this stupid thing:

Plus, if you need more proof than that, there' the actual blogpost, which is scatological in its stupidity.

Yeah I gotta link this one. Everyone else already has. (Congratulations, David Plotz.)

It has to be read in its entirety.

Now as I quote, you will begin to suspect that this article is actually a sneaky ironic post which is actually making the case for private school while ostensibly arguing against it, by presenting a chilling portrait of public school (which failed to educate the author, as she's about to inform you).

Like Swift's A Modest Proposal.

But I don't think so.

Enjoy the hardcore link-trolling, David Plotz style: more...

Posted by: Ace at 02:37 PM | Comments (301)
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McCain: Immigration bill could give foreign workers leg up on Americans
"Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake, both Arizona Republicans, said they fear that foreign workers will be more attractive to hire than Americans for some companies because the foreigners wonÂ’t be eligible for the same health care benefits." Suggested new headline: "McCain Admits Immigration Bill Sucks." [rdbrewer]

Posted by: rdbrewer at 12:13 PM | Add Comment
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Matt Yglesias is actually not nearly so important a contributor to Slate's All-Dumb Rebranding Effort as LV Anderson. It's not that Matt Yglesias isn't profoundly stupid -- Oh, he is -- it's that people already know he's stupid. And also boring and tedious and walking around with a certain kind of I've Made It Now, Bitch swagger that doesn't suit someone who writes blogposts for a failing group blog.

LV Anderson, en revanche, is an Unknown Factor. You don't know that she's an idiot you're not supposed to take seriously, so she tricks you sometimes into reading her retard-bait blogposts and thus often has Slate's most trafficked articles of the day.

Nevertheless, although Matt Yglesias is sodden with failure-sweat, he did show the Stupid Flag today as well, and must be mentioned.

Provocative Title:

"We Need Government Handouts, Not Equality of Opportunity."

Outstanding start. Gentlemen, start your troll-engines.

Writer: Matt Yglesias, a Socialist who owns a million+ dollar condo despite not having the sort of salaried position which would usually produce the income enough to purchase such a palace.

Gee I wonder how he swung that.

Evidence of Trolling Intent: What's especially hate-trollish about this is that he attempts to offend both the right and the left in order to generate some Failure Links for Slate. Of course his headline seems like it's calculated to grab some Outrage Traffic from the right -- but his article is actually a repudiation of Barack Obama's statement that people need opportunity, not hand-outs.

Thus, he seeks to troll both sides.

Being Matt Yglesias, he fails. Not only is he too boring to read, but you're too bored even reading my attack on him for me to continue much longer, and so it is I will try to wrap up quickly.

Estimated Time It Took To Produce This Work: I would guess about twenty minutes. Well, for Matt Yglesias, I'd say an hour and change.

There's almost nothing to it. He quotes Obama, and then makes a series of assertions which he doesn't bother supporting.

Suggesting that this isn't seriously intended as an argument; it's just a headline crafted to get linked, with some verbiage beneath it to make it look like a Real Blogpost.

Crescendo of Stupid: Most of it, of course, so I'll just quote a bit, more or less at random.

The entire piece is confused because he didn't bother actually writing a piece, he just wrote a grabby headline and then doodled for 500 words. He cavalierly confuses "hand outs" with government's role in regulating things like lead paint and requiring seat-belts for highway travel. So none of his offered examples even bother to try to make the headline's provocative case that "people need more hand-outs."

And I guess this is where he tries to really amp up the Outrage:

You think about the good old days of the pioneers when you could pull up your bootstraps and go work a farm out west (if you were white, that is). Well, that was a government program! You didn't confiscate that land from its native inhabitants. Somebody else made that happen.

I thought the same thing about your $1.175 million condo, Matty. I cry myself to sleep thinking about the land your parents must have appropriated from the Indigenous Condo Board.

Okay, I shouldn't have done this post at all and should have gone right to #3, which is a doozy. But here's the crap post, now out of the way, and I'll get on Slate's Screamingly Stupid Blogpost of the Day Year.

Posted by: Ace at 12:07 PM | Comments (209)
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