Please Don't Kill David Broder

There are many reasons not to elect Hillary Clinton President besides the fact that her election could result in the collapse of Western Civilization as we know it. There is also a very important humanitarian consideration. Electing Hillary Clinton President could kill David Broder.

Washington Post columnist David Broder is 78 years old and I just don't think he could survive Hillary's being elected President. Broder hates the Clintons with a passion; in fact, it's the only thing he does do with a passion. "He came in here and he trashed the place and it's not his place," Broder once said of the way Bill Clinton treated Washington, which Broder bought years ago when real estate was cheap. But he was younger then and it didn't matter so much if he got himself all worked up and raised his blood pressure. Now it could be fatal.

Today, Broder wrote yet another column about the marriage of Bill and Hillary Clinton, less than a week after he promised that he wouldn't in an online chat. "Will you and the media ever apply as much scrutiny to the Giuliani marriages as you have done to the single Clinton marriage?" someone had asked him during the chat and he replied, "I plan to leave both subjects alone." I know that old people can sometimes be a little forgetful so it's possible that he didn't remember saying that. But I think it's also possible that he just can't help it. I think for days he tried to resist discussing the Clintons' marriage in disparaging terms but in the end his hatred of them was too strong. Now, I'm very worried that Broder won't be able to make it through four years of yelling at Hillary to get off his lawn without hurting himself.

David Broder, the "dean of American journalism," built his reputation on his ability to be dispassionate and not take sides on issues or have any strong opinions at all. People in Washington think of him as a dependable old jalopy that is always in neutral. Even when President Kennedy was assassinated he didn't let emotion sway him, as he once explained once to a group of Chinese students: "On November 22, 1963, I was one of the journalists following President Kennedy's motorcade. You know what happened later -- the President was assassinated and I was right on the spot. As an ordinary man, I wanted leave the scene, hide somewhere, and weep. But I managed to calm myself and to report the event in the most objective way." While other reporters lost their heads, Broder refused to take sides after the President was killed. Was he for the assassination or against it? It was impossible to tell from his reporting. No matter what his personal feelings might have been, as a reporter he had to be objective when it came to the issue of whether killing Kennedy was a good thing or a bad thing.

But like Spock in the midst of Pon farr, every seven years or so Broder loses control over his emotions and his seething hatred for the Clintons resurfaces. Many pundits in Washington are afraid of what Clinton's candidacy might do to his carefully cultivated reputation for honesty and even-handedness. They are attempting to derail Clinton's campaign not so much because they think she would make a terrible President, but because they are so terribly worried about David Broder's health. They will stop at nothing to keep Hillary from being President in order to protect their friend from bursting a blood vessel. Every time Maureen Dowd, for example, writes an embarrassing column about Hillary, it is really just a desperate attempt to save David Broder from himself.

So if you are thinking of voting for Hillary, please take a moment and consider what you are doing. You are not just making America vulnerable to terrorists, immigrants and socialized medicine, you are killing David Broder. Every vote for Hillary is like a vote to disconnect David Broder from life support.

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Technorati Tags: Jon Swift, Hillary Clinton, David Broder, Washington Post, Maureen Dowd, Giuliani, Bill Clinton, Politics
Carnivals: Carnival of Political Punditry, Carnival of Education

The Torture Race

The New York Times story on classified Justice Department memos authorizing enhanced interrogation techniques in alleged violation of American laws against torture has some people in a dither. Andrew Sullivan has called the President a war criminal. Sen. Arlen Specter called the memos "shocking." Congress is demanding to see the secret memos, while the Bush Administrations maintains, in the words of press secretary Dana Perino, "It is a policy of the United States that we do not torture, and we do not." But although it may seem like the memos permit torture in defiance of the Geneva Conventions and the law that Congress had just passed banning the use "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment" that is not actually the case. In fact, Sullivan and Specter are relying on outmoded definitions of torture that just don't apply to the 21st century War on Terror.

Sullivan has pointed out that many of the enhanced interrogation techniques approved by the CIA appear to be similar to interrogation techniques used by the Nazis. In fact, the Nazis even used the phrase "verschärfte Vernehmung" to describe these techniques, which roughly translates to mean "enhanced interrogation."

Now that sounds pretty bad, seeing how the Nazis were supposed to be so evil, until you look at what those techniques were. They included repeated beatings, long forced-standing, stress positions, withholding of food and medical care, sleep deprivation and other procedures to loosen up prisoners, which really doesn't sound so terrible. When I was a kid I got spanked, was forced to stand in a corner and went to bed without supper and I survived. Little did I know my parents were acting like Nazis! In fact, the Nazis initially banned the use of hypothermia and waterboarding as just too harsh for their delicate sensibilities, though they later discovered, as the CIA apparently did, that these kinds of limits really make life difficult for an interrogator.

Even though the Nazis were supposed to be really evil back in their day, their methods seem almost quaint by today's standards when compared with some of the stuff modern terrorists do. To even call some of these things torture is an insult to torture, according to The Weekly Standard's Michael Goldfarb. "The Times indicts the Bush administration for exposing terrorists captured abroad to 'head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.' Boo hoo," he writes in a piece called "Trivializing Torture."

As Jules Crittenden points out, "Article neglects to mention we are fighting an enemy that considers powerdrills into kneecaps and videotaped beheading of captives business as usual. That in fact, we have yet to face an enemy in the modern era that observes anything approaching the standards we do." The Times, he says, would have us fight the War on Terror with "one hand tied behind back." (Apparently, a malfunction in Mr. Crittenden's word processor rendered him incapable of typing definite articles on the day he wrote this post.)

Mr. Crittenden makes an important point. As long as we can say the terrorists are worse than we are, we have the moral high ground. But we cannot let them get too much worse than us or there will be a morality gap that could be as devastating as the missile gap potentially was during the Cold War. So we need to stay just one small step behind the enemy in the torture race. If they ratchet up their interrogation techniques, we need to ratchet up ours, making sure that they always stay just a little bit more evil than us so that we can retain our moral superiority. If we had remained only not quite as bad as the Nazis, we would have fallen too far behind the terrorists. As the terrorists leave the Nazis in the dust, so must we if we have any hope of defeating them.

Unfortunately, the strict standards of the Geneva Conventions and American laws that incorporate them don't allow for the fact that the definition of torture is a fluid one. These rules seem to be based on an inflexible Platonic ideal of torture. But times change. What seemed like torture back during World War II is like a walk in the park today. The CIA and our armed forces need the flexibility to continually redefine torture and enhance our interrogation techniques as the enemy continually enhances its interrogation techniques. Only by frequently defining torture up -- but not too far up because we never want to be as bad as they are -- can we hope to stay on an almost even playing field with the enemy. As long as there are a few new atrocities that the enemy commits that we can point to as worse than things we do, then we know we are winning the moral battle and we still have a chance to win the military one. The CIA has a tough enough job making sure that their torture is worse than our torture (which can't even really be called torture anymore) but not so much worse that they pull too far ahead of us. They don't need to have their job made even more difficult by meddling politicians whose outdated conceptions of torture and rigid moral standards only strait-jacket our troops.

If we do win this war and Western Civilization survives, no doubt future generations will look back on this debate and wonder what all the fuss was about. "That's not so bad at all," they'll say, "compared with what we do today."

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Technorati Tags: Jon Swift, Iraq, War on Terror, Terrorism, Bush, Torture, Andrew Sullivan, Michael Goldfarb, Nazis, Foreign Policy, Politics
Carnivals: This Is Not My Country, Carnival of Principled Government

Jonah Goldberg's Shining (Liberal Fascism with LOLcats)

All work and no play makes Jonah a dull boy. But two years after the scheduled publication of Jonah Goldberg's magnum opus Liberal Fascism, there is no evidence that he has actually written anything other than the subtitle -- again and again and again, like Jack Nicholson in The Shining. And now he is even rewriting that. The original subtitle, "The Totalitarian Temptation from Mussolini to Hillary Clinton," had to be changed, probably because the publisher worried that Hillary Clinton would no longer be President by the time the book came out.

But the new subtitle, "The Totalitarian Temptation from Hegel to Whole Foods," has come under some criticism from jealous wags. "I’ve met John Mackey a number of times and I know for a fact that he’s not a 'fascist,' nor does he distribute 'fascist food,'" wrote Tom Palmer about the founder of Whole Foods. "Fascism is a more complicated subject than he makes it sound," Goldberg responded wearily, clearly worn out by all the energy he has expended rewriting the subtitle. "'I know John Mackey, John Mackey is a friend of mine, and he's no fascist,' is a pretty vapid argument."

But in defending the subtle new subtitle, Goldberg has dropped a few tantalizing hints as to what the book is going to be about once he starts writing it. Apparently, Goldberg unearths for the first time shocking similarities between Nazis and liberals. For example, Nazis wanted to clean up the environment. So do liberals! Nazis wanted to cure cancer. So do liberals! Nazis liked organic food and many were vegetarians. So are many liberals! A lot of Nazis were gay and a lot of liberals are, too! Nazis made Volkswagons and liberals love to drive them! Hitler loved dogs and so do many liberals! (which is why many conservatives like Kathryn Jean Lopez were very relieved to discover that Mitt Romney hates dogs). Goldberg's book will explore the remarkably nuanced similarities between liberals and Nazis and not be the simplistic exercise in liberal bashing his critics claim it will be without even reading the book, which isn't even written yet.

Like many conservatives I can't wait for Goldberg to publish his book, which he promises will be "a very serious, thoughtful, argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care." But the publication date keeps getting pushed farther and farther into the future. The first sign of trouble was when Goldberg asked for help from readers of The Corner. "I'm working on a chapter of the book which requires me to read a lot about and by Herbert Spencer," Goldberg said. "There's simply no way I can read all of it, nor do I really need to. But if there are any real experts on Spencer out there -- regardless of ideological affiliation -- I'd love to ask you a few questions in case I'm missing something." The idea that he would try to read any Spencer at all before writing about him already struck me as biting off more than he could chew. But the addition of Hegel to the new subtitle raises more troubling questions. Hegel is even more tedious and difficult to understand than Spencer and I'm afraid that finding someone who can explain Hegel to Goldberg is going to take up yet more precious time. After all, Hegel himself reportedly said, "Only one man ever understood me, and even he didn't understand me."

I don't know how Goldberg can possibly meet his deadline in time for the book to come out on the latest publication date -- December 26 of this year -- so I have an idea that will save Goldberg a lot of time writing and also spare the reader from having to plow through too much prose once it's finished. Most of Goldberg's ideas could be expressed much more economically, not to mention entertainingly, by using LOLcats, an Internet meme where pictures of cats and other cute animals (or "varmints," as Mitt Romney likes to call them) are captioned with grammatically challenged prose. Cats are thematically appropriate because they are often used to depict Nazis in such books as Art Spiegelman's Maus and Maus II. And conveniently, many cats look like Adolf Hitler so these "kitlers," as they are called, can be used as pictorial shorthand to depict liberals.

Using LOLcats to express his ideas instead of boring old-fashioned prose would also help Goldberg appeal to a new generation of young people who seem to be getting more and more liberal according to recent polls. In fact, I think Goldberg could solicit the help of many young Photoshop whizzes on the Internet to write the book for him. Below, I have already provided a few suggestions to start the ball rolling. Feel free to email me or drop links in the comments to your own examples and I will post the links here.

Introduction: A Very Serious Book








Chapter 1: Hegel









Chapter 5: Why Do Liberals Hate Adam Smith?










Chapter 13: Nazis and Liberals: Separated at Birth?













Chapter 24: Rachel Carson, Nazi













Chapter 27: Gay Marriage and the Decline of Western Civilization










Chapter 32: Fighting Islamofascism











Chapter 33: They're Taking Our Guns Away!












Chapter 35: Food Fascism











Chapter 46: How We Can Fight the Whole Foods Menace











Update: Im in ur blogosphere writin ur book:

Pinko Punko from Three Bulls is the first to meet the challenge with the dust jacket and some more chapters:

Prologue: Liberal fascism is tempting!










Chapter 36: Food Fascism II













Blurb: im in ur pornography knowin it when I seez it. o book is fine kthxbye










My Signature weapon presents Chapter 4: Liberty and the Marketplace of Ideas

Reader Ginsu Chef sends along Chapter 42: Protecting Democracy from Democrats:














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Technorati Tags: Jon Swift, Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism, Books, LOLcats, Internet, Politics
Fesitval of Good Books #5