Category: Politics

It’s good to get an Iraqi view on some of the mythology that people like Juan Cole are pumping into the culture about Fallujah. It turns out that Cole’s view of Fallujah’s history is the Saddam view, not the academic view. See IRAQ THE MODEL for the real story:

So you can see how conflicting all these info with what the two professors had provided; No revolution inside Fallujah, no bombing at all and not even the leading role they described for the tribes near Fallujah in the revolution that magically turned to be inside Fallujah in their posts. However I agree that history is kind of repeating itself, only with reversed roles. This times it%u2019s some of the Sunnis tribes that are making the mistake of opposing, or better say not doing enough against those who oppose the change.

Anyway, I don’t know which is worse; that the two experts in Arb world didn’t know about Dr. Al Wardi and his writings or that they knew but chose Sadam’s version of Iraq’s history!?

For someone who claims to offer Informed Comment, Cole is very poorly informed.

My old California buddy Stefan Sharkansky has been doing a great job bird-dogging a Washington State governor’s race that’s seen some pretty dubious developments coming out of Democratic Party stronghold King County, home of Seattle. First they find an unexpected cache of 10,000 ballots show up out of the blue in the last few days of the count, and on the last day one of their judges approved 400 invalid absentee and provisional ballots specially rounded-up by the Democratic Party, but the good guy Dino Rossi wins anyway by a margin of 261 votes. An automatic recount ensues in any election this close unless the loser concedes and I don’t much expect that to happen. If Rossi can withstand the dirty tricks, he’s the first Republican governor in 20 years in this state, and he’ll likely be a good one according to those who know him from the state senate.

Congratulations to Governor-elect Rossi and to the Shark for helping to keep the count honest.

Here’s a unique insight into the inner life of progressive Portland from the local freebie:

If there had been a cultural dictionary of Portland during the 1980s, the definition of “Progressives” would have been Steve and Marcia Moskowitz.

He was a brainy Reedie lawyer who left the city attorney’s office to become a top aide to mayor Bud Clark. She was a spunky blue-collar Chicagoan who worked as a city planner. They went to potlucks hosted by the New Jewish Agenda and volunteered for left-leaning causes–hippies who became yuppies without selling out.

In 1992, however, the couple split up. Later that year, Steve began seeing another woman–and Marcia snapped. On Oct. 17, she drove to his Northwest apartment, knocked on his door, pulled out a .22 caliber pistol, and fired four shots into his chest, stomach and groin. Then she knelt over him and fired three more.

“That’s what happens when you shoot a gun,” she told him. He went to the emergency room. She went to jail.

Fourteen years later, Steve has a new calling. He’s now a rabbi at Temple Israel in Long Beach, Calif. He’s also got a new wife, Ana, whom he met at Congregation Beth Israel in Portland. Contacted by WW, he said he still follows local politics but was not eager to discuss the shooting.

Marcia served 18 months behind bars. She, too, has remarried (to Gary Suttenberg, a college friend of her ex-husband’s). After working as union organizer for several years, she is now executive director of the Portland Women’s Crisis Line–a job where, she says, her background is an asset, rather than a liability.

“I tell clients, ‘Right now you may feel like you’ve hit the bottom,'” she says. “‘But you will come up.'”

Marcia’s really in the right line of work, isn’t she?

Sure enough. See Real Clear Politics on the election:

This was the equivalent of The Alamo for the mainstream media. CBS News and the New York Times, and to a lesser extent their colleagues at the other major networks and newspapers, exhausted themselves in a near-pathological desire to remove George W. Bush from office. They know the days of the liberal elites in New York and Washington setting the news agenda for the American people are coming to an end. Which is why they fought so hard to eliminate President Bush and restore a Democrat to the White House.

The Democratic Party and its allies were no less aggressive. George Soros and his billions, the 527’s and their millions, Michael Moore and his propaganda “documentary” – all were thrown at this president in the most comprehensive, coordinated attack ever marshaled to defeat a sitting president.

The Democratic Party registered more voters than ever before, got more people to the polls than any time in history, and far exceeded their numbers and goals. And at the end of the day, it was all for naught. George W. Bush steamrolled to a majority of the vote while picking up 4 critical Senate seats and expanding the GOP’s margin in the House.

This is why the Democrats are apoplectic and find themselves staring into the abyss. They know they gave it everything they had and it wasn’t enough to defeat the Bush Juggernaut. And they know they are left with an empty shell of a party that is unlikely to put together as focused and disciplined an effort any time soon.

So let’s be nice to our lefty friends, they’re in a lot of pain right now.

Aren’t liberal Democrats smarter, cooler, and better-educated than backward Republicans? Probably not, according to the research of law professor Ilya Somin:

Political Knowledge by Strength of Party Identification
2000 National Election Study
Self-Described Party Alignment / Average Political Knowledge Score
(Average number of correct answers on 31 point scale)

“Strong Republican” / 18.7
“Independent-Republican” / 15.7
“Strong Democrat” / 15.4
“Independent-Democrat” / 14.2
“Weak Republican” / 14.1
“Weak Democrat” / 13.3
“Independent-Independent” / 9.5

The political knowledge score is based on a test you can see in this article. Another stereotype bites the dust.

Read The Sore-Loser Party and Bush’s Secularist Triumph.

Michael Barone is one of our most astute political analysts, and his take on the recently-concluded contest is excellent:

Love is stronger than hate.

There’s more.

The endless drooling about Jesusland and hacked voting machines is drowning out any discussion of the real trick used by the Evil Republicans to steal this election from the rightful candidate of the Good Hair Party, namely, psychic mind-control rays. Here’s a first-person account from a Sensitive:

Ok, I can understand the restlessness I’ve been feeling since yesterday. There’s a lot riding on this election, and passions are running high on both sides, so naturally eceryone and their naked brother who has an ounce of Power and no clue about Shielding is leaking energy like a hair dryer in a bathtub. So it’s Shields Up for me, but I’m still getting enough bleedover to make me jittery and a little manic if I don’t concentrate. That’s all to be expected.

What wasn’t expected was that once I filtered out all that background noise, I started hearing a calm, resonable, and powerful head-voice saying things like “Kerry doesn’t have the experience we need in these troubled times.” and “Give Bush a chance to make it better.”

Anyone who knows me KNOWS these are not my thoughts!

And besides, I voted last week. No, there’s no way in Hades these are my thoughts.

Gods-damn it! The f*cking Republicans have got Magical help pumping out a clear, unified, focused broadcast, and you can be sure, every sensitive is picking it up. These are the people most likely to vote Kerry, and I’d like to think they are resolute enough not to be swayed by telepathic subliminal advertising, but it’s such a rarely-done thing, and so few people are properly trained these days, that I fear it will be more effective. Just watch and see who says “I was going to vote for Kerry, but for some reason I changed my mind at the last minute.”

There you have it – and a tip of the tin-foil hat to Best O’ The Webs.

An anonymous buddy of Andrew Sullivan crunches the numbers and finds that the gay marriage bans didn’t drive up Bush support compared to comparable states without them:

It is certainly possible that the fact that the Bush administration raised the issue to the level to which did led to increased turnout among religious conservatives nationwide, which then resulted in Bush’s overall improved vote share over his 2000 performance. However, one would also expect that this vote share improvement would have been particularly high in states in which the marriage issue was particularly relevant. On the contrary, there is no evidence that suggests that the strategy of putting the anti-marriage initiatives on the ballot in several states did anything to improve Bush’s performance in those states.”

I suspected as much when I compared Ohio’s exit polls to Pennsylvania’s. Gay marriage is just not that big a deal for most people.