LIMBAUGH: My lawyers at the Landmark Legal Foundation are looking into the possibility of filing an objection with the Nobel committee over the unethical tampering for this award that Al Gore is engaging in.
I fear this one may end up in the Supreme Court before all is said and done.
Yes, our country had a chance to not fall behind every other so-called advanced country. It's hard to know what happens next when the government's competence and reputation have been destroyed intentionally by people pretending that they were trying to do something else.
1: Proof that Limbaugh has no goddamn idea of how the Nobel committee works.
we were so close to being so much better off
You know, I'm not sure about this. The crazies impeached a president over nothing, and they weren't going to suddenly disappear when Gore took the oath of office. Yes, we would have been better off, but I think that means that the decline would have been slower and more bitterly contested; maybe we all would have been hating America in 2010 instead of 2007.
I have a sneaking suspicion that ~25% of the motivation for awarding Gore the Nobel was to give a big one of these to Bush.
I agree with 4. The last seven years would have been filtered through the twin lenses of Crazy Michael Kelly and Junior Class President Maureen Down.
By the way, how big of a scumbag is Mickey Kaus? This big.
Why does Mickey Kaus still write for Slate? Is it some deal like how the Pat Robertson Hour has to be on the Fox Family Channel for one hour during prime time from now until the end of time?
Why does Mickey Kaus still write for Slate?
Good question. Kaus is one reason why I almost never read Slate.
I was walking right behind Kaus heading to the subway after Kerry's acceptance speech at the 2004 DNC. I was tempted to say something to him, like how I thought Kerry had done a good job, but I didn't bother.
Why are you treating Slate as a reputable outlet? Other than Dahlia Lithwich, who do they have that's worth reading? They're still publishing Hitchens, Anne Applebaum, and Lord Saletan, too.
I set up like 25 different RSS feeds for all the good parts of Slate, so I could avoid having to look at the front page of the website all the time and saying "Ooh, is this interesting? No, it's summarizing other magazines. Ooh, is this interesting? No, it's summarizing recent medical findings. Ooh, is this interesting? No, it's just a PDF file of someone's arrest record. Ooh, is this interesting? No, it's a work of satirical fiction. I always forget what "low concept" means."
Even though he's taken the last train to Crazyville, I always find Hitchens worth reading because he really is an excellent writer.
I think 4 and 6 are wrong. Yes, we'd have been buried under false rhetoric from pinched-faced ninnies but in the meantime we might not have started a war and we might have handled Katrina and we might have fewer people in indefinite detection and on and on and on. Maybe we'd hate America in 2010, I dunno, but I think it's a bit too easy to shrug it all off and say meh to the very thought.
On the other hand, wishing or believing that things might have been different isn't turning back any clocks, so maybe it's just easy enough and there's no point either way.
I don't know whether this is good, bad or indifferent but if Gore entered the race tomorrow I would be an instant contributor and determined voter.
Someone please summarize 7 for me, so I don't have to click through and get grumpy.
Why are you treating Slate as a reputable outlet? Other than Dahlia Lithwich, who do they have that's worth reading?
Fred Kaplan
Timothy Noah
Daniel Gross some of the time
Music and movie reviews most of the time
Sports stuff (one of the realms in which knee-jerk contrarianism is actually valuable)
Witold Rybuxcvkjbxcjski
That commercial-review guy who seems to have disappeared
The National Enquirer says that John Edwards had an affair and Mickey Kaus can't stop writing about it.
11: Fred Kaplan is quite good, and Daniel Gross is often worth reading.
I try to read Kaus because I feel I spend to much time in a liberal bubble, but what a despicable prick he is.
70% of the Kossacks would immediately support Gore if he stepped in. That's an amazing stat.
Noah can be pretty scummy.
15- The National Enquirer says Edwards had an affair with some woman who made a campaign film for him, and of course he denied it, but he denied it in such a way that I (me, Mickey Kaus -ed) can continued my evidence-free rantings about how the MSM (exemplified by Drudge -ed) keep ignoring this hot story.
He's pushing a story from the Enquirer about Edwards having had an affair that everyone involved has unequivocally denied.
I agree with 14. Had Gore won, we'd think things were pretty messed up, but that's because we wouldn't know, as we now know, just how awful they can get. Not starting a dumb war is a pretty huge deal. Of course, as we learned from the Eid thread, I care about my brown brothers, while Ogged is objectively pro-death.
I try to read Kaus because I feel I spend to much time in a liberal bubble, but what a despicable prick he is.
If I'm your idea of a non-liberal, you must really be beyond the fringe. Sir, I am a bona fide liberal, all my friends are liberals, and I am inside the tent pissing in.
Wokka-wokka!
If Gore enters the race now (which I doubt he will), I bet the Right would smear him and say we can't trust someone who won the Nobel Peace Prize to be strong and stand up for the security of our country.
I had forgotten about Kaplan for the reasons you lay out in 12. Fair enough.
14 is right, too -- I should amend my comment to say that while obviously Gore wouldn't have invaded Iraq and thus the U.S. (and the world, and perhaps especially Iraqis) would be better off, the political atmosphere in this country would be hugely worse. I can only imagine what an unchastened bunch of crazies in the House would have gotten up to with Al Gore in the White House on 9/11. (Impeachment again, maybe?)
Apostropher has it right in 5. And to give the Swedes some credit, this is much better kiss-off gesture than the Nobels to Carter and Pinter. They're learning!
On Kaus/Edwards: Let me flagrantly violate the analogy ban. If the Enquirer reports that Romney cheats on his wife, that's not news? Seems like a story to me.
Gore won't enter the race because everyone thinks Hillary is unstoppable. Which probably does make her unstoppable. Unless Gore enters the race.
I should confess that I didn't vote for Gore because I lived in a safely blue state and Joe Lieberman, even at the time, gave me the crawling willies. President Holy Joe! It could have happened.
General claim: if X enters/is in the race, and X is a Democrat, the right will smear him/her and say [something bad about X].
Why do people say Hitchens is a good writer? I find his prose pointlessly convoluted, and untangling one of his sentences at best just reveals a single piece of snark or rather obvious observation.
Gore has to endorse one of the candidates, doesn't he?
Wouldn't that make that candidate the front-runner?
Are you upset that other news outlets didn't run with the Weekly World News' alien endorsements?
This story is news for any outlet that can confirm the facts through their own reporting or that of sources they trust. Does the Enquirer fit in that category?
Just a reminder that if you want to get out of the liberal bubble, you can always read the Chomskyite types.
Enquirer pieces are ignorable and usually best ignored, though it's permissible for partisan hacks to pick them up. Kaus claims not only not to be a Republican partisan hack, but even to be a Democrat. But he functions as a Republican party hack.
If the Enquirer reports that Romney cheats on his wife, that's not news? Seems like a story to me.
Sure, a story about a story (an unsubstantiated rumour, for example) is a story. That doesn't make it news.
28: IA has been allowed to become too familiar with our ancient national ways. If she returns to her native land, we will never be safe.
We have been heavily infiltrated, right here on Unfogged. Does the name "Colonel Sutherland Brown" mean nothing to you people?
31: C'mon Rob. This is teh awesome.
I can only imagine what an unchastened bunch of crazies in the House would have gotten up to with Al Gore in the White House on 9/11.
I can't help thinking that they would have gone to work, piddled around, and gone home, as on any other day.
38: It's probably relevant that I really enjoy DFW and Salman Rushdie as well, and find convoluted prose to be its own reward.
baa, it is a regrettable fact of life that there is something to what you say: in our debased media culture, a National Enquirer story of this sort is news, on some level.
However, Kaus is not a news reporter, and what he's doing would be despicable if he were doing it to Romney, too. But he wouldn't do it to Romney.
Hitchens on religion = entertaining (see TV appearance after Falwell's death.)
Hitchens on anything relating to the real world = tedious.
If Gore won, 9/11 doesn't happen, and Osama bin Laden would probably be dead. Also, the extreme right was losing hope after 8 years of Clinton. If you read the Weekly Standard back when it looked like Gore would win, you can tell they're trying to get used to diminished expectations about their future.
Hitchens wrote on Mother Theresa and Lady Di, and they both died within a week of one another. Coincidence?
Bad news comes in threes, and #3 was President Mobuto. I bet Hitchens wrote about him too.
If Gore won, 9/11 doesn't happen
I kinda doubt this, actually.
Maybe we could get Hitchens to write about Mickey Kaus?
I can only imagine what an unchastened bunch of crazies in the House would have gotten up to with Al Gore in the White House on 9/11.
Assuming, of course, that Gore, not being a lazy, ignorant goof-off, would still have let 9/11 happen.
If the Enquirer reports that Romney cheats on his wife, that's not news?
If the homeless crazy guy on the corner says that George Bush is controlled by a sentient tapeworm that lives in his intestines, that's not news? I think it sounds like a fascinating story and we should all blog about how awesome it will be when the autopsy proves it's true.
You know what? If the Enquirer ran a story that Romney had cheated on his wife I'd probably say the Enquirer had better have good lawyers and I would be hard pressed to take it seriously. It's the fucking Enquirer. After this break, we bring you the shocking truth: that kid Michelle Malkin wants to beat up for being on the radio station she can hear through one of her fillings is actually Bat Boy!
51 - Dick Cheney as a member of the Monster Society of Evil?
Does anyone read Kaus at this point, other than some Back-To-Mexico types and liberals looking to ridicule him? I can't imagine that he's actually bringing in any substantial amount of traffic in to Slate. Does he just have photos of a naked Jacob Weisberg in a motel room with a chicken or something?
(Impeachment again, maybe?)
That's what I was thinking the other day; Gore would have been impeached after 9/11 (which I don't think he would have prevented) and we'd be living in something that was even more of a banana republic than what we have now. There are no good outcomes when a significant portion of the population doesn't believe in democracy or the constitution!
43: I think that there are institutional problems with American political culture that transcend the presidency, and those problems were going to exist in a Gore administration and would have to play out to their conclusion. In other words, what ogged said in 4.
That said, the particular idiosyncratic way this has played out - Iraq, New Orleans, 9/11 - is a product of the particular buffoon who was elected.
Gore wins in 2000: 9/11 happens (but no one in the administration pretends it was a surprise); Gore's popularity peaks at 68% in the weeks immediately following, then the Right finds their collective sack and starts savaging the White House for 'letting it happen'. Half a Patriot Act gets passed, Right says 'nanny state take away muh guns waaaaah!' War in Afghanistan, no invasion of Iraq. ObL killed at Tora Bora, Right claims it was to keep him from talking about the White House's complicity in 9/11. GOP presidential and congressional landslide in 2004 -- not sure who the president is but Cheney is the VP. War in Iraq begins 2007.
In your heart you know I'm right.
57: Fuck, I wish that wasn't absolutely and entirely convincing.
57: LB beat me to it, but yeah, you're absolutely right on.
Speaking of escaping the liberal bubble, I came across this theological joke a while ago:
"A Barthian is standing on the top of a cliff with a liberal and a member of the Religious Right. Whom does he push off first?
"Answer: The liberal. Business before pleasure."
OK, Protestantism isn't a barrel of monkeys for everybody, but my father laughed and laughed when I told him.
There's only one way to settle this, people, and that's by divining the true history of the Gore-as-president universe through the arcane scryings of the I Ching.
Why wouldn't Gore have prevented 9/11? The Clinton administration were the only people in America who took al Queda seriously. They had been worried about an al Queda attack for years. At the time I was sure that this was some sinister attempt by the National Security State to ensure its continued relevance, but there is no question that they thought of bin Laden as a threat.
Jesus, if I ever happen to meet Hitchens I have a conversation opener. I wonder if he's tought about it.
We have a lot in common -- alcoholism, cynicism, and an unsavory reputation. I wouldn't be surprised if he was up on the health benefits of masturbation too.
19, 34, 61: Seriously, what Emerson said. If you feel the need to expand your horizons, try to expand them to the left for a change. There's no shortage of interaction between liberals and the right.
If Gore had won, he wouldn't have won the Nobel, I tell you what.
62 - Hawthorne Abendsen says that President Tugwell would have won WWII.
constitution!
I can't believe ogged just used an exclamation mark.
65: Left and right aren't the only directions. That's why the old cartographers referred to "the compass rose," rather than, say, "the compass shoelace."
Why wouldn't Gore have prevented 9/11?
You know, I'd be confident in saying that a Gore Administration would have worked harder at preventing it, and have been paying more attention to the issue -- I'd bet there wouldn't have been briefings like "Obama determined to strike within the US" that just got ignored. But that still doesn't mean we would have found and stopped the relevant 19 individuals, or had people in planes and airports ready to react appropriately to stop them.
The odds of it not happening would have gone up, but that doesn't mean it wouldn't have happened.
65: Liberals talk way too much with libertarians.
"Obama determined to strike within the US"
snrk.
There are no good outcomes when a significant portion of the population doesn't believe in democracy or the constitution!
This is so true, but believing this leads to complete fatalism. Is there any effective means of consciousness raising? Simple propaganda seems to work, but I hate Michael Moore.
like "Obama determined to strike
I can't believe I did that. It really is an unfortunate coincidence of names.
OK, so the claim, just to be clear, is that if the National Enquirer claims to have emails proving that a GOP candidate is having an affair, that's not news, we should ignore it, and someone who reports on it is a low-life. And the reason is: the National Enquirer is an unreliable source, and can usefully be analogized to the Weekly World News.
You'd think Kaus would have learned after that Villaraigosa thing blew up in his face...
Simple propaganda seems to work, but I hate Michael Moore.
Simple solution? Get over yourself.
OK, so the claim, just to be clear, is that if the National Enquirer claims to have emails proving that a GOP candidate is having an affair, that's not news, we should ignore it, and someone who reports on it is a low-life.
Nope, the claim is that the Enquirer isn't reliable enough to justify repeating its claims as truth unless they can be confirmed. If you, Reporter X, want to start from an Enquirer story and see if there's something to it, knock yourself out.
My understanding is that the Enquirer is actually pretty reliable on these things.
Baa, unpacking your claim slightly, the Enquirer says it's seen emails in which this woman claims to have an affair with Edwards, which is not quite the same as emails proving that Edwards has had an affair.
78 posted without seeing 77, with which I agree.
63: He tried and failed to stop it. Sometimes you eat the b'ar, sometimes the b'ar eats you.
In some of the Gore-2000 timelines, it was a close thing. In some it wasn't. In some, some of the hijackers were recognized and not all four planes took off. In 6% of the Gore timelines, we still have one WTC tower standing (and a lovely memorial park on the site of the other). In some of them, AQ knew we were on their tail and moved up their schedule using only two planes, and the WTC went down on 8/28. In others, some of their cells were disrupted and they had to regroup, bide their time, and attack on 9/10/2002. In none of the Gore-presidency timelines that I've observed so far did the attack not occur at all, nor fail to kill at least 1000 people.
There's 'pretty reliable' in the 'not the Weekly World News just writing fiction, without pretending to report' category, and 'pretty reliable' in the 'the fact that they've reported this makes it true' category. I really wouldn't put a lot of publications in the latter box, would you? But a supermarket tabloid is a little farther outside that box than most newspapers.
74: Fox News' work here is done.
To me the point is that Kaus claims not to be a hack, and even to be a Democrat.
I would gladly circulate Enquirer rumors about Romney, but I don't claim to be a Republican or a serious journalist either.
baa-
The National Enquirer has reported a couple of times over the last 18 months that Bush is off the wagon - zero MSM coverage. The mere idea is unspeakable on "serious" TV. While there's been desultory discussion of this on liberal blogs, there's no outcry that the MSM is "covering up" for Bush.
I strongly suspect that at least one major media outlet has done some digging into the Nat'l Enquirer story, and that, if there's any there there, it will get coverage. But the NE does not lead news coverage, for a variety of reasons legitimate and il-.
On the broader issue, it would be nice if the MSM actually learned to leave this shit alone. Extramarital relations between consenting adults should be a nonstory except in exceptional circumstances. We've seen this movie before, and it didn't end well.
Many people (including me until recently) have the understanding that the Enquirer is reliable on these things, but where does that understanding come from? I think it's some media strategy by the Enquirer themselves that makes us think that. It has just the right amount of contrarianism that makes believing it tempting to certain weak-willed individuals (i.e. me).
75: If I read the story right, they've got emails referring to a guy named 'John', and the person who gave the emails to the Enquirer, a friend of the woman involved, says it's John Edwards. That's a little thin to run with as news, I'd say.
People tell me that Pierre Elliot Trudeau actually gained support when people found out that his wife was screwing the Rolling Stones. What a weird country.
Liberals talk way too much with libertarians.
Not only do liberals talk way too much with libertarians, the ones they talk with aren't even the really interesting libertarians. The liberal/libertarian conversation you see is mostly liberal/economic conservative conversation. I'm more interested in libertarians who've staked out positions on the drug war, on the military-industrial complex, on foreign policy, on prison and police reform, that are considerably to the left of where the Yglesiases and Kleins of the blogosphere are. But liberal bloggers are a lot more squeamish about engaging with views to their left than they are with talking to Random Right-wing Hack #379 about why poor people deserve to get sick.
As far as talking to actual leftists - or even to ordinary liberals who take a left-of-DC stance on issues like the environment, education and labor - you hear little to nothing. "Out of the liberal bubble" never means Andrew Levine or even Brad Plumer - it's always Megan McArdle and Tyler Cowen.
Many people (including me until recently) have the understanding that the Enquirer is reliable on these things, but where does that understanding come from?
I also think that there's a lot of 'open secrets' that make reliability on a category of gossipy stuff about politicians that wouldn't make it into the mainstream press possible. (Or, really, that there used to be such a category back before the Clinton era. Now, I don't know.) I don't know specifically from the Enquirer, but I'm thinking about things like Spy back in 1992 publishing that oddly enough, Bush, as well as Clinton, had had an affair with a woman named Jennifer.
The National Enquirer has reported a couple of times over the last 18 months that Bush is off the wagon - zero MSM coverage
That's news! I didn't know that! If a Kaus-style blogger wants to point it out in a "why doesn't someone follow up on this fashion" (which is Kaus' gig) that would be absolutely fine with me.
Now maybe the view is that Kaus' gig basically shouldn't exist, and instead there should basically be two levels of the press: Enquirer-style publications, and serious journalists who follow-up and do work and never repeat what the Enquirer said until it's verified. I am not so sure what's wrong with there being an an intermediate niche, where a guy says: "hey, National Enquirer reported X, seems kinda credible, someone should follow up on this."
87: The Enquirer made a decision (I think after being sued successfully by Carol Burnett) that they were going to get out of the business of just making up crazy shit. So they do make an effort nowadays for some level of factual reliability.
And what JRoth said about the Enquirer reporting on Bush's drinking.
81 is written funnily, but I actually don't buy that stopping 9/11 is as unlikely as it says. We had a LOT of hints, and 2 or 3 very solid leads (the FBI agent from MN, for instance).
I don't know how resilent and/or multiply redundant that kind of terrorist operation is - if Atta is rolled up in August '01, does 9/11 happen, does 9/10/02 happen, or do a dozen other guys get arrested within a month and it's all over? I think the most likely scenario (without actually catching anyone in advance) is that security/alertness is raised high enough that not all 4 planes are hijacked and/or reach their targets. Christ, just a faster CAP scramble could have prevented 2 of the 3 hits.
But that may just be the human tendency towards assuming the mean.
Notice the threadjack, who did the jacking and/or sustains it, the particular direction it took.
Just saying. They're all alike.
I trust the Enquirer to be as close to accurate as almost any paper in the country. But I don't really care if he had an affair.
If a Kaus-style blogger wants to point it out in a "why doesn't someone follow up on this fashion" (which is Kaus' gig) that would be absolutely fine with me.
The MSM sometimes has its agenda foisted on it by the National Enquirer, and that's a problem that's difficult for the media to control. I'm genuinely sympathetic to the MSM quandary on that one.
Kaus, however, chooses his own agenda, and consciously chooses to use his influence to worsen the MSM dilemma. That sucks.
Was it a national scandal when the Enquirer reported that Bush I was having an affair?
I think the argument about Kaus is more that he's a little liquid shit and we'd all be better off and smarter if we never saw another word he wrote, but I'd be happy to argue that he's a racist hack instead.
Gore wins in 2000: 9/11 happens (but no one in the administration pretends it was a surprise); Gore's popularity peaks at 68% in the weeks immediately following, then the Right finds their collective sack and starts savaging the White House for 'letting it happen'. Half a Patriot Act gets passed, Right says 'nanny state take away muh guns waaaaah!' War in Afghanistan, no invasion of Iraq. ObL killed at Tora Bora, Right claims it was to keep him from talking about the White House's complicity in 9/11. GOP presidential and congressional landslide in 2004 -- not sure who the president is but Cheney is the VP. War in Iraq begins 2007.
Gore shifts 10,000 votes in 2000, bags Florida, wins election in electoral college reasonably handily. Precedes on basis on doing something about Global Warming and lockbox and whatnot. Also doing something about the electircal situation in California. Stock market continues long fall. Gore blamed for bad economy and having taxes too high. FBI bags one set of hijackers, and misses other three. One tower goes down, the other remains standing. Congress investigates failures of Gore administration to stop terrorists, while demanding that he do something about Saddam Hussein who is obviously behind it all. To forestall the issue, Gore goes into Afghanistan using lightweight attack [the fashion right at that microsecond], just misses bin Laden, but gets Mullah Omar. Leans heavily on Pakistan to get bin Laden. No go. Congress passes resolution demanding invasion of Iraq. Conspiracy theories abound. Gore puts pressure on Hussein, Hussein gives somewhat under pressure, Gore launches bombing campaign against Iraq. Hussein not killed, Congress demands further action against Iraq. US cuts deal with Iran, puts together international coalition to invade Iraq and places large forces in Darfur. (The latter campaign is heavily opposed in Congress.) Iraq invaded. Invasion is initially successful, then insurgency ramps. Insurgency in Darfur, low-level war with Sudan. Many investigations of Gore administration. Gore generally blamed for failure to get OBL, capture Hussein, invade Pakistan, kill Iraqis hard enough, long recession just ending. Situation in Afghanistan stable due to agreement with Iran and large numbers of forces present. Oil imports from Middle East in steep decline due to high gas taxes, but nobody cares. Loses reelection campaign to Guilani who demands total war (including war on Syria and Iran) in Middle East, aggressive action against terrorism suspects.
max
['That's better.']
99:Republicans, conservatives.
baa attempting a Malkinesque distraction from Gore/PO/GW to a smear against a Democrat.
Bob, the threadjack actually was kicked off by Apo.
Guys like Apo are all alike, too. I'm just not sure what other guys are like Apo. But if there were any, they'd be all alike.
Bob, the threadjack actually was kicked off by Apo.
Another fact-based procedural liberal, slowly killing the republic.
102:Gore never had a chance of becoming President after election day. Either the Florida House and/or the DeLay House would have installed Bush. Now whether Scalia was right in thinking the the safest institution for taking the heat of a stolen election was SCOTUS and whether some of us, well me, are misguided for preferring that the contradictions should have been heightened to the maximal extent is a matter of taste.
Whether the country would have better been served with a even more obviously illegitimate Bush Presidency is a question process liberals should consider. But Bush was going to be President.
104:I included sustains, as I followed the thread the Kaus/Edwards sub seemed supported most enthusiastically by baa.
If we had gone down to Florida, and kicked the ass of those "rioters" who shut down the recount, Gore would have been President.
I can't defend 109 as being actually true. I like the idea, though.
Why do I get the feeling that people are going to be boring me with arguments about 2000 well into my quadruple-bypass-and-Plavix years? Honestly, you guys all think you're the Cathars, but to the virgin ear it sounds more like the squabbles of minor heretics in the streets of Roman Palestine.
If we had gone down to Florida, and kicked the ass of those "rioters" who shut down the recount, Gore would have been President the media would have presented us as the rioters and insisted that the whole mess be brought to a close as soon as possible.
It's all about the media.
90: Just as a factual matter, both people you mention spent a while promoting Brad Plumer's blog years ago.
But we would have kicked some well-deserving ass, Ned. You have to learn to enjoy the fringe benefits.
process liberals
"Alfred North Whitehead in '08!"
Let's not jump to actually endorsing him in a particular year, Populuxe. First you have to test the waters, then prime the pump, then plant the seed.
little liquid shit
"shitstain" is better.
116: You're going to get Alfred North Whitehead pregnant?
Bob, you are being a silly goose.
Even were we to stipulate that for whatever reason I am 100% committed to the ruin of Democratic fortunes (which really, I am not -- political affiliation and ideology plays a relatively minor role in my concept of self) I assure you that I would have no illusions that what I write here would contribute in any way to the success of my (malign) designs. Alas, commenting here is not an efficient method of effecting politics change in the outside world. It's just a conversation between people who may, or may not, find each other's comments enjoyable. I have acquired enough interest in the conversation here that I can be interested, amused, or intrigued. When people say things that strike me as weird or funny, I comment back. That's all. No master plan.
I'm just not sure what other guys are like Apo.
My brother. And, uhh, I think that's about it.
I wish I had a more substantive comment, but I'm just really, really happy for Gore.
On the Edwards' thing, there's nothing wrong with wondering why no one's following up on the tabloids if you regularly think the tabloids are reliable and have good reason to think they are reliable in this case, but for crying out loud, if there was e-mail proof, everyone would already be on it and we'd all kill him for cheating on Elizabeth. So I think it's pretty reasonable to conclude that Kaus is a hack.
111: In the interest of comity I won't make my routine response to easily-bored morons. It's easy not to care about elections if you're wishing hopelessly for 5% of the vote.
27, 35: A blog full of pedants and nobody points out that the Peace Prize is awarded by Norwegians, not Swedes.
124: Like there's a difference.
Dr. Marhsall says: By every just measure, Gore won the presidency in 2000 only to have George W. Bush steal it from him with the critical assistance of the US Supreme Court.
Bush v. Gore is wrongly decided in a number of ways, but my understanding is that there were legitimate standards by which the recount could have been conducted (if SCOTUS hadn't illegitimately stopped it) which would have given Bush the win anyway. Am I just wrong about that?
It's always been my assumption that all of the Unfogged commenters, not to mention the bloggers, actually are Al Gore. This site is just a Gore multiple personality debate (not unlike a chess master, playing multiple boards against himself).
Given that, please run Mr. Gore.
That was a subtle joke that we all got, Bave Dee.
Just as a factual matter, both people you mention spent a while promoting Brad Plumer's blog years ago.
They link to Plumer once every couple months. They link to Megan McArdle on a daily basis. There's a difference here.
If I recall correctly, there were ways it could have played out that would have given a Bush win, but not a lot. Any consistent statewide standard went to Gore -- to get a Bush win you had to freeze the totals in some counties under one standard, and recount others under another. But there was some reasonably plausible 'it coulda happened like that' route to get to the inconsistent counting method that would have given a Bush win.
115 is cracking me up and will continue to do so all day. Society for Field Being here I come!
126: But of course if you're talking justice, not 'how might it have technically played out' the Palm Beach Buchanan votes settle it for Gore. (I'm not saying that there was a legal way to count them for Gore, just that there were enough of them to swamp any question of 'If everyone who made it to the polls had their vote counted as they had intended to cast it, who would have won?")
But wasn't it true that based on the Gore camp's own call for selected recounts, in targeted highly Democratic districts, that they would have lost? Or lost based on the bizzare way in which the votes ended up being counted. In other words, the final vote recount, I think, showed Gore winning statewide but still losing if only the areas he wanted recounted were. If that makes sense. Or I'm just wrong.
But wasn't it true that based on the Gore camp's own call for selected recounts, in targeted highly Democratic districts, that they would have lost? Or lost based on the bizzare way in which the votes ended up being counted. In other words, the final vote recount, I think, showed Gore winning statewide but still losing if only the areas he wanted recounted were. If that makes sense. Or I'm just wrong.
129: Maybe Plumer's competition, while the others are complimentary. Who cares? Though I don't really know why Plumer doesn't get much more love, except that maybe he doesn't update often enough.
129: Not what I'm talking about. I mean that Yglesias used to write posts about "Why aren't more people reading Brad Plumer?" If Yglesias hadn't switched blogs sixty billion times I'd try to find them for you.
The inept and jellified Gore response in 2000 is the big mystery for me. Sometimes I really think that both Gore and Kerry found horses' heads in their beds. That might explain the Democratic leadership too.
As Palast has reported, there was a lot of voter denial in upper Florida which never made the national news at all. Jesse Jackson was ready to get on it, but the Gore team called him off (same way Lieberman conceded the late military ballots). Ten or twenty years of Jesse Jackson ridicule paid off right there.
126:An accurate count, accepted by both sides, was unavailable. Florida was a tie. There was, IIRC, also a deadline approaching for the Florida legislature, IOW, a slate of electors had to be chosen. I was bored by Dec 1 and I knew Bush was going to be inaugurated. As did everyone else, which determined coverage. In retrospect, Al Gore is to be admired for continuing the fight for the sake of the fight.
Al Gore conceded, and the Democrats in Congress did not contest the electors as vigorously as they could have. A lot of players were involved in Bush becoming President without blood in the streets.
But SCOTUS deliberately chose to be the fall guy, and apparently succeeded. I find that boring.
Man, I love walking into a room, yelling "Gore would [or would not] have won a just recount!" and walking out. Works every time.
Following up on 129: And there's been no attempt on the part of these bloggers to link to actual leftists. No Chomskyites, no socialists, no one much farther to the left of the American Prospect. Consciously or unconsciously, the left has been written out of the conversation.
"present Democratic Congressional leadership"
Christ, you people are totally going to ruin this glorious moment of wingnut head explosions by dragging us all back through 2000.
Aren't you the one who said that reading Plumer is too depressing? Anyway, he doesn't get the love because he often points out systemic, and not just partisan, failures, and no one except boring leftist scolds wants to read that stuff.
The winger condemned the Nobel Peace Prize, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the U.N., the Amish, Gandhi, and practically every other non-warmongering institution in the world decades ago. This will change nothing.
What?!? The Amish vote Republican!
Not that I've gone looking much, but most of the outrage has seemed to take the tone of "What! That asshole didn't deserve the Nobel Prize!" rather than "The Nobel Peace Prize is a pathetically bankrupt liberal anti-Bush anti-American blah blah blah Yasser Arafat!!!!"
143:no one except boring leftist scolds wants to read that stuff.
I read Plumer. Also Agonist, American Leftist, Arthur Silber, and other leftist scolds with systemic pessimism.
Does having "Total Dick Head" on my blogroll compensate?
124- I said nothing in 35 about who awards the peace prize, all I said was Al looks Swedish. Kind of like the Iranian Swede a couple posts down.
This will change nothing.
Neither does giving wingers a swift kick to the nuts, but it sure is fun.
Didn't progressives (of whatever stripe) pretty much write off this prize when they gave one to Kissenger? There have been other laughable ones since then, too. Giving the current administration an international finger may be fun and all, but it can't redeem this committee.
On Florida, I think part of the confusion is a result of Gore's efforts to specify which votes needed to be recounted and in what fashion they needed to be recounted. If your standards is: what if the vote was conducted the way Gore asked, then he loses some of those scenarios. If your standard is: What is the clear legal intent of Florida voters (granted enough time to determine that intent) then Gore wins.
The key issue (if my memory is right, which it may not) was "overvotes." That is, people who both voted for Gore and wrote his name in on the same ballot. Those weren't counted - and I'm pretty sure Gore wasn't insisting that they be counted - but they would have put him over the top.
147: When you're raving, sometimes you forget you're priorities.
The Amish refused to respond with hatred when a gunman killed some Amish students in a school. One of the warbloggers ripped them savagely for that.
No, no, I do sometimes forget that I'm priorities. I mean a lot to some people.
152: Right. What makes that argument kind of bullshit is that it freezes 'what Gore asked for' at a stage before anyone looked at the votes. Before recounting started, the assumption was that a machine-unreadable 'undervote' might be an unambiguously interpretable vote for a candidate, but a machine-unreadable 'overvote' couldn't possibly be. On looking at the actual votes, the existence of quite a lot of 'vote for a candidate, write in the same candidate' overvotes, which were obviously countable, became clear. But just because Gore's campaign wasn't psychic enough to guess this before recounts started doesn't mean that it makes sense to say that those votes wouldn't have been counted if the other side hadn't been fighting tooth and nail to stop it.
Okay, no one else should say anything else about 2000 because I'll talk about it forever if the conversation goes on, and it makes me queasy and unhappy.
138: That "deadline" is based on SCOTUS's bizarre reading of Florida law such that it's highest priority became compliance with the federal Electoral Count Act for no reason at all.
140: Some of the Crooked Timber bloggers were, at one point or another in their lives, much further to the left than the American Prospect, are still influenced by those views, and get linked regularly.
I do agree that "American Prospect-types" (though we are just talking about Yglesias and Klein, right?) don't spend any time trying to refute people who favor the abolition of private property or a 100% tax on income over a certain level. But I guess I would say that's because there is no viable American left in that sense, and than you'd probably say the reason they aren't viable is because they don't get much attention, and I guess you'd be right that that's one reason.
143: Yes, but I kind of like German cars, so I find him disconcerting. And I still read him. Just not on days when I'm looking forward to killing a tree for the sheer joy of it all. But what about the True Sons of the Left, like the Academics? Or even normal people?
Okay, no one else should say anything else about 2000 because I'll talk about it forever if the conversation goes on, and it makes me queasy and unhappy.
Gore would've won if he wasn't such a boring inauthentic exaggerator. Also, I have noticed he is fat.
Liberals talk way too much with libertarians.
We do? I react to libertarians the way I react to crazy people; smile insincerely, slowly disengage.
most of the outrage has seemed to take the tone of "What! That asshole didn't deserve the Nobel Prize!" rather than "The Nobel Peace Prize is a pathetically bankrupt liberal anti-Bush anti-American blah blah blah Yasser Arafat!!!!"
They're holding some ammo in case he decides to run. I'd be totally amused if he did enter the race now (I'm sure he won't), both because it would be entertaining to have a Nobel laureate running for President, and because the right-wing reaction to that fact would be hilarious.
In a fucked-up oh shit here we go again way, of course.
32: Gore has to endorse one of the candidates, doesn't he?
No, not before the convention, he doesn't.
48: Let's aim for one, preferably two, Supreme Court justices. But Hitch has to hold off until Jan 21, 2009.
Gore has to endorse one of the candidates, doesn't he?
I ask purely for information: what would happen if Gore said, "I wouldn't trust any of the Democratic candidates to fetch the milk. I'm asking to to vote for whoever gets the nomination purely because they're less likely to kill us all than the Republicans."
Washerdreyer, #157 makes you seem ignorant.
I would hurt myself laughing. Can't see it affecting anything much -- anyone agreeing with him is voting Dem for those reasons anyway, and anyone who'd be shocked is unreachable.
164: I agree that I'm ignorant of the currently existing American left.
do you want me to take you by the hand and walk you over to The Nation, In These Times, or Mother Jones?
The Amish refused to respond with hatred when a gunman killed some Amish students in a school. One of the warbloggers ripped them savagely for that.
I recently bought Amish Grace. I'm really looking forward to reading it after I finish, The Coldest Winter, by Halberstam.
If you're a Chomskyite, you could read Z, which I eventually grew to find comically predictable. Mother Jones is a pretty great magazine.
No, but I do find it helpful that you clarified that you mean the sorts of views regularly stated in outlets like Mother Jones, In These Times, and The Nation.
I find it odd that nobody ever links to The Agonist. That alone makes me question whether "left" bloggers really want to expand the scope of ideas leftward.
167, 171: I let my subscription to The Nation lapse after I started reading blogs regularly, because blogs played the same role in my information diet that The Nation did.
Does this mean that my news filters have moved towards the center?
171:There is a lot of blogospheric history, some of personal, connected to the Agonist masthead. Some writers are famously prickly.
They are often apocalyptic & polemical, reluctant Democrats at best, pessimistic about policy and the apparatus of policy, pretty much indifferent (at best) to peer review and dialogue with the big bloggers.
I find it hard to criticize anyone's linking policies. There is a lot to read out there, and for those who write a lot and wish to build & support the community, it must be maddening.
The Agonist writers regularly guest-post at Firedoglake, athough I don't seem able to find time to read FDL. FDL seems polemical about news I have read eleswhere, without sufficient added value. I am probably wrong, but if you don't read a blog first or religiously, many can look that way in your RSS feeds. Perhaps the Agonist looks like that to the big bloggers.
I'm sorry, I really can't afford to scroll through all the comments right now, but I just have to say that I was under the impression that there is one solid piece of evidence that Gore might have prevented 9/11. If I'm not mistaken according to Richard Clarke, the commission that Gore headed up wanted to come up with the Cockpit-locking rules that we now have in place, and he wanted them, but Congressional pressure---Republican Congressional pressure---led to Clinton tabling such rules until further investigation. President Gore would have had a lot more leverage in pushing that regulation forward---especially b/c he certainly would have actually read the August intelligence reports.
"124: Like there's a difference."
technically, a swede is a norwegian with their brains blown out.
As the well known piece of deductive logic states:
1. a swede is a norwegian with their brains blown out.
2. John F. Kennedy had his brains blown out
3. John F. Kennedy is way smarter than George Bush.
Hitchens on religion = entertaining (see TV appearance after Falwell's death.)
I loathe Falwell as much as teh next person, but I think that Hitchens' claim that religion is per se evil seemed a bit over the top.
I really wonder what Christmas with his brother Peter is like, since Pete happens to be a right-wing Tory, was anti-war from the start, and is solidly Christian.
