Scott Reid States the Obvious, Is Still Wrong

Here I go again, saying something utterly uncontroversial to anyone that isn't three years old, a partisan fuck, or an abject idiot.

People in politics, as a general rule, don't enter the life to serve you. And they really haven't for about thirty years.

Politics has become a laboratory for mediocrities to see how rich they can make themselves off of the public teat.

There's no greater example of that than the revolving door between politics and lobbying. This is nothing more than a legal version of influence peddling and trading in on public service. I actually have more respect for those that actually have the balls to steal taxpayer money without the pretence of serving anyone other than themselves. Were it up to me, politicians, their appointees, and the senior civil service would be banned from lobbying for life.

Actually, that's not true. The only reason I wouldn't advocate stuffing the lot of them in a bag and drowning them like cats is that it would be impossible to find a big enough bag. So a lobbying ban will have to do.

The more mediocre a staffer you are, the more likely you are to moonlight in opinion journalism, especially in Canada. You almost never see the real kingmakers on TV or writing columns that even third-graders know are horseshit. Instead, you get the worst sycophants imaginable pretending to know "how it really works."

Which brings me to Scott Reid, the former Paul Martin consigliere. In 2005, Reid said the single most balls-out stupid thing I've heard in thirty years of studying politics.

You see, then-Opposition leader Stephen Harper was hoping to steal the Liberal issue of a national daycare credit from out from the Grits. So he offered a $1,200 a year tax credit to families as a way of ward-heeling himself into office.

Now, if you opposed the Tories, there were any number of ways to attack the proposal. For example, you do what I did: call it an unaffordable welfare program for the middle class and an example of hucksterism at its worst. The left is always going to oppose Harper's programs. If you want to beat him, you need to turn fiscal conservatives around from voting for him. I thought everybody knew that.

Apparently, Scotty didn't. That's why he said this ...




The "beer and popcorn" debacle reinforced the long held and richly deserved Liberal reputation for unbridled arrogance. Even when its true, you never tell the public that the government can spend their money better than they can. And, unsurprisingly, Harper made the Liberal Party wear that remark for years.

That's why I'm amazed that anyone listens to anything Reid has to say about politics. On the other hand, a lot of people are very fucking stupid.

On Friday, he published this in the Ottawa Citizen, and it stands as an example of how you can be right, while still being completely ignorant of a history that you yourself lived through. It really is a remarkable read.

Stephen Harper is gradually turning into Jean Chrétien.

From Teflon to tinpot, from insuperable to insurrection, the two leaders appear to be travelling remarkably similar paths in the second half of their time as prime minister.

That's demonstrably not true. Harper was Chretien from as far back as 2005, well before he moved into 24 Sussex drive.

This is because Harper heads a party populated mostly with lunatics and fetus fetishists. Hyper-religious "Big Government Conservatives" are not only fewer in number in Canada than in the United States, they also tend to be more geographically isolated and don't carry as many seats as they do in the U.S Congress. Majority governments do not rely on these people's support.

But they can fuck up the chance of winning one, as we saw in 2004. The Conservatives were enjoying a 10 point lead over the majority Liberals, when their candidates started spouting off about abortion, gay marriage, and other shit that sane people don't give a shit about. The Tory hopes of a majority evaporated and Liberals were only reduced to a minority, instead of being physically destroyed.

When the Martin minority government was defeated in the fall of '05, Harper knew that he had to muzzle those psychopaths, lest he be humiliated again. Not only did he vow not to legislate on those issues, he imposed brutal message discipline on his candidates. Since nothing succeeds like success, it shouldn't surprise anyone that he carried that discipline into government.

Chretien's experience was different. As a minister in the Trudeau government, he was routinely humiliated by the Prime Minister's Office. The Sun King once went so far as to rewrite one Chretien's budgets and release it to the public without consulting him first.

Then there's the nature of the Liberal Party itself, which is based almost entirely on regicide. Since about 1975, every Grit leader has had a powerful leader plotting behind the scenes to relieve him of his job. And Chretien knew that Paul Martin (who Scott Reid worked for, remember?) would do to him exactly what he did to John Turner, as he in fact later did.

Similarities in the personal styles of the two leaders have long been noted — and many of the qualities they share are admirable. They are both good at winning elections. They each lack any shred of indecision. And they both hold their ground stoutly. Perhaps most important of all, they understand who they are, what they stand for, and the importance of communicating consistency.

Each of those points are demonstrably false.

Both Chretien and Harper won their elections as a result of hopelessly divided governments. The Progressive Conservative coalition built by Brian Mulroney was destroyed by 1993, and Harper beat (albeit, only barely) a Liberal Party in a state of open civil war. Neither was a fantastic political accomplishment.

Furthermore, neither stands for anything at all. Chretien ran on the tired platform of "free shit for everyone," opposing the GST and NAFTA, only to head the most fiscally conservative, globalist government in Canadian history. Chretien successfully carried out Mulroney's legacy.

Harper, on the other hand, ran as a manager and a fiscal conservative. Once in office, however, he blew up the deficit faster and bigger than anyone since Trudeau himself, mostly on ward-heeling nonsense that the Liberals invented.

Neither communicated consistency, and only a moron would suggest they did. Both transparently lied to the public and dared them to vote for someone else, knowing that realistic alternatives didn't exist.

Increasingly, it is not just character but circumstance that begs the comparison of Harper with Chrétien.

The most top-of-mind parallel is caucus unrest. Brent Rathgeber, until his recent resignation, was as unknown to Canadians as the whereabouts of Mike Duffy’s dignity. Suddenly, we are to believe his departure heralds the evaporation of Harper’s control over his own backbench. That would be a gross overstatement.

But it is plain that a number of government MPs are no longer content to suffer in silence. Their personal ambitions are stagnating. Their ideological itch is going unscratched.

And they’re sick of taking orders from the hired help while getting the high hand from the prime minister.

Christ, Reid can't really believe that nonsense, can he? The facts are very different, and they go to the fundamental differences between the Liberal and Conservative parties.

The Tories are generally more disciplined when it comes to caucus and messaging generally. They are also much better team players until things become intolerable, as they did in the latter Mulroney years.

The Conservatives also never have a very deep bench. There's rarely a clear successor to power that everyone knows can win an election, which is why they've never enjoyed party dynasties, like the Liberals used to.

The Grits, on the other hand, tend to have very deep benches of talent. The problem is that they all think that they should be prime minister right away. Since Lester Pearson died, they've devoted themselves to stabbing one another in the back more than they have to actually governing. Whenever the the Tories have shown even a modicum of discipline, they've kicked the shit out of the Grits.

And if Reid is right, there's a Paul Martin in the Tory benches ready to take over when Harper is done in by his own hubris. If there is, I don't see one. Harper's most likely successor is Jason Kenney, and I can't think of anyone who wouldn't be able to beat the snot out of that greasy prick.

I will say one thing about Scott Reid's column. It has the worst people in the world publicly furious, and demonstrates as clearly as anything can that the Liberal civil war is far from over. Those crazed bastards are going to continue to going into elections devoting more time and energy hobbling each other than they do the Conservatives. And they're going to keep doing it until they cease to exist at all.

If there's anything at all the Conservative government can take comfort in during these dark days, it's that.

"... Condemned to Repeat It:" The Cuban Missile Crisis in Perspective

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

- George Santayana

History is important, but what people do with that history is more important. To mythologize history is to make it important and, worse, may cause it's worst mistakes to be repeated.

For a president who didn't do all that much, the mythologising of John F. Kennedy is a little odd and a lot terrifying. Most people, when pressed, can't name three things that he did in office and several of them count his assassination twice.

The assassination perverted the history of a man who shouldn't have been president at all. He was a liar and a thief. The evidence strongly suggests, although doesn't definitively prove, that the 1960 election was stolen through wholesale vote-rigging in Cook County, Illinois and South Texas, where Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson stole his Senate seat twelve years earlier.

It wasn't known at the time, but when Kennedy commenced his campaign for the Democratic nomination, he had been administered the last rites of the Catholic Church four times. We also now now that the 35th president of the United States and Commander-In-Chief was regularly dosing himself with a combination of steroids and amphetamine. This was not yet twenty years after another president who hid the perilous state of his health from the American people, Franklin D. Roosevelt, died suddenly as the country was preparing to use nuclear weapons for the first time.

The American people seem to know none of this, or not care if they do. Poll after poll of non-historians regularly puts JFK in the top four chief executives, above George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan. Given the paucity of Kennedy's accomplishments, it represents the triumph of style over substance more than anything else in modern history.

Other than his murder in Dallas, the event most often associated with JFK is the Cuban Missile Crisis, which Benjamin Schwarz writes about in great detail in this month's Atlantic.

On October 16, 1962, John F. Kennedy and his advisers were stunned to learn that the Soviet Union was, without provocation, installing nuclear-armed medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Cuba. With these offensive weapons, which represented a new and existential threat to America, Moscow significantly raised the ante in the nuclear rivalry between the superpowers—a gambit that forced the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear Armageddon. On October 22, the president, with no other recourse, proclaimed in a televised address that his administration knew of the illegal missiles, and delivered an ultimatum insisting on their removal, announcing an American “quarantine” of Cuba to force compliance with his demands. While carefully avoiding provocative action and coolly calibrating each Soviet countermeasure, Kennedy and his lieutenants brooked no compromise; they held firm, despite Moscow’s efforts to link a resolution to extrinsic issues and despite predictable Soviet blustering about American aggression and violation of international law. In the tense 13‑day crisis, the Americans and Soviets went eyeball-to-eyeball. Thanks to the Kennedy administration’s placid resolve and prudent crisis management—thanks to what Kennedy’s special assistant Arthur Schlesinger Jr. characterized as the president’s “combination of toughness and restraint, of will, nerve, and wisdom, so brilliantly controlled, so matchlessly calibrated, that [it] dazzled the world”—the Soviet leadership blinked: Moscow dismantled the missiles, and a cataclysm was averted.

Every sentence in the above paragraph describing the Cuban missile crisis is misleading or erroneous. But this was the rendition of events that the Kennedy administration fed to a credulous press; this was the history that the participants in Washington promulgated in their memoirs; and this is the story that has insinuated itself into the national memory—as the pundits’ commentaries and media coverage marking the 50th anniversary of the crisis attested.

The first time I had seen the official mediation of the Missile Crisis challenged was in Gary Wills' The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Mediation on Power, which was first published in 1982. Since then, more and better literature has come out, including Kennedy's own secret presidential recordings. But the narrative remains mostly intact, due largely to a continuing flood of adoring Kennedy biographies and a singular unwillingness of Americans to study their own history.

Very few American non-scholars have bothered asking even the most basic questions about the Missile Crisis. "What's behind the half-century long obsession with a piss-ant country like Cuba?" "Why would Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev place the missiles there?" "Could the United States have resolved the crisis in a way that didn't risk a nuclear holocaust?" "What were the long-term consequences of it?"

Richard Nixon was remembered as a world-class red-baiter. In his first political campaign, Nixon tied his opponent, Representative Jerry Voorhis to the suspected Communist infiltrated Congress of Industrial Organizations' Political Action Committee (PAC,) although Voorhis refused to accept their endorsement. In his 1950 campaign for the Senate, Nixon called Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas "pink right down to her underwear" and compared her voting record to that of the avowed Socialist New York Congressman Vito Marcantonio.

In 1960, it was NIxon's turn to be red-baited in a particularly insidious way. From roughly 1948 onward, the GOP enjoyed an edge on national security issues, due largely to the "loss" of China, the successful testing of a nuclear bomb by the Soviets and the stalemate of the Korean War.

During President Eisenhower's second term, the Democrats invented a "missile gap" with the Soviet Union out of whole cloth. Had they bothered to ask the Pentagon or the CIA, they would have learned that the United States had a vast ICBM superiority that would last, ironically, into the presidency of Richard Nixon. But the news media and the public believed it.

Kennedy sought to capitalize on the missile gap by making Cuba an issue. He insisted during the presidential debates that he would do more to roll back communism in Cuba than would Nixon. Kennedy was the first presidential candidate to receive classified CIA briefings. He knew that the Agency under Eisenhower was planning just that. Determined not to reveal that, Vice President Nixon publicly argued against Cuban intervention, even though he was its strongest advocate in the government.

Once he was sworn in as president, Kennedy was stuck with, and haunted by, the issues of the missile gap and Cuba. JFK immediately began the largest peacetime defense build-up in American history up to that time. He also dramatically increased the nuclear arsenal, despite the U.S having as many as nine times the warheads the U.S.S.R had. In what was perhaps the most fateful decision of his presidency, he ordered Jupiter missiles deployed to Turkey, near the Soviet border.

The Jupiter missiles were an exceptionally vexing component of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Because they sat above ground, were immobile, and required a long time to prepare for launch, they were extremely vulnerable. Of no value as a deterrent, they appeared to be weapons meant for a disarming first strike—and thus greatly undermined deterrence, because they encouraged a preemptive Soviet strike against them. The Jupiters’ destabilizing effect was widely recognized among defense experts within and outside the U.S. government and even by congressional leaders. For instance, Senator Albert Gore Sr., an ally of the administration, told Secretary of State Dean Rusk that they were a “provocation” in a closed session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in February 1961 (more than a year and a half before the missile crisis), adding, “I wonder what our attitude would be” if the Soviets deployed nuclear-armed missiles to Cuba. Senator Claiborne Pell raised an identical argument in a memo passed on to Kennedy in May 1961.

Given America’s powerful nuclear superiority, as well as the deployment of the Jupiter missiles, Moscow suspected that Washington viewed a nuclear first strike as an attractive option. They were right to be suspicious. The archives reveal that in fact the Kennedy administration had strongly considered this option during the Berlin crisis in 1961.

It’s little wonder, then, that, as Stern asserts—drawing on a plethora of scholarship including, most convincingly, the historian Philip Nash’s elegant 1997 study, The Other Missiles of October—Kennedy’s deployment of the Jupiter missiles “was a key reason for Khrushchev’s decision to send nuclear missiles to Cuba.” Khrushchev reportedly made that decision in May 1962, declaring to a confidant that the Americans “have surrounded us with bases on all sides” and that missiles in Cuba would help to counter an “intolerable provocation.” Keeping the deployment secret in order to present the U.S. with a fait accompli, Khrushchev may very well have assumed America’s response would be similar to his reaction to the Jupiter missiles—rhetorical denouncement but no threat or action to thwart the deployment with a military attack, nuclear or otherwise. (In retirement, Khrushchev explained his reasoning to the American journalist Strobe Talbott: Americans “would learn just what it feels like to have enemy missiles pointing at you; we’d be doing nothing more than giving them a little of their own medicine.”)

At about the same time that Kennedy deployed the Jupiters, he ordered the disastrous Bay of Pigs operation, thereby giving Khrushchev the predicate he needed to give the Americans " a little of their own medicine" by moving their own missiles into Cuba.

As for Castro, he would have been crazy to refuse the missiles after after the Bay of Pigs and the numerous subsequent assassination attempts by the CIA known as Operation Mongoose. When he learned about it after becoming president, Lyndon Johnson said "We had been operating a damned Murder, Inc., in the Caribbean." Needless to say, a foreign plot - let alone several attempts - to assassinate a sitting American president would be seen as an act of war and responded to forcefully. That they didn't see their attempts on Castro's life similarly is but one of America's interesting post-war double standards.

Moreover, as Schwarz reports, the Cuban missiles didn't change the strategic balance a bit and Kennedy's Executive Committee (ExComm) knew it.

Kennedy and his civilian advisers understood that the missiles in Cuba did not alter the strategic nuclear balance. Although Kennedy asserted in his October 22 televised address that the missiles were “an explicit threat to the peace and security of all the Americas,” he in fact appreciated, as he told the ExComm on the first day of the crisis, that “it doesn’t make any difference if you get blown up by an ICBM flying from the Soviet Union or one that was 90 miles away. Geography doesn’t mean that much.” America’s European allies, Kennedy continued, “will argue that taken at its worst the presence of these missiles really doesn’t change” the nuclear balance.

That the missiles were close to the United States was, as the president conceded, immaterial: the negligible difference in flight times between Soviet Union–based ICBMs and Cuba-based missiles wouldn’t change the consequences when the missiles hit their targets, and in any event, the flight times of Soviet SLBMs were already as short as or shorter than the flight times of the missiles in Cuba would be, because those weapons already lurked in submarines off the American coast (as of course did American SLBMs off the Soviet coast). Moreover, unlike Soviet ICBMs, the missiles in Cuba required several hours to be prepared for launch. Given the effectiveness of America’s aerial and satellite reconnaissance (amply demonstrated by the images of missiles in the U.S.S.R. and Cuba that they yielded), the U.S. almost certainly would have had far more time to detect and respond to an imminent Soviet missile strike from Cuba than to attacks from Soviet bombers, ICBMs, or SLBMs.

“A missile is a missile,” Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara asserted. “It makes no great difference whether you are killed by a missile from the Soviet Union or Cuba.” On that first day of the ExComm meetings, Bundy asked directly, “What is the strategic impact on the position of the United States of MRBMs in Cuba? How gravely does this change the strategic balance?” McNamara answered, “Not at all”—a verdict that Bundy then said he fully supported. The following day, Special Counsel Theodore Sorensen summarized the views of the ExComm in a memorandum to Kennedy. “It is generally agreed,” he noted, “that these missiles, even when fully operational, do not significantly alter the balance of power—i.e., they do not significantly increase the potential megatonnage capable of being unleashed on American soil, even after a surprise American nuclear strike.”

Sorensen’s comment about a surprise attack reminds us that while the missiles in Cuba did not add appreciably to the nuclear menace, they could have somewhat complicated America’s planning for a successful first strike—which may well have been part of Khrushchev’s rationale for deploying them. If so, the missiles paradoxically could have enhanced deterrence between the superpowers, and thereby reduced the risk of nuclear war.

It stands to reason that the whole matter could have been dealt with through quiet diplomacy. Kennedy wanted the Soviet missiles out of Cuba and Khrushchev wanted to be rid of the provocative  Jupiters on his doorstep. In fact, that was the deal they ultimately reached, but only after the world was taken to the brink of nuclear annihilation.

Moscow was unaware that the missiles had been discovered until Kennedy announced it to the world in a televised address to the nation on October 22, 1962 and announced a naval blockade of Cuba. Knowing that the blockade was an act of war and that the missiles were legal under international law, the United States referred to it as a "quarantine," instead.

Wouldn't it have been easier (to say nothing of less dangerous) to have sent a back-channel message to the Kremlin that the Cuban installations were unacceptable to the United States? Nikita Krushchev himself offered to trade the Cuban missiles for the Jupiters in Turkey in the wake of Kennedy's October 22 address.

But Kennedy had cynically used both the missile gap and Cuba as wedge issues in the 1960 election and he was going to be publicly seen as having solved them, even after he knew just how catastrophic the slightest miscalculation might have been.

And it was nothing short of a miracle that there wasn't a miscalculation because JFK's negotiating posture seemed to be designed to humiliate the Soviets. Even when the trade of the Cuban missiles for the Jupiters was agreed to secretly, through Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, the Kennedy brothers insisted that the Jupiter part of the agreement not be announced publicly, fearing that such an agreement would politically damage the president.

Amazingly, Krushchev agreed to it. And he was removed from power less than 18 months later, becoming the first (and until Gorbachev, the only)  Soviet leader to leave office alive. It isn't a stretch to assume that sent a powerful message to Nikita Krushchev's successors. They would not be played by the Americans. Superpower relations went into a deep-freeze for a decade afterward.

Prior to Kruschev's March, 1964 removal, the Soviets were basically conservative in the conduct of foreign policy. Yes, they sponsored revolutionary movements; most notably in China, Korea and Vietnam, but the only used their own military within what they considered their traditional sphere of influence to put down uprisings. Beginning with Brezhnev, the Soviets become much more aggressive and far more intractable.

Would that have been the case absent the missile crisis? There's no reason to believe so.

As Schwarz points out in the Atlantic, the missile crisis had even greater consequences on the conduct of U.S foreign policy.

Although Kennedy in fact agreed to the missile swap and, with Khrushchev, helped settle the confrontation maturely, the legacy of that confrontation was nonetheless pernicious. By successfully hiding the deal from the vice president, from a generation of foreign-policy makers and strategists, and from the American public, Kennedy and his team reinforced the dangerous notion that firmness in the face of what the United States construes as aggression, and the graduated escalation of military threats and action in countering that aggression, makes for a successful national-security strategy—really, all but defines it.

The president and his advisers also reinforced the concomitant view that America should define a threat not merely as circumstances and forces that directly jeopardize the safety of the country, but as circumstances and forces that might indirectly compel potential allies or enemies to question America’s resolve. This recondite calculation led to the American disaster in Vietnam: in attempting to explain how the loss of the strategically inconsequential country of South Vietnam might weaken American credibility and thereby threaten the country’s security, one of McNamara’s closest aides, Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton, allowed that “it takes some sophistication to see how Vietnam automatically involves” our vital interests. Kennedy said in his address to the nation during the missile crisis that “aggressive conduct, if allowed to go unchecked and unchallenged, ultimately leads to war.” He explained that “if our courage and our commitments are ever to be trusted again by either friend or foe,” then the United States could not tolerate such conduct by the Soviets—even though, again, he had privately acknowledged that the deployment of the missiles did not change the nuclear balance.

This notion that standing up to aggression (however loosely and broadly defined) will deter future aggression (however loosely and broadly defined) fails to weather historical scrutiny. After all, America’s invasion and occupation of Iraq didn’t deter Muammar Qaddafi; America’s war against Yugoslavia didn’t deter Saddam Hussein in 2003; America’s liberation of Kuwait did not deter Slobodan Milošević; America’s intervention in Panama did not deter Saddam Hussein in 1991; America’s intervention in Grenada did not deter Manuel Noriega; America’s war against North Vietnam did not deter Grenada’s strongman, Hudson Austin; and JFK’s confrontation with Khrushchev over missiles in Cuba certainly did not deter Ho Chi Minh.

How many American troops would have been spared in the last half century were it not for Kennedy's duplicity before, during and after the Cuban Missile Crisis? U.S policymakers learned exactly the wrong lesson from the October crisis. And the brinkmanship of the Cuban Missile Crisis is almost exactly what we're seeing today in relation to Iran's nuclear program, albeit in slow motion.

The United States has had bad presidents both before and after John Kennedy, but none nearly ended life on earth as a result of his own deliberate and cynical machinations. In that, he might be the most dangerous man ever to have lived.

Yet he remains a hero to tens of millions of Americans and a worldwide icon, due largely to the machinations of his own lies and the personality cult developed over several decades by his palace guard.

Unless the real history of the Cuban Missile Crisis is more widely known, there's a very real chance that there will someday be another president as reckless as John Fitzgerald Kennedy. As George Santayana wrote, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

The next time we might not be so lucky.


Benjamin Schwarz's piece in the Atlantic is actually a book review of The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory: Myths versus Reality by Sheldon Stern, which I very much look forward to reading. However, Schwarz's article is impressive on its own and can be read for free here, which I encourage you all to do.

Dear Conservative Politicians: Please Don't Defend Fascism, Okay? Thanks.

The rap on me is that I'm often seen as being too hard on conservatives and don't defend them nearly enough. My view is that I'd be more than happy enough to defend them if they chose to do something that's actually defensible once in a while. That'd be pretty great.

But one thing I'm not going to do is destroy my own credibility of self-esteem by giving my stamp of approval to things that are stupid, offensive or stupidly offensive. That makes me a pretty shitty team player, I know.

One of things that I decided early that I wasn't going to associate myself with is the recent conservative (and particularly the Glenn Beck, Breitbart asshole, Tea Party variety of conservatism) revisionist history that paints fascism as a left-wing ideology.

That's actually part of a larger trend in modern conservatism, which refuses to recognize any of its evils, either ancient or recent. Watergate, for example, is an inescapable reality, so Tea Partiers point to Richard Nixon's creation of the Environment Protection Agency and establishment of affirmative action to paint him as a liberal and thereby absolve conservatism of his sins. Of course, that ignores the fact that every Republican in America vigorously defended Nixon until the last minute, but whatever.

Look, just because The National Socialist German Workers Party had the word "socialist" in it did not mean that the Nazis were left wing. They decidedly were not. Because fascism, first in Italy, then in Germany was a response to the rise of communism, Actual communists and socialists didn't do especially well in either regime. They were largely killed or imprisoned before the fascists went after the Jews. In fact, fascist anti-Semitsm was largely predicated on the canard that communism was a Jewish ideology, which is pretty hilarious when you consider that they also believed that the Jews controlled all of the banks.

The fascist economic model was a command economy, to be sure. But it wasn't an example of the people controlling the means of production, which is a foundational tenent of Marxism. Fascism was the partnering of government with big business, and business did very well indeed under that arrangement. The folks at Krupp, for example, only pretended that they were victims of persecution after the war.

It's also important to remember that fascism was premised on expansionist wars of conquest. Even in Western capitalist democracies employ command economies in wartime. One can make a very credible argument that in spreading their production facilities into every congressional district in America, defense contractors have created a virtual form of fascism. The United States government therefore cannot effectively review its interventionist foreign policy without immediately throwing hundreds of thousands of Americans out of work. Defense contractors also operate on a "cost plus" model, which guarantees profits regardless of cost overruns and inefficiencies. This is one of the reasons that President Eisenhower warned against the establishment of a "military-industrial complex."

Fascism is nationalist, while socialism and communism decidedly are not. The latter two movements are internationalist and believe that nationalism impedes the advancement of the ideology.

Having said that, just because conservatives shouldn't lie about fascism doesn't mean that we should run around defending it. And it's particularly regrettable that no one gave Silvio Berlusconi that memo.

Former Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi praised Benito Mussolini for “having done good” despite the Fascist dictator's anti-Jewish laws, immediately sparking expressions of outrage as Europe on Sunday held Holocaust remembrances.

Berlusconi also defended Mussolini for allying himself with Hitler, saying he likely reasoned that it would be better to be on the winning side.

The media mogul, whose conservative forces are polling second in voter surveys ahead of next month's election, spoke to reporters on the sidelines of a ceremony in Milan to commemorate the Holocaust.

I never thought I'd have to say this out loud, but not only should you not defend fascism, it's the height of bad manners to do so at a Holocaust commemoration ceremony. People get awfully touchy about that sort of thing.

“It is difficult now to put oneself in the shoes of who was making decisions back then,” Berlusconi said of Mussolini's support for Hitler. “Certainly the (Italian) government then, fearing that German power would turn into a general victory, preferred to be allied with Hitler's Germany rather than oppose it.”

Berlusconi added that “within this alliance came the imposition of the fight against, and extermination of, the Jews. Thus, the racial laws are the worst fault of Mussolini, who, in so many other aspects, did good.”

Berlusconi ignores a couple of important facts in his apologia of fascism.

First, Il Duce was the senior partner in Europe's fascist alliance, having come to power almost a full decade before Hitler did. Hitler looked to Mussolini for support, but was not taken seriously. It was only after the militarization of the Rhineland that he became Hitler's second banana.

Second, the Italian fascists were engaged in a war of conquest long before the German invasion of Poland, having attacked Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) in 1935. Mussolini also intervened on the side of the Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War in 1936.

Berlusconi seems to imply that Mussolini feared a German invasion of Italy had he not allied with Hitler which is nonsense. As we have already seen, the Italian Fascists were no strangers to foreign aggression. Moreover, the German high command had absolutely no respect for Italian forces, seeing them as more of a hindrance than anything else.

Yes, there was a German occupation of Italy, but that came only after Mussolini was dismissed and arrested by King Victor Emmanuel III.

Berlusconis's assertions to the contrary aside, the Fascist Italians were racist almost a decade before the publication of Hitler's Mein Kampf, endorsing a policy eerily similar to lebensraum. As early as 1920, the future Il Duce endorsed the taking of lands from the "inferior and barbarian" Slavs. Throughout the 1920s, long before the Beer Hall Putsch, Mussolini spoke about the "hierarchy of races." While it's true that the Manifesto of Race wasn't enacted until 1938, the seeds of it were always present in the Fascist movement.

As you might imagine, pretty much everybody's pissed at Silvio right now.

Reactions of outrage, along with a demand that Berlusconi be prosecuted for promoting Fascism, quickly followed his words.

Berlusconi's praise of Mussolini constitutes “an insult to the democratic conscience of Italy,” said Rosy Bindi, a centre-left leader. “Only Berlusconi's political cynicism, combined with the worst historic revisionism, could separate the shame of the racist laws from the Fascist dictatorship.”

Italian laws enacted following the country's disastrous experience in the war forbid the defence of Fascism. A candidate for local elections, Gianfranco Mascia, pledged that he and his supporters will present a formal complaint on Monday to Italian prosecutors, seeking to have Berlusconi prosecuted.

It should be noted that defence of Fascism is one of the very few things that Silvio Berlusconi isn't currently on trial for. He was convicted of tax fraud last October and is currently on trial for prostitution and statutory rape. If nothing else, it's pretty impressive that a 76 year old man can be the one-man crime spree that Silvio is.

Even more incredible is the fact that Berlusconi's People of Freedom party is running second in next month's national elections. With one-third of the electorate undecided, there's a very real chance that he can be elected to a record fourth term of office, just 15 months after having resigned.  Being that he's Berlusconi, he's made several differing and conflicting statements on whether he would be premier if People of Freedom wins the election.

One thing that People of Freedom has going for it, and this goes to Berlusconi's political genius, is that it's populated with wall-to-wall hot chicks, recruited mostly from his television empire. Imagine if, say, Vanna White was Senate majority leader in the 1980s. Italy is well on its way to having its fourth government like that. Were it not for the fact that she's Czech, Denise Milani would be the ideal head of the Italian government.

And that's probably the way it should be. If you live in an ungovernable country with a criminal prime minister, you might as well have an aching hard-on to distract you from your impending doom. If the government can't meet your needs, you should at least be able to jerk off to it. That only seems fair.

Sun News Network & the Marketplace of Ideas

I don't support public subsidies of most things, particularly in the cultural arena. As a practical sort of fellow, I recognize that when you pay for something, you get a vote in how it's done. For obvious reasons, government should be kept well away from culture, which I would include news as a part of.

I also don't believe that running a television network is an essential function of government, and it's almost impossible to argue that otherwise. You may have been able to make a case for the existence of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in the early years of radio and television, when it simply wasn't profitable for private industry to service large parts of a huge and sparsely populated country. But that hasn't be true for decades now. The federal government's sponsorship of the network has long outlived its usefulness and the CBC should be either sold or abolished.

I also oppose the government regulating the cable industry, especially as it pertains to programming. Cable does not utilize "the public airwaves," at least not as traditionally understood. The market, rather than the CRTC, can and should determine the fate of individual broadcasters.The CRTC retains jurisdiction over cable simply because it can.

As things currently stand, the government mandates the carriage of certain channels by the cable companies, who are then forced to pay the broadcasters for the privilege. Worse, individual households are forced to pay for the channels, whether they want them or not. I could probably list off dozens of channels that being artificially kept alive by CRTC policies in an age where it's getting harder and harder to justify the CRTC's very existence.

And that's where the Sun News Network comes in. The Sun started off as a newspaper chain for people who can't read. In 2011, it started a television news network for people who don't enjoy thinking very much.That network is losing money hand over fist and it's owner, Quebecor, appears to be gutting the newspaper business to keep it alive.

To say that Sun News is bad television is unfair. It's actually spectacularly bad television. It took all the worst aspects of Fox News and MSNBC and made them look like they were produced by a high school AV club. The on-air personalities, such as they are, are exclusively people who are genetically incapable of getting a job outside of Canada. The chances of a Peter Jennings or John Roberts emerging from the mess of Sun News are somewhere between slim and none.

One of the mantras of cable news is that all perspectives should be treated equally, which is nonsense and they know it. There are any number of opinions that are just stupid. But cable news thrives on what they call they call "diversity of opinion" because it allows them to put freaks on the air, and freaks are good for ratings.

Cable news - both liberal and conservative - isn't news. It's political propaganda, which is fine, but it shouldn't be treated as anything other than that, and certainly not by government regulators. But Sun News has spent the last few weeks agitating for mandatory carriage from the CRTC. These champions of the free market are demanding the same government cheese that everybody else gets.

SNN is unique, at least in Canada. The other broadcast networks at least pretend to maintain the pretense of professional neutrality. Sun News doesn't bother presenting itself as anything other than the house organ of the Conservative, Republican and Likud parties.

Like MSNBC and Fox, there's almost no wall between their "news" and "opinion" programming at Sun News. And like Fox, Sun devotes an incredible amount of time bitching about its competition and how unfairly it's treated by the world. In that, it is a perfect representation of what the conservative movement has become. Like modern conservatives everywhere, Sun News has embraced the cult of it's own victimhood and hilariously does so under the banner of "personal responsibility." .

Initially, I opposed granting Sun News mandatory carriage because I'm against the involuntary subsidization of political activity. Not only do I think that political parties shouldn't receive public money, I would eliminate the tax deduction for contributions to them, which is an indirect subsidy to both the parties and their contributors. If I don't believe in the involuntary subsidization of the parties, it stands to reason that I would oppose it for their broadcast mouthpieces.

That shouldn't suggest that I agree with Sun's liberal critics. They've been wildly dishonest in this debate. They oppose carriage for Sun simply because they're conservative. I can guarantee you that if there were a network blatantly supportive of the NDP or Liberals, they'd reverse their position in a heartbeat. They also don't seem to mind mandatory carriage for CTV or CBC, which I do. Were there a Canadian version of MSNBC, they'd be making exactly the same noises Sun's supporters are.

Denying SNN carriage does little more than play into their pathetic sense of victimhood and reinforces their argument that they're being unfairly treated because of their politics.

Look, Sun News is going to fail, and probably within two years. Not only are its ratings pathetic, its core demographic - old people - is one that advertisers don't care about. Mainstream advertisers are also awfully reluctant to support a network that goes out of its way to piss off so many of their potential customers. Advertising on SNN makes businesses boycott bait, and it's hard to see how that fits into any sane business plan.

Carriage is going to keep Sun News on life support, but not for as long as people tend to think it will.

I'm not signing any petitions for those hypocritical monsters, and I'm not asking any of you to, but I've very reluctantly come to the conclusion that Sun News should be granted mandatory carriage.

However, that should be accompanied by rescinding the CRTC's jurisdiction and a wholesale deregulation of the cable industry in this country. If a cable provider decides for whatever reason that it doesn't want to carry Sun News (or any other channel) or pay them what they want, they can drop them without the federal government getting involved. Cable companies would also be required to compete, and I would drop the ban on foreign ownership. If Rupert Murdoch wants to buy Sun News and make it profitable, like he has with his anti-Semitic and anti-American Rotana network in Saudi Arabia, he should be free to.

Will anyone at Sun News support my ideas for deregulation? Of course they won't. Once they get mandatory carriage, they'll take the money and find new ways to pretend that the world is out to get them.

But they won't be able to pretend that they've been forced off of the air for any reason other than they produce an unwatchable and hackish product.

Joe Biden is a Big Fucking Deal

It used to be that Democrats underestimated Republicans to their detriment. Eisenhower, they said, was lazy and not very bright. Nixon was sweaty, shifty and a two-time loser. Reagan was an amiable dunce. The first Bush was wimp and the second a classic case of nepotism. And the Democrats lost to all of them, in some cases by devastating margins.

Since 2004, the tables have turned rather dramatically. Instead of acknowledging just how badly the GOP ruined America's foreign policy and economy between 2000-'06, they chose instead to underestimate their opposition. In this, they remind me of no one as much as the Democrats during the tail-end of the Johnson Administration.

"It doesn't matter how unpopular LBJ and the war are," they told themselves. "There's just no way that the American people will elect Richard Nixon." If that sounds familiar, it should. That's almost exactly what Republicans told themselves in 2008. Instead of learning from their mistakes, they doubled down on their wishful thinking last year, with even more catastrophic results.

Much was made of Barack Obama's resume, as if that actually mattered. If experience was all it took to win a presidential nomination, Jon Huntsman would have faced Obama last fall instead of Mitt Romney. Not only was Huntsman a much more effective and popular governor, he had vast foreign policy experience that Romney didn't.

That's why conservatives should start taking Vice President Joe Biden seriously soon. He's almost certain to win the 2016 Democratic nomination and I'd give him better than even odds of ascending to the presidency.

"But what about Hillary," I'm sure you're asking. Well, I don't think that she's going to run for several reasons;

First, history tells us that the nomination is Biden's for the asking. The last three Democratic vice-presidents - Gore, Mondale and Humphrey - all won it, despite strong challengers. The last vice-president to run for the nomination and lose was Truman's, Alben Barkley in 1952, and he was practically a corpse when he announced.

Second, the Clinton legacy is something to be protected. Losing to the first serious African-American candidate for the nomination is one thing. Losing to Joe Biden, which she almost certainly would, is quite another. It may well be that Chelsea wants to run for something someday, which would be complicated if her mother decides to become Harold Stassen.

Third, Hillary is just a terrible national candidate. Yes, she was elected to the Senate twice, but she did it in a deeply blue state and beat two nobodies. Her presidential campaign was notable for the infighting within it, which was more focused than the goal of winning the nomination. And beating an incumbent vice-president is considerably more difficult than winning an open nomination.

Fourth, she's seen how much money her husband has made since leaving office, and she'll be leaving the State Department at least as popular Bill was when he left the White House. I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that Hillary has been talking to Colin Powell about how lucrative the private sector can be for a popular former secretary of state. Why damage that by running for a nomination she's unlikely at best to win?

Look, mocking Joe Biden is a lot of fun. I get that. I do it all the time. The difference is that I'm not running against him.

Also, as Ezra Klien points out in Bloomberg this morning, Biden is increasingly seen as a serious player;

In the continuing drama that is the Obama presidency, Biden often appears as comic relief. He’s the zany neighbor, the adorable uncle. As a result, his presidential ambitions, which burn brightly even today, have mostly been laughed off. Somehow, the sitting vice president of the United States, the former chairman of both the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee, a man who’s on a nickname basis with many of the world’s most powerful leaders, is seen in many quarters as lacking the gravitas to be president.

Yet just a few days before he was giving dating advice on C-SPAN2, Biden again proved himself perhaps the most effective member of the Obama administration. He reprised his role as the White House closer, the guy who can cut a deal with the Republicans after everyone else has failed. In the end, Biden got Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to strike a deal that the White House was happy with. That’s something neither Obama nor Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner had achieved. And it wasn’t the first time. Biden also helped close the 2011 deal that lifted the debt ceiling and the 2010 deal that extended the Bush tax cuts in return for fresh stimulus.

Biden’s skills as a campaigner are also considerable. According to Nielsen, his speech at the 2012 Democratic National Convention won better television ratings than the addresses of either Bill Clinton or Obama (or Republicans Mitt Romney and Representative Paul Ryan, for that matter). His debate performance against Ryan bucked up anxious Democrats and arguably stanched the bleeding from Obama’s hapless initial appearance against Romney.

Republicans would do well to study Biden's performance in his debate against Ryan. Paul Ryan was presented as the GOP's most serious thinker, and Biden managed to dismiss him as if he were a contender for vice president of his junior high school class instead of the United States. And the chances aren't good that the Republican Party will put up a nominee even as smart as Ryan in four years.

Therein lies another serious problem for Republicans: The GOP's ongoing civil war.

The Tea Party and the Religious Right maintain that when the party nominates sane people (Bob Dole, John McCain and Mitt Romney,) they lose. Of course, they forget that George W. Bush ran well to the left of the party's platform and won twice.

Those elements of the party control enough of the primaries that, if they manage to work together, they can deny the nomination to someone actually capable of beating Biden. Jon Huntsman and Chris Christie seem to already be disqualified for the nomination, and I can't see another Bush being nominated anytime soon. Between his performance as Romney's vice-presidential nominee and his vote for last week's fiscal cliff deal, I'd suggest that Ryan is out, too. If someone like Marco Rubio stays on the Tea Party right, he can't be elected. But if he moves to the center, he can't be nominated.

Then there's the party's "next in line" tradition for the nomination, which heavily favors Rick Santorum. But Santorum would be crushed everywhere but the Deep South, and there's a very real chance that he'd lose the Carolinas and possibly Georgia, especially if Biden picks a Southerner as a running mate.

Republicans have also adopted the old Democratic playbook that cost them seven out of ten presidential elections between 1968 and 2004. In 2008, McCain had to run to the base so hard that he couldn't move to the center after the convention. And last year Republicans started playing the old Democrat game of "kill the frontrunner," which made Romney all but unelectable in the fall. It should also be remembered that almost all of Obama's attacks against Romney were first deployed by Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry during the primaries.

When I look at a hypothetical election, I look at the likeliest winner and ask myself "Who's going to beat him?" Combine that likely scenarios and conditions, and you'd be surprised how often it works.

It's almost unthinkable that President Obama will leave office anywhere near as unpopular as either Bush did, although I can't see him having approval ratings like Reagan or Clinton did. If Obama starts 2016 with a job approval of about 45%, that puts Biden way ahead of the GOP, who are almost certain to have another ruinous primary. Since I believe this economy is "the new normal," employment and GDP growth numbers will only have to be slightly better than they are now for the Democrats not to be hurt too badly by them.

Then there's the Republican brand. The Tea Party penchant for nominating unelectable Senate candidates is going to cost them their third consecutive clear shot at that body in two years. There's also a better than even chance that they'll lose more House seats when they historically should gain a lot of them.

And that goes to the single biggest problem conservatives had last year: Their outright refusal to recognize reality. They managed to convince themselves that they couldn't lose against Obama when the history and the facts told them something very different. When they didn't rationalize away evidence contrary to the narrative, they ignored it completely or ascribed it to some nefarious media plot.

Every instinct in my body tells me that they're going to the same thing in a race against Joe Biden. And I can't see how that ends well.

The National Rifle Association Isn't Helping

The most predictable thing happened in the immediate aftermath of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Everybody got dogmatic, stupid, and frequently both. The reaction to the massacre managed to reaffirm my contempt for the human spirit more than the massacre itself, which is saying something since we are talking about 20 dead first graders.

As I've said repeatedly over the last week, if I thought gun control would be even remotely helpful, I might find it in myself to support it, the obvious constitutional problems aside. But that train left the station well over a century ago. Even if you could stop the production of all American guns tomorrow, there would still be as many as 300 million of them floating around out there. Liberals understand this, they just refuse to be honest about it.

Conservatives (or more exactly, Republicans) have been even worse over the last seven days. They're going out of their way to blame everything but guns and looking for liberal solutions that limit free speech rights and accomplish nothing. It's repugnant and all the proof you need that you shouldn't trust those assholes any more than you trust liberals. At the end of the day, their solutions require just as much big government and primacy of the state over the individual.

Over the last week, I've seen far too many conservatives blame TV, movies, video games, the Internet and even the news media itself. That kind of stupidity and brazen dishonesty is even more dangerous than the most powerful of assault weapons. Don't get me wrong, they still want their guns. In fact, they want more guns out there. The Second Amendment must be protected, even at the expense of the First.

It's also important to remember that most of the outraged voices this week are the same people that believe corporations are people for the purpose of election spending. If that's true (and I don't have any serious philospohical problems with it) it therefore stands to reason that they enjoy the full spectrum of First Amendment rights, including producing brutally graphic movies and video games.

If the sharp curbing of free expression rights,combined with the wholesale arming of the populace produces anything other than Yemen, I'm at a loss to explain what it would be. The American left and right seem to be in agreement that personal freedom has to take it in the nuts and are only arguing over whose will go.

Perhaps the most offensive notion out there is that this is all the fault of the news media. If I understand this assertion properly, it goes as follows: If the news media stops reporting the news, then nobody will get the idea to shoot a whole bunch of folks. The idea is that the desperate, sad and ill among us are looking for some manner of immortality. If they happen to attain that through a measure of infamy, so be it. You can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, right?

Boiled down, the logic seems to be that if we ignore them, they'll just go away. And if you're a simpleton, you might very well agree.

But why then don't we apply that standard to all bad actors in the world? Wasn't Osama bin Laden granted a measure of fame in the wake of 9/11? Would there have been attempted copycat attacks if we all just agreed not to talk about the big hole in Lower Manhattan? Would rockets stop falling in the suburbs of Tel Aviv if the Israeli media stopped making such a big deal about Hezbollah and Hamas?

The idea that crazy people often do weird shit seems to have escaped everyone. It seems self-evident that they do weird shit precisely because they're crazy, and guns or media have little, if anything, to do with it. But it seems that mine is an increasingly lonely voice. Everybody wants the government to do something, even people who don't naturally trust it to do much at all.

I was actually impressed with the National Rifle Association's ability to keep its mouth shut in the days after Sandy Hook. Not only did they show admirable restraint, it was savvy public relations, which they're not often famous for. For example, the NRA's mouthpiece in chief, Wayne LaPierre responded to the sieges at Ruby Ridge and Waco by calling government agents "jackbooted thugs," causing lifelong member George H.W Bush to resign in protest.

In keeping a respectful silence, the NRA very well could have gained some goodwill. And they couldn't have that, so they yesterday sent LaPierre out to piss it all away with a presentation so brazenly dishonest and chock full of stupidity that it couldn't possibly be ignored.



Actually, that's not true. Fox News bailed as soon as they understood just how badly Wayne was fucking up the narrative.

That LaPierre believes that the solution to a problem with guns is more guns should surprise no one. After all, the proliferation of weapons is the NRA's raison d'etre, their very bread and butter. But it is just a little counter-intuitive. As the always amazing Michele Catalano said "Next we'll combat the heroin problem in my town by providing the kids with more heroin!" I actually don't agree with that, but it's a great rejoinder.

According to the new official position of the NRA, guns aren't the problem, the media is. And only the government can address that. If the First Amendment has to go to protect the Second, by God, the NRA will be first one to pull the trigger.

In calling for armed cops in every school, LaPierre seems to be calling for a dramatic expansion of the federal government. Most of the examples he cited - airports, the president and Congress - are all protected by federal employees and paid for by Washington.

Let's not pretend that the NRA is a kumbaya, "Up with People" wing of the Democratic Party, okay? These are self-described conservatives. And they're basically proposing the federalization of the school security without a plausible way of paying for it and in direct opposition to decades conservative dogma about the federal role in education.

In fairness, that idea isn't half as fucking dumb as the wholesale arming of teachers. I could be wrong, but I suspect that giving glocks to a bunch of liberal arts majors won't end as well as some folks seem to think it will. Even if it did, it doesn't address the expanding use of body armor in mass shooting incidents since the 1997 North Hollywood Bank of America shootout. If it's hard for the cops to take these psychos out, there's no reason to believe that your kid's guidance counsellor is going to have better luck.

This expansion of government also flies in the face of the paranoid and constitutionally unsupported idea that the Second Amendment is necessary because Americans might have to rise up against their government that the NRA is generally supportive of.

Look, you're not rising up against shit, okay? Even the Whiskey Rebellion of 1791 was unequal to federal might, and the United States didn't have a standing army at the time, let alone drones, Apache helicopters and Ticonderoga class cruisers with Aegis combat systems that can destroy a basketball with a Tomahawk missile from 500 miles away. For all the lunatic romantic remembrances of Ruby Ridge and Waco, it's sort of important to remember which side won those confrontations. If the next 25 most powerful nations can't defeat American military might, why does anyone think that some pissed-off hillbillies and blogger shitheads can?

That's not to suggest that I'm against guns. I'm not. But I'm also not going to look at you with a straight face and suggest that your right to bear arms is more important than anyone else's free speech rights.

Not only does LaPierre say exactly that, he will fight to death for the right of people on terrorist watch lists to buy firearms but he wants Grand Theft Auto and a twenty year old Oliver Stone movie made verboten, pronto. There is no other reason to devote that many paragraphs to scapegoating the culture if you don't want action on it. If, as some suggest, that he's only calling for "public shaming," we should take a good long look at how effective that's been against the NRA. Some people are simply biologically without shame.

Here's an interesting test I use to determine if someone is being honest with me. I take note of whether someone holds up individual amendments over the Bill of Rights as a whole. For example, the Second Amendment is pretty meaningless without the Fourth keeping the government from coming to take your guns away. The rest of the document is little more than quaint without the First Amendment.

That's a test that LaPierre and the NRA routinely fails. In a mad and desperate effort to deflect even the tiniest amount of responsibility for gun violence from guns, he throws other freedoms over the side.

Yes, I know that ol' Wayne didn't explicitly call for the censorship or regulation of media. But I can't overlook the fact that he didn't have to. He has no shortage of stooges in Congress and the conservative media that will do it for him. In fact, they've already started.

Always remember that Wayne LaPierre isn't a symbol of freedom; he's a lobbyist. As such, he'll say anything you wind him up to, provided you dangle enough money in front of his snout first. And anyone who doesn't get that is probably too dumb to own a gun in the first place.

A New and Exciting Approach to Higher Education: "Don't Rape"

You ever see something that you know should make you angry, but makes you laugh so hard that you just don't have the energy to be outraged after the giggles stop? That's exactly what happened to me when I saw the picture to the left on a friend's Facebook page.

Don't get me wrong, it's a very earnest message but it's also a compelling argument that the great P.J O'Rourke was right when he said that "Earnestness is stupidity sent to college."

As hilarious as I think that this is, I'm also of the opinion that it's also somewhat dangerous in so far as it tends to trivialize something as serious as rape. In all seriousness, if a man is of university age and still a monster, I'm not comlpetely convinced that a lecture from a tenured professor is going to do a whole lot to change that.

I'm not going to discount entirely the possibility that I'm just a hyper-conservative whackjob and genetically wrong about everything, but it seems to me that the socialization process regarding sexual assault should start a lot earlier than when you're eligible for our first federal student loan. Again, I could be way off about this. I just don't think I am.

Look, I get that statements like this make everybody feel good, but I reckon that it's well past time that we recognize that things that make you feel good are often pretty stupid. Take cocaine as just one example. It makes you feel awesome, but it's a really poorly considered lifestyle choice unless, of course, you're me. Always remember that these are professional tricks, performed by a professional and not intended for home use.

The basic premise of this message is silly for practical reasons, as well. For those of you who spent too much time in school, I think it's necessary to point out that feminism is a philosophy. It might well be that it is among the finest philosophies ever devised, but that misses an essential point. So far as I'm aware, no philosophy is going to overwhelm a violent oaf with a hard cock that outweighs you by as much as 80 pounds. I have yet to see that in a mixed martial arts class. There comes a point when things like reason are pretty much useless.

Here's something else you might not know. Carrying around the collected works of Satre never prevented anyone from being shot to death, either. Just sayin'.

Having said that, a philosophy will make you feel better about yourself after you've already been victimized. I get that. Maybe I'm an oddball, but I'd emphasize preventing your victimization in the first place. I know, crazy, right?

I understand that you have the right to get drunk and pass out in the dorm room of some horny bastard that you barely know at 3 am, but that right doesn't necessarily immunize you from the consequences of your exercise of said right. You have the right to be free from rape, but you also have the right to vote. The only problem is that less than half the population chooses to exercise it.

Statistics show that nearly three out of four women will be sexually assaulted in their lifetimes. However, attacks by a stranger are relatively rare, which is why they keep winding up in the newspaper. Assaults are always unforgivable and unjustified and, in some cases, unavoidable.

My point is that they're not always unavoidable. The odds are that you will be raped, and it'll be by someone you know. Rape is also, in most circumstances, a crime of opportunity. Deny the victimizer the opportunity and your chances of being a victim decrease dramatically. That's not always true, but it's true enough of the time that it should really be considered.

Just as the aforementioned Mr. O'Rourke implied, earnestness often carries the day, particularly in politically correct institutions such as universities. That being the case, I can pretty much guarantee you that common sense is going to go right out the fucking window and "Don't rape" is going to taught in college.

It therefore stands to reason that there's going to be a test of some kind. I can't be the only one who really looks forward to the questions on it, can I?

Please complete the following sentence. "It's right to force yourself sexually on a woman after a date .."

a) Never
b) Always
c) When dinner and the movie cost over $200.

Is that going to prevent a single act of sexual violence? Probably not. But it will make any number of dumb people feel better.

And if you ever wondered why I cheer the asteroid squashing the Aerosmith guy's kid in the great Bruce Willis movie that is life, now you know.

I'd be remiss if I didn't leave you good folks without a life lesson from the master of common sense, Adan Carolla.




But what about girls who aren't of college age yet? Doesn't popular culture have a message for them?

Rush Limbaugh Presents the Dumbest Thing I've Ever Heard

Republican types like to bemoan comedians like Jon Stewart for "activism" and then berate his response that he's primarily a comedian. They call it "clown nose on-clown nose off." In fairness, there actually is something to that. I don't doubt that Stewart has an agenda. Most political comedians do, that sort of being the point of becoming a political comedian.

On the other hand, it quickly becomes clear just how full of shit these people are when Rush Limbaugh says something incredibly stupid. Then you see these assholes employ precisely the same defense of him that they attack Stewart for using himself. It's deeply amusing to watch and I'm actually surprised that no one's called them on it before.

Most Tea Partiers don't just view Limbaugh as a deep political thinker, they see him as something as a spiritual forefather. And god knows that elected Republicans don't dare cross him. The second that they do, the fat man goes on a tirade and within 24 hours the politician is calling in to grovel at Rush's feet.

But the second that Limbaugh goes over the line - and the Sandra Fluke tirade is as good an example as any - the party line becomes "Rush is just an entertainer. He's not a spokesman for the Republican party." Except, y'know, for the rest of the time when he is. Limbaugh certainly brings them to heel in ways that the RNC Chairman, the House speaker or the Senate minority leader can't. You tell me what that says about his power, or if there's a Democratic equivalent to it.

In my opinion, there's been such a lack of principled leadership in the GOP for so long that a collection of goddamn deejays have taken over. Limbaugh just happens to be the most prominent and powerful of them, but you've also got raving dickheads like Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Mark Levin following up the rear. And these people aren't the spineless shills they used to be. They actually set the agenda these days, and they will forcibly de-ball any supposed "leader" that crosses them.

Look, it's easy to brook no dissent when you're a glorified deejay because you have nothing to lose. As a matter of fact, it's often professionally better for afternoon radio types and Fox News talking heads when Republicans lose elections. As you might imagine, it's easier (to say nothing of more entertaining) to oppose than propose. There's a considerably higher level of difficulty in going on 45 minute long lunatic tirades about Marxist and Alinskyite conspiracies when the GOP is in charge without sounding like the late Robert Welch.

But for weapons-grade stupidity, obliviousness and outright hypocrisy, this is tough to beat.

RUSH: We got this piece in The Daily Beast: "A Scarlet Letter -- the Monica Lewinsky-ing of Paula Broadwell -- When powerful men stray, the press continues to ogle, and shame, the women they do it with, writes Allison Yarrow." And this whole story got me to thinking about how the country's changed in terms of simple things like humor. What used to be harmless, clever humor, today is heard by the people who've been educated the last 30, 35 years, today causes legitimate anger and indignation and charges of cruelty and insensitivity and bigotry or sexism or what have you. I've been doing a lot of thinking about this.

(...)

You could say cool versus uncool, hip versus unhip. But they've been brainwashed. I don't mean that in a communist way. I'm just saying they have been indoctrinated. And you can find evidence of it everywhere. I mean, for example, one of the things that I get in the most trouble on this show for is that what I say is really controversial? No. It is they haven't the slightest understanding of a traditional sense of humor. You see, you don't laugh at what they believe. It's just not done. And people who do that are considered reprobates or what have you. But most of the things that I get in, quote, unquote, trouble for, you know, I'll say something here, it gets all over the media and people, "You need to apologize, that's outrageous. You mean-spirited..." And you who listen every day know full well all we're doing here is entertaining, we're just having fun.

They don't get it. I'll give you one of my favorite examples. I love stereotypical humor. But you can't do that anymore. Stereotypical humor, top of my head, mother-in-law joke. You know what a real dichotomy is? Your new Cadillac you see driving off the cliff, but your mother-in-law's in it, so jeez, is it good or bad? You tell that joke today seriously, and these people are going to be out of their gourd. They don't see one thing stereotypically humorous about it. They just think it's entirely insensitive and mean-spirited and anti-woman. And that's cultural, not political. You couple this with the fact that they're preternaturally arrogant and cocky with what they think, so it's gonna be a daunting task. 

Oh, good! Rush is thinking!  And in a single monologue, he's already been able to completely misrepresent the way the conservative movement has acted over the last five years.

Limbaugh is right when he suggests that you couldn't tell a joke around liberals without being subjected to indignant, politically correct, endlessly boring lectures and wildly annoying indignation. But that's every bit as true of modern conservatives today as it was of liberals.

Try telling a joke about Sarah Palin's stupidity, Allen West's mental illness, Chris Christie's weight or Limbaugh's attempt a decade ago to transform himself into a wealthier version of Keith Richards. You'll immediately learn that shithead conservatives have bought into political correctness and identity politics every bit as much as shithead liberals have. Conservatives are actually even more insufferable about it because they're pretending that they're not doing it. Both sides have their golden calfs and they're all too often created on racial and gender lines. Yes, liberals are assholes about it, but conservatives are assholes and hypocrites.

I really think that we've gotta adopt a very, very long game if we're going to recapture the country, and we have to do what the left did. And I don't know how yet. But we are going to have to recapture the public education of this country, because that, folks, is where decent, honorable, really good, normal people like Mitt Romney end up being thought of as despicable human beings. It is through 30 or more years of public education run totally by liberals and the way they have characterized their opponents. I see it every day.

Please.

This idea that the left indoctrinates people to think of Republicans as assholes is true, but Republicans are hardly innocents. The right has been painting Democrats as traitors for 80 years now. The few Republicans that survived the 1932 election spent the following twelve years declaring that FDR was establishing an unconstitutional dictatorship. Then the Truman administration, which established the very policies that won the Cold War, was painted as willing dupes of the Soviet Union and a den of spies, to boot. As recently as this spring, Allen West said that 80 members of the Democratic caucus (or fully 50% of it) were members of the Communist Party.

And when the average Republican isn't trying to convince you that the Democrats are selling out the country, he'll have you believe that they're determined to destroy the family and even Jesus his own self!

Look at the nonsense issues that the GOP have run on the last 25 years. These include the death penalty, Willie Horton, the Pledge of Allegiance in schools and school prayer - none of which involve the federal government, let alone the executive office of the president.

And then there are the perennial issues of abortion and gay marriage. This year, Rick Santorum, along with any number of Republicans in Congress and the state legislatures made birth control - which was settled all the way back in 1965 - a wedge issue, only to be stopped by Democrats doing a better job of it first.

The fact is that Republicans have been running on little other than cultural issues for decades now. "Gays, Guns and God" has been their boilerplate platform since at least Nixon. And for a good long time, it worked for them, if only because Democrats were ideologically divided among themselves, and weak demographically and geographically.

As you might have noticed, that's no longer true. Not only were Bill Clinton and Barack Obama able to still win, they won in large part by turning those issues against the GOP. Worse, the demographics and geography have caught up and now strongly favor the Democrats, which I've only been warning about for five years now.

Republicans went so far on abortion and birth control in the last 12 months, that a new Rasmussen poll shows that the percentage of pro-choice voters has gone up during the campaign.That's all the evidence you should need that it's backfiring in a significant way. Remember, the GOP has won the popular vote exactly once since 1992 and they increasingly face annihilation in the Electoral College. If Texas so much as turns purple, it becomes mathematically impossible for Republicans to win the presidency.

Unfortunately, cultural campaigning is all the Republicans have left. The sad legacy of the second President Bush is that he single-handedly destroyed his party's natural advantage on foreign policy and the economy.

But let's go back to Limbaugh because he's hilarious.

As you know, I'm a big technophile, and I read every tech blog there is, particularly those related to Apple. And all of these people contributing and writing and posting these blogs are under 30. And they live in a different world than I do and they live in a different world than I grew up in. The things that they just assume are true, like there is no doubt whatsoever that we are destroying the planet with global warming, no doubt. They can't even conceive of what you and I both know to be the truth, and that is, the whole global warming thing is a hoax. They do not even think it's a political issue. They do not realize that everything they believe in has been totally corrupted by politics.

If Republicans believe this, they're fucked. It's all over. Look around the world. You will not find another major conservative party that engages climate change denialism as a part of its electoral platform. Not one.

Most of international conservatives take global warming positions that are variations of my own, which is as follows: "Is climate change real and man-made? Well, most of the really smart people who devote their careers to studying it seem to think so. So the balance of probabilities suggests that it is. Unfortunately, there realistically isn't a whole lot we can do about it without completely destroying the economy, which we sort of need right now."

What do the Republicans do? Why, they just deny that there's a problem at all and suggest an international conspiracy to undermine capitalism. The goofier ones say that they know that there isn't a problem because the Bible tells them so, which is amazingly funny when you realize that they're on the Energy and Commerce Committee.

Sure, they know that they sound like yokels when say shit like this, but they don't care because they're so afraid of their yokel primary voters that it doesn't matter if the rest of the country and world thinks that they might be retarded. But if this past election has taght them anything, it should be that the law of diminishing returns is kicking in.

What they think is science is nothing more than corruption by the left, but they don't know any better. It's what they've been exposed to from as early on in their lives as their brains were capable of learning anything. And that happens to be the kind of thinking that populates the entertainment culture and so forth. I really think that the solution to our problems are not really political. I think conservatives are seen by young people and the left and the pop culture the way they are not because of what these people have been taught about conservatism. It's purely cultural. They don't know ideology. They don't know liberal versus conservative. They've not been told, for example, that Romney is a skunk or whatever because he is a conservative. It goes far deeper than that. 

So the battle that we face is not really an ideological one. I must confess, I think the solution will be found in ideology, but I must confess, I think I've been a little wrong. I have waxed eloquent here on this program. I have longed for the day where people understand what liberalism is ideologically. I have begged the Republican Party to campaign on ideology and to explain to people what liberalism is by pointing liberals out. You want to see liberalism, look at Detroit. You want to see liberalism, look at California. You want to see liberalism, look at Cuba. You want to see liberalism, look at Venezuela.

There's more than enough blame to go around regarding California. It managed to pay its bills just fine until Proposition 13 passed. And it still pays Washington more in taxes than it gets in services, thereby directly subsidizing any number of welfare case red states. As a rule of thumb, the redder the state, the more it receives from Washington. That's just a mathematical fact. If Alabama and Mississippi are so fucking fantastic, why aren't they keeping, say, Illinois afloat, instead of the other way around?

By the way, wasn't the Republican-driven embargo of the last 55 years supposed to have taken care of Cuba?

The Republicans haven't done it. I don't know why, don't care right now. But the young people do look at Cuba, and they lionize Che Guevara. They wear his T-shirts. They look at Cuba, they don't see any big problem there. They don't know. My only point here is I'm just scratching the surface on this, by the way, so I'm speaking off the top my head here, but I really think that the way this is going to have to be attacked and dealt with is not to set politics aside. I'm not saying that none of this is political, but it's a cultural problem we face. The reason conservatives have been so maligned and are so maligned, the reason people who don't know us think of us the way they do is not because they understand politics. It's a cultural thing.

Are you fucking kidding me? Americans of high school and college age aren't just bad at world history, they're spectacularly, blindingly so! I doubt that they know who Che Guevara even was. Christ, I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that they wear those t-shirts because they think Che's the guy in My Morning Jacket. News flash: Hipster assholes believe stupid shit because hipster assholes are stupid.

But maybe there is a Grand Cultural Conspiracy underway that I'm unaware of. Maybe, just maybe, Hot Topic is giving those Che t-shirts away as part of a plot instead of selling them for profit, like good capitalists. Who among us can really say?

But maybe, just maybe, young people see Republicans as preening assholes that want to use the force of the federal government to impose their own, wildly inconsistent, morality.

Anti-abortion Tea Party crusaders, like Scott DesJarlais - a former doctor - is found to have fucked vast numbers of his female patients and counseled them to get abortions when he knocked them up, a theme that's confirmed by his own first wife. Or Larry Craig, who castigated Bill Clinton's being "a bad, naughty boy" only to be found trying to get suck-started in a Minneapolis airport men's room. Guys like Joe Walsh, who can't pay their bills or child support, are going to lecture us on personal responsibility. Or Mark Foley ...

The "Party of Family Values" had a presidential primary debate in 2008 where the only guy onstage that was only married once was the Mormon. Leading Republicans like Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich and, yes, even Rush Limbaugh are on their third wives.

Oh, I'm sorry. I made a factual error there. Limbaugh is actually on his fourth wife. The infernal cultural distractions make it hard for me to keep track.

Yes, the same Rush Limbaugh that was dropping hundreds of OxyContins a month and trolling the Internet for wives sees the culture as a problem.

No one has a lower regard for the intelligence of young people than I do, but I do think that they have pretty good bullshit detectors. Maybe more than any generation before them, they know when they're getting played, especially by dickhead political advocates. I like to think that I'm a hero to the young because I make it clear that I love strange pussy, non-prescribed pharmaceuticals and balanced budgets.

Limbaugh never actually comes out and says what his point is, or how it can be addressed. But by the sounds of it, he sees the GOP's political problems as cultural, and that those cultural problems should be addressed politically, which is circular logic.

The whole point of politics is to form government and shape policy, which you decidedly can't do if you keep losing elections. So Limbaugh seems to want to use the power of the government to shape the culture in ways that would allow conservatives to win the elections that they're losing now. How he plans to do this without winning elections is something I've given up trying to figure out because the entire idea ( as much as there actually is one) is fucking insane.

More insane still is the fact that he wants to do this to further the idea of a smaller government.