Nice Try, Bub
Shorter Jane Galt:
Above: Jane Galt
- Okay, okay, we were totally wrong on Iraq — but all of the left’s predictions, none of which I can recall at the moment, were, uh, even wronger.
‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard.
See Atrios here, Kevin Drum here, Nitpicker here, Josh Marshall here, David Neiwert here, and so on and so on.
Update: Since Whiskey Bar is gone from the Web (maybe for good), also see the Billmon retrospective below the fold.
Far be it from me to suggest yesterday’s Iraq “liberation” is rapidly descending into tomorrow’s Middle East quagmire. I couldn’t be heard anyway — certainly not over the chestbeating and the Tarzan cries from the freepers, the neocons and other assorted Bush babies. But at least consider this gem of a quote, plucked from deep down in the BBC reporters web log:
One of my close Iraqi friends went up to an American marine and said to him: “I’m going to exercise my right of free speech for the first time in my life — we want you out of here as soon as possible.”
The Day After
April 10, 2003By appearing to ally itself so openly and so closely with one side of the sectarian division in Iraq, the Coalition risks alienating the other side. This could make it easier for Baathist remnants to regroup as a new, pro-Sunni ethnic faction hostile to the occupation government . . .
The Iranian example, however, suggests the Shias are not the best instruments for an American neo-colonial order in Iraq. While the Islamic Revolution’s political hold over the Iraqi Shiite imagination was always exaggerated — by the Baathists as well as by their enemies – the cultural influence is real and deeply rooted. Here, too, geography is destiny: Iran will always be near at hand and America will always be far away. Proximity eventually may trump raw imperial power — at least over the long run.
And the Sunni elite? It’s living through the final moments of its historic domination of Mesopotamia . . . The Baath is fading away. The future is molten, like lava. Attitudes formed now, decisions made now, could endure after the lava cools.
Elites driven from power usually have much to fear. Fearful people need protection. If the invaders are seen as fundamentally hostile — or worse yet, allied with a domestic enemy . . . well, the Reconstruction Era KKK wouldn’t be the first terrorist organization to flourish under such circumstances. Or the last.
Geography is Destiny
April 11, 2003Sunni resistance would raise the premium on Shia cooperation, which would make intra-Shia factional friction even more dangerous . . . Iran, and only Iran, has the KY jelly needed to lubricate that particular problem. But the neocons don’t seem to mind rough sex, geopolitically speaking.
Mosul Match
April 15, 2003Bremer’s skill set may serve him well as he tries to reconcile the conflicting interests behind the U.S. occupation of Iraq. After all, knowing how to pull the strings back home is one of the first bullet items on a Proconsul’s job description. But it’s also a relatively narrow skill set to take to a place like Iraq . . . Bremer may discover the secret to running a neo-imperialist colony in the Middle East isn’t in his book of tricks.
How to Succeed in Diplomacy Without Really Trying
May 7, 2003In the imperialism business, troops equal money, and the neocons are under-capitalized. The Iraq deal was sold and leveraged on the assumption that the invasion and “stabilization” forces could be drawn down relatively quickly after Saddam was gone. But now the deal is starting to go south. The debt service costs are threatening to eat the neocons alive. At some point they’re going to have to tell the CEO, and then the board of directors. The regulators (voters) may be slow, but even they may figure it out sooner or later. Heads could roll.
The Imperial Stretch
May 18, 2003Before the invasion, if you recall, the administration told us the support of countries like Japan, Poland and Denmark (not to mention Uzbekistan, Azerbajian and the Maldive Islands) would more than make up for the loss of our traditional NATO allies in “old” Europe — insignificant countries like Germany and France . . . [But] the hawks can’t force their allies to send troops, and seduction clearly isn’t their strong suit. Which leaves only one way to get some action: paying for it — the way King George paid for his Hessians. Could be a big bull market for mercenaries.
Coalition of the Less Than Willing
May 29, 2003Even now, there are hawks who firmly believe we invaded Iraq to fight the “Islamofascists.” Some of us tried to tell them they were wrong — that the Baath were secular nationalists, and that America risked repeating Israel’s mistake in the early ’80s of building up Hamas as a religious counterweight to the secular nationalists in the PLO:
“I’m afraid the Bush Administration is about to make a similar mistake – but on a vastly larger scale. By knocking Arab nationalist thugs like Saddam out of the box, aren’t we just taking out the competition for Al Qaeda?”
We may soon learn the answer to that question. The hawks wanted to go to Iraq to fight “Islamofascism.” They may get their wish.
Al Qaeda Recruitment Center
June 1, 2003Whatever chance Iraq had to eventually emerge from Baathist dictatorship into some less horrific form of government has been blown. The only options now are Lebanon-style chaos or an expensive, bloody U.S. occupation — followed by Lebanon-style chaos once we finally give up and withdraw . . . Bottom line: The conservatives, their beloved president and his neocon revolutionaries have made an ENORMOUS mistake — of the kind that keep historians busy arguing for decades: How could they have done something so stupid? It’s the March of Folly, heading straight over a cliff.
Question of the Day
June 3, 2003The deception was not in the claim that Saddam had WMDs . . . although that claim indeed may turn out to be a falsehood. The deception was in the claim that Saddam’s WMD capability posed an immediate, critical threat to the security of the United States, urgent enough to require a massive military invasion to overthrow his regime. This is the conclusion the administration cooked the intelligence estimates to produce, this is the lie. And every piece of evidence we have seen since the “end” of the war — up to and including the discovery of Bush’s precious trailers — has demonstrated that it was a lie.
Rope-a-Dope
June 4, 2003The Sunni guerrillas may be making all the noise right now, but another, much quieter resistance movement also is emerging in Iraq. In the end, it may pose the more potent challenge to the neocons’ imperial project:
Clerics Vie With U.S. For Power
Shiites Widen Role In Reshaping Iraq“In the latest contest over Iraq’s uncertain future, the most activist and influential of Baghdad’s Shiite clergy have declared their intention to begin shaping a civil society that is tentatively emerging in the capital . . . ”
This kind of gradual, patient organizing work isn’t something that can simply abolished by decree — or rooted out by the 3rd Infantry Division.
Shiite Happens
June 7,2003Baghdad, like Kabul before it — and Saigon before that — is about to be hived away from its own country and converted into a Westernized oasis in a desert (a literal one in this case) of war and poverty. An oasis, moreover, largely inhabited by U.S. military officers, civilian bureaucrats, international aid workers and their assorted camp followers . . . In other words, a place where the American can learn to hate and despise the Iraqis, and the Iraqis can learn to hate and despise the Americans. A classic case of toxic codependency.
Midnight at the Oasis
June 9, 2003Bitching . . . has always been a soldier’s lot — and probably always will. But the bitching out of Iraq is taking on the particular venomous tone of an army that doesn’t know why it is doing what it is doing, and is beginning to believe the guys in charge don’t know what they’re doing, either . . . A volunteer army can vote with its feet. These guys may be pros, but how much more can they be expected to take? Maybe not enough to sustain the neocons’ grand imperial design for the Middle East.
Letters Home
June 24, 2003In April the Pentagon estimated the occupation would cost $2 billion a month. By early June, the price tag had risen to $3 billion a month. Now it’s almost $4 billion — a 50% increase in less than three months. That’s pretty good, even for government work. And, as the Times points out, there may be other unexpected costs coming down the pike . . . Before this mess is finished, we may have to invade Saudi Arabia to get the oil to pay for our Iraq occupation.
Money Honey
July 11, 2003The war, the weakness of our puppet government and our deteriorating relations with the radical and pro-Iranian elements of the Shi’a community won’t go away because the Saddam boys — or their pop — are frying in the infernal regions. But the all-in-one PR excuse will . . . Which means that once Saddam Sr. has finally been Fedexed back to hell, the task of persuading the American people to continue chasing the neocon mirage of “democracy” in the Middle East could get really hard, really fast.
Sons of Saddam
July 22, 2003Public opinion polls show America already has very few friends in the Arab world, other than those it has bought and paid for . . . Arab support and solidarity with the resistance in Iraq will shore up [its] morale, which otherwise is going to be pretty badly battered by the kind of firepower and technology the USA will eventually bring to bear on the guerrillas and their civilian supporters.
This, in turn, increases the odds that the war ultimately will be lost, just as Vietnam and Algeria were lost — not because the insurgents won, but because they were able to hang on and deny the counterinsurgents the clear proof of victory needed to maintain support for the war back home.
From Saddam to Solidarity
July 24, 2003In the end, policy mistakes — particularly big ones — tend to produce a kind of circular reasoning — in which those in charge try to justify the policy by citing the need to avoid, at all costs, the failure of the policy. So it was in Vietnam. So, too, with our latest misadventure in Iraq . . . Because America in Iraq, it must fight the “terrorists.” And because it must fight the terrorists, America has to be in Iraq.
This kind of circular logic permeates the entire enterprise. Why has the high command proclaimed that current U.S. troop strength in Iraq — about 140,000 men, give or take — is the “optimal” force? Could it be because that also happens to be the maximum force that can be scraped together by the hard-pressed Army?
Calling the war in Iraq the central battle in the war against terrorism ignores the distinct possibility that it is in fact a monumental diversion from the real struggle against terrorism — a strategic distraction that will make huge demands on the American military and the American intelligence community for years, if not decades.
The Self Inflicted Wound
July 28, 2003It would appear the coalition has only a few months left — a year at best — to meet some extremely demanding political and economic expectations. It must also deal with a hard core of 5-10% of the population (and a much higher share of the Sunni minority) that is actively rooting for a Ba’athist comeback. And it has to reckon with an even larger — but mutually antagonistic — grouping that desires either a Shi’a or Sunni Islamic government.
As a reporter for the British newspaper The Independent observed a few months ago, America’s big problem in Iraq isn’t that it has so many enemies — the problem is that it has so very few friends.
With Friends Like These . . .
July 29, 2003What we have here is a classic demonstration of asymmetrical warfare — except in this case, the asymmetry is all in favor of the resistance, and all against the coalition. Making a country an ungovernable hell is clearly a lot easier than turning it into a stable, functioning democracy . . .
The problem is the absurdly ambitious goal the administration has set — not just to conquer and subjugate Iraq, but to build it back up again as a functioning, self-governing state, moderate, pluralistic and friendly to the West. Classic counter-insurgency tactics, ruthlessly pursued, won’t lead to the New Iraq®. But neither will the current halfway measures, which — at best — can only maintain the current stalemate.
Made in America
August 17, 2003As others have already pointed out (even Tom Friedman now grasps the point), when the administration disbanded the old Iraqi Army, it destroyed the only cohesive national organization in Iraq that wasn’t owned lock, stock and gun barrel by the Baath Party. Like Cortez, Shrub has burned his boats.
Et Tu, Brute?
August 27, 2003Muqtada al-Sadr, the young firebrand who’s been most aggressive in attacking both the Coalition and the Shi’a factions that support the occupation, would seem to be both a natural target and a natural preemptor . . . More of a target, though, since any move on Sadr’s part would give the Coalition the excuse it’s been longing for to arrest him and crack down on his movement. Which would be another stupid mistake, since it would probably trigger the very civil war that the Coalition desperately needs to avoid. But since when did the Bush administration stop making stupid mistakes?
The Ayatollah Sleeps With the Fishes
August 29, 2003Having committed one huge error in disbanding the old Iraqi Army, the Coalition appears to be on the brink of committing an even worse one: letting the various factions on the Governing Council put their supporters on the street with guns . . . Given the way the Council has handled its business so far — carefully partitioning everything (seats, ministries, the rotating presidency) among the its various factions, it’s hard to believe a new militia wouldn’t be created in the same fashion. This is how private armies get created. This is how Lebanons get created . . .
It’s Working
August 30, 2003A wise hegemon goes to great lengths to conceal the true extent of its power. It always leaves something in the tool kit, so to speak, so that enemies and allies alike can never be sure exactly what’s in there. But the Bush Administration has let the cat out of the bag. It has exposed to the world the limits of U.S. military power — both in terms of the size of the forces (divisions, troops) and the relative ineffectiveness of those forces on a complex social and political battlefield like the one America faces in Iraq and throughout the Middle East. These events no doubt will be noted, and closely studied, by friend and foe alike.
The End of the American Century?
September 3, 2003There’s absolutely no guarantee the combat attrition rate in Iraq will stay as low as 4%, and many reasons to think it may go higher as the insurgents continue to refine their strategy and tactics . . . This would appear to be a damned serious problem for the Pentagon, and there doesn’t seem to be any obvious solution — other than the Coalition’s increasingly desperate attempts at “Iraqization.” After three decades of swearing it would never allow itself to be dragged into another meat-grinding war of attrition, the military has allowed itself to be dragged into one.
War of Attrition
September 14, 2003The American people have to choose: They can support the war, and pay the bloody price, or they can demand a speedy end to the American occupation and a withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. The idea of throwing more money at the corporate crooks who gave us Halliburton, and Enron, is nauseating. So is the thought of sending more troops to die in the desert. But the status quo is simply unbearable. Either the troops have to come home — all of them — or the money and the reinforcements have to start flowing the other way. And the sooner the American people (and the administration) get that through their tiny little heads, the sooner we can finally start having a realistic debate about the war in Iraq.
The Enron War
September 15, 2003Under the circumstances, it’s hard to see how the Coalition can expect to simply fort up its troops, draw down its forces and hand over key security tasks to a hastily created, semi-trained Iraqi Army — not without completely losing strategic control of the country . . . In the end, the White House might have to consider a fresh commitment of U.S. troops to Iraq, in order to prevent either the complete collapse of the country or the rise of a new regime (Sunni or Sh’ia) hostile to the United States and the existing order in the Middle East. But that’s a worry that can be left for the 2008 election, I suppose.
Exit Strategy
September 18, 2003An actual Tet-style offensive seems very far fetched. This isn’t Vietnam, and the Sunni insurgents . . . don’t appear to have the men, the resources or the command-and-control networks needed to launch anything so ambitious. A more plausible risk would seem to be something comparable to the 1968 urban riots here in America — a wave of civil unrest that breaks out in many cities at once, and quickly spirals out of control. The insurgents, no doubt, would be happy to fan the flames any way they can.
Such a scenario could leave the Coalition with two choices: Crack down very hard, with indiscriminate use of lethal force, or, let the riots burn themselves out before trying to restore order. Either way, the Bush administration would be looking at a PR disaster, one that would make it impossible to pretend that things are gradually “getting better” in Iraq.
Burn Baby Burn
October 7, 2003What’s really facinating aren’t the Shi’a factions that oppose the American-backed Governing Council, but the factions that are on it. According to Cole, persons affiliated with the al-Da`wa Party hold four seats, while SCIRI holds one. Remember: SCIRI hews to only a slightly more moderate version of Khomeinism, and al-Da`wa includes factions that have associated in the past with Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad — although most of the party’s anti-American hardliners apparently have yet to return from their Iranian exile. And these are the Coalition’s allies!
A Shi’a Scorecard
October 14, 2003Some of you may be wondering why I’ve been spending so much time recently writing about the obscure battles of even more obscure Iraqi Shi’a factions. It’s because I think the ultimate fate of the occupation — and thus, the war in Iraq — is going to rest on the Coalition’s ability to manage those same factions without tipping them over into armed resistance. So far, the results have been decidedly mixed, to say the least.
Shiite Storm
October 17, 2003As this Washington Post article notes, the administration’s policy has been set by default: Iraqification. This is supposed to be accomplished through a crash program to create a new Iraqi Army, a new police force and a Vietnam-style civil defense militia, plus the construction of a new intelligence service, using — if possible — the less bloodstained elements of the old Mukhabarat. But it seems to me that trying to do all this in a rush — before next summer, say — vastly increases the odds that the whole effort will eventually suffer a catastrophic and very bloody failure.
Operation Bug Out
October 29, 2003Saying Iraq is “no Vietnam” is about as silly and simplistic as saying it is just like Vietnam. The problem for the neolibs is that the differences may not be nearly important as the similarities — particularly on the American end of the war . . . The competence and strategic skill of the military and civilian officials running this war don’t seem to be noticeably superior to that of their Vietnam War predecessors. If those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it, these guys appear to have gotten life sentences.
Neolib Group Think
October 30, 2003Officially, the Coaltion’s wariness about the use of paramilitary forces — at least until now — has stemmed from fears the plan would institutionalize the strong sectarian tendencies within the embryonic Iraqi government. The major ethnic/religious factions represented on the Governing Council (Kurdish, Sunni, Sh’ia, Turkoman, etc.) already have divided up the various government ministries largely along sectarian lines. Extending that same spoils system to the armed forces could cause all kinds of trouble down the road — especially if the division of spoils becomes a less amicable process.
Building Another Lebanon
November 5, 2003I’m reasonably sure that driving around a hostile city taking random pot shots at “suspected” insurgent hideouts and dropping bombs on uninhabited mud flats are not part of any generally accepted counterinsurgency doctrine. They’re not nearly brutal enough to terrify the population into submission, but they’re a great way of showing the insurgents you’ve been reduced to a helpless, impotent rage — which is pretty much the state of mind they’re trying to induce.
Showing Them We’ve Got Teeth
November 7, 2003By putting Iraq in play, [Bush and Blair have] opened up an entirely new front, one that sucks up people and resources at an alarming rate, but yields absolutely no offsetting advantages in the struggle against jihadism. It’s become the 21st century version of Gallipoli — at best, a bloody stalemate; at worst, a disastrous strategic defeat . . .
It seems more obvious than ever that neither man has the slightest idea what kind of war they’re fighting. They’re as clueless as the British politicians who fed men into the meat grinder of trench warfare during World War I, or the French generals who tried to hide behind the Maginot Line in World War II. They have no strategy. They don’t even have a concept of a strategy. All they have is warmed over Churchillian rhetoric, as uninspiring as it is irrelevant.
The Price of Folly
November 20, 2003“In war,” Napoleon supposedly said, “the moral to the material is as three to one.” By moral, he meant not so much the correctness or justness of the respective causes, but rather the elan and effectiveness of the respective combatants. Surely, in a war such as this, that ratio is more like 10 to 1 or even higher.
Judging from events — by the stupidity and the arrogance of the neocons, the Pentagon’s over-reliance on brute force, the Bush administration’s easy tolerance of incompetence, corruption, and careerism, and the raw political opportunism displayed by the Republican machine — I’d say America is coming up way short on the moral end of that equation.
Failure, the hawks like to say, is not an option. But failure is always an option. And unless the powers that be and their witless supporters get that through their thick skulls, failure is what we are most likely to get.
Is Osama Winning?
December 10, 2003Having destabilized Iraq, America will have to live with the consequences, which probably won’t be much more pleasant than they were before Saddam was captured. If the insurgency collapses completely (and even the coalition’s professional optimists don’t seem to expect this) the political Lebanonization of Iraq is still likely to continue, providing a breeding ground for extremism and terrorism — the very threats we supposedly invaded Iraq to prevent . . .
How much more fuel will the coalition’s Israeli-style pacification campaign add to the fires of jihad throughout the Islamic world? And how long will it be before an American president — maybe this one, maybe the next — will have to choose between the collapse of a weak but friendly government in Baghdad, and an even deeper military commitment to Iraq?
The truth is that while the rat has been caught, the rat catcher is also trapped — and in a hole much bigger, and deeper, than the one Saddam was found cowering in.
Trapped Like a Rat
December 14, 2003
And Digby
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2007_01_01_digbysblog_archive.html#116901006238360119
What? I like Digby…
Looks like they’ve received new marching orders; “We were wrong, but the left might have been wronger! Neener!”
amazing….”objectivists” engaging in rationalization! say it ain’t so!
Hmmmm, admitting you were wrong without actually admitting you were wrong.
Nice trick. Nice try. I’m sure we’ll see plenty more of this.
billmon
as good as it gets. a fucking genius, a great writer, with a way with a phrase second to none, an encylcopedic knowledge of pretty much everything, and an ability to cut to the bone, bypassing tendons and ligaments and all other meat as necessary.
and where is his equivalent on the right? how much better of a writer is this guy than klein, than bennett, then (FSM help me) goldberg, than any asshole pundit spewing useless verbiage into the potomac like so much effluent? christ, reading this makes me depressed. our country has brilliant people like billmon in it. these people have been given a forum (blogging) and a distribution mechanism (the internets) and if we lived in any kind of a meritocracy, they would be promoted up the food chain of discourse to the very top.
but no. beinart gets a new shiny job. fucking gold fucking berg destroys the la times twice a week, while scheer doesn’t have a job. broder has a job for life. ken pollack is on my tv.
fuck all of you fucking fucks, you’ve ruined our country with your arrogance and stupidity. you are a bunch of fucking scum and i wish nothing but ill to you all.
billmon rules, ok? oh, and jane galt, the next intelligent thought you have will be the first.
“That doesn’t mean that my decisionmaking wasn’t faulty. It was, in all sorts of ways, and I am trying to learn from them with proper humility.
Which apparently entails sneering at those who got it right. Christ.
Love the Nitpicker demolishment of Drum, though. What a fucking moron.
I miss Billmon.
Well see now you’re just gloating…
It really wasn’t that hard to figure out what was going on.
What Digby said.
I seem to remember protesting with millions of other people who had a clue, before the war even started. Galt must have stayed in bed that day.
I seem to remember protesting with millions of other people who had a clue, before the war even started. Galt must have stayed in bed that day.
No, she was busy writing that such people should be beaten with 2x4s. Really.
How on earth can you credit Daniel Davies for the “shorter” format, yet leave out his monumentally prescient comment on the (then impending) conflict in Iraq?
I mean this one, later elucidated here. You S/N overlords have all referenced these seminal tracts, whether you knew it or not, but alas, no credit. Credit only goes to that text-addict’s “funniest home videos” format that the poor bastard arguably inaugurated, and never to his early and deadly accurate predictions about the course of the Iraq
waroccupation.In the buildup to the Iraq war, I was working full time and going to school full time. I was working on a degree which required me to read somewhere around five hundred pages a week from six or seven different books in disparate areas (depending upon how many history classes and which history classes I was taking in any semester), and schlump out a whole bunch of writing, as well. Needless to say, this left me not so much in the way of spare time to follow the news…I used my spare time for stuff like sleeping.
And yet, somehow I was able to see enough discrepancies in the administration’s portrait of Iraq’s weapons of mass distruction to be opposed to the war from day one. So all I can say is that if you didn’t see the holes in the adminstration’s story, you must not have been looking very hard.
Or you’re very stupid.
Or both.
Retardo:
No, she was busy writing that such people should be beaten with 2×4s. Really.
Reminds me of Andrew Sullivan. Right now some liberals are praising him for having noticed that Bush sucks, and writing about it. But these liberals conveniently forget that back in 2002 or thereabouts he was writing about how liberals were all a “Fifth Column”, which might have to be locked up or otherwise gotten rid of.
What I am saying is that we really need to remember how people acted under the influence of 9/11 back when it happened. Did they try to use reason and understand the situation? Or did they go with their fear and anger? Did they lash out at someone, and decide that the problem would be solved by eliminating someone they had always hated?
We need to never forget how people acted under the influence of 9/11, even if we decide to forgive. Because another 9/11 could happen, and we have to know how people will act in that case. So thank you, Retardo, for remembering that tidbit from Jane Galt.
This is for the all of 2 downloaders of Pasty Comment Generator v0.3 (PCG):
A new update is available: PCG v0.7!!!
!!!Wild Applause!!!
Ok, thank you, thank you. Anyway, new in this feature are actual randomly generated comments. In 0.3, I was picking a full sentence at random and displaying it, however in this version, I randomly pick 5 sentences and combine them into a paragraph.
In the super secret version, there is the ability to insert comments under 5 categories.
In this version I have pre-generated a file with random characters just to prove the concept.
Because the program isn’t going to change, (except maybe to lower the number of available comments and to fix up a few things that are bugging me) I can provide the comment file instead of the whole program, lowering the download size.
For those interested, there are 5 categories with 100 entries, ending up with 100^5 different combinations or 1,000,000 different combinations.
There isn’t a readme file with this release because this post is pretty much it.
I’m open to suggestions for additional features – like selecting different wingnuts to have a comment generated for.
Send them along to z_zcool@hotmail.com.
P.S. Sorry about posting this here, I just couldn’t wait for Jonah Goldberg to say something stupid enough to be worthy of your attention, now if the program was about Mark Noonan….
This is for the all of 2 downloaders of Pasty Comment Generator v0.3 (PCG):
A new update is available: PCG v0.7!!!
!!!Wild Applause!!!
Ok, thank you, thank you. Anyway, new in this feature are actual randomly generated comments. In 0.3, I was picking a full sentence at random and displaying it, however in this version, I randomly pick 5 sentences and combine them into a paragraph.
In the super secret version, there is the ability to insert comments under 5 categories.
In this version I have pre-generated a file with random characters just to prove the concept.
Because the program isn’t going to change, (except maybe to lower the number of available comments and to fix up a few things that are bugging me) I can provide the comment file instead of the whole program, lowering the download size.
For those interested, there are 5 categories with 100 entries, ending up with 100^5 different combinations or 1,000,000 different combinations.
There isn’t a readme file with this release because this post is pretty much it.
I’m open to suggestions for additional features – like selecting different wingnuts to have a comment generated for.
Send them along to z_zcool@hotmail.com.
P.S. Sorry about posting this here, I just couldn’t wait for Jonah Goldberg to say something stupid enough to be worthy of your attention, now if the program was about Mark Noonan, well that’s pretty much a daily occurrence.
Sorry about the triple post.
Can you delete this one and the one preceding and include this link in the original post.
http://rapidshare.com/files/12079801/PastySaysV0.7.rar
Once again sorry about the triple post.
One of the many reasons I despise Objectivists is that they have perfected the “Standing On A Pillar Of Mine Own Rectitude” defense long favored by the more authoritarian religions. The hardline godsbotherers may have worked their “Sure, I *may* have been wrong (or so say the local criminal-justice forces, not to mention the scorch marks surrounding the scene of my latest project) — but God still loves me best, ergo I’m still better than you, so nyah, thou heathen unbeliever!” schtick since the days when our ancestors first had enough of a food surplus to support a parasitical caste, but the Objectivists have managed to close the Idiocy Loop by setting themselves up as their own personal Objects-of-Worship.
And yet, these are the people who keep complaining that “cultural leftists” like us are the ones suffering from a toxic excess of self-esteem. I know that violence is never a good answer, but I find myself believing that *some* people just didn’t get smacked enough when they were small, destructive, obnoxious larvae!
And yet, somehow I was able to see enough discrepancies in the administration’s portrait of Iraq’s weapons of mass distruction to be opposed to the war from day one.
Yeah Jillian great point.
I remember that for whatever reason, I knew in my soul that they were lying sacks of $**%. I think it was cynicism that enlightened me, helped me see enough of what was going on. I even believed Powell at his speech at the UN, but still the rest of the case for invading Iraq just smelled like death.
And I told people. I found that, as I started talking about the situation, using logic, I would hit an emotional nerve. I would say, “OK, we are going to attack Iraq to get their WMD’s, but this leaves Nuclear weapons in the hands of Israel, Britain, France, Pakistan, India, possibly China…”
By that point they would be yelling at me to “Shut up! We are going in to make the world safe!”
Intentional ignorance is a funny thing.
they have perfected the “Standing On A Pillar Of Mine Own Rectitude� defense long favored by the more authoritarian religions.
So, you are saying that “Objectivism”, (by which I think you mean Libertarianism), is really best looked at as being like a religion? Not saying I disagree, but that is interesting.
So, you are saying that “Objectivism�, (by which I think you mean Libertarianism), is really best looked at as being like a religion? Not saying I disagree, but that is interesting.
Atheist, I have not investigated the JaneGalt blog, but it has been my understanding that Rand’s most fervent followers came up with the term “Objectivism” specifically to separate the purity of their Dear Leader’s moral philosophy from the mercurial “libertarian” fever-swamps pullulating with lesser breeds and squishier thinkers. (Kind of the far-right equivalent of Marxists, Leninists, etc. pulling away from the mere socialists-cum-communists.) Perhaps I oversimplify, but if Objectivism (or Straussianism, or Neoconnery in general) isn’t serving as a religion-analog, why does the behavior of its most fervent public adherents so neatly parallel that of the followers of more traditional religions?
Gavin, Glenn Greenwald posted yesterday about how Scott Ritter was right about Iraq, and was smeared for his troubles.
That Ritter was right about everything he said, and Beinert, Goldberg and company profoundly wrong and misguided — and that the latter helped lead the country into the worst strategic disaster in its history — means nothing. To this day, it is almost impossible to avoid hearing from Peter Beinert and Jonah Goldberg in the nation’s most influential media outlets (Beinert was recently given a column in The Washington Post, and Goldberg went on to become a twice-weekly columnist for The Los Angeles Times). But if one wants to know what Ritter thinks about anything — say, whether the nation should wage war on Iran, or about anything else — one would have to search for obscure websites or alternative weekly newspapers.
why does the behavior of its most fervent public adherents so neatly parallel that of the followers of more traditional religions?
Yeah Anne, that’s a good point. Interesting, I didn’t know that “Objectivists” considered themselves separate from the “Libertarian Rabble”.
Hmm, but this raises another issue when you get to the Neoconservatives. Do you think there is truth to the idea that the Neoconservatives follow an intentionally misleading philosophy? In other words, from what I have read, Strauss considered humanity to be in essentially two parts:
1. A tiny vangaurd of people who understand that morality, religion and normal honesty are for the masses only. This vanguard gives the masses a mythology of patriotic, religious lies to follow.
2. The masses, who are born for servitude, and are given the mythology from the vanguard, and follow it because that’s how people like that act.
Such was Strauss’s plan to get rid of liberalism and return society to ‘old-time virtues’. As I understand it- maybe there is something I missed.
So, what I wonder is, which Neo-cons consider themselves to be part of the ‘vanguard’? And, are they right? Does Bill Kristol Jr. consider himself to be part of the vanguard group? Does Dick Cheney consider himself that way? Does Sean Hannity think he’s the vanguard? And, if Sean Hannity thinks he’s the vanguard, is he right or is he fooling himself? Who’s playing whom in the Neo-conservative game?
When they mea culpa on climate change – DO NOT sell them a boat.
atheist –
Which neocons consider themselves part of the vanguard? What a silly question. ALL OF THEM. The only clowns that would swallow this shit do so because they think they are (or can be) the vanguard. Otherwise, why bother?
The only clowns that would swallow this shit do so because they think they are (or can be) the vanguard.
Sure. That’s true. What I sometimes wonder, though, is- does Cheney think he’s the vanguard fooling Hannity? Does Kristol think he’s the vanguard fooling Cheney? (In which case he’s even stupider than he looks.) Does somebody else think they are the vanguard fooling Kristol?
More historical whitewashing. The polls before the invasion were a lot closer to 50/50 support than McArdle et al like to remember (most Americans, IIRC, wanted to give the UN inspectors more time, or at least get UN approval before invading another country.) The marches were attended by hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Americans. The only place the war had 100% unqualified support was wingnutistan and the elite (“liberal”) media.
I’m glad Retardo mentioned McArcle’s 2×4 comments, which should go down with Volokh’s “torture gives me a huge erection” posts as illustrative of what really drove our serious-minded warbloggers during the recent epic clash of civilizations. Does anyone remember her lame backpedal afterwards, where she tried to claim that she didn’t realize 2x4s were wooden truncheons meant for skull-crushing, that she was just repeating an obscure phrase without really understanding the meaning of her words? YA RLY.
THE ECONOMIST sure knows how to pick ’em, doesn’t it?
You know what really boils my blood about all this? Her need to lecture the people who opposed the war on the seriousness of this terrible tragedy. No shit, really? You’re kidding! If only someone could have seen this in the first place and tried to stop it… She can’t see the war’s opponents as anything but knee-jerk pacifists and is so ego-obsessed that she can’t read anything but crass triumphalism in their insistence on being take seriously, but THEY’RE the ones who are treating the war like winning a high school debate. Infuriating, myopic, self-righteous…grr. It’s not the “I was wrong, but you were wronger, in a different way” that gets me. It’s the “I was wrong, but I’m still a far better, moral, and serious person than you, and if you don’t like me saying that, it just means I’m even more better.”
She can’t see the war’s opponents as anything but knee-jerk pacifists and is so ego-obsessed that she can’t read anything but crass triumphalism in their insistence on being take seriously
Maybe a case of, some people can’t understand that there really are people who think differently then they do?
Once the Iraq war began, it was obvious to see the Bush administration was not serious about terrorism. Saddam and bin Laden were natural enemies– the secular dictator versus the fundamentalist jihadi. When Bush attempted to link Iraq and al Qaeda, it should have been obvious to anyone with a functioning frontal lobe that he was full of shit. The Bush administration correctly guessed that the American population would be sufficiently misinformed and gullible to allow the Iraq invasion. People like Jane Galt helped grease the skids by putting an intellectual veneer on the bullshit. Thanks, Jane!
Believing in the Iraq War, even back in 2003, meant believing in a pack of obvious falsehoods. The sense that I was being lied to was palpable. Now, I knew the war was wrong, but never did I imagine it would devolve into the heinous clusterfuck that it has. Bush and Rumsfeld managed to perform well below my worst expctations. So I can’t say I predicted the war would go so badly… I figured, like most people, that it would be a re-run of the O.G. Iraq War, but the sequel would end with Bush installing a puppet dictator. The dismantling of the Ba’ath party and the farcical, ham-handed attempt to jam the square “democracy” peg into a round hole were fatal mistakes Rumsfeld never recovered from.
Rummy is kind of like the Isiah Thomas of defense secretaries. The Iraq war is a lot lilke the current Knicks team– expensive and stuck in a quagmire with no hope of ever really winning.
it’s easy to recall my own, absolutely correct, rationale for opposing the war. though the reasons were MYRIAD, i put the most succinct, compelling ones on the sign i carried in the march at washington, dc.
on one side: STRIKING FIRST WILL MAKE AMERICA LESS SAFE
the other: HEALTHCARE NOT WARFARE
we’re less safe.
we squandered our fucking treasure.
eat it jane galt. and you too drum.
Maybe a case of, some people can’t understand that there really are people who think differently then they do?
I’m not that generous. I think it’s just an exercise in self delusion, rationalizing her support of the war by claiming there were really no other reasons to oppose it than just opposing war in general…certainly no rational, logical, obvious reasons that she might have willfully ignored.
If memory serves me right, not only that, but polls shows steadily declining support if Saddam didn’t have WMDs, didn’t have ties to al Qaeda and if US casualties exceeded 1,000.
Well, guess what. The prewar polls must certainly have guided the Administration propaganda talking points (Mushroom cloud! Saddama bin Laden! Cakewalk!) gleefully pushed by “Jane Galt” and her ilk, but they were also a remarkable predictor that the American public wouldn’t support the war once the truth came out. And, of course, anyone paying attention at the time knew the Administration case was full of holes, and worse, was being steadily undermined by the UN inspectors going to the places noted by US intel and finding bupkus.
At best, the Cheney Administration was gambling that they’d be vindicated retroactively (remember, early on, how rightards were saying “just wait til we find the weapons! Then you peaceniks will look foolish!”?). But then again, so what? Even if not, they’d still have their war, and all that that implies.
I miss Billmon, too. Hello, Billmon. You don’t post anymore, but i got very much from you.
atheist: Did they lash out at someone, and decide that the problem would be solved by eliminating someone they had always hated?
Minor nitpick, dude/dudette: you meant to say “by eliminating someone they once liked but turned against after 9/11.”
Well, I didn’t blog at the time so there’s very little surviving documentation save perhaps a few frantic emails with WHOLE PASSAGES IN ALL CAPS and many!! many!! exclamation points!!!, but in the summer and fall of 2002 I was extremely vocal in my opposition to an invasion of Iraq. Not because I believed they would screw it up, and not because I believed there were no so-called WMDs in Iraq, but because an invasion and occupation would necessarilly fail. I actually believed that Iraq had chemical weapons, but I’ve never been comfortable with them being lumped in with Bio and Nuke as WMD. They are not in any way strategic weapons, they are a particularly gruesome and ineffective battlefield weapon.
One thing I remember is a lot of people telling me that the invasion was not actually going to happen. I thought this a particularly pollyanna opinion. They were going to do it, and just like vietnam or the soviets in afghanistan, it was going to be a meat grinder and we’d eventually be forced to leave.
I have been surprised by the arrogance and stupidity of the political hacks running the whole operation, but if you had eisenhower, patton and teddy rooseveldt you were still going to end up where we are today…
mikey
“There is no squabbling so violent as that between people who accepted an idea yesterday and those who will accept the same idea tomorrow.” – Christopher Morley
Billmon is gone (from the net, for now?), but along with Digby I’d like to tip my hat to D r i f t g l a s s.
Is there any doubt that that bimbo McArdle would be another of the entirely unknown Randians populating the internet since the heady days of usenet, if not for the fact that she’s “a former model”?
I’m astounded anyone can take her dishonest, brainless bloviating seriously.
The fact that she and Jonah Goldberg both appear on CNN is all the evidence I need to disprove a kind and loving God.
Robert Green wins comment of the year.
These assloafs are always wrong, all the time, about everything, and they never go away. I can’t turn on my TV without Kristol or Goldturd or any one of the 1000s of these clowns stinking up the place. There is literally nothing they can say, nothing they can do, and no mistake they can make that will get them laughed out of town.
So, you are saying that “Objectivism�, (by which I think you mean Libertarianism), is really best looked at as being like a religion? Not saying I disagree, but that is interesting.
Michael Shermer’s Why People Believe Weird Things devotes an entire chapter to Rand and Objectivism titled “The Unlikeliest Cult.” Shermer posits that Rand and her inner circle had all the attributes of a cult, e.g., veneration of the leader, inerrancey of the leader, absolute truth.
(I think a better title for that book would be What Weird Things People Believe. Shermer spends maybe a page and a half on the “why” and the rest is just a catalog of a lot of weird beliefs.)
(I think a better title for that book would be What Weird Things People Believe. Shermer spends maybe a page and a half on the “why� and the rest is just a catalog of a lot of weird beliefs.)
True dat. He falls into the same “reason-only” trap that a lot of us atheists and so-called smarties do: People who hold weird beliefs are flawed, and inferior to us logical folk. He disregards the fact that we’re biologically wired* to create myths that then live like truths. Ergo, George Bush and the War That Couldn’t Be Lost.
* maybe “biologically prone to miswiring” is a better way to say it.
Speaking objectivistically after seeing her photo, it would be in my self -interest to invite Jane Galt to climb atop my fountainhead.
athiest – it has to do with ‘the vanguard’ choosing the ‘first against the wall’.
the ‘will to power’ is really just the ‘will to choose who is first against the wall’
they totally get off on that sort of talk.
and oh yeah. Jane Galt?
so where where is Spot Galt?
Oskar Werner said: “If somebody is good and a Nazi he is not intelligent. If somebody is intelligent and a Nazi, he is not good. And if somebody is good and intelligent, he cannot be a Nazi.”
Substitute neocon for nazi and you have the Jane Galts of this world.
Bonus shorter Jane Galt: Yes, but the little boy did not tell me precisely which clothes the Emperor did not have.
mikey: One thing I remember is a lot of people telling me that the invasion was not actually going to happen.
Oh God of Shit, do I remember all that noise. I remember in particular the smarminess of certain of my online wingnut correspondents who crowed that “Oh, when it turns out Bush doesn’t invade, won’t you have egg on your face.” A bunch of delusional liars. And they’ve been wrong about every single thing since.
I don’t know if I was sadder after the Cheap Seats finale or the day I clicked Whiskey Bar and instead of seeing the blank home page template I saw a ‘bad domain’ page.
Either way I needed some Zoloft or something late last fall.
/billmon come back
mikey,
I’ll own up to be one of the folks that thought, at least at the very beginning of the run-up, Bush and company wouldn’t pull the trigger. Part of it, admittedly, was my idealism. They couldn’t be that stupid and venal, they just couldn’t. It defied logic, it just wasn’t a smart thing to do by any stretch of the immagination. Hell, I could see that, and I was (at the time) just a hard-drinking, maniacly depressed music journalist. I also had doubts the U.S. would really give up its favorite super-villain by actually ousting Hussein. We had control over him and had so for nearly three decades. Osama is to unpredictable and Castro’s bought dead, so I figured we’d get at least another 10 years out of Hussein.
I’m not sure excatly when I gave up that notion – probably during the heat of the Ritter smearing – but right up until the invasion, I was hopeful that they’d change their minds, that they were just waving their dicks at the world. I wasn’t surprised when it happened, though.
And yeah, no mulligans for assholes who say people excercising their First Ammendment rights should be beaten with friggin’ lumber. Fuck that noise. Why in God’s name should I pay attention to someone who argues that what this country really needs is my ass beaten if I speak against the status quo? Are there any of those guys who didn’t say we who were against the war should either be physically harmed in extreme manners or that we were the moral equivallent of mass-murdering fundamentalist terrorists? A year ago, you wanted my head on a pike and now I’m supposed to nod obidiently at your sage words? Up yours, man.
It’s not the “I was wrong, but you were wronger, in a different way� that gets me. It’s the “I was wrong, but I’m still a far better, moral, and serious person than you, and if you don’t like me saying that, it just means I’m even more better.�
That metaphorical stick up her arse? It’s where she stores her invisible Pillar of Rectitude, handy for pulling out & standing atop whenever our paltry arguments about “reason” and “logic” and “cause & effect” look to swamp her proudly-held (yet STUPID, even EVIL) beliefs. It’s hardly a firm foundation, that Pillar of Rectitude — one might call it a slender reed — and yet people like Robert Novak demonstrate that they can balance atop one for years, even decades, serenely indifferent to whatever oceans of blood and tears their misguided politico-religious theories have produced upon the bodies of other (un-Pillared) individuals. Once you understand about the Pillar of Rectitude, you’ll never again see Tucker Carlson dancing or the C-Plus Augustus strutting without realizing why ‘rectitude’ and ‘rectum’ lie so close to each other in the dictionary!
Dear teh l4m3:
Minor nitpick, dude/dudette: you meant to say “by eliminating someone they once liked but turned against after 9/11.�
To be honest, I disagree. It seems to me that the people who turned on liberals or peaceniks after 9/11 were people who had wanted to rid the country of liberals/peaceniks for years, and just had not seen a chance to do it. To me, it was a wake-up call to see the authoritarianism and eliminationism that had existed in our society for years suddenly bubble up to the surface.
Can you or anyone think of someone who, before 9/11, really honestly liked liberals, but turned against them post 9/11?
/billmon come back
Totally- Billmon rocked.
This weird amnesia is all over the place from the war supporters. “I can’t remember what you said, but I know you were wronger than me.” Why can’t they remember?
On the big hoax day of the Toppling of the Statue, everybody from Hannity on down among the blowhards was very clear about who and what had been proved right and wrong. According to them, the toppling of the statue finally and completely “disproved” the prediction that Iraq would turn into another “Beirut.” Meaning: a guerilla war. Statue toppled, mission accomplished.
What did Hannity and the Weener Savage and all the other Dubya lovers want on Statue Toppling Day? An apology from all the defeatocrat traitors who predicted that the US might get bogged down in a guerilla war after the relatively easy push to Baghdad. “You were wrong,” they shouted. “When will you say you’re sorry for being so wrong!”
And now the war supporters just can’t remember anything war opponents predicted? Go figure.
It seems to me that the people who turned on liberals or peaceniks after 9/11 were people who had wanted to rid the country of liberals/peaceniks for years, and just had not seen a chance to do it… Can you or anyone think of someone who, before 9/11, really honestly liked liberals, but turned against them post 9/11?
Atheist, I believe the reference to “eliminating someone they once liked but turned against after 9/11” concerns those now in the Oval Office who were allies of Saddam Hussein back when Saddam was considered a useful counterweight against The Bad Mullahs in Iran. Remember the news photo of Donald Rumsfeld grin’n’gripping the late dictator? There’s a good point that the ‘Nine-eleven changed everthin!’ rallies were, among many other objectives, a way for the Cheney Court to dispose of a long-term junior partner who had become politically embarrassing.
If you dirty, 2×4-worthy hippies didn’t want to get dissed like that, you shouldn’t have smelled like dirtweed and patchouli like that.
To be honest, I disagree. It seems to me that the people who turned on liberals or peaceniks after 9/11 were people who had wanted to rid the country of liberals/peaceniks for years, and just had not seen a chance to do it.
Ooh snap, you misread me, or I wasn’t clear. I was referring to the American wingnuts’ loving the Taliban/Muslim wingnut types prior to 9/11…
PS thnx Anne for clearing that up.
About three or four days after 9/11, I knew the US was going to invade Iraq no matter what, that nothing would stop ShrubCo. Was I some brilliant policy wonk? An insider with connections to the highest levels of government? Able to see in to the future just by closing my eyes?
Of course not. I’m a secretary who works in the construction biz and reads and remembers. Once I heard Iraq mentioned in connection with 9/11, even though there didn’t seem to *be* a connection, my LSD-addled brain still managed to remember The Project for A New American Century. Five minutes of Googling and there it was: all the scumbags that were on the masthead at the PNAC website were in the Assministration or starting to make noises about Sa-damn.
I started telling everyone I knew that the US was going to invade Iraq and I was met with stares that suggested I had three heads.
So, there I was, a proud hippie, able to figure this all out in about 5 minutes less than a week after 9/11. I gave up protesting after the 2002 mid-terms, I saw it was futile. And here we are in 2007, in a total nightmare. What’s the fucking war hawks excuse?
Oh, and I hope Ezra Klein gets stomped to bits by a bunch of String Cheese Incident fans. He actually wrote, when Jesse was stupid enough to let him post at Pandagon, that well, yeah, all the dirty hippies at the UC school he was at doing stuff like *gasp* protesting *gasp* convinced him to support the war. Seriously. Stupid little turd.
[…] Oh, they were right to be anti-war, the line goes, but they were right for the wrong reasons. Presumably the rest of us were wrong for the right reasons. So we still deserve to have a seat at the table. […]
teh l4m3, anne
allies of Saddam Hussein back when Saddam was considered a useful counterweight against The Bad Mullahs in Iran.
Ooh snap, you misread me, or I wasn’t clear. I was referring to the American wingnuts’ loving the Taliban/Muslim wingnut types prior to 9/11…
Oooohhhhhhh. Now I get it. Yes, you are absolutely right.
Besides, McArdle is being — surprise, surprise! — disingenuous when she talks about predictions as opposed to risks. Even if Saddam never used mustard gas on our troops, it was quite rightly pointed out as a risk.
Meanwhile, the “risks” of not invading so shrilly touted by the prowar side — nuclear weapons carried by balsa wood drones piloted by al Qaeda; hell, the notion that Iraq posed any threat at all to the US — never did pass the smell test.
If someone gets drunk, insists on driving, and insists that everything will turn out just fine, and one responds by noting that driving drunk could result in a totaled car, an arrest, the driver or someone else getting killed, all of those are perfectly valid risks. If the drunk proceeds to total the car and get arrested, he or she doesn’t get to point out that no one got killed to claim that his or her dissuaders “got their predictions wrong.”
Even if they’re reflexively opposed to driving drunk.
Given McArdle’s obvious affinity for straw men, it’s clear that if she doesn’t recall the antiwar arguments, it’s because she was never listening — deafened by the drums of war she was banging, perhaps.
No.
This has been another edition of Simple Answers to Simple Questions (h/t Atrios).
[…] Oh brilliant, it’s her again. […]