I'm sure it has to be a coincidence, but get a load of this photo of Bush (appearing to give the Nazi salute) from the front page of today's Philadelphia Inquirer:

Such utter childishness. (I guess they now have a better photo for this kind of stuff.....)

Is someone getting even for the bunny suit? I think they're really scraping the Nazi thing for all it's worth. (What's next; Nazi armbands with black "W" replacing the swastika? Nah! Probably been done.....)

In last night's speech, John Kerry failed to take my advice that he distance himself from Michael Moore. Perhaps he thinks that Dale Earnhardt's support of Moore means that Moore's message plays well in middle America. In any event Kerry seems to be following Moore's advice.

Here's an excerpt from Moore's July 26 speech in Cambridge:

The Democratic Party of 2004 is not the Democratic Party of 2000. The threat that you posed in 2000, they got the message. And it was carried on by Howard dean and Dennis Kucinich and others in this year. And they helped push the Democrats toward where the majority of Americans that liberal progressive majority, is at.

You did a great thing and now, they are in a better place. You have to admit that. Even Al Gore of 2004 isn't the Al Gore of 2000. He's moved! And all you have to do, if you think the Democrats this year are the same as the democrats four years ago, ask yourself this question. Do you think john Kerry will ask Bill Clinton not to campaign in Arkansas for him? Hum? I don't think so. So my appeal to the Nader voters, to the greens out there, is that we have a different job to do this year....

I think that when it comes to that day people will know what to do. But I would not have the Democrats spending any time attacking Ralph Nader. All right? That is the wrong way to go. What the Democrats should be doing, and I have heard Kerry say this, is we need to give, we need to give those who are thinking of voting for Ralph Nader, a reason to vote for John Kerry. That is the right answer.

When I was in Cannes with the movie, I showed it to the American students whose were working there. There were about 200 of them. At the end of the movie, I asked them, let me just ask you a question, how many of you are college-aged student, how many of you are thinking for Ralph Nader? Nearly had a lot of them raised their hand. I invited Kerry's daughter, Alexandra, to come and sit in the back. They didn't know she was there. And she witnessed this. And we went out to lunch afterwards and she was shocked. How could they, after watching this movie, for two hours, with the message of the movie that seems to be that Bush must go, that nearly half of them would say they are still considering voting for Ralph Nader?

I think I saw one poll recently that said 12% of 18-25-year-olds are planning on voting for Ralph Nader. And I said to her, I said you have to tell your dad that, you know, because they, some of the kids that gave their reasons and they spoke with all that great honesty that comes out of an 18 or a 19-year old. Right? Because there's [beep] right? When you are 18 and 19. And they call you on it really quickly. I said you need to tell your dad that the way to deal with this is to take the strong stand that needs to be taken. The majority of Americans are already with you. Don't be afraid. Speak out on these issues. Speak out about health care in the right way. Don't put ads on TV that say we will provide health care for nearly all Americans. Don't do that. Stand up for something. Don't be afraid. Don't try to be the hamburger version of the Republican Party. And I think he got that message. And I think that from what I've heard in recent weeks, I got to say this and I've said this to everybody here who's been asking me about the war.

One thing I do know about Kerry, he will not invade a country like George W. Bush did. I believe in my heart of hearts – that this man, because you know, when you have been shot three times and you have been in that situation and you know this – if you have family members whose have been to war, if you have parents who were in World war II, my dad always says to me, he was in the Marines in the south pacific and he said, you know, if you have been there, you never want to see anybody else go there. And you want it to be the last resort. And so in my heart, I trust that when he says that. In closing, I just want to thank you for everything that everyone here has done. We are all in the same boat together....

I am glad these rallies are taking place, because, you know, I don't know how the press will write about these gatherings of these rallies.... This is not a niche of the Democratic Party. The things that the people in this room believe in is where the American public is at. Especially where I believe a large chunk of that 50%, that non-voting public, is at. And it's going to be our job to get them out on November 2 and that's what we are all going to do. Thank you very much for being here. Thank you.

THE INVASION OF IRAQ

Moore:

One thing I do know about Kerry, he will not invade a country like George W. Bush did.

Kerry:

I will bring back this nation's time-honored tradition: the United States of America never goes to war because we want to, we only go to war because we have to.

.....And on my first day in office, I will send a message to every man and woman in our armed forces: You will never be asked to fight a war without a plan to win the peace.

..... I know what we have to do in Iraq. We need a president who has the credibility to bring our allies to our side and share the burden, reduce the cost to American taxpayers, and reduce the risk to American soldiers. That's the right way to get the job done and bring our troops home.

.....Here is the reality: that won't happen until we have a president who restores America's respect and leadership - so we don't have to go it alone in the world.

ON THE (CAPTURED) FLAG

Here's Kerry on the American flag:

That flag doesn't belong to any president. It doesn't belong to any ideology and it doesn't belong to any political party. It belongs to all the American people.

Well, who said it belonged to any president, political party or ideology? Michael Moore, that's who!

I don't know what it is with right-wingers and Republicans. They seem to have hijacked over the years the word "patriotism", the American flag, these things.

For too long now we have abandoned our flag to those who see it as a symbol of war and dominance, as a way to crush dissent at home. Flags are flying from the back of SUVs, rising high above car dealerships, plastering the windows of businesses and adorning paper bags from fast-food restaurants. But these flags are intended to send a message: "You're either with us or you're against us," "Bring it on!" or "Watch what you say, watch what you do."

I honestly can't recall Republicans or war supporters ever saying that the flag belonged only to their president, their party, or war supporters. Flying the flag became very popular after September 11, and while flag waving did wane, neither Kerry nor Moore (who's really the champion of this idea) have shown that this happened because Republicans "hijacked" it. Surely they're not suggesting that Republicans made network correspondents stop wearing flag lapel pins, are they?

THE SAUDIS AND OSAMA BUSH

Then there's the Kerry-Moore Saudi theme.

Kerry:

I want an America that relies on its own ingenuity and innovation, not the Saudi royal family.

I too want a self reliant America, but does the country really rely on the Saudi royal family? Michael Moore thinks the Saudis control the Bush administration, somehow via bin Laden (even though he's waging war against the Saudi royal family).

The fact is, Saudi oil accounts for only nine percent of American oil consumption. Hardly control.

What gives here? Another thinly disguised jab at Osama Bush?

Might Kerry have been listening to Moore's pronouncements about Saudi and Disney? Again, Moore:

You know the old saying that the rich man will sell you the rope to hang yourself with if he can make a dollar off it? That will eventually be their undoing. But this time it didn't happen. This time a film made for a very small amount of money that will now make, you know, at least a quarter billion dollars around the world by the time it's done, the greed didn't motivate them to release this film. I couldn't figure it out for the longest time and it took a Canadian journalist to finally do the story and thank god for the Canadians, you know?... The Canadians really do like us. They just wish we would read a little more and – but it took a Canadian journalist to write that perhaps one of the problems that Mr. Moore had with Disney is the fact that the Saudi world family owns almost 17% of Euro-Disney. And that in 1994, Prince Walid, one of the richest men in the world, and a member of the Saudi Royal Family, wrote Michael Eisner and Disney a check for over $300 million to bail out Euro-Disney. And the people that helped put the thing together to bring the two together was a company called the Carlyle group.

I know this craziness goes in circles, but why would the "Saudi-controlled" Miramax underwrite the film in the first place?

There are so many contradictions inherent in Moore's Saudi conspiracy claims that TomPaine.com (hardly a bastion of Bush support) posed a few good questions:

The stated implication is that Bush is more loyal to the Saudis than he is to America.

Huh? Here are some questions for Moore: If Bush is so “in the pocket” of Saudi Arabia, why is he Ariel Sharon’s strongest backer? Why, when he had Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah down at the Texas ranch a few years ago, did he flip off the Saudi’s peace plan? And most important, why did he invade Iraq—since Saudi Arabia was strongly opposed to the U.S. invasion of Iraq? Why did he launch his Iraqi adventure over Saudi objections, with many of his advisers chortling that Saudi Arabia would be “next”? Why did he stock his administration with militant neocon crusaders who see Saudi Arabia as the main enemy? Why, Michael?

FAMILY BOAT VALUES

John Kerry loves to invoke the boat as a grand metaphor:

I learned a lot about these values on that gunboat patrolling the Mekong Delta with young Americans who came from places as different as Iowa and Oregon, Arkansas, Florida and California. No one cared where we went to school. No one cared about our race or our backgrounds. We were literally all in the same boat. We looked out, one for the other and we still do.

That is the kind of America I will lead as President: an America where we are all in the same boat.

if you have family members whose have been to war, if you have parents who were in World war II, my dad always says to me, he was in the Marines in the south pacific and he said, you know, if you have been there, you never want to see anybody else go there. And you want it to be the last resort. And so in my heart, I trust that when he says that. In closing, I just want to thank you for everything that everyone here has done. We are all in the same boat together

UPDATE: Arnold Kling puzzles over Kerry's new isolationism, which of course constitutes a policy flip-flop on Kosovo and Haiti. (Via Glenn Reynolds.) Well, here, from 1999, is Moore on Kosovo:

Now, it is time for all of us to stop Clinton and his disgusting, hypocritical fellow democrats who support him in this war. It is amazing to watch all these "liberal" congress members line up behind the President. In a way, I'm glad it's happening, if only to show the American people there is little difference between the Democrats and the usually war-loving Republicans.

MORE: Moore-Kerry linkage in this video.

EVEN MORE: If it seems unbelievable that Senator Kerry might take foreign policy advice from his daughter via Michael Moore, consider this Newsmax report:

Alexandra Thorne Kerry was just 16 years old when she persuaded her father to vote against the first Gulf War.

If it's true, Alexandra would seem to have a real influence on her dad's foreign policy.

Which means Michael Moore might very well be right about Kerry getting the message.

We know that Kerry mispronounced a woman's name as he misled America last night, but did you catch this?

This is where I ended up scratching my head:

I ... I wish, I wish my parents could share this moment. They went to their rest in the last few years. But their example, their inspiration, their gift of opened eyes, of own ... open mind, and, and endless heart, and, and world that doesn't have an end are bigger and more lasting than any words at all.

Now if someone had told you George W. Bush said, "gift of opened eyes, of own ... open mind, and, and endless heart, and, and world that doesn't have an end are bigger and more lasting than any words at all," you'd believe it and you'd roll your eyes, or laugh.

The official transcript made sense out of it:

I wish my parents could share this moment. They went to their rest in the last few years, but their example, their inspiration, their gift of open eyes, open mind, and endless world are bigger and more lasting than any words.

PBS too reproduces the official "transcript" which is not at all a transcript: "a written record (usually typewritten) of dictated or recorded speech."

Interestingly, both also omit the silly opening line, "I'm John Kerry, and I'm reporting for duty." It struck me immediately as a mistake, and I would suspect that his handlers felt the same way, hence its quiet demise in the official version. It felt like a cheap line, and it was surely meant to conjure images of Kerry the soldier.

However, they do retain the bit about being born in the "west wing" -- of the hospital.

Then there was the anecdote about riding his bike into Communist East Berlin, and there's little doubt that it changed him. Before long he was riding his political career into communist apologetics, and has spent the better part of his adult life passing freely from one side of the divide to the other as it suited him.

But enough about the past. John Kerry doesn't want to talk about his lies about war crimes in Vietnam. That would damage his current claim to war heroism. It's time to look at his record, as he invited us to do last night.

And according to John Kerry his record is this:

I ask you to judge me by my record: As a young prosecutor, I fought for victim's rights and made prosecuting violence against women a priority. When I came to the Senate, I broke with many in my own party to vote for a balanced budget, because I thought it was the right thing to do. I fought to put a 100,000 cops on the street.

And then I reached across the aisle to work with John McCain, to find the truth about our POW's and missing in action, and to finally make peace with Vietnam.

Now that's some record. I'm curious first how many (assistant) prosecutors don't care about victims, and how many pick and choose which the kinds of cases they prosecute. I wonder if Kerry ever said, "violence against a man? Let's put that case on the back burner." Of course not. That's just silly. But claiming that as a county prosecutor he made prosecuting violence against women a priority is equally silly. His jobwas to prosecute, not to prosecute certain cases, or to prosecute in certain ways. This kind of rhetoric is designed to buy the votes of women, and true to the leftist mindset, it fails to give women credit for seeing through cheap appeals.

Every prosecutor prosecutes violent offenders regardless of the gender of the victim. Your pain hurts no more than my own.

Now, in two decades as a senator Kerry did only three things:
1. He voted for a balanced budget.
2. He voted to put cops on the streets.
3. He worked with John McCain on POW/MIA issues and Vietnamese relations.

But now he's just being modest. He has apparently led the fight on numerous issues in the Senate.

In fact, while he only claims to have broken with his party to vote for a balanced budget, as recently as January he claimed that he led the fight:

[C]laiming to have "led the fight" for the balanced-budget measure is political puffery.

The measure was actually drafted by two Republicans, Sens. Warren B. Rudman of New Hampshire and Phil Gramm of Texas. Kerry became one of about 40 co-sponsors.

At a 1985 news conference Kerry actually followed behind another Democrat, Chris Dodd of Connecticut, who spoke in favor of it. The Washington Post described what happened next:

"Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) entered the room as the news conference broke up, saying he supports the measure now that he has been assured Social Security would not be cut."

Now there's leadership. Consider the fact that from his two decades in the Senate he listed three accomplishment when asking us to look at his record, and one of those accomplishments consisted of walking into a room at the end of a news conference and saying, essentially, "well, okay."

As for the 100,000 cops (a number never actually reached), thank not John Kerry, but Joe Biden of Delaware, who was at the head, and who is one Democrat who might make a serious run with the American people (which means the Democrats will never nominate him). And yet, this bill is remembered not as the project of any senator, but as the project of President Clinton. (One more note. Don't forget that the bill ultimately failed. Republicans were right: the new police went where they were needed least.)

Which leaves the record Kerry outlined for us with one issue: John McCain and Vietnam.

Okay. So John Kerry worked with John McCain, and supported two bills led by others. Is there nothing else in his record he could direct us to? Is it that his Senate career has been uneventful, that he has authored only 8 bills, and that the bulk of them had no real importance?

Asked recently what he has accomplished that wouldn't have happened had he not served in the Senate, Kerry replied: "There are actually a lot of things."

"Can I say that it wouldn't be done, that somebody else might not have picked up the cudgel?" he said in an Associated Press interview. "I don't know. But I know I led a lot of fights in the Senate that nobody else was doing and that made a difference."

His response prompted an examination of his record. Kerry has been the lead sponsor of eight bills that have become law. Two are related to his work on the Senate panel on oceans and fisheries - a 1994 law to protect marine mammals from being taken during commercial fishing and a 1991 measure for the National Sea Grant College Program Act, which finances marine research.

In 1999, President Clinton signed his bill providing grants to support small businesses owned by women.

The rest of the laws he saw passed were ceremonial - renaming a federal building, designating Vietnam Veterans Memorial 10th Anniversary Day, National POW/MIA Recognition Day and World Population Awareness Week in two separate years.

As I said above, that's some record.

Now, there wasn't much else of interest. Of course it was fun to see Jack Tripper, I mean John Edwards, appear to be directing an airplane with those rigid gestures, the point and then the thumbs up, over and over again when Kerry acknowledged him.

And it was a challenging to grapple with Kerry's new math which makes it four years since 9/11 (I finally decided he must be counting inclusively, which means he has at least one classical value).

And we saw that the piercing logic of John Edwards is as strong in Kerry:

You don't value families by kicking kids out of after school programs and taking cops off our streets, so that Enron can get another tax break.

That's almost as sensible as the line about "senators and menators [sic] of congress," which the official "transcript" corrects to "senators and members of congress."

Now, why am I picking on flubs? Because, by gum, enough misstatement by Bush makes the rounds unedited, while these cats get a white-washing!

Oh yeah ... and because "menators of congress" just cracks me up.

Details, details!

Last night John Kerry singled out a local Philadelphia woman as an example of how America can do better:

BOSTON - In his acceptance speech last night, to flesh out his theme that "America can do better," John Kerry mentioned a number of people who suffered misfortune in the last few years.

One was Deborah Komins, a psychotherapist from Center City Philadelphia - whose name he mispronounced as "Kromins."

Kerry described her as a woman who had worked and saved "all her life only to find out that her pension has disappeared into thin air - and the executive who looted it has bailed out on a golden parachute."

Komins, 68, who has never met Kerry, said last night in a phone interview that she lost an unspecified nest egg when "the stock market went bust. I thought I had a safe investment in mutual funds, but the fund invested heavily in Enron stock. It went down the tubes."

Former Enron Corp. executives have been charged in connection with the December 2001 collapse of the company. The Securities and Exchange Commission contends that Kenneth Lay, Enron's former chairman, personally profited by selling stock, pulling in more than $90 million.

But did Lay actually loot this woman's pension? (Actually, the victim, Dr. Komins, described her investment as a "nest egg," so I'm not sure it's properly called "her pension." Plus, she's still working -- as a psychiatrist/psychotherapist in Center City Philadelphia -- so I suspect she's not quite as ragged and bereft as Kerry's audience imagined.) Whether Lay even looted Enron is questionable: he manipulated the books to conceal losses and sold off stock before the losses were generally known. Dr. Komins had invested money in a mutual fund which owned Enron stock. How Lay's conduct looted her pension escapes me.

From what little I remember about corporate law, fraudulent accounting practices and insider trading are not the same thing as looting (the misappropriation of corporate assets). And even if Lay did engage in looting, he didn't loot from Dr. Komins' mutual fund.

Except Kerry says he did.

Can anyone explain?

We here at Classical Values thought Dr. Ehrlich deserved some rebuttal space after the casual dismissiveness of Norman Borlaug.

Accordingly, we dispatched Peabody and Sherman to 1974, where they found this treasure.

It's not quite as over the top as I might have liked, but I would urge all readers to click over for the pictures alone. Dig on the sideburns, while Plowboy asks the scary questions. Here are just a few highlights...

You see this is going on all over the world with the so-called Green Revolution. Native strains are being replaced everywhere. There's one place in Turkey where they had 35 indigenous varieties of wheat growing 20 years ago and now they have one.

This is a very dangerous trend, you know, because you've got to remember that today's high yields in agriculture are due not to pesticides and not to other chemicals . . . but to plant genetics. Despite the claims made by the big agribiz companies, we really don't do any better job of protecting our crops now than we did in 1935. The bugs get resistant to pesticides very quickly. The pests that want to eat our crops are always evolving-always trying to find ways through the defenses we set up-and -the plants we raise, in turn, are always evolving ways to slap down the pests.

Trying to explain this to the agencies that control the money which gets spent to support chemical agribiz, however, is like trying to explain alternate-day gasoline rationing to a cranberry. I mean you're talking to a blank wall. It's absolutely incredible.

Paul....maybe it's all in your presentation.

If you want to know the truth, I'd say that the biggest mistake mankind ever made was the agricultural revolution. We were a great hunting and gathering animal. If you look-and I have, I've lived with Eskimos and seen bushmen and aborigines and so on-you may be struck, as I have, by the fact that each individual in that kind of society was-at least before they had contact with us-almost a carrier of a full culture. Every individual knew exactly where he or she fit into the picture, had more personal worth and was less alienated than any member of our modern civilization.

Every individual...had more personal worth...than any of us.

PLOWBOY: And we are destroying the world . . . in an ever increasing number-of ways: with strip mining, clear cutting, industrial pollution, chemical warfare, nuclear waste and hundreds of other "weapons" that our ancestors never dreamed of. Since we've been talking about agriculture, however, let's stick to that subject just a little longer. Look at what agribiz is doing to this country. Look at what it's doing to this state-California-alone! How long are we going to continue silting and salting out the valleys of California so that Chicago and New York can eat through the winter?

EHRLICH: Well what can you do but raise more and more salt resistant crops? There is a limit to that game, of course, but we never seem to learn. We're not only wearing out the soil, we're covering it with houses. According to Ken Watt, half the good farmland in California will be covered with subdivisions and concrete by 2020 if we continue building developments at the current rate. But what the hell . . . the "experts" tell us that we'll just use some scientific magic to either grow twice as much on what's left or to make artificial foods of some kind.

PLOWBOY: And what do you see coming? What's the best we can expect?

EHRLICH: Taking the world view, the best we can hope for will be that humanity will finally come to its senses and organize to ameliorate the time of crisis we're coming to. This means that, although a lot of people will die young, the whole system won't quite break down because even the people who are in trouble will realize that other people are trying to help them and it will all become a cooperative operation. Now that is utopian to say the least and I don't expect to see things go that well. save a lot of energy and, in my opinion, have a great deal more fun. At any rate, that's the best practical case I can see-the planet's population will fall drastically sometime in the next decade or two for very unfortunate reasons, but the whole world will not be totally destroyed in the process-and it means that an awful lot of poor people are simply going to be written off.

That's the BEST? We won't QUITE break down? Paul! You're scaring the kids.

PLOWBOY: Paul, you paint a damn realistic and an awfully pessimistic view of the future. Yet you point out all of these horrible scourges and catastrophes hovering there on the horizon with the warmest good humor and the calmest attitude imaginable. How do you manage to keep your sanity when-day after day-you peer into the coming decade and see so many possibilities for complete and utter calamity?

Was it the Genius Grant Paul? No, wait, that's still years in the future.

EHRLICH: Listen, once you understand the forces that mankind is playing with and once you've reviewed our track record and projected it ahead a few years, you have two choices: A, you can put a gun to your head and pull the trigger. Or, B, you can do everything within your power to change the course of history while you simultaneously delight in the natural wonders of this magnificent planet. I prefer the second.

Man, I just HATE those awkward binary choices!

Don't you?

UPDATE: File these under too good not to print.

"any scientist who thinks he's any good is egotistical, but my ego is tied up in arcane arguments about numerical taxonomy. I don't have any ego involvement in giving out autographs. At the same time I'm not sitting around feeling oppressed about it either, I don't find it difficult to shoot my mouth off."

"Most of the people who are vitally concerned about the future of the planet and its inhabitants, though, do nothing but cheer every time Paul speaks."

"Paul Ehrlich is a long, lean, physically fit dynamo..."

UPDATE: If you enjoyed the salt water farming links above, you might also like this cached thread from Metafilter. There's a teensy lil' bit of Green GMO paranoia to it. You get the feeling that at least one poster would like the project better if didn't depend on corporate funding. I particularly liked their link to this Kaplan piece in Atlantic Monthly. Also, a possibly "sinister" connection is uncovered, which leads us to iconoclastic billionaire John Sperling. Good Stuff.
How many people do you suppose are aware that Malthus changed his mind?

By now most people who read blogs will have watched the JibJab political spoof song, which is unfortunately becoming another classic example of copyright laws being used to destroy free speech.

The song parodies the famous Woody Guthrie classic -- This Land is Your Land" -- or, does it satirize it? This may sound like semantics, but according to U.S. copyright law, parody is an authorized use of copyrighted material, but satire is not!

The germ of parody lies in the definition of the Greek parodeia . . . as "a song sung alongside another." Modern dictionaries accordingly describe a parody as a "literary or artistic work that imitates the characteristic style of an author or a work for comic effect or ridicule," or as a "composition in prose or verse in which the characteristic turns of thought and phrase in an author or class of authors are imitated in such a way as to make them appear ridiculous." For the purposes of copyright law, the nub of the definitions, and the heart of any parodist's claim to quote from existing material, is the use of some elements of a prior author's composition to create a new one that, at least in part, comments on that author's works. If, on the contrary, the commentary has no critical bearing on the substance or style of the original composition, which the alleged infringer merely uses to get attention or to avoid the drudgery in working up something fresh, the claim to fairness in borrowing from another's work diminishes accordingly (if it does not vanish), and other factors, like the extent of its commerciality, loom larger. Parody needs to mimic an original to make its point, and so has some claim to use the creation of its victim's (or collective victims') imagination, whereas satire can stand on its own two feet and so requires justification for the very act of borrowing. [footnote: Satire has been defined as a work "in which prevalent follies or vices are assailed with ridicule," or are "attacked through irony, derision, or wit."] (Via Eugene Volokh.)

In a truly fair world, none of this should matter, because Guthrie himself clearly manifested an intent to give the song away:

"This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do." (From Jesse Walker, via Eugene Volokh.)

Sheesh! Next they'll be telling me I can't satirize parody satirize or parody Air America!

Either neither or none!

Deep, deep thoughts on the classics, from the Chairman:

Having a limit to the drama is one of the conditions for taking life seriously and trying to make the most of it. Homer, in The Iliad and The Odyssey, showed us the alternatives. He contrasts the mortals with the immortals…Zeus, Apollo and the like…who, if you look at them, they lived just shallow and frivolous lives. And their amusement depends upon looking and watching what the mortals do, because the mortals are the only ones who do anything that really matters. It’s mortality which makes life matter.

In the Iliad, Sarpedon exhorts his comrade to greater feats of valor in battle. Toward the end of his argument, this gem leaps out.

My good friend, if, when we were once out of this fight, we could escape old age and death thenceforward and for ever, I should neither press forward myself nor bid you do so, but death in ten thousand shapes hangs ever over our heads, and no man can elude him; therefore let us go forward and either win glory for ourselves, or yield it to another.

A sensible chap, it's too bad he gets killed. Now for a bit of re-cycling.

Homer in The Iliad and The Odyssey presents human beings whom he names as mortals. That is their definition in contrast to the immortals. And the immortals, for their agelessness and their beauty, live sort of shallow and frivolous lives. Indeed, they depend for their entertainment on watching the mortals who, precisely because they know that their time is limited, and that they go around only once, are inclined to make time matter and to aspire to something great for themselves.

Leon Kass speaking to Morton Kondracke on "Sage Crossroads". Comes with tasty professorial video!

During his travels, Odysseus visits the land of the dead, and amongst much palavering meets the shade of Achilles, who seems a trifle out of joint...Odysseus tries to cheer him up.

...as for you, Achilles, no one was ever yet so fortunate as you have been, nor ever will be, for you were adored by all us Argives as long as you were alive, and now that you are here you are a great prince among the dead. Do not, therefore, take it so much to heart even if you are dead.'

Achilles isn't buying any.

"'Say not a word,' he answered, 'in death's favour; I would rather be a paid servant in a poor man's house and be above ground than king of kings among the dead.

I like that line so much, I'm giving you a twofer. Here's an earlier translation.

In life thy eminence was ador'd of all,
Even with the Gods; and now, even dead, I see
Thy virtues propagate thy empery
To a renew'd life of command beneath;
So great Achilles triumphs over death.'
This comfort of him this encounter found:
'Urge not my death to me, nor rub that wound,
I rather wish to live in earth a swain,
Or serve a swain for hire, that scarce can gain
Bread to sustain him, than, that life once gone,
Of all the dead sway the imperial throne.

Be grateful it's not Alexander Pope.

Now, I had read the Iliad and the Odyssey a couple of times each before I was twelve. I read them again in college. Great books, both of them.

Our next quote may have a certain familiarity...

To number our days is the condition for making them count. Homer’s immortals—Zeus and Hera, Apollo and Athena—for all their eternal beauty and youthfulness, live shallow and rather frivolous lives, their passions only transiently engaged, in first this and then that. They live as spectators of the mortals, who by comparison have depth, aspiration, genuine feeling, and hence a real center in their lives. Mortality makes life matter.

Leon Kass, writing in "First Things."

Waste not want not, eh? Shame to let a good soundbite languish. And yet, I am filled with disquiet. Much as I loved both books, I'm not sure Bronze Age Epics are quite the thing, when it comes to looking for timeless wisdom about mortality.

Especially when they contradict you.

And for all you bright-eyed Chicago undergrads out there, save your emails.
I already know Kass knows the Achilles quote.

It's right there in "Toward a More Natural Science", on page 308.

UPDATE: If you don't check out the links, you'll miss some truly fine stuff. The following are excerpts from the Sage Crossroads interview. Take it away, Mr. Chairman!

We are still early enough in the game, I think, that at least a certain amount of public discussion might be in order. We might try to hope to separate those interventions that deal with the degenerations that are not necessarily life-prolonging.

I mean, if one could do something about Alzheimer's, if one could do something about chronic arthritis, if one could do something about general muscular weakness and not, somehow, increase the life expectancy to 150 years, I would be delighted.

Behold Bioethics in action. A private practice would definitely have been the wrong career move...

...this gives me an opportunity to say I am not a Luddite, I am not a hater of science. I esteem modern science and I regard it as really one of the great monuments to the human intellect, even as I worry about some of the uses of some of the technologies that science is bringing forth.

And if everybody else was worried about it, you would find me as one of its defenders. I am taking up the side that is weaker here, that needs articulation.

That last sentiment is worth an entire post.

First let me begin by saying that Al Sharpton upstaged John Edwards despite his innumerable innacuracies and anachronisms. Aside from the popular lie about 40 acres and a mule.

According to Sharpton, while it is true that Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, there was an unfulfilled commitment to 40 acres and a mule. This is at the very least a misleading statement.

General Sherman, the scourge of revisionist Civil War history, was the source. And what Sharpton fails to tell you is that the congressional bill intended to follow up on that promisewas vetoed by Democrat Andrew Johnson, who assumed office upon Lincoln's assassination. Andrew Johnson was both an enemy of civil rights and a friend to the secessionists, which led to his impeachment.

And yet Sharpton's most glaring error was perhaps proudly shouting the name "Obama Barack," evidentally revealing his relative unfamiliarity with the Democratic Party's newest star, Barack Obama.

But let's give Sharpton, Al the benefit of the doubt.

John Edwards, as expected by all reasonable people, said absolutely nothing last night. But I was given many reasons to vote for him. For example, did you know he used to dress up as Santa Claus? Besides that, the guy looks like John Ritter. The one fault I just can't seem to get past is his use of 'myself' for 'me,' though Jerry Springer has nearly desensitized myself me to pronominal ignorance.

I'll run roughly through a few points of interest.

1) Edwards perpetuated the line about Kerry's heroism. One wonders then why more than 220 men who served with him have organized against him.

Edwards also claimed that captaining swift boats was "one of the most dangerous" jobs in Vietnam.

I wondered how the tunnel rats felt at that, the medevac workers choppering into combat zones, or men like my father who spent their days and nights amidst the spray of agent orange and enemy fire south of Da Nang, men who didn't apply for a purple heart everytime they cut themselves shaving. And I thought about a young J.F. Kerry scurrying for a quick tour to command the closest thing in 'Nam to J. F. Kennedy's PT boat.

Among those protesting are veterans who feel betrayed by Kerry's lies about atrocities. They cite his well-known ambition, his efforts at emulating Kennedy, and the exaggeration of commonplace events that led, for example, to a silver star and swift ticket home.

(None of the news outlets on the web seems to be carrying remarks I heard on NPR by one man who served with Kerry and claimed that his desire to be like Kennedy was known to everyone. He echoed what has been said well elsewhere: that Kerry collected medals faster than Audie Murphy.)

And they resent the fact that while they were villains and war criminals when it served Kerry's political career, they are now allowed to join him when his career demands a war hero.

There's little noise being made about the Vietnamese marching alongside the veterans. They call Kerry a coward, a traitor, and a communist apologist.

But John Edwards calls Kerry a hero for turning his boat around and for hunting down and killing a fleeing and wounded enemy, despite the old party line that the Vietnam war was a mistake and a crime, its participants on each side victims.

Following the collapse of French imperialism in the East, the Geneva Accords threatened an imbalance of power in favor of the communists in Vietnam. President Eisenhower supported anti-communist forces in the south, forming the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization. Kennedy, in his understandable fear of communist proliferation, stepped up U.S. involvement as conflict escalated between the communists and the counter-revolutionaries. Finally, after Kennedy's assassination, Lyndon Johnson made a bolder commitment and created the Vietnam war as we know it. (By no stretch of the imagination was Vietnam "Nixon's war," as Kerry has claimed.)

The victims were the Vietnamese who were subjected first to French imperialism, then to Democratic mismanagement, and finally to communist rule.

2) The best argument Edwards could make for receiving our vote was that the GOP has said mean things about Kerry. Aren'tcha just tired of it, y'all? See, people, you can do something about negative campaigning. Vote for us.

Compelling stuff.

3) How's your Aristotle? Ready for a syllogism? Here goes ...

A. Edwards's parents were working class.
B. He's a democrat.
Therefore, the working class should vote Democrat.

4) Vote Democrat because John Edwards spent his career suing HMO's.

I'm not making this up. This was his argument. I'm somehow expected to be convinced to vote for a trial lawyer who helped raise my health insurance premiums through litigation?

5) Say goodbye to the Two America's, and say hello to Utopia!

5 a) John Edwards promises that there will no longer be two kinds of health care, that for those who can afford the best, and that for the rest. How this will be possible without mandatory state-administered health care is unclear, but in the same breath he promised tax cuts to help pay for healthcare.

5 b) There will no longer be two kinds of public education under Kerry and Edwards, which means that the executive branch will in some way bypass congress as well as every state and local government and magically transfer the administration of public education to the federal government.

5 c) There will no longer be two economies, one for those who have lots of money and one for those who don't.

Am I crazy, or is this a promise of the redistribution of wealth? Is a vote for Kerry/Edwards a vote for communism? Once again, how can the executive branch promise anything of the sort? Perhaps we should examine the "specifics" as outlined and emphasized by Edwards:

• They will create "good paying jobs."
• They will not give tax breaks to companies which move jobs overseas, but will in fact offer tax breaks to companies which do not move jobs overseas.
• They will invest in future technologies (and here he lost me saying "because jobs are about dignity.")

But wait! There's more...

• Through tax breaks and health care reform you will save nearly $1000.
• You will be eligible to receive a $1000 credit for childcare.
• You will be eligible for a $4000 tuition credit for college

How might we pay for this, you ask?

The wealthiest individuals and corporations will pick up the slack. Hm. Keep that in mind.

6) There are 38 million impoverished Americans, and Kerry and Edwards will do something about it "because it is wrong," as if anyone else thinks it's right.

But what will they do?

• Raise the minimum wage.
• Reform welfare.
• And, once again, create good jobs.

By now you're probably wondering how productive it might be to increase corporate taxes while forcing companies to pay higher wages. Couple that with tax incentives for keeping jobs in the States, and we have a genuine problem. If the tax breaks are significant enough to keep companies from using overseas labor, then every eligible corporation will seek these tax breaks, significantly decreasing the Kerry camp's major source of tax revenue. If not, corporations will take the new tax penalty and seek the cheapest available labor in the world, destroying any hope of creating good jobs at home and taxing their proposed tax scheme.

The Democratic party needs to learn at last that you can not promise the stars. The overall message seemed to be, "Dreams can come true," and I thought to myself, "Kennedy had Camelot, but Kerry has DisneyWorld."

Quite by chance as I crawled into bed I picked up Christopher Hitchens' Letters to a Young Contrarian. Chapter three seemed apt, so here's an excerpt, beginning with a quote from Huxley's Brave New World:

"Homer was wrong," wrote Heracleitus of Ephesus, "Homer was wrong in saying: 'Would that strife might perish from among gods and men!' He did not see that he was praying for the destruction of the universe; for if his prayer were heard, all things would pass away." These are the words on which the superhumanists should meditate. Aspiring toward a consistent perfection, they are aspiring toward annihilation. The Hindus had the wit to see and the courage to proclaim the fact; Nirvana, the goal of their striving, is nothingness. Wherever life exists, there also is inconsistency, division, strife.

You seem to have grasped the point that there is something idiot about those who believe that consensus (to give the hydra headed beast one of its names) is the highest good. Why do I use the offensive word "idiotic?" For two reasons that seem good to me; the first being my conviction that human beings do not, in fact, desire to live in some Disneyland of the mind, where there is an end to striving and a general feeling of contenment and bliss. This would be idiocy in its pejorative sense; the Athenians originally employed the term more lightly, defining as idiotis any man who was blandly indifferent to public affairs.

My second reason is less intuitive. Even if we did really harbor this desire, it would fortunately be unattainable. As a species, we may by all means think ruefully about the waste and horror produce by war and other forms of rivalry and jealousy. However, this can't alter the fact that in life we make progress by conflict and disputation. ...
...
... I am quite sure of two things. The first is that even uneducated people, whether sunk in the theocratic despotisms of yore, or the more modernised totalitarianisms of today (or the other way about, if you prefer) have an innate capacity to resist and, if not even to think for themselves, to have thoughts occur to them. ...

The second, which is only a corollary to the first, is that we do not naturally aspire to any hazy, narcotic Nirvana, where our critical and ironic faculties would be of no use to us. ... Only one other sacred text mentions "happiness" without embarrassment. But even in 1776, this concept was thought to be mentionable only as the consequence of bitter struggle, just then being embarked upon. The beautiful word "pursuit," however we construe it, would be vacuous in any other context.

Edwards would doubtless not get it. He plowed on ahead with his justification for one America, picking up Kerry's gross mis-interpretation of the Pan-African nationalism of W.E.B. Dubois. For Edwards, in sharp contrast to the willful black separatism espoused by the early socialist leadership of the NAACP, the segregation of the past fuels the need for "one America" today.

This is crucial. Edwards compared racial segregation with economic disparity. I can not imagine a bolder socialist statement in a relativley mainstream forum. The civil rights movement of today, for Kerry and Edwards, is the redistribution of wealth, or if not that then the effort of the federal government to reduce as much as possible whatever difference exist between any two people.

This is a drive toward conformity, sameness, and entitlements as rights.

Once again Edwards failed to make any sense. On this point he added that their goal was that their grandchildren's be the first generation to grow up in "one America" because ... we're at war.

This fails to explain the politics of division which holds this 'empty' war at its core.

In truth this was simply a weak transition as Edwards moved swiftly on to the hawkish posture necessary to seriously challenge the President in a hostile world. Despite criticising the President for going too far Edwards sketched in outline just how far he and Kerry would go:

• They will do more!
• They will act faster and be better!
• They will listen to the 9-11 commission! (Ignore the fact that Bush is listening.)
• They will form strong alliances.
• They will support our emergency services.
• The will always use force. (emphasis not mine)
• And finally, their message to al Qaeda is, "You can not run. You can not hide. We will destroy you."

Keep in mind of course that the new party line is to criticize the Bush administration for doing too much, too fast, not to mention his use of force. From here we learn that 4 months in a swift boat qualifies Kerry to be commander in chief, are assured that he will win the war, and are treated to a verbal parade of the infirmity and death among our troops because of this war and promptly assured that the war will go on. What's more, under Kerry and Edwards the military will be strengthened and 'modernized' (no more muskets—finally!), that numbers will be doubled, and funding increased.

They really are planning to get a lot of money out of the top 2% of wage earners, aren't they? Soon enough Bill Gates will enter my tax bracket. Keep in mind the records of these senators on defense spending and conclude what you will of their veracity.

But the magic never ends in Disneyworld. Edwards also promised the respect of the world, an end to terrorism, and end to nuclear proliferation, and—here's the kicker—"that's how we'll keep you safe."

Wait ... how? You never said how. Oh, it doesn't really matter, anyway, because (cue the chorus) ... HOPE IS ON THE WAY!

In the end we've been promised far more than 40 acres and a mule. We've been promised the promised land. And when the Democrats don't deliver, will Sharpton come to see that only an elephant, and not a donkey, can ford the River Jordan?

Well, no, because that's just empty rhetoric. The kind a second rate reverend makes his bread and butter on.

Does anyone remember the mysterious daisy?

I did a whole bunch of research at the time, but I was short on conclusions. Finally, the mystery was solved.

Of course now, four months later, "Kerry flip flop" is a more popular Google entry than "Kerry daisy". Can the "Kerry bunny suit" be far behind?

Well, I just found a not-to-be-missed gift item!

Give your loved one a hot foot today!

And, if you're looking to have hot feet, you can't hold a candle to this Ebay item, but you better hop over there now, because the sale ends today (at 8:10 p.m. EST).

Personally, I don't think daisy flip flops would clash with the bunny suit, but I'd have to ask the experts on fashionism.

(Now I've got to hot-foot it out of here.....)

Not that you could easily tell, but I try not to be negative. It just isn't healthy.

So you may wonder why all the negative coverage on Rifkin, Ehrlich, Kass und so weiter?

Well, I figure it's not really negative if it generates wholesome enjoyment.
Plus, it's a public service.

But even so, I sometimes tire of transcribing idiocy, and at times like that I enjoy reading about genuine heros.

Norman Borlaug fills the bill nicely.

Borlaug is an eighty-two-year-old plant breeder who for most of the past five decades has lived in developing nations, teaching the techniques of high-yield agriculture. He received the Nobel in 1970, primarily for his work in reversing the food shortages that haunted India and Pakistan in the 1960s. Perhaps more than anyone else, Borlaug is responsible for the fact that throughout the postwar era, except in sub-Saharan Africa, global food production has expanded faster than the human population, averting the mass starvations that were widely predicted -- for example, in the 1967 best seller Famine -- 1975! The form of agriculture that Borlaug preaches may have prevented a billion deaths.

...the Midwest was becoming the Dust Bowl. Though some mythology now attributes the Dust Bowl to a conversion to technological farming methods, in Borlaug's mind the problem was the lack of such methods. Since then American farming has become far more technological, and no Dust Bowl conditions have recurred. In the summer of 1988 the Dakotas had a drought as bad as that in the Dust Bowl, but clouds of soil were rare because few crops failed. Borlaug was horrified by the Dust Bowl and simultaneously impressed that its effects seemed least where high-yield approaches to farming were being tried. He decided that his life's work would be to spread the benefits of high-yield farming to the many nations where crop failures as awful as those in the Dust Bowl were regular facts of life.

For a slightly different take, try this article. My favorite:

Borlaug recalls, "We were to help Mexico solve its own food problems. In other words, alongside our own work we were to train local scientists and ease them into our jobs. Moreover, we were to be neither consultants nor advisors, but working scientists getting our hands and boots dirty, and demonstrating by our own field results what could be done."

...But in the process Borlaug had to fight some aspects of Mexican culture, in particular the conviction that scientists were above hand labor or getting dirty. He was told by one of his colleagues in the early days, "Dr. Borlaug, we don't do these things in Mexico. That's why we have peons. All you've got to do is draw up the plans and take them to the foreman and let them do it."

Borlaug lost his temper (it wasn?t the last time). He yelled back "That's why the farmers disrespect you. If you don't know how to do something yourself, how can you possibly advise them? If the peons give you false information, you wouldn't even know. No, this has to change. Until we master our own efforts, we will go nowhere in this project."

Nice to see the American virtues unambiguously displayed, isn't it?

If you like what you've read so far you might want to check out this interview with Ron Bailey, the science correspondent for Reason magazine.

On the other hand, if the first two articles are too long for you, the interview makes a pleasantly sized introduction.

Reason: What do you think of Paul Ehrlich's work?

Borlaug: Ehrlich has made a great career as a predictor of doom. When we were moving the new wheat technology to India and Pakistan, he was one of the worst critics we had. He said, "This person, Borlaug, doesn't have any idea of the magnitude of the problems in food production." He said, "You aren't going to make any major impact on producing the food that's needed." Despite his criticisms, we succeeded, of course.

Reason: When an alleged expert like Ehrlich is being negative like that, does that discourage people? Does it hurt the efforts to boost food production?

Borlaug: Sure, because we were funded by a foundation....They'd hear his criticisms, and I'm sure there were some people at Rockefeller saying, "Maybe we shouldn't fund that program anymore." It always has adverse effects on budgeting.

Reason: Why do you think people still listen to Ehrlich? One can go back and read his doomsday scenarios and see that he was wrong.

Borlaug: People don't go back and read what he wrote. You do, but the great majority of the people don't, and their memory is short. As a matter of fact, I think this [lack of perspective] is true of our whole food situation. Our elites live in big cities and are far removed from the fields. Whether it's Brown or Ehrlich or the head of the Sierra Club or the head of Greenpeace, they've never been hungry.

Maybe I am feeling just a little negative....

This Kerry Flipper film (linked by Glenn Reynolds and discussed below by Varius) is quite remarkable. The guy's flip-flopping is even more blatant than I realized.

The website supplying the video also links to this gem of a comment about 9/11 by Michael Moore:

Three thousand Americans were killed. There's 290 million Americans, all right? The chance of - of any of us dying in a terrorist incident is very, very, very small.

OK, for the sake of argument let's give Moore the benefit of the doubt here.

9/11 was a mere statistical trifle of little concern to any of us.

So why subject the entire country to an elaborate, highly polarizing piece of propaganda devoted to blaming Bush for it?

The only answer I can come up with is that he really must think Americans are as stupid as he says they are.

Will Kerry disavow Michael Moore?

If he has any sense at all, he will. At least one columnist has speculated that this situation presents an ideal Sister Souljah moment:

A clever Kerry move would be to turn Michael Moore into his Sister Souljah. In his 1992 campaign, Bill Clinton criticized black rapper Sister Souljah for talk about killing white people. Repudiating an extremist who would normally back one's candidacy was a brilliant tactic. Likewise, Kerry could give Moore a light spanking for his simple-minded sermons on the evils of war.

But he shouldn't leave any marks on Moore's rear. The filmmaker does have followers, and their votes will be helpful. The Democrats have little choice but to let the Nader Traitors join their parade — but preferably in the back, and with bags over their heads.

Kerry has an opportunity here.

If he doesn't take it, he'll be sorry.

(Howard Dean missed a similar opportunity.)

MORE: Not surprisingly, Fahrenheit 9/11 is having a devastating effect on the morale of our troops:

Michael Moore's film, Fahrenheit 9/11, is making the rounds here at U.S. bases in Kuwait. Some soldiers have received it already and are passing is around. The impact is devastating.

Here we are, soldiers of the 1st Armored Division, just days from finally returning home after over a year serving in Iraq, and Moore's film is shocking and crushing soldiers, making them feel ashamed. Moore has abused the First Amendment and is hurting us worse than the enemy has.

There are the young and impressionable soldiers, like those who joined the Army right out of high school. They aren't familiar w/ the college-type political debate environment, and they haven't been schooled in the full range of issues involved. They are vulnerable to being hurt by a vicious film like Moore's.

I didn't think things would ever get this bad. I always thought of Michael Moore as fringe.

Bush is lucky I am not working for Kerry, because I feel quite strongly that if he slammed Michael Moore -- hard -- right now, he'd draw some boos at the convention.

And win in November.

The GOP's 12 minute video chronicling Kerry's flip-flop on the war issue is now available.

One apologist has already tried to soften the blow:

"There's no question that comments here or there, taken out of context and thrown together, are intended by Republicans to try to simplify or dumb down a crucial issue of war and peace into a simple yes-no question," said James Rubin, a senior foreign policy adviser to the Kerry campaign.

But that's not the video they produced. Rather than "comments here or there, taken out of context and thrown together," we're treated to extended arguments that change year by year.

My favorite bit is perhaps in 1998 (9:19 into the video) when Kerry proclaims himself at the head of the pack, proudly ahead of the Commander in Chief, in urging the use of force against Saddam Hussein's impending threat. He even says that we must do "whatever we can to disrupt his regime." A simple bombing campaign is not enough, he adds, and justifies action for the ramifications it will have on surrounding nations.

Aside from that the video does a good job of showing that Howard Dean was the better candidate, that the Democrats made a mistake.

And honestly, I might've voted for Dean. For awhile Kucinich was my guy.

Where's the aftermath of the close of last night's Newshour coverage of the Democratic Convention?

There is no link to the transcript, and near as I can tell no one is talking about it.

Mark Shields, in gushing over Barack Obama, called him Tiger Woods, a comparison which is valid if one considers his youth, the excitement he is generating throughout the party, and his meteoric rise to stardom.

But Shields didn't mention any of that.

Instead he said that Obama is of mixed-race (just like Tiger Woods). He qualified that by saying he can appeal to everyone. Jim Lehrer laughingly added that people once said that about someone else (whose name I missed -- let me know if you caught it), to which Shields quipped:

"He was purebred!"

Lehrer, laughing, echoed him.

"He was purebred."

And then it was good night, America.

I was honestly stunned.

WAAAAHHHH!

I am being misunderstood!

A commenter is upset not by something I have done, but by an idea I had recently. When I read that there were going to be more beheading videos, it occurred to me that some of the beheaders might feel, well, inspired by Michael Moore and his antics. After all, he did compare them to America's early revolutionaries, and he did say, "and they will win."

Those are words of encouragement and inspiration by any standard that I know of.

And I am tired of the beheading videos. At least as tired of them as some people (like Michele Catalano) are of certain 1970s songs....

So what I did was simply to opine that maybe -- if the beheadings continue (as threatened) and if I continue to link to them -- I ought to dedicate them to Michael Moore.

Anyway, the commenter takes me to task in an almost lawyerly manner:

Moore's comments were about the insurgents in Iraq. Of the videos you mention, only Nick Berg was beheaded in Iraq. Pearl was beheaded in Pakistan, and Johnson was beheaded in Saudi Arabia. The connection you are making of Moore's comments about Iraq to the beheadings that are occuring outside the Iraq insurgency is uninformed and ridiculous.

“This American hostage got what he deserved,” the statement said. “He tasted what many Muslims tasted from the fire of Apache helicopter attacks.

“We are moving forward to fight the enemies of Allah and to avenge our brothers in Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan and the Arabian Peninsula.

“To Americans and to infidels united in a war against Islam, this is retaliation and a lesson to those that come to our country: This will be their fate,” it added.

Ever heard of artistic license? I know I don't rank with Ronstadt or Moore, and this is only a lowly blog, but sheesh!

True, my idea was not original. Quite shamelessly, I copied Linda Ronstadt -- who dedicates "Desperado" to Michael Moore. And now, because I do try to answer criticism, I have forced myself to read the song's lyrics. In all honesty, I still don't fully understand the connection between Moore and this stuff from 1973:

"These things that are pleasing you will hurt you somehow"

"you only want the things that you can't get"

"Open the gate"

"Let somebody love you before it's too late"

These things that are pleasin' you(fried cheese)Can hurt you somehow (high cholesterol; heart attack)

you only want the ones that you can't get (no matter how much money he makes, he can't get what he really wants: everyone to mindlessly hate President Bush)

open the gate (again the image of some fence supporting Moore's weight is just too ridiculous)

You better let somebody love you, before it's too late (too late being the inevitable heart attack from eating fatty foods and shouting angrily all the time)

Any artist should know what artistic license is all about.

Dude, where's your head?

UPDATE: Rachel Lucas weighs in on "Desperado":

Every time I have ever been in a place where that song has come on and most of the people around me started acting like total dopes, as though the song was a brilliant piece of musical workmanship, I've wanted to just die.

1. "Every American loves 'Desperado'"

2. "Americans are possibly the dumbest people on the planet."

This convention is boring! I wanted excitement and I think everyone else does too! So what to do, huh? Huh? Here's my big idea.

What I wanna see is John Kerry fighting Wolfman.

Don't you dare laugh. It's perfect, see. For many reasons.

First John Kerry gets to dress up in tails and an opera cape. It is SO perfect for him! See, the cape hides his thin, insect-like limbs. Aaaand, he's a natural aristocrat, so he will finally look all comfortable and stuff. And the outfit goes with his head.
He LOOKS undead, so this is like PERFECT branding for him!

So anyway, here's how I see it playing out...

The stage is dark, see ...spotlight on Elsa Heinz Lanchester.
She's got high hair with a dyed platinum squiggle in it.
Major Goth identification.
She's leading Al Gore on a leash, and he's made up to look like Frankenstein.
The monster that is, not the mad scientist, that will be Bill Clinton...Anyway, he's you know ...Big...and he's got these honkin' bolts in his neck and best of all, he's GREEN, get it?
Maybe this will be too subtle...

Anyway, Teresa Lanchester says to Green Gore, 'Our power grows weaker and weaker' and he's all like, inarticulate and stuff.

And she's like, ' Our age is past, I can smell it in the air...the water...the earth...The Villagers come, with Fire and Cold Iron...' and Al, he's like moping up a storm.

Cue the dry ice and (small) explosion...It's Count Dracula! (really it's just John F. Kerry dressed up as Dracula). Would college kids in the audience be scared, do you think? Oh who cares, "Screw Them" hahaha.

Anyway John F. Kerry turns to Elsa Heinz and makes this really really arrogant face, like a...sneer or something...and the audience can tell she really digs it. We may have to use some body language here.

And John Kerry makes this sweeping, imperious gesture, and She's all like UNABLE TO RESIST!

And he's all 'Fear them not, for know that I HAVE that POWER! ....and Frankenstein (Al Gore) is instantly down on his knees, slobbering and weeping and stuff, and Elsa Kerry is all hypnotically approaching him, like a bird and a freakin' SNAKE man, when theres this shhh-thump...shhhh-thump...shhhh-thump and out comes Jimmy Carter all dressed up like the Mummy in rolls of cardigan mufflers, dragging his leg like the real Mummy would!

(Note: Is Jimmy Earl physically capable of this? Check w/doctors first)

The crowd will like seeing the old geezer, but it's a cameo only, see. We keep focus on the candidate.

The Mummy will be like, all muttering in some weird egypto-mummytalk and John Kerry will just crook his fingers all sinister kung fu style and Jimmy will bow down and Make Obeisance to him. It's a new Party, baby!

But, all this is just...the...warm-up!

There should be a crash of thunder and lightning and then out runs Wolfman!

But... its really Howard Dean! Yeeargh!!! YEEEARGGHHH!!!

He should be dressed in authentic Wolfman get-up, torn pants, no shirt, raggedy open vest. No shoes!

And then they fight. They grapple. They clinch tight, then break, then grapple more. Finally, after a hellacious, special effects laden ASS KICKING, complete with Crouching Tiger style mid-air wirework, they wind it down.

And Kerry is all suave and cool, he just stands there giving Dean The Look.

And Dean is all panting and bloody and whining with excitement, and he growls and snaps at the air.

And Kerry just stands there without a hair out of place and looks down his nose and smiles a tiny, cold smile.

And Dean says ' Gives it back...We wants it...'

And Kerry is like 'Your time is ended...slink now, back to your obscure rustic hole, and I may yet spare your plebeian life'.

And Dean is like...wait for it...'Yeearggh!!!' (It should be his best one yet, I think) And he leaps! And Kerry does a super-kung fu move and sends him just flying!

And Kerry says 'That is not dead which can eternal lie...Think you to fight ME little doggy? I, who commanded troops in Vietnam, long before you were born? My electoral strength is TEN times that of yours! Begone!'

And he just stands there looking all bad.

And Dean leaps again, but now we see that the whole big fight from before was just Kerry TOYING with Dean, cause now Dean is getting his clock cleaned and Kerry is just twitching his fingers in cryptic mystical patterns, and Dean is getting the TAR beat out of him, nolo contendere!

But he's a plucky one he is, and won't quit till he's decked cold, at which point Kerry raises his upper mantislimbs in an unholy invocation of The Dark, and Heinz Elsa is just looking at him like, 'Oh! Now John....Now...Now...NOW! (And so are Jimmy and Al) and then she goes over and KICKS WolfDean, and he screams like a little girl...and Kerry is all with that cold, small smile....

And then Elsakerry says 'What shall we do with him my master?'

And Kerry is like 'His fate need not concern such a one as you'

And then Dr. Frankenstein and Igor come onstage, but it's really Bill and Hillary dressed up in costume, and that is just so funny, cause they'll be dressed as DOCTORS! Well, anyway.... I thought it was funny... and they drag Wolfman off.

And then Frankenstein and Mummy leave too.

And then it's just Dracula and The Bride.

And he's all, 'Come to me my love...feed my hunger...forever.'

And she's all, 'YES!...YES!!'

Fade to Black.

Now, that's what I wanna see...

With apologies to Frank J., Universal Studios, and Abdul Al-Hazred.

Much as I hate elections, I couldn't help noticing that poor Domitian hasn't gotten a single vote in the evil emperor contest over on the right hand side of this blog. This is understandable, and generally speaks well of the knowledge of history of Classical Values readers. For Domitian is probably the weakest candidate for most evil emperor, although I felt obliged to include him because the traditional view of him is so negative.

However, it has occurred to me that some readers may have overlooked Domitian because they don't know much about him, in much the same way that voters overlooked, say, the candidacy of Dennis Kucinich. (And no, that is not in any way a suggestion of moral equivalency!)

I hesitate to call this an endorsement of Domitian, though. Perhaps it should be called a get-out-the-vote sort of infomercial.

For starters, Domitian is considered to be a persecutor of Christians -- a charge many historians consider overstated, if not unproven. (Here's the traditional Christian view.)

But without dwelling on whether or not the Christian persecutions may be laid at his doorstep, what kind of guy was Domitian? The following is along the lines of the traditional view:

Historians have described Domitian as "crazy and unbalanced". He suffered from social inadequacy and preferred solitude to the company of people. He had a distrustful nature and was constant in fear of conspiracies; the pillars of his palace were made of white reflective marble so that he could see what was going on behind him. Like Caligula, Domitian was very sensitive of his baldness and official portraits continued to show him with flowing locks of hair. Domitian was also notorious for his cruelty. He is supposed to have invented a new method of torture: burning the sexual organs of his victims. Domitian was capable of inviting an erring official to supper, dismissing him in such a way that the man retired happy and carefree. Nevertheless, the next day he was executed. Domitian also enjoyed asking senators to dinner-parties at which all the equipment was black, so that the guests were numb with fright. Like Vespasian, Domitian persecuted Stoic philosophers and Jews. He had all Jews, who claimed descent from King David, tracked down and killed. Very peculiar was Domitian's pleasure in catching flies, stabbing them with the point of a pen and tearing their wings out.

Worth a vote or two maybe?

But according to the more modern view, Domitian "governed the empire well."

Yeah, well why did his own father (and predecessor, Vespasian) not want him on the throne? Why was there such rejoicing in his assassination (a plot even his wife joined)?

I decided that because Domitian hasn't gotten a single vote, that it's fair for me to put in at least one bad word or two for his candidacy.

From a libertarian standpoint, the man's autocratic style was dreadful:

Domitian was an authoritarian figure for whom people were a means to an end. The elaborate facade of grandeur that he built for the office of emperor has been impossible to breach to find the man behind the mask. His morality was strict and punitive, as was his inflexible application of the rule of law. A quote of Domitian that nobody believes in conspiracies until the emperor is dead reveals the paranoia that motivated him, particularly following the rebellion of Saturninus. Greater security, however, was his ultimate undoing. It is ironic that Domitian’s courtiers were those who murdered him, fearful of the unpredictable nature of their master, while the Senate remained impotent to take action.

After Domitian’s death, aristocratic members of the Senate rejoiced. They saw to it that a damnatio memoria that was passed but this measure appears to have had mixed results. Only 37% of Domitian’s extant inscriptions throughout the empire were re-cut.[4] The reign of Nerva, in contrast, was greeted as a restoration of liberty. But his fellow-consul, Fronto, had the last word on his colleague remarking, "that it was bad to have an emperor under whom nobody was permitted to do anything, but worse to have one under whom everybody was permitted to do everything." (Dio 68.1.3).

This account is, I think, typifies the modern view of Domitian. Excerpt:

In many ways, Domitian is still a mystery - a lazy and licentious ruler by some accounts, an ambitious administrator and keeper of traditional Roman religion by others.[[24]] As many of his economic, provincial, and military policies reveal, he was efficient and practical in much that he undertook, yet he also did nothing to hide the harsher despotic realities of his rule. This fact, combined with his solitary personality and frequent absences from Rome, guaranteed a harsh portrayal of his rule. The ultimate truths of his reign remain difficult to know.

Anyway, this view is taken to task by Peter Wiseman, who goes so far as to call Domitian The Saddam Hussein of the Roman Empire:

Why is it, then, that modern scholars are eager to whitewash Domitian? His latest biographer, Brian W. Jones, announces in the preface to his book that `the traditional portrait of Domitian as a bloodthirsty tyrant has not completely disappeared and still needs emendation'. Dr Jones begins his section on Domitian and the Senate with a reference to Suetonius' list of eleven ex-consuls put to death, and he rightly notes that it represents `only the most eminent' of Domitian's senatorial victims. But his conclusion runs: `So Domitian's attitude to the aristocracy was that of a benevolent despot.' If that is benevolence, what would count as malice?

....Suspicious and implacable, with a manner deliberately calculated to emphasise the supremacy of his power, he picked out and destroyed his victims with what seemed to contemporaries a gratuitous and sadistic cruelty. How many of them were genuine threats to his security, we cannot know. The way Pliny and Tacitus saw it, to be denounced was itself a sentence of death. Are we really in a position to say that they were wrong?

The main reason, I think, why modern biographers are predisposed to minimise the despotism of emperors is that they live in liberal democracies. Dr Jones is Australian, Professor Barrett Canadian. In their countries, as in Britain and the United States, unfettered autocracy has become something practically inconceivable, especially to we academics, who lead the obscure and blameless lives appropriate to our station. People just do not do such things. If our sources say they did, then our sources must be systematically unreliable.

It would look different to a Russian who had lived under Stalin, an East German who had lived under Honeker, a Romanian who had lived under Ceaucescu. And that is to restrict oneself to Europe; what about Marcos, Bokassa, Pol Pot? Our age has seen examples enough of the effects of irresponsible total power, and it is a mere failure of the imagination to assume that such things did not happen in Imperial Rome. `Just remember', Caligula is reported to have said to his grandmother, `I can do anything to anybody.' It seems to me to be a kind of treachery to the dead to disbelieve Tacitus and Pliny on merely a priori grounds. Are we to doubt their word just because they survived the experience they describe? It may well be that their conduct in Domitian's Senate was less than heroic, but would you or I have done any better?

Some historians avoid the issue by the strategy of dismissing Imperial biography altogether.

.... If we resist the temptations of facile `source-criticism' on the one hand, and inappropriate devotion to the longue duree on the other, we may be able to get the feel of Roman autocracy in the developing Principate by comparing it with a modern analogue, the rule of Saddam Hussein. Of course there are very wide differences in the two historical situations, but there are some striking parallels too: the importance of the family, with the concomitant necessity sometimes to execute close relatives (in Domitian's case, his cousins Sabinus and Clements); the importance of military success, with grandiose triumphal monuments to commemorate it (Saddam's twin-scimitar arch is worthy of an emperor); the importance of the personality cult, with images of the leader everywhere (Domitian's great equestrian statue dominated the Roman Forum); and of course the importance of a totally loyal and ruthlessly efficient security machine (though Domitian's failed him in the end).

Saddam Hussein took over the Presidency of Iraq from Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr in July 1979. Two weeks later he called a meeting of the Baath Party Regional Congress to announce that a plot to overthrow the regime had been uncovered. Not only that, but the guilty men were present in the hall. Muhyi Abd al-Hussein al Mashadi was called to the podium to confess. Saddam sat calmly smoking a cigar. In horrified silence the audience listened as Mashadi named a long list of fellow-conspirators. Each man in turn was made to stand up, and led out of the hall by armed guards. When it was all over Saddam spoke of the need for loyalty. The survivors stood and fervently applauded.

The entire proceedings were recorded on videotape for the benefit of the party faithful. Copies were sent to friendly governments, and thus eventually became available in the West. The film was shown on television in Britain at the time of the invasion of Kuwait, and I am sure no ancient historian could have seen it without thinking immediately of Tacitus and Pliny on Domitian's reign of terror.

Saddam Hussein is way ahead of that game.....

So far ahead, in fact, that I'd be willing to speculate that by comparing Domitian to him, Mr. Wiseman has inadvertently assisted the modern relativistic view. (I can see it now: "Like Saddam Hussein, who governed Iraq well, Domitian has been much misjudged and misunderstood....")

But bear in mind that Wiseman was writing way back in 1996.

A time when nearly everyone thought Saddam Hussein was bad....

Teresa Heinz Kerry, wife of Democratic hopeful John Kerry, has some interesting things to say. I'm not referring to "shove it" (which, incidentally, makes her tough and sexy--a woman who knows when to say 'enough!'; it's also shorthand for "shove it up your ass", the sort of thing Dick Cheney would be roasted for).

I'm talking about her Hillary-styled ambition. I'm also talking about her mangling of the English language which rivals the President's.

First there's the quote I heard on the radio this morning. There is as yet no web link available, but Teresa Heinz Kerry thinks that we would like to know that the President and his wife are able to check one another. She also thinks it's important that we know she and her husband enjoy being leaders.

So keep that in mind. When you elect John Kerry you elect co-president Teresa Heinz Kerry.

Now try to wrap your mind around this quote:

“I don’t mind criticism, provided it’s intelligent, not gratuitous,” she said. “I’m not perfect, Lord knows. And I have opinions and so do other people. The only thing one hopes is that when people criticize you, they’ve really thought about it. And I would hope that my friends and those that are not my friends, but would think about whatever, would criticize me with that in mind, which is to make it be better. That’s what criticism should be for. Other kinds of criticism, you know, it’s a free country.”

Setting aside the confusion between 'one' and 'you' (a forgivable error and one commonly made by people trying to sound smart), no sense can be made of the sentence, "And I would hope that my friends and those that are not my friends, but would think about whatever, would criticize me with that in mind, which is to make it be better."

Come again? But it's followed by another gem. Asked about her emotional response to her husband's decision to run she managed another string of disconnected words:

“Scared,” she said, “Of the awesomeness of this job. Not responsibility. You can see the faces of presidents when they go in and when they come out. It’s a huge weight, a great honor, obviously, but it’s weight and you lose for a time being, anyway, some freedom, movement.”

That reads like a Leelee Sobieski poem (the poem in question, "This Day And All the Rest," sadly -- and unbelievably -- is not on the internet. If anyone finds a transcript I will be forever gratefeul). [UPDATE: You can download an mp3 of the infamous poem, but I warn you, it may cause vomiting or excessive laughter.]

I'm not going to go so far as to criticize her claiming to call herself an African American because the only source on that seems to be NewsMax, and the sources it cites seem nonexistent. Still, that's just the sort of thing Kerry supporters do to their enemies.

UPDATE: Eric pointed out in the comments here that the NewsMax story is accurate despite the fact that it no longer appears on the Baltimore Sun website. For some reason the story was not archived, but I dare not speculate as to why. The story, however, survives intact on a Peace Corps message board.

And I've decided to archive it here as well since such a seemingly innocuous piece has proved so hard to find.

NB: the link, of course, is dead.

>>