Re: I do indeed know that the US did not sign the treaty banning napalm.

Napalm is not banned. It probably was a violation of international law to use it in Fallujah, however. The entry in wiki is not perfect, but that UK Mirror article was atrocious. I should check FAS but I'm being lazy. Try this...

http://www.yirmeyahureview.com/articles/napalm_phosphorus_iraq.htm

It's not quite accurate to say the U.S. did not sign the CCW. It did not sign on to all the protocols. It's complicated.

But if someone declares in a snide aside that "What are you liberals going to do when the mole-men hatch from their lava eggs and start forcing the human women to bear their larval children?", do the readers of this blog really have to fill up 50 pages to respond to such mentally ill paranoia?

It's Easter Sunday and most of us are too old to hunt for Easter eggs.

Are we to assume that Shooter would in favor of atheists using weapons and violence to prevent Christian prayer in our schools?

In what context?

As of the last election, and the next and the next, etc.:

Liberal Democrat (us) = Winner

Conservative Republican (you) = Loser

The very essence of politics in the Clinton years was the constant rightwing effort to delegitimate and dis-establish the Clinton presidency. The right wing was largely joined in this effort by the Washington establishment, which viewed the Clintons as hick interlopers.

The GOP's RWA base ate this stuff up. But the majority of Americans did not, as shown by Clinton's continued high job approval numbers, and the consistent majorities opposed to his impeachment.

In short, RWA helps make the Clinton years considerably easier to understand, and the Clinton years help illuminate the broader explanatory role that RWA should have in understanding our politics.

My only quibble is a minor one, and an addition:

"The very essence of politics in the Clinton years was the constant rightwing effort to delegitimate and dis-establish the Clinton presidency [despite the policy and style differences being minor]."

Clinton, aside from being a much better president, a better executive, was as centrist as any Democrat can get. Distortions and mischaracterizations were used to exaggerate differences that were rather minor between Clinton and actual conservative principles. To wit:

"The Mother of All Big Spenders: Bush spends like Carter and panders like Clinton.

by Veronique de Rugy and Tad DeHaven"

This article originally appeared in NRO on July 28, 2003. It can be found at Cato so tell me about it's bias:

http://www.cato.org/research/articles/dehaven-030728.html

eRiposte has a fairly good comparison of Bush vs. Clinton/Gore

http://www.eriposte.com/politics/bush/bush.htm

Clinton was a moderate centrist. Too moderate and too centrist for some people, and far more willing to work with his political enemies than Bush. Bush is the radical extremist. Everyone agrees with that now. Even the moderate conservative right.

I'm not sure I would have the two lines perpendicular to each other. I think communism and authortarianism are closer than 90% apart.

I was reading some wingnut's blog the other day. He actually wrote this:

The other issue is a thornier and not entirely clear to me yet. It is that conservatism is not on the right, as opposed to the left. If been told several times by people wiser than me that the connection between conservatism and "the right" is a ruse perpetrated by the left. A regular named Jerry ("jerry") over at Roger Simon's site told me this a year or two ago, for example, saying that "right" was coined by Stalin to distinguish himself from other leftists with whom he was incompetion. What makes the issue even more interesting is that "left" must disappear when we dissolve "right" into nonsensehood. Anyway, I'm not the historian that Jerry is. But I am a philosopher, and I have something to say about the matter. It does seem to me that the philosophical status of conservatism is not to the right in any sense at all. There will be a lot to think when we get to that post, as we will do soon.

I think this from the guys who did the Political Compass test is probably closer to the truth:

"The old one-dimensional categories of 'right' and 'left', established for the seating arrangement of the French National Assembly of 1789, are overly simplistic for today's complex political landscape."

Arbitrary seating arrangements or some fucking wingnut's conspiracy theories? What do you think?

If you lived in Somalia any time in the recent past, you might call it damn close to hell, or totalitarian, or an anarcho-capitalist's paradise. Milton Freidman was an anarcho-capitalist but he wouldn't last 5 minutes over there.

Communism is not totalitarianism. Period. Left and right refer to economic models in the political compass scale. Capitalism is not a form of government. George Orwell was a democratic socialist. A socialist, and a most dedicated anti-totalitarian, an anti-Stalinist. Get it? And Hitler was not a socialist or a leftist. Say that and everyone laughs at you.

Stalinism was not Marxism, socialism or even communism.

"Liberty" and the "pursuit of happiness" meant very different things to Jefferson and Franklin than they mean to you average corporate boardmember today, I guaranfuckingtee you.

In my 70th decade

Please share your diet and other longevity secrets with the rest of us. You are almost as old as Methuselah!

The Nolan test is a crock of shit. It's a marketing tool. Everyone is a libertarian. It's so "weighted" you could use it as an anchor. Some wonderful facts, snark and even a parody of those "tests"

http://world.std.com/~mhuben/wspq.html

If you want to see something a little different, try this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_politics

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQRUu_4W2j8