Picture: Mantis

Comment Elsewhere: The Smoking Gun as a Stake Through the Heart

In a rare emergence at Peevish, we got into a discussion of Bush administration criminality and Republican obstructionism, and I said:

We need the smoking gun. We need proof that Bush and Cheney and Libby and Rove and Kagan (and Kagan, and Kagan, etc.) and Kristol and Rumsfield actively conspired to put partisan success over national welfare, put ideological barriers in the way of reality, put profit ahead of people. I can see the bullet holes, you can see them too, but until we can put that gun in their hand and their prints on the trigger and the bullets, people will consider the Republicans to be just another political party, rather than a treasonous criminal conspiracy. If we can do that, we can make the Republican party as dead as the Whigs and the Know-nothings, and we can get on with our lives. There will still be a conservative movement, a business party (a big chunk of the Democratic party qualifies!) an anti-liberal movement. But they will have to abjure the Republican legacy to remain legitimate.

All I want for Christmas is a smoking gun email....

Picture: Flying Ant

Picture: 1941 Nickel

I wasn't really planning to remark on Pearl Harbor Day, but look what I got in my change at Wal-Mart:

For sixty-eight years, that nickel's been working its way through our economy. Maybe it lived in a jar for a while, but still.

Picture: Hopper

Comment Elsewhere: Soft-handed hypocrisy

In a discussion of the new Senate report on the failure to capture bin Laden at Tora Bora I wrote

Rumsfeld’s argument at the time, the report says, was that deploying too many American troops could jeopardize the mission by creating an anti-US backlash among the local populace.

I haven’t seen anyone point out the irony of this argument. If it’s sincere, it represents a bizarrely uncharacteristic soft-handed approach by an administration which routinely denigrated anyone who publicly suggested such a direction. I suppose you could just chalk that up to rank hypocrisy, which is plausible.

Or it could just be a smokescreen for incompetence. Either works.

Picture: Fall Colors

Comment Elsewhere: The Dark Side of Thanksgiving

After reading a devastating revisionist history of the origins of Thanksgiving (really: if you're at all sentimental about the history of the holiday, don't read it. If, like me, your sentiment is reserved for the modern practice of the holiday, the admittedly invented traditions and family memories, you should be fine.) I wrote:

I'm having a more complex reaction to this post, though. As it notes, huge numbers of Native Americans died as a result of disease rather than direct European action: this sets up a causality problem. Even in the absence of European eliminationist violence, Native American communities were going to be devastated in the short run, and possibly the long run, due to disease. Conversely, even in the absence of the "Columbian Exchange" diseases, European eliminationist violence was going to disrupt and dislocate Native American society in the long run, though it might have looked different in the short run.

I'm having trouble imagining plausible alternative histories. It's a failure of imagination on my part, perhaps, but that's where I am at the moment.

Picture: Twin Astroboys

Comment Elsewhere: God and Vegetarianism

Over at Acephalous, where I learned that the creators of South Park also wrote a musical based on the Packer expedition, I commented on Sarah Palin's invocation of the immortal sentiment, "If God didn't intend us to eat [X], then why did he make them edible?" I remarked:

The theology is twisted. God didn't intend for humans to eat animals. Genesis, Chapter ONE*:

29: And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.
30: And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.

Only later, after the abomination and destruction of all life but Noah&Co., does God permit the eating of meat. Chapter Nine:

1: And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.
2: And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hand are they delivered.
3: Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things.

God then goes on to start writing the rules of Kashrut. God may have made animals (and people) edible, but allowing them to be eaten was Plan B.

* KJV, since I'm sure she wouldn't accept any other translation.