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t seems like only yesterday we were looking at nominee #3 for this year’s C-SM “Most Ridiculous” award (actually, it was Tuesday), and here we are again so soon with #4 – a second nominated article from the nearly always ridiculous Gary Kamiya of Salon.

Kamiya easily checks off all the requirements for consideration for this august (if ridiculous) honor:  He is a serious writer, writing about a serious subject in all seriousness, yet he goes far beyond the sublime, settling heavily into the imbecilic.

His piece, Night of the Living Neocons, The shameless fools whose Iraq folly empowered Iran’s hard-liners are back, smearing Obama as an appeaser, is typical Kamiya: Blind to all the Left’s faults, while accusing the right of exactly those faults … oh, and being utterly unable to forgive or forget George W. Bush, who he sees as the primordial presidential ooze from which all things evil evolved.

Let’s start with a rundown of the derrogatory words he uses for neocons:  Rasputin-like, unhinged, disgraced, braying, raving, unreconstructed, lunatic, Visigothic, idiotic, ludicrous, paper-pushing pundits ensconced in comfy right-wing think tanks, supposedly “idealistic,” and cavalier.  A little later on he belittles neocons for belittling Obama.  The pot is allowed to call the kettle black, but the kettle gets no such rights in Kamiyaland.

As the piece’s title hints, Kamiya believes it’s Bush who created Iran’s hard-line regime, and that Obama is right to appease use carefully considered words, because just three words – axis of evil – are behind all that’s wrong in Iran.

That these neoconservative pundits have the gall to talk about Iran at all, let alone pose as defenders of the Iranian people, would be stunning if it were not so familiar. For it was their own policies that were largely responsible for the rise of the hard-liners in Iran. … And of those U.S. actions, none was more consequential than the very “axis of evil” statement that the neocons are now tumbling over each other to glorify.

Kamiya quotes Islamic affairs scholar Malise Ruthvin:

“The build-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq provided them with strong public support. In the local council elections of February 2003 — one month before the invasion — conservatives regained nearly all the seats they had lost in 1999 at the peak of the reformist movement. This was not a rigged poll: for unlike the parliamentary and presidential races, candidates for municipal elections are not vetted for ‘Islamic suitability.’ The right-wing victory was sealed two years later with Ahmadinejad’s election as president.”

It’s simplistic to blame the results of elections in Iran on the actions of America. Economic issues at home and tribal alliances and conflicts also matter greatly, and whatever America does or does not do is grossly distorted by the state-controlled Iranian media – which didn’t cover Obama’s Cairo speech and reported his recent milquetoast comments as if they were incendiary. Be that as it may, haven’t events borne out the fact that Iran is indeed evil? It has ruthlessly repressed its people, called for the destruction of free, Democratic Israel, tried to strip Lebanon of democracy, killed our soldiers, and thumbed its nose at the world.

Oh, and we need not mention Jimmy Carter’s contribution to the mess in Iran, or Bill Clinton’s.  We need not mention that Democratic presidents have had their visions for progress in the Middle East destroyed by Islamists just as much as Republican ones have.  Kamiya just won’t talk about that – he just is interest in the failure of Republicans.

Kamiya than attacks the Iraq war, familiar ground for him indeed:

And, of course, the entire Iraq war greatly empowered Iran by removing its greatest enemy, Saddam Hussein, and shifting power to Iran’s coreligionist Shiites.

He ignores the fact that the war also created a functioning (for better or worse) Muslim democracy next door, something the Tehraniacs have fought tooth and nail since the neocons first started working towards bringing it about. We didn’t remove Hussein and leave a vacuum; we did it and left a form of government that threatens Tehran to its core. How many of the demonstrates on the Iranian streets are there because they saw fair elections happen next door, and they want them now, too? Most of them!

At this point, Kamiya must have stopped writing and fired up a big, fat doobie because what follows appears to be some kind of drug-induced hallucination:

One of the things the neocons would like the rest of us to forget is that they were the most ardent proponents of invading the very country whose people they now piously claim to support. Back in the heady “Mission Accomplished” days, the neocon slogan was “Wimps go to Baghdad — real men go to Tehran.” Leaving aside the fact that the neocons were a bunch of paper-pushing pundits ensconced in comfy right-wing think tanks who never “went” anywhere that didn’t have room service, the point is that they have been burning to attack Iran for years — an attack that would inevitably result in the slaughter of tens or hundreds of thousands of Iranians. Yes, some of them claimed that invading Iran would be a cakewalk, that the long-suffering Iranian people would welcome Americans as liberators, and so on. (Some of them even managed to keep a straight face while saying this.) And if you believe them, there’s a bridge in Fallujah I’d like to sell you.

Have any of you ever heard any of us call for any sort of ground attack on Iran that would slaughter hundreds of thousands of Iranians? I sure haven’t, although I’ve heard plenty of calls for limited attacks on Iran’s nuclear capabilities. Have any of you heard that “Real men go to Tehran” slogan? I sure haven’t. Have any of you heard anyone idiotic to say attacking Iran would be a cakewalk? To the contrary, I’ve heard neocons explain that Iraq was selected as a target because a war with Iran would be exponentially more difficult. Look at all the straw dogs barking at the neocons!

As if you haven’t guessed by now, the next target of Kamiya’s angst is Israel:

Beneath their talk of spreading freedom and democracy, the neocons have always hated and feared Iran. There are several reasons for this, including the state of enmity between Iran and America spurred by the Khomeini revolution and the 1979 hostage crisis, but the main one is that Iran is Israel’s most dangerous enemy. Removing Iran as a threat to Israel is the main strategic goal of the neoconservatives, and that goal is far more important to them than “liberating” the Iranian people.

That’s it. Really. There’s no mention of holocaust denial or pledges to wipe Israel off the map. There’s no mention that Israel is a democracy. And there is certainly no mention of the regional destabilization a nuclear Iran would present, or the threat to America posed by Iran providing terrorists with nuclear weapons or materials for dirty bombs. It’s just that we have this curious strategic goal to protect Israel.

The most tragic and pathetic statement by Kamiya follows.

For the truth is that the neocons’ supposed “idealism” was and is in fact a fig leaf covering utter, cavalier indifference to the massive death and destruction their reckless — but so “principled” — policies caused.

He apparently has avoided any contact with information about what happened in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos after his side won and we ended all that neocon silliness about domino theories in Southeast Asia. Millions died, were tortured or forced into state-sanctioned slavery, and that’s all just hunky dory with Kamiya – just don’t ask him to consider how hundreds of thousands were executed by Hussein, but that doesn’t happen any more … well, it happens in Iran, but not Iraq.

And what of Obama’s position in all this?  Why, it’s just brilliant, of course!

The situation in Iran is a tricky moving target, but so far, Obama has played it exactly right on. He has expressed deep concern about the election and the regime’s violent response to peaceful demonstrators, but added that “it is not productive, given the history of US-Iranian relations to be seen as meddling — the U.S. president, meddling in Iranian elections.”

Since when is calling for fair elections “meddling?”  Since when is sympathizing with freedom-loving people “meddling.”  I know meddling when I see it:  Owning 60 percent of GM or canning its CEO; that’s meddling. But Kamiya is convinced in a meddle-free foreign policy:

It should be amply clear by now that America’s ability to influence events in the Middle East is severely limited. Indeed, as the Bush years showed, U.S. actions in the region tend to result in the exact opposite of their intended consequences.

He then turns around and says:

The success of the March 14 Alliance in Lebanon, a major victory for the U.S., is widely attributed to the “Obama effect.”

Which is it? Is he saying the Cairo speech led to the riots in Iran as the exact opposite of its intended consequences?  Or is he saying that Obama should speak very strongly in favor of democracy in Iran because there’s an “Obama effect” that can really make things happen?  I am so confused.  But that’s something that happens frequently when I consider the ridiculous things said by Liberals.

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nlike some folks I know of the other political persuasion, I revel in reading the other side’s point of view, so this morning I read Why I Plan to Emulate Dr. George Tiller by med student Rozalyn Farmer Love on AlterNet.  I really don’t want to put the story into nomination for the Most Ridiculous Story of 2009 because Love has, on the surface at least, tried so earnestly to bridge an all but unbridgeable gap.

That’s worth kudos and shouldn’t lead to catcalls of “Ridiculous!”  Had the author been honest in her examples, I might have been citing this article as a must read instead of including it in this year’s running.

Let’s get the formalities taken care of:  To be considered, a piece must be written by a serious writer about a serious subject in all seriousness, yet go far beyond the sublime, settling heavily into the imbecilic.  By those criteria, I suppose that Love will be an also-ran come December 31 (especially given the stories in the hopper thus far by a couple Rulers of the Ridiculous, Gary Kamiya and Glenn Greenwald), but let’s see how this stacks up.

The author starts by seeking affinity, which may seem odd given that the piece is on the decidedly left-wing AlterNet, but don’t give her demerits for that; it was originally published in the Atlanta daily.  Here’s her pitch:

I’m a third-year medical student at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. I plan to become an obstetrician-gynecologist. I dream of delivering healthy babies, working with families and supporting midwifery. But as part of my practice, I also envision providing abortions to women who need them.

The road I took to get here isn’t your stereotypical one. My parents are conservative Christians who believe abortion is wrong. Growing up, I naturally shared their view. But I’ve also wanted to be a doctor since I was 4 years old, and in high school, I began to feel drawn to issues of women’s health. In college, I designed my own major to broaden my understanding of women’s health by including psychology, sociology and women’s studies.

OK, so she’s from a conservative, church-going background, she’s focused and driven, and she’s gone out of her way to pursue her life-long dream.  Kudos, we can all relate.  But why, then, does she start the column with this intro:

If I’d passed her on the street, I probably wouldn’t have known her. Her gait is a bit stiff and her left eye somehow different from her right. She’s not famous, exactly, but some people might know her name: Emily Lyons. She’s the nurse who survived the 1998 bombing of an abortion clinic in Birmingham at the hands of Eric Rudolph.

It’s a bit curious to me that someone who works in an abortion clinic should get heroic status, but Love tells us:

Watching her walk slowly into our fund-raiser on her husband’s arm — a woman who’d endured more than 18 operations — I thought of all she’d been through and knew that I’d come to the right decision in my support of reproductive rights.

Everyone in their right mind has to feel sorry for the tragedy that was interjected into Emily Lyons’ life.  It should never have happened.  Of course, had she chosen a more morally acceptable field of medicine to practice in, she would have lived a different life.  Providing abortions is hardly a high-risk occupation, with a mortality rate of, what, one a decade or so?  But Lyons’ career choice ended up costing her a lot, because of the evil and irrational reaction it created in Eric Rudolph’s mind.

Next we learn of another moment of inspiration to Love, related in her usual inclusive, mellowing style:

I agree that ending an unwanted pregnancy is a tragedy. When I advocate for reproductive rights, for choice, I don’t claim that abortion is morally acceptable. I think that it’s a very private, intensely personal decision. But I was stunned when one of my professors, a pathologist and a Planned Parenthood supporter, told me that decades ago, entire wings of the university’s hospital were filled with women dying from infections caused by botched abortions.

Really?  Entire wings?!  Let’s assume conservatively that it was just two wings of the university’s hospital and they had, oh, 20 beds in each wing. That means 40 beds filled with women dying from infections from botched abortions at any one time.  Let’s assume, again conservatively, that it took them two weeks to die.  That means we would have been cycling through 40 deaths 26 times a year, or 1,040 botched abortion deaths per year in one hospital.

According to wiki.answers.com, there were 7,569 hospitals in America in 2005, so let’s say, conservatively again, there were 5,000 “decades ago.”  If all these women were in fact dying in all these hospital wings as Love has so gullibly believed from such a credible source as a Planned Parenthood leader, why, we would have been racking up 5.2 million botched abortion deaths a year in this country!

Why didn’t Planned Parenthood do a better job of letting us know this back then?

Any deaths from a botched abortion is horrible, and it presents a morally credible argument for abortion, whether you accept it or not.  Judging the relative value of one human being over another is at its heart a moral issue, and the case can be made that the value of protecting grown women from painful deaths justifies the taking of a pre-born life.  But it is immoral to present your moral arguments with wildly skewed, incorrect evidence.

Another driver for Love was this:

At the same time [she was studying women's health issues], I found myself shocked at how little many of my friends — women who were studying biology and planning to become doctors — knew about their own sexual health. They didn’t know about or couldn’t get the reproductive health care they needed because of barriers put up by their culture, their religion and their parents. (emphasis added)

This is a third-year med student, so we are talking here about women who are currently in their 20s and 30s.  Why are federal, state and local governments giving millions of dollars a year to Planned Parenthood and various sex education/health clinic programs if smart women who are in pre-med can’t get the care they need?  Didn’t the SCOTUS rule that anti-abortion demonstrators can’t block clinics?  Do you need your pastor’s permission to get an abortion?

What did these women need, anyway? Late term abortions on the pew of a church?  I can’t imagine what they couldn’t get.  Honestly, you’d think Love was talking about tribal women in north Africa, not American women in the late 20th and early 21st century.

So Love, who tells us she still goes to church and is considered “a good person” by her old Christian friends, has gradually abandoned the morality of her youth, and accepted the morality of the abortionists.  But late-term abortion?  Letting a baby drop into the birth canal and sticking a gizmo into its brain and scrambling it? Cutting it apart to get it out?  Well, that took her a while:

As I continue my education, my views on abortion are still evolving. Take late-term abortions. When I first heard about them, I was horrified.

It wasn’t until I spent time in ultrasound rooms in graduate school that I began to see late-trimester abortions in a very different light. In one case, the patient’s baby had just been diagnosed with a lethal congenital anomaly. The high likelihood was that it wouldn’t survive after birth for more than a few minutes. As long as the baby remained in her mother’s womb, however, she would live. I asked the physician what this woman’s options were. The answer was, not many. She could choose to continue the pregnancy, but then she might be waiting for almost 20 more weeks to give birth to a baby that would never take more than a few breaths on its own. She was past the point where she could legally terminate the pregnancy in Alabama. If she could get an appointment in Atlanta within the next week, she might be able to have the procedure there. Beyond that, there were only a few physicians in the nation who would perform an abortion in such a case.

I could hardly wrap my mind around the agony that this woman and her husband must have been facing. They needed a caring physician to help them through this dark moment, and if they chose not to continue the pregnancy, they also needed a physician who was both skilled enough and brave enough to provide them with the care they needed. They needed Dr. Tiller.

Again, Love cites a morally defensible position, whether you agree with it or not.  Is a two-breath life a life worth living?  But how many partial birth abortions are like the tragedy she presented as her motivator?  Such stats are all over the board, as you can imagine, so let’s go to the abortionists’ mouth and see what they have to say:

Kansas requires physicians to report reasons for performing PBAs. Of the 240 PBAs [Partial Birth Abortions] reported in Kansas in 1998 and 1999, there were none where the mother’s life was at risk; in every case the attending physician certified “that continuing the pregnancy will constitute a substantial and irreversible impairment of the patient’s mental function” [i.e., she didn't want a baby] and that there was not a substantial physical risk to the mother from the pregnancy.[29] No PBAs have been reported since 1999 in Kansas, but other abortions performed at 22 weeks gestation or later must similarly be reported. For these as well, few if any are cited as involving risk to the mother’s life; typically, risk to the mother of “substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function” is cited.[29]

Physicians who perform large numbers of PBAs have stated that many are performed for elective reasons. In an interview with American Medical News, M. Haskell stated that about 80% of the PBAs he performed were purely elective, with the remainder performed for genetic reasons.[30] In testimony to Congress, J. McMahon reported that for about 2,000-2,100 PBAs he had performed, 1,183 (56%) were for fetal “flaws” or “indicators”, 175 (9%) were for maternal “indicators” [see next paragraph], and the remainder (about 700, or 35%) were elective.[31] McMahon further indicated that elective abortions comprised 20% of those he performed after 21 weeks gestation, and none of those he performed after 26 weeks.[32]

McMahon’s 1995 testimony to the House Judiciary Committee gave more detailed statistics, which have been analyzed by physicians P. Smith and K. Dowling. Among maternal indicators, the single most frequent was maternal depression (39, or 1.9% of total), with 28 attributed to maternal health conditions “consistent with the birth of a normal child (e.g. sickle cell trait, prolapsed uterus, small pelvis)” (1.3% of total) and the remainder (5% of total) for other maternal factors ranging from maternal health risk to “spousal drug exposure” and “substance abuse”. Those performed for fetal indicators included some for lesser conditions such as 9 (0.4% of total) for cleft lip-palate, 24 (1.1% of total) for cystic hydroma, and other for conditions either surgically correctable or involving lesser degrees of neurologic/mental impairment.[32, 33] (emphasis added, Johnston Archive)

Love picked the easy way out, the minority case she could justify. What will she do when a woman comes into her clinic and says, “I know I’m in my last weeks, but my junkie boyfriend just left me for a stripper and I’d rather not deal with a kid, at least until I’m off parole.  Could you just kill the little f***er for me?” Where’s the nobility of purpose in that? What is the moral justification?

For all her considerable efforts to connect with us so we understand her position, Love leaves us with an argument about as compelling as a Planned Parenthood position paper arguing against letting pregnant women see sonograms.  She has picked her cases very carefully, presented them unrealistically, and created a perfect world for justifying abortions.

Give her credit for bravery and points for trying, but to use a fantasy world to argue a real-world position is just ridiculous.

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hen Obama hysteria mixes with global warming hysteria, the results can be ridiculous indeed, as readers of Grist may have noticed today (probably not, lost in hysteria as they are) upon reading Joseph Romm’s Obama’s First 100 Days Make – and May Remake – History.

This is the third nominee in C-SM’s 2009 Most Ridiculous Story of the Year competition.  The rules are simple:  Entries must be work that serious writers present in all seriousness that goes far, far beyond the sublime and settle heavily into the imbecilic.  So, are your shrill-protectors on? Good, let’s get right into it:

The media just keeps missing—or messing up—the story of the century.

Future historians will inevitably judge all 21st-century presidents on just two issues: global warming and the clean energy transition. If the world doesn’t stop catastrophic climate change—Hell and High Water—then all presidents, indeed, all of us, will be seen as failures, and rightfully so.

There is no terror threat. There is no economic crisis. There is nothing you should focus on except global warming and the forced march to alternative energy. I believe the media is on this story well enough, but gosh, they just keep insisting on reporting on other stuff like swine flu, Wall Street, Iraq and politics. Shame on them!

But, shoot, once you understand the threat, you understand why Romm’s so intense:

How else could future generations judge us if the U.S. and the world stay anywhere near our current emissions path, warm most of the inland United States 10 to 15°F by century’s end, with sea levels 3 to 7 feet higher, rising perhaps an inch or two a year, with the Southwest from Kansas to California a permanent dust bowl, and much of the ocean a hot, acidic dead zone — impacts that could be irreversible for 1,000 years if we don’t reverse emissions soon and sharply.

Never mind that we’ve had ten years of cooler temperatures, or that the oceans have been rising steadily at 1/2 to 3/4 inches a year for the last 14,000 years, or that everything he says is based on computer models that didn’t pick up the recent temperature dip. We need to act, and act now! If we don’t, other models might get other things wrong!

But since that is the world as Romm sees it, he just thinks Barack Obama’s first 100 days were peachy:

In that sense, what team Obama has accomplished in its first 100 days is nothing less than an unprecedented reversal of decades of unsustainable national policy forced down the throat of the American public by conservatives. While I will present a longer list below — and welcome your additions — three game-changing accomplishments stand out:

1. Green Stimulus: Progressives, Obama keep promise to jumpstart clean energy, economy — conservatives keep promise to jumpstop the future
2. Sustainable Budget: The first sustainable budget in U.S. history.
3. Regulatory breakthrough: EPA finds carbon pollution a serious danger to Americans’ health and welfare requiring regulation

Obama has clearly demonstrated he has a serious chance to be the first President since FDR to remake the country through his positive vision. Indeed, if Obama is a two-term president, if he achieves even half of what he has set out to, he will likely be remembered as “the green FDR.”

Uh-huh. I’ve heard “sustainable” used every which way, but I’ve never heard it used as “driving future generations into a deep cesspool of debt that will paralyze their options and poison their quality of life.” And isn’t it interesting that the fourth most common element – one that is basically us to our core – is suddenly a serious danger to us?

Romm then launches into a tirade against Ronald Reagan for “making conservatives strongly and permanently on the pro-pollution, anti-efficiency, anti-clean-energy side,” and here I thought he was merely correcting some wayward Carter policies.  But what would a leftist rant be without an attack on Reagan?  That was expected, but his next statement caught me be surprise:

… since establishment historians almost by definition focus on the past …

Have you met any historians, establishment or otherwise, who focus on the future?  Me neither.

He then attacks Time’s Joe Klein for an “utter lack of knowledge or interest in the substance of the global warming problem” because Klein wrote this:

The fate of Obama’s first year in office, if not his Administration, will probably be determined by the way he handles four distinct challenges — two in foreign policy and two domestically….

And that’s the second domestic challenge: the realization that Congress will not give Obama everything he wants. Aides say the President’s moments of frustration almost always have to do with Congress. “We know that not every wagon makes it across the frontier,” says a top Obama adviser. “But we’re not willing to decide yet which wagons are going to make it and which aren’t.” In fact, that decision seems more and more apparent: Congress is unlikely to pass the linchpin of Obama’s alternative-energy initiative — a cap-and-trade program for carbon emissions to combat global warming and tilt the market toward energy independence but that would also raise energy prices in the midst of a recession.

“The wagon that needs to get through is health care,” says a second Obama adviser, picking up the metaphor. (emphasis Romm’s)

It seems that Klein has reported pretty accurately on the state of affairs in DC, which has nothing to do with whether or not he has an utter lack of knowledge or interest in the substance of global warming policy.  (Romm argues that cap-and-trade is not the linchpin of Obama’s alternative energy initiative, but rather that alternative energy that is the linchpin of Obama’s effort to avert catastrophic global warming.  So what exactly is cap-and-trade? Just some passing fancy of no real consequence? Sheesh.)  He also says all the hooey about cap and trade raising prices should be summarily dismissed because the higher prices won’t kick in until 2012, and the recession will be over by then.

Romm wraps it up with a list of 11 things he really, really likes about Obama’s first 100 days.  I’m not sure I share his enthusiasm; boldface is Romm, standard is me:

1. Obama began the process of blocking the vast majority of new coal plants. Never mind that no viable replacement is in sight and we do still need energy.
2. He began the process of dramatically increasing the efficiency of our vehicles, by stripping them of protective mass, which will result in a steep upsurge in traffic fatalities.  But you wanted to be sacrificed to the global warming god, didn’t you?
3. He appointed a first-rate Cabinet and then unleashed them to start inconvenient-truth telling to the public after 8 years of Administration denial and muzzling of U.S. scientists. First-rate liars, thieves and tax-dodgers, and please, there was no muzzling – it’s just that Bush let both sides be told.
4. In every single major speech, he has focused on the urgent need for the clean energy transition, for a price for carbon (cap-and-trade and “closing the carbon loophole”), and the unsustainability of our current economic system . I just love it when the president of the world’s most successful capitalist nation hawks failed socialistic platitudes and expresses his desire to move beyond success and into gloomy darkness. Can I say “darkness?”
5. He signed into law the tax credits needed to achieve his ambitious goal of 1 million plug-in hybrids by 2015. Yeah, those hybrids with their nickel smelters, acid and costly recycling.  The other night on Top Gear, they followed a 4-cylinder hybrid Prius with an 8-cylinder BMW M3.  The Prius made 17 mpg; the M3 made 19.
6. He signed into law a massive investment in mass transit and train travel. So what if buses and trains are less efficient per capita than cars?
   
7. He signed into law the tax credits needed meet his ambitious goal of doubling renewables in his first term. Yeah, let’s check back on that little gem of Really Big Talking.
8. He signed into law the funding needed to jumpstart a 21^st smart grid that is critical to enable the renewable energy, energy efficiency, and plug-in hybrid revolution. Of course the private energy sector could do this themselves with the sort of incentives Obama is showering on “ambitious” goals like “doubling renewables.”
9. He signed into law the single biggest investment in the deployment of energy-efficient technology in U.S. history. He bought some cars and light bulbs – one of the stimulus program elements I actually liked – except I think mercury-laden screw-in fluorescents are a dangerous joke.
10. For the first time in three decades, he more than doubled the annual budget for advanced energy efficiency, renewable energy, and low carbon technology. Why not? He’s spending like there’s no tomorrow on everything else.

My friend Frank has been arguing elegantly about the need for a less mocking tone when confronting environmental issues, and instead engaging in conservative environmentalism, pointing out that there are more cost-effective, free market was to confront our environmental challenges. I like his thinking but think there’s also a need to confront the loons and call them loons, and I offer as exhibit one of my argument this concluding paragraph from Romm:

Of course, it’s entirely possible that this history-making first 100 days won’t remake history. It’s more than possible that we won’t stop catastrophic warming. But if we don’t stop the 100s of years of misery, of Hell and High Water,” [sic] that will almost certainly be because the conservative movement threw their entire weight behind humanity’s self-destruction — because conservative in both chambers refuse to conserve anything, including a livable climate, and willingly sacrificed the health and well-being of the next 50 generations of Americans for their ideology.

It makes my stomach turn. I don’t know a conservative who isn’t also a conservationist, or perhaps more accurately, a believer in stewardship, the biblical concept the enviros have tried to turn into “sustainability.” The Good Lord taught us to use His creation for our sustenance, but also to protect it so future generations could use it. We are not the evil drones Romm portrays; we are just stewards who want rationality, economic sensibility, an end to agenda-driven over-regulation and a return to sanity.

Romm succeeds in moving us farther from all those noble goals.

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stonishingly, Gary Kayima of Salon is new to C-SM’s “Most Ridiculous Story of the Year” competition.  He’s certainly been skewered by me previously, particularly for his Palin as dominitrix piece, which I wrote about here.  Well, welcome to the club, Gary.

His Salon column today starts with a defiant headline: Torture works sometimes, but it’s always wrong. Here’s the lead:

We know and have known for years that since 9/11 we have been a nation of torturers. We have also known, in large part, what those tortures consisted of — waterboarding, slapping, sleep deprivation, the withholding of pain medication. With the Obama administration’s release of the four “torture memos,” we have learned about other disgusting practices, such as slamming prisoners into walls and locking them in boxes with insects, and gained further insight into the nauseating legal arguments used by Bush administration lawyers to justify the unjustifiable.

As you can see, the ridiculousness of this story is ingrained deeply from the outset:  Kamiya’s unthinking acceptance of a new definition of torture tortures all the careful liberal thinking that he applies to  his topic from this paragraph onward.  Let me restate it:  We know and have known for years that with 9/11 the left redefined torture to suit their purposes, not the true meaning of the word, in order to punish Bush, even if it would cost us lives.

We used to know what torture meant.  We were all clear on this simple matter: ripping out fingernails, breaking bones, applying electrical charges to sensitive parts of the body, burning with acid, raping or killing family members in front of the victim.  More historically, the rack, drawing and quartering, the Iron Maiden.  In other words, stuff that kills, that leaves marks, that changes lives.

The people who carried out these practices did so without much concern for due process, so many of their victims had no business being tortured, whether you believe in the process or are appalled by it.  It just came with the territory. “Oops, sorry. We meant to go to your neighbor’s house. Here are your fingers back. Good luck.”

Nothing is so clearly drawn with Kamiya, so he accepts not only waterboarding (aka college hazing in some schools), slapping, sleep deprivation and the withholding of pain medication as torture, and then adds to the definition of the word “disgusting practices, such as slamming prisoners into walls and locking them in boxes with insects.”  Nevermind that the walls were flexible and the prisoners wore neck braces.  Nevermind that the insects were not poisonous. Kamiya’s got anti-American outrage to fuel, and now he’s set it up by redefining torture to include behaviors like setting the alarm clock for too early.

Once he’s created this skewered and false playing field, he’s ready for his logic games – and this is where it gets really ridiculous.  He impresses us by comparing humanist Kantians who would curry to no torture (except, perhaps, those listed by Kamiya, which they probably wouldn’t consider torture) and utilitarian Benthamites, who when confronted with the ticking clock torture – get the information now, or 100 innocent children die – will pick the lesser of two evils and torture the whacko.

Kamiya isn’t buying the Behamites’ line. First, he rejects the ticking clock scenario as something “endlessly depicted in Fox’s TV show ’24,’” but presumably not in real life. Dick Cheney, in his interview with Sean Hannity, used Iyman Faris’ plot to cut the cables of the Brooklyn Bridge as a real-life example of such a scenario, saying waterboarding helped to reveal Iyman’s locale, which led to increased guarding of the bridge, which led to Iyman calling off the whole deal because “the weather is too hot” – too many cops.

It wasn’t exactly the ticking clock, but it was the stopping of a plot before it could be carried out.  Iyman reportedly had torches for cutting cable when he was arrested.  But don’t bother Kamiya with all that.

But in the real world, the “ticking bomb” situation never arises. It is never the case that we know we can automatically avert mass slaughter by torturing someone. Reality is not that neat. Guilt and knowledge are not established in advance. Those whom we torture may or may not be planning nefarious deeds.

Under those guidelines, the perpetrator would have to be arrested, arraigned, tried and convicted before we could know with certainty that he had information that might merit torture to obtain.  Am I missing something here or is that just plain … ridiculous?

Kamiya plows on:

But let us, for the sake of argument, assume that [former Bush intelligence head Michael] Hayden and [former Attorney General Michael] Mukasey are correct, and that torturing Zubaydah led him to give information that resulted in the arrest of KSM and other terrorists. That still would not constitute a “ticking bomb” situation. No one can say whether those captured would have carried out other terrorist attacks. There are too many unknown factors.

Again, before we could pull out teeth or put bamboo under fingernails play loud music or pour water into their mouths, we would have to know their guilt with the certainty of … um … the certainty of … oh yeah! … the certainty we would have if we arrested the terrorist scum leaving the scene of the blown up school and the 100 dead innocent children, with the detonator firmly gripped in his hand.  Kamiya has succeeded in a masterful display of liberalism here:  It is better to kill innocents than to take a chance at wrongly causing temporary discomfort to an enemy of America.

He goes on to declare that a nation that puts insects in with terrorists who behead people and take down skyscrapers “forfeits any claim to a moral high ground. It becomes no better than those it is fighting.”  And he believes it.  He’s read the memos, he understands the methods.  He lived through 9/11. He knows the fate of Daniel Pearl and other unfortunates who fell into the hands of al-Qaeda. 

Yet still, he’s comfortable with his definition of torture and can see no moral difference between our carefully designed, rarely applied and thoroughly supervised non-invasive techniques and the mental wet dreams of KSM and bin Laden.

Worse, he’s willing to let you die for his beliefs.

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oming in just a few days under the wire in C-SM’s Most Ridiculous Story of the Year competition is a story on a subject that I’m sympathetic to – the difficulty women who’ve stayed home with their children have coming back to work.  But it still clearly earns a spot on the “most ridiculous” list.

Kids most decidedly do better when mom stays home, and nearly as important, moms do better, too. I saw Incredible Wife’s guilt and anxiety amp up considerably when she worked – first, because we needed her income, then so she could make her Voice of the Victims films – then wind back down when she once again was “there for the girls.”

So why is Anne Glusker’s “Personal Business” column on the subject in Sunday’s WaPo so ridiculous? The title tells the story: She’s a Kennedy, But She’s a Lot Like Us.

Yes, Kennedy, who is worth $100 million, is just another mom who decided to stay home with the kids, and now wants to go back to work!  Really:

Amid all the recent buzz about Caroline Kennedy’s bid for a U.S. Senate seat, there has been a great deal of talk about her connections, her power, her wealth. But the way I see it, if you strip away the glamour, the name and the money, then Caroline is . . . me. And many of my friends. Maybe even you. If, that is, you happen to be a midlife woman raising kids and returning — or thinking of returning, or hoping one day to return — to the full-time workforce.

Yes, I’ve heard the buzz about connections, but I call it dynasty stuff.  And power, and wealth.  But what I’ve also heard that Glusker is afraid to put in her lead is Kennedy’s inexperience.  You strip away the glamour, the name and the money and you’ve got one inexperienced rich gal.  But that most definitely isn’t how Glusker sees it:

A great deal of the criticism around Kennedy’s interest in Hillary Rodham Clinton’s soon-to-be-vacated Senate seat sounds an alarm for women like me. We’ve been at home with the kids, sure, but we’ve also been busy with lots of other things. We’ve been working part-time, consulting, freelancing. Like Kennedy’s, our resumes don’t conform to the conventional, one-job-after-the-other sequence that recruiters expect. When I read a sniping post on Gawker.com that “Caroline has been a happy housewife since getting her law degree, published a few ghost-written books and sat on a few boards that used her celebrity to draw donations,” I thought, hmm, wait a minute. Couldn’t there be a more inventive way to look at her CV?’

Yep, that’s what we need for our incoming U.S. Senators:  A more inventive way to look at their CVs.  Lord knows, she needs it: She hands out the Profiles in Courage award, she worked part-time for the NYC Dept of Education, she’s been on a private school’s board, she’s currently vice-chair of an education foundation and a couple Kennedy-legacy positions.  It’ll take considerable creativity to turn that into a CV for one of the most exclusive and powerful political positions in the world.

Glusker has the creativity:  She calls Kennedy’s experience “diverse”‘ and her resume “unconventional.”  Too bad non of that unconventional and diverse experience has anything to do with the business of running a country via our complex political machinery.

It’s clear she’s using Kennedy as a symbol for her agenda:

Rather than a privileged aberration, I prefer to view Kennedy as a bellwether, a case study in how things could be if only the workplace were more accepting of an unconventional CV, one that may brim with great experience and skills and talent but is also peppered with gaps and one-off projects and volunteering.  …

When we talk about women going back into the workforce, it’s illuminating to consider the circumstances under which they left it in the first place. For many women, it was never truly a choice, never truly voluntary. As Pamela Stone, author of “Opting Out?: Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home,” points out, many are pushed out by jobs with long hours, rigid workweeks and inflexible demands. “These women haven’t opted out,” says Stone. “They’ve been shut out, by workplaces that don’t pair well with family life.”

Of course none of that applies to Kennedy; she’s a “privileged aberration” to Glusker’s model, and somehow I find it hard to accept that stay at home moms desirous of a return to the workplace will join Glusker in seeing Kennedy as the personification of their cause. But Glusker is undaunted:

… Kennedy … is running smack into what social psychologists call the potential vs. performance split. It works this way, according to Kathie Lingle of the Alliance for Work-Life Progress: “The guys in charge say, ‘Oh, John can do it, we know he can.’ They’re assessing his potential.” Whereas, when looking at a female job candidate, they’re likely to say: ” ‘Oh, Sue can’t do it; she’s never done it before.’ ” They’re basing their evaluation on her past performance.

Yep, that’s what’s holding Kennedy back from open-armed acceptance of Her Senatorship: the potential vs. performance split, entirely a guy/gal prejudice thing.  We just know that Gov. Patterson is going to judge her differently than he would judge, say, Andrew Cuomo.  Patterson would just look at Cuomo as a guy … not a former HUD secretary, not a current NY Atty Gen, but just a guy ‘cuz a guy can do it.  (And he’s ex-hubby to a Kennedy!)

Of course the flaw in all of Glusker’s supposition is that Kennedy isn’t angling for a job as a copywriter at an ad agency or a software exec in the Silicon Valley; she’s asking for a free ride to the U.S. Senate, where she’ll have committee assignments that matter to the nation and the world, and will be expected to represent her state during one of the most troubling times in U.S. history.  Glusker attempts to deal with this little matter:

Even though the job Kennedy is trying to nab is a far cry from the account executive or publicist positions that my friends might go after, the phenomenon at work is the same. The reaction seems to be: If she hasn’t followed a straight-and-narrow, logical path, we simply can’t imagine her in the role under discussion.

There’s nothing ridiculous in the statement; we simply can’t imagine Caroline Kennedy in the job given her anything but logical path towards it.  What’s ridiculous is that Glusker ridicules us for not accepting Kennedy as just another housewife wanting to return to work.

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aomi Wolf’s Fascist America in 10 Easy Steps won the inaugural year competition, becoming Cheat-Seeking Missiles most ridiculous story of 2007. Now she’s back with another horror fantasy on the Bush-Cheney-Rove Cabal, The Battle Plan II: Sarah “Evita” Palin, The Muse Of The Coming Police State.

Wolf lives in a perpetual nightmare. On Dennis Prager’s show yesterday, she was complaining about being on the TSA watch list. This from a woman who just penned a book called Give Me Liberty: A Handbook For American Revolutionaries. She wants to foment revolution, and she can’t understand why she’s on a watch list. With that introduction to her acuity, let’s take a look at why Wolf looks at Sarah Palin and sees Evita Peron.

Please understand what you are looking at when you look at Sarah “Evita” Palin. You are looking at the designated muse of the coming American police state.

You have to understand how things work in a closing society in order to understand “Palin Power.” A gang or cabal seizes power, usually with an affable, weak figurehead at the fore. Then they will hold elections — but they will make sure that the election will be corrupted and that the next affable, weak figurehead is entirely in their control. Remember, Russia has Presidents; Russia holds elections. Dictators and gangs of thugs all over the world hold elections. It means nothing. When a cabal has seized power you can have elections and even presidents, but you don’t have freedom.

There’s a small flaw in her thinking here: Soviet Russia didn’t exactly offer up a multi-party election, and if anyone had such an idea, the KGB would quell it quickly. And they were better at appearances than the rest of the world’s dictators and gangs of thugs. Our elections still mean something.

I realized early on with horror what I was seeing in Governor Palin: the continuation of the Rove-Cheney cabal, but this time without restraints. I heard her echo Bush 2000 soundbites (“the heart of America is on display”) and realized Bush’s speechwriters were writing her — not McCain’s — speeches. I heard her tell George Bush’s lies — not McCain’s — to the American people, linking 9/11 to Iraq. I heard her make fun of Barack Obama for wanting to prevent the torture of prisoners — this is Rove-Cheney’s enthusiastic S and M, not McCain’s, who, though he shamefully colluded in the 2006 Military Tribunals Act, is also a former prisoner of war and wrote an eloquent Newsweek piece in 2005 opposing torture. I saw that she was even styled by the same skillful stylist (neutral lipstick, matte makeup, dark colors) who turned Katharine Harris from a mall rat into a stateswoman and who styles all the women in the Bush orbit –but who does not bother to style Cindy McCain.

How many Clintonistas are on the Obama campaign? Never mind. The reference to supporting torture? I believe it’s this, from Palin’s convention speech:

“Al-Qaida terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America; he’s worried that someone won’t read them their rights.”

The left has been trying to redefine torture so it includes just about everything, and with this, they’ve done it. Not read your rights? TORTURE!! Continue Reading »

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