What a Strange Crop of Conservatives we Have Here…

Jonah Goldberg at the National Review

Does anyone know what we’re supposed to call this decade? Is it the 2000s? The twenty-ohs? We’re coming up on the last year of it and I still have no idea. Personally, I always liked the “oughts,” as in, “Back in ought-six, I ate a brick of cheddar cheese in one sitting.”

But perhaps the best reason to call it the oughts is that one is left with the sense that this decade ought to have been about something, and yet it really doesn’t feel that way. [....]

Ok, some basic navel gazing….

Neither the pro-Bush nor anti-Bush segments of society seemed to control the commanding heights of the popular culture. After 9/11, the Bushian forces seemed to dominate — freedom fries, 24, the Dixie Chicks’ implosion — but that didn’t last long. And, with the exception of a brief counter-Bush surge led by the lefty blogosphere, Jon Stewart and the re-imagined coffeehouse rock version of the Dixie Chicks, the battle for decade dominance has been between a fizzle and a deadlock.

The war on terrorism doesn’t define young peoples’ lives, but neither does Bush-hatred. Virtually all of the antiwar or anti-Bush screeds put out by Hollywood over the last year, including Oliver Stone’s latest doggerel, have bombed.

It was during the oughts that Americans started drinking more bottled water than beer. As Susan McWilliams of Pomona College observes, you can tell something about a society that chooses clever water over humble beer. Bottled water is personal, inward-driven. Beer is social, outward-driven. Beer gets the party started. Water is the thirst quencher of choice for the solitary fitness addict, marching to the beat of his or her own drummer, digitally remastered for the iPod.

(emphasis mine)

Ahhh, there is the problem. We ought to be fat (ok, fatter than we already are) and drunk.

30 December 2008

Workout notes Last night, yoga with Ms. Nancy. This morning: 2650 swim (unbelievably slow; 100s were 1:40-1:44, IMs were 2:15) then yoga-lattes with Ms. Nancy.

Of course, Nancy wanted to rub my newly crew-cut head (got the hair cut at the DFW airport) and I let her.

We did something that involved down dog

three legged dog

Note: this is what photobucket censored:

pigeon

back to three legged dog all in a continuous motion. That helped loosen the piriformis.

Other topics

Gaza war and terror: Mustafa Barghouthi, Secretary General of the Palestinian National Initiative gives his side of it here. Here is one of his 7 points:

7. Israel claims that Palestinians are the source of violence.

Let us be clear and unequivocal. The occupation of Palestine since the War of 1967 has been and remains the root of violence between Israelis and Palestinians. Violence can be ended with the occupation and the granting of Palestine’s national and human rights. Hamas does not control the West Bank and yet we remain occupied, our rights violated and our children killed.

With these myths understood, let us ponder the real reasons behind these airstrikes; what we find may be even more disgusting than the act itself.

The leaders Israel are holding press conferences, dressed in black, with sleeves rolled up.

‘It’s time to fight’, they say, ‘but it won’t be easy.’

To prove just how hard it is, Livni, Olmert and Barak did not even wear make-up to the press conference, and Barak has ended his presidential campaign to focus on the Gaza campaign. What heroes…what leaders…

We all know the truth: the suspension of the electioneering is exactly that – electioneering.

Like John McCain’s suspension of his presidential campaign to return to Washington to ‘deal with’ the financial crisis, this act is little more than a publicity stunt.

The candidates have to appear ‘tough enough to lead’, and there is seemingly no better way of doing that than bathing in Palestinian blood.

‘Look at me,’ Livni says in her black suit and unkempt hair, ‘I am a warrior. I am strong enough to pull the trigger. Don’t you feel more confident about voting for me, now that you know I am as ruthless as Bibi Netanyahu?’

I do not know which is more disturbing, her and Barak, or the constituency they are trying to please.

In the end, this will in no way improve the security of the average Israeli; in fact it can be expected to get much worse in the coming days as the massacre could presumably provoke a new generation of suicide bombers.

It will not undermine Hamas either, and it will not result in the three fools, Barak, Livni and Olmert, looking ‘tough’. Their misguided political venture will likely blow up in their faces as did the brutally similar 2006 invasion of Lebanon.

In closing, there is another reason – beyond the internal politics of Israel – why this attack has been allowed to occur: the complicity and silence of the international community.

Israel cannot and would not act against the will of its economic allies in Europe or its military allies in the US. Israel may be pulling the trigger ending hundreds, perhaps even thousands of lives this week, but it is the apathy of the world and the inhumane tolerance of Palestinian suffering which allows this to occur.

‘The evil only exists because the good remain silent’

From Occupied Palestine. . .

Speaking of war and going and not going, this is one of the most honest pieces I’ve ever read:

Around four years ago I went to a military recruiter. As a 35 year old guy, with multiple degrees, and a good job the guy that interviewed me was confused. Why was I there? I told him I came from a family of military folks. I can run a 6 minute mile. And if I have to I can shoot somebody in the head from a hundred yards. I might have even said I want to hunt down and kill terrorist. I told him what I thought he wanted to hear.

But that wasn’t why I was there.

* webranding’s diary :: ::
*

Instead I felt guilty. My fellow Americans were dying in a far off land and I was sitting in my nice house doing nothing.

That I heard a guy/gal was going back for their second, third, and now even fourth tour just didn’t seem right. Maybe I ought to do something.

But when the time came to get serious I was gutless. I couldn’t do it.

I found it was easier to talk about projecting force, then actually picking up a gun and doing it myself. This realization made me feel really, really small.

Hey, the easy solution is to become a conservative. Then, talking big while not doing much yourself is perfectly acceptable.