From 2/17/08 post:

"Shouldn't basic self-awareness compel the faux-warriors who read that to at least entertain the thought: "Maybe my belief that I'm waging an apocalyptic War of Civilization against The Uniquely Evil Enemy is grounded in a psychological need, one that is extremely common if I look to the past, rather than an objective assessment or any sort of political belief or ideological conviction. Maybe I'm exaggerating the threat posed in order to inflate my own importance and give myself a sense of purpose and power as I convince myself that I'm waging all-important (though risk-free) war."

Glenn;

It would be interesting to further explore the psychology of the faux-warrior in response to your interrogatory paragraph above. Is there an element of this type of dogmatism that causes not only reflective blindness but blindness to the existence of the blindness itself? I posit that the conservative authoritarian mindset is organically unable to contain or even accommodate the “basic self-awareness” you describe. Other aspects of the personality type are consistent with this hypothesis: worship of authority and authoritarianism, disdain for fact-based realities and those who rely on them, fervent belief in supernaturalism, and delusions of persecution and grandeur. These belief sets share a common enabler: absence of critical review.

A capacity for the awareness you mention would threaten the intricate structures of fictions that feed the egos of faux-warriors, thus they studiously but unconsciously repress any such urges.

This points up a core difference between left and right (to apply a too-broad label system). Self-awareness and self-evaluation are standard, even prized components of the cognitive states of those who politically lean leftward, while they are disdained and repressed out of existence by righties. Of course, this is far too broad a generalization (a phrase you won’t find in words from Coulter, Savage, Boortz, O’Reilly, et al) but the concept has merit because it can be applied broadly with a high degree of accuracy.

Dennis Mick

Austin, TX

Hoach.

That was the first place I checked but it still makes no sense.

I like WT's explanation but we know he's just ad libbing.

:-)

OTOH, the anonymous hoachie koachie was right. Terrorism is up all over the globe thanks to Bush and his failed policies.

Getting warrants to show cause is good, and I am for that, but realistically since we are "at war on terror", slipping by that check is not hard for the govt. What I, as a citizen, want is recourse in the courts when the govt oversteps its bounds, its staten purpose for the warrant, and comes after some poor sucker who uses the wrong set of phrases and gets data mined into Gitmo. Saying it won't happen or that Bush would not be "overly safe in protecting America", just does not get it anymore. The House needs to build in protection IN THE COURTS for us citizens.

Hootch.

A terrorist Hootch.

But they have caves and bunkers these days instead of tunnels and hootches.

You mean the hoach is hoax?

Mein Gott!

City slickers're always tellin' folks how to talk. Hell, y'all don't even have back yards, let alone one big enough to bury a hoach in.

Something like 10 dead 70 injured, between 20%-35% turnout because people were afraid of violence, militants keeping women from voting in the tribal areas. Some interesting first hand accounts of vote rigging on teeth maestro, follow the links.

http://www.teeth.com.pk/blog/

(small glossary:
PML-N is Nawaz Sharif's party
PPP or PPPP is the party of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto
PML-Q is Musharraf's party
AWAMI is the secular party in the frontier territories
Jamaat-i-Islaami is the main Islamic party
MQM is a group, originally of people displaced from India during The Partition, which depending on your attitude, is a bunch of supporters of PML-Q, or a bunch of armed thugs and racketeers who help rig elections and other things.)

Oh, and the vote counting will take days. Critical issue: a 75% ruling majority by, say PPP and PML-N, would be able to impeach Musharraf and restore the Constitution.

Americans aren't used to watching elections in some foreign country very far away, where the people have very different issues and the voting culture is not like ours. The big issue on the table in the Pakistani election is democracy itself, along with transcendence. Transcendence above dictatorship, transcendence above corruption, transcendence above militant religious violence. And hope. A hard quantity to keep in a country with massive poverty, an 80% illiteracy rate, a dictator, and the real al Qaeda and Taliban in their backyard.

One thing that Americans could learn from watching all this is what could have happened if our $10 billion, or even a much smaller figure, had gone to civilian aid instead of military aid. For all the propaganda we hear about tribal conservatism and customs and about islamofascists and all that, what the majority of the people in the FATA want is peace, schools for their children, and an end to corruption and the bullying of the religious militants. As Wahir Zaid basically said in yesterday's NYT, South Asian Islam is gentle and flows from Sufism, and doesn't need the harsh fundamentalism of the Middle East.

William Kristol, the new kid on the block at the New York Times op-ed page, says today that Democrats should read more Kipling.

Kristol relies on George Orwell for his slam against the Dems, taunting them and suggesting that they may not be up to actually governing.

Orwell, as quoted by Kristol, thought Kipling a "gifted writer." But as a man, Orwell thought Kipling was "morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting."

Kipling famously talked about the "white man's burden" in the context of the Victorian imperial era, the "crown jewel" of which was the British Raj, the colonial administration in India. Much of his fiction had to do with this time and Victorian rule over a large part of the world.

Kristol, holding up Kipling to pick at Democrats, says Orwell - who thought Kipling might have been a kind of slimeball, even though he was "gifted" - "identified with the ruling power and not with the opposition."

It's interesting (as a droll aside) to wonder what opposition there was during Victoria's time, she being nearly as powerful as Elizabeth was during the Renaissance, and for a long time too. She was the bloody queen after all!

There might have been some backbenchers whining away in the House of Commons, but we're talking about a time when Britain was at the apogee of empire. Business around the world was really, really good?

"What's not to like"? the poobahs might have said then.

it always occurs to me to wonder how lame it is for high-falutin and high-paid pundits in this country to quote great British writers and politicians to encourage Americans to be great and good in the world.

It's always Churchill this and that lately. Now, Kristol is holding up Kipling, who supported empire in the Middle East and the Indian sub-continent, as some paragon.

The argument in favor of empire is implicit in what he says.

Today, using Kipling, Kristol is saying Democrats are just weak, that they're afraid (Be very, very, afraid!) to actually rule after so little time in control of the White House, and that they therefore don't know how (in this dangerous world!) to choose, and take responsibility.

Kristol's glaring evidence for this weakness is last week's refusal by House Democrats to move forward on the FISA law and telecom immunity.

No doubt, if we're to believe William Kristol, Rudyard Kipling is weeping profusely in his grave over this lack of respect for authority in the United States Congress.

But George Orwell may be simply be wondering to what use his words have been put.