Political parties - in the end it seems all they do is force me into defending something I have but small interest in defending simply because my alternatives are so limited. I suppose a democracy would tend towards becoming intractable without them, but my god they lug about such idiocy in their wakes that it really is a tiresome spectacle following after them.

"... it's not that the left hopes for an American decline per se, it's rather that they long for a diminished stature for those things that confoundedly compromise their sense of superiority while conversely seeming to enhance the America they feel compelled to despise - money, a vigorous business ethos, a restive, opinionated and independent citizenry that tends to distrust elites, a powerful military held in high regard by the people who actually believe it exists to serve and safeguard their rights and liberties and not those of their would be masters - it's these things they abjure, which the left sometimes can admit may lend a certain greatness to America within a narrow context, but have the unfortunate effect of marginalizing a world view liberals value and a view therefore that must exist in order to validate all the good things they want to believe about themselves... in other words, they don't see their agenda so much as a weakening of America but rather as an evolution towards a state of affairs more inclined to raise them up and reward them accordingly and consequently a state of affairs that must inherently be better... that America may appear weaker in relative terms would be judged irrelevant since those terms would no longer be considered important... and if certain people or competing countries or hostile powers were to stubbornly insist on continuing to believe those terms important despite assurances from the evolved left that they were wrong then that would be judged irrelevant too..."

A little odd I think that the Washington Post has started up a bit of a media vendetta against Palin - vendetta maybe too strong, but they're sure targeting [now, c'mon] her for special negative treatment that seems personal and therefore markedly biased. I mean, there's a chance [slim I think] that she'll be a presidential candidate in 2012 - how can it be right to single her out for abuse and still lay claim to being a credibly objective news source? Abuse here being implied, and I suppose that's the equivocation they're hiding behind - one of their staff political writers, Dana Milbank, has declared February a Palin free month and the Post is supporting this effort by linking to a Twitter feed that I guess they're hoping will go viral or some such thing. This is unquestionably wrong, right?

One day someone's gonna write a fascinating book on the left's obsession with Palin and their seeming boundless contempt for her - she's a potent cultural signifier or bellwether or simulacrum or delineator or some god damn thing because she has absolutely burrowed into their collective brains and is gnawing away at something unpleasant - an astringent introduced into body politik of the left. Is it fear or contempt? Or is it fear expressed as contempt? And of what? If Obama wasn't president, I wonder if the animus against her would be as intense - I mean, the relative comparison of them with the idea that she could be president too, I wonder if that's what infuriates them, insults them even - ie, as with Reagan, that someone who could be characterized as the anti-Obama could not only be president but actually be quite good at it - not to engage in the silliness of comparing Palin to Reagan, but if you look at the world through the designer, academy approved rose colored glasses of a liberal, the type who sometimes acts as if The West Wing was a documentary, the idea of Palin being not only president, but maybe like Reagan possibly even a good one, must represent an almost unbearable thing to contemplate.

Detached from the realities of how true power and leadership actually function in the world as it is not the world as one wishes it could be, Western democracies and their sundry hangers-on, cowering behind the fortress that is America, are vulnerable to an enfeebling attachment to whimsical lassitude and the self indulgence of quaint idealism that leaves them in denial of their own weakness and the threats roiling beyond the gates. They're like the spoiled children of the rich - dad worked hard to build a fortune which his kids will now squander because they lack the wherewithal to understand the meaning of the how and why of it.

That the relationship between America and its democratic offspring accords with this dysfunctional familial dynamic occurred to me when I heard some Canadian intellectuals going on about America's gun culture post Tuscon - I'm not going to offer some blanket defense of American gun laws, but I would like to have asked these sanctimonious pissants how a country could possibly hope to field and maintain as viable a military as robust as America's without being able to rely on a culture that was comfortable with the idea of a gun? Of course they would have no answer and would fall back on hypothetical constructions entirely detached from reality - like I said, spoiled kids without a clue as how to get on in the real world.

Problem is, these spoiled scions usually only get their comeuppance when dad is dead and the fortune is gone. Nazi Germany's and Soviet Russia's perceptions of America and the strategies generated thereof were at least in part based on the belief that day was at hand - now China's machinations make the same assumption. I wonder if this time they'll be right?

From Max Boot at Commentary:

That tensions remain even after the two presidents broke bread together should hardly be a surprise. Keep in mind the larger picture. Numerous countries have ascended to great power status in the past 1,000 years, as China now aspires to do. Not a single one managed to make the transition peacefully. Not the Ottomans, not the Habsburgs, not the French, not the British, not the Germans, not the Russians. Not even the Americans. We like to think of ourselves as a peace-loving nation, but that’s not how our neighbors see us — and with good cause. Remember, as soon as we were strong enough, we went to war with Mexico to wrestle away the Southwest, and then, for good measure, we went to war with Spain to wrestle away Cuba and the Philippines. These were the actions, recall, of a liberal democracy. Autocratic regimes like the one in Beijing tend to be much more belligerent.

"... she remarked, with an acidic smile, on how republican I'd become, clearly meaning it as an insult, oddly tinged with an animosity that suggested she felt for some reason betrayed... I assured her that me speaking to facts unadulterated by idealist fantasy was in no way meant to offend or otherwise indicate a state of being hopelessly corrupted by evil... I told her that I found any partisan appeal to or affirmation of a particular ideological brand to seem uncomfortably simplistic and distasteful to a skeptic like myself and what's more also a wee bit antithetical to democracy's fundamentally moderating and consensual nature ... I declared that if asked I might be tempted to call myself a libertarian but felt even that was to say too much and admitted to being merely something of a conservative, an approximate conservative, if you will, and that even my devotion to that mild asseveration was somewhat conditional... the condition of course being the idea of American exceptionalism, an expression that sounds too definitively grand for my tastes, but still, the completely reputable notion that America remains, as it was during the rise of fascism, the rise of Soviet styled communism and now the rise of a Chinese styled Leninist, capitalist, vaguely fascistic hybrid, the vital, necessary power in the world... I asserted that great, epochal powers like America could and should not be governed from the left, the middle possibly, but the left no... that such great powers demand realism of their leaders and can only be weakened if not destroyed by an enslavement to the idle fantasies evinced by liberalism in its modern, emotionalist incarnation... I explained that since the considerations that keep a great power great and powerful all tend to fall within the purview of conservatives and conservative thinkers, that I therefore must logically render myself a conservative too... I contended that lesser entities, the post war states of Europe for instance, could possibly afford or delude themselves into thinking they could afford the luxury of enervation that is the natural consequence of a soft socialist dalliance, but that the last defender of the Western tradition can never abide such an indulgence, and the dramatic rightward turn of the erstwhile socialistic sentimentalist currently afoot in the White House is probably, if we agree to grant the diminished demagogue the benefit of a doubt, ample testament to that harsh reality... in short I assured the affronted creature, leaning forward and deftly placing my hand on the small of her slender back, that despite her hatred for me I would still insist on saving her soul if given the chance, but not necessarily because she herself was worth saving..."

And furthermore and so on - let me just say this last thing about that speech - even if one allows that it was 'great' - and I don't allow that but am willing to stomach the thought of allowing it for argument sake - even allowing for its putative [just can't help yourself, can you] greatness lets remember that the perceived need that occasioned it,  the issue that caused it, that it was summoned forth to address, was a falsehood, a lie, a phony, self serving narrative manufactured by an hysterical liberal elite and enabled by their willing co-conspirators in the press - built to address an illusion, a manufactured reality, like a house built on sand, the speech, no matter how pretty, can have no lasting value since it is doomed to sink into the mud.

One enfeebled liberal actually compared it to the Gettysburg address - which is absurd but actually serves my purposes quite well - Lincoln's solemn address in that graveyard was great because the event and cause that occasioned and gave it true meaning were great - likewise Churchill's speeches were great because the events that defined them were monumental - Pericles' funeral oration was magnificent because the heroic deaths he honoured evoked the very ideal that was Athens - all these words were wonderful in their own right but were made great by the events and circumstances that occasioned them - Obama's speech was about a false narrative constructed on top of the corpses of some unfortunate innocents murdered by a psychopath - in other words, Obama's speech was occasioned by an event with, at best, a very limited scope that had little to say about the nation as a whole, or at worst, was the ignition point of a scandalous, partisan lie.

In fact, oddly enough, Palin's speech had more to say about what the tragedy actually had to do with the idea of America than Obama's speech did - she ruined it all of course with the 'blood libel' misstep, but her message of American exceptionalism being about open debate between free individuals unencumbered by an overbearing government had much more meaning relative to the events, at least as far as the idea of America goes, than Obama's words which merely said, when you boil them right down - can't we all just be nicer to each other - which may have sounded comforting and even noble under the circumstances, and indeed may be what people wanted to hear, I don't know - but ultimately is a message that falls far from any notion of greatness.

But regardless, expect more comparisons to Lincoln, as if the country has just gone through a similarily divisive and extremely trying ordeal by fire and Obama is now here to heal us as a nation - an association that is patently absurd, ridiculous, insulting, vile even - but that won't stop liberals from crawling all over each other to proclaim it.

Seems I was quite right viz Obama's speech - the uber liberals, reeling from the setbacks of last week, have now pounced on it, make wild rut with it in orgiastic unison, ringing out a message, a new narrative [simply the old one in a new suit] that essentially proclaims: see, the Great Obama gets it, he knows how to be civil, to engage in proper, well reasoned political discourse - and he's one of us! He's ours! That was our point last week - not really ya know that Sarah Palin actually killed those people, but rather that the uncivilized [didn't go to Harvard] evil that she represents is killing the country [by making it less willing to accept that everything the editorial board of the NY Times says or believes is absolutely true] and only the great light that is Obama [remember, he is us, if you love him, or more precisely, if you loved that speech, you gotta love us] can save the country from this gathering darkness.

Essentially what they're saying is that republicans, or simply just conservatives, by expressing their opinions, are damaging the social fabric of the nation, and although the murders in Arizona were not directly caused by this conservative decay, they were emblematic of it, a symbol of it if you will, and that was our point. Accordingly, if you want civility to be preserved, if you want the country to be good and just, you must reject republican rhetoric because it represents the only true threat to the country [and just if you will try not to think about the fact that what we're really arguing for here is the institution of a liberal autocracy that outlaws or vilifies any free speech that doesn't sound like it was incubated in the faculty lounge at Harvard - in fact try not to think at all - we're really smart people and can do all that thinking stuff for you. Thanks].

If this new narrative manages to endure - and lets face it the MSM is highly motivated to enable it seeing as the events of last week made them look like absolute partisan dupes, which of course they are, but they now desperately need to rationalize that perception or rather obscure it behind a conveniently nebulous context - if it endures I would say Palin is toast if she really did nurture national ambitions [which I tend to believe she didn't - I think she's probably smart enough to realize it will be virtually impossible to win a national election when so many people have already decided they hate her] - the powers that be within the republican party will now be thinking her refusal to hire professional speech writers, professional advisors may have served well her 'rogue imaging' thing but is now proving a liability to the party as a whole and there's no way they're gonna let her anywhere near a presidential run. Then again, the narrative may not hold - the public didn't buy the first attempt at smearing the republican brand with these murders - but keep in mind, with Obama once again embracing the illusory mantle of the moderate, which served him so well in 2008, he now becomes a much more viable salesman - and that's what that speech was, it was a sales pitch - and it looks like an ever gullible public is ready to buy it up.

About that Obama speech - I won't even address the question of why this memorial service was deemed necessary - doesn't it amount to at least in some way a confirmation of the narrative liberals tried to falsely graft onto the crime? Isn't Obama being way too clever here, having pie and eating too, and the press is simply letting him get away with it - hell, encouraging it? But why would I be surprised by that - idiot. Anyway, this bloody speech - why is it people inflate these things so monstrously out of proportion? Yes, giving nice speeches is part of the job and I guess all the lofty prettiness is important in its own way - but, c'mon - the two most important duties by far of any POTUS are making sure he gets his foreign policy right and his economic policy right and Obama is failing badly on one of those and at best, at best barely passing in the other - so how does a nice speech change that? Reporters and pundits are constantly going on about how superficial politics is or has become and yet they mindlessly, reflexively inflate these speeches to an acclaim and relevance they can't possibly reasonably deserve - they're nice speeches for christ sake! That's it - not policy, not action, not results, not even plans for anything that eventually might look like results - a few nice, fluffy sentences strung together to... to do I don't know what the fuck they do! Country's going to war, ok, I get that - but this? C'mon.

Maybe I find it all so risible and annoying because I've actually read extensively the masters of periodic English prose - so I know what good, inventive, rhythmical, well balanced yet unique writing sounds like and Obama ain't got it, not even close, not even in the conversation - but I suppose the rationalization here is for a politician etc etc - I find him somewhat hackneyed and affected, actually, although in a pretty, church going sort of way I guess - and his attempts at grandiose appeal are so obvious as to verge on being clumsy or clichéd - definitely far too aware of just how perfectly grandiose he's sounding - he's no Lincoln, although even Lincoln was not as good as advertised - better than Obama, sure - but you catch Lincoln often trying too hard to sound wonderful - his prose becomes quite tortured at that point - still when he get's it right he's not bad.

But regardless of all that - I'll allow Obama his fancy speechifyin' skills - my point remains: why do people act as if a nice speech changes in some miraculous way the fundamental calculus of things and events when even a cursory examination reveals there's absolutely no logical connection whatsoever? Or let me put it this way: my wife catches me cheating on her; I write a floridly apologetic love letter pleading forgiveness; she consents and is appeased for a week or two - but she's an idiot if she imagines I'm somehow no longer a lying prick, right? So when we go gaga over these political speeches that are quite obviously intended to manipulate and appease, isn't the real message being sent and received here simply that we're all just a bunch of idiots?

Roger Simon in Poltico:

The liberal intelligentsia of our society may not be as sick as Jared Loughner — that would be hard — but they are exhibiting a depth of neurosis that borders on a collective personality disorder. And, to play psychoanalyst, I think this disorder points straight back to unresolved issues related to the experiences of the sixties and seventies... the left’s confused and ambivalent attitude toward violence has never gone away and has now been projected out on their opponents.

Exacerbating the situation — and increasing the left’s anger — was their recent electoral defeat and the attendant failure of Keynesian economics to deal with the financial crisis. Their ideology is dissolving around them. The attempts to blame the behavior of a clinical paranoid schizophrenic on the words of right-wing politicians and pundits are the acts of desperate people.

Now that the smoke has cleared - clearing, anyway - that liberal intelligentsia is still desperately trying to claw back some of all they've lost by going on endlessly about Palin's 'blood libel' video as if it's yet another manifestation of the profound evil lurking in every conservative's heart - even extolling Obama's speech in comparison to Palin's but conveniently ignoring or looking past the awkward fact that Obama took them to task in it [albeit softly] for their mad rush to judgement [but honestly, what else was he gonna do? does any objective person doubt for a second that if there was any evidence at all connecting the wacko to Palin or the Tea Party that Obama's speech would have been much less magnanimous?] - but now that things are settling, what do we make of that mad rush?

Well, as I've said before and the above reiterates, the irrationality of emotion - these people hate their opponents - like all true believers they adore what they believe, they adore the self they see incarnate in those beliefs and therefore, with a need so great, can admit to no flaws, to no doubts - they are convinced they are right and become offended by anything that suggests otherwise - it's not just that Palin et al oppose them, it's that they're popular, are listened to, are taken seriously that galls them, infuriates them - that the electorate, which they praised not so long ago for being so wise as to crown Obama, and by so doing sanctifying them as well, or rather their beliefs, which amounts to the same thing - that this mob should turn on them this way after all they've done for them engenders a visceral humiliation that throws everything into doubt. So, the opportunity seems to magically arise that promises to undo all these wrongs, these insults, to set things right again - hardly surprising that they leapt on it like ravenous dogs.

And that Obama, their savior, the chosen one who promised to make whole what was broken, that he's seemingly turned his back on them as well has gotta hurt [although I highly suspect his turn is merely tactical and possibly lacking in sincerity - I imagine he's either got religion as they say ie has woken up to the grave responsibility of being president and realized that simply being a lefty ideologue won't cut it - or he's playing possum and hoping for a dramatic turnaround in 2012 - or he sees that his legacy as the first black president will be very much tainted if he's remembered as Jimmy Carter, part II, and is therefore going to try and pull out all the stops to keep that from happening, even if it means abandoning the people responsible for getting him elected].

At a certain point though early on this ideological rampage turned into something else - a deliberate campaign to change the narrative in the liberals favour. Possibly they started to undertand that they'd over reacted but recognized there was still a chance to maintain a narrative that depicted the right as intemperate and therefore bad, which would effectively chasten the opposition into silence and servility again. The left leaning MSM was happy to play along because they resent the fact they're no longer final arbiters of the publics' truth - the NY Times was especially venal in this matter, but of course they used to be the unquestioned gospel of all that's holy and therefore have lost the most as information has spun out from the center and into the hands of the barbarians.

Sadly for the intrepid ideologues, once it became clear the shooter was a raving lunatic without political motive or affiliation, this last desperate effort at deception and manipulation ran aground too - and now all the fallen are stumbling about, obsessing on 'blood libels' and trying to pretend like nothing happened: what, me engaged in a scurrilous calumny designed to curtail free speech? Certainly not, you must be mistaken. And that in the end is what may prove most striking about this episode: the way liberals were so ready and willing to throw their supposed principles aside to secure a highly dubious victory, a victory that would have been fatally flawed by irrationality since the desired outcome would have been to establish their point of view as the only credible point of view - in other words, they would do anything to remain convinced, if only in their own hearts - especially there, I imagine - that they and they alone are right.

Well, I had suggested that if Palin played it right she could emerge the winner from this scandal  [if it's right to even speak of 'winners' here - but of course it is - it's politics, only a naive fool would imagine all parties involved are not  vigourously calculating how to mitigate damage or capitalize on opportunities] - but I guess she hasn't played it right, anyway she's getting kicked around for her responding message yesterday, mainly for the 'blood libel' reference.

Now, I'm surprised she did anything - I thought the right move was to wait at least another week, or possibly even better make no response at all other than sending out condolences to the victims and their families and thereby rise above the political/media fray. She decided otherwise and, more revealing, decided to compete directly with Obama's big memorial speech [which is getting high praise from just about everyone]. This decision suggests various possibilities: She doesn't care about the fallout because she has no national intentions and is only concerned with 'her brand' - it's always seemed highly plausible that she has no intentions of running for president and only keeps that pot boiling for other purposes; she does have national intentions, why else go head to head with Obama, but is somewhat delusional concerning her powers of persuasion and her ability to appeal to the country as a whole; she may or may not have national intentions but continues to suffer from her refusal to hire a staff made up of Washington professionals, the type of people who would have nixed any 'blood libel' reference and probably have strongly advised against trying to compete with Obama who has clearly shown he has only one real talent - giving evocative speeches - and now has the added advantage of the solemn authority and prestige that come with the office.

I think either of the above scenarios could be accurate - the last two though seem to lend credence to claims that Palin lacks the goods for national office - the goods here being the intellectual heft and a manageable personality type that would enable one to endure not only the grueling primary and presidential campaigns but also the demands of being the most powerful person in the world.

True, I think the intellectual component of effective leadership is overstated - I think people lean on it cause it's easily quantifiable, easily supported by, paradoxically enough, superficial signs, traits and talismans - I think Obama is a perfect example of how distorting and false this view of intellect and leadership can be - although it's not like I want my leader to be an idiot - I'm just saying effective leadership is a much more complex mix and match of attributes, many of which have nothing or little to do with high intelligence. So, Sarah being less than brilliant intellectually is not necessarily a disqualifier for me [and let's be honest, Obama's brilliance is an illusion manufactured by an adoring press - from what I can see he's written two mediocre books - about himself - served two mediocre, uninspiring years as a senator and graduated form an Ivy league law school - everyone who graduates from an Ivy league law school is smart, that's a given - smart don't make ya brilliant, though] - no, it would be the possibility of a fragile temperament that would be the more troubling to me given a Palin  presidency - but again, it's my opinion she's either not running or, if she does, lacks the wherewithal to survive the primaries.

Although, that being said, if she does run and does manage to somehow survive the primaries - a lot of independents will be forced to reevaluate her, and then all bets are off.

"... c'mon Tom, that's just insulting to people's intelligence - you write some little post that tries to sound like it's not really engaging in chauvinistic mudslinging and slander and ideological hyperbole - and then tack up an image of SarahPAC? Can you make a more pathetically transparent effort to say what you mean by pretending to not say what you mean? Jesus.

What are you whinging fools gonna do when it's revealed that the shooter was not motivated by politics at all - that he was just a delusional paranoid with mommy issues who has held a grudge against Giffords since 2007, long before the advent of Sarah and Tea Parties? And now all you've managed to do is turn Palin into the victim of a scurrilous left wing attack thereby enhancing her popularity?

Tell me, if after Aaron Sorkin's hysterical, illogical, hate filled rant against Palin regarding her 'Alaska hunting episode' some animal rights wacko had been motivated to do her harm, would y'all have held Sorkin and the Huffington Post responsible? Of course not - in fact I imagine many of you would have privately celebrated such a thing, just as many of you would have let out a little cheer if that flying Iraqi shoe had clubbed Bush in the head and drawn blood or something worse. You're hypocrites.

If some wacko had taken Obama's 'bring a gun to a knife fight' rhetoric seriously and done just that and then squeezed off a few at a republican rally would you immediately have blamed Obama's intemperate language for the damage done? Or would you, shameless creatures that you are, have pleaded for calm and sober reflection as you did with Fort Hood where lefties broke ankles so desperate were they to jump out of the way of even the slightest insinuation of Islamic fanaticism? And that guy actually did kill those people because he was an Islamic fanatic! he screamed it as he was killing them! - but no way you were going to get a democrat to even mention the word 'Muslim', least not until copious amounts of sober reflection had buried all negative thoughts beneath a dunghill of perspective.

But of course Sarah is such a blatantly evil creature that perspective is unnecessary - maybe Paul Krugman can appease his great outrage by stoning her to death live on The View while those insufferable shrews stand around hurling curses at her.

I love how you liberals insist you're not about instituting the nanny state, but some sociopath kills a few poor souls in Phoenix and you simply can't wait to start legislating what does and does not amount to appropriate political discourse - regardless of whether or not the shooting actually had anything at all to do with politics! I guess Tom Friedman's not the only enlightened one suffering from China envy - including, irony of ironies, the shooter - certainly his political views are closer to Friedman's and the Times' than they are to Palin's.

I'm a conservative but not particularly a Palin fan - I retain an interest in her stemming from fact that when she first came on the scene I was one of the few who recognized she had talent and cautioned against perils of under estimating her, but I have no real enthusiasm in seeing her run for president - still, this shooting has so revealed what ignoble little shits liberal ideologues are that I may have to entertain the notion of becoming a proximate fan simply out of spite..."

And what about the uber lefties [and not just marginal players but big voices like Krugman and Daily Kos and CNN etc] mad rush to blame the Arizona shootings on right wing vitriol in general and Sarah Palin in particular regardless of any evidence whatsoever that there was some coherent political motive to the shooting or that the shooter had ever visited Palin's website - regardless of fact that according to erstwhile friends he was more pot head liberal than conservative, was more interested in abstract [unhinged] philosophical musings than politics and may have targeted Giffords because in 2007, long before the advent of Palin and Tea Parties, she had not taken an absurd question he had asked her at political gathering concerning the 'nature of language' seriously and that this - again, according to friends - seemed to 'really piss him off'? Add to that the fact Giffords is a Jewish woman in a position of political authority and he apparently suffered from paranoid delusions involving arcane government conspiracies, that his mother is Jewish, that his decline into dementia seems to be have begun with a bad beak up with a girl friend - jumble those ingredients all together in the toxic soup of a sick mind and there's a real possibility that this shooting had nothing at all to do with politics, at least not in any remotely rational or practical way.

But let's assume for the moment there was a vaguely coherent political motive - hell, let's assume he saw the gunsight imagery on Palin's website and was driven by that or had heard the angry rants centered on Giffords' support of healthcare reform or had even participated in the vitriolic spewing by certain blowhards concerning Obama's socialist agenda [although given the shooter's apparent fondness for Marx that seems like a stretch] - let's in short assume the worst - would it matter? What rights to free speech would one be looking to outlaw in such a case? Who would decide? What political party would get to arbitrarily choose, depending on which way the wind happened to be blowing that week, between appropriate political discourse and inappropriate political discourse? The would be assassin, as I said, was a fan of Marx and apparently Hitler's writings as well, not to mention the more outlandish musings of Philip K Dick and the Matrix movies -  do we ban reading and going to movies? Since the uber liberals are convinced the only real evil here is right wing vitriol and all the noxious influences I just mentioned are generally associated with the left [yes, I think you could argue Hitler was a lefty - really, really left, but still] deciding which forms of speech are acceptable could take just a wee bit of inventive thinking, no? - but let's be nice and say enlightened liberals would simply intuit right from wrong in these hard to reckon cases. And accordingly if Obama, not unlike Palin, employs again, as he has in the past, an analogical trope that could imply condoning the use of violence to a troubled mind, and I'm speaking here of when in the campaign [a military expression, by the way] he encouraged liberals to bring a 'gun to a knife fight' when dealing with republicans - if some poor demented left addled soul takes him seriously and essays the rhetorical breach armed with an actual gun? - well, I'm sure we will be able to trust democrats to reasonably adjudicate right from wrong in such a tragedy.

You see how the political rationalizations, when you attempt to tie them to an absurdity, quickly become absurd themselves. Look at Aaron Sorkin's recent decline into hysteria concerning Palin's hunting moose on her reality show - yes, Sorkin is not a politician, but he's an influential public figure and was writing on a subject that definitely broached politics in a forum that is decidedly driven by a leftist political ideology, the Huffington Post, and what he had to say was heated to say the least - the point being, a nut job animal rights activist [and there's plenty of those] could easily have interpreted what he said as an invitation to kill or otherwise harm Palin - would liberals have denounced Sorkin for inciting violence? Would they have said the vitriol of liberal animus against certain right wing beliefs was to blame for this theoretical tragedy? I think we all know the answer to that - in fact my guess is most hardcore liberals would privately rejoice at any misfortune befalling Palin [as no doubt many secretly hoped some rogue assassin would take out Bush] and then entirely ignore the bitter irony of such a thing, convinced as they are in the absolute verity of their dreams.

But I wander with a Quixote-like dissolution - what about this mad, even reckless dash by the Obamaphiles to assign blame? Not surprising. As I've always maintained, ideologues believe what they believe not because of some well reasoned approach to the harsh realities of the world, but rather because they have an emotional and psychological need to believe certain things - therefore, that their response seems rashly emotional is not surprising: insomuch as Palin in particular and the Tea Party in general seem to, because they're popular, threaten these beliefs is motivation enough to go feeding frenzy even with only the faintest hint of blood in the water - in other words, better to utterly and ruthlessly demomize your enemy then ever admit that maybe what you believe is flawed because to admit flaws is to undermine identity and identity is the master of one's emotions.

addendum: George Will has an article up that puts things in a way that I can't. Also, I was thinking: the way things are trending - and it's all very uncertain at this point - but the way things are trending Palin, if she plays it right, could come out looking the victim here - or among  the victims - in that the left wing attack on her could come off looking quite scurrilous and debased - in which case, not only will her reputation with conservatives grow even more, but independents, whose good graces no one with national aspirations can do without, may also start to reconsider her - ie, they may conclude that their negative opinion of her was indeed a result of biased left wing character assassination and decide to give her a second look. That would be an ironic turn of ye old worm, no? Then again the shooter could make jail house confession that implicates Palin et al and then the culture war is definitely on - remember the county sheriff, a democrat, who will be overseeing the investigation, has already gone very publicly on record saying that, regardless of corroborating evidence, he believes absolutely that the killings were politically motivated. The next few weeks could prove quite interesting indeed.

This national moment of silence Obama has called for at 11am today is a bit odd, no? I mean, people are murdered by sociopaths everyday in this country - 'moments of silence' are usually reserved for august events -  I suppose since a sitting member of congress was the target of this violence that that sort of qualifies this incident - but the congresswoman isn't dead - the Fort Hood massacre was much worse and I don't remember any moments of silence proffered up to those poor souls - so what gives? Politics, of course - Obama sees an opportunity to put republicans on the defensive and to mute, if not entirely emasculate their criticisms, and he's gonna milk it. What's funny or interesting is how people are afraid to suggest this is the reality of the agenda here - or how some [many] shockingly don't believe it is! Amusing too how so much of what we call 'civility' is simply the willingness for a group to believe in or accept as true things that quite obviously are not.

My popular response to an aggrieved liberal who used the Arizona shootings as a pretext to argue that a 'gun crazed' America was no longer fit to be a world leader:

"... are you serious?  There's been many dumb blog postings in the wake of the shooting, so one couldn't possibly say this is the dumbest, but the audacity of its moronic reach certainly puts it in the running.

Great powers always have and always will embrace violence as a means to an end - this necessary embrace leads to a fascination in violence and this fascination to a sometimes disconcerting fondness for the tools of the trade thereof.

If this makes you uncomfortable, fine, but then that means America as a great power makes you uncomfortable, not just now, but ever, and you should just come right out and say that and admit to the consequences - and then good luck to you and your ilk when whatever great power that rises in its stead not only abuses the 'civilized' norms your refined moral superiority judges acceptable, but disdains them utterly.

Have you never read the personal histories of WWII recipients of the Medal of Honor? By and large they loved their guns and were more or less comfortable about using them to kill people for a purpose they thought just - they may not have been happy about it, and some may have suffered from bad dreams and a troubled life as a result - they all weren't saints and many of them certainly would not have been welcomed into Ivy league faculty lounges - but pretty much every one of them would have been shocked to learn they were uncivilized, gun crazed beasts serving a master that did not deserve the greatness it claimed.

So, not only is your argument seriously flawed as a matter of logic, no doubt because its originating premise suffers from the reactionary simplemindedness of the ideologically offended, but it's also grossly hypocritical if, especially as a Jew but even if only as a democracy loving American, you have ever lauded the republic for the role its free citizens played and the sacrifices they made in undoing one of the greatest wrongs of history... not that I mean with that to indulge in the strident jingoism of the smugly patriotic... the point being that regardless of whatever tenuous virtues pacifism and it's various derivatives may manage within certain contexts, the governance of a great power can have nothing to do with it and to argue otherwise is to engage in delusion, dishonesty or outright ignorance..."

"... the thing is, or at least the way I see it tends to suggest, that it's fine for China to chug along quite nicely by grafting a Victorian England laisez faire business ethos and the manufacturing prowess of 20th century America onto a highly efficient Leninist bureaucracy and setting it loose on a vastly under utilized and extremely low cost labour market that remains relatively docile and willing to fall in line... yes, they can be wildly successful simply cloning certain aspects of the last three hundred years of Western economic history including, oddly enough, given their actions in Africa and elsewhere, replicating the worst abuses of our colonialist past, and feeding these cannibalized bits and pieces of Adam Smith et al through the entrails of communist orthodoxy... but what happens when simply regurgitating another culture's past is not enough? If China is merely a selective reiteration of old ideas and methods, commanded into being by the politburo, how can it ever produce anything new and of lasting value? America was new - it was innovative, dynamic, progressive - it redefined human culture as a whole in a way that was so attractive that even those people who resented it couldn't help but imitate it, envy it. Will anyone ever say or think that about China? I'm not saying they won't - who knows, this civilizational eugenics project may indeed evolve into something truly dynamic and capable of stirring the imaginations of the wider world - but a rampant GDP is that and that only, a rampant GDP - and in ten or twenty years when that number eclipses its American counterpart that's all it will be, a bigger number. To my mind, to imagine that come that day the world will step into a new and golden age would be at best to lose oneself to wishful thinking... my guess is, rather than a new day, we'll wake up to something we've seen before and had hoped to never see again..."

I hadn't considered that... China's increasing reliance on ballistic missiles to deny the battlespace for American carrier groups in any future conflict presents a troubling escalation problem - if this defense succeeds or otherwise appears workable and America wishes to counter any future Chinese aggression they may be forced, barring some technological trump card not immediately evident, to resort to ballistic missiles themselves - the rub here being, how will the Chinese know that these are not nuclear missiles? Seems like a nasty problem, especially if the Chinese are relying on the dreaded escalation implied or carried along within the ambiguity to dissuade the Americans from responding in any forceful way whatsoever - in short, it could prove an extremely effective bluff that leaves the US no choice but to go entirely on the defensive.