April, 2007 archive

Still waiting for that comment about Senator Thompson.

John Cole. I’m liking him more and more. A conservative with principles.

Again the unique Bush gift goes beyond making a plainly stupid argument to some ethereal plane of counterproductive mendaciousness. A sworn enemy of the United States could not manufacture a Manchurian president-bot that would serve their interests better than our current leadership.

Media Matters.

Via Atrios.

Someone has to.

Here.

No, they aren’t all political. Just the best ones.

Speaking at Al Sharpton’s National Action Network event in New York, (Senator Joe) Biden said President Bush, Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove are responsible for what he called “the politics of polarization.”

Biden said Republicans have created an environment that brings bad things to the United States.

“I would argue, since 1994 with the Gingrich revolution, just take a look at Iraq, Venezuela, Katrina, what’s gone down at Virginia Tech, Darfur, Imus. Take a look. This didn’t happen accidentally, all these things,” he said.

This is only the most outlandish of many outlandish things that have been said and writen about Monday.

Mr. Biden, and many others, would have done well to listen to Virginia’s Governor Kaine:

. . . Kaine said that he’s got ‘nothing but loathing’ for people who want make the event political.

I’ve already discussed the foolishness of thinking that gun control–or absence of gun control–might have had any bearing on this. The shooter was determined to kill. If not guns, it might have been Molotov cocktails or a car crashing through a crowd.

The Virginia Tech shootings are in no way comparable to a domestic dispute that might have ended in a fist-fight, had a gun not been in a desk drawer somewhere. Or an argument on the street that might have ended in a knifing (with, mind you, no stray bullets hitting bystanders), had someone not had a Glock in his pocket.

Then there are some who would say (but, unlike certain reporters, I will cite at least one who says) that the University should have issued a warning immediately after the first shooting. On what grounds? Does your town or city of county go into lockdown mode whenever there’s a shooting and the perp appears to have fled?

And there are others who would say that the University is somehow responsible for, heaven’s sake, not predicting the future. As I said earlier, it appears that the University and its faculty, staff, and students did everything they reasonably could have done.

The plain fact is that there is such a thing as original sin. I’m not referring to any particular theological group’s doctrine of original sin, but, rather to the larger truth:

Persons will make wrong choices and bad stuff will result from those wrong charges.

I do not mean with that statement that it is pointless to try to do anything about the bad stuff.

We should try to understand why persons choose to do wrong so that we can help them–and others–not to do wrong when we can.

We should do all we can to prevent evil when we can and to mitigate it when we must.

But, at some point, we need to say to “some who say”:

“We cannot wrap ourselves and our loved ones or anyone else in a bubble. We cannot predict what might happen tomorrow or even in the next instant (hell, I might drop dead of a heart attack before I click ‘Publish’).

“In short, my dear some who say, it’s time to grow up.”

(A nine-term what?)

. . . among thieves.

Just another one of many.

I have read his columns for years.

Now he’s leaving.

With a somewhat equivocal good-bye.

With a tip to Eschaton.

In my new job, I’ve been going through printer cartridges like mad. We continually print out documents for review by customers.

Today, I went out to buy lots of cartridges for my trusty Lexmark (which has served me well for five years and certainly repaid the $37.00 I paid for it on AOL Outlets) and came home with this:

30ppm color and tax-deductible, with cartridges that will cost half as much as what I’ve been paying.

It rocks.

Who woulda thunk?

The pro-smoking lobby got a small boost on Monday after a South Carolina woman cheated death by nipping outside the house for a cigarette.

Brenda Comer, of Rock Hill, had just finished washing the dishes at around 11am when she popped out for a gasper. At that moment, The Seattle Times dramatically recalls, “an 80-foot-tall oak tree, felled by winds gusting up to 40mph, crashed through the roof.”

(Aside: Rock Hill is just a half-hour from where my mother grew up and it’s where she went to school.)

. . . said, “The law is an ass.”

In this case, the witness was also an ass:

The first witness in a lawsuit Wednesday between two neighbors was Buddy the donkey, who walked to the bench and stared at the jury, the picture of a gentle, well-mannered creature and not the loud, aggressive animal he had been accused of being.

I heard some excerpts of the hearings today.

Abu hasn’t realized he’s dealing with the Big Boys now.

He’s clearly not up to the task.

Addendum, Later That Same Evening:

Oh, my, the illustration is well worth the subscription fee.

Susie on amnesia.

To quote my brother, “Jesus Christ! The bodies are not cold yet and this has become a political argument about gun control?”

There has been a lot of stuff flying about in the right and left blogosphere trying to turn the actions of a lone nutcase into some kind of political symbol. I was working at home most of the day, and, when I do that, I stay out of the blogosphere (or, frankly, I wouldn’t earn my hourly rate).

As I said in the comments to my initial post on this topic, this proves nothing about gun control, one way or the other. Someone who is willing to die in order to kill, frankly, cannot be stopped from killing.

It says nothing about the University’s response to the initial shooting. They had two dead and a shooter who appeared to have fled. If you look back over similar cases that have been in the news, whether in the workplace, the campus, or the school, someone who goes on a killing spree goes on a killing spree, all at once. He doesn’t disappear for two hours and then come back for more.

As far as I am concerned, the police probably thought, with good reason, that they had a “Law and Order” case on their hands, where what was needed detective work and pursuit, and saw–again, with good reason–no cause to incite panic across the community with a lockdown.

(And if I read later that some ambulance chaser has sued Tech or Blacksburg or the Virginia State Police over this, I think I shall puke.)

So to those who think this will “reopen the dialog on gun control”–sorry, wrong case. They would do better to look at what happens daily on the streets of Philadelphia, where the homicide rate so far this year has outstripped the Julian date.

And to those who think letting the students pack heat would have ended this sooner, I suggest they learn a little about guns–they are noisy, messy, dangerous, and difficult to use skillfully–and stop masturbating to visions of the Man with No Name.

And to those who think that, somehow, the victims should have tried to overpower this nutcase who came after them with guns a-blazin’, well, John Cole and Phillybits said it better than I.*

____________

*John Cole is a Pajamas Media blogger. Phillybits wouldn’t be caught dead in Pajamas Media (he appears from time to time on Kos; I don’t know whether he actually wears pajamas, and, frankly, I don’t want to know). It says something when they agree.

Eugene Robinson:

Today’s topic is credibility — specifically, recent claims by certain high-ranking present, former and perhaps soon-to-be-former Bush administration officials. The aim is to answer a simple question: Should we believe these three Bush loyalists if they tell us that rain falls down instead of up, or should we look out the window to make sure?

(snippage)

Rove, Wolfowitz and Gonzales are making the last-ditch argument of a cheating husband caught in flagrante: Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?

Ya know, every time I think the Current Federal Administration has exhausted the depths of sliminess, it surprises me with new bouts of creativity.

Tangiers, 18th and Locust, 6 p. m.

I won’t be there–I have a meeting.

Maybe they should stop worrying about our emails and pay attention to their own:

Security researchers have traced spam-sending botnet clients back to networks run by the US military.

Support Intelligence, the firm whose research on honeynets revealed that the networks of at least 28 Fortune 1000 companies contained malware-infected spam-spewing PCs, has found evidence of bots running behind military networks.

This week, Waste of Newsprint was busy claiming that Don Imus should not have been fired. (I can’t argue with him on that. The firing was clearly a commercial, not a moral decision. Had it been a moral decision, Imus would not have been on the air in the first place. Waste’s reasoning, though, seemed to have more to do with his own experiences than with Imus’s conduct.)

Nothing about Senator Thompson, though.

My father and my brother both went to Tech, as did many of their and my classmates and acquaintances.

It was the place to go if you expected to be a farmer or an engineer (though today it is much more). Indeed, the Tech alumni on the Eastern Shore of Virginia are amongst the most active and most giving of any.

When my father was there, it was all military. That’s how he ended up in France as an officer, rather than as a private. (I remember how, when I was applying to college, I got an advertisement to sign up for ROTC. My father took it out of my hands and said, “You don’t need this.”)

When my brother was there, ROTC was an option. (My brother opted out. He wasn’t particularly keen on going to Viet Nam either.) He knows well both of the buildings where the shootings took place.

I have been on campus (which is filled with glowering gray stone buildings of unimaginitive monumental architecture), so I and everyone in my family feels some relationship to what happened there today.

God be with the students, family, faculty, and staff of VPI.

_______________

It appears that the shooter saved the Commonwealth the trouble of executing him. And, in Virginia, he undoubtedly would have been executed.

And, in a case like this, I really couldn’t get worked up about it. The problem I have with the death penalty cases is the inability of the legal system to find the guilty party. (That inability, though, is so pervasive as to invalidate the death penalty on practical grounds; that’s the difference between a moral argument and a practical one.)

No, it’s not a deterrent. Anyone who so argues is a fool or a sophist. Frankly, the bad guys don’t stop in the middle of a crime and think, “Now, wait a minute. I might get the chair for this!”

Rather, some persons simply forfeit their right to remain members of the polity.

Addendum, Later that Same Evening:

Phillybits on the disgusting efforts to use this event to score political points before the damned bodies are even cold.

When I saw this

I emailed Phillybits that I was planning to do something about the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the NeoConservatives (as differentiated, I must say, from Conservatives). Then I find out today that Glenn Greenwald has beat me to it (some gyrations required to get to the full post):

. . . the Kagan/Kristol/Krauthammer war propagandists continue to say whatever they have to say in order to find a way to stay in Iraq forever. Our Serious Beltway pundits continue to embrace that reasoning because staying is the only way to avoid the reality of how wrong they were. And the disconnect between what Americans want and think, and what our government (and the “small but powerful” faction that controls it) does, continues to grow without any end in sight. On the most crucial issues faced by this country, nothing matters less to the Kagans and the Fred Hiatts (and, increasingly, to many disturbingly tepid Congressional Democrats) than the views of Americans. Within that disconnect lies most of the sicknesses ailing our political culture.

Ya know, it’s really really really wrong to start a war just because you can.

Addendum, 4/16/2007

Professor Cole.

Daniel Metcafe interviewed by Tony Mauro.