Well, neither of the teams I was rooting for won their respective playoff matches today, so it looks like I’ll be watching the Super Bowl for the commericals this year.
To console any other depressed Patriots and Saints fans, here’s a cute video of a kitten and a Mac:
Over at No More Mister Nice Blog this week, Steve’s been giving full coverage to recent nasty rumors about Barak Obama that have been circulating through the Internet and various right-wing news outlets. Based on information about where Obama went to school when he was 6 years old, the intent is to plant the seeds of fear in people and thereby scuttle his potential presidential run in 2008. To borrow a techie phrase, it’s classic FUD.
I find the whole thing despicable, not least because the real fear-mongering part of this crap is based on the concept that all Muslims are somehow part of a vast, evil, and powerful worldwide conspiracy. Replace the word “Jew” for “Muslim” and this is the exact same horrible lie that’s been lobbed against the Jews for centuries.
The sad part is, it was a highly effective lie. People still believe it today. And at least some of them will believe this too.
Life is slowly getting back to normal chez lux, but I’ve managed to fall out of the blogging habit in the interim. I feel some lingering guilt for not posting daily, but I also don’t feel that I have much to say right now.
If past experience is a reliable guide, my blogging frequency tends to go up almost immediately after I make a post like this. We’ll see what happens.
A quiet night in chilly California.
Two happy kitties hanging out on the office couch. Even though Bear is no longer a kitten, Gimi is almost always very gentle with him.
Starting off the morning, I noticed that Glenn Greenwald links to an NPR audiocast wherein longtime conservative Rod Dreher expereinces a crisis in his political faith.
As President Bush marched the country to war with Iraq, even some voices on the Right warned that this was a fool’s errand. I dismissed them angrily. I thought them unpatriotic. But almost four years later, I see that I was the fool.
In Iraq, this Republican President for whom I voted twice has shamed our country with weakness and incompetence, and the consequences of his failure will be far, far worse than anything Carter did. The fraud, the mendacity, the utter haplessness of our government’s conduct of the Iraq war have been shattering to me.
It wasn’t supposed to turn out like this. Not under a Republican President.
I turn 40 next month — middle aged at last — a time of discovering limits, finitude. I expected that. But what I did not expect was to see the limits of finitude of American power revealed so painfully. I did not expect Vietnam.
As I sat in my office last night watching President Bush deliver his big speech, I seethed over the waste, the folly, the stupidity of this war.
I had a heretical thought for a conservative – that I have got to teach my kids that they must never, ever take Presidents and Generals at their word – that their government will send them to kill and die for noble-sounding rot – that they have to question authority.
On the walk to the parking garage, it hit me. Hadn’t the hippies tried to tell my generation that? Why had we scorned them so blithely?
Powerful stuff, and I feel for the guy. It is not easy to admit that you were wrong and question yourself after so many years of believing you were right.
The Mahablog, picking up on the theme, muses:
The problem is, as it is with so many of his fellow travelers, that his understanding of politics remained childish. He seems to have retained a child
Seriously, who thinks this stuff up?
And who buys it?