Blog Watch: Sadly No!

It's been over a year since I updated my "Blog Watch" series. I previously covered Lawyers, Guns and Money and Digby's Hullabaloo, although I quit writing "Blog Watch" when other projects became more interesting. But who knows? Maybe I'll restart the series now as a regular feature. Lord knows there's plenty of material across the netroots fever swamps.

When I started the series I noted my interest in "dissecting and challenging radical, antiwar bloggers." I'd expand the criteria now to include the plain old nihilism we see all around.

Which brings me to Sadly No!, one of the most predictably stupid blogs on the web.

I thought about Sadly No! when R. Stanton Scott starting trolling around at my eminently popular post this weekend, "Mainstream Bigotry and Racism on the Democratic-Left." That entry brought out all the lefty airheads, and Sadly No! linked with an unintelligible post, "Creep Learning Curve," which includes this line: "Larry Elder! Thomas Sowell! Bill Cosby! Star Parker! Does the Left have an equivalent roster of genuine African-American scolds who so tirelessly browbeat blacks as a class with such naked relish?"

Browbeaten? As you can see, that's what (black) conservatives get when they actually have the temerity to talk about, gasp!, personal responsibility!

Well it turns out that Sadly No! spends a good amount of time doing "brilliant" satire against black conservatives, as is abundantly clear in the exquisitely tasteful Photoshop above, available at "The Awful Rowing Toward Godwin." The reference is to "Godwin's Law," which admonishes against Hitler comparisons. Sowell's essay this week suggests we compare our smooth talking Obamessiah with another great orator from the interwar period. It's not an unreasonable comparison, although Sadly No! takes exception. Ain't that Photoshop just dandy? William Buckly in the crapper? And there's Thomas Sowell as "Uncle Ben the Janitor" opening up the lid no doubt with some "whitening" scouring powder to de-Nazify that commode.

I've been linked up at Sadly No! plenty of times. Those satirical intellectual giants "scour" the Internet for posts and pics of the conservative blogger du jour, and viola! Snark City Rollers! You name 'em: Pamela Geller. Rick Moran. Betsy Newmark. John Hinderaker. Beware, nobody - I mean nobody! - escapes the crack investigative skills of the Cruising Clouseau Clowns of the web!

Even my friend Mary Grabar came in for a drubbing.

While exchanging e-mails, Mary suggested to me, "Yeah, those idiots know how to use Photoshop, but not much else."

But hey, c'mon, these guys are good! Look at William Buckley up there! He needs hims some scourin' powda' up on dem 'dere teeth, nah. The Dem'crats' Little Black Sambo puts 'eem to shame!

Oh, wait! I almost forgot! Leftists are the paragons of racial propriety! It's really the Republithugs who can't, for the life of them, scrape the stain of Lee Atwater from their hands! That's right! Only the "evil" conservatives could have the, er, balls to market Barack Obama presidential dildos! You see, those "malevolent" GOPers have no values whatsover. Totally bereft of human decency - they expect people to work, aahhhh!!!

The Left's Conspiracy of Silence

I noted in an earlier post, "Deafening Left-Wing Silence on Islamist Barbarism," how the radical left routinely launches unhinged attacks on the Bush administration and its "faux-warrior" backers, but we hear nary a word of denuciation against the most depraved inhumanities committed by the warriors of the "religion of peace."

I noted:

In the midst of the widespread distribution of the most barbarian videotape on Islamic depravity yet seen, the hard-left blogosphere's been deafeningly AWOL in joining the online campaign denouncing the violence.Instead, we get top surrender voices like Glenn Greenwald waving his own hare-brained bloody shirt against "the handful of Muslim-obsessed faux-warriors" he imagines are the real threat to civilization.

It turns out Dr. Sanity puts some psychiatric analysis to the problem in her post, "A Conspiracy of Silence":

Most family therapists are familiar with the "conspiracy of silence" that occurs in families desperate to avoid an unpleasant realty or painful truth. For example, it can be seen in the unwillingness to talk about a catastrophe or death; to pretend even, that the traumatic event never occurred. The movie Ordinary People showed the destructive power of this kind of silence on one member of a family, which eventually split apart the entire family. The conspiracy can descend when there is sexual abuse going on within the family and other members look away and act like everything is normal, ignoring even the most blatant warning signs. The phrase has also been used to describe the indifference of onlookers when some terrible event is happening to others (e.g., Darfur) and they lift no finger to help.

Elie Wiesel wrote passionately about this sort of conspiracy during the Holocaust. He said, talking about the victims in the concentration camps, "The worse sort of cruelty would have been incapable of breaking the prisoner; it was the silence of those he believed to be his friends—cruelty more cowardly, more subtle—which broke his heart.There was no longer anyone on whom to count … It … poisoned the desire to live… If this is the human society we come from—and are now abandoned by—why seek to return?"

That is why Wiesel believed, "...to remain silent and indifferent is the greatest sin of all...". Yet it is an all too human defense brought to bear when the consequences of facing reality would be overwhelming.

In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud wrote about an "obtuseness of mind, a gradual stupefying process" that occurs when people desperately try to avoid a reality with which they cannot or do not want to cope. Sometimes it is accompanied by real hysterical blindness; or sometimes just an incredible indifference to truth.

This obtuseness perfectly describes the state of mind of the MSM as they try to come to grips with something that goes counter to their multicultural template; a template where all the left's 'approved' victim groups--such as the poor, oppressed Palestinians and other Islamic terrorist groups--are NEVER the perpetrators of violence, but are always the victims of it.

This also describes the nihilist left in the United States, which cheers the deployment in Iraq of mentally impaired women as human bombs:

I think it's just horrible that whoever was behind this latest disaster used Down's women to perpetrate the bombings but I don't see it as a sign of desperation. I see it as a sign of adaptation and a brilliant one at that.

As Dr. Sanity adds:

There is almost always an identified family 'scapegoat' on whom all the problems of the family can be blamed (and who can be the recipient of all that intense affect and emotion which rightfully should be directed elsewhere were it not for the conspiracy of silence).

In the case of the unspoken conspiracy between the poitical left and those in the media when it come to the issue of terrorism, it has been fairly clear for some time that America and the Bush Administration receive the full force of all the anger, rage, and fear they feel.

Psychologically and personally, the separation of affect and emotion from the real issue and its redirection toward someone or something that is less offensive or threatening in order to avoid the real threat and to maintain the cherished multicultural dogma they are so invested in is quite comforting for a while. The family members can pretend that they are 'loyal' and good people; especially when they persecute and torment the scapegoat.

On a larger scale, this is, of course, the same type of psychodynamic that lead to genocide. And it all begins with a conspiracy of silence and the obsessive avoidance of an uncomfortable truth.

Note also, as evidenced by the occasional drive-by commenter here (Sheldon), just to point out these trends, for the left, amounts to "The surest sign there is of superficiality of thought."

Oh sure, it's superficial in note that 12 year-old American boys are not beheading captured enemy combatants here in the U.S., who are affording the most generous due process of law anywhere in the world.

No, the truth hurts, and frankly only psychology can explain the intense hatred of the United States and the embrace of our enemies by our most implacable America-bashers here at home.

Blog Watch: Lawyers, Guns and Money

I thought this might be a good time to add a new post to my "Blog Watch" series. I noted at the start of the series that I was particularly interested in hammering hard-left bloggers and their nihilist ideologies.

Well it turns out that "d" over at Lawyers, Guns and Money (LGM) is the focus of today's dissection.

I don't read LGM, but I'm moved to write following the little dust-up I've had this week over LGM's attack post, "So Many Anecdotes." The author, "d", had a little fun with my entry on Republicans in academe.

I'm not dwelling on that debate, although the fairly vicious comments in both posts - here and here - are showcases in left-wing adolescence and intolerance. (But note Kreiz's response in the comments at PoliGazette: "It’s a bit like getting gang-mugged in an alley. Ah, a place where ridicule substitutes for reason.")

No, I thought I'd just have a little fun returning fire a bit.

It turns out that "d" over at LGM is really David Noon, an assistant professor of history at the University of Alaska Southeast.

Unless Noon's tardy in updating his curriculum vitae (available at the previous link), the man's untenured, which explains why he didn't pile on his posse's attacks on my academic credentials. Noon's crew got off on the "instructor" versus "associate professor" distinction in their argumentum ad hominem jubiliee, and for nothing really. My department's outdated webpage lists me as an "instructor," although I was promoted to "associate professor" a few years back. A quick check in my college catalog shows the current listing of full-time faculty and their professional titles (human resources bestows the title of associate professor to Ph.D. recipients after the completion of a four-year probationay period). LGM's mob was too busy foaming to find accurate information to sustain their folly.

In any case, back to Noon: This guy's perfect for a Blog Watch entry! Here's his biographic details, as listed at his department's homepage:

David Noon has taught U.S. history on the UAS Juneau campus since Fall, 2002. His dissertation, “This is (Not) a Child: Race, Gender, and ‘Development’ in the Child Sciences, 1880-1910,” displays the full range of Dr. Noon's research interests in history, which include developmental psychology, criminology, medicine, and the social construction of race and gender. More recently, Dr. Noon has written about the use of World War analogies in contemporary political rhetoric, cold war historical memory in the fiction of Don DeLillo, and the work of neoconservatives and Christian prophecy writers in the war on terrorism.

There you have it: Race and gender! That's a pretty good clue to this man's ideological orientation! I especially love the "social construction" part - code words for postmodern, radical multicultural blather. This guy's in the thick of the nation's campus culture wars. You've got to love it!

Not only that: He's written on "the work of neoconservative writers...in the war on terrorism!" Aghast! No wonder I've been targeted! I'm part of that evil Bush/Cheney cabal now turning the country into a fascist dictatorship!

Here's a good example of his schtick: In his post today Noon riffs on some dissertation research performing a comparative analysis of the post-Civil War economic status of Cherokee freedmen and emancipated black slaves of the former Confederacy (some of this research is available in pdf).

I have not read any of this work, and my satire is not directed at the author, Melinda Miller. I did however get a kick out of Noon's blurb at the post. Commenting on how many Cherokee did better than blacks following the Civil War, Noon wonders if stable patterns of land ownership and cultivation could have taken place thoughout the South:

I don't think it could have been. There's no question that any morally just outcome to the Civil War would have included massive agrarian reform, including the total liquidation of the plantation economy and the redistribution of the region's land without regard to race or previous condition of servitude. The Southern Homestead Act of 1866 made some effort in this direction and - had it been applied to more than five states, and had it actually hacked apart the viable plantations lands that were largely restored to their previous owners - it might have worked some of the effects that Miller finds among the Cherokee.

Notice the language: "massive agrarian reform" and "redistribution of the region's land without regard to race or previous condition of servitude." This is the historicism of class analysis (I'm reminded of Eugene Genovese's Marxist analysis of the post-bellum South, see here and here).

I returned fire in the comments, poking fun at Noon with an attack on the cult of racial victimology his genre represents:

Now that sounds sophisticated! Whoo! I'm impressed, boy!....

Tsk, tsk...

Man, those faces really are at the bottom of the well! I thought all men were created equal!

Good thing Miller’s paper’s in pdf! I got to get caught up on my reading! Hey, where’s my copy of C. Vann Woodward? It’s around here somewhere. Oh yeah, it’s right over there with Eric Foner. Shoot, I thought I was losing my mind there!

I’ve got the light of freedom! The fire next time!

My words are playing off the titles of canonical works in the black politics literature, especially Derrick Bell's, Faces at the Bottom of the Well (a founder of "critical race theory"), C. Vann Woodward's, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, and Eric Foner's, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877.

I'm also playing with the titles of Charles Payne's, I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississipi Freedom Struggle, and, of course, James Baldwin's, The Fire Next Time.

These are important works - especially Woodward, Payne, and Baldwin - and I don't begrudge them in any sense (or at least only to the point that they constitute components of revolutionary pedogogy).

My game here is to return the ridicule, just poking into the hornet's nest over at LGM. Last I checked, it looked like Noon had had enough and was throwing in the towel. Here's my last follow-up drive-by:

"d": What's the matter, buttercup? You're giving me the cold shoulder?

Boo hoo! I think I'm gonna cry...I better cuddle-up with my secretly-coded black slave quilt hand-me-down!

Speaking of curriculum vitae: You're an assistant professor? That's rough, the old publish or perish thing, right? Got to keep on pumping out those manuscripts, I guess.

Hey, I've got an idea for a paper: "The Erotic Adventures of the McKingford Trio in the Donald Douglas Exsanguination Affair."

How’s that? You do have some of your underlings responding for you. I saw old Matt Weiner playing tough-guy second-fiddle in that last thread: Clinton supported affirmative action? Yes, dismally, I might add. His whole race initiative was panned – no legacy, you know - but you never did specify the dependent variable at the post, leaving your bracketed presidential records waiting for some filler.

I’ve got to hand it to you though: You haven’t gone to comment moderation! You don’t want to ban me, naturally. You’d look like a loser: If my ISP gets the delete, then my victory’s complete!...

Toodle-oo, big boy. I’ll head back on over to my place now. Come on out to play when you finish that Yoohoo.

The "erotic adventures" line is a take on one of Noon's articles, listed on his resume,
"The Erotic Adventures of Stacy Koon in the ‘Rodney King Affair’"; McKingford's one of the commenters in LGM's attack posse (who, spinelessly of course, comments pseudonymously, with no back link).

If anyone's really interested, read the full comments at the LGM threads, here and here.

Let me close with one more example of Noon's blogging. Check out this passage, from Noon's post on this year's anniversary of the September 11 attacks:

Six years ago today, four airplanes - hijacked by a small army of freedom-hating suiciders, lesbians, civil libertarians, Islamofascists (and their appeasers), stem-cell researchers, Francophiles, historical revisionists and unelected judges - descended through the gaping national security hole pried open by Bill Clinton's eight years of distracted, fellated rule. While The Decider thumbed through a children's book about goats - demonstrating how quickly ordinary life must resume if the terrorists are to be deprived of victory - Hugo Chavez, Dan Rather, Michael Schiavo, Kofi Annan, George Soros, the Dixie Chicks and Michael Moore each pondered how they might declare their hatred of America and freedom and frozen embryos.

At an undisclosed location somewhere in the United States, Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and Stephen Cambone raised their heads from the goats they were hungrily exsanguinating. Wiping their glistening lips, they nodded silently to each other and loped away. America's corporate press corps, in an unprecedented gesture of patriotism, expressed their near-unanimous devotion to the cause of liberty by agreeing to suspend their disbelief for the next several years. In a Paris hospital, the first case of Bush Derangement Syndrome was diagnosed by a team of researchers who nevertheless failed to properly quarantine the patient and incinerate the corpse. Tony Blair, selflessly drizzling lighter fluid over his historical legacy, quickly assembled a care package filled with massage oils, scented candles, and a large, monogrammed dog collar. Hoping the American President would not find his gift too suggestive, the Prime Minister threw caution to the wind. "See you in Baghdad," he scrawled quickly on the outside of the package before giddily stuffing it in the nearest post box.

There's more, if anyone's got the stomach for the rest.

I had to look up "exsanguinate," which according to Answers.com, means "to drain of blood." Thus, the Bush/Cheney cabal I mentioned earlier (here seen as the rogue's gallery of Libby, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, and Cambone), are portrayed as draining the vital liquid of goats, or metaphorically, the people.

This is what comes from that radical, class-analysis historical frame I mentioned, and franky I find it sickening.

In a post yesterday, I cited Dr. Sanity's discussion of how Bush-bashers have responded to the National Intelligence estimate on Iran, "Sympathy for the Devil." I think this passage helps explain Noon's propensity for exsanguinating metaphors:

The delusional abyss wherein this kind of leftist logic simmers and marinates is the part of the leftist mind that simply is unable to cope with a dangerous and frightening reality. In that dark void of the mind, BUSH=HITLER, BUSH IS WORSE THAN BIN LADEN; BUSH IS THE WORLD'S WORSE TERRORIST, AMERICA IS HUMANITY'S #1 ENEMY etc. etc. etc. because it is just too scary to contemplate the real danger that faces civilization. The logic that proceeds from the delusional premises, however, is impeccable: get rid of Bush/Cheney/America and the danger will vanish in a puff of magical smoke!

In psychiatry this phenomenon is called psychological displacement and you can read more about it here, here, and here.

Like deer paralyzed with fear in the headlights of an oncoming train, people exhibiting this particular form of psychological denial are immobilized and frozen, focusing on trivialities and blithely unconcerned about the lethal danger that is speeding toward them. But they feel completely safe --for the moment anyway.

If you go back and check the comments over at LGM, one of the visitors, "aimai," has attacked me as "nuts":

He'd better hope his supervisors and students don't google his name and find out what he's been posting on the internet. No one wants to work with someone who seems to be losing his mind.

Noon's obviously flummoxed in his retreat, and now his commenters have picked up his sword. But in my opinion - and in all seriousness - in both the original writing and in the comments the real crazies are to be found among the anti-American multiculturalists at Lawyers, Guns and Money.

See also the previous entries from Blog Watch: The Blue Voice, Firedoglake, Glenn Greenwald, and Digby's Hullabaloo.

A Thanksgiving Day Smackdown

I was surprisingly tickled yesterday!

I consider holidays like Thanksgiving to be political truce days among bloggers. So I was caught off guard by Michael Van Der Galien's decisively penetrating takedown of Libby Spencer's recent post pumping up Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez.

Ms. Libby's the publisher of an extremely hard-left Bush-bashing blog, The Impolitic. In my previous blogging persona I used to regularly visit there, attacking Ms. Libby for her outlandish diatribes against the administration, the war, and anything else under the conservative sun.

Ms. Libby's post yesterday, "Loving Chavez," was published at her co-blogging site, The Newshoggers (whose main publisher Cernig has delusions of foreign policy expertise, but that's another story).

After a rambling introduction about how she's been to Venezuela, and how well she knows the Venezuelan people (blah, blah), and how Chavez's consolidation of dictatorial power comes amid "significant support among the majority of that nation's poor," Ms. Libby got down to her main point:

Whatever you think of Chavez and his admittedly abrasive style, the majority of his people love him. It strikes me that all this talk about his tyranny is more than a little misplaced considering Venezuelans have more of a voice in their government than we do under Bush.

I didn't respond at the post, as I was temporarily banned from the comments by The Newshoggers for my relentless and unassailable attacks on the blog's anti-Americanism and irrationalism. That's where Van Der Galien comes in. He's provided a precise riposte to Ms. Libby's authoritarian sympathizing:

At The Newshoggers, Libby writes: “Now I don’t want to get into a debate over whether Chavez is crazy, or a communist or pursuing the right policies for Venezuela. I honestly don’t know the answer to that, but I do know that he is a democratically elected leader who still enjoys significant support among the majority of that nation’s poor.” And, more importantly to the left, of course: “These are the people who take to the streets to protest Chavez and his programs to help his country’s poor and in a way one can understand their hatred for him. Chavez, whom they consider to be an upstart meztito, has instituted socialist policies that have redistributed the wealth and power more equally and it came at their expense.”

To top it off, she also compares Chavez to Bush: “It strikes me that all this talk about his tyranny is more than a little misplaced considering Venezuelans have more of a voice in their government than we do under Bush.”

Now that is misplaced. Lord knows I respect Libby and consider her a friend, but she’s way out there on this one.

Firstly, it does matter whether Chavez is a wannabe dictator or not.

Secondly, he’s amassing so much power that it’s already difficult to say whether the majority truly supports his reforms or not.

Thirdly, whether oppression is supported by the majority or not, doesn’t make it any more acceptable. Many Germans supported the Nazis for instance.

Fourthly, comparing Bush to Chavez and then concluding that citizens have more influence under Chavez’s rule than under Bush’s presidency is utterly ridiculous and it says tons about your prejudice and lack of ability to understand nuances if you argue that it is worse under Bush than under Chavez. Bush has yet to close down newspapers or networks that are critical of him for instance.

Fifthly, it never ceases to amaze me that for all the talk about freedom, many progressives actually only care about one thing: distribution of wealth. It’s not truly about freedom (if it were, they would constantly celebrate America where people are still more free than anywhere else in the world, yes really) at all. They only use ‘freedom’ when it suits their agenda.

Sixthly, the reason many progressives continue to support Chavez is that he’s anti-capitalism, anti classical liberalism and anti-America. In other words, Chavez’s enemies are the enemies of many progressives. As we all know, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

It’s the same everywhere: in Europe and America, the driving forces of the progressive ideologies are the same.

Quite troubling.

Again, I respect Libby, but progressives shouldn’t make the mistake of defending Chavez. Ever.

Michael's too nice, I would argue. Ms. Libby needed the smackdown, so it's none too soon. But what followed the exchange was even more interesting. Rather than defend her position, Ms. Libby wrote the lamest retraction imaginable, where she states:

I am not saying that I personally love Chavez. I don't. But his people do and who knows why? I think the guy is kind of crazy and I don't think he should be president for life but my understanding is, the referendum will extend the term of the presidency from 6 to 7 years and eliminate term limits. The people will vote and decide. That's not really the same thing as declaring a dictatorship, is it?

Well, actually it is. Venezuelan elections are not free and fair. The Chavez regime intimidates the opposition, and the support he does have has been manufactured through social policy largesse and manipulation of the nation's media. His anti-American foreign policy follows a long line of opportunistic Latin American caudillos railing against the Yanqui hegemon to the north. On the eve of the December 2 referendum, the growing activity of the Venezuelan opposition has called into question the notion of overwhelming popular support.

Besides Ms. Libby's quick backtracking, she also visited another blog highlighting her stupidity to mount a lame disclaimer (Blue Crab Boulevard's "Defending The Indefensible"):

You misread the intent of my post Gaius, as did many others. I updated so I’m not going to repeat the explanation, but in no way should that post be taken as advocating for Chavez’ policies.

How utterly spineless and completely preposterous!

I already despise Ms. Libby (and I don't say that lightly, as I tend to avoid the type of political hatred common on the left). But let's get real: Nobody misread the post. Ms. Libby is an unreconstructed neo-Marixt who never tires of slandering the Bush administration. She calls the United States a police state. She backs the international policies of America's enemies and supports the collapse of U.S. sovereignty through an open-borders immigration policy.

Ms. Libby also refuses to recognized the danger from Iran's foreign policy of Middle East revanchism, and when challenged, she just throws up her hands, and throws out ad hominem attacks.

Recall how I mentioned Van Der Galien's too nice? Well, he's a right-of-center blogger who's got career aspirations in online media (as far as I can tell). He's not out to ruffle any feathers. His blog's popular too, getting a lot of prominent play at Memeorandum. A former co-editor at the disastrously non-moderate "Moderate Voice," he's got power over folks like the fawning Ms. Libby. One critical word and she'll be high-tailing back to her keyboard to disclaim her nihilist views, lest the hits on her Sitemeter drop to deeper lows of marginalization and ignominy.

That's not how I blog. Political blogging is hardball. I defend my positions and I don't curry favor. If I make a mistake I'll say so, not to maintain shameless networking ties in the political blogosphere, but to uphold my commitment to integrity. That commitment's clearly absent in the cowardly anti-Americanism of Ms. Libby Spencer.

Blog Watch: Digby's Hullabaloo

With this entry, the "Blog Watch" series comes to American Power. As regular readers may recall, the original goal of Blog Watch was to comment on political blogs that raised:

...significant questions involving style, analysis, and ideological orientation. I'm particularly interested in dissecting and challenging radical, antiwar bloggers.

So far, as things have developed, I've challenged not just antiwar ideology, but the whole mindless nihilism associated with the endless hard-left attacks on the Bush administration and all things Republican (my earlier entries in the series are here, here, and here).

That effort continues with today's dissection and rebuttal of Digby's Hullabaloo. Hullabaloo's a vile yet influential leftist blog (Digby's posts are regularly cited by some of the top Bush-bashers of the left-blogosphere). I have on occassion waded into the dark comment threads there, which feature all of the classic characteristics familiar to the paranoid hate-addled hordes of the radical set. Most of Hullabaloo's posts are written by Digby, whose biography at The Huffington Post notes:

"Digby" has been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn and a writer whose political and cultural observations have entertained and informed the blogosphere since 2002. They can currently be found at http://www.digbysblog.blogspot.com/ and http://www.laweekly.com/.

(Yawn here.)

Hullabaloo's a group blog, however. That slippery wannabe international relations blogger Glenn Greenwald did a guest gig at Hullabaloo some time back (my jaws clench and hackles rise at the mere mention of Greenwald, but I've made mincemeat of him elsewhere). One current Hullabaloo co-blogger is Tristero, which is the pseudonym for Richard Einhorn, a modern classical composer by profession. Tristero should probably stick to music, as his foreign policy analysis is nothing more than boilerplate antiwar hatred of the Bush adminstration's forward international policy.

In one of his recent posts Tristero claims Turkey was readying an incursion into Northern Iraq, despite news reports indicating that Turkish plans were merely preliminary, against the wishes of the United States government, and that strikes against Kurdish rebels in Iraq were nowhere near forthcoming. But such facts didn't stop Tristero from launching this outlandish diatribe against the administration:

As far as I can tell, this article contains no information to support the assertion that "a Turkish military offensive into northern Iraq" is unlikely and plenty of reasons to worry about the opposite. Anyone familiar with the situation care to explain? Juan Cole mentions it, with a slightly less optimistic take on the situation than the Times provides, but does not offer an opinion as to how likely it or unlikely a military incursion by Turkey could be.

A personal note: Once, I had a long private talk with an American deputy ambassador who had been stationed in Iraq during 2004. I brought up my concerns about Turkey and the Kurds and, with the kind of flattery ambassadors learn to dispense on a moment's notice, he expressed surprise that I, a mere musician, knew enough to ask questions about it. I, too, was surprised, but I was surprised that he thought the questions were that esoteric.

The unpredictable effects - except that I knew they would be the bad kind of unpredictable - of destabilizing Iraq on its neighbors were among the many reasons I thought the Bush/Iraq invasion was major league cuckoo. By 2004, however, I had come to the genuinely terrifying conclusion that I, a mere musician, and my colleagues for the past year, a bunch of loudmouth bloggers who refused to accord any respect to those who believed in "the triumph of hope over experience," understood the world far better than America's political and media leaders. That may sound like a boast but really it's not. It highlights how profoundly incompetent, claustrophobic, and twisted American political discourse had become, and still is.

It chills me to the bone to realize that Walter Russell Mead, an old friend who has since gone on to acquire an enormous reputation in international affairs, got Bush/Iraq wrong and I got it right. There is something profoundly out of whack in this country for something like that to be true. But it is. And it wasn't just a lucky guess on my part; I wasn't guessing. Nor was it an excusable mistake on Walter's part, not only because it wasn't simply one mistake, but because it was an inexcusable cluster of serious mistakes for anyone to make who claims expertise in foreign policy.

The citation of Juan Cole is odd, since Cole fails to support Tristero's main point. Perhaps Tristero thought that bandying about Cole's name would lend some credence to his argument, although Cole's radical views have long been marginalized (Cole's reputation in the historical profession is controversal, and his application for a post at Yale University was rejected on the grounds of anti-Americanism and shoddy scholarship). But what's more interesting is all of Tristero's unwarranted assertions of superior foreign policy knowledge. Tristero's post is dated October 10, and this is just weeks after General David Petraeus testified to Congress on America's military success in Iraq, a performance that has been greeted by a growing sense that events in Iraq have improved dramatically.

But such views are par for the course over at Hullabaloo. In a characteristic post, Digby dismisses mainstream policy discourse as mere "incoherence" :

Something very disconcerting has been happening in our discourse for some time, even worse than the up-is-downism that has characterized the most unctuously presumptuous members of the Cheney administration. It's no longer just Bush who is blatantly dumb on TV. A lot of public figures these days adopt all the poses and cadence of ordinary conversation, but actually speak in some sort of gibberish language that makes no sense.

As an example of this, Digby attacks Mitt Romney, and she cites his (objectively sensible) views in this YouTube as "complete nonsense":

Also, after the recent commanding debate performances by Rudy Giuliani, Digby pulls up some partisan hack piece at Slate calling Rudy a liar, and then argues:

I don't think Rudy cares about facts any more than George W. Bush does, and undoubtedly doesn't know them in the first place. After all, Bush lied repeatedly during both of his presidential campaigns, just as he's doing now when he claims that SCHIP will allow rich people to steal from the taxpayers. (Like he thinks that's a bad thing.) They just make things up because they don't care to know the truth ... and it doesn't matter....

In any case, the bar has been set very low for GOP presidents. Yet they seem to be able to set it lower each time. If Giuliani wins we will not only have an idiot for president we will have a dangerously unstable idiot for president who is even more arrogant and malevolent than the one we have now. I have a sneaking feeling "competence" is going to be the least of our problems.

That's it? A couple of factual discrepancies over New York City tax policies during the 1990s and you have the basis for a complete smear of the entire GOP establishment as a bunch of liars! "Bush lied, people died!" Haven't we heard that before? It's so simplistic, and it would be just a matter of odd fascination if it weren't for the fact that these innacuracies go over as mainstream analysis in contemporary left-wing policy circles.

But I truly understood the true nature of Digby's hard-left ideological project after reading her denunciation of Bill Cosby's appearance last weekend on Meet the Press. Digby mounts her attack on Cosby with another volley of the "gibberish" line, laced with extreme exaggeration for effect:

I just suffered through one of the most excruciating experiences of my life. I watched Bill Cosby ramble on like he was drunk, dominating the conversation, for nearly an hour on Meet The Press, most of the time speaking pure gibberish.

(Imagine him doing it in his patented Fat Albert voice as well...)

The context for Cosby's Meet the Press appearance is the release of his new book, Come on People: On the Path from Victims to Victors, which is coauthored by Dr. Alvin Poussaint, a well-respected child psychiatrist who specializes in African American issues. The book argues for a closer look at black American culture in an effort to find solutions to the current African American crisis.

Now, I watched the show, so I can attest to the real reason Digby attacks Cosby as incoherent: Cosby argues that the contemporary black family is dysfunctional - especially families of lower socioeconomic attainment - and these families have failed to provide the model of stability and responsibility that is the necessary prerequisite for success in life, educationally, professionally, and socially. Digby cites this passage from the interview transcripts to illustrate Cosby's alleged gibberish:

MR. COSBY: “Somewhere in my life a person called my father has not shown up, and I feel very sad about this because I don’t know if I’m ugly, I don’t know what the reason is.” And so there’s a great deal that a person has to put up with.[...]

MR. COSBY: ...in times of need, etc., etc. So when you look at education, it is my belief that it is there with a very ugly head. However, it is also my belief that this is not the first time my race has seen systemic or institutional racism. There were times, even worse times, when lynchings were acceptable. Sure, the newspapers wrote about it, but it happened. Juries were set and freed the, people who did the, the lynching. Therefore, we knew how to fight, we knew how to protect our children, protect our women. Today, in lower, lower economic areas, some people—not all—some people are not contributing to that protection. Therefore, when you see these numbers, you see, you see numbers and the character correction has not happened. Many times it’s the TV set, a BET or, or videos played, kids look at it and they admire it. It’s the proliferation of drugs into the neighborhood.

Cosby's been been at the forefront of a recent movement to pinpoint the causes of the contemporary African American crisis at the level of the family. His speech at the NAACP's 50th commemoration of the Brown v. Board of Education decision sparked a vigorous debate in the black community over institutional versus individual factors in the crisis of poverty and crime among black youth today.

Cosby wasn't speaking gibberish last Sunday on Meet the Press. Indeed, his comments were far from incoherent. A written transript - like that provided by Meet the Press - can't do justice to the syncopated down-home patterns of Cosby's speech.

I listened with ease as Cosby spoke truth to the pathologies of contemporary black America. He speaks with the voice of the traditional black elder sage who's been down with the brothers in the 'hood and knows "what dey got t'do" to rise up from the depths of danger and despair. Cosby's voice is the powerful trumpet of contemporary black conservatism, a movement which doesn't discount America's history of institution racism. Instead, black conservatives focus on educational excellence as a means of advancement within the society. They stress neighborhood safety and security, and most of all they denounce the endless cries of "racism" which cast blacks as the "victims" of an irredeemable racial caste system that locks them in the dire straights of socioeconomic inferiority. Black conservatives look within, to the heart and soul of the indiviual, for answers to the problem of black uplift.

And this is why Cosby's attacked mercilessly by Digby ("it's all gibberish"), as well as the entire class of left-wing victimologists. The conservative position on individual responsibility challenges the enduring shibboleths of the radical sociology on race. This nihilist ideology (which inherently offers no compelling policy alternatives) is anathema to the future chances of America's black youth, and the entire anti-Bush, anti-traditionalist project mounted at Digby's Hullaballoo holds disastrous implications for the future of American public policy.

So, as we see here and elsewhere, conservatives have a continuing interest and responsibility to challenge and rebut this radical left-wing dogma. The stakes are incrediby high: For although the radicals propose absolutely nothing of reason and hope, such "discourse" is becoming all too common within the broader tide of leftism that gaining traction in the poltical system. All conservatives need to join together to beat back this antiwar, multicultural, statist onslaught chipping away at our common political decency and vitality.

See also the previous entries from Blog Watch: The Blue Voice, Firedoglake, and Glenn Greenwald.