Lean Left

Wordle
Posted by Kevin

Mindless fun. This one of my blog posts turned into a work of art. Click on the picture for the larger view.

Via Justine Larbalestier

June 19th, 2008 | General, Writing | 3 comments

Better Grammer Through Violence
Posted by Kevin

1. This is funny
2. Since when do we not put two spaces after a period? I was taught that through junior high and high school, in two different states no less.

Via Making Light.

December 14th, 2007 | General, Writing, Humor | 2 comments

Beacon Broadside
Posted by Kevin

So I get this email saying that someone has a blog they want me to check out. No big deal, happens, even to relatively small blog fish like us, every so often. I usually ignore them, mostly out of a lack of time. I figure if it is interesting enough, I’ll stumble across it in the natural course of my reading. This was different for two reasons. One, the emailer actually offered me advice on getting rid of the track back spam. Second, and more importantly, she was upfront about the blog being a publisher publicity blog. But she also said that they tried to be different. I’m a huge book geek, so the combination of good will form the good advice and curiosity got the better of me. And I am glad it did.

The Beacon Broadside is a publisher’s blog, no doubt about that. But they aren’t just a publicity blog, not in the usual sense. The posts are mostly by their authors, and they are usually pretty interesting. There is one by Carol Joffe (who, by the way, wrote a fantastic book. It literally changed the way I looked at abortion politics and Roe v. Wade) about abstinence only sex education. There is a very interesting piece about Chanukah in Israel and the meaning of the holiday by a foreign rights agent. There is a good overview of the differences in the national culture and the meaning of the Romney and Kennedy religion speeches by the author of a book on the Religious Right and its focus on the judiciary. What there isn’t is a lot of hard sell, buy me now, here’s a contest desperation masquerading as marketing. They have their authors write about subjects that interest them and let their writing do the marketing. It’s a very good idea and should be a template for how publishers do blogs.

So it goes on the blog roll, both becasue the concept is interesting and, so far, I’ve liked the posts I have read.

December 13th, 2007 | Bloggin, Writing | 2 comments

An Analogy Bad Enough to Make Baby Jesus Cry
Posted by Kevin

From Farhad Manjoo’s otherwise very good Kindle review:

“E-ink come at a cost, though: This display responds more slowly than a mime at a parliamentary debate.”

November 29th, 2007 | Writing, Technology | 2 comments

Madeleine L’Engle Has Died
Posted by Kevin

I don’t have any profound comments about her place in literature or her works. I just know that they were very good and brought me a great deal of pleasure in my childhood. We should all do so well.

Via Scalzi.

September 7th, 2007 | Writing, Culture, Books | one comment

There Is a Test of Common Sense and Intelligence; If You Fail, They Give You the Job
Posted by Kevin

There are times when I really, really hate Slate. Like, when I saw this:

Few movies get the second chance to enter the public’s consciousness that Primary Colors now has. But with Hillary Clinton running for the White House, Mike Nichols’ 1997 adaptation of Joe Klein’s sleazy roman à clef about Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign deserves another look—if not for its political insight, then for what it might tell us about the current Clinton campaign.

No. No, a fictional account of a presidential campaign from fifteen years ago written by a reporter with no particular connection to the people he based his story upon can tell us absolutely nothing about a real person running an actual campaign today. It’s insulting to their readers to even suggest that it can. Movies can talk about particular arch-types or the broad sweep of society and culture, but they cannot gives us any meaningful information about a particular person. People are complicated. much more complicated than any movie could ever be. No movie can capture everything important about a person, an no movie character “based on” a real person can ever tell us anything important about that model for the character. The real person is lost in the demands of shooting schedules and running time and dramatic necessity. The Statons are caricatures at worst, poor, pale shadows at best, of the Clintons. That should be obvious. Sadly, it appears its not, at least not at Slate.

And, sadly enough, the article gets worse:

he moment shows off the brains Emma Thompson brings to the role, but it also suggests the dilemma facing Hillary Clinton. If she learned from the gaffes she made during the ‘92 campaign (particularly her dumb remark about Tammy Wynette’s great “Stand by Your Man”), she has never seemed fully at ease with the smiling public face she has adopted since then. For Hillary Clinton, that public face, the pressure to make nice and act nice, the constant knowledge that women have to prove themselves capable but not act “manly,” may be a distraction from the real work of politics. The catch, of course, is that the public face has to be winning if she’s ever going to have the chance to do that work.

Well, that may be true, but tis only true if people liek this reporter continue to place appearance above substance. Spend more time covering health care plans and less time covering how candidates look on stage and I am rather sure the “public face” of Hillary will be fine.

And this, this is just dumb:

But the deeper problem of Primary Colors isn’t that it trades in gossip but that it endorses a brand of idealism that’s as destructive to politics as corruption. Liberals (and I speak as one) have an unfortunate tendency to confuse compromise with corruption, to mistake the ballot box for the confessional and assume the choice made therein should leave our souls clean. (That’s why so many of us have gone off the deep end and voted for Nader.) The challenge the Clintons have always posed to liberals is the challenge of growing up and realizing how things get done. It’s the inability to accept the compromises of politics that strands Libby Holden in her Neverland (Kathy Bates’ performance strikes the movie’s only genuinely tragic notes).

Put aside the “so many of us” nonsense, and put aside the writer’s flawed understanding of the end of the movie and focus on the argument about liberals and their relationship to the Clintons. It’s as if this person has never heard of NAFTA or Welfare Reform, or the death penalty or the Iraq war vote, or any of a dozen other issues where the Clintons have been to the right of progressives and Democrats. But opposition to them and those policies cannot possible come from the principled belief in certain policies and plans for the country. No, it must come from some strange, childish Clinton Derangement Syndrome. This paragraph is particularly odd in that it is written in the middle of a primary campaign when Democrats don;t have to decide between the Democrat and the Republican but rather between candidates with different visions of what Democrats should stand for and how they should achieve their goals. Its the one place in the electoral system where voting close to your ideals is actually appropriate and effective. Arguing that liberals - -or anyone - -should compromise at the level required in a national election at the primary level is an odd and borderline condescending argument.

And, again, the writer’s reading of the movie is flawed. It isn’t the inability to accept compromise that dooms Holden. It is the realization that the Stantons are on the verge of completely abandoning a core principle that dooms Holden. When Stanton asks toward the end of the movie “But I passed the re-make. Which grade do I get, teach?” the movie is acknowledging that Holden was right, that the Stanton’s first choice was so far from acceptable to their followers that they deserved to lose their support. Their decision — prompted by the loss of their friend — to go another route, to fight back in a more appropriate fashion, is the movie’s “happy ending” so to speak. The Stantons fought back, but, in the end, they didn’t give away all of their core values to do so. It seems odd that someone could argue, then, that the movie means that the liberals should vote for Hilary Clinton in the primary no matter what how far form their positions she may be.

But, then, I’m not the one who thinks a fifteen years old movie written by a stranger provides some sort of window into the soul of Hillary Clinton.

September 5th, 2007 | Politics, Writing, Culture, Media | no comments

Aaah! Aaah! The Stupidity! . . . It Burns Us!! . . .
Posted by KTK

The New York Times  Business section (so, OK, expectations aren’t high, but still . . .) has an article today on a lawsuit against the manufacturers of the artificial sweetener “Splenda”. The issue hinges to some extent on how the sweetener is synthesized, and the reporter tries to explain this horrifically complex process to the reader. It’s not a pretty sight.

April 6th, 2007 | General, Politics, School, Economics, Environment, Writing, Culture, Science, Health, Education, Media, Food & Cooking, Technology, News & Current Events, Math | 5 comments

False Equivalence
Posted by KTK

The Ann Coulter “faggot” incident has set the right-wing blogs buzzing with commendable attempts to distance themselves from her and denounce her incessant hateful gibbering. But some have claimed that it’s unfair to pin this sort of behavior on right-wingers, that lefties do the same thing or worse.

Of course there are inflammatory statements made by the left. But you don’t hear the kind of truly vile hatefulness you constantly hear on the right, and you certainly don’t hear it as commonly, or on a routine basis from major figures who are either in office or appear in prominent roles at political functions and in the media. Patterico, however, tries to disprove this (fairly self-evident) claim by presenting a roll call of “true hate speech” from “prominent leftist figures”. You can go read the list if you want to; the quotes are mostly accurate. It’s hard not to notice a couple of things about his collection, though.

Most obviously, a considerable number of sources on it could in no way be considered “prominent leftist figures”. Several are professional comedians who are not particularly associated with politics (Chris Rock - often called conservative for his criticism of low-income blacks; Conan O’Brian; Craig Kilborn); some are totally marginal figures regardless of their politics (Charlie Brooker, a British TV reviewer; Dan Savage, an alternative-paper sex columnist; the St. Petersburg, Florida, Democratic Club [?!]); some are simply not leftist or liberal (Louis Farrakan?! - when was the last time you heard the Nation of Islam called “leftist”?).

More to the point, after scouring both sides of the Atlantic as far back as he could reach, he could only find two dozen quotations, from 21 figures (he gets Farrakhan in there 4 times for effect - it reminds of Warren Beatty’s line in “Bulworth”: “I’m sure they put something bad about Farrakhan in there for you!”). And how far back, exactly, did he have to go to find them? Well, here are the dates of the quotes he cites, in order:

• Nina Totenberg: 1995
• Julianne Malveaux: 1994 (who?)
• Richard Cohen: 1999
• Craig Kilborn: 2000
• St. Petersburg Democratic Club: 2004
• Conan O’Brien: 1998
• Chris Rock: 1998
• Spike Lee: 1999
• James Carville: 1998, if not earlier
• Alexander Cockburn: 2000
• Dan Savage: 2000
• Robert Byrd: 2001
• Jesse Jackson: 1984
• Louis Farrakhan: 1995, 1994, 2000, 1994
• Howard Dean: 2005
• Charlie Brooker: 2004
• Pete Stark: 2003
• Earl Hilliard: 2002 (not proven he wrote the flyer in question)
• Markos: 2004
• Atrios: 2006 (a direct quote of a joke from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy)
• Lou Hendra: 2006

I can’t help but notice some of them are as much as 23 years old. On average, they are almost 8 years old. Barely a third were spoken within this century (counting from 2001) - only two are within the past year. This is the “leftist” scourge Patterico trumpets. He’s proven his point: the “leftists” of America and Europe (defined to include religious reactionaries, comedians, and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) do say rather undisciplined things about conservatives . . . once a year, on average.

By way of contrast, this rom just the latest Ann Coulter column alone, before her CPAC meltdown:

Liberals want mass starvation and human devastation.

They want us to starve the productive sector of fossil fuel and allow the world’s factories to grind to a halt.

There are more reputable scientists defending astrology than defending “global warming,” but liberals simply announce that the debate has been resolved in their favor and demand that we shut down all production.

When are liberals going to break the news to their friends in Darfur that they all have to starve to death to save the planet?

“Global warming” is the left’s pagan rage against mankind.

Liberals have always had a thing about eliminating humans. [Among “liberals”, here, she includes Stalin and Hitler]

Margaret Sanger wanted to eliminate poor blacks

Rachel Carson wanted to eliminate Africans

Paul Ehrlich wants to eliminate all humans

global warming is the most insane, psychotic idea liberals have ever concocted to kill off “useless eaters.”

If we have to live in a pure “natural” environment like the Indians, then our entire transcontinental nation can only support about 1 million human beings. Sorry, fellas — 299 million of you are going to have to go.

[Environmentalists] never intended for us to survive.

[According to liberals,] [t]he entire fuel-guzzling, tacky, beer-drinking, NASCAR-watching middle class with their over-large families will simply have to die.

Yep - you can find fully half as many quotes, twice as insane, in one single column by Ann Coulter - and this one written and published while she was still the right’s darling - as in 23 years’ worth of selective quotation from every dubious “liberal” on two continents. And that doesn’t even touch on Ronald Reagan, Pat Buchanan, Newt Gingrich, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Grover Norquist, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney . . . . Patterico tells us it’s just the same thing. What do you think we’d get if we went back over 23 years of right-wing hate?

Update: Patterico, on his blog, points out that the Conan O’Brien attribution is wrong; it was something said by Alec Baldwin on O’Brien’s show. I can’t see that that changes anything about the basic debate.

March 5th, 2007 | General, Politics, Writing, Culture | 35 comments

Coulter and the Right: When Does “Consensus” Become a Mob?
Posted by KTK

By now I think everyone is aware of Ann Coulter’s latest outrage: her “witticism” (in her case, I guess it was one) to the effect that she couldn’t talk about John Edwards because she’d be criticized for using the word “faggot”. She was, and more vigorously than probably she, or anyone else, expected.

It’s refreshing to see the immediate negative reaction across the right-wing blogs and media. There seems to be little disagreement that what she said was inexcusable, and there are widespread calls for her not to be encouraged in such behavior. (The punditry is a bit ahead of the rank and file, here; the CPAC audience she was speaking to applauded her and then stood in line for two hours afterward to get her autograph. And I doubt we’ll see her book fall off the best-seller lists just because she’s vicious or disgusting - they never have before.) Some of the reaction is clearly self-interested; a common complaint is that Coulter is making conservatives look bad, not that homophobia is bad in itself. And there are the usual failures of comprehension and perspective: many right-wingers compared this incident to the case of Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan’s organized hounding out of their jobs on Edwards’s campaign for supposedly offensive language on their personal blogs. Nonetheless, there was an unquestioning sense that this kind of talk is no longer acceptable (in stark contrast to complacency over previous incidents, such as Dick Armey’s “Barney Fag”, or Jerry Falwell’s blaming gays and feminists for 9/11). That alone is progress.

But the issue does raise familiar questions of how to deal with offensive speech, and especially offensiveness in a public or quasi-official setting. (Coulter does not represent any organization, but she was an invited speaker of a conservative group that surely knew of her offensive behavior in the past; she is also wildly popular among the conservatives who have made her among the most in-demand right-wing speakers and have made her books best-sellers. She clearly embodies a popular point of view and is given credence in that role by conservatives’ endorsement of her speech and behavior to date.) How does one react to such an offensive message without turning that into an attack on the speaker? And when the speaker clearly is never going to change their ways, how can one shun their message without turning that into ostracism?

The welcome condemnation of Coulter’s statement has bloomed into calls for her to be banned from talk shows or magazines. It is beginning to look like another example of conservative mob behavior, triggered by one incident, overrunning even people whose points of view they otherwise endorse - another “Zumboization”, in other words. Many of the right-wing blogs have called for conservative organizations and publications to shun Coulter from now on.

Aside from the superficiality of the response - I have seen many calls for Coulter’s ostracism, but not one for the denunciation of homophobia or right-wing hate in general; the intention, again, seems to be mitigating embarrassment, not really reflecting on the conservative values that made Coulter a star in the first place - I have to say I am concerned that this is not the right way to deal with the issue. As much as I despise Coulter, as much as I would like to see her and all her fans (including the critics who are now silently saying ” . . . but, you know, she has a point . . .”) gone from the public arena, I don’t want to see any more Zumbos, any more mobs, any more secondary boycotts or harassment or blacklists. To be consistent with my position on Zumbo, whom I didn’t really care that much about to begin with, and with that on Amanda and Melissa, who fall into an entirely other category, I must ask for the same consideration for Coulter, whom I truly loathe.

The easiest way to explain is to quote an exchange from another blog where I commented on this. Right-Wing Nuthouse comes down hard on Coulter (from the “avoid embarrassment” perspective, that is), and offers the following suggestions for dealing with her:

I urge everyone – right and left – to take the following actions:

1. Never write another blog post about Ann Coulter no matter how outrageous, cruel, or bigoted her language.

2. Immediately write the Presidents of Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN demanding that they refuse to schedule Coulter on any show for any reason on their networks.

3. Write the editor of Human Events and demand that they drop her column.

4. If her column appears in your local newspaper, write a letter to the editor demanding that they drop her column.

5. If you see her writings in any on line or print publication, write the editor and demand that they stop carrying her columns.

6. Any upcoming forum in which she is scheduled as a speaker or panel participant, write a letter to the organizers and make it clear that the reason you are not attending is due to Coulter’s presence.

The goal is to starve the witch of the attention she craves. I’ll have more on this later today, including an on-line petition we can sign and send to the cable nets and a report on my progress.

My response, in comments, was the following:

I appreciate and admire your inclination to roust Coulter from conservative ranks (though . . . I think she is only the tip of the iceberg). But I am uncomfortable with boycotts and protests.

. . . I think it is perfectly appropriate to shun or boycott the products (books, speeches, etc.) of someone whose ideas you disagree with. I am uncomfortable with secondary boycotts – threats against those who merely do business with the offender – and demands for others to shun such a person. If the right of free speech includes the right to say hateful things – which it does, even for Ann Coulter – then it must include the right, not to be heard or agreed-with, but to say them without fear of harassment or retribution other than the disapprobation that the ideas themselves justify.

In the case of people whose product is speech – i.e., writers and speechmakers – the question is a little trickier, because to shun their products is to shun their speech, and to request that publications find better writers, simply because you want to read better ideas, is essentially to request that they fire offensive writers because you don’t like the ideas they promote. It’s hard here to draw a line between rejecting a professional writer’s ideas and seeking financial retribution for their having spoken them. But I think that line at least includes not organizing a mass protest to demand that they be fired.

Certainly no decent person should read or listen to Ann Coulter. Reasonably enough, people can indicate to publishers or program directors that they want better ideas to be presented. But I think there is a difference between saying you won’t read a publication because of the content it carries and demanding that they fire one of their contributors because you don’t like that person’s ideas. (It’s understood that in most cases an opinion writer’s ideas are not endorsed by the publication itself. That distinction does carry some weight, and should offer the publisher some protection.) That distinction, between an expression of opinion and a demand for appeasement, exists even if the end result – the publication will lose a reader if they continue to carry a certain author – is the same. And threatening boycotts of publications or programs because of just one person they carry is a means of using the economic leverage of a large corporation to give your personal grievance a heft it does not deserve.

Although these distinctions may be small, I would suggest that, while I endorse your point #1 above, points #s 3, 4, and 5 should be reworded from “demand that they drop” to “indicate you will no longer read them as long as they carry” the offending writer. Point #2, I think, is similar: the point to be made is that there are better guests to schedule, that you want to see them, and that you will stop watching the show if it does not improve; putting it in the language of “demand” simply makes it sound like you are being intolerant of them for tolerating Coulter’s intolerance, which rather muddies the moral issue.

Point #6 is complex: I don’t know if it’s really a good idea to boycott programs at which hateful people appear. There may still be many other good people on the program, and why cut yourself off from them? To the extent that attendance implies approval of a particular speaker, that is a problem, but one that it seems to me should be worked out case-by-case. But the idea of punishing entire institutions or programs because you disagree with certain speakers is a dangerous one – it smacks of the refusal by the Eisenhower administration to allow Columbia University to hire Bertrand Russell, or the threats today to defund public colleges because they invite controversial speakers. If it’s true that the right wing hardly needs more hateful crazies, it’s also true that they hardly need more McCarthyism.

March 3rd, 2007 | General, Bloggin, Writing, Culture, Media, News & Current Events | 14 comments

Talent on Loan From God
Posted by Kevin

Why doesn’t hilzoy have a job writing for Time or Newsweek?

I admire Peter Beinart’s willingness to think about what he got wrong, and why. But while I think that he’s right to say that we can’t be the country the Iraqis and South Africans wanted us to be — a country wise enough to liberate other countries by force — there’s another mistake lurking in the train of thought he describes. Namely:

It’s not just that we aren’t the country Beinart wanted to think we were; it’s that war is not the instrument he thought it was.

Go read the whole thing; that quote is the least of the piece.

February 28th, 2007 | General, Writing, Iraq | 3 comments

Book Review: Dreaming in Code
Posted by Kevin

When I was a kid, my parents had a simple system for paying bills. They had a cheap, plastic bill holder — a hunk of puke colored plastic with fins of various sizes rising from it’s base. Bills to be paid went on the left half of the holder, already paid ones went on the right, waiting for stamps. The bills themselves could be anything — actual bills from a real company, notes written on scraps of paper to remind my parents to donate to the charity of the day, even bank statements to serve as a reminder to move money form checking to savings, or vice versa. It worked very well for my parents and they still use it — having replaced the ugly bill holder with slots in their elegant computer desk — to this day. It is also a system that is very hard to replicate in a computer.

Computers and human beings do not think the same way. For a human, concepts like “next Tuesday” and “a meeting every other week, on Thursdays” and “this piece of paper is both a piece of mail and a reminder to put a check in the mail on the 13th” are both easy to remember and easy to understand. The same is not true for a computer. Computers store data differently than the human brain and making certain associations is not as easy for programing languages as it is for human beings. This fact, that the human brain isn’t really a biological computer, is the cause of almost all frustration people have with software. We expect our tools to “think” in the same fashion we do, and they don’t. Dreaming in Code, by Scott Rosenberg, is is the story the failure of programmers and engineers to bridge the gap between they way we think and what our tools can do, using the Chandler project as an example.

I want Chandler, but I will probably never see it. As described in the book, the Chandler group wanted to a create a personal information manager that would store and manipulate data in a fashion much more similar to how we hold information in our brains. In traditional programs, data is separated into categories or “silos”. Email is one kind of data, and so goes in one spot. An appointment on a calender is another kind of data and so goes in another. But as we already discussed, humans don’t operate like that. That email form my boss is also a change in schedule. That status report is also a reminder that the widget problem needs to be solved before we can decide on a release schedule. That calendar appointment is also a mile high stack of paperwork I have to get done before the meeting with the security audit. In small doses, this is easy for me to remember. It is progressively harder to do the more I have to remember, which is why we use programs to help us remember in the first place. But due to the discrete nature of computer data, building in those kinds of relationships among disparate kinds of data is not easy to do. Eventually,you pay a price in performance, in data size and robustness, and in user experience. Rosenberg details how the Chandler team encountered and dealt with — or failed to deal with — those problems. He also, at appropriate points, ties in the decisions that the Chandler team made or fell into to past discussions and fads about the best way to create software.

This is an area where the book really shines. Making software is still hard to do. Its rare for a large project to come in on time, under budget, and with the original feature set. This has been true since the invention of large scale software projects, right after the Second World War, and millions of tress and billions of electrons have given their lives in the search for why this is so. Rosenberg ties the Chandler team’s current problems to discussion of programming efficiency and software engineering from the past, using their problems to bring to life the consequences of popular theories and methodologies of software creation. None of these methodologies or theories has been anything resembling a large scale success. There are many reasons for this, from the iinabality to accurately and objectively measure programmer performance (this is a rant of a separate post, but if you are trying to measure programmer efficiency by some measure like lines of codes or number of bugs reported or fixed, then you are setting yourself up for a colossal failure) to the difficulty in brining new people onto a software project. Rosenberg uses the individual experiences of the Chandler people to illuminate a given set of theories, weaving their personal frustrations and triumphs as a touchstone to a more academic discussion of the history and qualities of software engineering methodologies. It is a very effective tactic, the difference between telling you that Picasso could paint and showing you a print.

This is not just a book for programmers. Anyone who designs, writes code, or manages programmers will be well served by reading the book, of course. Rosenberg has written a kind of meta case study. Not only does Rosenberg highlight what went wrong and right (and much more went wrong than went right), he also highlights what those failures mean for various software engineering theories and methodologies. It is an illuminating look at the topic. But this is also a tail for everyone else. More and more of our lives our intimately tied to software. Everything from how we get our entertainment to how we do our work to how our cars’ safety systems function is dependent upon software. The soul of Rosenberg’s book is the struggles of the Chandler team members to take what happens in their heads and turn it into a software. Understanding that struggle is one of the best ways to come to terms with the failures, compromises, and limitations of the software that runs your life.

January 29th, 2007 | Reviews, Economics, Writing, Science, Books, Technology | 3 comments

Science Writing
Posted by Kevin

This is cool: a book collecting the best science blog writing of the past year. There is some rather extraordinary science writing on blogs. Something about the medium, I think, seems to encourage scientists and science journalists to create some very, very good popularizations of science issues. I am looking forward to my copy.

January 16th, 2007 | Writing, Science | no comments

Hitchens: Poor Propoganda
Posted by Kevin

Under the guise of telling us what Jefferson thought of Islam, Hitchens engages in a slightly more subtle smear job of Congressman Ellison who is a … Muslim. Shh! Don’t tell anyone. Like with most of Hitchens writings, it’s a bit difficult to pierce together what he is trying to say, primarily because the headline bears no resemblance to the actual contents of the piece. But if you read it in its entirety, it really amounts to nothing more than an attack on two things: Islam and Ellison. And, being Hitchens, it chews up far too many words for such a simple argument and leaves out far too much of reality to be taken seriously.

Let us start near the beginning, with the clearest attack on Ellison, his past association with the Nation of Islam:

If Ellison now wants to use his faith to justify an appeal to pluralism and inclusiveness and diversity, he needs to repudiate the Nation of Islam, and in much more unambivalent terms than any I have yet heard from him.

Here is how Ellison has repudiated the Nation of Islam:

In Ellison’s letter, he denounced the Nation of Islam and Farrakhan, writing “I wrongly dismissed concerns that they [Farrakhan’s remarks] were anti-Semitic. They were and are anti-Semitic and I should have come to that conclusion earlier than I did.”[75] He explained his previous views, saying that he, “did not adequately scrutinize the positions and statements of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan, and Khalid Muhammed”[70]. He also stated that “any kind of discrimination and hate are wrong. This has always been my position”

That is a pretty strong condemnation; strong enough, in fact, to win the support of his local Jewish newspaper. Technically, Hitchens hasn’t lied here. He may, indeed, not be satisfied with the condemnation. (Though one has to wonder, after reading Ellison’s words, just what would satisfy Hitchens. Perhaps if Ellison would ritually gut himself with a pair of pruning shears on the steps of the Capital while chanting “Nation of Islam bad! Bush is my God! Hitchens is the new Orwell!” over and over again, maybe that would satisfy Hitchens) But he by using the term “unambivalent” and by not quoting Ellison himself he is clearly trying to create the impression that Ellison has not repudiated the Nation of Islam strongly. Any reasonable person who read Ellison’s actual condemnation of the group would know that wasn’t the case. Hitchens is clearly being dishonest and being dishonest in a fashion that can only be described as a smear.

But Hitchens is not done. No, he has bigger targets in his sights: an entire religion. Hitchens then sketches out a brief history of the Barbary Pirates and their relationship to the United States. He then points out that one envoy of the Pirates stated that the Quaran supported piracy. All of this is the case of course, but, curiously, Hitchens fails to point out that such views were hardly uncommon at them time — especially among Christians and especially among our slave holding president, Jefferson. More importantly, it, like the slam at Ellison, has no bearing on what the article is purportedly about: Jefferson’s opinion of Islam. Hitchens himself admits that:

And as far as I can find, he [Jefferson] avoided any comment on the religious dimension of the war.

So, why bring it up in a piece that is supposedly about Jefferson really thought about Islam? And why bring it up shorn of any historical context? And why bring up Quaranic justification for slavery in a discussion of Jefferson without discussing how it compared to Jefferson’s own opinions on slavery and the Christian justifications for slavery from that same time period? This is an obvious attempt to make Islam look bad to modern readers, to associate that feeling of dislike with the Muslim Ellison, and to reinforce the earlier smear of Ellison’s beliefs. Hitchens has already attempted to create the false impression that Ellison has not condemned the Nation of Islam, and thus might harbor some sympathy for its loathsome views. If Islam does uniquely provide religious justification for piracy and slavery, as Hitchens implies by the use of selective historical amnesia, then maybe Ellison thinks piracy and slavery are justified too. After all, didn’t Hitchens just say he supported the Nation of Islam’s horrible views?

I wonder of Hitchens thinks he is being clever, or if he realizes the dishonesty that is at the center of his little hit piece? Hitchens is being so transparent in his attacks and is so obviously presenting a distorted picture of the times in question, that it is almost insulting to his readers. If slate is going to stoop to printing the works of cheap propagandists, is it really too much to ask that they hire one with some pride in his craft?

January 10th, 2007 | Politics, Religion, Writing | 7 comments

Orson Scott Card, Empire, Ender’s Game, Authorship and Extremism
Posted by Kevin

The latest form Orson Scott Card is getting quite a bit of well deserved mockery from the liberal blogosphere and quite a bit of understandable praise form the right. The book, a story about a leftist Army taking over New York City and precipitating a civil war, is badly written right wing wish fulfillment. In appears to contain every lazy stereotype and fantasy the more deranged on the right harbor about their neighbors on the left. The fact that Instapundit loves it is telling. Brad and Roy have the best takes, as usual, but I have seen more than a few references to the rumor that Card didn’t write his best novel, Ender’s Game. I don’t buy it: Card has always had streak of militarism and “kill em all and let God sort em out” in his writing, even in Ender’s Game.

The best argument for Card not having written Ender’s Game is just how much better it is than almost anything Card has written since. In fact, Card’s technical writing ability seems to have steadily declined. Just take this awful, awful passage from his new book:

You look pissed off,” said Malich.

“Yeah,” said Cole. “The terrorists are crazy and scary, but what really pisses me off is knowing that this will make a whole bunch of European intellectuals very happy.”

“They won’t be so happy when they see where it leads. They’ve already forgotten Sarajevo and the killing fields of Flanders.”

“I bet they’re already ‘advising’ Americans that this is where our military ‘aggression’ inevitably leads, so we should take this as a sign that we need to change our policies and retreat from the world.”

“And maybe we will,” said Malich. “A lot of Americans would love to slam the doors shut and let the rest of the world go hang.”

“And if we did,” said Cole, “who would save Europe then? How long before they find out that negotiations only work if the other guy is scared of the consequences of not negotiating? Everybody hates America till they need us to liberate them.”

“You’re forgetting that nobody cares what Europeans think except a handful of American intellectuals who are every bit as anti-American as the French,” said Malich.

This is representative: chapter two is nothing more than an extended Mary Sue sequence where Card’s alter ego really sticks it to all those liberal, American hating hoity-toity professors. The whole thing almost makes me pity Card. Almost. There is nothing remotely that bad in Ender’s Game. But I don’t take that as evidence for the contention that Card didn’t write Ender’s Game In fact, the sample chapters actually work to tie Empire back to his first work.

Put aside for the moment the stale dialogue, the horrible clichés, and the fantasy about Europeans and “anti-American” liberals. This conversation happens literally a few minutes after a terrorist attack kills most members of the Executive — including the President and the Vice President — and a few moments after the two men involved in this had decided that the Army, and perhaps they themselves, were going to be framed for the attack. And yet what really makes them mad is the fact that European intellectuals will think that this proves they are right about the value of military might in the world. Real people don’t act like this. Real people would be worried about their country, about the possibility of more attacks, about the safety of their friends and family, about the possibility that they were going to be framed for the greatest terrorist attack in the country’s history, about what they should be doing right now to help put things back together again. But Card hasn’t written real people; he has written talking point spewing robots. And Empire is not a real story, it is a polemic to the joys of Might:

“Nothing,” said Reuben immediately. “They respect us now because we have a dangerous military. They adopt our culture because we’re rich. If we were poor and unarmed, they’d peel off American culture like a snake shedding its skin.”

“Yes!” said Torrent. The other students registered as much surprise as Reuben felt, though Reuben did not let it show. Torrent agreed with the soldier?

Remember that — there is nothing good or valuable in American ideals or culture. They only thing that keeps America from being ignored is the power of her military. Might is right, Might is good, Might is all. It is a similar message to at least one of the themes that runs through Ender’s Game.

As a brief synopsis of the relevant portions of Ender’s Game:(and apologies for the lack of quotes — I don’t have the text in front of me) Ender is a child the military raises to be the ultimate strategists and battlefield commander and thus lead the Earth to victory over its alien enemies. Ender accomplishes this by committing genocide on the aliens, genocide that the military has maneuvered him into committing. Before that, however, the military manipulates Ender’s life so that he needlessly kills two boys (though Ender doesn’t know they are dead until long after the fact) and that he is abused and oppressed by others in order to impress upon him the fact that only overwhelming violence is the answer. When Ender is given his first student command, Ender treats his best subordinate in the same fashion in order to get similar results. At no point is any of this played as even morally ambiguous: the torture of Ender is justified, as are the deaths, as is Ender’s own torment of his subordinate as Good and Right and Necessary. Ender is explicitly forgiven his actions several time sin the text — even the genocide, even the murder of one boy where he clearly went farther than was required to take himself out of danger — in part because he was manipulated, but in part because overwhelming, destructive violence is a necessary part of human and human/alien relations. Even the men who manipulated Ender into genocide and murder are exonerated both by the text and the courts of Earth. Might is right, Might is good, even if Might is not yet all. There are other themes in the book, and the question of genocide is dealt with with more complexity than it might seem from this summary, but the

A common thread runs through Ender’s Game and Empire, then, even if it is much more developed in Empire. And that last is the primary difference: Ender’s Game is a story; Empire is not. Ender’s Game tries to be a good story; that is, it tries to build realistic characters and have them react realistically to the situations they find themselves in. It attempts to mirror how real humans behave because it is, like all good stories, interested in telling us something about people. Empire does not have real characters because it is not interested in telling us a story. It is interested in making a political point and it will make that point, realism,. believability, character be damned. The difference between Empire and Ender’s Game are not the result of different authors. They are the results of differences in authorial intent.

Okay, so this is OSC’s entry into neo-con porn, a badly written book that amounts to nothing more than material for the 101st Keyboarders to wank off to. Why spend so much time on it, aside from the unintentionally hilarious prose? Because I believe the distance between Ender’s Game and Empire illustrates one of Dave Neiwart’s points: extremism can be mainstreamed.

In the late eighties, Orson Card was a writer with authoritarian leanings who wrote decent stories. Then came sixteen years of Rush Limbaugh and his ilk’s demonization of the left wing. That demonization only increased after 9/11, turning in some cases to explicitly eliminiationist rhetoric; Dave’s site has the details. And at the end of the time, Orson Card has morphed into full blown right wing lunatic who writes a political polemic flecked with spittle and pours bile on leftists of all stripes. Now, a person’s growth is never as simple as A caused B, and obviously I am not privy to what goes on in Card’s head. But the similarities are so striking as to be compelling. Leftists, in the world of Limbaugh and Coulter and Malkin, are vile things: anti-Military, closed-minded, smug, superior, elitist, anti-American, violent, incapable of reasoned though, practically traitors. Leftists, in Empire, are vile things: anti-Military, closed-minded, smug, superior, elitist, anti-American, violent, incapable of reasoned though, actually traitors. America, in the world of Limbaugh and Coulter and Malkin, is always right (even when it acts as an Empire it’s not really acting as an Empire) and its correct course of action is always to show the world who is boss. America, in Empire, is always right (even when it acts as an Empire it’s not really acting as an Empire) and its correct course of action is always to show the world who is boss.

In just five short chapters, Empire contains almost every vicious strawmen that people like Limbaugh have constructed to represent the Left in their minds and the minds of their followers. Ender’s Game had none that I can think of, and was only tentatively authoritarian. It is possible, of course, that Card came to his conclusions about liberals years after that Limbaugh and his imitators built strawmen that look precisely like those conclusions. But forgive me if I think that the road from Ender’s Game to Empire went through the cesspool that is the world of Limbaugh and Coulter and Malkin.

November 30th, 2006 | Politics, Writing, Culture, Terrorism, Books | 36 comments

Ignorance Week
Posted by KTK

Is it just me, or does Banned Books Week seem to come like three times a year? I guess the holiday really is annual; it’s the stupidity that’s chronic. Anyway, go ahead, click the link, and chuckle at the chuckleheads who tried to ban It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health and It’s So Amazing! A Book about Eggs, Sperm, Birth, Babies, and Families - in both cases for “sex education” and “sexual content”. (Yes, they protested sex education in sex education books. I wonder if there’s some clown out there somewhere who protests the Kelly Blue Book for “automobile content”?) While you’re at it, follow some of the helpful tips to show support for freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of conscience.

Redneck Mother got it just right:

I always enjoy Banned Books Week. The lists of most-banned books are a guide to what the kids and I should be reading, because I don’t like censorship and because anything that scares the timid must be worth reading. . . .

Hat tip: Jill at Feministe

September 27th, 2006 | General, Politics, Legal Issues, Church & State, Religion, Writing, Culture, Media, Books, News & Current Events | 2 comments

And On and On and On …
Posted by Kevin

I find this unaccountably amusing.

September 26th, 2006 | I do too have a life, Writing, Humor | no comments

A Hole in The City
Posted by Kevin

Since ABC thought to debase today with a fictional political hit piece, I thought I would share my favorite piece of art about 9/11 as an antidote. It’s a kind of lament and a kind of affirmation; sad but not broken. It’s also kind of a ghost story. But I suppose every story about tragedy is a kind of ghost story. It’s well worth the few minutes it will take you to read.

September 11th, 2006 | Writing, Terrorism | one comment

TNR’s Odd Sense of Responsibility
Posted by Kevin

So TNR has fired Lee Siegel. Siegel, the man who coined the term “blogofacism”, obsessed over baseball hats, and accused a Slate writer of being a pedophile got caught using a sock puppet to support himself in the comments of his TNR blog:

After an investigation, The New Republic has determined that the comments in our Talkback section defending Lee Siegel’s articles and blog under the username “sprezzatura” were produced with Siegel’s participation. We deeply regret misleading our readers. Lee Siegel’s blog will no longer be published by TNR, and he has been suspended from writing for the magazine.

Franklin Foer
Editor, The New Republic

Before anyone feels too sorry for the man, remember - - he accused another person of being a pedophile. And then there was his attempt to ruin Ezra Klein:

I’ve never been entirely sure what happened next, why that throwaway line ignited such white hot rage. Plenty of folks were mocking Siegel’s inanity, but something about my punch really wounded him. Here’s what came the next day:

“One madly ambitious blogger, who has been alternately trying to provoke and fawning over TNR writers in an attempt to break down the door–I’m too polite to mention any names–even asked who it was at TNR who gave me “the keys to a blog.” This after his mom sent me a very sweet private email complimenting me on something I’d written and appealing to me to get in touch with her little boy! Tsk tsk. Go to your room.”

Awhile back, my mother had followed a link off my site to Siegel’s. Unbeknownst to me, she liked what he wrote, and sent him a complimentary e-mail. I wasn’t aware of it, nor did the e-mail, which I later saw, seek to set up a meeting or introduction. But distorting and deploying the kind note of a writer’s parent — I can hardly even imagine blogofascists sinking so low!

There’s a reason I never mentioned this till now. E-mails with that excerpt were piled in my inbox, but by the time I saw any of them, TNR brass had forced the graf’s removal and apologized to me. That was, I thought, the honorable thing, and I decided to hold fire, not wanting the magazine to suffer more damage than it already was. The paragraph was amended to only contain the nonsensical accusation that I was seeking new employment by attacking eminent TNR author Lee Siegel and senior editor Jason Zengerle while defending reporter-research Eve Fairbanks.

Siegel tried to make Ezra a joke and thus destroy his writing career when it was just starting. Lying about a letter from Ezra’s mother was just icing on the slimy cake Siegel had baked. Siegel got what he deserved.

Which makes me wonder about Jason Zengerle. Zengerle is the man who printed three fake emails, claming they were from Steve Gilliard. Zengerle, after an initial defense, admitted the emails were faked. TNR apologized, but they never released the names of the sources that provided the false emails to Zengerle. In other words, there is no evidence beyond the word of the people most vested in protecting the reputation of TNR that Zengerle did not just make up the emails in order to further his contention that the left blogosphere was a Borg-like creature taking orders from Kos.

TNR did the right thing in Siegel’s case, but the wrong thing in a similar case involving Zengerle. Remember, too, that Siegel was fired, according to TNR, not for his slander of the Slate writer or Ezra but for using a sock puppet in his own comment section. Sock-puppetry is embarrassing; printing false information as if it was true undermines TNR’s only real asset — journalistic integrity. One has to wonder why either protecting a man who either makes up stories in print or protects sources that lie to him is less worthy of condemnation than someone who uses a different name to protect himself in the comments of a blog.

September 4th, 2006 | Bloggin, Writing, Media | one comment

Book Review: Fiasco
Posted by Kevin

Fiasco, by Thomas Ricks, is an important if unpleasant book. Its title captures its essence perfectly: this is the tale of the disaster that the American occupation of Iraq has become. In clear, precise and often powerful prose Ricks methodically builds the case that the American occupation has failed and the many reasons, causes, and poor decisions that lead to that failure. He has interviewed Americans at all levels of the occupation, in both civilian and military circles, and skillfully connects the decisions made in Washington and Baghdad to the daily failures and struggles of US troops and civilian administrators. Ricks spends some time on the failures of Congress and the press, but failures of the occupation of Iraq had two parents: the Bush Administration and the United States Army.

When the history of the Iraq occupation is written, it will largely be the story of the failures of the Bush Administration. And those failures were the direct result of the decisions made by George W. Bush. Put bluntly, the Iraqi occupation was doomed by decisions made in the White House. It was the White House and the neo-cons advisors in it that based their post war planning, such as it was, on ridiculously optimistic scenarios. There is nothing wrong with optimism, but the Administration did not admit for the possibility of pessimism. As a result, the roses and cheers of Paul Wolfowitz’s imagination dictated that the occupation be built around the assumption that the Iraqis would quickly fill the power vacuum left after the fall of Saddam and as a result, the occupation would require far fewer troops than the invasion. Of course, the opposite was predictable, predicted, and came to pass. For most of the occupation, the number of troops either equaled or surpassed the number used to topple the regime.

During this time, the Department of Defense and the State Department were in something very much like a war. The working relationship between members of the two departments was beyond awful, verging into adversarial. More than once Ricks described members of one department or the other rejecting out of hand valid information form the other side simply because it came from the other side. Towards the end, Rumsfeld and Powell appeared to openly despise on another. And Bush did nothing to bring the two camps together. As a result, the first CAP head was forced to leave behind talented and experienced State Department people when he went to Iraq. The Defense Department forced Garner to take to Iraq ideological hacks with no experience instead of accomplished diplomats. Iraq paid the price in terms of bugled reconstruction, corruption, and a loss of stability due to ideological correctness being placed far ahead of the needs of the Iraqis. The Heritage Foundation neophytes that ran the CAP invariably choose to attempt to transform Iraqi society along their notions of an ideal society over providing stability, security, and opportunity to the Iraqis.

As damaging as those failures were, however, much of the problems in the Iraqi occupation stemmed from the Administration’s original error: lying about WMDs and Iraqi-Al Qaeda connections.

Ricks doesn’t spend a lot of time in the build up to war, but he does clearly highlight when the Administration — generally in the form of Cheney or people who worked for Cheney — ether said things that it knew to be untrue or claimed intelligence support for contentions where such support was extremely tenuous or nonexistent. Colin Powell’s famous speech in front of the United Nations is the most prominent example of the way the Administration used half truths and deception to suggest a certainty that did not actually exist, but it was not the only one. And Ricks leaves no doubt that such deception happened on purpose. Those deceptive WMD claims and links to Al Qaeda hamstrung the US occupation form the moment they crossed the Iraqi border.

The initial invading forces were reluctant to destroy arms caches and weapons bunkers that they came across for far that they contained chemical or nuclear weapons and would thus cause fallout related deaths among US troops and Iraqi civilians. Those undestroyed bunkers become the armory of the insurgency, once it became clear that the US did not have enough troops to effectively guard those bunkers. In addition to facilitating the arming of the insurgency, the search for WMDs took intelligence gathering resources away from the fight against the insurgency, leaving the Army severely disadvantaged.

The connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda provided a subtler kind of problem, one of attitude. Ricks talks to many soldiers, and details the actions of many more, than seemed to regard the Iraqis as the enemy from the moment they crossed the border. Instead of looking on Iraqis as victims of a totalitarian regime, many soldiers appeared to be suspicious of all Iraqi males under the assumption that some of them were involved with the group responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Obviously that worked against US forces attempts to win over Iraqis to their cause.

The Army, however, didn’t always seem to be interested in winning over Iraqis. The Army came out of Vietnam a broken institution, with poor morale and ever poorer discipline. In the sixteen years between the end of the Vietnam War and the first Gulf War, the officers of the Army did a remarkable job re-creating the Army. They took a beaten organization and turned it into perhaps the finest strike force the world had ever seen. But in doing so, they made two mistakes that would haunt the Iraqi occupation: they threw away everything that they learned about counter-insurgency in Vietnam and they decoupled their operational planning from considerations of the operations political goals.

The Army that rose form the ashes of Vietnam was an Army built around overwhelming firepower and maneuverability. It was designed to destroy an opposing conventional army, and it was very good at it. But it seemed blind to the notion that it would be asked to fight counter-insurgency campaigns. The Army did not train its soldiers in how to deal with an insurgency in their day to day operations. Ricks paints a picture of an Army where counter-insurgency was, at best, an afterthought and at worst a never thought of at all. As a result, US forces were unprepared to deal with the reality of an insurgency. Some commanders - -such as the commander of the 101st Airborne — used their own instincts, intelligence, and common sense to great effect, leading to a relatively stable and supportive Iraqi population in their area of control. Others, such as the commander of the 4th Infantry Division, treated the Iraqis in the harshest, most punitive fashion possible and thus did the insurgency’s recruiting for it. Most commanders were somewhere in the middle, but somewhere in the middle generally meant that the wrong decisions were made far too often.

Classic counterinsurgency doctrine calls for a troops to live among the populace to gain a feel for the situation and the people and for force to be a last resort and used in a minimal fashion when required. In general, US forces concentrated on force protection over Iraqi protection, which lead to housing US units far form contact with ordinary Iraqis, the use of overwhelming firepower in response to any provocation, and rules of convey conduct — speeding, brushing aside civilian traffic, firing on civilian cars that got too close — that worked counter to the need to win over the Iraqi people. With almost every action most US commanders took, they made their job much more difficult.

But those decisions were generally in line with US doctrine. And that was largely the fault of the decision to treat wars as nothing more than the clash of arms. The US army lost the connection between military means and the larger war aims. Without that connection, it was too easy for US forces to fall into the trap of thinking only about the means to destroy the enemy without given proper consideration to second and third order effects of those action on the larger political goals of the conflict. Part of the reason that they post war planning on the part of the Army was so poor was that the culture of the Army just assumed that after the battle their troops would be drawn done and sent home. Their was little conception of what happened after the opposing force had been driven from control because that was the realm of politics and the modern US army spent very little time thinking about those issues. And that lead directly to things like Abu Gharib.

Absent the connection between tactics and the political strategy, US forces generally concentrated on the tactic that brought about the immediate victory as quickly as possible with the smallest risk to US personal. An army whose officers were accustomed to thinking in terms of how their tactics affected the broader political goals would have made very different decisions. Officers who knew that the goal was to convince the Iraqis to join the new Iraq would respond with much less force, far fewer mass roundups, and much more culturally sensitive searches and interactions with locals. The Army as a whole would have been prepared to quickly process prisoners and so the overpopulation that lead to the command breakdowns in Abu Gharib would not have happened. In those places where the commanders did think in larger, political terms, the US occupation went much, much smoother than in places were officers could not shake off the prevalent military culture.

The Iraqi Occupation stands a very good chance of being remembered as the greatest strategic disaster in American history. Ricks book is a wonderful history of the early years of the occupation. It is not perfect, but its flaws do not overwhelm the scholarship of the book. Ricks is a military reporter, so the majority of his interviews are with military personal. To a certain extent that is a justifiable decision. US soldiers were in much more direct and constant contact with Iraqis and thus were both the prime movers on the US side and the people best able to know what was happening in the country as a whole. However, the discussion of reconstruction could probably have benefited somewhat with a few more voices form inside CAP in Baghdad. And the book cannot be said to be a complete history of the time because it does not deal with the Iraqi side of the conflict, for obvious reasons. Ricks does make a good effort to get the opinions and thoughts of Iraqi citizens into the discussion, but Iraqi voices are still too few and they are often filtered through the recollections and biases of US officers and soldiers. And, of course, there is nothing from the Iraqi insurgency, meaning that how the insurgents reacted to US actions is missing.

These small problems aside, Fiasco is a marvelous book. It takes a complex subject with hundreds of players and dozens of conflicted motivations and teases out the story of why the Occupation has gone so poorly. It is written too soon to be the last word on the history of the occupation and invasion, obviously, but it is an essential read for anyone who wants to understand what has gone wrong and what problems in our political and military cultures need to be addressed in order to prevent a repeat of this fiasco. Thomas Ricks has written a book that all other serious histories of the Iraqi Occupation will be built upon.

August 21st, 2006 | Reviews, Writing, Iraq, Terrorism, Books, Fiasco | 4 comments

A Poor Defense
Posted by Kevin

Ezra Klein defends his defense of a TNR piece defending Ann Coulter after Charles Pierce rips his original defense. He should have quit while he was ahead:

Reeve’s piece is of a different type altogether. She argues that, as a young woman in punditry, something in Coulter’s brassy provocation is alluring, and refreshingly different from the general stereotype of women wilting before criticism. I think there’s something to that, and knowing my office is overwhelmingly male, and that the gender imbalance is replicated throughout political punditry, I’m not willing to dismiss it so quickly. As for my criticisms of the article (of which there were many), folks can read the original post.

Except that turning the stereotypical female pundit notion on its head is not what Ann Coulter is concerned with. Woman like Arinna Huffington, Barbara Ehrenrich, Katrina vanden Heuvel, and Molly Ivens are all examples of women who give better than they get. And those women have the added bonus of not being hate-driven, half-deranged, completely full of sh*t apologists for the worst authoritarian, McCarthy-like tendencies of the far right. Ann Coulter is not a brave women boldly going where no woman has gone before. She is the paid shill of those in power. What she does requires nothing in the way of courage as she risks nothing. The right wing money machine will make sure she is compensated and the right wing media will provide her a place to ramble whenever she feels the need.

The TNR piece is ridiculous on its face because it doesn’t deal with the reality of Ann Coulter. It is a defense of an Ann Coulter that doesn’t exist anywhere outside the imagination of the writer. Ezra is defending a figment of someone else’s imagination. And since the real Ann Coulter bears no resemblance to the one in the TNR piece the piece itself is indefensible.

August 17th, 2006 | Politics, Writing, Culture | 2 comments