text: He goes on for ten goddamn minutes, in which he refers to Reason magazine, and says that while he doesn't like Islamic law, "for them it gets simple things like labor contracts and contracts to trade commodity groups in their largely agrarian society to work." Also, Somalia is "in the top ten or the top twenty in the world with regard to pretty good cell phone and telecommunications coverage. Top twenty? The United States is not even in the top twenty anymore!" We have much to learn from these Somalis. Also, Leviathan, mirror neurons, and "anarchy is the default position... even in New York, you effectively have anarchy," which will come as a shock to Michael Bloomberg.
  1.) Make Dick Cheney, Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh the public three-headed dog of the Republican Party. The most interesting facet of this is the reanimation of Gingrich, whose whirlwind tour of the liberal media continued on Meet The Press this morning. The massive long-term failure of the Contract with America to scale back American government seems not to bother his persistent supporters in the movement, who only remember that it won them votes once upon a time. If you expect people to re-imagine the New Deal as a disaster, you can also expect them to remember the Contract as a success.
  2.) Celebrate torture. You can see how deeply this has settled into conservative bedrock by viewing the account at The Volokh Conspiracy of Eric "Mancow" Muller's reversal on waterboarding after experiencing it himself, and then reading the outraged defenses of the practice offered by the conservative intellectuals who frequent this lofty site ("Would you rather be a live monster or a dead saint?"). The morons, of course, are even more excited by it.
  These people aren't even pretending "enhanced interrogation" isn't torture any more, and it's not because they're just tired of lying. They've taken Obama's recent hard line against it as an opportunity to seize the willingness to torture as a sign of moral superiority. The hope is apparently that Americans will identify with that.
  3.) Redefine liberty to exclusively represent rightwing talking points. This Classical Values post attacks the government's environmental policy ("This time, it's a real war. I say it's time to get the government out of all of our emissions, for good. Emissions are a human right!"), and muses: