Jesse! Whoopi! The only thing that could make this better is if Jesse walked onto the set of the View and shot Elizabeth Hasselbeck in the head, gansta-style, then called her the n-word.
In Labs's imagination, Jesse is played by Samuel L.
Seriously, wouldn't a violent, Samuel-style Jesse be much more awesome?
I would certainly be more awesome if played by Samuel L. Jackson.
Great, now Tim has a little Jesse crush.
Slol, if Samuel L Jackson played you, I would totally buy tickets to that movie. I would also accept Ving Rhames.
Is a person supposed to know who Elisabeth Hasselbeck is? All I know at this point is that I dislike her, and that the suggestion in 1 would have improved the show immensely.
8: Or hates Sam Jackson. (Sort of true.) Labs, even you have to admit he's not that attractive. Can't we find...common ground?
Sometimes, Tim, dudes can look good by looking bad. This is a lie critical to my survival, so don't mess with it.
Hasselbeck, I think, was on a reality show before becoming the token dumbass Republican whitey on The View. She believes in pulling oneself up by bootstraps and doesn't "see" color.
11: I would have thought you leaned on "everything's proportional." I would.
I think Samuel L. Jackson could do an eminently credible job with Edward's dialogue, too.
Basically, SLJ brings a certain ... quality ... to a role.
She believes in pulling oneself up by bootstraps marrying an NFL quarterback.
Tim, what? Samuel L. Jackson's a hottie.
SLJ brings a certain ... quality ... to a role.
Unfortunately, it's a Stephen A. Smith quality these days. Delroy Lindo's more interesting, Cheadle is a better actor, and Fishburn...well, I don't like him all that much, either. And that's off the top of my head.
SLJ is now that Snakes on the Plane of African-American actors.
marrying an NFL quarterback
You're being generous to Tim H. mostly, she's the sister-in-law of an NFL quarterbackl
Well yeah, Don Cheadle is a better actor. But there's allowed to be more than one cool black actor, Tim, you racist.
Anyway, Jackson's a bonafide movie star. And a hottie. So there.
19: He's a guy who got trapped by what made him successful. It happened to Pacino a bit, too. I suppose it's not really his fault, but it bothers me.
So, when I try to make fun of ben, you all get really horny? Weird. Noted.
Humiliating Ben is hot, what can we say.
Humiliating Ben
I think it's sad that his mom calls him this.
25: BEN LOVES HIS MOM, OKAY??
And her marginalia.
Marginalia, penetralia, whatever gets you through the night.
27: Marginalia, penetralia
inter alia
The only thing that could make this better is if Jesse walked onto the set of the View and shot Elizabeth Hasselbeck in the head, gansta-style, then called her the n-word.
Regular reader, first-time commenter. Also, black. Hasselbeck went up in my estimation: she was trying really hard to understand. That's got to count for something.
Basically, SLJ brings a certain ... quality ... to a role.
Racist.
Re. the original cartoon, in the post: is it actually correct punctuation to put a period after a simple name? After all, a name isn't a sentence....
32: Are you going to be changing your signature to Little Bitchphd?
Mr. Hasselback:
The following week he had the ignominy of recording the lowest possible single-game passer rating (0.0) in a 27-0 loss to the Dallas Cowboys. Hasselbeck was 6-for-26 (23%) for 57 yards with four interceptions in that game.
Bitch doesn't realize that Future Ben W-lfs-n has created his own street argot, in which the utterance or inscription of a single name functions as the full sentence "[name] was here."
Its kinda like Wittgenstein's language of the builders.
35 &:the moniker "Edward"
I assumed that "Edward" represented a future W-lfs-n neologism indicating movement along some as yet-to-be-decided axis. Onward, upward, forward, backward, edward.
33 made me laugh out loud, here in my empty office. (Why did I show up on time when everyone either has the day off or is chronically late?)
Totally OT: Air Force reaches new heights of tone-deafness.
39: Obviously the security classification on that information was not high enough. Amateurs.
Best graffiti ever.
It would be better if it included a caret and a standard deletion mark.
39: I guess Cheney's sick of the Airstream.
The comic in 43 is nice.
More OT: This made my head explode this morning.
there's allowed to be more than one cool black actor
The question here is one of qualities (Ben, you're a honkey). If the question is, which middle-aged black actor is cooler, I think you have to go with Cheadle: let us contemplate for a moment the career that embraces Traffic, Hotel Rwanda, the Ocean's remakes, Boogie Nights, and acting as spokesman for the NFL. Cool.
But if your question is, which middle-aged black actor brings the bad to the screen, you have to go with SLJ. Although I would also accept Ving Rhames.
This made my head explode this morning.
Bave, blowing up your head pre-emptively is the only way to prevent a global nuclear war.
44.2: The amount of WRONG contained in this single paragraph makes my head spin:
"Given the fundamentalist, self-sacrificial mindset of the mullahs who run Iran, Israel knows that deterrence may not work as well as it did with the comparatively rational men who ran the Kremlin and White House during the cold war. They are likely to use any bomb they build, both because of ideology and because of fear of Israeli nuclear pre-emption. Thus an Israeli nuclear strike to prevent the Iranians from taking the final steps toward getting the bomb is probable. The alternative is letting Tehran have its bomb. In either case, a Middle Eastern nuclear holocaust would be in the cards."
Somebody please take Morris' crack pipe away from him.
44. Oh, Benny Morris.
Such a situation would confront Israeli leaders with two agonizing, dismal choices. One is to allow the Iranians to acquire the bomb and hope for the best -- meaning a nuclear standoff, with the prospect of mutual assured destruction preventing the Iranians from actually using the weapon. The other would be to use the Iranian counterstrikes as an excuse to escalate and use the only means available that will actually destroy the Iranian nuclear project: Israel's own nuclear arsenal.
Given the fundamentalist, self-sacrificial mindset of the mullahs who run Iran, Israel knows that deterrence may not work as well as it did with the comparatively rational men who ran the Kremlin and White House during the cold war. They are likely to use any bomb they build, both because of ideology and because of fear of Israeli nuclear pre-emption. Thus an Israeli nuclear strike to prevent the Iranians from taking the final steps toward getting the bomb is probable. The alternative is letting Tehran have its bomb. In either case, a Middle Eastern nuclear holocaust would be in the cards.
Those crazy mullahs!
blowing up your head pre-emptively is the only way to prevent a global nuclear war.
The world is safe, then. Thank you, New York Times op-ed page!
The iranians will use the bomb because they are crazy OR they think the Israelis are crazy. I'm sure Morris would launch the strike more in sorrow than in anger. It's for their own good.
I like the idea that Israel now announces its save-the-whole-world-from-certain-destruction, super-seekrit missions several months in advance in the pages of the Times. It's like the Jewish establishment's version of guerrilla marketing. It just seems like the IDF used to be so much less concerned with branding. That was a simpler time.
Ari, are you saying that the IDF will attack with vaporware?
I love that it's "Fatman" who said that. Little Boy, on the other hand, is perfectly happy just to relaunch.
51: Certainly the surgical strikes will hurt Benny Morris more than the people inadvertently vaporized in the blast. Collateral damage is always tragic, you know. But sometimes it's a necessary byproduct of keeping the world safe for Benny Morris. These are the horrible dilemmas facing civilized nations in an uncivilized world.
Given the fundamentalist, self-sacrificial mindset of the mullahs who run Iran
Thank god that fundamentalists have no power in Israel. Because then there could be real trouble.
Really, though, what I was getting at in 52 is that this kind of op-ed, if it represents anything at all, represents the way that Bush's doctrine of preemption has changed the rules of the game. Israel really did used to be much more low-key about this kind of shit. Now it crows, in advance, when it's going to kill a bunch of people in the name of preemption. This strikes me as not good. But I'm too tired to think through the relative merits of brazenness versus subtlety grounded in shame and anxiety.
They are likely to use any bomb they build, both because of ideology and because of fear of Israeli nuclear pre-emption.
They have managed to survive for nearly thirty years without martyring themselves.
I know Israel does not want Iran to get the bomb, but the more practical side of me thinks that it's not because Israel fears Iran nuking them (it almost certainly goes worse for Iran in the end) but because once you have the bomb, you have to be treated as a major player.
What blew my mind about the op-ed, even though I should be used to this kind of thing by now, is the whole "we create our own reality" aspect:
Israel will almost surely attack Iran's nuclear sites in the next four to seven months -- and the leaders in Washington and even Tehran should hope that the attack will be successful
Reading this, I have that same "oh my god the fuckers are really doing this and we can't stop them" feeling I remember from 2002-early 2003. Bush demonstrated that the reality-based community is pretty ineffectual in the short term.
Some of the older, respectable Israelis seem pretty nutty to me. I seem to recall a short New Yorker piece that had Crevald declaring that Israel had been abandoned by the West, was likely to fail because of that abandonment, and that when it failed, it wouldn't go down alone, but would launch nukes Italy-ward. I think this got characterized as "gloomy" rather than "mad" or "hallucinatory." It's OK if you're not a Muslim, I guess.
it's not because Israel fears Iran nuking them (it almost certainly goes worse for Iran in the end) but because once you have the bomb, you have to be treated as a major player.
As I understand it, it's not the nuking Israel fears, but the ability to deter nuking. That in turn means Iran and its allies can increase the tempo of terror-related disruption, which makes turning Israel into a normal country more difficult, which could lead to demographic death as the brightest and the best leave for the West.
It seems that the popular understanding among the Israeli public of Israel's security doctrine is that it must maintain an overwhelming military advantage against its neighbors, since anything approaching parity would put tiny Israel in unacceptable danger of destruction. (I don't know how much this understanding reflects the actual strategizing of the generals and civilian leaders.) Iran getting a nuke is unacceptable simply because it would mean parity with Israel; no further rational argument about the likelihood of an Iranian first strike is required.
As I understand it, it's not the nuking Israel fears, but the ability to deter nuking.
More clearly: As I understand it, Israel does not want Iran to no longer have to fear a first strike nuclear attack as a response to large scale terrorism.
The US/West/Israeli strategic imperative that Iran must never develop nuclear capability is only not delusional if it exists primarily to serve as a pretext to take military action on them whenever the powers that be deem it necessary.
I have that same "oh my god the fuckers are really doing this and we can't stop them" feeling I remember from 2002-early 2003.
Every time this sensation starts coming back--and it was literally sickening at the time--I think, c'mon that's even beyond them. What a sucker I am.
60: Bush demonstrated that the reality-based community is pretty ineffectual in the short term.
Fixed that for you.
(I don't think many people have absorbed the real lesson of the "creating our own reality / reality-based community" thing, which is that the Bush official in the story was absolutely correct. Having a politics where empirical reality matters is not a given; it's an achievement that requires a great deal, both socially and, especially, institutionally. We no longer have that, if we ever did, and until people stop worshipping our broken, archaic constitution and start proposing serious institutional reform, we're all fucked.)
[/mcmanus]
Err, no, wait, McManus hates proceduralism.
[/Sandy Levinson]
It seems that the popular understanding among the Israeli public of Israel's security doctrine is that it must maintain an overwhelming military advantage against its neighbors, since anything approaching parity would put tiny Israel in unacceptable danger of destruction.
I sympathize with Israel here, but if their self-image is that of the 80-year-old immigrant grandmother who lives in a neighborhood that has been colonized entirely by terrifying and violent immigrants in the 50 years since she moved there, then the answer is to MOVE THE FUCK AWAY FROM THERE. The idea that Israel is the only place on earth where geography must morally be linked with a particular ethnic status is particularly laughable when spoken by the same Republican party that shakes its head sadly at anyone who would dare resist the tide of globalization.
A future W-lfs-n confronting a future SAMO.
44: And just within the last hour I read this Engagement Finally...SPK and the Agonist crowd are not usually optimists.
Really, I know there are a lot of emphatic words here, almost superlatives, but it's a shocking turnabout. And one I, in particular, am thrilled to see happening...SPKI do not believe there will be a military attack on Iran by any nation. After Obama is elected, there will either successful diplomacy or Iran will go nuclear. Either way there will be no attack on Iran.
68:I have to say I don't quite follow what's going on there. Perhaps I will devote some time to it later, but it would bore the blog.
Empirical reality matters to liberal proceduralism as much as it mattered to Caesar & Henry VIII & Hitler. A fricking lot. But procedural liberalism thinks it mirrors empirical reality in some weird early Wittgenstein way ("we speak the truth, not rhethoric or propaganda") that no earlier politics was arrogant enough to claim. Ok, Periclean Greece, but they spoke a brutal truth.
Liberal proceduralism is an obvious outgrowth of the Enlightenment and goal is not to find a politics for which facts matter, but a politics where people don't matter. Where all that messy irrationalism can safely be ignored, because like classica, economics, the conflicting craziness achieves an equilibrium. Are we going to achieve a politics where the lies of politicians and the delusions of voters become irrelevant because we have put in adequate safeguards?
That's not just insane, it's evil.
I am pretty well aware of the criticisms of liberalism, but the actually-existing alternatives mostly look much worse. I'd like to see a proposed alternative, but most critics seem to be either Marxists or Utopians. I can't see Marxism as a positive alternative any more.
74:Sorry, John freedom means you not only don't get to see the Plan, but that we could fuck it all up and die. You can't create an abstraction that will comfort or protect you, but you can change the world.
Matt Yglesias was asked recently:"If Bush decides to bomb Iran, how can we stop him?" Matt's answer:"We can't." Fucker.
If Bush decides to button off the complete arsenal, how do we stop him? "We don't, for we must follow the law." is slightly inadequate. Military coup to scoped rifle, there are plenty of ways to save the world, that Jefferson understood but since that age of revolution have been deliberately purged from the political vocabulary, such that the 60s have become described as an exercise in illogic and bad taste.
Liberal proceduralism, like general equilibrium, is a fun imaginary world for academics to play with. It has nothing to do with politics.
It is late in the day, but bob you are more full of shit than ever. Bush can not just order an attack on Iran and have that order obeyed. There is a paper trail, and without proper authorization, it won't happen. Procedures do matter. Now, with some kind of Congressional approval, you might have something.
77:You are mistaken. The War Powers Act has a delay, and Bush can certainly order what he likes. I do not understand what you could possibly be thinking. The military is not only sworn to obey his orders, they have a culture of not questioning orders from the commander in chief. The military could get in his way, but that would be an illiberalism.
See, this is the delusion of procedural liberalism, the false sense of security and corresponding feelings of impotence it engenders.
Bush can torture to his heart's delight, until we stop him by impeachment, or arresting subordinates, or insubordination of subordinates, or whatever. The law & institutions are irrelevant. People will allow or stop the torture, by liberal or illiberal means.
You're right about that, it is the people, not the laws. But orders, especially those of the magnitude we are discussing, get written down with a chain all the way back. just sayin.
Now working out the exact scenario of Bush ordering a B-2 with a nuke to Teheran can be complicated, but AFAIK, it is mostly* legal. Generals might resign, the media & congress alerted, the White House is mobbed, and Bush backs down. But I said above that reality is a constraint, but these empirical constraints have little relation to the law.
But the bombing would be legal, and I really don't think Congress could act in time to make it illegal.
*I happen to believe that the invasion of Iraq was illegal under the Conventions "treaties are the law of the land." It didn't matter.
Could Bush in 2002 have rounded up all Arab-Americans and put them in camps? Again, that is an empirical question, not a legal one.
I don't deny laws can be useful, like rifles and molotov cocktails, to the righteous and wicked, whomever they might be. And like most religions, liberal proceduralism has an eschatology where everyone will act according to and because of an allegiance to the rule of law. But like most utopias, it is worse than useless.
I'll go now. Dahlia Lithwick has a recent article in Slate about the FISA bill that I think is relevant. I forget where I saw it.
And this is all mostly intellectual. As to how I feel, well, I know I am not supposed to mention her, but I did read Katherine's comments down below in the the heebie thread about Obama "It Really Just Seems..." and they made me very sad.
We need a whole bunch of better people like Katherine & Horton & Levinson and...
This is tiresome, Bob. What are you trying to say? I understand that you're sure that you're right, but what are you saying that's right?
What are you trying to say?
Not really a very specific question, is it? So looks just like gratuitous hostility to me. But hey, I'll give it a shot, moving backwards
We need a whole bunch of better people like Katherine & Horton & Levinson and
This meant that many difficult problems would be helped by having more moral people around.
Glad to help.
