August, 2011 archive

Support efforts to air this in Eric Cantor’s district.

Via C&L.

I see that Charles Krauthammer has a column about Martin Luther King, Jr.

I’m not going to read it. I like to keep an open mind, at least on topics where I still have questions, but Krauthammer’s history of intellectual dishonesty and absolute wingnut hackery has taught me that, when he knocks on my mind’s door, to lock the damned door.

He’s not worth the effort, not even to know the latest wingnut fable.

Instead, if you wish to read about Dr. King, read the post I excerpt below written by a fellow who grew up black in the South. Here’s a snippet (emphasis in the original):

So anyway, I was having this argument with my father about Martin Luther King and how his message was too conservative compared to Malcolm X’s message. My father got really angry at me. It wasn’t that he disliked Malcolm X, but his point was that Malcolm X hadn’t accomplished anything as Dr. King had.

I was kind of sarcastic and asked something like, so what did Martin Luther King accomplish other than giving his “I have a dream speech.”

(snip)

My father told me with a sort of cold fury, “Dr. King ended the terror of living in the south.”

H/T ABL.

The good old days weren’t, unless you are Ron Paul.

Dick Polman comments on the point-counterpoint of Paul’s calling for the end of FEMA in the midst of flooding and death from a tropical storm. A snippet:

What year would this guy prefer that we live in, 1900? When there were no federal warnings of looming natural disasters, when there was no federal help for the newly homeless?

Actually, the answer to those questions is, quite literally, yes.

Here’s Paul again, arguing last Friday that Washington should go back to the good ole days, when it played no role in disaster preparedness or response: “We should be like 1900. We should be like 1940, 1950, 1960. I live on the Gulf Coast. We deal with hurricanes all the time. Galveston is in my district.”

What’s wrong with those remarks? Pretty much everything – starting with the fact that Paul didn’t even bother to visit his congressional district after it was hammered in 2005 by Hurricane Ike. Most notably was Paul’s invocation of 1900, which happens to be the year when Galveston was decimated by a hurricane that killed upwards of 8000 people (as vividly rendered in the book Isaac’s Storm).

In Libertarian World, elegant theory trumps messy reality any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

Tom Papantonio’s language in this disturbs me, not because of any profanity, but because of his use of words like “hick,” “rube,” and “bumpkin.”

As a country boy, I dislike those words and others like them, which are often used to dismiss persons because of their backgrounds, rather than engage them in discussion based on their knowledge and abilities. (That’s part of why I could never fully enjoy The Beverly Hillbillies, despite plot lines in which, just before the last commercial, the good-hearted rubes always bested the cold-hearted banker.*)

I have also found that belittling folks, however richly they may have earned it, does not win friends, but it may influence people–to hostility. Indeed, it’s likely to fire up Perry’s supporters, who are already feeling mighty aggrieved.

Nevertheless, I recommend attempting to disregard Papantonio’s intemperate language and to listen to the facts that his guest brings to the discussion. The substance starts about two minutes in:

Rick Perry is an empty boot.

______________________

*Yeah. Right.

Addendum, Comment Rescue Dept.:

Dick Destiny comments:

Late in the segment they start going on about cyberwar and Richard Clarke being a savior. Which makes ‘em a bit guilty of a bit of the same kind of alleged bad thinking they accuse Perry of.

Goodness, there’s enough to criticize Perry over without going off on Yellow Peril tangents.

He has a point.

I agree that the whole cyber-war stuff is hype designed to generate full employment for consultants.

I purposely lowered my BS filter because I could not resist the irony of Perry’s embracing one of the few companies that even the Bushies could not love.