evolution

Go ahead, boys and girls — see where it gets you.

Personally, I’d like to see them get a little political comeuppance, if doing so weren’t essentially a rubber-stamp for eight to sixteen years of Clintons being president. (And, God help us, the next generation of Bushes after that.)

Ron Rosenbaum:

To me the visit was about the necessity to bear some kind of moral witness against the evil represented by Ahmadinejad, whatever pseudo-sophisticated arguments are used deny responsibility to him for his regimes crimes or to treat him as open to Reason.

The new meme tries to frame it as being about “fear” of Ahmadinejad. No it’s not about fear, it’s about moral disgust, revulsion. The fear can be seen, rather, in the posturing of those super brave boyz who accuse those who have the clarity to express moral disgust and rejection as “fearful”. When in fact it’s their fear—that their super-sophisitcated white boy, think tank subsidized, wonk mentality with all its nuances is laughably impotent in the face of fundamentalist, theocratic fascist evil. And what’s equally laughable is their belief that their arguments, their rhetoric their desire above all for dialogue will make a differ[e]nce in a kumbaya way, to the victims of a theocratic Stasi-like state.

RTWT.

The Wichita Eagle editorial board’s grip on the obvious remains an iron one:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., wasn’t kidding Tuesday when she referred to the legislative body as “the Children’s Congress” in trying to persuade President Bush not to veto the reauthorization of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. As Dana Milbank of the Washington Post noted, this year alone there have been hundreds of bills “for the kids,” including the “Kids Come First Act, the Protect Our Children First Act, the Prepare All Kids Act, the Early Childhood Investment Act, the Play Every Day Act, the Safe Babies Act, the Children’s Dental Health Improvement Act, and the Early Detection of Dyslexia in Children Act.”

But of course — it’s the best way to get all of the liberty-choking legislation for the cradle-to-grave entitlement state rammed through, not to mention the rafts of crap that are attached to them, while the rest of us sit slack-jawed watching American Idol or fricking Survivor. Oppose it for any reason at all and you’ll be painted as “anti-children”.

So you’ve seen it, you’ve Technoratied it, you’ve refreshed Memeorandum every 15 minutes, and you’ve worn your index finger out from refreshing your RSS reader.

I speak, of course, of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s appearances before the National Press Club and at Columbia University. I won’t link all those things here — you’re all familiar enough with this medium that you can find whatever views smooth your plumage.

I will say that every living soul that was a part of this — from Ahmadinejad himself, to the U.S. government which granted him a visa, to the tough-talking questioner from Columbia, to the people that invited him, to the chin-stroking “progressive” multiculturalists** and their starry-eyed charges, to the media which covered the show, played their assigned role to the hilt. Not one deviated from the script prepared for them by fate and their respective masters.

My own views — outside of quite a deepening of the general malaise which has settled over me — can be described as some amalgam of the following. First, Wretchard:

Does Bollinger actually believe that the more Ahmedinajad speaks the more he “undermines” his own position in Iran? That the “many good-hearted, intelligent citizens” listening to Bollinger’s exchange with Ahmedinajad will have their eyes opened? About the only thing Bollinger got right was the assessment of the importance of his own remarks at the closing of his speech. The Columbia President continues:

A year ago, I am reliably told, your preposterous and belligerent statements in this country, as at one of the meetings at the Council on Foreign Relations, so embarrassed sensible Iranian citizens that this led to your party’s defeat in the December mayoral elections. May this do that and more.

I am only a professor, who is also a university president.

This is beyond sad. It’s the closing of a man out of his own depth. It’s an faculty lunch speech dispatched against a man accustomed to command the secret police, rockets, EFPs, sophisticated propaganda and disinformation cells. Bollinger was game, but not only is he not in the same ring, he doesn’t even know where the fight is scheduled to take place. If this is what our intellectual leaders think is effective resistance against the Islamic Revolution then we are in serious trouble.

Jeff:

And when all is said and done, that’s what this is all about: not only does inviting [Ahmadinejad] serve as a PR coup and a thumb to the eye of warmongering Buscho and its simplistic “axis of Evil”-type thinking — but it shows how “civilized” can be the “free exchange of ideas” once international diplomacy is handed over to those intellectual elites who understand nuance and have been properly schooled in multiculturalist dogma.

Fellow ex-member of the now defunct Raging RINOs Nick Schweitzer:

For my part, I don’t think he should be silenced. While I certainly question the motives of those at Columbia University who invited him to speak… my questions center on them, not him. Why would they want him to speak? What value does his insight into world politics bring? His hatred of Jews? His hatred of freedom? His encouragement of terrorism? Does Columbia find these things valuable because they agree with them, or because they want to provide him a forum to pronounce his views and hope that students will backlash against him? …

But for those who truly do want to silence him… I would ask you why. What are you afraid of? In my experience, people don’t bother attempting to stop things that they don’t fear. Do you truly believe that the people of America will be swayed by what this monster says? Isn’t it just as likely that those who hear him will be disgusted by him, and will only convince them how evil he is? Is there that little faith in the heart of the basic American? If that is so… then our problem isn’t with Ahmadinejad, but rather with ourselves. Silencing him won’t restore our faith.

That faith, at least in me, is decreasing by the second.

*: The result of Alan Turing’s work combined with Godel’s incompleteness theorem shows that either a logical system is inconsistent or incomplete (cannot be computed by a Turing machine, cannot be fully enumerated or catalogued — there exist statements in the system that are true but unprovable within the system). Guess which ones we are.

**: Osama has made the same sort of overtures, mentioning various leftist causes in his “most recent” (read: cobbled together posthumously) messgaes. But, these were ham-fisted and even they saw through it. Ahmadinejad is slick — essentially, this “president” is a press secretary for the Ayatollah. He plays them like a harp***, and they love it, because it’s a thumb in the eye to the Bushitler and the Real Enemies™ (other Americans). Bush’s own incompetence and failure of leadership in this matter, as in many others, cannot be either understated or forgotten.

***: It’s really not that hard. Mouth a few of the shibboleths and off you go. (Bill is going to sue me for abusing his footnote device, but here I go again.)

j.d.: “I take it you’re not as concerned as I am with the approaching el foldo that Western civilization is heading toward later this week?”

tacos:

j.d.: “I mean, let’s just hand Ahmedinejad a flag and take him to South Dakota to plant it right on old Teddy Roosevelt’s nose.”

tacos:

j.d.: “I mean, come on - Ground Zero? The Rough Riders wouldn’t allow for this crap, I can tell you that. In fact, I think all but the tapioca-brained Jimmy Carter and the equally tapioca-brained Bush could muster something. Even Martin Sheen and a cokehead writer came up with an assassination plot.”

tacos:

j.d.: “Fictional plot, natch. And my purchasing power is going down by the day, it seems like. What’s a guy to believe in these days?”

tacos:

j.d.:

tacos: “If you’re lucky, we’ll dribble sour cream on you later.”

UPDATE: j.d.: “Well, if you’re lucky, I’ll lap it up as quickly as the media laps up Ahmadinejad.”

I occasionally come by publications and information regarding Kansas’s disaster preparedness. This document is a look back at disaster preparedness in 2006 and 2007 in Kansas. It’s got a good bit of “look how great your government is, particularly those members which might run for, say, open Senate seats or Vice President soon!” to it, but there are some interesting tidbits.

For one, there are only five Kansas counties (Mitchell, Republic, Marion, Jefferson, Atchison) out of 105 which have not had disaster declarations in them in the last two years. Widespread flooding struck northeast Kansas last year and southeast Kansas this year, nearly wiping out the city of Coffeyville. There were epic blizzards out west last winter. And, of course, an epic tornado laid low the town of Greensburg earlier this year.

It’s interesting reading, if only to remind yourself where society is vulnerable.

I know - I’ve been studying and job-interviewing and car-purchasing, and I haven’t had time for aught but dick jokes, disgusting news stories, and half-assed political commentary.

Which, come to think of it, forms about three-quarters of this blog. Two of those tasks are put to rest at least for the near future, so hopefully I can do a couple of posts a day now that the fog has lifted.

This Japanese restaurant gives new meaning to the phrase “tag it and bag it” (possibly NSFW and certainly not fit for human consumption, but too good not to quote large sections of):

I found the secret to driving traffic to your site using StumbleUpon.

Just draw a bunch of crappy, low-quality, unfunny comics about “search engine optimization” and “monetizing” your blog, and occasionally post pictures of your cat along with obscure, poorly-spelled video game references.

Pack ‘em in to the gun-wales, you will.

I am an authority, according to Wikipedia. And on the Pink Taco, no less.