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Via Andrew Sullivan, a brutally good review of Dinesh D’Souza’s book The Roots of Obama’s Rage, by Andrew Ferguson, who writes:

“Throughout the nineties I heard mainstream Republicans describe the president as a shameless womanizer and a closeted homosexual, a cokehead and a drunk, a wife beater and a wimp, a hick and a Machiavel, a committed pacifist and a reckless militarist who launched unnecessary airstrikes in faraway lands to distract the public’s attention from all of the above. 

How did the left-wing, coke-snorting Manchurian candidate become the fondly remembered Democrat-you-could-do-business-with—“good old Bill,” in Sean Hannity’s phrase?

Barack Obama is what happened. The partisan mind—left-wing or right-wing, Republican or Democrat—is incapable of maintaining more than one oversized object of irrational contempt at a time…. 

We should probably be grateful for this psychological limitation. Without it the negativity of our politics would be relentless. Like Ronald Reagan before him, George W. Bush was reviled for eight years by Democrats driven mad by a sputtering rage—the “most right-wing president in history”!—but it’s only a matter of time until they rediscover him…” 

It’s worth reading his review in full, but this passage is the most illuminating.

I do have to disagree with his assertion that “we should be grateful for this”, though. The phenomenon makes it incredibly difficult to tell what the hell the actual truth is.

I am sure that some liberals have experienced a little bit of nostalgia for George W. Bush and his crew, not as President, of course, but as leader of the Republican party. I myself feel that Bush was much less hostile to liberal values than, say, Sarah Palin. And I can recall Bush making many statements which the current GOP leaders would no doubt condemn in a heartbeat were they uttered by President Obama. So, I don’t think it’s entirely partisan rage.

I would also argue, therefore, that this is, at least partially, strategically sound thinking. Bush is retired; he’s not going to screw things up any more for liberals. Similarly, Clinton may make a few speeches, but he’s not going to do anything substantive to fight the Republicans agenda again. (Some would argue that he never did)

Nevertheless, Ferguson has touched on a disturbing truth in modern politics.

One of the most fascinating ideas in George Orwell’s novel 1984 was the Two Minutes’ Hate, which is an activity where all the Party members go every day to vent their fury at the enemies of the Party. Orwell describes it as “a hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness…turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.”

In 1984, when the Two Minutes’ Hate is over, everyone goes back to their duties. The fact that it is so readily turned on and off, and so easily transfered, is what is really insidious about it; it demonstrates the way that people are manipulated by the totalitarian government of Orwell’s novel.

Therefore, I  think that the temporary nature of this fury that Ferguson describes is what is most disturbing about it–it suggests that people are being manipulated to feel it.

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I thought Bethesda Softworks‘ Fallout 3 was kind of overrated, to be honest. I know it’s heresy to say that, but that’s my opinion. Nevertheless, I’m quite excited about New Vegas.

There are a lot of flaws I could point out in Fallout 3, but for right now, I want to focus on the two things that it did right: it conveyed a sense of scale and a splendid atmosphere. The giant Capital Wasteland was an epic area to explore. I used the quick travel thing as little as possible; because my favorite part of the game was walking through the desolate wasteland, alone.

Sadly, for me, the game was fatally flawed by weak writing and dull characters. But I’m not worried about that this time; because this time Bethesda is having the game made by Obsidian Entertainment. And great writing and great characters are what Obsidian is known for.

If it lives up to its potential, and combines the epic size and atmosphere of Fallout 3 with the wonderful storytelling of everything that Obsidian does, Fallout: New Vegas has the potential to be one of the greatest games of all time. We’ll find out tomorrow.

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 “Views in favour of dictatorship, xenophobia and anti-Semitism are increasing in popularity” in Germany. (Hat Tip to Little Green Footballs)

I am reminded of this quote from a Tom Lehrer song:

“Once all the Germans were warlike and mean,/But that couldn’t happen again/We taught them a lesson in 1918/ And they’ve hardly bothered us since then.”

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“I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice!”–Barry Goldwater. 1964.
I think Goldwater was right in this belief, even if I do disagree with some of what he believed needed to be done in order to defend liberty.
This is why it’s rather disheartening to me to see that Harry Reid chose to attack Sharron Angle by calling her “extreme”. Extremism is a relative concept, based off of what is considered “normal” in the conventional wisdom of the time and place. Only about a century ago, the idea of women voting was “extreme”. So what? That doesn’t mean it was a bad idea.
Paul Graham put it best in his wonderful essay “What You Can’t Say“:

 “If a statement is false, that’s the worst thing you can say about it. You don’t need to say that it’s heretical… So when you see statements being attacked as x-ist or y-ic (substitute your current values of x and y), whether in 1630 or 2030, that’s a sure sign that something is wrong.”  

Now, you might think from all this that I’m one of those people who thinks that Angle is being oppressed and slandered by evil liberals. Nothing could be further from the truth. Personally, I think Angle is absolutely dead wrong on almost all the issues. That, therefore, is the message that ought to be repeated by Reid.

Or am I being too extreme?

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I’ve been wanting to write a post about history for quite some time. But I can’t.

History is such a broad subject that everyone who loves it is generally forced to pick a particular period which interests them, and focus on that. And I confess, I prefer some periods to others; I have a particular liking for the American Revolution and World War I. It was one of these that I was hoping to write a post about.

But this, in many ways, goes against what I love about History in the first place. What is so wonderful about History is the Grand, almost Cosmic sweep one feels when studying it. So awesome is the scope, so tremendous is the scale, that it is frankly impossible for anyone to fully comprehend. The only field which can compare is Astronomy–and truly, what is Astronomy but simply the ultimate in History?

For this reason, it is impossible for me to write cogently on the subject. For me, it’s too broad a field to really settle down and just write something coherent about a specific time period. I find that I am always distracted by other times; other epochs, and of course, other people. There is something poetic about history that defies clinical, scholarly writing.

In the novel Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres, there’s a part where one of the characters is trying to finish writing the history of the Greek island of Cephallonia that was started by her late father. She works on it so much, and works with so many scholars that, as de Bernieres writes:

 “…she began to feel in danger of finishing up by writing a ‘Universal History of the Entire World’, because everything connected to everything else in the most elaborate, devious, and elegant ways.”

This is how I feel when I try to write about history. It is so overwhelming that it is hard to put into words, it can only be experienced viscerally.

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Tragically, I’m busy with stupid real-world stuff right now.

I’ll be back tomorrow, though. In the meantime, I recommend that you all read this post by thingy.

(Personally, I suspect all of these types of Republican candidates are the work of Jedi Master Sifo-Dyas.)

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Republican Senate candidate Marco Rubio says:

“This race is not your traditional race… It is a referendum on our identity. This race forces us to answer a very simple question: Do we want our country to continue to be exceptional, or are we prepared for it to become just like everybody else?”

For Rubio, of course, American Exceptionalism means much emphasis on economic freedom and laissez-faire Capitalism. This is what he says the Democrats are trying to take away.

But wait a moment. According to the Conservative Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom, the U.S. is not the most economically free country in the world, and haven’t been since at least 1995, when the index was started. That honor goes to Hong Kong.

This is where the materialism ends and the nationalism begins. With the Republicans, it is not merely a matter of allowing the materialistic interests of money to triumph; it is also a fervent belief in the God-given superiority of America to all other nations. They are not completely devoted to economic freedom; if they were, the cry would be: “let us be more like Hong Kong”, not “let us remain exceptional”.

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So, one Halloween night when I was a kid, I read the horror story Green Tea by Sheridan Le Fanu. That was a huge mistake. I didn’t sleep that night.

The story scared the bejeezus out of me. And on re-reading it as an adult, I was quite surprised by how well it held up. Usually, when you revisit stuff that scared you as a kid, you think: “Damn, I was an idiot”. Well, at least I do.

…

Anyway, I’ve always suspected that this story is best if read while drinking a cup of, you guessed it, green tea. Sadly, I hate drinking green tea, so I’ve never tried it.

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Why is it that, no matter how many times I read my posts before I publish them, I almost always have at least one typo, omitted word, grammatical error or punctuation error that I only notice after I publish?

Thank God for the ability to edit posts, or I’d never make any sense.