My sincere apologies. Those links don’t work and I don’t know why. Sorry to have wasted your time and to have made an unwarranted accusation. I was able to successfully cut and paste the links into the URL line, being very careful to delete any spurious characters from the front and back of the URL.

Bush made his suggestions for SS with the clear statement that everything was on the table and all good suggestions should be considered. In fact, there have been some good suggestions. Raising the cap seems to have political backing, it’s just a question of how much. The total SS tax is high, though — 13%, including employer and employee SS taxes. Raising the cap too high would have other consequences.

I favor private accounts, but not the speculative kind. In other words no stocks. or stock funds, and no churning of accounts. What’s more, there should be no paid brokers involved. Bonds and bond funds would be very appropriate and quite safe. My review of the last 100 years of the stock market indicates that, if the personal accounts were not limited as I suggest here, people could make some bad investments at the wrong time and not recoup losses for a decade or so. On the whole, the market has never had more than 4 bad years in a row, but some stocks and funds do a lot worse than that.

I agree that the last thing we need is a SS-funded stock bubble that only lines the pockets of Wall Street. A good case can be made that the market is still grossly overpriced and due for more correction – a lot more. There are some good stocks out there, no doubt; but one can only be sure in hindsight. The Stock Market is worse than a casino.

This link(it had better work – scroll down to the chart):
http://www.chartfilter.com/djia/overview.htm

shows how the Dow Jones Index has run away since the mid-1980s. Of course, to be fair, the chart needs to be corrected for both inflation and GNP, which both grew tremendously as well. Such a correction would greatly reduce the size of the bump since the 1980s. Nevertheless, most stocks, based on price/earnings are still way overpriced. SS private accounts need to avoid that kind of thing.

I’m on vacation at the moment, which accounts for all of this leisure time I have to devote to arguing. I’ll be brief.

Regarding the ’shrillness’ accusation: I guess that’s how the whole mirroring/ projection thing works. But if someone had busted Rove’s balls like they should have 20 years ago, we wouldn’t now have to listen to him saying anything he can to distract from the fact that Bush fixed the intelligence and went to war. (Nice how I slipped that in, huh Ire?) A periodic whack on the nose with a rolled-up NYT is my service to you, Ire.

With respect to Kerry and Edwards, there are other ways to function in the Senate than to pass legislation. Edwards was only a one-termer, but Kerry was and is actually a very important Senator in other ways. What drove me crazy during the 2004 campaign was the total silence about his leading role in the BCCI investigation. BCCI, if you remember, was an international bank used for money laundering, and a big contributor to Democratic power brokers (Clark Clifford). Kerry, a junior senator, led the investigation, and when official Washington told him to lay off, he found a way to publicize the report and shut down BCCI. BCCI, by the way, became the model for the financing of terrorist networks in the 1990’s. So, investigative and committee work is a big part of what goes on in the Senate. I mean, look at John Warner. Not a legislator, but a hell of a powerful chairman. By your measure, is he therefore an ‘absentee’ Senator?

Regarding my supposed ‘evasion,’ no, the links DIDN’T work. What’s more, they wouldn’t come up when I typed the URL’s into my brower. I figured it was probably a technical problem. But this raises a larger point that has no obvious answer: substantiation for claims is needed, but hyperlinks really lard messages. For the most part, I work from memory. I really prefer to confine the argument to what I can recall, unaided. But you’re right, the problem could be the filter on my computer–which I call the Spin Filter.

Regarding SS, it is of course the case that growth in the problem will have to paid for in some way. I’m all for fixing the problem: let’s raise the cap from $90,000 to $150,000, so those upper-income folks who materially benefit from a stable civil society can do their proportional part. The Bush approach, which seems to have washed up, bloated and stinking, on the shore, has nothing to do with ’saving Social Security,’ and everything to do with releasing the money in the program for the investment markets. Everybody knows that’s his real goal. Guess that 51% ‘mandate’ shrinks a bit when people realize you’re trying to take away their Social Security.

My goal, Ire, is altruistic: it is to keep you from crossing over like some of your co-ideologists over on the Killen thread. Them’s some racist whack jobs, and my guess is they mostly vote RepubliSpin. Remember: we’re known by the company we keep.

Actually, I think that the fewer new laws we get the better off we are. Anyway, I notice you had nothing to say to support Edwards. I understand Kerry is pretty much an absentee Senator, himself. Senate drudgery must be too much work for a limousine liberal.

Clarke was a functionary who cried wolf too many times to be effective. He was pushed aside, probably for his approval of the departure of bin Laden’s family from the USA after the 9/11 attacks.

I never liked the way Republicans went after Clinton like junkyard dogs. The Presidency deserves more respect than that. I don’t want to see any Presidency constantly under siege by such attacks. I’m sure a lot of what Bush endures in this regard is simple payback. It wastes a lot of time and money.

I had been looking for that website that listed all the comments from Administration officials. Thanks for the link. Many of the quotes are taken out of context, which makes them suspect; but yes, the Administration did obviously imply an immediate need to remove Saddam. Apparently, Congress agreed. Are they all liars, too? My point is simply that the President did not say what has been attributed to him ever since his 2003 SOU address, and those who misrepresent his words should be more precise.

Nice evasion — “none of the links worked”. Dem hypocrisy rules! Those links are good. Try a different computer. Yours must have a truth filter (just joking here).

You’re efforts on 7, 8, & 9 are merely proof that philosophers don’t spend much time on economics. The word of the government about future commitments is illusory when it is making no provisions to pay what’s coming due. In the future (exactly when depends on estimates of growth vs. liabilities), real negotiable bonds will have to be issued to pay those debts, or retirees will have to accept smaller than promised SS payments. What’s so wrong about fixing that problem now?

By the way, you seem a bit shrill when you accuse me of being shrill.

1. “I will revert, instead, to layman’s language and restate the point in terms of my weariness with both the media’s general ignorance and the too-widely-held notion of academic freedom as intellectual license combined with suspended ethics.”

Huh. With the media I’d call it ’studied ignorance,’ but that’s a quibble. ‘Intellectual license combined with suspended ethics.’ That’s quite a couple of slanders to just throw out there for such a defender of liberty as yourself. A large part of the contemporary right wing functions by systematically discrediting reason. You youself did this by valuing practical reason over intellectual reason, but you have good company here with Aristotle. However, the real irony is that while you disclain ‘post-Enlightenment’ thought, your actual quibble is with Kant and the idea of ’sapere aude,’ or ‘have the courage to use (and trust) your own reason. The modern neocons are all followers of Leo Strauss, who held that power is best concentrated and wielded by a small group of insiders, and that no one else, however sound their reasoning, is qualified to do so. Whether or not this is your view I can’t say. But I think your beef with reason goes back much further than the recent postmodernism you vilify.

(Parenthetical note: E. Ireland responds at exhaustive and exhausting length. This, too, is a strategy of the modern right: drown the opponent, and they’ll get tired and go away. Fortunately or unfortunately for me, I read Hegel, so I can play this game).

2. With respect to the Susskind article, the Man of Ire says:

“First possibility: the Administration person was speaking only for himself, using terminology that was both imprecise and too clever by half; so it hardly represents a central truth about the Administration. In any case, I wouldn’t care to expand that simple, one-time comment by an unnamed, supposedly Administration “official” into an Administration-wide plot to apply nihilistic philosophy to their press releases; but somehow you do.”

Well, as the right is so fond of saying, if it looks, quacks, and acts like a duck, then it’s a duck. Moreover, I believe the phrase used by the official was that members of the press and liberals belonged to the ‘reality-based community,’ whose epistemological stance committed them to a realist view of objects that are independent of observer-dictated reality. It was this epistemological/metaphysical construct that the official derided. ‘We,’ he said (and I’m paraphrasing) ‘make reality through our choices and actions, and you (academics, liberals, and the press) study, judiciously, the history that we make.’ Sounds pretty relativistic and self-aware to me, Ire.

This is, of course, the interpretation you offer. But it seems clear that the official wasn’t just making an ex post facto description of the way things are. Rather, he was saying that realist epistemological convictions are out and spin is in. But you are right that his conclusion is that Susskind, and the rest of us adhering to quaint notions of right and objectivity, should just suck it up. I feel completely justified in calling this nihilism, and in saying that the Administration is a fish that rots from the head down.

3. Moving on, we come to the big daddy of all epistemology, truth, and specifically, the Adminstration’s gleeful contempt for it. Ire (I hope you like how I’ve extracted the truly decriptive part of your name–hope you like it) wrote the following:

“Haters of the Administration have a way of inflating the word “lie” to mean anything they disagree with. They make no allowance for slight mis-statements or honest errors.”

Huh. Funny thing to hear from someone who, I suspect, bought into every Regnery ‘expose’ of Bill Clinton. It’s funny how, now that the shoe is on the other foot, Ire and his Ilk want to revisit the question of what the word ‘is’ means.

Ire continues: “So the fact that the empty suit, pretty boy Edwards, failed to make any memorable impression on Dick Cheney during Edward’s entirely undistinguished Senate career, is somehow a lie attributable to Cheney. In any case, the Cheney comment was, if anything, nothing more than a social mis-step. It was nothing close to a lie. Calling it a lie just emphasizes the left’s niggling immaturity.”

Huh. So, during a state dinner, the sitting Vice-President sits next to the Junior Democratic Senator from the State of North Carolina, and later doesn’t recollect this? Here, Ire, you’re falling back on the favored GOP strategy of asking ‘who are you gonna believe, me or your lyin’ eyes?’ Well, I’ll be generous and give you a choice: you either have to think Dick C. is so imcompetent as to not remember this, or you have to maybe grant that he’s being disingenuous. So, which is it? Is he a dolt or a liar? I don’t see any third possibilty, and the fact that you claim to shows the lengths you’ll go in order to avoid being wrong. There’s a further issue here as well with your RepubliSpin tactic of using this as an occasion to go after John Edwards. Well, if ‘undistinguished records’ matter to you, here’s Cheney’s: I can Google, too, Ire. Cheney spent 11 years in Congress. And what did he get? Two laws.

96th Congress: 4 Sponsored; 0 became Law
97th Congress: 4 Sponsored: 0 became Law
98th Congress: 8 Sponsored: 0 became Law
99th Congress: 7 Sponsored: 1 became Law
(H.R.1246 : A bill to establish a federally declared floodway for the Colorado River below Davis Dam.)
100th Congress: 7 Sponsored: 1 became Law
(H.R.712 : A bill for the relief of Lawrence K. Lunt.)
101st Congress: 1 Sponsored: 0 became Law

Pretty sad if you ask me. But even though the people of Wyoming didn’t get their money’s worth out of Dick, Dick got his money out of them.

4. It is at this point that Ire’s defense takes on truly Jesuitical proportions. Admittedly, I wouldn’t want to have the job of defending Condi the liar, but no one forced him. Anyway, here’s Ire’s spin:

“On the Rice statement, Secretary Rice acknowledges the fact that hazy, unspecific, and operationally useless FBI musings about unsupported and unconvincing airplane attack scenarios were too-often forwarded to the National Security Advisor, but this does not mean that anyone imagined those fantastical musings to be real, or found anything in them specific enough to act upon. Perhaps Ms. Rice spoke imprecisely by choosing not to drag us all through these details as she spoke, but playing Philadelphia lawyer and parsing her words after the fact does not mean that she lied.”

Huh. So, Richard Clarke and Colleen Rowley were just thinking ‘fantastically’ and in an ‘unsupported way?’ Here again, because Ire is a good Wingnut and will never admit he’s wrong, I ask you, my readers: doesn’t he sound a bit shrill right about now? Like he’s trying really, really hard to look casual? As I said, I don’t envy him his task, but it doesn’t matter. Condi refused for a long, long, time to testify, and when she did she was evasive, misleading, and obstructionist. Despite Ire’s contorted explanation, one doesn’t have to be a rocket scientist to read the whole episode as, well, evidence that Condi is, and has been, less than truthful.

Ire continues, “The criteria for truthfulness that Bush haters have established against the Administration would make liars out of everybody, including Bush haters.”

I must say, it’s funny to hear Wingnuts play the aggreived victim, considering their 13-year orgy of unabated Clinton demonizing. So, Ire, are you accusing us of hypocrisy? Or are you saying we hold the bar too high? If the latter, then I plead guilty. But where self-government is concerned, that is the preferrable error to the current error in which NO ONE holds Bush and his gang accountable for their actions.

5. The word ‘gang’ in the above sentence is relevant for Ire’s next point. He writes, “On a later point, exactly what is there to parse between there being an “imminent danger” and Bush’s clear statement that he thought the Iraqi threat of WMD was not yet imminent? One is positive and the other is negative. They are true and complete opposites. Logic provides no simpler or more decisive juxtaposition. There are no nuances. There are no details to parse. Bush spoke precisely and correctly in his 2003 State of the Union Address. The false notion that Bush lied about the imminence of the threat is entirely a fabrication of the Bush haters, and you know it.”

Well, I’ll cop to being a Bush hater who has good reasons, but don’t call me a liar, Ire. When Bush said Iraq was a ‘real’ threat where WMD is concerned, sounds imminent to me. Moreover I seem to recall that ol’ George wasn’t the only member of the Administration making the case. And many of them–Ari Fleischer included-DID use the word. So, frankly, Ire, you’re reduced to arguing sematics: even if Bush didn’t use the word, others did, and the locutions he used are clearly intended to invoke the referent of the term. Here’s the link so our audience can decide whether you’re right or I am:

http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=24970

Final point: if Bush and his gang really thought Iraq had WMD, why would they have massed 200,000 of our troops on the border?

And don’t call me a liar again, Ire. Things have been civil here, but next time I’ll hit you as hard as you hit me. THIS Democrat doesn’t believe in taking knives to gunfights–or, for that matter, in taking prisoners.

6. Regarding your Googling expedition for Democratic hypocrisy, well, duh. I’m a man: I can take criticism and laugh at myself. But none of the links worked, so I’m moving on.

7. With respect to Treasury notes, obviously, there’s not a big pile o’ money in some vault being paid out on a monthly basis. They are PROMISSORY. But shouldn’t the word of the US Govt. as to the trustworthy disposition of these notes be of utmost and strategic importance? What a Treasury Secretary says is one thing: what a President says, for political advantage, is quite another.

8. You use the mention of Paul O’Neill to segue back to Iraq, and to engage in that passion of the Right, discrediting hostile witnesses. Sorry, Ire. Contingency plans are one thing: major policy intitiatives are another. And every indication is that Bush came into office spoiling for a fight with Iraq. This is something that is patently obvious to many ‘thinking Americans.’ Again, back to the duck.

9. Bill Clinton did indeed say that. But when he said it, there was a budget surplus that ostensibly COULD HAVE SERVED AS PRECISELY THE TRUST FUND THAT YOU SAY IS IMPOSSIBLE The statement, therefore, meant something different when he said it, because the country’s financial circumstances were different. Presumably, his intention in making this statement was to secure that chunk of money for the purpose of securing the soundness of the system. When Bush makes the statement, his intention is to foster the impression that the system is precarious and on the verge of collapse, so that drastic action is necessary. Which it is not, at least not ‘imminently,’ unlike, say, Medicare.

Wingnuts like you, Ire, pull statements out of historical context and then act as if they are simply equivalent. They only seem to be if you restrict yourself to the words on the page, and refuse to THINK through the differences. So, et tu, Brute. The accusation of thoughtlessness cuts both ways, methinks. So, it hurts your widdel feewings when you awe attacked? Tough.

Finally, your last remark is most telling: “Bush’s poll numbers don’t matter because he isn’t up for re-election.” I guess this isn’t a surprise, but for the Republican leadership, that’s all that matters: winning, consequences to the country be damned. As reflected in your dismissal of public attitudes, what doesn’t matter is the reason for winning: namely, governing. The Bushes came into office for themselves and their buddies, and have ‘governed’ accordingly. Oh, and ‘doing so much’ doesn’t have to cost a President her popularity: I seem to recall a certain Democrat in the early 1930’s who remade the American socio-economic landscape and was ADORED by a vast majority of America. The difference is that he tried to make their lives better, where the policy initiatives of the current President are in no dangger of accomplishing this.

Unless you have something to add, I suggest we carry this fight to other threads.

I don’t remember much about the Susskind fracas, except that you can make two interpretations of it: First possibility: the Administration person was speaking only for himself, using terminology that was both imprecise and too clever by half; so it hardly represents a central truth about the Administration. In any case, I wouldn’t care to expand that simple, one-time comment by an unnamed, supposedly Administration “official” into an Administration-wide plot to apply nihilistic philosophy to their press releases; but somehow you do.

Second possibility, and I favor this interpretation: What the “Administration source” told Susskind, though Susskind wasn’t smart enough to understand how badly he’d been smacked, was that his lack of vision doomed him to the job of sorting out reality after the fact. The Administration official was trying to be nice to Susskind by couching his words, but the point went right over Susskind’s head, proving that the real brains are in the White House, not in the press corps; and I’m glad.

Curiously, I note that the post-postmodern left’s response after Susskind’s unrecognized smackdown, has been to beat up on religion . That isn’t very smart for an outfit trying to woo the red states.

And on a later point you made — Haters of the Administration have a way of inflating the word “lie” to mean anything they disagree with. They make no allowance for slight mis-statements or honest errors. So the fact that the empty suit, pretty boy Edwards, failed to make any memorable impression on Dick Cheney during Edward’s entirely undistinguished Senate career, is somehow a lie attributable to Cheney. In any case, the Cheney comment was, if anything, nothing more than a social mis-step. It was nothing close to a lie. Calling it a lie just emphasizes the left’s niggling immaturity.

On the Rice statement, Secretary Rice acknowledges the fact that hazy, unspecific, and operationally useless FBI musings about unsupported and unconvincing airplane attack scenarios were too-often forwarded to the National Security Advisor, but this does not mean that anyone imagined those fantastical musings to be real, or found anything in them specific enough to act upon. Perhaps Ms. Rice spoke imprecisely by choosing not to drag us all through these details as she spoke, but playing Philadelphia lawyer and parsing her words after the fact does not mean that she lied. The criteria for truthfulness that Bush haters have established against the Administration would make liars out of everybody, including Bush haters.

On a later point, exactly what is there to parse between there being an “imminent danger” and Bush’s clear statement that he thought the Iraqi threat of WMD was not yet imminent? One is positive and the other is negative. They are true and complete opposites. Logic provides no simpler or more decisive juxtaposition. There are no nuances. There are no details to parse. Bush spoke precisely and correctly in his 2003 State of the Union Address. The false notion that Bush lied about the imminence of the threat is entirely a fabrication of the Bush haters, and you know it.

You mentioned hypocrisy – and in that regard, one must seriously wonder how the left manages to stomach politics at all, given its frequent hissy fits over the fact that politicians actually muck about in politics. For fun, I’ll give you some real examples of hypocrisy – the Black Caucus working diligently to keep blacks on the federal plantation (http://www.papillonsartpalace.com/petejrson.htm), Teddy Kennedy’s infamous claims about Chappaquiddick (http://www.ytedk.com), Kerry’s triumphant entry into Cambodia(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A27211-2004Aug23.html), the Social Security Trust Fund (http://www.fff.org/comment/ed0901j.asp), the Space Shuttle(http://www.nationalreview.com/derbyshire/derbyshire200506160749.asp), the idea that villages can raise children – well, at least as long as it’s politically advantageous (http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0325,lerner,44903,1.html), and on an on.

I am guessing that your comments about Treasury Notes had to do with Social Security. You seem to believe that the Social Security trust fund is real. The fact is that the trust fund is a shell game where special, non-negotiable bonds are written, but there’s nothing to back them up except present and future astronomical debts. The reason there is nothing to back them up is that Congress keeps spending the money that ought to be there. The trust fund exists, to be sure. People actually get paid to operate it. In a practical sense, though, it consists of a ledger with two columns – assets and debts. At this point, the debts column is huge and the assets column is empty.

Bush’s characterizing the Treasury Notes as worthless is very close to the position of former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill. You know him. He’s the one who “let it out of the bag” that Saddam – the guy against whose unrelenting intransigence the US had a continuing military conflict (no-fly zone enforcement) throughout the Clinton years. Well, O’Neill let it be known that Saddam was on Bush’s mind before 9/11. Big whup! But the Bush-haters, hungry for something to misconstrue, blew it all out of proportion. Of course, a thinking American (but not an elite university intellectual, apparently) would certainly hope there were advanced contingency plans to deal decisively with Saddam before 9/11; that’s the sort of thing our leaders and government planners are paid to do.

Anyway, O’Neill is a favorite of the Bush-haters now, so I am sure you’ll agree with O’Neill, who insists that the trust fund is worthless (http://www.treas.gov/press/releases/po494.htm ).

Here’s what Bill Clinton had to say on the subject:
“Trust Fund balances are available to finance future benefits…but only in a bookkeeping sense…they do not consist of real economic assets that can be drawn down in the future to fund benefits. Instead, they are claims on the Treasury that, when redeemed, will have to be financed by raising taxes or borrowing.” — President Bill Clinton in his Analytical Perspectives section of the 2000 budget.

Yet somehow, when Bush says essentially the same thing it’s a lie. You Bush haters are so transparent — hate Bush first, make dumb accusations second, and always defer real thinking to some future date, even when cornered by the truth. And anyone who disagrees is a bible-thumping bumpkin.

You mentioned polls, but Bush’s poll numbers don’t matter. He isn’t up for re-election. Besides, no president who tried to do so much ever had good poll numbers. Demagogues always denounce them and the media loves to hype the controversy, so poll numbers decline. Big deal. If democrats gain in 2006, I’ll lick my wounds then, but it won’t change my mind about who was right.

For you to say that the FBI and CIA turf battles were the main issue regarding non-cooperation is only partly true. The testimony during last year’s Congressional 9/11 hearings made it clear that specially-issued PC directives were at the core of policies that further discouraged FBI and CIA cooperation.

We already apply American ideals to the War on Terror. We will NOT have sunk to the level of terrorists until we mutilate and saw off the heads of all the Gitmo prisoners in front of a video camera, dump their headless bodies in the street, and broadcast our decapitation videos over Al Jazeera along with polemicized rantings for several weeks. To imply that we have sunk to the level of terrorists shows an inordinate lack of perspective.

You seem to be laboring under the misconception that some law applies to terrorist prisoners that gives them the rights of US citizens or the rights of captured combatants from a country that signed the Geneva Convention. No such US law exists, and they are not a member of any country’s military, they wear no uniform, they follow no rules of civilization, they have no treaty with the USA, they approve of those who regularly decapitate American prisoners, and they are not covered by the Geneva convention. They are, therefore, entirely at our mercy, and all lawsuits claiming otherwise have failed. I have no problem extending America’s ideals to those who deserve it, but the Gitmo prisoners were caught shooting at our soldiers and defending terrorist ideals. They have a bad problem, and it’s all theirs.

The reason eastern Europe was denied the benefits of American reconstruction is that FDR and Churchill relied on a few men who were Stalinist spies, which gave Stalin the upper hand at Yalta. Roosevelt and Churchill should have stood up to Stalin at Yalta, but they didn’t. They gave him eastern Europe in return for more help against Germany and Japan. It was the biggest failure of WW II, and it cost millions of lives later in Eastern Europe.

I don’t agree with any of his spin on any current event. It seems like to me that he is a pretty intelligent person, but with the help (I’m betting) of some university somewhere we forever lost him. This saddens me deeply.

There is very little respect given to any conservative ideas in most university settings in the U.S. E. Ireland (I’m betting), Karl Rove, Rush Limbaugh, and etc. are smart people whom I believe were galvanized in their positions by the arrogance one finds in the PCness of most higher education institutions.

Imagine, if you will, that Karl Rove had received acceptance, and maybe a little psychotherapy while he was in college. The world might be a very different place had this occurred.

WOW! Now that’s something I can sink my teeth into, even if I do think you’re delusional. Sadly, I’m headed out of town, and have to skeedadle. But I do want to address one point that you make, since it concerns an area with which I have some familiarity: contemporary philosophy.

You wrote:

“Of course, there are many kinds of intelligence. Unfortunately, uppity intellectuals won’t recognize any but their own post-enlightenment / relativist form of it.”

I take it that you are referring to Nietzsche, Derrida, and Foucault among others. By ‘relativist,’ I take it that you intend something like these claims: there is no absolute truth or absolute moral standards; therefore, anything goes.

A couple of comments: first, the conclusion doesn’t follow from the premises. Indeed, Nietzsche and Derrida are quite concerned with the truth. For Nietzsche, truth is commonly understood as ‘the multiplication of perspectives,’ and for Derrida, every ‘truth’ can be deconstructed, which means that it can be seen to depend the premises it suppresses. Moreover, for Derrida, there is only one undeconstructable truth: justice. The whole point of Derrida’s philosophy isn’t to trash truth, it’s to show that truth is more conditional and difficult than we want to grant that it is, and that what instead holds sway is the absolute necessity of doing justice to another, even if it can never be fully accomplished.

Now, here’s the irony: the modern GOP, itself, is the bastion of the caricatured ‘postmodern,’ ‘relativistic’ standpoint. It embraced the relativization of truth as a conceptual weapon, and changed the rules of discourse, in its use of media technology and its constant refinement of spin.

Remember the Ron Susskind fracas about how a member of the administration said that members of the ‘reality-based community’ were out of step with the GOP’s ability to create narratives that people accept and believe? Well, E. Ireland, that’s the culmination of what you say you hate. Here you have an anonymous member of the administration saying that, yeah, we don’t have the facts on our side, but it doesn’t matter, because what matters is that people THINK that we do.

E. Ireland, does it get any more relativistic and nihilistic than that?

The irony, which is both delicious and unsettling, is that the modern Right Wing has turned the conceptual tools of the postmodern Left against it. Where guys like me–get the pitchforks out, it’s a Left Wing Intellectual!–saw interesting theories, power brokers like Rove, Ailles, and others, saw tools and had no scruple about using them, consequences be damned.

And now we have the spectacle of an adminstration that lies at will and no one calls then on it. And yes, I said ‘lies.’ How about Dick Cheney during the VP debate lying to John Edwards’ face that they’d never met, when they had? How about Condoleeza lying that ‘no one could have imagined that terrorists would run planes into buildings,’ when she had demonstrably seen the FBI reports alerting her to just this possibility? And George–God, where does one begin?

With George, I think it’s important to stress that there are more kinds of dishonesty than ‘I did not have sex with that woman.’ One can imply dishonest things while maintaining ‘plausibile deniability,’ so that apologists such as you, E. Ireland, can parse the differences between ‘imminent’ and ‘non-imminment,’ and provide a fig leaf. For that matter, how about George’s trip to the repository fo Treasury Notes, where he went to the file cabinet containing them and said they were ‘worthless?’ Well, they’re not–unless a President chooses not to honor them. A lie? Sort of. Dishonest? You bet.

But I digress. To sum up, E. Ireland, the concepts you denounce are the choice political tools of the contemporary GOP. It embraces them while denouncing them. Now, that kind of hypocrisy doesn’t speak very well for them, now does it?

In the end, all this ‘plausible deniability’ is only going to go so far. One could read W’s shrinkage in the polls as evidence for this. I think W is in for a very long three years, and that the chickens will come home to roost in a way that is beyond anyone’s control.

As for the ‘talking points’ slam, I read widely read, and no one tells me what to think. That’s an awful lot more than one can say for the Mellon-Schaife funded right wing think tanks (AEI, Heritage Foundation, Cato Institue) that disseminate their message through Fox, Sunday talk shows, the leaders (sic) of the House and the Senate, and the White House. I asked before and I’ll ask again: what WILL Wingnuts do when the Think Tanks go dark?

Nobody’s writing my script, Basil. Bush himself made SS the issue, decided that war on Iraq was a good idea regardless of the rationale, and his administration also seems to have decided to change the rules regarding prisoner detention and interrogation. If one is in the minority, as I clearly am, one plays defense and responds to the agenda one is given. And these are substantive, substantive, issues.

Regarding your ‘I have a job’ ad hominem, so do I. I spent ten years preparing to do what I do, and I won’t apologize for being educated. Doesn’t make me wrong, Basil, any more than being a ‘working-class hero’ makes you right.

The name of the game here is using one’s critical faculty, and all your objections consist of is name calling and posturing. Give me some arguments, Basil. Give me some actual reasons, rather than more Right-Wing Red Herrings designed to distract from the disastrous rule of the GOP.

Back to you, Basil.

FBI and CIA are part of the same government. It was the turf battles, not question of moral high ground that stopped them from sharing info. And by refusing to apply American ideals of rule of law, we have sunk to the terrorists’ level, that is to treat all who are not explicitly with us as inferior to us, or with the enemy and thus must be exterminated. Forget other nations’ priorities, or even ideas to win the war. Keeping the moral high ground shows the populace that our way is the way to go and induce them to cut support for the terroists.

In Western Europe and Japan, WW2 did not end in ‘45 with the defeat of the Axis. Marshall Plan was devised to win the hardest battle of all, for the heart and mind of the populace, for them to accept and legitimize the new governments. The results are evident, Japan and Germany, despite militaristic pasts, have not to date use military force to conquer others, and have both become prosperous free countries. Sadly, many other countries didn’t have the same story, notably the Eastern Europeans. My only hope is that this Administration follow the example and have similar plan for Iraq and Afghanistan, now that we’re there.

But I digress.

The Patriot act was the issue. Ya gotta give the neo-cons credit here. They are masters at putting deceptive monikers on acts and programs. Witness the “Clear Skies Innititative” that allows increased pollution. Or the “Healthy Forests Innitiative” a clever attemp to prevent forest fires…..by cutting down the forests. I could go on. But I digressed again. Forgive that. There is SO much about Bush that begs intelligent intervention. Why was it not the anti terror act? How about the home defense act? Why the name “Patriot Act”?
The answer is as simple as Bush’s quote, “You are either with us, or against us”. In choosing that name and the freedom taking powers in it, this land was moved away from freedom. When the person and his party in power can define patriotism, he and they can define a threat or enemy as anyone opposed to his or their agenda. Long story short, “treason” is a simple as daring to disagree.

Lyn — give me a factually documented list of how this administration has “blatantly lied about pretty much everything”. It ought to be easy for you, since you say pretty much everything is involved. Remember now – it has to be a factually documented list, not quotes from mindless ideologues or democrat demagogues.

I will pre-empt you on a favorite misrepresentation of the Bush haters. Actually, even before Bush haters claimed he said the Iraq threat was imminent, their own deceptions have been the real problem. In fact, Bush said that the Iraq threat of WMD was NOT yet imminent, but that it would be a mistake to wait until it was. Big difference, but apparently the nuance between “imminent” and “not imminent” is too subtle for Bush-hating intellectuals to see.

Besides, Bush gave many reasons for toppling Saddam. WMD just became the main one. Any of the others might have been the best reason, but so what? Is it so bad that Saddam, a murderer of millions, was toppled for the wrong best reason?

Roo — Mythology is a nice escape, but continually harassing a President during wartime (thereby giving a kind of legitimacy to the enemy) is quite another thing.

Intellect and common sense are two different things, of course; and professors are as famous for great ideas that won’t work as for great ideas that do. Oddly enough, the swarthy Bush had slightly better grades at Yale, and had a higher intelligence test score, than the “intellectual” Kerry. I never understood how anyone could think that Kerry’s rambling circumlocutions could be considered intellectual, but if that’s what floats your boat…

Of course, there are many kinds of intelligence. Unfortunately, uppity intellectuals won’t recognize any but their own post-enlightenment / relativist form of it. Their intellectual pride consumes them. Wisdom would not seem to be one of their collective virtues, as demonstrated by their frequent dismissiveness towards “the swarthy masses”, by their superior attitude about what’s “wrong” with Kansas, by their writing the absurd and abortive 500 page European Union Constitution, and by their endless debating and posturing at the UN while millions die. Ah, but the rules of debate were scrupulously followed! Please forgive those dumped into mass graves for not noticing such intellectual niceties.

Anyway, conservatives have their intellectuals, too – Condoleeza Rice, for example, a brilliant black woman whom the media all but ignores and who is castigated with racist slurs by media darlings like Al Sharpton. Conservative intellectuals often prefer to avoid the politically correct straightjacket of academia, where only PCSpeak is permitted. So, no, you won’t see many of them in universities. Those places are for brilliant, honest, liberal intellectuals like Ward Churchill and Morgan Reynolds http://washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/20050613-102755-6408r.htm . Apparently, even their own friends don’t believe them and their nonsense: http://www.aimovement.org/moipr/churchill05.html,
http://www.tamu.edu/00/start/DrGates-statement.html.

Roo, your comments about journalists read like the introduction to a high school journalism textbook. Nice high sounding words, all right. Maybe Jayson Blair, Dan Rather, and Eason Jordan should have read them before publicly fabricating stories out of whole cloth. Unfortunately, I have been interviewed by journalists and have been a part of stories reported by journalists. Not once, not ever – never did they ever get the story right. It was always their preconceptions and editorial agenda that got in the way. Media reports are, by my experience, largely incompetent and/or dishonest, especially when politics are involved. Having adopted a relativist philosophy as a cover for dishonestly generating controversy, the media has become the rabble rouser, making problems instead of solving them. But, gee, it sells papers and increases viewers.

Abu Ghraib would not have become a symbol of anything except for the international media’s blatant Anti-Americanism and its over-hyping of anything negative about us. Yes, it sells papers, but don’t let’s get sucked in by it, too. You can disagree about how serious a crime the Abu Ghraib silliness actually was, but to say that nothing was done to stop it ignores the facts that the Army had already stopped it, removed the general in charge, completed most of is investigations, and had begun filing criminal charges even before the subject even became public. The fact is that our leadership did not condone it, has repeatedly condemned it, and has taken steps to assure that it won’t happen again. Only a few people were involved, no other incidents have surfaced, and it’s time to put it to rest.

Umm, why should any legal status be given to terrorist combatants? Why do they deserve any universal protection, and what is “universal protection” anyway? Do terrorists offer our civilians universal protection? No, they torture and cut off the heads of captured civilians. Why should terrorist prisoners be released? I haven’t heard of a war where prisoners were released before hostilities were over. Actually, some terrorist prisoners have been released, and we ran across them shooting at us again in Iraq. No more should be released.

Moral high ground isn’t worth a damn to me if it’s code for the kind of PC that kept the CIA and FBI from cooperating and sharing information on terrorist activities before 9/11. Right now the issue isn’t about the moral high ground. It’s demonstrating to the world that you don’t attack us without retribution. The allies won W.W.II by using absolute brutality on the military and civilian populations of Japan and Germany. Their will to resist was crushed. Consequently, it took less time to end that conflict than our pussy-footing around in the Middle East, fearful of upsetting some hair-triggered mullah.

As Michael Ledeen says, “Faster, please.”

In my humble opinion, academias do have a tendency to possess superior intelect than the swarthy masses. That’s why many succeed in the pursuit of knowledge. As for Journalists, it is their job to find the story of human events and to present them. To be “in the know” is imperative to their very survival. And in the course of their profession, knowledge is gained, even to the point of changing the preconceived notions. Wisdom, however, is a different matter altogether. It’s the yardstick on how well knowledge is used. The wise do not look down upon the mass, they try to help enlighten the minds.

Abu Ghraib, as the symbol of American bullying, is not “just like a hazing,” itself is deemed illegal anyway. The victims do not wilingly “rush” the house. Abuses happen not because of some bad apple, but because higher-ups do nothing to stop it. The crowning evidence was given by the DoJ by not extending any legal status to detainees.

America is not about insisting the other parties to adhere to the rules, but to show leadership that her ideals are not lost in the midst of fear. Rule-of-law, universal protection, those are the stuff that makes America a great country, not whining about how the other guys refuse to play by the rules. Moral high ground may lose some battles, but it is the key to winning the war! Unless there is no plan to end the conflict until the Second Coming, as the current administration has repeatedly implying.

Let’s see — the Downing Street memo is a non-issue that claims Bush wanted to invade Iraq much earlier than he later said. Umm — so what? I intended to buy a house a long time before I said anything about it. I would hope the President works on ideas for a time before he acts on them, too. Anyway, Iraq needed invading, even if only to upset the French/German/Russian/UN oil-for-fraud scandal of lining their pockets on the deaths of starving Iraqi children. Iraqis are still turning up new mass graves, now totaling tens of thousands of murdered men, women, and children; but the Bush haters wring their hands that we have lost some soldiers — unfortunate, yes; but fewer than the people slaughtered on 9/11 by Islamicist murderers that previous administrations chose to ignore. But Bush haters don’t have any perspective about it. They just hate.

On the Gitmo issue, the transparent hypocrisy of Bush haters is amazing. Ask John McCain how our treatment of captured enemy fighters compares to his experience as a prisoner of war. Ask Amnesty International how they dare to compare our Gitmo prison (where no deaths have occurred) to the Russian gulag where millions of political prisoners died of exposure, malnutrition, and torture; and ask Cuba’s thousands of political prisoners whether they would like to trade places with our Gitmo prisoners.

Abu Ghraib is another overblown non-issue about some adolescent nonsense that wasn’t as bad as many fraternity hazings. The fact that the MSM conspired with the Islamicists to blow it all out of proportion even as Islamicists were slicing the heads of their civilian prisoners is quite telling. Bush haters happily overlook their obvious double standards, and it’s impossible to stomach their dishonesty on this matter.

As for Social Security, Bush has not crashed and burned. He has courageously gone where others fear to go, showing that Social Security is unfair and unnecessarily keeps many retired people in the poorhouse. If I had the opportunity to invest a part of my Social Security money, as Bush has suggested, I could easily have twice as comfortable a retirement as I will have because democrats want to keep us all beholdin’ to the government, down on the plantation, and barefoot in the kitchen.

What really irks the democrats is that coming clean on Social Security, however it’s done, means that Congress can’t keep spending the so-called “trust fund” — the excess yearly payroll collections for Social Security that Congress fritters away every year on pork and overpriced educational nonsense.

Well, the chickens will come home to roost; and the poop will be on the democrats who let the inevitable insolvency of Social Security go unfixed. As it is, our children will pay for Social Security, but they won’t get any. Thank you, democrats, for screwing away my kids’ opportunity for a comfortable retirement.

Bush haters still complaining about the elections? Well, they need to grow up. The democrats stole the Washington state governorship “fair and square” (that is, it can’t be completely proven, but no-one doubts that it was stolen); but I don’t see democrats offering to give it back. Precincts in Philadelphia and Baltimore had more votes for Kerry than registered voters — and not one vote for Bush. How quaint! The democrat election slogan in Chicago has always been “Vote early and vote often.” Everyone knows Kennedy stole the election from Nixon; but the adults who run the Republican party let it go. It’s time for democrats to find some adult leadership again; but there’s no chance for that any time soon with Howard Scream in charge of the DNC.

Those who call Iraq a disaster only reveal their poor understanding of past conflicts. Vietnam was a disaster, but only because democrats refused to keep their word to fund the South Vietnamese defense after we pulled out. Millions of lives were needlessly lost in the subsequent defeat and tyranny by the Viet Cong, the disastrous “boat people” flotillas, and the Cambodian/Laotian disasters that accompanied our failure to support the defense of those peoples. Furthermore, had Johnson let his generals run the war instead of micromanaging it from Washington, American losses would have been far less, and the outcome would have been far different. The entire Vietnam disaster rests squarely and fully on the democrats.

In World War II, another democrat-led war, we were attacked by Japan. And what did Roosevelt do first in response? He attacked north Africa. Did the media vilify him for not starting with Japan in the way today’s media hounds Bush for going into Iraq? Not at all. In those days, the media let the President establish strategies. Also, there were millions of unnecessary civilian deaths in WW II. Entire cities were purposely targeted and completely obliterated. Atrocities were committed on a scale no one wants to talk about. America lost 40,000 troops to friendly fire. Oh, but that was a “great” war, you see; at least to hear democrats tell it.

We won’t dwell on Carter’s abortive two-helicopter assault on Iran, or Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs fiasco, will we? Lives lost because of irresolute leadership are a hallmark of modern democrats at war.

By comparison, the Iraq campaign has been the cleanest and most efficient war in history. The percentages of civilians lost and soldiers lost by accidents or friendly fire are lower than ever seen before. Property damage has also been minimized compared to other conflicts.

The brilliance of the Iraq campaign also shows through in the Iraq elections, the removal of Syrian control over Lebanon, better leadership in Palestine, cooperation from Libya that uncovered the Islamic nuclear bomb being developed with Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, and Malaysia, a start for elections in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and more.

If you only follow the MSM, you think Iraq is nothing but one bombing after another. But Arthur Chrenkoff at http://chrenkoff.blogspot.com/ continually updates his exhaustive report on the good news in Iraq. There is plenty of it, but the media ignores it in order to concentrate on making Bush look bad. They continually misunderestimate him at their peril! Their credibility is in the tank.

Are we so biased that we forgot to decipher what is really the truth?

Its sick that everytime some prominent ex-official speaks out about whats really going on, they are chastised and labeled as being un-american and a part of the liberal conspiracy. Give me a break theyre just being human. There is way too much information floating around for there not to be some truth in the matter.

Frankly, between the Downing Street Memos, Bush’s crashing and burning on Social Security, Gitmo, the Iraq disaster, and, frankly, the last two questionable Presidential elections, REALITY ITSELF comes out pretty strongly against Bush, if not Republicans in general. With a few exceptions, the Eagle, like the rest of the mainstream media, sticks to its corporate/Repubican script (Iraq is going great! Saddam was evil! Bush is a common man from Crawford Texas!)and ignores the real stories (Downing Street Memo, Coingate, Gitmo and Abu Gharib) until popular outrage or the foreign/alternative media forces it to confront them.

When it comes to the thinking processes of the editorial board, I, as a full-on, fighting liberal, agree with them 45-50% of the time. But to my eyes, their line only appears liberal from an extreme right vantage point.

Back to you, Basil.