I suppose Iowahawk deserves credit for putting in the man-hours it must have taken to put this together, but it succeeds as humor just in case there’s merit to the idea that there’s something exceptional to the extent to which liberal elites look down on the noble savages of flyover country as if from empyrean heights, specifically that there’s something exceptional to the extent to which liberals treat Barack Obama as some sort of demi-divinity, and moreover that Obama himself shares that view to any exceptional degree. And not to put too fine a point on it, not only is the conceit of exceptionalism in any of these cases fairly idiotic, so is, in ascending order, the idea that these propositions hold at all. Besides which, this election’s pidgin-poetry is already covered, is a heck of a lot more compelling than Iowahawk’s adaptation of Homer, and helps give the lie to the ideas underwriting his attempt at satire. To put it briefly, it’s tough to find “The Idiossey” funny without buying into several distinct, and exceptionally stupid anti-Obama sneers. (Which helps to illustrate the failures of conservative — or let’s be accurate, Republican — political satire* in recent years: if you don’t give credence to a series of dumb insults, watching the “comedy” routine doesn’t just fail to provoke laughs, it induces a vicarious mortified reaction.)

(more…)

The past 14 months of my life have been dedicated to a project; to put Peace on the map.  I just safely made it home after 98 days on the road. I rode 11,000 miles on a 125cc scooter. Last year I rode 11,000 miles as well.  By the end of my trip, which started and ended in Washington D.C., I had traversed through 29 states, and created the largest Peace sign in history on the U.S. map.

I wanted to reach thousands of Americans and ask them, simply,  “How do you define Peace?”  In order to approach and develop conversations with a diverse sampling of Americans, I chose to leave politics out of our (more…)

It’s good that Ezra Klein is kicking off the inevitable word games with the name of the likeliest next VPOTUS, Tim Kaine, but I would have expected him to do a little more than Kaine-can/can’t puns given the richness of the material. We are, after all, talking about the most ubiquitous fantasy villain name ever.

(more…)

AOTP readers are more than familiar with a large cross-section of the strong, and arguably decisive objections to voting for Senator Obama. But the problems we libertarians/civil-libertarians/anti-warriors have had with the candidate, especially recently, hardly exhaust the very good reasons to oppose him. Someone for whom opposition to abortion rights and other forms of reproductive freedom is more salient than any other issue would be more or less rationally obligated to support any marginally better (by those lights) alternative. Likewise with gay marriage and other social conservative issues. A sufficiently rich person motivated exclusively or nearly so by short-term self-interest — especially on the assumption that restrictions on liberty don’t really apply to persons of sufficient wealth — would have a clear rationale for supporting Senator McCain, which conclusion could only really be shifted by an antecedent shift in that person’s priors (i.e., getting her to take other factors into consideration besides her marginal tax rate). There’s lots more where those examples came from, and there are people who can make the good case against Obama much more persuasively than I can.

(more…)

Downblog, re: the flap over the New Yorker cover, I asked in passing: “Anyone care to wager how long it will take an idiot at Commentary or the Substandard to suggest that the joke is really on the New Yorker, since in their parallel epistemic universe Obama does have troubling connections to radical Islam…The over/under is 4:30 pm EST, today, Monday.” Sure enough, Abe Greenwald at Commentary, in two posts timestamped 10:02 and 11:55 am, respectively, first writes: “In assuming that the serious Right seeks to burlesque Obama as the embodiment of our anti-American nightmares, the New Yorker burlesques itself.” And then, still commenting on the New Yorker not quite two hours later, he adds: “You know, if Obama is going to keep ex-terrorists around, he should at least utilize them.” Attaway, old sport, the credibility of the Commentary brand isn’t going to maintain itself. Anyway, the unders have it.

(more…)

Last week, John Schwenkler posted the latest in a series of well-taken criticisms of those of us anti-warriors who plan to vote for Senator Obama. The fundamental conflict here is between John’s claim that “if we all beat the drums nice and loudly on the issues that are close to our hearts and refuse to join into marriages of convenience where too many core principles are violated, there’s the possibility for a real shake-up,” and mine that the best outcome of this election at any possible world within the inner (relevant) sphere of possibility (to borrow a Lewisianism) is an Obama victory. There’s certainly nothing I can say to decisively refute John, and I feel somewhat sheepish trying, since an occasion on which, ahem, Bismarck’s maxim that “politics is the art of the possible” applies is also highly likely to be an occasion on which Orwell’s maxim that politics is “the defense of the indefensible” applies. By the same token, I don’t see how John can decisively refute my position either. The stalemate is something like Schopenhauer’s description of the philosophical sceptic (from memory, not verbatim): a knight guarding a fortress which can never be conquered, but from which he can never sally forth to challenge others. (John’s the one with the morally unblemished position here, so I take it he’s the knight for purposes of this metaphor.)

(more…)

The Economist is on-target in their analysis of why the latest New Yorker cover is bad news for the Obama campaign. The caricature of Barack decked out like Muammar Gaddafi fist-jabbing a camo’d, AK-wielding Michelle, is so clearly and profoundly over the top that there isn’t any non-negligible possibility that it’s anything but satire; as satire, there is really nothing objectionable about it; in fact, it makes the Obama campaign’s point; and if there are any New Yorker readers who fail to pick up on the satire, Ripley’s would like to have a word with them. The problem is that the images are going to circulate, firstly, among non-New Yorker readers who see the magazine cover in person and don’t understand satire, and secondly and crucially among TV chattering heads whose job it is to be incapable of appreciating irony, and who will ever so earnestly recirculate the cartoons, devoid of context, to an audience orders of magnitude larger than the magazine’s readership [but Remnick & co. hit all the right demos -- ed.]. What will be the net effect of the wide-scale circulation of such images? It’s hard to imagine them achieving anything on balance besides pushing some people in the direction of believing there is something fishy involving Obama and Islam and/or terrorism. Though I suspect the impact will ultimately be too marginal to matter.

(more…)

Will Wilkinson has “a dream that President Barack Obama will decide to privatize Social Security, because it’s the sensible and moral thing to do. Democrats will be extremely confused for a couple months, but then will decide that this is in fact the greatest idea ever. Roles will reverse and Republicans will enlist the AARP and Jonathan Chait to kill it in a repeat of 2005, but their hearts aren’t in it, and they lose. Obama’s successful Jason Furman-lead transformation of the Social Security system is incredibly popular with the younger voters who put him into office and and sets him in such a strong centrist position that he completely crushes Romney in 2012.” Needless to say, this dream will become reality about the same time as my dream of inheriting a billion dollars pounds or euros† from a distant relative I never knew existed. And while Will’s dream about Obama privatizing social security is clearly tongue-in-cheek, his confidence that “it’s going to happen sooner or later” seems quite earnest. I don’t get it. Granted, the welfare state is bound to go out of business eventually — the entropy of the universe will catch up with it if nothing else does — but I can’t see any reason for thinking welfare state won’t persist, and indeed, get precipitously larger (hello, socialized medicine) for the foreseeable future.

(more…)

Andrew Sullivan is not the only one on the right who’s swooning over Obama, said Bruce Bartlett:

The largest group of Obamacons hail from the libertarian wing of the movement. And it’s not just Andrew Sullivan. Milton and Rose Friedman’s son, David, is signed up with the cause on the grounds that he sees Obama as the better vessel for his father’s cause. Friedman is convinced of Obama’s sympathy for school vouchers–a tendency that the Democratic primaries temporarily suppressed. Scott Flanders, the CEO of Freedom Communications–the company that owns The Orange County Register–told a company meeting that he believes Obama will accomplish the paramount libertarian goals of withdrawing from Iraq and scaling back the Patriot Act.

(more…)

I’ve been supporting Obama. My mom, Blanche, is a vocal supporter of Hillary Clinton. Since Obama supporters seem to be over-represented in the non-McCain blogosphere, I asked my mom to write a post about why she favors Clinton. Here is what I was sent: (more…)