Headline FAIL of 2010. So Far.

Man angry at IRS crashes plane into building (AP)”

Yeah, and men angry at US crash planes into buildings. IOKIYAR.


Palin again.

No, you don’t get it. They like her because she’s obviously personally interested in the retard thing. See, libruls who try to take care of everyone, equally take care of people that don’t look like me.

Just in case

Next time we have to talk about Michelle Malkin.

Oxford English Dictionary:

malkin, mawkin Obs. exc. dial.
†1.1 Used as a female personal name; applied typically to a woman of the lower classes, esp. in various proverbial expressions. Obs.
†b.1.b The proper name of a female spectre or demon. (In 17th. c. app. associated with sense 5 a.)
†c.1.c = Maid Marian. Obs.
2.2 An untidy female, esp. a servant or country wench; a slut, slattern, drab; occas. a lewd woman.
†b.2.b An effeminate man. Obs.
3.3 A mop; a bundle of rags fastened to the end of a stick; esp. that used to clean out a baker’s oven. Obs. exc. dial.
b.3.b Naut. ‘A joint-staff sponge, for cleaning out a piece of ordnance’ (Smyth Sailor’s Word-bk.).
4.4 A scarecrow (also fig.); a ragged puppet or grotesque effigy; a ‘guy’. Obs. exc. dial.
5.5 As a designation for certain animals: sometimes as quasi-proper name. a.5.a A cat. dial.
Grimalkin occurs in Baldwin’s Beware the Cat, 1561–82.
b.5.b Sc. and north. dial. A hare.

Tom Friedman Fail #23,108

This is a typical piece of Friedmanian shit. (Though at least he’s not wetting himself over what Republicans think like the usually wonderful Franck Rich.)

Shorter version: Somehow we need to figure out how to make Muslims stop believing they are the victims of the West.

Maybe we should stop doing things confirming that belief.

Seriously, this is very difficult to stomach as something occupying space in the New York Times. The idea that America or Western countries should intervene in he Middle East to cause a region-wide political revolution is basically the cause behind our continued mistakes in the region and is exactly the philosophy of Neo-Conservatism that led us to war in Iraq.

Imagine that the EU decided that the right-wing political culture in the United States was troubling to their interests. (It is.) What if they decided that it was in their interests to foment a political revolution in the US that would empower a government with more conciliatory views toward Europe. Well, at first they would try to prey on the corruption of our governments and buy politicians and make deals with the indigenous rich. In other words, they would be able to preserve their interests with raw power, but such an exercise would bring the blow back to a boiling point. Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin would probably call for a nationwide ban on French Fries.

Pretty soon, Americans would get tired of foreigners owning their politicians and of their rich neighbors betraying them for foreign countries. There might even be violent uprisings. Shootings here and there. Hate crimes. Someone might even blow up a federal building in Oklahoma—terrorism! Then, at the ballot box, a giant earthquake would put the neo-isolationists into power, and it would require a military invasion to enact regime change by force from without.

Now, the occupied US—what exactly has been our historic reaction to foreign occupation? even of a foreign power with a virtually identical culture, let alone one that speaks FRENCH?

What would the “Minute Men” and “Tea Party” movement people do? Would they—out of a sense of decency—be totally weak on national security and not advocate and or execute bombings against the occupiers?

Then, Sarah Palin leads us on a “Christian revolution” that expels the Europeans and the Japanese dare call it a “liberation event” (the way Friedman complains of the European reaction to the revolution in Iran). Obviously, a theocratic idiocracy taking over America would be a disaster, but expelling a foreign power would in fact be a liberation and it would probably be popular here for a while. Isn’t that what happened in the Soviet Union, in almost all of post-colonial Africa, especially Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Congo, and Ethiopia? in Bosnia, Kosovo, or so many other places that it should be expected. Indeed, just about all of the worst parts of the world are post-Euro-colonial.

Now you can see that the problem in the Middle East is more complicated than simply talking the people out of it with a slick ad campaign because we are actually perhaps the root cause of the problem, and, as idiotic as some of the popular beliefs in the Middle East are (though we do a great job of ludicrous popular beliefs here), the underlying truth they believe is correct: America is their problem.

This doesn’t make the “terrorists” the good guys—not at all. It doesn’t make us the bad guys. It doesn’t mean that there is a desperate need for reform in the Middle East—there is. And I’m certainly not suggesting that we not use our military to protect our interests there or anywhere else.

I’m just suggesting that the notion that the kind of reform we want will come from us is absurd on its face, and, worse for Friedman, absurd on the basis of recent well known history, not just the scores of ones obscured from most people’s memory.

Sarah Palin Declares War on Iran

[Update: Palin wants war with Iran, but if Obama does it he’s “playing the war card.” She’s not even aware of the “____ card” reference resonating with “race card,” which of course reminds us Obama is black. It’s funny, usually when Republicans use dog whistle language they’re doing it on purpose. This is her answer to problem #1 below: make IOKIYAR: It’s OK If You’re A Republican.]

I do have a comment about a military attack on Iran, but first I want to comment on two ways in which Sarah Palin’s comments about this are evidence of her stupidity, and it’s not the way you think. I’m not suggesting this because I believe attacking Iran is per se a bad idea.

I’m saying it because (1) why would Palin want President Obama to launch a war that would rally the American people behind him, and (2) why do we have to “declare war on them” when what is really at question is a discrete military strike to disable their nuclear weapons production capability.

It’s been over 7 years since I first worried that invading Iraq would defang our military’s ability to deal with a more bona fide nuclear proliferation threat: Iran. I think it was pretty apparent that nuclear proliferation was not a genuine concern of the Bush administration. If it had been, we would have not invaded Iraq, which demonstrably did not have any nuclear weapons before we invaded (after the standards were lowered to a few chemical weapons left over from the 80s we invaded) and they would have been much more engaged with Pakistan once we were in Afghanistan anyway and would have dealt differently with North Korea, which developed a rocket capable of striking Hawaii all while Iraq was being run over by our military.

Since that time, America has grown weary of our interventions in the Middle East, but has also demonstrated popular support for the Iranian opposition since the stolen election there last year.

I can’t imagine that we have the capability to enact a regime change directly in Iran. It’s possible that a strike against them would trigger such a change, but it wouldn’t be like Iraq or Afghanistan.

And the other near certainty is that the Iranian regime will only be bolstered if it is the Israelis that attack, and they will. Make no mistake. They did not tolerate Syria’s program in 2007, nor Iraq’s in 1981. So that puts the United States in the position of dealing with the fallout on the ground in our empire if the Israelis strike Iran. Boy oh boy.

From what I’ve read, it isn’t even clear that the Israelis would be able to pull the mission off, at least not without risking their own homeland air defenses and requiring a probably suicide mission from some of the pilots.

So we can’t change the regime in Iran, but the Israelis probably can’t take out the nuke program… but we can.

Even if it was just a gambit to make them look bad to the world, Iran made Obama look foolish last year when it held a fraudulent election after Obama promised to engage them. Hillary is rattling sabres too.

I don’t think there’s much reason to think Obama wouldn’t go for it in 2011 or later this year.

So, for those of you that have been disappointed by this President’s lack of leftiness, be ready for a bigger disappointment, if that’s what it is to you. Personally, stopping nuclear proliferation is one area where I don’t mind the use of force at all.