Francis Fukuyama Discovers the Limits of Francis Fukuyama

Francis Fukayama came late to the party. Still, the Lord loves a prodigal, no matter his rolling in the mud with neo-conservatives before he got here:
"What was truly troubling, however, was that the collapse undermined the fundamental moral justification for material inequality in a politically egalitarian society. Basic to the legitimacy of market capitalism is the efficient market hypothesis—that is, the notion that in a truly competitive market everyone earns something close to his or her “social” rate of return. This means, in other words, that if your investment banker earns 100,000 times as much as your plumber, it’s because he or she is contributing roughly 100,000 times as much to society’s total pool of wealth.
The crisis made it glaringly obvious that the efficient market hypothesis was wrong: Oversized returns were flowing to innovative financial entrepreneurs who, in their avidity to create new and more complex financial instruments and products, were destroying rather than creating value for society as a whole."

No shit, Sherlock.

Let me get this straight; it took two wars and an economic collapse for a tenured professor to realize what my sharecropping ancestors knew in their bones?
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Francis Fukuyama is the fellow who announced "The End of History" in 1989, after Russia lost the Cold War. This made him a lot of friends among fans of Ronald Reagan. He later explained that what he really meant was an end to interpreting history as having a goal, as Hegel, Marx and apocalyptic Christians do.
I could almost buy his equivocation, but Fukuyama's inner Pangloss never knows when to shut up: "... while earlier forms of government were characterized by grave defects and irrationalities that led to their eventual collapse, liberal democracy was arguably free from such fundamental internal contradictions." Say wha--? Democracy (or republicanism, if you prefer Latin to Greek) is chock-full of "fundamental internal contradictions"-- that's why Lincoln warned that democracies are inclined to self-destruction; why Churchill called democracy the worst except for all the others. You're a hard man indeed if you can see the dead at Fredericksburg or Wounded Knee as nothing more than a perfect system correcting itself. Call me Manichean, but I still see history as a struggle between forces of creation and destruction, Thanatos and Eros. It only takes a moment for a soldier to kill Archimedes.


I am not calling for F.F. to start wearing an IWW shirt and become a neo-socialist. I just want him to discover that there might be a reason the left feels pissed off and pissed on. And this does give me another excuse to assign the reading of Kipling's "Gods of the Copybook Headings", despite its misuse by the odious Beck, unable to recognize himself in its warnings.

I would not bother with this if Francis were just another Wanker Like Me with a blog. But this guy is a paid lecturer in the if-you-have-to-ask-you-can't-afford-it range. Francis Fukuyama has made a spectacular career out of being wrong, but being wrong in a way that flatters the masters of our world.
I'm all in favor of being wrong and making grand barroom pronouncements-- as a storyteller and a reader, I embrace six impossible things before breakfast, hoping to unearth those poetic truths that "burn like cold iron", as Lewis said of Tolkein. We bohemians (cough slackers cough) are, after all the secret legislators of the world. But when I wear a history teacher's hat, I have to answer "I don't know" a dozen times a day, puzzling innocents who think a mastery of trivia and telling anecdote is the same as knowing "everything", then try to turn the things I don't know into a problem for them, like a cat giving kittens a crippled mouse to bat around. But my foibles don't end in a body count, as Fukuyama's did when he signed William Kristol's letter urging regime change in Iraq.

It may be that a repentant Francis is trying to find his way home, to move the bead of isn't-it-pretty-to-think-so a bit closer to what is. He's just about the only neoconservative I can stand to read without gagging, certainly the only one capable of conceding that he might be wrong, and any sign of enlightenment is to be cherished-- for this thy brother was lost, and is found. So, my turn to make a pronouncement, though the thoughts of Francis Fukuyama are worth 100,000 of mine, and it's a truism the ancient Chu Yuan knew in his drowned bones: No courtier ever went broke by telling the bosses what they want to hear.

"It Is Fear, Little Brother, It Is Fear!"

Following McCain's justification for our never-ending presence in Iraq, we have Douglas Feith, one of the architects of the invasion, on the Diane Rehm show (listen here ) defending himself against a charge of being either a mass murderer or "the dumbest fucking guy on the planet", maybe both.

Interestingly, Feith's father was a Polish Holocaust survivor, which ought to have made his son sensitive to the wreckage bad government can visit on frail human bodies, but instead it seems to have turned him into an appeasement-is-for-sissies kind of guy: " Chamberlain wasn’t popular in my house". He accuses his opponents of foolishly "trusting" tyrants and bullies, a willful misinterpretation of those who lobby for peace instead of war. Feith never quite grasps the fact that for all his willingness to fight, it's someone else who will have to travel to a foreign land and actually be shot at by unfriendly strangers.

Now he and the rest of the rats are writing their books and swarming the talk shows to explain how very afraid, afraid, AFRAID they were of Saddam Hussein in 2003. "We invaded Iraq because we were afraid they'd attack us. He was shooting at our flyovers! He had aluminum tubes! What if there'd been smallpox?!

How about this explanation, instead: "My boss is a dry drunk, we're all a bunch of hysterics, we whipped each other up into a frenzy and the next thing we knew, we'd gone through billions of dollars and thousands of of people lay dead." Feith's is the the kind of defense we might expect in a trailer park shooting, as he tries to convince the jury that the reckless use of firearms was inspired not by actual danger, but by fear.

Who then is a greater threat to those we love? Dark-browed villains in foreign lands, or bland monsters like Douglas Feith, who start wars they can't finish? And how shall we defend ourselves from our rulers' good intentions?

What I'm Reading: Clive James Cultural Amnesia

Came back Sunday night from the World Fantasy Convention in Saratoga Springs, much too over-stimulated and inspired by many meetings to give a coherant account of the experience: I saw this one, heard that one, developed a little crush on another, bumped into this one or saw such-and-so a mighty one from a distance drinking overpriced scotch in the hotel bar. I expect the anecdotes and insights will come dribbling out bit by bit as I have time to process them.

Here is one such: the comic book artist Matthew Dow Smith and I had an informal gripe session about why some "superstar" artists who shall remain nameless turn into shitheels. I compared notes from my own experience watching medieval graduate students evolve into professors and my own brief encounters with the famous (in my experience, famous persons most deserving of reknown have been the least pretentious, and showed the most curiosity about the world around them.) It costs so little-- seconds really-- to show noblesse oblige to someone farther down the ladder than yourself, and pays off down the road by spreading good will. He was interested in my ideas about the "poison mentor", the false friend and father figure who uses the apprentice instead of teaching them, a type who causes at least as much damage in society as the overly-analyzed "devouring mother".

All this is prologue to saying that Cultural Amnesia is a very generous book, by which I mean Mr. James has crammed so much good thought and bonhomie into this collection, you can browse just one or two of the essays and come away with passages that will keep your wheels turning for a week. Cultural Amnesia is a collection of original essays concerning the violence of the past century, a handful of people who did their best to stave off the darkness, and favorite writers off Mr. James' shelves. I plan on giving it to my more thoughtful former students as a friendly introduction to the larger world of humanistic thought and why it matters, as generous a gift as the Durants' Story of Civilization. A long time ago, a casual recommendation by a professor when I was a teen led me to Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory and the works of Joseph Campbell, and when I came across them years later, took me miles from where I started. Cultural Amnesia is that kind of resource. This is how we are nutured by those who have gone before, rather than exploited.



Slate magazine has a selection of some of the essays here, enough perhaps to make you buy a copy and keep it on your shelf for reading with your morning coffee. I got mine as a birthday present and read it through the summer, starting with characters I was already familiar with, and then more slowly from A-Z. Someone in the old Whole Earth News recommended this approach when reading new reference books: start by reading the entries on a subject you already know something about, and if it's good, start working your way in deeper.

It's like a really good buffet from a generous host. This morning I dipped into "Hegel" and "Keats" and found enough in there to have me muttering to myself the rest of the day. Here are a few bites from James' essay on Adolf Hitler:

"Some of the last aphorisms written by the great Robert Musil were devoted to summarizing the pathogenic nature of Hitler. Beautifully crafted statements, they had no effect on Hitler whatsoever.... a sufficient concentration of violence could neutralize any amount of culture, no matter how widely diffused."

"It may seem unfair to condemn intellectuals who conspire to undermine vulgar democracy in favor of a refined dream for failing to foresee the subsequent nightmare. And Moeller was only one among many. But there were too many: That was the point. Too many well- read men combined to prepare the way for a pitiless hoodlum who despised them, and they even came to value him for being a hoodlum: for lacking their scruples, for being a drum of nature."

If that doesn't take the piss out of the neo-conservative "intellectuals", the Podhoretzs, Kristols and Abrams who have enabled Bush the past several years, who are now foisting Rudolph Guliani on us, nothing will-- their self-love is adamantine.

They Won't Quit. They CAN'T Quit.

So the Senate's going to pull an all nighter; it seems the least they can do, considering the sleepless nights imposed on Iraquis and the untenable position of our troops. The Democrats proposed a pull out starting in 120 days. The Republicans threatened a filibuster. The Democrats, in a bit of jiu jitu, said, fine,let’s sit up all night and talk about it.

The Texans think this is silly, a "slumber party": aid and comfort to the enemy, support our troops, wait until September, you know the drill. Does anyone else feel that the Arabs and the Texans truly deserve each other? The odious Lieberman, standing tall with Mitch McConnell and McCain, thinks this is a terrible idea, all this fussin', 'sides, all this commotion might upset Marse' George. At least one of the soldiers thinks the members of Congress ought to serve a rotation: "they don't have to do anything, they just come hang out with me and go home at the times I go home, and come stay here 15 months with me." Update: The timetable didn't get the 60 votes needed to pass, but it did win 52 votes, up from 39 votes a non-binding withdrawl resolution got last year.

John Mc Cain, bless his heart, keeps talkin’ ‘bout the "chaos": “Failure will lead to chaos, withdrawal will lead to chaos.... I believe that a withdrawal, or a date for withdrawal, will lead to chaos in the region.” The chaos is already here, John. They've already followed us home: George Bush's invasion of Iraq was a recruiting bonanza for al-Qaeda. Sigh... always the last to know.

Carl Levin, one of our senators from Michigan since forever, just wants this open-ended commitment to end: "What we have is a glass called Iraq that has a hole in the bottom, and whatever we put into Iraq, goes right through that hole." I've been puzzled by the dead enders like William Kristol or the mad monk Norman Podhoretz . I'm infuriated by the administration's willingness to keep throwing good lives after bad.

But they will not, they cannot, stop the war in Iraq. All the twenty-years olds in the world will not be enough to feed that maw. To quit would be to admit that everything they've done, and the dollars and the lives they spent, were a waste. We will be in this war until the grownups take the wheel away from the crazies, and then for the next thirty years, Bush and Kristol and the rest will blame the grownups for "losing" Iraq, because we weren't willing to spend a thousand lives more.

As a Dog Returneth to Its Vomit, Part... I've Lost Count

Ah, there's nothing like vaudeville. Every time I think the Bush vaudevillians can no longer astonish me, when I think they've run out of tricks, one of them makes my jaw drop in delight and astonishment yet again.

Paul Wolfowitz, a principal architect of our success in Iraq, has for the past two years been serving as president of the World Bank. He might have retired from the public eye, lying doggo in the bushes, as it were, but Lo!

It seems that Mr. Wolfowitz's lady friend, Shaha Riza, herself a former communications advisor at the World Bank, has, in the words of The Washington Post, "done exceptionally well in terms of salary in the last 18 months." Miss Riza left her $132,660 job at the bank about six months after Mr. Wolfowitz became her boss, in order to avoid any hint of impropriety or conflict of interest. In September 2005, she went to work for Karen Hughes at the State Department.

All well and good-- until it was revealed that she's still getting a six-figure paycheck from the World Bank... AND she was promoted to a managerial-level just before she left... AND instead of a $20,000 raise for the promotion, she somehow received a $47,340 raise...

So THIS year-- still working at State, not the World Bank-- Riza ANOTHER raise of $13,500, bringing her up to $193,590, which is $7,000 more, net, than the Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice makes gross.

How does he do it? How does the man consistently make a shambles of everything he touches? How does this fifth column saboteur disguise his depredations as mere incompetence? What audacity! What arrogance! What a body count!

I hear the drums speak! They signal one another in the jungle night... they say the elephants are restless... they say that the other employees at the World Bank are very angry... the drums say the career employees are already unhappy with the one known as "Wolfie"... they fear his vengence will be terrible... they are sharpening their knives...

The poor schlub. And to think, he only went into this career for the chicks.

UPDATE: Mr, Wolfowitz says he's terribly sorry, and that it won't happen again.The White House says they still love him. His staff still doesn't like him. The State Department says Miss Riza has been working at Foundation for Freedom since September (but Foundation for Freedom still gets its money from State.) Me, I'd be much more sympathetic towards such a "painful personal dilemma" if it had occured on a shoestring budget.

Cats Rest Easy; Sheep May Safely Graze; Frist Leaves Politics

"By day, I was little Billy Frist, the boy who lived on Bowling Avenue in Nashville and had decided to become a doctor because of his gentle father and a dog named Scratchy. By night, I was Dr. William Harrison Frist, future cardiothoracic surgeon, who was not going to let a few sentiments about cute, furry little creatures stand in the way of his career. In short, I was going a little crazy."
Thus former Senate Majority Leader, presidential dreamer and HMO scion Bill Frist, explaining why he told the staff at three Boston animal shelters he wanted to adopt cats as pets, when in fact he was spending "days and nights on end in the lab, taking the hearts out of cats, dissecting each heart, suspending a strip of tiny muscle that attaches the mitral valve to the inner wall of the cat heart and recording the effects of various medicines I added to the bath surrounding the muscle."

Frist announced this week that he would not be entering the 2008 presidential race. This also fulfills a promise he made in 1994 to leave the Senate after two six year terms.
I know that animal sacrifices-- and human volunteers as well-- have saved millions of lives because of medical research. I also believe it takes a special kind of wickedness to operate on unwilling subjects, as the Axis did in World War II and as happened here in the Tuskegee experiments-- and if an animal must be used in an experiment, let it be done respectfully and NEVER on an animal that's been brought up to think of itself as a citizen. The ease with which Frist committed that kind of casual betrayal is one more reason we are well shut of him.

Who Will Ann Coulter Call If She Needs Bail?

Complaining about about right-wing hypocrisy and the pecadilloes of public moralists is like complaining about the heat in July or the snow in winter. I am concerned here with what happens as they fall down the other side of the Wheel of Fortune.

Twenty years ago, a friend of mine had a niece who was just beginning a career in entertainment. My friend was concerned that "the little shit" should be careful whose hands she stepped on as she was climbing the career ladder, because she'd be needing them if she ever slipped and fell down. Despite the odds, her niece has made a living in the arts for the past twenty years; any failures were moderated by other triumphs. I've fallen out of touch, and never heard anything more about the niece's backstage behavior towards housekeeping staff and the spear carriers, but if her career collapses, I'm sure she has a place to sleep.

When I was a janitor, I knew more about the people whose offices and toilets I cleaned than they knew about me. Some I could have embraced as friends; there were others I wouldn't have pissed on if they were on fire.

Now Ann Coulter faces felony charges for voting fraud. There's always been an age discrepancy on her driver's license (unless she voted at the age of 16 in 1980), but now according to a Florida election official's incident report, she tried to vote in a precinct she wasn't registered for and then tried to vote twice in the same race, a no-no loaded with 5 years in prison and a fine. The part of me that feels a little sorry for Malvolio at the end of "Twelfth Night" says this can happen to anyone. I myself have a phobia against filling in forms. If a form requires that I attach other forms, I panic, hide the form under other forms, withdraw into a corner of the room and go into shock like an animal caught in a trap. ("Tharn", the rabbits called it in Watership Down.)

Let her fill in the forms and forget about it, I say. Arthur Anderson, the Palm Beach County elections supervisor, agrees: "We want to give her a chance. She needs to tell us where she really lives." Do as I do-- ask a friend or relative to talk her through the process, promise her a treat when it's done. This is why we pay other people to fill in our tax forms. I assume Miss Coulter became successful not for fame or better restaurants, but so that she could hire a secretary to handle the forms. If it all turns to shit for Miss Coulter, I'm curious to see who her friends turn out to be; she has made a career out of bashing people lower than herself, and they might be the only friends she has left. If she gets tossed into the tank, she might want to rethink her mockery of anti-apartheid activists, her call for a New McCarthyism, and "I think the government should be... engaging in torture as a televised spectator sport... and sending liberals to Guantanamo." All I'm saying is, if I were a Harvard professor or a liberal Supreme Court judge, and Ann Coulter had called for my murder, I'm damned if I'd chip in for her bail.

The president of the National Association of Evangelicals fessed up to buying amphetamines and three years of monthly "massages" from a gay prostitute. The circles I travel in would say "to each his taste" and shrug, except that the fellow is a prominent gay basher with a wife, five children, and a 14,000 member megachurch.

Republican Jim Gibbons in Nevada is having a very bad week including attempted rape, a $300 bar tab (oh, THAT'S only going to get more expensive), and millions in no-bid sweetheart contracts for friends. All of this could just be a wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time story, except this is a guy who screams about illegal immigration but hires an illegal for eleven years, then drinks for two hours with a 12-top, spends $300 and leaves a ten-dollar tip.

Republican Congressman Don Sherwood, a married, "family values" conservative paid $500,000 to his mistress if she would just shut up about the strangling incident until after the election.

When my own life hit a rock, it was instructive to find out which of my friends stayed true, while others dropped me as a bore and an inconvenience. One of my "closest" friends couldn't see me because he didn't want to miss Adrienne Barbeau's nude scene in "Swamp Thing". Ordinarily I would sympathize with this excuse, but damn, man, rent the video.

This was not long after he'd taken a management job and started dropping me for golf dates with new friends he openly described as people important to his career. "Le affaire Barbeau" involved an invitation to watch the film with the movers and shakers. None of them were at his funeral. Another friend-- that I might have judged in our first acquaintance as superficial, overly-concerned with bourgeois social propriety-- lent hundreds of dollars with a bohemian indifference as to when I paid it back. "Thus the whirligig of Time," Feste tells Malvolio, "brings on its revenges." We never learn what Malvolio did to Feste to inspire the feud between them; we do know Malvolio could not call upon his friends when he fell from grace because he had no friends.

I envision a day when Guantanamo Bay is packed with every gay, liberal, homeless, black, lesbian Harvard graduate, Arab, elite intellectual, cock-sucking, muff diving, dope smoking, Communist, Socialist, titty baring, Muslim, French, porn-loving, wine-drinking, Bush-hating, flip-flopping, anti-Semitic, Times reading, rap-singing, terrorist-sympathizing lawyer in the country. In that post-apocalyptic America, Ann Coulter is about to be groped by Jim Gibbons and there's no one left alive to answer her 911 call but Alan Dershowitz. And Dershowitz can't come because he's barricaded himself in the bathroom to escape the zombie of Roy Cohn.

No wonder Jesus hung out with the publicans and sinners; they were more humane than the moralists. Now if we could just get Lloyd Dobson to Shut The Fuck Up Already about everyone else's spiritual growth, and worry about his own...

MEMO FROM: Jesus of Nazareth/ TO: Congressional Torture Caucus

Somebody over in Congress finally read the Constitution, or had lunch with Robert Byrd, or maybe their kid came home from civics class and explained it to them. At any rate, they have rediscovered checks and balances and have started to grow some balls.

The McCain amendment S.AMDT.1977 forbids the torture of "persons under the detention, custody, or control of the United States Government." It was attached to a major spending bill, but the current president has announced he will veto it. (I'm pleased that Michigan's own Carl Levin was one of the co-sponsors. I'm very fond of ol' Carl; I ran around with a lot of Jewish kids in high school and Senator Levin reminds me of everyone's dad or uncle.)

There were, of course, abstentions (feelthy people, pah! -- we will speak no more of them) and nine senators who voted against the amendment. In alphabetical order, they are:

Wayne Allard, Colorado (odd choice for a former veterinarian with pretty mountains on his website)
Kit Bond, Missouri (Sen. Bond has a son in the Marines-- I pray the lieutenant's never captured and finds the shoe on the other foot)
Tom Coburn, Oklahoma (Oklahoma stands united for torture! And him an OB/GYN man who delivered babies. It's wonderful how the moral sense can compartmentalize itself)
Thad Cochran, Mississippi (awards from National Wildlife Federation and The Nature Conservancy-- here's a fellow I can talk to)
John Cornyn, Texas (lists his favorite book as "Bonfire of the Vanities" and favorite film as "Jerry Maguire"; thinks his "most embarrassing moment occurred when I muffed the opening pitch at a Round Rock Express baseball game"... we're frickin' doomed)
James Inhofe, Oklahoma (posing with young soldiers who behind the grins are thinking, "If I'm ever captured, this bastard is going to get my nuts cut off.")
Pat Roberts, Kansas (Senate Intelligence Chairman, also on Select Committee on Ethics; and yes, his ethics are "select")
Jeff Sessions, Alabama (Alabama; no surprises there)
Ted Stevens, Alaska (Ted's been a madman for years now, and I see no reason for him to change)

Several bloggers are calling them "The Nazgul", a literary nickname for the nine dark riders and servants of Sauron from "The Lord of the Rings."

I'm curious as to whether or not these fellows openly adhere to the teachings of Yeshua of Nazareth, aka Jesus the Christ, who was himself a victim of torture. I assume they do identify themselves as "Christian", when asked, that being the most popular answer for politicians these days. (I'm looking for a quote from Mark Twain, wherein the devil says to a smug fellow, "The trouble with you is, you think you're the best people here, whereas you're really just the most numerous.") I'm not speaking from any high moral ground-- I indulge myself with elaborate revenge and torture fantasies for people who hurt animals or little kids, bullies in general-- but I'm not making laws. Even from the coldest perspective imaginable, I thought they got the memo Torture Doesn't Work as an intelligence gathering tool. Satisfying, yes, but productive, no. This is an old Victorian notion in fiction, that you've converted the bad guy by making him cry. By the time you're finished venting your anger, the other side has changed their plans and the information you got from the torture victim is out of date. It doesn't change people's minds, either... you can bomb the shit out of someone's home town and blow up any number of old ladies and kindergartners, and all it does is make the citizens even more determined to fight you. Did Abu Ghraib (new even more offensive photos coming soon, I hear) accomplish anything beyond increasing anti-American feeling? How the hell did we blow the lead, the world sympathy we had on September 12?

Has it occured to anyone that the Nazgul Nine might be Al-Qaeda sleeper agents?

Flaming Asshole of the Week: the Nominees

More antique Dane than Roman, I often berate myself for impulsive words that caused hurt while I was all of fourteen. When I was twenty, I so embarrassed myself in a conversation about existentialism that I went on to minor in philosophy until some of the sting went away. And the worst thing I ever said… bad enough to cut my own tongue out before I’d confess in print.

Happily, those who feel chosen to lead us through the flood have no internal editor to protect them from speaking too soon. They ignore the old saw: rather than be thought a fool, they are compelled to open their mouths and remove all doubt.

Whoever wins— and I’m sure there’s more to come! Will have to compete for Flaming Asshole of the Year against last week’s classic: "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." (C. in C. Bush on "Good Morning America," Sept. 1, 2005.) Good luck to you all!

The nominees for Flaming Asshole of the Week are:

Dennis Hastert on rebuilding New Orleans:
"It looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed," the Illinois Republican said to the Daily Herald of Arlington Heights, Illinois. "We ought to take a second look at it. You know we build Los Angeles and San Francisco on top of earthquake fissures and they rebuild, too. Stubbornness. I don't know. That doesn't make sense to me." … And Los Angeles had better not come crying to me after the Big One hits.

Trent Lott to three child refugees, resting on cots:
“Now tell me the truth boys, isn’t this kind of fun?” …Yessuh, Huckleberry, it JEST like camping out. Hope you rebuild your beach house porch in time for Mr. President G.W. Bush to SIT his SILLY ass DOWN.

Rick Santorum, who saved us from dog-fucking by holding the line on gay marriage, now sees a need to punish those who didn’t get out in time:
“There may be a need to look at tougher penalties on those who decide to ride it out and understand that there are consequences to not leaving.”

Barbara Bush the Elder, visiting refugees in the Houston Astrodome:
"What I'm hearing which is sort of scary is that they all want to stay in Texas. Everybody is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway so this (chuckle) – this is working very well for them." Sept. 5, 2005, first aired on American Public Media's "Marketplace"

But the president himself may take the palm for the second week in a row, after this endorsement of FEMA director Michael Brown on September 2:
"Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."

If A Social Darwinist Dies, Should Any of Us Care?

Let's assume for just a moment that these Social Darwinists are correct, and it was the poor people's own damn fault they were caught when Ponchatrain broke through the levee that was neglected by their own local government.

Can you also defend the federal government's abandonment of the doctors and nurses who stayed at their posts? By the end of the week, medical personnel were giving one another IVs in order to stay hydrated. These professionals were just as abandoned as the "losers" in the stadiums. Their own fault for not getting out in time, right?

Let's blame the children in the stadium, too-- probably their fault for being born to lazy parents. And the old ladies, and the diabetics and the asthmatics.

I would respect your rather nasty attitude more if you would honesly come out as a worshiper of Odin or some other pagan god. Republicans, stop pretending that Christianity motivates your political beliefs in any fashion.

How sad that your entire political philosophy is an elaborate defense for your own meanness, your cruelty and small mindedness. It is only by the grace of God, inherited wealth, family connections and conservative blindness that your own coke addled, "reformed" alcoholic president isn't out there with his shirt off, whoopin' and lootin' with the rest of the "losers" along the Gulf. It could be your turn next week.

You sad assholes, New Orleans is a great city, and in spite of its horrendous flaws and your disapproval, it deserves to live and laugh again.

"Necon Bloging" Defined as a Mental Disorder

NEOCON BLOG BABBLER:
from the DSM-IV
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
Latent repressed homosexuality and gynophobia, with racism virus outbreaks under stress. Hatred of the poor, hatred of self, hated of injured or damaged people described as "victims", self-hatred, and hatred of those sympathetic or supportive of "victims".
To meet the criteria for this disease, persons must exhibit three or more of the following:
1) The use of the word "pussy" as an epithet, meaning somehow unmanly. It is striking that these sufferers would try to insult others by identifying them with a part of the female anatomy that average adults have always been rather fond of.
2)The use of "faggot" in the list of political insults. It is remarkable that people suffering from this syndrome use references to homosexuality as the sine qua non of insults, the worst thing you can call another man-- worse, apparently, than drug abuse, perjury, stealing old ladies' pensions, taking bribes, ignorance, indifference, slander and libel, race-baiting, contempt of congress, consorting with the enemy, poisoning the soil and water, hypocrisy, draft-dodging, gun crimes, weapons-trading, neglect, cocaine and alcohol abuse, religious intolerance, etc., et alia.
Neocon Blog Babblers are fascinated by other men's penises, and what they might be doing with those penises. A state referendum was passed in Michigan to deny employee benefits to men who play with other men's penises, whereas most heterosexual males rarely think about other men's penises, with the exception of urologists, artists, and tailors. Phallocentric courtesies such as "How they hanging?" or "Do you dress to the left or the right, sir?" are lost on them.
3)These sufferers will sometimes combine their fear and revulsion regarding women and male homosexuals. The resulting complex of emotions will confuse the sufferer until he has no recourse but to resort to epithets like "liberal".
4)Up until the 1980's, the political term "liberal" was not considered derogatory, outside of certain right-wing fringe groups. It was the sinister but sunny actor, lifeguard and General Electric spokesmodel Ronald Reagan, showing signs of Alzeheimer's while still in office, that made it socially acceptable to denigrate someone for being "liberal", i.e., tolerant of divergent beliefs.
Ironically, the "laissez faire" or "live and let live" attitude of liberalism was applied by followers of Reagan to the economy and business practices. The hypocrisy inherent in a "free market" full of sweetheart deals went unnoticed.
5) Sufferers show an inability to step outside of this complex of assumptions and prejudices long enough to vote for the long-term good of their country. They defend against self-knowledge of this contradiction by loudly proclaiming their patriotism and questioning the patriotism of dissenters.
6) Cognitive dissonance, a gap between what is said and what is done, to a remarkable degree. A candidate need not increase funding for schools to hire more qualified math and science instructors, so long as he SAYS he wants "No Child Left Behind." A candidate need not actually defend our shores, so long as he owns guns and is PERCEIVED to be "tough". Wouldn't it be great if all those business majors and politicians' kids were given the same chance to defend their country that the kids in Flint and East St. Louis were given? We would pay real money to see Tucker Carlson scrambling for cover. (How did he become a television pundit? Was it something like Brett Summers being declared a "celebrity" on the Match Game?)
Lastly (for now) we must face the clinical difficulties in trying to reason patients afflicted with neocon virus. Like alcoholics and other addicts, they are not grateful to those who might point out their flaws. Instead we see a classic pattern of denial, anger, projection, even outbreaks of self-righteous violence. They even resent those who might have more facts at hand as "pointy-headed", "snooty", "elite", etc.
The decision to close their minds seems to occur at an early age-- inheriting the resentment of the parents, being snubbed by liberal girls at a dance, the belief that someone wants to spoil their fun with guns, etc. Since their ideas cannot hold their own in a marketplace of ideas without first discrediting the opposition, they band together with people who already agree with their world view. The campaign of disinformation that brought them to this position of power would make the old Comintern blush.
It saddens us when once respectable conservatives hitch their wagon to the neocon star; like Colorado Avalanche fans, these conservatives are so desperate to be winners, they tolerate the neocons' thuggery as a necessary evil. We simply don't know if this obtuseness, i.e. willful ignorance, is genetic or environmental. The future is dark, though lit by many eager fools. There is no known cure, but is there Hope?