Candide’s Latest The Daily Journal: Wednesday, June 27, 2007 Edited by Pierre Tristam/Candide's Notebooks
open thread... yesterday's open thread:
The Repulsive Ann Coulter Pierre Tristam / Candide's Notebooks, June 27, 2007
Yes, she has an absolute right to say and write whatever she pleases. But she doesn't have an absolute right to say it on national television: that's by invitation. And the blame for those invitations rests exclusively with the hosts who give her the platform, because she draws viewers more reliably than cheap porn. It's the age's variation on blackploitation: call it boobploitation, raceploitation (she's especially strong on dehumanizing foreigners, undocumented immigrants, Muslims), liberalophobia: it sells, not just because it's entertaining, but because Coulter taps into a strain of good ol' radneck-cum-back-alley-cum-country-club bigotry that has more adherants in this country than we care to admit. Plus, unlike late-night porn, she can be aired any time of day. To say that her latest is "particularly" disturbing would be silly: she is by definition disturbing. She couldn't have a persona without being the (so far) unbannished Don Imus with boobs. Still, the clip, on Hardball, is arresting for its illustration of Coulter's prosecutorial dishonesty. Elizabeth Edwards calls in. She asks that Cooulter stop using personal attacks. Coulter immediately turns it around on several counts: she impunes Edwards for being the "wife" calling in to defend the husband (a sexist insult that subtly makes yet another reference to Coulter's favorite characterization of John Edwards as gay), she completely mischaracterizes Elizabeth's request as a gag order, and she blames Edwards for raising money using her name, all with that dark-shaded face of chuckles of hers that pastes hilarity on poison. Here it is...
Giuliani Goes Conspiracy Theorist Candide's Notebooks, June 27, 2007
From the Center for American Progress: "During a speech yesterday at Pat Robertson's Regent University, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani indirectly blamed President Clinton for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Echoing arguments offered frequently by Bush administration officials, Giuliani claimed that Clinton treated the 1993 World Trade Center bombing "as a criminal act instead of a terrorist attack," which "emboldened other strikes" on the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, Kenya, and Tanzania, and later on the USS Cole. "The United States government, then President Clinton, did not respond," Giuliani said. "Bin Laden declared war on us. We didn't hear it." The claim that Clinton "did not respond" to global terrorism during his administration is demonstrably and flagrantly false. (Giuliani himself knows this. Just last year, before he became a presidential candidate, he said, "The idea of trying to cast blame on Clinton [for the 9/11 attacks] is just wrong for many, many reasons, not the least of which is I don’t think he deserves it.") Giuliani's fundamentally misguided approach to counterterrorism is evidenced not only by his dishonest smears of President Clinton, but by his embrace of the same national security strategy as President Bush, under whom global terrorism is rising, Osama bin Laden is resurgent, the Middle East is deeper in violent unrest, and the U.S. military is in the midst of a readiness crisis." See the full report...
There may be hope after all. From the Times: "Young Americans are more likely than the general public to favor a
government-run universal health care insurance system, an open-door
policy on immigration and the legalization of gay marriage, according to a New York Times/CBS News/MTV poll." Then again, a reality check: "The poll also found that they are more likely to say the war in Iraq is heading to a successful conclusion." If there are still people around who think the war in Iraq is heading toward a successful conclusion, it's because there are also still people who think Saddam was behind 9/11 (41 percent, was it?), which underscores a culture of disconnects, not of awakenings. More:
More than half of Americans ages 17 to 29 — 54 percent — say they intend to vote for a Democrat for president in 2008. They share with the public at large a negative view of President Bush, who has a 28 percent approval rating with this group, and of the Republican Party. They hold a markedly more positive view of Democrats than they do of Republicans. [...] By a 52 to 36 majority, young Americans say that Democrats, rather
than Republicans, come closer to sharing their moral values, while 58
percent said they had a favorable view of the Democratic Party, and 38
percent said they had a favorable view of Republicans. Asked if they were enthusiastic about any of the candidates running for president, 18 percent named Mr. Obama, of Illinois, and 17 percent named Mrs. Clinton, of New York. Those two were followed by Rudolph W. Giuliani, a Republican, who was named by just 4 percent of the respondents. The survey also found that 42 percent of young Americans thought it was likely or very likely that the nation would reinstate a military draft over the next few years — and two-thirds said they thought the Republican Party was more likely to do so. And 87 percent of respondents said they opposed a draft. The full story...
V. S. Naipaul Flatters Himself (As He So Often Does)
“That idea of ruin and dereliction, of out-of-placeness, was something I felt about myself, attached to myself: a man from another hemisphere, another background, coming to rest in middle life in the cottage of a half-neglected estate, an estate full of reminders of its Edwardian past, with few connections with the present. An oddity among the estates and big houses of the valley, and I a further oddity in its grounds. I felt unanchored and strange. Everything I saw in those early days, as I took my surroundings in, everything I saw on my daily walk, beside the windbreak or along the wide grassy way, made that feeling more acute. I felt that my presence in that old valley was part of something like an upheaval, a change in the course of the history of the country.”
