Iatribe

Saturday, December 14, 2002

 
Answer to TPM's contest is...John Ashcroft.[BTW: This still appears to be an Iatribe exclusive.]
Steven I. Weiss 7:37:00 PM

 
Southern Partisan Magazine, which TPM has identified as the source of a controversial interview with some major Republican in addition to Lott, used to be hosted here. Follow the link to the main page and read a little bit...for starters, try the article on how slavery wasn't racist...
Steven I. Weiss 7:34:00 PM

 
Procedural Note: I've been spending the larger part of my blogging recently at Protocols, a collaboration with some past Commentator colleagues. I'm still figuring out how I'll split my posting between here and there, and likely a third blog come January. Any suggestions/comments, please let me know.
Steven I. Weiss 7:16:00 PM

Friday, December 13, 2002

 
Ladies and gentlemen...Tiffany's dildo necklace.
Steven I. Weiss 10:48:00 AM

Thursday, December 12, 2002

 
Daschle apologizes for sexist Clinton? You'vegot to be kidding.
Steven I. Weiss 8:58:00 AM

 
Tacitus gives a correct argument for what's wrong with Trent Lott, dragging in Bob Herbert. He says(link via Instapundit):

One must feel sorrow for his predicament, and pity at his impasse. For if Trent Lott represents a dying past, so too does Bob Herbert. They grapple, two old men and their old ideologies, dragging one another down into history and secretly (or not so secretly) hating those who will not join in their struggle. And America, the country they both earnestly want to save from itself, increasingly ignores them and, in its younger generation, increasingly does what it should have done all along about race: shrug, miscegenate, and not care.

I've been saying this all along: the majority of the social problems that we have today are reinforced by the generation gap. Even self-described non-racists of the older generation often tend to be -- I'm not claiming this isn't the case, but there's a serious difference between people who grew up passively acknowledging segregation and those who grew up after affirmative action had already been in place; the older generation is overwhelmingly consumed by the former, and the younger generation is entirely consumed by the latter. This makes rather dubious the contemporary demands that old racists apologize when they make racist statements or somesuch...anyone who grew up in a segregated world and didn't think it was wrong and try to do something about it is on majorly questionable ground in the first place. Every college kid who decided to stay on campus and sleep one weekend instead of taking a bus to join in protests or voter-registration drives has an internal responsibility to answer for their action/inaction, but they'll never be called on it. Everyone made such a big deal about how Joe Lieberman went to Mississippi(I think so -- he went somewhere, and that's the point), and rightly so, but the bigger story should be that there are a bunch of boomers who were the same age who did nothing and are considered progressives. And then there are those who sided with segregation -- actively or inactively -- who can still be considered moderates. Boomers, for this reason and others, are a major problem for our generation to deal with. I don't think it's fair or honest to judge them by their generational standards -- they shouldn't get a pass just because they were part of a larger generation that on the whole didn't do the right thing.
Steven I. Weiss 8:48:00 AM

Wednesday, December 11, 2002

 
There is no moral equivalence between race-baiting and racism. Despite the point that Charles Murtaugh wants to make(and to which Instapundit apparently agrees), the crevasse between pandering to minorities' sense of victimhood and declaring segregation desirable is extremely vast. Murtaugh declares:

I think the most egregious example of campaign race-baiting in recent memory was the NAACP's James Byrd ad of 2000, which tried valiantly to link George W. Bush to Byrd's racist dragging murder. And today, Al Sharpton remains a viable political figure. None of this is to make any excuse for Trent Lott, who ought to be dusting off a comfy seat on the back bench ASAP. I'm just pointing out that there are still more fingers yet to be pointed.

I don't know about the examples he uses, but race-baiting certainly is a problem in at least a few specifiable circumstances. Is it a problem on the scale of appealing to segregationist ideology? Nowhere near.
Steven I. Weiss 5:27:00 PM

 
When playing constituency politics, it's a safe prediction that whenever you empower one group through a liberal agenda, they'll turn conservative on you when you want to extend the same rights & privileges to others. Just read this headline: "Gay Factions May Sink Bill On Sex Rights"...can you think of anything that should sound more inane?
Of course, gay-rights groups were always a kind of false presence amongst liberals: they tend to be populated with middle-to-upper class lobbyists who have one and only one issue, and the only reason why they can't align with conservatives is because of the conservative alliance with Christian groups. This is their bill, their one and only bill, and they're not willing to let another group in...it's just plain wrong.
David Paterson has a great comparison here:

For Mr. Paterson, there’s an irony underlying his push for trans-inclusion. He recalls that in 1987, he held out against voting for a hate-crimes bill because it didn’t include gays and lesbians. Black and Hispanic constituents were furious, but he held his ground. Now, some of the same constituents he held out for then—gays and lesbians—are equally enraged by his holding out for another group on the margins.

Astounding.
Steven I. Weiss 8:04:00 AM

Tuesday, December 10, 2002

 
Discarded doesn't count. Trent Lott today announced that his earlier statement seemingly supporting segregationist policies was misguided, and that he was wrongfully assumed to have "embraced the discarded policies of the past." Well, as a Jew, I'd like to bring up Hitlerism, which was more than discarded, it was defeated. And yet, if anyone referred to it as "a defeated policy of the past," as a retraction for having seemingly supported it, I can't think of a single person who'd let him have a pass.
Steven I. Weiss 9:35:00 AM

Monday, December 09, 2002

 
WaPo ran a story on Lott/Thurmond. There's some interesting infor in the Saturday story, most notably:
1) A response from Lott's office that doesn't revise or retract his statements in any way:

Lott's office played down the significance of the senator's remarks. Spokesman Ron Bonjean issued a two-sentence statement: "Senator Lott's remarks were intended to pay tribute to a remarkable man who led a remarkable life. To read anything more into these comments is wrong."

2) Apparently, Thurmond has made similarly questionable comments in the past.

In 1998 and 1999, Lott was criticized after disclosures that he had been a speaker at meetings of the Council of Conservative Citizens, an organization formed to succeed the segregationist white Citizens' Councils of the 1960s. In a 1992 speech in Greenwood, Miss., Lott told CCC members: "The people in this room stand for the right principles and the right philosophy. Let's take it in the right direction, and our children will be the beneficiaries."
Asked to comment on Lott's remarks at the Thurmond celebration, Gordon Baum, CEO of the Council of Conservative Citizens, said "God bless Trent Lott."

Love Trent Lott, indeed. Love the sinner, hate the sin, as they say...but deny this sinner any credibility unless he apologizes.

Steven I. Weiss 8:47:00 AM

Sunday, December 08, 2002

 
RIP John Kerry. At least, by looking at this picture you'd think so. Wait, hold a mirror under his nose...he might still be breathing.
Steven I. Weiss 10:19:00 PM

 
BACK AT THE DAWN OF THE MILLENIUM...Noam Scheiber predicted the midterm results. Pretty surprising that he hasn't taken credit.
Steven I. Weiss 10:11:00 PM

 
The curious prescience of Josh Marshall. Just randomly decided to review the first week of Talking Points and, a little more than a week after the election, when Gore proposed a statewide recount, Mr. Marshall had this to say:

There's no denying this was a tactical coup for Gore. Let's get him into the White House and have him loose some of that mojo on Saddam Hussein!

He works in mysterious ways.
Steven I. Weiss 6:14:00 PM

 
Lott "roundly criticized" for Thurmond comments, according to Punditwatch. Somehow, this doesn't seem to be quite enough. The zone is not yet flooded.
Steven I. Weiss 3:30:00 PM

 
NYT: The Liberal Quandary Over Iraq.
Steven I. Weiss 1:02:00 PM

 
Fernando Ferrer's column appeared in the Daily News this week, and what a load of crap. Firstly, the writing is simply horrible. The argumentation is a farce, the facts are questionable, and the conclusion is ludicrous. Boy, does this guy not deserve a column.
Steven I. Weiss 10:37:00 AM