Now, anyone can be cut down to size by Kanye West.
Kanye isn’t just a jackass, he’s a derivative jackass:
Of course, ODB was a crazy person on a good day, and a crack-abusing crazy person on a regular day. What’s Kanye’s excuse?
Really:
Either the people around him at Fox News are afraid to say anything, or they’ve resigned themselves to the fact that everyone who knows how to spell has moved on. The next logical step, of course, is for Fox to have him shot and killed on-air.
Over the past few weeks I’ve been fielding a number of questions about the status of this blog, so I’ve decided to address the issue head-on here. The problem, in short, is that no new posts have been going up. The explanation is that in my efforts to secure some sort of income in this wintry economic climate, I’ve come to the conlcusion that the solipsistic delights of writing for an audience of thirty cannot justify the time they consume. I love all thirty of you, but even a Despot has to eat.
My colleagues are similarly busy. Meiji has been securing your freedoms via various activities in Iraq - I don’t understand the specifics either, but I feel as free as ever, so clearly it’s working. Frederick has been doing whatever it is he does in his undisclosed location. Our Photoshop and finance experts are no doubt making better use of their respective talents.
None of which is to say that the Despot is finished. Like MacArthur, We Shall Return, and I suspect that, in the meantime, the political blogosphere - unlike the Phillipines - will be just fine. I doubt I’ll be able to produce much over the next month and a half, though if I see an amusing New York Post cover, you’ll be the first to know. But by early September, I expect to have rejoined the regular, documented work force (thus making a small dent in the dreary job statistics you keep reading about), and I will work regular blogging back into my routine.
For now, I leave you with the madness of Sarah Palin’s final speech as governor, first via a Wordle graphic, then via some highlights, supplemented, as always, by snark.
Brace yourselves, here we go:
The rugged rugged hardy people that live up here and some of the most patriotic people whom you will ever know live here, and one thing that you are known for is your steadfast support of our military community up here and I thank you for that and thank you United States military for protecting the greatest nation on Earth. Together we stand.
Together we stand indeed. I hear the elitists say it differently on the east coast of these Together States of America, but they should remember that the military.
And getting up here I say it is the best road trip in America soaring through nature’s finest show. Denali, the great one, soaring under the midnight sun. And then the extremes. In the winter time it’s the frozen road that is competing with the view of ice fogged frigid beauty, the cold though, doesn’t it split the Cheechakos from the Sourdoughs? And then in the summertime such extreme summertime about a hundred and fifty degrees hotter than just some months ago, than just some months from now, with fireweed blooming along the frost heaves and merciless rivers that are rushing and carving and reminding us that here, Mother Nature wins. It is as throughout all Alaska that big wild good life teeming along the road that is north to the future. That is what we get to see every day. Now what the rest of America gets to see along with us is in this last frontier there is hope and opportunity and there is country pride.
Dadaism is the new populism.
And it is our men and women in uniform securing it, and we are facing tough challenges in America with some seeming to just be Hell bent maybe on tearing down our nation, perpetuating some pessimism, and suggesting American apologetics, suggesting perhaps that our best days were yesterdays.
Dadaism is also the new WaitDidIMentiontheMilitary?! In case I didn’t:
But as other people have asked, “How can that pessimism be, when proof of our greatness, our pride today is that we produce the great proud volunteers who sacrifice everything for country?” Now this week alone, Sean Parnell and I we’re on the, um, on Ft. Rich the base there, the army chapel, and we heard the last roll call, and the sounding of Taps for three very brave, very young Alaskan soldiers who just gave their all for all of us. Together we do stand with gratitude for our troops who protect all of our cherished freedoms, including our freedom of speech which, par for the course, I’m going to exercise.
The course, in this case, being Sarah Palin. She has a handicap of awesome.
And first, some straight talk…
Wait, what? Just whose resignation is this? Is there going to be a part about her father working in a coal mine later?
… for some, just some in the media because another right protected for all of us is freedom of the press, and you all have such important jobs reporting facts and informing the electorate, and exerting power to influence.
Were I an accredited journalist, I would immediately get business cards printed up with the phrase ‘exerting power to influence’. Actually, I think that might already be the motto of her sponsor, the Weekly Standard.
You represent what could and should be a respected honest profession that could and should be the cornerstone of our democracy.
Because, let’s face it, we need someone respected and honest to make sure elected officials don’t mess with the cornerstones of our democracy.
Democracy depends on you, and that is why, that’s why our troops are willing to die for you. So, how ’bout in honor of the American soldier, ya quite makin’ things up. And don’t underestimate the wisdom of the people, and one other thing for the media, our new governor has a very nice family too, so leave his kids alone.
She knows whereof she speaks; I used to think it was impossible to go wrong underestimating the wisdom of the people, until John McCain announced his running mate.
Our founders wrote “all political power is inherent in the people. All government originates with the people. It’s founded upon their will only and it’s instituted for the good of the people as a whole.” Their remarkably succinct words guided us in all of our efforts in serving you and putting you first, and we have done our best to fulfill promises that I made on Alaska Day, 2005, when I first asked for the honor of serving you.
You know, give or take a few years.
And I promised I’d govern with fiscal restraint, so to not immorally burden futre generations. And we did…we slowed the rate of government growth and I vetoed hundreds of millions of dollars of excess and wtih lawmakers we saved billions for the future.
Or perhaps that’s the opposite of what happened. It all seems like a distant memory.
Let me tell you, Alaskans really need to stick together on this with new leadership in this area especially, encouraging new leadership… got to stiffen your spine to do what’s right for Alaska when the pressure mounts, because you’re going to see anti-hunting, anti-second amendment circuses from Hollywood and here’s how they do it. They use these delicate, tiny, very talented celebrity starlets, they use Alaska as a fundraising tool for their anti-second amendment causes.
Lock and load, Alaskans, the Olson twins are coming!
Stand strong, and remind them patriots will protect our guaranteed, individual right to bear arms, and by the way, Hollywood needs to know, we eat, therefore we hunt.
Actually, someone really should tell the Olson twins about that first part. Sorry.
And I promised that we would get a natural gas pipeline underway and we did.
Not physically underway, mind you, but pipe-related happy thoughts are up 70% since the Murkowski adminstration.
Since I was a little kid growing up here, I remember the discussions, especially the political discussions just talking about and hoping for and dreaming of commercializing our clean, abundant, needed natural gas.
And now, finally… Moving right along.
What I promised, we accomplished. “We” meaning state staff, amazing commissioners, great staff assisting them, and conscientious Alaskans outside the bureaucracy - Tom Van Flein, and Meg Stapleton and…
It’s touching to see regular everyday Alaskans outside the administration coming together to do their part, from the governor’s attorney, right on down to the governor’s personal spokeswoman. This is what makes America great.
So much success, and Alaska there is much good in store further down the road, but to reach it we must value and live the optimistic pioneering spirit that made this state proud and free, and we can resist enslavement to big central government that crushes hope and opportunity. Be wary of accepting government largess. It doesn’t come free and often, accepting it takes away everything that is free, melting into Washington’s powerful “care-taking” arms will just suck incentive to work hard and chart our own course right out of us, and that not only contributes to an unstable economy and dizzying national debt, but it does make us less free.
And that’s what made Alaska great.
And we have come so far in just 50 years. We’re no longer a frontier outpost on the periphery of the world’s greatest nation.
I don’t know how to read this other than as a smear against America (and Russia). Congratulations, Tibet, you’re the new Alaska!
Todd and I, and Track, Bristol, Tripp, Willow, Piper, Trig…I think I got ‘em all. We will forever be so grateful for the honor of our lifetime to have served you.
One last chance for Palin to argue that her children’s travel represented legitimate state business, one more chance for me to snicker at their names.
[I]n Alaska it is not an easy living, but it is a good living, and here it is impossible to lose your way. Wherever the road may lead you, we have that steadying great north star to guide us home.
This is actually true if the road only ever leads you south to the lower 48.
So let’s all enjoy the ride, and I thank you Alaska, and God bless Alaska and God bless America.
Note that she doesn’t call for God to bless the troops. I guess she doesn’t support them.
Andy McCarthy has some incredible breaking news, in a post whose title is so long, it can only be included in a blockquote with the excerpt:
“Had [President Bush's Warrantless Surveillance Program" been in place before the [9/11] attacks, hijackers Khalid Almidhar and Nawaf Alhazmi almost certainly would have been identified and located.”
[Really. That's the title of his post. Punchy!]
Another Friday night, another dump by the Obama administration of a report underscoring the vital importance of President Bush’s post-9/11 national security tactics.
The above quote about Midhar and Hazmi and is from Gen. Michael Hayden, the former CIA director who was director of the NSA when that agency ran Bush’s “Terrorist Surveillance Program.” It is a bombshell mentioned in passing on page 31 of the 38-page report filed by five executive branch inspectors general (from DOJ, DOD, CIA, NSA, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence) pursuant to Congress’s 2008 overhaul of FISA (the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act).
I’ll have more to say about the report this week, but it also contains some other interesting facts that the folks who drop these reports late on summer Fridays would rather you didn’t linger over.
Other interesting facts, eh? Other than what, exactly? Unverifiable counterfactual claims are, I do believe, generally referred to as ‘opinions’ not ‘facts’. But never mind. The fact that the former CIA chief would make such a claim is pretty mindblowing. Shame on the Obama administration for hiding this bombshell in a Friday news dump.
Wait, what? Hayden made this claim three years ago, in testimony to the US Senate, and it was widely reported on then? Really?
Shit, Andy McCarthy tricked me again. Sorry, my bad. He just sounds so reasonable all the time…
UPDATE: Presumably a coincidence, but it turns out this is a great time for security hawks to do some hand waving.
Sarah Palin doesn’t understand why people won’t accept her stated reasons for quitting at face value. Kevin Drum is somewhat sympathetic. Stanley Fish thinks the pundits searching for an angle are more dispicable than Palin herself. They are all way off the mark.
Human interaction would be pretty difficult if it weren’t the default assumption that most people were telling the truth most of the time. Most utterances are fairly trivial; we can generally assume that people aren’t lying to us about the weather, because even the slightest inclination toward honesty would be sufficient to outweigh any possible incentive to lie about such a thing.
Of course, it is customary to give people the benefit of the doubt even when they do have a tangible incentive to lie. Our attitudes toward lying and liars make even this a good bet under many circumstances. Since we tend not to associate with people who have proved to be dishonest in the best, our odds get better with time. And since people are generally rational enough to save their lies for situations in which they are unlikely to be found out, a ceteris paribus assumption of honesty works out fairly well.
If, however, we are concerned only with figuring out what is actually true about the world, and have no interest in common courtesy - as we shouldn’t in analyzing the public actions of political figures - there is no reason whatsoever to make this assumption. That a politician says that x is true when the stakes are high and the chance of being proven a liar are essentially zero (even if a scandal breaks, no one can prove she was lying about her motivation here) should barely count as prima facie evidence for the actual truth of x. When the politician in question is Sarah Palin you can drop the qualifiers: that Palin is quitting for the reasons she gave is no more likely than if she had said nothing at all. Which is to say, not very likely at all.
As always, a little David Hume is instructive:
It is, therefore, a just political maxim, that every man must be supposed a knave.
Every woman, too. And in Palin’s case, it isn’t just a supposition.
Lisa Schiffren has the scoop:
If Mark Krikorian and the new conventional wisdom are right, and nominating one “Nuyorican” woman (who, as Jonah noted earlier, is not even properly the child of immigrants, as Puerto Ricans are citizens) is all it takes to allow the White House to delay indefinitely the messy, no-win issue of amnesty for 10 million illegal aliens, mostly of Hispanic origin, few of Princeton/Yale education — that is a strategy that should not be subjected to too much conservative scrutiny. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, as the saying goes. The less talented you think Sonia Sotomayor is, the easier a trade this should be.
If it works, the White House should consider other applications. Everyone suspects that President Obama has been fibbing about his sympathies in the gay-marriage debate (he supported it before he opposed it) because he understands the potential political fallout (not least among black voters) from advocating, or helping to advance, same-sex marriage. Gay activists are coming to suspect that they’ve been played, yet again, by a Democratic administration which they believed to be sympathetic. Can they be bought off with a SCOTUS appointment? Would the nominee have to be out? Perhaps a genuinely brilliant, prominent lesbian constitutional law scholar would be a reasonable sop. There is one on the short lists. For conservatives, of course, that is a dicier deal than the Sotomayor tradeoff — since a genuinely brilliant constitutional scholar might advance the left-wing agenda a little too effectively.
Did I say, “if it works”? We know this strategy works — at least with the rank and file. Case in point: President Obama regularly makes plain his disdain for Israel’s democratically elected leaders; his almost visceral desire to force Israel to bend to his vision of an accommodation with the Palestinians; and his clear indifference to Israel’s existential security from threats of nuclear annihilation. Yet large numbers of liberal American Jews, who in many respects are quite intelligent, continue to point to Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod — two high-level political advisor/enforcers lacking in tenure or the ability to make law or interpret the constitution (not yet a redundant statement) — and smile about how much they love the president and believe that he loves them back.
My kingdom for a horse? My huge, game-changing cultural issue for a seat on the court? The Obama version of “triangulation”? Whatever.
That’s how you crazy!
Mark Levin raises some thoughtful questions to one of his listeners:
CALLER: I just wanna say, Obama is a lot smarter than you folks give him credit for. You guys were on a roll, I have to admit, with all those tea parties. Everything was rolling along, the Republicans were gaining momentum. And he managed to change your entire conversational focus. And you let those three hundred thousand people —
HOST: My God. He’s so smart. His own party voted against him on Guantanamo Bay. How stupid was that, Cindy? His own party refused to fund the closing of Guantanamo Bay.
CALLER. Yeah but you know he can just move those people over here anyway. He’s already doing it with the one guy.
HOST: Yeah, sure, he can do whatever he wants. Let me ask you a question. Why do you hate this country?
CALLER: No, I love this country.
HOST: (angrily shouting) I SAID WHY DO YOU HATE MY COUNTRY! WHY DO YOU HATE MY CONSTITUTION? WHY DO YOU HATE MY DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE?
You just said it. He can blow off Congress. He can do whatever he wants, right?
CALLER: Well, he seems to, he just moved (inaudible).
HOST: Answer me this, are you a married woman? Yes or no?
CALLER: Yes.
HOST: Well I don’t know why your husband doesn’t put a gun to his temple. Get the hell out of here.
That’s how you debate.
The other day, I dismissed something Dick Cheney said as crazy - a natural enough impulse - but I’m suddenly having second thoughts. Here’s the quote, in all its glorious context :
“We fail to recognize the fact that we’re alone out there in terms of trying to achieve the objective of forcing the Iranians to give up their nuclear weapons,” Cheney said at a dinner following the Intelligence Squared debate, in which Elizabeth Cheney and former Coalition Provisional Authority spokesman Dan Senor debated former diplomat Nicholas Burns and Mideast scholar Ken Pollack on the topic of negotiations with Iran.
The former Vice President characterized the Iranian goal in negotiations on ending that country’s nuclear program as mere stalling for time, and the Europeans as trying to “restrain the U.S.” from military action.
“Everybody’s in a giant conspiracy to achieve a different objective than the one we want to achieve,” Cheney said.
That first sentence, of course, really is crazy. There is plenty of disagreement over just how bad it would be if Iran had nukes and to what lengths we should be willing to go to prevent this, but most countries are right there with the United States when it comes to having a preference for a world in which Iran is not a nuclear power.
That last bit about the conspiracy sounds crazy as well, but on further reflection, I think it’s actually a pretty obvious truth, on this and every other issue. Of course everybody else is working to achieve things other than what we want to achieve - that’s what makes them part of them, rather than part of us. No two countries - and no two people, for that matter - have exactly the same interests. So whoever you are, the world is united in not wanting things to go your way. Of course, since they all disagree about what they do want, it’s not usually a very idiologically coherent or effective conspiracy, but it’s still pretty irritating.
Hell is other people, Dick. Have some ice cream.
I thought I’d linked to these photos the other day, but looking back, I see that I didn’t. If you missed them, be sure to take a look at the rest. These top secret briefings from Rumsfeld all come with a big shiny picture and a healthy dose of scripture, but this one is the most explicit invocation of the ol’ crusader spirit. Note that part of the classification is redacted - this document is no longer too secret for you to see, but you still can’t no just how secret it was in the first place.
(Yes, I realize that such redactions are made all the time, and indeed one can think of intuitive reasons why that might make sense. Still, amusing stuff.)
UPDATE: Rumsfeld is denying responsibility for these reports.
The vast majority of U.S. Senators are fairly skilled at passing themselves of as more or less sane and capable of semi-rational thought. Every now and then a Ted Stevens comes along, but it’s rare. The same, however, cannot be said for the House of Representatives, which is always populated with the overtly crazy, the profoundly ignorant, the utterly inarticulate, and the good old fashioned dumb. Maxine Waters, whom you would not leave alone with your children in a million years, has been in the House for almost two decades, and that’s pretty much par for the course. But no matter how often I remind myself of this fact, these legislators still have the power to astonish me:
(h/t Chris Orr)
UPDATE: Note that this video was posted by (someone claiming to be) Representative Barton himself. As you can see from the title, and from his comments on Twitter posted by Orr, Barton is actually pleased with his performance here, and thinks he showed Chu up. This man should not be allowed to wield sharp objects without supervision. Democracy is an ugly business.
Cliff May shares some deep thoughts with K-Lo:
Kathryn — I think we are at a point where the Left/Islamist Alliance thinks it really has a historic opportunity to stifle free speech. The Miss California episode is making clear that a price will be paid for voicing banned views in public. Lawyers who wrote opinions on the interrogation of terrorists are to be prosecuted as criminals — this will encourage others to follow the party line in the future. Janeane Garofalo says that anyone who criticises Obama’s policies is a “racist.” In Geneva this week, a U.N. conference is pushing to prohibit, under international law, any criticism of Islam. Call me crazy, but I see a pattern.
Okay, since you askeed nicely: You’re crazy, Cliff. Deeply crazy. And not like a fox. More like this guy:
The VDH Watch is back. There are a million dishonest lunatics out there in the blogosphere, but for some reason this guy really gets to me. There is a depth of propaganda in his writing that really rewards a sentence-by-sentence treatment. So I promise I’ll (try to) lay off for a while after this, but, for now, here we go again, Victor:
Under Obama we are obliterating, by Predator-missile attack, suspected jihadists (and anyone in the general vicinity near them) in Waziristan — the last time I looked, it was a foreign country — something a little bit more discomforting to them than rendition.
The last time I looked, Waziristan wasn’t a country at all, but never mind the details. One can argue about the merits of the drone campaign in Pakistan, but only hard-core pacifists deny that there is a time and a place for firing missiles at people to kill them. Meanwhile, it isn’t rendition simpliciter that the Obama administration has rejected, but rather turning detainees over to other countries for the purpose of torture. Are there people who would rather be tortured than blown up by a missile? Sure. But that isn’t a very interesting point. Over thousands of years of human civilization, people have periodically resigned themselves to the necessity of doing their best to kill other people. Yet most civilizations have maintained that it was a moral imperative to treat their surviving enemies with some degree of restraint. If Hanson wants to argue that humanity has had this one wrong all along, he should say so. Pretending it is a novel hypocrisy of the Obama administration isn’t a serious option.
And blowing the brains out of suspected piratical kidnappers in international waters might be seen, in the now hyper-legalistic universe of Western transnational jurisprudence, as something a little more extreme than bringing detainees out of their Koran- and Mediterranean-food-stocked Guantànamo jail cells for interrogations.
Victor, you’re doing it again! Whatever ‘extreme’ is supposed to mean here, it isn’t relevant. Forget getting shot, I’d choose a few minutes on the rack over life in prison without a second thought. Yet the former has been considered legally and morally impermissable since long before ‘the now hyper-legalistic universe of Western transnational jurisprudence’. (Try saying that five times fast!). Also, that bit about interrogations? Also dishonest. No one has ever suggested we not interrogate prisoners. That would be crazy. What bothers people is when the interrogations look like this:
It is possible to ask people questions without resorting to this sort of evil.
I know I’d prefer to be shown some upsetting nudie magazines as humiliation to make me talk than have a bullet take apart my skull.
I’m glad you like porn more than sudden death. Me too. But, on top of repeating the confusion and hand-waving from above, you are side-stepping the fact that this sort of humiliation is designed for devout Muslims, and doesn’t really apply to you. It’s more akin to someone forcing you to read a science textbook.
Once Team Obama chose to trash Bush as a Constitution-shredder, while blinking and nodding at Spanish theatrics — all the while either not changing, or, in fact, stepping up Bush-era anti-terrorism measures — it put itself in a soon-to-be untenable position that even a fawning media won’t long be able to ignore.
Well, it sort of depends on the measures, doesn’t it? The idea wasn’t to stop counter-terrorism altogether, just the evil, illegal, and ineffective kinds. There is nothing untenable about condemning certain means of fighting terrorism while continuing to fight terrorism. That’s not all that complicated.
Who knows what’s in our future — a Spanish indictment of “judge-and-jury” Barack Obama for ordering the executions of Pashtun and Somali suspects in foreign or international territories, without an arrest warrant, habeas corpus, rights to counsel, and recourse to appeal?
I’m actually in Spain at the moment, so I asked around, and no, it turns out that Spain isn’t planning to outlaw warfare. I’ll let you know if there’s any movement on that though.
‘Kenyan’ doesn’t have any fewer letters than ‘nigger’, so it’s not a brevity thing. If that’s what you’re Tea Partying about, come out and say it.
(h/t the YZA)
Uh-oh, it looks like someone else has noticed that Victor Davis Hanson is an ever-flowing fountain of entertaining lunacy:
Courtesy of The Corner’s increasingly wacky Victor Davis Hanson:
In academic circles the last two decades, pirates have been romanticized in a variety of contexts—as in pirates being contrarian individualists, admirable anarchists, Marxist redistributionists, sexually ambiguous, cross-dressing, transgendered libertines, and Lotus-eater-like sensualists, rather than as murderous criminals. Who knows, maybe such esoteric theorizing has filtered down to the U.S. State Department.
Sure, VDH is confusing academia and hollywood, and splicing dishonesty with paranoid delusion to create his trademark variety of unhinged screed, but pointing that out is my job. Stop stealing my thunder, Isaac!
The most recent wave of piracy is a lot of things to a lot of people, but first and foremost it’s a great opportunity to remind people that you really hate Muslims:
The early republic’s experience of piracy shows how long it can take to stamp it out. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams dealt with the Barbary pirates — essentially a north African Muslim protection racket — when they were diplomats in the 1780s. The problem continued through the first four presidential administrations, until after the War of 1812.
George Washington negotiated, and John Adams signed, a treaty with the bashaw of Tripoli in which we agreed to pay protection money to spare our ships from attack and asserted that America “was not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.” Latter-day secularists often cite the Tripoli treaty, without seeming to realize that it was an attempt to blackmail thugs.
It’s not entirely clear to me what impact religion had on the conduct of Barbary piracy, but I don’t have time to stop and think about it because there’s just so much more:
I try to take away the larger lesson here, which is about the so-called “rule of law.” “So-called,” I say, because transnational progressives, who are instinctively converting the Somali piracy into — as Secretary Clinton put it yesterday — mere “criminal activity,” are perverting what the “rule of law” means. It’s the same thing they’ve done with the challenge of radical Islam in general, the Muslim pirates being no different from other Muslim unlawful combatants who flout the laws and customs of civilized warfare.
…
“Civilized” is a much-misunderstood word, thanks to the “rule of law” crowd that is making our planet an increasingly dangerous place. Civilization is not an evolution of mankind but the imposition of human good on human evil. It is not a historical inevitability. It is a battle that has to be fought every day, because evil doesn’t recede willingly before the wheels of progress.
There is nothing less civilized than rewarding evil and thus guaranteeing more of it. High-minded as it is commonly made to sound, it is not civilized to appease evil, to treat it with “dignity and respect,” to rationalize its root causes, to equivocate about whether evil really is evil, and, when all else fails, to ignore it — to purge the very mention of its name — in the vain hope that it will just go away. Evil doesn’t do nuance. It finds you, it tests you, and you either fight it or you’re part of the problem.
The men who founded our country and crafted our Constitution understood this. They understood that the “rule of law” was not a faux-civilized counterweight to the exhibition of might. Might, instead, is the firm underpinning of law and of our civilization. The Constitution explicitly recognized that the United States would have enemies; it provided Congress with the power to raise military forces that would fight them; it made the chief executive the commander-in-chief, concentrating in the presidency all the power the nation could muster to preserve itself by repelling evil. It did not regard evil as having a point of view, much less a right to counsel.
Christian pirates, we hardly knew ye. That’s a lot of crazy to digest, but when you’re done, consider this bit of satire from the Exurban League:
Obviously, this incident has raised many concerns among Americans. There have been calls for justice and even violence against the misguided perpetrators. But such an emotional reaction has led to the disparagement of entire groups with which we are unfamiliar. We have seen this throughout history.
For too long, America has been too dismissive of the proud culture and invaluable contributions of the Pirate Community. Whether it is their pioneering work with prosthetics, husbandry of tropical birds or fanciful fashion sense, America owes a deep debt to Pirates.
The past eight years have shown a failure to appreciate the historic role of these noble seafarers. Instead of celebrating their entreprenuerial spirit and seeking to partner with them to meet common challenges, there have been times where America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive.
Some of us wonder if our current Overseas Contingency Operation would even be needed had the last administration not been so quick to label Pirates as “thieves,” “terrorists” and worse. Such swashbucklaphobia can lead to tragic results, as we have seen this week.
Emphasizing the achievments of good pirates is absurd, because all pirates are engaged in evil. This is a terrific send-up of the rhetoric on Islamic terrorism that emphasizes the achievments of good Muslims, because all Muslims- Wait, never mind.
