Dennis Perrin has some genuinely interesting and useful thoughts in response to an online dustup between liberal-ish bloggers and more radical types about the lessons of history.

EARLIER: Matt Stoller, then Max Sawicky, then Steve Gilliard and then Max again, and more Max and Matthew Yglesias, plus surely many others I’m missing.

There’s a very silly debate going on in the blogosphere right now about whether those of us who opposed the war from the start deserve credit for our prescience if, in many cases, we did not predict every single thing that would go wrong in exactly the precise order it would do so. (You can catch up on this, if you care, by reading this from Tbogg and this from Atrios.)

Well, two things. First: Lord knows, I’ve been wrong often enough in my life and in my work, but at the risk of straining a muscle as I pat myself on the back, let me direct you for the umpteenth time to this cartoon from April of 2003, which predicted the next four years with the sort of eerie accuracy that Nostradamus could only have envied.

I will pause as the shivers run up and down your spine.

Okay then. Clearing throat, moving along: it’s also worth directing your attention to Roy Edroso, who responds to the silliness rather definitively, here.

Speaking only for myself — as someone who is decidedly not a dove, but who thought this war was a bad idea from the beginning — I make no claim to analytical or any other kind of brilliance. If anything, I just have a lick of common sense, drummed into me by my late mother, who did not trust fancy salesmen who refrained from showing their merchandise; this trained me to look askance upon a war against someone who hadn’t attacked us, justified only by the assertions of untrustworthy Republican poltroons.

Devising paradoxes and logic puzzles to get around bald reality is some sort of a skill, but not the kind that pays the rent or keeps a nation out of unneeded difficulties.

I don’t know why this was too complicated for the various Sensible Liberals to understand, then or now. Maybe their own upbringing was too sheltered, too privileged; maybe they never had to learn that there are hucksters in the world who will shower you with flattery, compliment you on your discriminating taste and obvious intelligence and overall non-dirty-hippieness, and yet do not have your best interests at heart. I really don’t know.

Auctions end tomorrow night (link above). I may have some other old movie posters and miscellaneous crap up at some point, but probably no more of my own posters in the near future.

A few readers thought this cartoon from a few weeks back unfairly targeted college Republicans. (Actually, a few impressively dense readers interpreted it as a swipe at all 18-to-22 year olds everywhere, but that sort of thing is just an occupational hazard.) At any rate, my friend August alerts me to this impressive act of self-sacrifice on the part of GWU College Republicans:

But the political cynicism prevalent on GW’s campus and across our nation tells a different and more disturbing story. Like our parents in Vietnam, we have lost the will to fight, to make the sacrifices that are necessary to protect our country. We have substituted healthy patriotism and deep reverence for American traditions with petty protests and condemnations of our nation’s highest leaders.

- - - - - -

Our generation has been courageous in combat, but the home front has yet to wholeheartedly endorse America’s historic mission to transform the Middle East. Generation Y, which includes the GW student community, has denied the troops the steadfast support required for victory. Unless we vigorously defend the mission in Iraq, our country will again suffer a devastating defeat and its reputation will be irreparably damaged. We can’t let this happen.

With President Bush’s recent proposal to commit more than 20,000 new American troops to Baghdad, our generation has an opportunity to renew its devotion to winning the war on terror and earn its billing as the new greatest generation. The GW College Republicans will do its part to answer this critical calling.

We invite all students, regardless of party affiliation, to join us in visiting wounded American soldiers at Walter Reed Hospital this Friday night. While war is an understandable source of disagreement, we must transcend partisan divisions and facilitate broad-based support for the men and women of the armed forces.

This is not satire. As August emailed, “The GW College Republicans are doing their part to support the war by going to Walter Reed and saying hi to troops who actually enlisted. And they’re bragging about it in an insurgent-destroying editorial for their school newspaper.”

Related links: the original 18-22 year old cartoon, and this recent Onion piece.

… to our friend Jane.

Charles Murray tells us the real problem with American schools. It’s not that they’re underfunded or overcrowded or fraught with inequality, but that some kids are just too dumb to learn.

One word is missing from these discussions: intelligence. Hardly anyone will admit it, but education’s role in causing or solving any problem cannot be evaluated without considering the underlying intellectual ability of the people being educated. Today and over the next two days, I will put the case for three simple truths about the mediating role of intelligence that should bear on the way we think about education and the nation’s future.

Today’s simple truth: Half of all children are below average in intelligence. We do not live in Lake Wobegon.

Our ability to improve the academic accomplishment of students in the lower half of the distribution of intelligence is severely limited. It is a matter of ceilings. Suppose a girl in the 99th percentile of intelligence, corresponding to an IQ of 135, is getting a C in English. She is underachieving, and someone who sets out to raise her performance might be able to get a spectacular result. Now suppose the boy sitting behind her is getting a D, but his IQ is a bit below 100, at the 49th percentile.

We can hope to raise his grade. But teaching him more vocabulary words or drilling him on the parts of speech will not open up new vistas for him. It is not within his power to learn to follow an exposition written beyond a limited level of complexity, any more than it is within my power to follow a proof in the American Journal of Mathematics. In both cases, the problem is not that we have not been taught enough, but that we are not smart enough.

Why on Earth would anyone publish this horseshit? This whole article seems to be based on the bizarre notion that there’s a direct correlation between percentile intelligence (which is dubious on its own) and grades. It roughly follows, using Murray’s retarded logic, that those in the 90th percentile are the ones capable of making A’s (80th, B’s, etc.), therefore only the smartest 40% of kids are even capable of passing grades. The bell curve is adjusted a bit to get more kids to pass, but in the end, subjects like basic math, science, and English are just too hard for the dumb kids.

I cannot imagine a more simple-minded approach to education than the one laid out in this article and it’s the same arrogant junk science that Charles Murray has spent the last dozen years pushing. Some people are just “inferior” so we shouldn’t waste our time trying to help them. It’s a bullshit idea regardless of where you try to apply it and it’s especially heinous when applied to public education. The idea that the best way to fix our public schools is to stop trying to teach the kids who need our help the most is as immoral and ass-backwards as having a healthcare system that makes the sick fend for themselves. Then again, that’s pretty much how things work now…

Ummmm…Sen. Feinstein, you voted for the PATRIOT ACT twice. I agree that the Bush Administration’s mass-firing of federal prosecutors is an egregious abuse of power, but you and the rest of your timid colleagues are the ones who have allowed the President to consolidate power. To your credit, you’ve introduced a bill to change the PATRIOT ACT provision regarding the method by which interim appointments are made for U.S. attorneys, but isn’t the real issue here that the President has the power to purge ideological “enemies” from office at a whim?

I remember seeing this ad in the classifieds a few years back:

WANTED: Liberal hawk to write regular column for Los Angeles Times. Must be willing to say things that are 100% insane in attempt to redeem discredited political philosophy. Ability to do so without apparent sense of shame a +

As we now know, Jonathan Chait got the job. In his most recent column he disparages the idea that anyone who was right about Iraq should be listened to in the future. His particular whipping boy here is Jonathan Schell:

Being right about something is a fairly novel experience for Schell, and he’s obviously enjoying it immensely. But before we genuflect to Schell’s wisdom, it’s worth recalling that his own record of prognostication is not exactly perfect…

Schell insisted [in 1990] that we could force Iraq to leave Kuwait with sanctions alone, rather than by using military force. But the years that followed that war made it clear just how impotent that tool was. Saddam Hussein endured more than a decade of sanctions rather than give up a weapons of mass destruction program that turned out to be nonexistent. If sanctions weren’t enough to make him surrender his imaginary weapons, I think we can safely say they wouldn’t have been enough to make him surrender a prized, oil-rich conquest.

Sure, the sanctions motivated Saddam to get rid of his real WMD. But did they force him to get rid of his imaginary WMD? Clearly not!

Likewise, perhaps sanctions and regional negotiations could have forced Saddam out of the real Kuwait in 1991. But what good would sanctions have been in getting Saddam to leave the imaginary Kuwait? No good at all!

Thus, sanctions were “impotent.” QED.

BUT: Seriously, though, the people who run the United States are dangerously insane.

Here’s the transcript from the famous “Wolves” ad run by the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign:

ANNOUNCER: In an increasingly dangerous world… Even after the first terrorist attack on America … John Kerry and the liberals in Congress voted to slash America ’s intelligence operations. By 6 billion dollars… Cuts so deep they would have weakened America’s defenses. And weakness attracts those who are waiting to do America harm.

(On screen: Several wolves eye the camera, as if preparing to attack.)

BUSH: I’m George W. Bush and I approve this message.

You can watch the whole thing here.

Now, this appears on page 91 of the Pentagon’s Iraq Perspectives Project, based on captured recordings of Saddam speaking with subordinates:

…as [Saddam] often reminded his close advisers, they lived in a very dangerous global neighborhood where even the perception of weakness drew wolves.

AND: For more in the continuing “Thank god our leaders are completely different from Saddam Hussein” saga, see here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

I love this video (which I first saw at Crook & Liars) of Barney Frank giving his Republican counterpart a parliamentary beating :

There’s no shortage of things to hate about this Bush administration, but you gotta respect Rep. David Wu for finding a new reason to get pissed.



“These aren’t Vulcans!”