Top Stories Saturday Nov 16
Tom Tomorrow on which party speaks for real Americans:
We’ve seen this nonsense before, from the likes of Ann Coulter, and I suspect we’re going to be seeing more it, this idea that Democrats are all a bunch of Northeastern elitists completely out of touch with some mythical “real America”–which is, of course, most often promulgated by Northeastern conservative elitists who mostly live in Manhattan or DC. I mean, come on. Anyone who could write that Democrats would “go homeless before toiling as a middle manager at Procter & Gamble” clearly has very little contact with the “real America” for which they profess to speak. The numbers speak for themselves: the last two elections have been statistical dead heats. The country is split straight down the middle. And it should be clear to anyone, even the conservative Upper East Side/Beltway crowd, that fifty percent of the voting public can’t all be investment bankers and doctors (categories which, correct me if I’m wrong, probably contain more than few Republican voters).
Seeing the Forest demonstrates the dangers of the Bush administration’s politicising of the war on terrorism:
It used to be, I would worry about what might happen. I worried about going to Comdex last year because of anthrax. I worried about flying.
Now I think about whether the Bush people have been caught at something they’re trying to distract us from. I wonder what advantage the Republicans are trying to gain. After going down a checklist like this, and then hearing that the Europeans are also worrying, THEN I start to worry that this one might be for real.
This is the consequence of Bush politicizing the war on terrorism. There were several phony terrorism alerts, each one coming immediately after some embarrassing revelation – like the Harken stories hitting the press. Remember when Ashcroft came on TV from Moscow to talk about “dirty bombs” and later we found out the guy had really been caught a month previously? Remember how the terrorist alerts STOPPED after the press started questioning the timing?
The Road to Surfdom comments about somebody’s amazingly original insight that Communism can be thought of as a religion:
Of course, those who follow the science of capitalism exhibit none of these attributes. No unsubstantiated beliefs. No gross simplifications to make a point. No idols and no priestly caste. No central temples and regional churches. No straying sheep. No faith in abstractions, even in the face of evidence. No vision of a better life based on right behaviour. Just Gradgrindian fact. Absolutely nothing like a religion.