-- sajwan

Perfect!

What!? No handcrafted put down? You're welcome.

Dorothy Parker would give you high marks. She might blush at one or two of your more "earthy" barbs - but she would be more rude today herself. She would've hated these pukes.

Arne.. I'm afraid these are parlous times, and it's so hard to tell the difference between serious 'argument' and snark.

Even with the lights on, it's hard to tell.

At My Left Wing--where I've been MIA for some time now--my tag line is:

< /snark... no, wait, the snark never goes off

Consider yourself warned.

(1) Bucky1 is a deluded whackjob extremist who supports the racist Ron Paul for president, and devotes enormous energy and invective to arguing that Republicans and Democrats are all the same, and that the state is the root of all evil. His attacks on LBJ as pure evil are all of a piece with his whackjob extremist POV, and thus cannot stand up to any examination of the evidence. Which is why he repeatedly ignores any evidence I produce.

(2) The reality is that Democrats and Republicans are quite different, though by no means as different as I or most of us would wish. In international terms, the Republicans are a rightwing party (listing to far right in recent years), while the Democrats are a centrist party. This is a difference, and it is real. The Democrats' liberal wing, when it has been robust, has been close to a moderately leftwing party in other countries, and LBJ's domestic policies approached this position, particularly with the establishment of Medicare, which cut the over-65 poverty rate in half in less than a decade.

I see the local hit squad had no one to hate today and I got elected. Yea! I won.

on #1) I see famous people on the left, middle and right going for the peace and small government message of Ron Paul, but Paul Rosenberg is so full of hate that he misses no opportunity to smear a man by slanderous tactics. You also seemed to have missed the one I posted where Reason claimed, "Ron Paul, for the People" and did a fine writeup of him.

http://www.reason.com/news/show/120767.html

One of the keys to why Paul should have wider appeal is that while he is certainly very libertarian, he is in many ways more federalist and constitutionalist than libertarian in a strict sense. He’s willing to leave all sorts of things to the states rather than imposing small-government solutions from the top down. He represents—or should, to most thinking voters—little in the way of a threat to their interests, insomuch as their interests don’t involve living off the federal teat or using federal power to their advantage. As Paul told me when I interviewed him for my book Radicals for Capitalism, “the freedom philosophy shouldn’t be challenging to too many people, when you emphasize that all I want to do is leave you alone.”

As to evidence; Paul you never produce evidence. You produce vile invective and your weird personal opinions; and the occasional fringe author you dig up.

on #2) The Democrats and Republicans are not all that different; two groups who love to get the full force of government behind them to enforce their concept of what others should do. Both groups are pro-war; they just differ on who to kill. Clinton was not unwilling to bomb innocent men, women, and children. The Democrats do not need to fear being called "weak" as Democrat presidents have shown a great willingness to go to war.

Conclusion: Paul Rosenberg is an intellectual lightweight and coward who needs to continually slander and attack with his little toady posse right behind him. He will now whine that I have gone too far and gotten personal as if no one could possible see who hurled invective and slander first. Evidence? Every day, I just respond to the mindless slander they hurl.

I can not just live here like the two of them (LWM and his "Anonymous sock-puppet; as well as Paul), but I'll check in.

[Arne]: I'm afraid these are parlous times, and it's so hard to tell the difference between serious 'argument' and snark.

Even with the lights on, it's hard to tell.

Even with name tags on, it's hard. I say we just shoot 'em on sight and let Gawd sort 'em out..... Ummm, come out in the light where I can see you, L.W.M. Slowly. No sudden moves. ;-)

Cheers,

= Dick Cohen's "work" in one word. Pravda in its heyday couldn't have churned out a more odious jackbootlicker.

.... day 37 of ignoring "bucky1". And I'm a happier man for that.

Cheers,

While channel surfing last night, I ran across “All the President’s Men” on cable. I hadn’t seen it for many years. After a few minutes, I was riveted. I found myself transfixed both, by the story itself and by the glaring difference between America as it was then and the way it is now.

Most superficially, I was reminded of how much harder it was to find stuff out back before there was an Internet. Woodward and Bernstein spent days doing research, flew across the country and pounded the pavement and knocked on doors for weeks on end to find out the kind of stuff you could ferret out today in fifteen minutes with Google. There’s a paradox for you: reporters today won’t take fifteen minutes to obtain the kind of information they would spend weeks discovering thirty years ago. Maybe part of our problem today is that the cost of getting facts is so low that reporters no longer value them.

Semantically, I found it striking how, both then and now, when people felt the country teetering on the brink of authoritarianism, they resumed referring the country as “the Republic,” a 19th Century usage revived as if to remind ourselves of what was, and is, at risk.

More substantively, I was struck by how dangerous to the Republic Nixon’s larger scheme to harness the full power of the U.S. government’s law enforcement, intelligence and executive power to the service of his party’s own narrow political ends truly was. The movie was in accord with my memory of how frightening that scheme seemed to most people—in both parties—once the truth was known. Even taking a Hollywood hype discount, the movie reminds us of how earnestly and fearlessly Woodward, Bernstein, the Washington Post pursued that truth in the face of serious and often blunt threats to their paper, their livelihoods and even their lives.

As I watched the story of how these guys slowly wrung the truth out of a shadowy, secretive regime bent on the subversion of democracy itself unfold, I was struck by the profound difference between what “reporting” meant in 1972 vs. what today’s reporters think it means.

In 1972 – 73, reporters did not make seven figures and did not have, or want, the ear of the high and mighty. They nibbled their way in from the periphery of this story to its interior over the course of many months, interviewing dozens of second and third tier players and generally digging and scrounging for bits of information that they could piece together into a big picture. Now, they think the very epitome of their profession is the ability to obtain and nurture access to the the people at the top.

In 1973, reporters' unnamed sources were powerless people in possession of parts of the truth, and by protecting their identity, the reporters enabled the sources to hold the powerful accountable without fear of reprisal. Now the reporters’ unnamed sources are the powerful, and, by protecting their identity, reporters enable their sources to have their lies reported as truth without fear of accountability.

As Hal Holbrook’s “Deep Throat” finally broke down and explained what was really going on, it became apparent that all the cloak and dagger stuff and the wide-ranging knowledge of what the FBI and the Justice Department knew about the scandal wasn’t just a cheap literary device to advance the story. With benefit of hindsight, it seems instead to have been a big fat clue as to his real identify, a clue that had sat out there in broad daylight for all those years.

More importantly, though, Holbrook's explanation of the wider scandal made me realize that, dangerous as they were, Nixon’s Constitutional transgressions are actually trivial in comparison to the full blown assault on the Constitution that Bush, Cheney and the rest of Nixon’s spiritual heirs in this Administration have been waging for six years now. It was revealing to note that where Nixon and his minions felt the need to at least give lip service to the rule of law while dealing in cutouts and intermediaries in the shadows, while Bush and Cheney feel openly sneer at those who express concern about protecting the fundamental principles of the Republic.

Finally, most sickeningly of all, after it was over, I was left to contemplate the difference between Ben Bradlee and the Woodward, Bernstein and Washington Post of 1972-74 and Fred Hiatt, the Woodward, Bernstein of 2001-2007 and the Washington Post of today. At the time, that difference seemed to perfectly sum up the modern day media’s fawning, servile collaboration with the Neocon assault on the Constitution.

Yes, last night, I thought I knew what it meant to truly despair for the Republic. And then, today, I opened up the opinion page of the Washington Post’s website, read Cohen’s column and realized I was wrong.