Hope Springs Eternal

I took a peek at the Althouse site today.(My bad, but I was curious to see if I was right. Fortunately for yours truly, I was. Whew!) What I saw there gave me some hope, in a kinda perverse way. Instead of actually talking about something remotely resembling an election or issues, the posters there were discussing John Kerry. If, in a covertly rabid partisan blog you have to resort to bashing someone who isn't even running, well then maybe there's hope after all.

Also reading those wacky posts cleared out the bile from reading the WP's bit about how the President of the United States said this: "However they put it, the Democrat approach in Iraq comes down to this: The terrorists win and America loses."

No, I didn't make that up. The President of the United States actually said that about the opposition party. Why not just have them declared enemy combatants and be done with it?
At least the ugliness that is the GOP machine is finally out in the open. It's like a sci-fi story where the attractive human is revealed as horrible ugly monster. As the LAT pointed out the other day, even Nixon (Nixon!) never went this far. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/la-na-outlook29oct29,0,2375674.column

Maybe this is the right's version of the destructive mayhem of the early 1970s? Only, since they are already in power, they want to take all of us down with them.

The Althouse site itself also appears to be becoming a pallid imitation of Red State. Perhaps they could effect a civil union. The Red Staters can do the heavy thinking and Ann can do Styles. It'd be just like the NYT. How nice!

Forget? I hope not.

Via Altercation http://mediamatters.org/altercation/ I came across this parody:
http://www.thewarofthewords.net/

Quite well done. But I confess that my primary initial emotion ran more along the lines of "humans can be pretty scary" than anything else. Sometimes it seems like technology just gives us the power to be scary messianic idiots more quickly. And I do mean all of us.

Dis-enchantment

Despite having switched to Apple machines several years ago, I liked to think that I was not zealous about the product. I preferred it, true, but also recognized that as a closed system there were certain things you couldn't do with a mac that you could do with a pc. But those all seemed fair tradeoffs, as you were getting something more reliable both as to hardware and software.

I am here to report that it just ain't so. I have owned a powermac, an ibook, and now a macbook. The powermac has never given me a minute of trouble. The ibook was a great machine, except that it was one of those ibooks with a faulty logic board. Apple did replace the board each time it failed (3x!) but still, it would be better to not have a pervasive fault. But, ok, these things happen. So after Apple stopped covering the ibook, I bought a "refreshed" macbook. That failed after 48 hours. So after some hassles, Apple took that back without charging me. So I got a bright and shiny new macbook, and it has had continuous software issues since I updated it to 10.4.8. It's calmed down a bit after I erased the hard drive and started over, but just yesterday it crashed after installing Flash. The upshot of all of this is that while I still think the Apple products are pretty good--and am not planning to return to pc-ville--I will say that it's a mistake to think they will be problem free. Whether these problems are particular to me or whether they are indicative of growing pains with Apple only time will tell.

Evidence of Evidence?

So I was reading David Brooks' review of Andrew Sullivan's most recent book in the NYT today. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/22/books/review/Brooks.t.html?ref=books

And I come across this:
I have a rule, which has never failed me, that when a writer uses quotations from Jerry Falwell, James Dobson and the Left Behind series to capture the religious and political currents in modern America, then I know I can put that piece of writing down because the author either doesn’t know what he is talking about or is arguing in bad faith.

And then a bit further on there's this:
The people who are most destructively closed-minded in America are people like Donald Rumsfeld, Ann Coulter and Howard Dean, and they are not exactly religious nuts.

Now, there are any number of observations I could make here. I could, for example point out that there's only one political operative named here. Or that no one has actually explained why, precisely, Mr. Dean is "closed-minded." Perhaps its because he's a Democrat who thinks Democrats should win. In that case, I suppose it would be difficult to decide who on the Republican side should be chosen since, apparently, they all think just that same way. Or, if we are talking real (as in fatal) destructive closed-mindedness, why the President wasn't put on this list. But what fascinated me was the use of the same rhetorical maneuver of selective naming employed by the person who levelled the initial criticism of selective naming.

Admittedly, we could stop here, with a simple Bravo! But let's press on, shall we?
If, in light of the observations made about this particular listing, we apply the writer's own "rule," we can see that he is either (a) ill-informed or (b) "arguing in bad faith." Label (a), definitionally, cannot apply here, since the writer has made a living creating a pseudo-typology of American psychologies. So that leaves us with (b). I for one am encouraged to see a commentator so forthrightly display his blade. Reminds me of a charming post at Redstate, wherein the "values" folks attempted to extol the virtues of hypocrisy.