I don’t like cranks, and I especially don’t like cranks who exaggerate their own importance.

I’ll resist joking about the self-hating aspect of this posture etc.

More info: Goldfarb Reflects.

Plus, Rep Steve King (R-IA):

Let’s just say that, that, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, is brought to the United States to be tried in a federal court in the United States, under a federal judge, and we know what some of those judges do, and on a technicality, such as, let’s just say he wasn’t read his Miranda rights. … He is released into the streets of America. Walks over and steps up into a US embassy and applies for asylum for fear that he can’t go back home cause he spilled the beans on al Qaeda. What happens then if another judge grants him asylum in the United States and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is on a path to citizenship.

Congressman, are you nuts?

Why is going from one paralyzed devotional epiphany to another so good for pundits’ careers? Just cause they can write interestingly about whomever they’re currently slavering about?

Maybe he needs to shut the fuck up about Senator Clinton, considering the acid fogs of surreality he’s convinced himself into believing previously. You were wrong the first time..

John McCain, raised in Nixonland, calls Senator Obama a socialist, trots out a plumber to stoke class and cultural resentments, and employs his Vice-President to question Obama’s patriotism by linking him to terrorists. Nixonland 101 — and if its rules still applied, Senator Obama would be in trouble. …

The old tactics aren’t working…. Nixonland is dead.

Pop Quiz:
When was the last time a Republican presidential ticket won without a Bush or Nixon?
Eighty years ago.

And it is permitted to be said such things as, “Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.” Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim, he’s a Christian. He’s always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no, that’s not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president? [...]

I feel strongly about this particular point because of a picture I saw in a magazine. It was a photo essay about troops who are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. And one picture at the tail end of this photo essay was of a mother in Arlington Cemetery, and she had her head on the headstone of her son’s grave. And as the picture focused in, you could see the writing on the headstone. And it gave his awards–Purple Heart, Bronze Star–showed that he died in Iraq, gave his date of birth, date of death. He was 20 years old. And then, at the very top of the headstone, it didn’t have a Christian cross, it didn’t have the Star of David, it had crescent and a star of the Islamic faith. And his name was Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, and he was an American. He was born in New Jersey. He was 14 years old at the time of 9/11, and he waited until he can go serve his country, and he gave his life.

Candidate McCain now supports the wartime tax cuts that Senator McCain once denounced as immoral.

Candidate McCain criticizes Senator McCain’s own climate change bill.

Candidate McCain says he would now vote against the immigration bill that Senator McCain wrote.

Are you kidding? Talk about being for it before you’re against it.

Let me tell you, before he ever debates Barack Obama, John McCain should finish the debate with himself.

My Republican opponents, they don’t like to talk about efficiency. You know, the other day I was in a town-hall meeting and I laid out my plans for investing $15 billion a year in energy efficient cars, and a new electricity grid and all this.

Somebody said, ‘Well, what can I do, what can individuals do?’ So I told them something simple, I said:

“You know what, you could inflate your tires to the proper levels, and that if everybody in America inflated their tires to the proper levels, we would actually probably save more oil than all the oil that we get from John McCain from right below his feet there, whatever it is that he was going to, wherever he was going to drill.”

So now the Republicans are going around—this is the kind of things they do, I don’t understand it—they’re going around, sending like little tire gauges, making fun of this idea as if this is Barack Obama’s energy plan.

Now two points. One, they know they are lying about what my energy plan is. But the other this, they are making fun of a step that every expert says would absolutely reduce our oil consumption by 3 to 4%. It’s like these guys take pride in being ignorant.

You know, they think it is funny that they are making fun of something that is actually true. They need to do their homework, because this is serious business. Instead of running ads about Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, they should go talk to some energy experts and actually make a difference.

I really believed more strongly when I left here than when I came that ideas matter, that evidence matters, that thinking and reasoning matter, that ideas have consequences and that in politics that means ideas lead to policies which have positive or negative effects in people’s lives. [...]
If you have a philosophy, it generally pushes you in a certain direction or another. But like all philosophers, you want to engage in discussion and argument. You are open to evidence, to new learning. And you are certainly open to debate the practical applications of your philosophy. There are, you might wind up making a principled agreement with someone with a different philosophy.
— Full Transcript.

“[A] true pilot must of necessity pay attention to the seasons, the heavens, the stars, the winds, and everything proper to the craft if he is really to rule a ship”
— Plato, The Republic

LIMBAUGH: And so, now, we find out that there is obesity and all this amongst the poor more than amongst those who are not poor. It’s sort of a textbook case of what happens when we let liberals have their way. I mean, for decades, all over the world, we’ve been beat about the head that there are hungry people out there, that they are starving. UNICEF—how many of you trick-or-treated for UNICEF? Did you “Trick-or-Treat for UNICEF,” Brian? We all did—did you? We all trick-or-treated. One of the biggest scams on the face of the earth. It was—the scam was to get everybody loving the United Nations. The scam was to get everybody thinking the United Nations is feeding poor people. Remember all these stories: “A dime a day will feed 20 kids in some outward place around the world”?
[...]
LIMBAUGH: This is what happens when you let the left run things. We’ve been beat about the head. There are hungry people everywhere. UNICEF got it all started. We’ve seen the babies with the extended tummies, the walking skeletons, told that kids can’t learn unless they’re fed. We’ve been guilted into pouring resources on the problem. And now, now, the latest crisis is that there is obesity among those who are impoverished. Because we are sympathetic, we are compassionate people, we have responded by letting our government literally feed these people to the point of obesity. At least here in America, didn’t teach them how to fish, we gave them the fish. Didn’t teach them how to butcher a—slaughter a cow to get the butter, we gave them the butter.

There’s lots of things to say about this, but in general, if one points out that

1. Regardless of whether food stamps or welfare checks are involved, more affluent people always have easier access to more food than poorer ones do;
2. Therefore it appears that well-off countries like the USA, the Divine and All-Knowing Invisible Hand aligns nutrition and lifestyle choices so that it’s cheaper to tend towards obesity—
3. Will Rush Limbaugh’s substance-abuse-addled head explode?

Billmon:

It cost the IDF almost 30 KIA and 40-50 wounded to take those two villages, and now they’ve given them back. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

Juan Cole:

It was such a stupid war. It was thick-as-two-blocks-of-wood strategy on all sides. It was moronic for the Israelis to plan it out last year. It was idiotic for Hizbullah to cross over into Israel, kill soldiers, and take two captive. It was brain dead for the Israeli officer corps and politicians to think they could get anything positive out of bombing Lebanon back to the stone age and making a million people homeless. It was dim-witted for Hasan Nasrallah to threaten Israelis with releasing poison gases from Haifa chemical plants on them. It was obtuse for the Israelis to confront a dug-in guerrilla movement with green conventional troops marching in straight lines. It was dull of Hizbullah to fire thousands of katyushas into open fields where they mainly damaged wild grass. The few times when the rockets managed to kill someone, it was often an Arab Israeli civilian. Stupid.

George Will:

Foreign policy “realists” considered Middle East stability the goal. The realists’ critics, who regard realism as reprehensibly unambitious, considered stability the problem. That problem has been solved.

Fred Kaplan:

How many souls over the decades have sallied forth into the desert, beaming with bright eyes and blueprints for a “new Middle East,” only to bog down in the dunes, blistered by sunstroke and bitten by scorpions?

Sidney Blumenthal: ‘Israel’s debacle, courtesy of Bush’.