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The most wonderful time of the year

Astute readers will have noticed a distinct lack of blogging lately — life has been keeping me kind of busy, and with the holidays rushing up like a freight train, that situation is likely to continue for awhile longer. But in keeping with the spirit of the season, I did want to make one last pitch for some of my own humble gift suggestions:

— first and foremost, a copy of The Very Silly Mayor for the young person in your life. If you’ve been reading this blog for the past — oh, what probably seems like forever at this point — you know the basic rundown on the Mayor. It’s not a book for adults secretly posing as a book for kids, it’s genuinely a book written for the enjoyment of children. Feedback from parents on Amazon and elsewhere has been overwhelmingly positive — you can read more about it on the Mayor website. (Guess who did the coding there.) Also, as I’ve said many times, this book was published by my fantastic but very small publisher, and every copy purchased makes a very real difference to my life and theirs.

–an autographed copy of The Very Silly Mayor. (Very limited quantities remaining, and I’m probably not going to make these available again anytime soon.)

–stuff from the Cafe Press store. It’s got the usual range of t-shirts and coffee mugs, and some new stuff they’ve added, like Sigg bottles. Contrary to the fantasies of the info-wants-to-be-free triumphalists, I barely make any money at all off this stuff — there are really only so many t-shirts people are going to buy. But it’s still kind of fun to have it out there, and some people like having Sparky mugs on their desk at work. Anyway, this seems like the time of year that it might be a useful thing for somebody.

–a copy of Backspacer. I have no profit-sharing here, so this doesn’t impact me in any way, but it’s genuinely a great album.

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Two very good posts on Afghanistan…

… from Lindsay Beyerstein, here and here.

Tomasky also takes Moore to task for his so-called knee-jerk anti-imperialism.

“Why wouldn’t someone with Moore’s lefty politics be righteous in the conviction that we owe it to the Afghan people to try to help them establish a proper nation-state for the first time in their history?” Tomasky wants to know.

I am so sick of hearing this straw man argument from liberals. They point to a desirable goal and accuse us of rejecting it, even though nobody actually objects to the war because they hate women’s liberation and clean drinking water. The point of contention is not whether a stable and democratic Afghanistan would be desirable, but whether military occupation is a good means to that end.

It’s like saying, “You’d think a lefty would want to put out this fire.” Well, yes, we lefties like firefighting, but the question is whether it’s a good idea to try to put out this blaze with gasoline.

Follow the links to Tomasky’s column and you get this:

Having invaded it, we ought to try to help it, not just throw up our hands and say forget about it.

I write this with full awareness that we probably will throw up our hands and say forget about it in three or four years. But who knows? Maybe some actual progress toward a functioning civil society will be made in those three or four years. So it seems to me worth one more shot. So to speak!

I wonder how many billions we’ll spend and how many people will die in the course of giving it “one more shot” before we “throw up our hands and say forget about it.” I wonder if the possible progress in the general direction of maybe accomplishing someday will seem like a worthwhile tradeoff.

God save us from the Sensible Liberals.

(In the spirit of that full disclosure thing so popular with the kids today, Tomasky was editor at The American Prospect for awhile when my cartoon ran there.)