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Saturday, Nov 7, 2009
Hume's Ghost
Published Letters: 412
I've been somewhat out of the loop and what not, and I haven't read all the comments here, but I've got to say, I find the fact that we've progressed to the point where a war czar has been proposed and there's barely an audible sigh from the American public.
I can tell you this. If the founders were alive today and they heard talk of a war "czar" they'd probably express, in some lofty 18th century English no doubt, what Charlton Helton expressed at the end of Planet of the Apes when he saw the Statue of Liberty submerged.
Let's pause for a moment and consider what "czar" implies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar
Originally, and indeed during most of its history, the title tsar meant Emperor in the European medieval sense of the term, i.e., a ruler who has the same rank as a Roman or Byzantine emperor due to recognition by another emperor or a supreme ecclesiastical official (the Pope or the Ecumenical Patriarch). Occasionally, the word could be used to designate other, non-Christian supreme rulers. In Russia and Bulgaria, the imperial connotations of the term were blurred with time and by the 19th century it had come to be viewed as an equivalent of king,[1].[2] The modern languages of these countries use it as a general term for a monarch.[3][4] For example, the title of the Bulgarian monarchs in the 20th century was not generally interpreted as imperial (although the title was possibly implying imperial ambitions.
Ok, the word czar was the Russian version of Caesar. The founders HATED Caesar. They thought he was one of the world's greatest villians of all time. They read Cato's Letters and thought Brutus a hero and what not.
There should be no title whatsoever in the United States of America that has "czar" as part of the title (one could also bring up the expanded police state powers and curtailment of liberty that have risen concomitantly with the "drug czar").
Hell, you may as well call this new position the War King or War Emperor.
"Pax Americana" indeed. Every day that goes by neoconservatievs of the PNAC variety betray their deep seated antipathy to the bedrock that this nation was founded upon: democracy.
Coulter expressed what the conservative movement believes about its eternal enemy, the "Liberal". Liberals a sissies, faggots, girly-men, half-men, wusses, pussies, etc.
Real men are movement conservative. Which means that real men are manly because they are in favor of every U.S. citizen carrying a gun and doling out justice like Clinton Eastwood in one of his spaghetti westerns. Real men are also manly because they want other people to go fight and die in endless permanent wars that they themselves will not fight in. And real men are in favor of the Leader torturing brown-skinned stinking raghead terrorists, cause god damn torture is about as manly as it gets.
You see the same cult of masculinity going on around the VaTech shooting. The buzz is that if the students carried guns that shooting wouldn't happen, and the only reason those students don't carry guns is because we've been wussified by liberals.
In fantasy movement conservative world, we'd all be carrying death machines in our pockets and that would make us all safer. This indicative of what is the animating spirit of the movement: it's inability to think over an issue in a manner that is more than a millimeter deep where all answers to any and all issues can be derived from ideology.
"Practically everything that the RW noise machine says/writes/blogs is some kind of a false choice."
This gets to a key point. In a more rational society, we would not be wasting time having to repond to the noise machine and it's echo chamber in the mainstream media. The conservative movement operates on a level that is transparently idiotic. So much so that it shouldn't require more than hearing its pundits talk to no how wrong they are, kind of like how you don't need to be an art critic/historian to tell that a five year's sketch of a stick figure isn't comparable to Van Gogh's starry night.
Bill O'Reilly as been leading his S-Ps are liberal/communist/atheist god-hating Soros funded socialist radicals who operate via organizations that are more dangerous than al Qaeda (Media Matters and the ACLU). Why, oh why, does that even need a response? Has the moronic Bill O'Reilly ever heard of William Jennings Bryan? You know, the cross-of-gold fundamentalist anti-evolutionist Populist party presidential candidate. That right there just shatters O'Reilly's binary world view.
But he won't notice that. No. Point it out to him and he'll yell at you or cut your mic. Then he'll put you on his enemies list and say you're a Soros funded anti-American S-P who is waging war on Christianity.
It's so frustrating.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The Maine fight was supposed to be the dress rehearsal for repealing California's Prop. 8 -- but gay marriage lost
Once one obtains Seriousness credentials in the Washington media, they are irrevocable no matter one's conduct.
Salon headlines in your mailbox
