Eh, who cares?

Although a general-audience entertainment forum may not be the best place for political statements, let's not overreact. Most celebrities are 1) naive and 2) possessed of the belief that their words can move the world away from injustice and nachos, or whatever it is they oppose this week. So they feel like they have to spout off about complicated subjects -- sans nuance -- if they are to be good, conscientious citizens who shelter as much of their money from taxation as humanly possible.

By and large they're dopes, dancing hurly-burly monkeys really, and if the monkeys fling poo on occasion, well that's what monkeys do. They're still entertaining, at least once in a while, sometimes by accident.

Sally Field and the left will cry censorship, of course. Let them. It's important for very comfortable, pampered people to feel as if they're being oppressed; it gives their lives some kind of meaning. When you're not only fantasically rich but on top of that almost never have to pay for the simple costs of entertainment, eating, drinking, travel or blow, one may tend to develop Hardship Envy. Let us not be too begrudging of their desire to at least feel like the rest of the human population who actually has to worry about money and who's going to pay the bouncer at the Viper Room for the thirty tabs of X and bovine growth hormone.

Every celebrity a Sakharov, every singer a Solzhenitsyn. It's a silly conceit, but they're living in such a state of utter unreality anyway it seems small-bore to challenge this particular delusion. By sheer fortune, they're separated from the great mass of humanity which has real troubles and real "oppression" in the form of less lavish lifestyles in which simply reality sharply delimits what we are capable of doing at any time; I sort of view this as a rather cute and forgivable impulse to "be like common people."

99.999% of the human population would never even have been in a position to deliver a rather dumb cheap-applause line about Moms Who Hate War. She's as oppressed as I am. But I guess it's important to all of us to feel a little oppressed, to feel a little bit the rebel and contrarian. Even when someone is as rich and establishment and "part of the problem" as our spectacularly fortunate celebrity class.

Hey, if I'd been on that stage, at least at the point where I was comfortable in my career and had enough f-u money to survive a blacklisting, I would have said something about our brave servicemen. And maybe I would have whined about having my words censored by "The Man" too.

Of course I'll never be on that stage. I just think Sally Field has gotten so used to her life being positively extraordinary she now considers it perfectly normal, and the minor bit of nannying from overly-eager network censors now seems to her to be some major crisis.

Censored For Language Not Content?: Slublog points out, very rightly, she used the word "goddamn," which seems to be accepted by a lot of people as a meaningless bit of vulgarity but is in fact historically a true, bona fide, dictionary-definition profanity, as in "profaning against God."

Indeed, most networks are pretty skittish about this word. They'll routinely dub out the "God" part of it and leave the damn in. It's not as flagrant a curse as "fuck," but it is considered by many to much more profane than a minor league vulgarity like "bullshit," and bullshit itself is usually censored on TV.

I think this is bang-on right: It wasn't the PC applause line that got the guy in the seven-second delay booth to push the red button. It was the word "goddamn."

Not saying that makes Sally Field and potty-mouthed whore or anything. I've said the word often enough. But this is a much more likely explanation for the censorship. She just doesn't spend enough time with people who take God seriously to realize that this word is up there, in many people's minds, near the top of the list of unacceptable public profanities.

Even while I curse a lot, there are three or four words I give special consideration to before writing, and this is one of them. I'm pretty sure it's my least used major curse word, and often where I've initially written it, I've either deleted it or changed to the less-objectionable (yes, less objectionable) ""fucking."

Posted by: Ace at 08:21 AM | Comments (32)
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Senator Clinton is unveiling her newest healthcare reform plan today. The cornerstone of her plan (and John Edwards' also) is that everyone will be required to have health insurance.

The AP report makes it sound like this requirement will be just like most state requirements that drivers have auto insurance; in other words, "No big deal." However, there's no details yet on whether Clinton plans to criminalize failure to purchase health insurance in similar manner to auto insurance.

As is standard procedure for Democrats funding anything these days, they say they'll manage by undoing President Bush's tax cuts.

Clinton makes some other questionable claims about her plan. She plans to force insurance companies to accept all comers, regardless of pre-existing conditions. She somehow claims that things will not change for people who already have health insurance, apparently not seeing a connection between the costs of health insurance to consumers and companies' selection criteria.

Clinton says Medicare and the federal employees' health insurance program will be expanded to cover people who cannot get "adequate" coverage through their employers. That part of the plan contains this whopper:

Consumers could choose between either government-run program, but aides stress that no new federal bureaucracy would be created under the Clinton plan.

Sources on the Hill report that Clinton also lives in a magical fantasy-land.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 08:06 AM | Comments (21)
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Old news by now, but important:

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said on Sunday his country must prepare for the possibility of war against Iran over its nuclear programme, but he did not believe any such action was imminent.

Seeking to ratchet up the pressure on Iran, Kouchner also told RTL radio and LCI television that the world's major powers should use further sanctions to show they were serious about stopping Tehran getting atom bombs, and said France had asked French firms not to bid for tenders in the Islamic Republic.
Photo

"We must prepare for the worst," Kouchner said in an interview, adding: "The worst, sir, is war."

Asked about the preparations, he said it was normal to prepare for various eventualities.

"We are preparing ourselves by trying to put together plans that are the chiefs of staff's prerogative (but) that is not about to happen tomorrow," he added.

...

Kouchner's comments follow a similarly hawkish statement by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who said last month in his first major foreign policy speech since taking office that a diplomatic push by the world's powers was the only alternative to "an Iranian bomb or the bombing of Iran".

The worst is not war, but a nuclear-armed Iran.

The left is dishonest as usual on this issue. They will often claim that a nuclear-armed Iran is "intolerable," but then propose tolerating this situation.

It's not that the right is just knee-jerkedly in favor of "bombing brown people," as the left has it. It's that when we say a nuclear-armed Iran is "intolerable" we actually mean the word as it is actually defined, e.g., not to be tolerated. The left mistakes its political PR and lies for "nuance" as usual.

The left clearly believes a nuke-armed Tehran is quite tolerable. They should say so and make their case to the American people on this point, rather than speaking out of both sides of their mouths. Democracy -- consent of the governed -- relies upon honest statements of intentions and values, not lies. And if the left wishes its policy as regards Iran to prevail, it must first actually announce to the American people what that policy is, for the very first time. And that policy is permitting Iran to have nukes and hoping for the best.

This may be a justifiable policy. It may even be wise policy. But the left must make its case, rather than simply lying that they won't permit Iran to acquire the bomb while ruling out any action likely to forestall that nightmare.

But, as usual, the left simply refuses to gain true consent and approval for its favored policies from the public.

Perhaps had they really argued all the stuff about Iraq they now claim they knew all along, they could actually have participated honestly in the Iraq War debate and possibly prevailed. They seem to think their secret hostility to that war makes them noble and right; I think it makes them craven. You don't get credit for being "right" if you're too cowardly to make your true position known. And here, yes, I'm talking primarily about the Democratic Party itself, which was tepidly in favor of Iraq publically. We all knew they were against it, but they tried to pretend they were in favor of it. How this qualifies as a profile in courage or demonstration of foreign-policy wisdom is beyond me.

Posted by: Ace at 07:57 AM | Comments (11)
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Britney Spears has had a rough few weeks, starting with her disastrous "return" performance at the MTV Video Awards. She was panned in the press for her sloppy lip-syncing, flabby gut, and flailing dance moves. Then she was brutally mocked by foul-mouthed Sarah Silverman, who referred to Spears' children as the "most adorable mistakes [Britney] ever made."

Spears' week was capped when a new round of nude photos circulated on the Internet. But things could be even worse this week.

Custody hearings for her little "mistakes" continued this morning. Kevin Federline is said to have a "mystery witness" with all the dirt on Britney's drug use. Well known attorney Gloria Allred, is playing for keeps.

I almost feel sorry for Britney.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 07:40 AM | Comments (20)
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Not good:

US security contractor Blackwater has been banned from operating in Iraq, after eight civilians were killed in Baghdad yesterday.

...

Yesterday, a US diplomatic convoy came under fire in the Iraqi capital's western al-Yarmukh neighbourhood.

Blackwater members accompanying the convoy returned fire, leaving nine people dead, one of whom was an Iraqi police officer.

All of the other fatalities were civilian bystanders.

Iraqi Brigadier-General, Abdul-Karim Khalaf, confirmed that a mortar had landed close to the convoy and said the US firm had 'opened fire randomly at citizens'.

...

And today Iraqi Interior Minister, Jawad al-Bolani, issued an order to cancel Blackwater's licence and prohibit the company from operating anywhere in Iraq.

...

A US embassy official only said that security vehicles of the 'Department of State' were involved in an incident near al-Nissur Square.

Posted by: Ace at 07:32 AM | Comments (20)
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One of the men he was with turned his digital voice recorder on.

Bonus: How the Simpson murder trial led Roger L. Simon away from traditional liberalism.

I remember looking over at the jury. The women were sitting there stone-faced, probably trying to hide their boredom with peripheral testimony. This was the fourteenth week of the trial. I started to feel sad. What had happened to America that things had come to such a pass that a group of black women were about to free a rich black celebrity who had butchered his white wife and a friend of hers? (Yes, it was pretty clear at that point that that would happen.) This wasn’t 1934 but 1994. We weren’t in the world of Richard Wright – or were we?

I searched around for an explanation Â… still do Â… for why the promise of the Civil Rights Movement had never been fully realized. These women, largely from South Central Los Angeles and similar neighborhoods, lived lives light years from OJ and his friends and yet they still bent over backwards to defend this man who essentially deserted them. The psychological reasons (shame, rage at the white bitch, etc.) were clear enough, but this stuff was as old as the American subconscious. Surely these women could rise above it. But they couldnÂ’t.

Of course, the obvious answer, the cliché, was that we had not done enough, not enough aid, not enough affirmative action. But sitting there that day, and in the weeks to come, I started to consider that the reverse was true. Well, not quite the reverse. We had not done too much, but we had done well enough. At the point of history America had reached, probably had already reached some years before, affirmative action had become an albatross around the neck of those who received it. Aid given to people – no matter who they are – when it is not earned carries with it a level of insult and denigration. It comes from on high to down low and carries with it an implicit message of lowness.

I began to think of Johnnie Cochran as condescending to the African-American community, as their enabler, treating them like children who would believe something as imbecilic as “If the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit.” Cochran was in a way the racist in how he dealt with his own people. He was certainly a racist in the way he dealt with white people.

I didnÂ’t say that out loud in those days, at least not very often, but I began to think it. It was the first chink in my very traditional liberal armor, the first time I thought outside a conventional wisdom that I had never questioned in my life. The groundwork was prepared for a larger questioning after 9/11. The OJ Trial began it all.

Posted by: Ace at 07:16 AM | Comments (8)
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They're not "real Al Qaeda," of course, as Juan Williams always tells us. Apparently they're "Al Kinda," as Dennis Miller jokes.

I hope whatever we do we don't confront these guys in Iraq, because they just want to get back to kite-flying and attending the Yearly Kos.

Posted by: Ace at 07:13 AM | Comments (3)
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I had no idea there was a big ANSWER anti-war march on the capitol this weekend, something else was occupying my attention. But harrison was on the scene and photoblogged about it here.

Plus he got to meet Michelle Malkin and Bryan Preston, who is from Texas.

189 arrests. Sweet.

Posted by: Dave In Texas at 06:28 AM | Comments (14)
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President Bush is set to nominate his choice for next Attorney General and it's not Ted Olson or Michael Chertoff. It's Michael Mukasey.

Mukasey is a former federal judge (nominated by Reagan) and good friend of Rudy Giuliani. He was the first judge to hear the Jose Padilla case and managed to frustrate all parties by ruling that even an American citizen like Padilla could be held as an enemy combatant, but that such a detainee has the right to challenge that designation. His ruling is almost exactly what the Supreme Court decided a year later in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld.

Chuck Schumer in 2003 suggested Mukasey as a replacement for Chief Justice Rehnquist. More recently, Schumer told the White House to nominate as a new AG, "somebody who, by their reputation and career, shows that they put the rule of law first, a person like a Michael Mukasey, a person like a Larry Thompson, a person like a Jim Comey."

Of course, President Bush shouldn't have believed him. Now that Mukasey's actually being put forward, Schumer says he only "has the potential to become a consensus nominee."

Senate Republicans should be reading Schumer's prior statements about Mukasey on the floor during confirmation hearings. Repeatedly, until Schumer gets over his little two-faced lapse.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 05:59 AM | Comments (8)
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Some sub-moron named Idris Leppla writing an op-ed in the Columbia Spectator is apparently shocked that the service academies are run by the military! I must confess, I always thought Annapolis was a marketing arm of Kellogg and was commanded by Captain Crunch, so this naturally came as quite a surprise to me.

...My brother ended up liking Annapolis and he has decided to stay. While it has been difficult for me to accept that I have a brother in the military, I must allow him to pursue whatever path he is drawn toward, and he has admitted to me that he feels called to being there. However, for anyone else out there considering a career in the academy, let it be known: the U.S. Naval Academy is not an elite college; it is first and foremost a branch of the U.S. military and the prestige comes at a big price—it taxes parents, siblings, and participants if they do not understand what they were signing up for...

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 05:33 AM | Comments (133)
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