BOO ! AND OTHER HALLOWEEN GREETINGS !


And then this is enough to make any poor trick-or-treater scared witless:


- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 12:34 PM |

 
HOW TO MAKE SURE YOU WIN AN ELECTION EVEN IF YOU LOSE ***Updated***
UPDATE 10/31/06 6:44am: In case you thought I was kidding, here are today's batch of headlines supporting the Democratic election storyline:
CNN - Poll: Stumping Not Helping Bush Popularity
NYT - Democrats Are Seen to Gain in State Races
AP - Voters Are Challenged in NY Race (those evil Republicand are already cheating even before the election!)
AP - Poll: Webb leads Allen in Va. race and Polls: Menendez leads Kean in N.J. race (AP)
NYT - A G.O.P. Leader and Star Struggles for Traction

Also, can anyone doubt that, if the story I linked to yesterday in this post "Dying to Vote", (which brought in the angry trolls even though I was being tongue in cheek) had data showing that by a 4 to 1 margin dead Republicans cast more votes than dead Democrats, that the headline of the article would have screamed that fact?


It's happening and anyone who is paying attention should be able to see it. The media have been spinning it for weeks now.

We have seen headline after headline proclaiming that the Republicans are in trouble and while there is some truth to this assertion, I am bored to death at hearing the media's broken record. Every day there is a new take on it; a new perspective we might not have thought about. A new poll proclaiming it every day and everywhere across the land. 24/7. We are innundated with stories about how everyone is deserting the Republican ship; how the Democrats are finally and justifiably poised to take back control; how the chances of maintaining a Republican majority are nil; zero; absolutely impossible.

The polls say so.

Democratic strategists say so.

The New York Times and The Washington Post say so. CNN says so. All the major networks say so. They say it every day, so they must be very very sure. which is pretty amazing don't you think, particularly since the election hasn't been held yet?

Pundits on the left proclaim that there is no way the Democrats can lose....

Except....except....

And this is where things get interesting for a psychiatrist. Because, if the red flag wasn't already waving in a psychiatrist's brain after such a sustained and straightfoward manipulation of one's opinion (ever heard of the saying that makes a person suspicious when someone dost protest a little bit too much?); then the next part of this little dance of manipulation would not be so sinister. Not only are the flags waving, but the alarm bells are going off.

The exception that the political left wants to make sure all of you retards out there are perfectly clear about is this: They want you to think that the only way the Republicans could keep their majority; the only way the Democrats would not "sweep" and take over in the 2006 midterm elections next week is...wait for it...if the Republicans cheated.

The first meme was simply annoying. The giddy self-congratulations; the constant reaffirmations by this and that poll, dutifully reported in the Democratic propaganda outlets at the Times and Post. The never-ending dissection of the public's obvious dissatisfaction with all things Bush and Republican.

Basically, I could just ignore such stupidity; particularly since I don't believe in polls, except of course for the actual election itself, which is the ONLY POLL THAT EVER MATTERS--at least in a democracy.

But now we have the second meme emerging just in time to swamp the MSM with all the allegations of future voter fraud. Here are three points:

1. We have been hearing repeatedly about how electronic voting machines can be manipulated. Now magically, days before the election, several videos have been released that show the testimony of some computer "expert" testifying before a Congressional Committee about how this could have been done in Ohio in 2004. And you know how he knows this? He knows it because the actual result of the election did not conform to the Exit Polls.

You got that? The Exit Polls are now to be regarded as more accurate than the actual election. Can anyone out there tell me the number of ways that Exit Polls might be able to be manipulated? I can think of several hundred, and not one of the manipulations would be "by changing the source code" (as the hired gun says in the video). All you'd have to do is get a few deranged leftists to interview the right (excuse me, the left) people for the accusations to start flying.

2. Then we have the demon-possessed people like Kos, who has helpfully set up a "voting fraud clearinghouse" in anticipation of all the Republican cheating.

3. Of course, there is the mandatory manipulation of Google, so that searches for "election fraud" helpfully have at the top of the page articles that assert that the 2004 election was "stolen"-- all of them notable leftist sites.

Folks, what we are witnessing is a coordinated attempt on the part of people who not only are not content to let the process of democracy unfold, but who intend to make sure that it unfolds in the proper way...or else. I am sure that the lawyers and rioters are standing by, awaiting instructions to make their moves in case things need to helped along in the correct direction.

I don't know about you, but I can't stand to be manipulated this way. I am good at recognizing it because I have worked with Borderlines, Narcissists, and Sociopaths for the last 30 years of my life in my profession. But never have I seen such a crazed and coordinated effort to make sure a particular political side wins the election, even if they lose. Because, all that will matter is their allegations of fraud. Truth will be ablsolutely irrelevant. History will be absolutely irrelevant. The left's documented election fraud in elections gone by will be conveniently forgotten, never to be mentioned--either this week before the midterms; or after the Kos Kidz make up their list of Republican evils.

No one will remember that in Wisconsin, there was documented fraud committed by the Democrats that was sufficient to throw that state to Kerry by a margin by less than the margin Bush won in Ohio. There was no outrage then about the Democrats duplicity. There will be little outrage this time around.

But let me tell you something about this clever little manipulation. You have heard me use the term psychological projection quite a bit on this blog. It is a very useful defense mechanism, especially for people who like to think of themselves as morally and intellectually superior to the rest of us mortals (as all the Cluster B personality types tend to do). This wonderful defense enable the people who use it to remain psychologically pure as they project their own deceitful intentions and despicable behavior onto someone else. You can think of it as "the best defense is a good offense".

John Fund, author a new book, Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy, released today from Encounter Books writes:

A note about partisanship: Since Democrats figure prominently in the vast majority of examples of election fraud described in Stealing Elections, some readers will jump to the conclusion that this is a one-sided attack on a single party. I do not believe Republicans are inherently more virtuous or honest than anyone else in politics, and I myself often vote Libertarian or independent. Voter fraud occurs in both Republican strongholds such as Kentucky hollows and Democratic bastions such as New Orleans. When Republicans operated political machines such as Philadelphia's Meehan dynasty up until 1951 or the patronage mill pf Nassau County, New York, until the 1990s, they were fully capable of bending — and breaking — the rules. Earl Mazo, the journalist who exhaustively documented the election fraud in Richard Daley's Chicago that may have handed Illinois to John F. Kennedy in the photo-finish 1960 election, says there was also "definitely fraud" in downstate Republican counties "but they didn't have the votes to counterbalance Chicago."

While they have not had the control of local and administrative offices necessary to tilt the rules improperly in their favor, Republicans have at times been guilty of intimidation tactics designed to discourage voting. In the 1980s, the Republican National Committee hired off-duty policemen to monitor polling places in New Jersey and Louisiana in the neighborhoods of minority voters, until the outcry forced them to sign a consent decree forswearing all such "ballot security" programs in the future.

In their book Dirty Little Secrets, Larry Sabato and co-author Glenn Simpson of the Wall Street Journal noted another factor in why Republican election fraud is less common. Republican base voters are middle-class and not easily induced to commit fraud, while "the pool of people who appear to be available and more vulnerable to an invitation to participate in vote fraud tend to lean Democratic." Some liberal activists that Sabato and Simpson interviewed even partly justified fraudulent electoral behavior on the grounds that because the poor and dispossessed have so little political clout, "extraordinary measures (for example, stretching the absentee ballot or registration rules) are required to compensate." Paul Herrison, director of the Center for American Politics at the University of Maryland, agrees that "most incidents of wide-scale voter fraud reportedly occur in inner cities, which are largely populated by minority groups."

Democrats are far more skilled at encouraging poor people — who need money — to participate in shady vote-buying schemes. "I had no choice. I was hungry that day," Thomas Felder told the Miami Herald in explaining why he illegally voted in a mayoral election. "You wanted the money, you were told who to vote for." Sometimes it's not just food that vote stealers are hungry for. A former Democratic congressman gave me this explanation of why voting irregularities more often crop up in his party's back yard: "When many Republicans lose an election, they go back into what they call the private sector. When many Democrats lose an election, they lose power and money. They need to eat, and people will do an awful lot in order to eat."

You see, both sides commit fraud and cheat. But what is so despicable and distasteful about the today's Democrats and the lunatic left that currently controls them is that they do it because they deeply and passionately believe they know what is best for this country. They do it because they are so much smarter, and know what's best for the all the rest of us. Whether we like it or not.

In fact, they do it because in their heart of hearts--deep down in the place they don't want to look at too closely-- they, themselves, are the worse kind of totalitarian/fascist thugs; but they have managed to delude themselves into believing that their virtuous and laudatory ends justify the use of any means on their part.

And, if they can't win honestly and fairly, they would just as soon drive this country into the ground if they must. But please, don't question their patriotism. They mean well.
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 6:36 PM |

 
FIDEL OF THE DEAD
All Day I Dream About Socialism. Well, not me...Fidel. He's likely worried about what's going to happen in his worker's paradise when he's no longer around. Supposedly he has made an appearance to dispel rumors of his death in what the Babalu Blog calls a "Bionic Tracksuit".

Or maybe he's just another zombie? Fidel of the Dead. It fits.
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 7:43 AM |

 
IT'S A MAD MAD MAD MAD WORLD...That Has The BBC In It
Honestly, the BBC is just looking out for the interests of all the oppressed people of the world! You know that. Hence the following exchange between one of the BBC "embeds" with the Taliban in Afghanistan. Yes, you read that correctly..."The BBC's David Loyn has had exclusive access to Taleban forces mobilised against British forces in Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan" (hat tip: Tim Blair):

Q: Do the Taleban foresee a time when they will lay down their arms and stop fighting? What is their objective and can they see a time when there will be peace?Edward McCarthy, Edinburgh, UK
'Islam' means 'the way of peace'. That is their dream. But it may not be achievable in any normal human context, Edward. Rather like the dreams of communism the struggle may be as important as the result. They were very surprised that when they brought relative security to most of the country in 1996 the international community did not congratulate them.

Or, how about this:

Q: Do you think that the Taleban will win the war? Can Afghanistan really become a democratic country with the help of the West?
Ramon Garway, Monrovia, Liberia I am short of a perfect crystal ball, Ramon. The Taleban were under-rated by everybody in the late 90s but they took most of the country. As it stands the war is unwinnable for Nato. Afghans say the West has had five years to install a functioning democracy and Afghanistan is still waiting. (emphasis mine)

I suppose one is not allowed to question Loyn's patriotism, or even his committment to..errr freedom, democracy, human rights etc. etc. I wonder what his political persuasion is--but, of course, that's not relevant when you are talking about objective journalism like his and the BBC's.

Read the entire piece to understand what a bunch of good and admirable people (misunderstood, clearly) we are fighting in Afghanistan. I'm sure it will make your day.
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 7:20 AM |

 
DYING TO VOTE
And here is the data to prove it. Then there's the real shocker:

Democrats who cast votes after they died outnumbered Republicans by more than 4 to 1. The reason: Most of them came from Democrat-dominated New York City, where the higher population produced more matches.

Of course, the dead are simply one more special interest group whose rights are being trampled on by Bush et al.

Or, it is just possible that there are a lot more zombies originating in the Democratic Party.... that would account for the discrepancy, I suppose.

Perhaps they are the oversampled Democrats that show up in all the polls these days.

- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 6:47 AM |

 
PROBLEMS WITH BLOGGER
So, what else is new? I'm having difficulty posting and don't know if this will get through or not. It took over an hour to get the Carnival posted below.

I'll keep trying....
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 10:21 AM |

 
CARNIVAL OF THE INSANITIES
Time for the weekly insanity update, where the insane, the bizarre, the ridiculous, and the completely absurd are highlighted for all to see! This has been a week of rare idiocy (as always!). So, if you want to remain sane, the best thing is to poke some fun at the more egregious absurdities.

Send all entries for next week's carnival to Dr. Sanity by 8 pm ET on Saturday for Sunday's Carnival. Only one post entry weekly per blogger, please. And you might read this before submitting an entry.

Thanks for all the submissions. I try to use as many as possible! SO MANY INSANITIES! SO LITTLE TIME!!!

1. Hey! The mufti might be on to something! What kind of creatures stalk and attack uncovered meat, after all? Sheik, sheik, sheik...sheik your booty. Case in point.

2. Men like sex?? How odd. They look at women? How bizarre.

3. "Our minds are exquisitely tuned to detect sexual opportunity - especially when it is invisible"--oh yeah, especially then. How about this quiz: Quiz: Match the porn with the politician who wrote it.

4. Everything has its price. Now we know what a major university is worth. Not much.

5. Little girls' boys' room--a triumph for transgendered rights?

6. It was mean to kill Nazis? Now they tell us!

7. The "If At First You Don't Succeed" school of global climate change theory. Shields up! Red Alert! Planetary Emergency....Captain Gore to the Bridge immediately! (The bridge to the 20th century perhaps?)

8. Out of bounds?? Remember whose set the ground rules on this playing field. But Rush is a recovering drug addict, so that makes him a member of an equivalent victims group, doesn't it? (it's in the ground rules for that playing field, I think)

9. It's probably best to avoid all bosses if you can.... But some can flourish in a worker's paradise if they have the right boss.

10. The D.C. (Dixie Chicks) gulag archipelago. They play like a cheap violin for sure.

11. Actually, Rush is a harmless, lovable little fuzzball of gay! (In the GOP some would like to see, anyway!) Let's face it, though, Republicans are just plain evil. But at least they don't use ellipses to delete 213 days!

12. The Islamic Rage Boys - just another boy band n'sync with the backstreet jihad.... Then there's the violent protester for...peace! He must be their opening act.

13. The NYT blames Israel for a lack of Palestinian moderation.... so, is anyone surprised at this?
14. 5000 years of Middle East history in 90 seconds!

15. Metalloids depose noble gasses in bloodless revolution. A Cu de Ta, perhaps ?

16. Unserious about terror indeed.

17. Paris causes Japanese tourists to go insane. Really

18. Wine tasting robots? Doesn't that miss the point?

19. Affordable health care on every corner. Doc-in-the-box, to be precise.

20. Grumpy women in the morning. When she died was she on time?

21. Slut-o-ween?

Happy Halloween, Everyone!

Carnival of the Insanities can also be found at The Truth Laid Bear's ÜberCarnival and at the BlogCarnival.

***************************************
If you would like to Join the insanity, and add the Carnival of the Insanities button to your sidebar (clicking on it will always take you to the latest update of the Carnival), click on "Word of Blog" below the button to obtain the html code:

- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 7:39 AM |

 
REALLY MOST SINCERELY DEAD ?
This sounds like good news for the world:

Last Wednesday, Cuban dictator Fidel Castro may have slipped into a coma.

On Saturday, his sycophant, Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez, flew into Havana (scroll down), possibly to bid a final farewell to his Cuban master. And Brazil’s President Lula da Silva made a slip of the tongue last weekend, saying ‘when Castro was alive…’ forgetting no one had announced that The Beast was dead. Meanwhile, Otto Reich reports that news agencies are getting visits from Castroite government functionaries regarding coming funeral arrangements, including seating, best camera angles, visas, how-tos ahead the coming spectacle…where guerrillas, tyrants, and Sandalista suckups will gather in one horrible place to mourn their hero.

Imagine, if you will, the amount of brainwashing or willful blindness--not to mention the degree of sociopathic selflessness--that an individual would have to possess to consider this psychopathic tyrant a "hero". It gives nuance to meaning to the word delusional.

We have been down this road before, though. Soon, bells will ring announcing that this last of the old-school Latin-American communist thugs (as opposed to the new school being run by Chavez) is not only merely dead, he's really most sincerely dead
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 10:59 AM |

 
A GLIMPSE OF TRUTH FROM THE PARANOID PALESTINIANS
This article says it all about the dysfunction of the Palestinian people, but probably not in the way the authors intended:

"The motive behind the Fatah and Hamas leaders in these miserable moments is the chauvinistic, overbearing thought that has no room for people, country, homeland or history.

"Our leaders have nothing to tell [us] but lies and deception, because they have become sickly, failed, and afraid of the truth, since they are subjugate to the culture of factions, of opportunism, of [special] interests... and of narcissism. Nothing interests them but satisfying their unbridled lusts and urges to rule, their madness, their self-love, and their love of power....

"The violence toys with us, leads us, and drags us into the abyss!! Even our children have lost [their] innocence and become filled with both fear and violence. It has become a terrifying nightmare that pursues us with an axe of death, dripping with blood. We have become captives in the hands of the violence that has taken the best of our children and our sons from us...

"We must call an 'Honesty and Reconciliation' conference, in which we express regret for mistakes and sins, acknowledge them, and undertake, before Allah and before our people, to abandon violence forever, and henceforth not to use bullets, shells, or disgraceful words - [and for] the spirit of tolerance and love to grow within us.

"It is thus that nations are built, and it is thus that the individual is built. Thus we will be able to move a long way ahead on the path towards independence and freedom...

The authors are so close to the truth that they must be able to feel it breathing down the back of their necks. But, as Freud might say, "Close...but no cigar."

The insights offered at best reflect only a flickering, almost ghostlike wisp of truth and insight; a tiny crack of light penetrating the paranoia and dysfunction that enshrouds the Palestinians like an opaque black burqa.

Only emotionally healthy people could have a genuine--or meaningful-- "Honesty and Reconciliation Conference". Neither honesty nor reconciliation is possible as long as the essential core of the Palestinians is characterized by psychological projection, denial and distortion: blaming the despised Jews for their own dysfunction; blaming Israel for the beast that they themselves have loosed.

In this regard, the cult of Palestinian victimhood is emblematic of the distorted reality of almost all the the followers of Islam in the Middle East. Palestinians are the poster children who represent all the dsyfunctional and warped political regimes that have sprung up pledging allegiance to Allah, killing and destroying in his name. Where Allah is worshiped these days, the paranoia and projection; the denial and distortion are the everyday necessities of life, required to explain the pervasive backwardness, the poverty, the intellectual and moral wasting that afflicts most of the worshippers.

Modern Islam is like a carnival funhouse mirror that distorts and deceives those who gaze into it, exaggerating what is reflected back so that those who blissfully gaze within and contemplate their own virtue are unable to see the beasts they have become.

Victor Davis Hanson wrote recently:

It is almost surreal now to read about the elemental hatred of Jews in the Spanish Inquisition, 19th-century Russian pogroms or the Holocaust. Yet here we are revisiting the old horrors of the savage past.

Beheading? As we saw with Nick Berg and Daniel Pearl, our Neanderthal enemies in the Middle East have resurrected that ancient barbarity - and married it with 21st-century technology to beam the resulting gore instantaneously onto our computer screens. Xerxes and Attila, who stuck their victims' heads on poles for public display, would've been thrilled by such a gruesome show.

Who would have thought centuries after the Enlightenment that sophisticated Europeans - in fear of radical Islamists - would be afraid to write a novel, put on an opera, draw a cartoon, film a documentary or have their pope discuss comparative theology?

...Who these days is shocked that Israel is hated by Arab nations and threatened with annihilation by radical Iran? Instead, the surprise is that even in places like Paris or Seattle, Jews are singled out and killed for the apparent crime of being Jewish.

Siggy in commenting on the latest insane pronouncement of yet another Islamic religious leader, starkly points out how the mufti has all unwittingly explained to us the essential nature of his religion and the people who follow it--because, what kind of creature attacks "uncovered meat" after all?

It is with that in mind that we ought to ponder and consider the issues of terrorism and the Palestinians, using language and ideas the mufti finds so appropriate (the following is derived from published accounts if the mufti’s own remarks, we noted in “The mufti loves women in the same measure he loves Jews”):

“The Islamic savagery in Palestine and elsewhere, is nothing more than the actions and behavior of animals. The so called resistance is the work of dysfunctional wild beasts that see themselves leading herds of cattle into battle, only to rejoice and take pride in the killing of innocents. While there are international conventions to protect civilians, they are disregarded by these beasts and animals, because they believe they are exempt from civilized behavior. Only animals and beasts would hide behind children as they fired weapons. Only animals and beats would place anti aircraft weapons on hospitals and school roofs. Only animals and sub human beasts would educate their children in the ways of hate and murder and only animals and beasts would have so called‘religious leaders’ call for the rape and subjugation of women and children, and refer to that as a religious and ‘obligatory.’ These so called ‘monotheists’ are really nothing more than a so called ‘people’ that for last one thousand years have ruined and destroyed everything they have touched. They have contributed nothing but death, destruction and failure. That shouldn’t be surprising- after all, what can you expect from wild beasts and animals?

For the Palestinians to hold a conference on honesty and reconciliation; or to rally around the concepts of "love and understanding" would be similar to schizophrenic patients holding a conference on the treatment of psychosis, when they are off their medication.

And, make no mistake, despite the brief glimpses of truth that poke through occasionally in this article, it is still littered with evidence of the same unwillingness to take responsibility; the same paranoia and projection; the same dysfunctional victimhood--that have become the hallmarks of the Palestinian poster children, as well as many other adherents of today's Islam.

Why should the authors be surprised that Palestinian leaders are deceitful, oppressive and violent? Why should they be surprised that the culture of destruction and death that was crafted to externalize the Palestinians' own psychopathology would, in the end, consume those who created it in the first place?

Left to their own devices; walled away from the object of their delusions, that psychopathology must turn against its owner. That is the nature of the beast. The critical mistake the authors make is in thinking that that the beast's essence can change without addressing the psychopathology that funcamentally created and motivates it.

The authors say:

"Let us collect the weapons from our streets and from our homes, and uphold the motto: 'among ourselves - love, dialogue, and mutual understanding; towards the enemy - force, resistance and steadfastness.' This is the proper formula. Do not overturn it..."

Oh yes, they love that beast when it can be projected outward--onto the Jews, or America, or the West. When they can attribute their own unacknowledged bestiality onto others; when they can pretend to be the victims of the beast's aggression instead of the originators.

But once the paranoid beast is unleashed, "love, dialogue, and mutual understanding" wither away. The beast will find "uncovered meat"--and souls--to devour and it cannot be contained by "formulas" that ignore the reality of its origin. Hamas will kill Fatah; Fatah will kill Hamas; Palestinians will kill Palestinians--because that is the nature of the beast.

Love and understanding can only thrive when the beast within is acknowledged as one's own; and then chained and civilized. If you let it loose, free to spread its rabid hatred--i.e., your own rabid hatred--just so you can see yourself in that carnival mirror as the heroic victim of another's aggression, then it will always be there to turn on you; to devour and rip you to pieces when it cannot get fresh meat any other way.
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 7:11 AM |

 
SOME SANITY IN PARIS FOR A CHANGE
One of the members of The Sanity Squad is in France, covering the al-Durah/France 2 defamation trials. Neo-neocon, arguably the most sane member of the Squad has several postings from Paris:

Behind the facade of justice: French defamation law and freedom of what?

Paris observations

The facade: encountering the Palais de Justice

I'm off to the Palais de Justice

Check out Neo's perspective.
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 3:15 PM |

 
TO THE DEMOCRATS, TO MAKE MUCH OF TIME
By Robert Herrick Karl Rove

Gather ye Gallup while ye may,
And Zogby and Rasmussen:
The same sweet polls on election day
Just may turn rather gruesome.

The glorious hopes of days gone by,
The exit polls and cheering
Have turned to dust and made you cry,
We still can hear the swearing.

That race is best when finished first,
You taste both House and Senate;
But things might go from best to worst
In just one single minute.

So be not coy, but use your time,
Get ready while ye may:
To blame, accuse and curse and whine
When things don't go your way.
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 7:09 AM |

 
ALICE IN WONDERLAND or DEMOCRATS IN DENIAL ****Updated***
Victor Davis Hanson (who I already quoted this morning here) has this to say at The Corner:

In the last 24 hours I have heard some of the craziest things of this entire war.

The Palestinians are complaining about the Israeli security fence on grounds that it perpetuates "racial segregation" — in a way perhaps suicide bombers do not? Or the state-run Palestinian megaphones with their usual "apes and pigs" rants?

At a meeting the other day with some political scientists, I was lectured by some that there was nothing such as jihadism in the comprehensive sense. That is, that Hamas, Hezbollah, al Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, etc. simply have entirely separate agendas, understandable (i.e., Israel, "occupation" of Arab lands) and particularist grievances, etc. rather than a deeply shared anger at the West that originates from a common sense of lost pride and frustration, brought on by recognition of failure when zeal and religious purity do not restore honor or influence in the age of globalization.

I thought these who advocated such nonsense might at any second suggest that because Mussolini's fascists, Hitler's Nazis, and Tojo's militarists all had quite different agendas, separate racial ideologies, and particular aims in WWII, then, they could hardly be lumped together as the Axis that threatened Western republics and needed a generic anti-fascist response. All during the Vietnam War, we were lectured daily about the intricacies of Vietnamese, Russian, and Chinese Communists — their rivalries, hatreds, and quite separate aims-as they combined to defeat the United States, and trumped their own tensions with an all-encompassing hatred of Western democratic capitalism.

There is also an Alice in Wonderland flavor to the current Democratic response to the Korean and Iranian crises. We talked to the Koreans all during the 1990s as they prepared nuclear materials.

And now are told that we have a catastrophe since we have not recently talked to them. We talked all during the 1990s with Syria — and got nothing. Bill Clinton has always praised Iranian democracy; so, we talked to Tehran too, both stealthily and overtly.

So what is this obsession with talk, talk, talk? It reminds me of all those discredited British empty-headed pacifists and aristocrats who wanted to keep talking to Hitler after the fall of Poland, even after the fall of France, right up to the Battle of Britain.

I note that in the previous thread a commenter has this to say:

I had to check in to see if Dr. Sanity has posted the new column from one of her favorites, Jonah Goldberg. I guess I shouldn't be surprised she hasn't, since what he says here requires common sense and a relationship to reality, not massive ideological wish-fulfilling distortion. In his own words: "The Iraq war was a mistake."

[article here]

Kernberg/Kohut

I would note that his particular brand of denial is extraordinary--particularly since Kohut/Kernberg suggests by his alias that he is in the mental health field, and I am always surprised when I witness colleagues displaying the same symptoms as patients (but we are, after all only too human). The following is actually what Jonah Goldberg has to say as he rationally and without the rampant psychological denial that characterizes the political left,looks at the situation in Iraq:

We are in Iraq for good reasons and for reasons that were well-intentioned but wrong. But we are there.

Those who say that it’s not the central front in the war on terror are in a worse state of denial than they think Bush is in. Of course it’s the central front in the war on terror. That it has become so is a valid criticism of Bush, but it’s also strong reason for seeing our Iraqi intervention through. If we pull out precipitously, jihadism will open a franchise in Iraq and gain steam around the world, and the U.S. will be weakened.

Bush’s critics claim that democracy promotion was an afterthought, a convenient rebranding of a war gone sour. I think that’s unfair, but even if true, it wouldn’t mean liberty isn’t at stake. It wouldn’t mean that promoting a liberal society in the heart of the Arab and Muslim world wouldn’t be in our interest and consistent with our ideals. In war, you sometimes end up having to defend ground you wouldn’t have chosen with perfect knowledge beforehand. That’s us in Iraq.

Of course, people like Kohut/Kernberg never get beyond the "mistake" part of any sentence when it comes to Iraq--or Bush for that matter. They stick their heads out of the sand just for a moment so they can say "I told you so!" and then they plant it firmly underground again. Just the other day I had this to say:

Today, there is much to be grim about if you are a person who thinks that the continued appeasement of regimes like North Korea; and the refusal to stand up against Islamic fundamentalism are strategies that are likely to get us many of us killed in the not too distant future.

George Bush started doing what needed to be done in both areas. After decades of appeasement and ostrich-like behavior, he has boldly changed America's stance in dealing with these growing threats. For that he has been excoriated, demonized and unceasingly attacked.

But there is really only one reason to critique Bush, in my opinion. And that is because, while he clearly sees what needs to be done, even he has not had the strength or ability to break out of the politically correct mindset that keeps this country time and again from acting decisively or making difficult choices. At every turn, Bush has pulled his punches, limited American capabiltiy and been conciliatory when strength and determination was called for. He has tried to coax the opposition in this country into taking their heads out of the sand only to be rebuffed again and again. I suspect he has given up and is now willing to let things slide until the end of his term.

And that is precisely what he must not do if he is serious about protecting this country. Yet, it is precisely what the Democrats demand that he do.

Not only has he been rebuffed by the opposition by trying to be conciliatory, his attempts to bring them onboard have only strengthened their psychological denial and made them more ferociously attack him. Democrats are convinced that Bush is the real enemy; hence their only strategy for dealing with the world's problems is to get rid of Bush and all will be well.

Another equally strong leftist meme is that, if we get out of Iraq, then all will be well! This is foolishness beyond measure. As my fellow Sanity Squad member Siggy points out:

The war in Iraq is going badly. Not because we aren’t doing the right thing- clearly, we are. The war in Iraq is going badly because we aren’t saying the right things.

Liberating a nation that was brutalized under the iron jackboot of a tyrant who also funded global terror, was a good thing to do. Attempting to instill a pluralistic democracy in Iraq was a good thing to do, is a good thing to do- for Iraq and for the region.

Having acknowledged that things are going badly, what is the next step? Kohut/Kernberg does not offer a solution because his head is too stuck in the sand. He, along with others are too intent on blaming Bush, to be capable of understanding what is at stake in Iraq. In fact, his thinking remains in the "quagmire" of Vietnam and refuses to take the next logical step: we need to do what is necessary to win.

As Hanson and Goldberg both clearly state, the all-encompassing hatred of the West that lies at the core of the Islamic totalitarian ideology is what we are fighting against; and one of the crucial fronts in this war is in Iraq.

But, Iraq is also a key front on a philosophical war with today's postmodern political left, who seem to share with the Islamists that same all-encompassing hatred of the West and its values. Indeed, they share it with anyone who hates freedom and democracy (check out their attitudes toward Hugo, Fidel or Kim for validation of this, if you like).

For both of those reasons, we must develop a strategy that will "finish the job and not leave a mess"--in other words, to defeat both the barbarians from without who violently threaten Western Civilization and seek a physical return to the Dark Ages; as well as the barbarians from within who seek to undermine and destroy Western Civilization with their smarmy politically correct ideology, whose words and dogmatically righteous platitudes effectively enable and encourage the evil that threatens us.

My position is unequivocally that both ideologies must be defeated by the forces of good in Iraq and everywhere they have taken root.

UPDATE: Let me just say that I am rather sick and tired of clueless idiots like this commenter:

So 64% of America hates freedom now? And our "values" are lying, corruption, cronyism, irresponsibility, and imperialism? Wow.

So I will be perfectly clear. The political left (of which I am certain that "Joseph" is a part) to the extent that they are immersed in the postmodern ideology that denies objective reality and truth are indeed supporting and encouraging the enemies of freedom. Some of them are too lazy to think about the underlying philosophical implications their behavior is based on; the others are deliberately malignant and overtly hate the values this country is founded on. The former are in psychological denial in my opinion; and the latter are not much different from any other totalitarian thugs.

I assume that if a poll was taken that showed a majority (or "64%" or any other number plucked out of the blue) that black was white or right was wrong, that Joseph would cheerfully rally 'round it. Good for him--he gets the "Postmodern Award for Most Relativistic Nonsense".

Here's a novel concept: Let's do what is right and accept the burden and responsibility that goes along with such behavior; and damn the polls--and anyone who needs polls to be their moral compass.

I hope I make myself perfectly clear so that "Joseph" and others don't waste anymore time annoying me with their poll-driven and completely worthless belief systems.

[You may notice from the above that I am rather irritable today as well as extremely busy, so don't mess with me :-)]
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 10:19 AM |

 
LIVE FROM THE MIDDLE EAST! It's The Dark Ages Again....
Victor Davis Hanson writes about how easily our pre-modern enemies from the Middle East have brought a stunned postmodern world back into the Dark Ages:

Who would have thought centuries after the Enlightenment that sophisticated Europeans - in fear of radical Islamists - would be afraid to write a novel, put on an opera, draw a cartoon, film a documentary or have their pope discuss comparative theology?

The astonishing fact is not just that millions of women worldwide in 2006 are still veiled from head-to-toe, trapped in arranged marriages, subject to polygamy, honor killings and forced circumcision, or are without the right to vote or appear alone in public. What is more baffling is that in the West, liberal Europeans are often wary of protecting female citizens from the excesses of Sharia law - sometimes even fearful of asking women to unveil their faces for purposes of simple identification and official conversation.

Who these days is shocked that Israel is hated by Arab nations and threatened with annihilation by radical Iran? Instead, the surprise is that even in places like Paris or Seattle, Jews are singled out and killed for the apparent crime of being Jewish.

Since Sept. 11, the West has fought enemies who are determined to bring back the nightmarish world that we thought was long past....
civilization is forfeited with a whimper, not a bang. Insidiously, we have allowed radical Islamists to redefine the primordial into the not-so-bad. Perhaps women in head-to-toe burkas in Europe prefer them? Maybe that crass German opera was just too over the top after all? Aren't both parties equally to blame in the Palestinian, Iraqi and Afghan wars?

In the last two days, I have been writing about just one aspect of how the modern-day barbarians would like to take us back to the Middle/Dark Ages--and that is on the issue of women's pervasive oppression under Islam (see here and here). Let me make one last point that even a ditzy former feminist like Yvonne Ridley should be able to appreciate.

That issue for women is freedom of choice (surely even a former feminist and current dhimmi can appreciate the irony here).

It is too true that many Islamic women like Ridley happily defend their oppression and defend their oppressors. This is not a phenomenon that is exclusive to the situation under Islamic shar'ia and Arab misogyny; and I have witnessed the same psychological defense in battered women who ferociously defend the men who abuse them, even unto death. (I recount a personal experience with this in this post)

The only response to women who enable and support not only their own oppression, but that of other women, is to remind them that, how they live and under what conditions, is clearly their own free choice -- at least in the Western world.

However, as long as there are other women in their society who do not voluntarily choose to live that way, or are forced to continue to live that way when they have changed their mind; who are forced to wear certain clothing; prevented from driving or acting independently and freely of their own choosing---then the protestations of happiness and contentment have no validity whatsoever and cannot possibly be binding on anyone else.

They are only exhibiting the same symptoms of "identification with the oppressor", denial, and reaction formation that almost all battered women display --even toward those who would help them.

When women (and men for that matter) are free to choose or not to choose Islam; free to leave Islam; free to discard the restrictive clothing; free to move about independently and without fear of reprisals; free to achieve their own individual dreams and aspirations--then it will not be any of my concern that some women appear to enjoy the subjugation and humiliation that is institutionalized under Islam.

I'm sorry, but you will never convince me that this subjugation and second-class citizenship is what all women in Saudi Arabia; or under the Taliban; or even in an Islamic "gilded cage"-- truly desire.

Even if there is only one single woman anywhere under Islam's tyranny who desires to be free to live her life as she chooses, then I am completely, totally, and irrevocably on her side.

The attacks we are witnessing against not only freedom of choice, but also freedom of speech--indeed, freedom with all its blessings and challenges--clearly represent a return to the dark ages of mankind.

That is what Ridley and her "progressive" ilk are really arguing for.
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 6:36 AM |

 
A RELIGION OF NARCISSISTIC ENTITLEMENT AND BORDERLINE BEHAVIOR
Anne Applebaum poses a pertinent question about "the veil" issue, which cuts to the heart of the multicultural hypocrisy rampant in the world today:

...at a much simpler level, surely it is also true that the full-faced veil -- the niqab, burqa or chador -- causes such deep reactions in the West not so much because of its political or religious symbolism but because it is extremely impolite. Just as it is considered rude to enter a Balinese temple wearing shorts, so, too, is it considered rude, in a Western country, to hide one's face. We wear masks when we want to frighten, when we are in mourning or when we want to conceal our identities. To a Western child -- or even an adult -- a woman clad from head to toe in black looks like a ghost. Thieves and actors hide their faces in the West; honest people look you straight in the eye.

Given that polite behavior is required in other facets of their jobs, it doesn't seem to me in the least offensive to require schoolteachers or civil servants to show their faces when dealing with children or the public. If Western tourists can wear sarongs in Balinese temples to show respect for the locals, so too can religious Muslim women show respect for the children they teach and the customers they serve by leaving their head scarves on, but removing their full-faced veils.

In other words, it is incredibly rude for anyone to insist that their right to practice religion is more important than anyone else's right. As Applebaum notes, Orthodox Jews do not demand the "right" to work in a restaurant only open on Saturdays; nor does a Quaker have the right to join the military and then refuse to fight. Those who feel it necessary to practice their religion to such an extent have no absolute right whatsoever to make the rest of the world adapt to their practices. They are free to stay home and wear whatever they choose; they are not free to demand the "right" to jobs that put their religion at odds with the job requirements.

I would submit that the behavior and attitude we witness today from the practitioners of Islam--in Britain, France and most of Europe; as well as in the Middle East--has gone way beyond "rude" or "impolite", however; and more clearly belongs in the realm of "borderline" and "narcissistic" psychopathology.

I wonder if you can describe a religion as completely narcissistic? Well, if the shoe fits....

The supposed "Religion of Peace" (RoP) would definitely meet diagnostic criteria for a "Religion of Malignant Narcissism" (RoMN). Some of the more radical practitioners of this religion seem to think that it is their divine right (also called having a "sense of entitlement")to demand the world accede to their wishes at all times:

Patients with this type of attitude always want more. Whatever you do is never good enough for them, and they also generally show no gratitute or express any thanks--even when someone goes out of their way for them. Like the most spoiled of royalty, they merely expect that they should be the center of your world at all times.

This attitude is normally seen in toddlers, who want what they want and they want it now. Every parent has had to deal with this kind of whining. When you see this attitude repeatedly in an adult, then you know you are dealing with psychopathology. Many adults whimper at the slightest inconvenience, delay, or restriction. Why? Because, like toddlers, they are convinced they deserve what they want when they want it. They are "entitled" to it.

The examples of this attitude of Islamic narcissistic entitlement are all around us these days. They demand "respect" for their religion, even as their religion dismisses and denigrates others; they demand that you draw only cartoons they they approve of (even as their own "humor" in cartoons passes the bounds of civilized behavior in terms of sadism and offense). They immigrate to countries that are polite enough to let them in and allow them to practice their religion in peace; and they threaten violence unless those countries are willing to alter their own traditions and subvert their own values in adopting the Islamic perspective.

Let's face it. These Islamic narcissists don't want to be tolerated by the society they live in and free to practice their religion even in the most multiculturally sensitive nations; they want the society or nation they live in to completely submit to their values and religious practices and to acknowledge their obvious superiority--or else.

Like most borderline personalities, is it any wonder that Islam's relationships with other cultures are unstable and characterized by intense mood reactivity such as dysphoria, irritability, anxiety, anger and rage? Or that they have a markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self that expresses narcissistic rage at the slightest hint of an insult? Or that they constantly express intense anger or difficulty controlling anger, characterized by frequent displays of temper, constant recurrent physical aggression and fighting?

Not to mention the recurrent suicidal and homicidal impulses that are nurtured and given religious sanction.

This is all descriptive of a very sick religion. I am not talking here only about the "extremists", since many of these attitudes are apparently shared by even the so-called "moderates" of the religion; who, while they might eschew the more violent acting out, still arrogantly express the sense of entitlement and display not the slightest insight into their own intolerance and phobias regarding other cultures.

There is no appeasing borderlines. Giving into their sense of entitlement only leads to more and more demands for attention and acknowledgement of their narcissistic superiority. They will never express gratitude or thanks, and always view you as mere extensions of their own damaged self.

The only way to deal with such borderline behavior is to clearly set limits and expectations-- and then stick to them. Tolerating the unceasingly intolerable behavior and demands that modern Islam exhibits will only reinforce the underlying psychopathology and accentuate the bottomless narcissistic entitlement.
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 7:39 AM |

 
THE SANITY SQUAD SPEAKS UP (Have you ever known them to stay silent??)
The latest Sanity Squad podcast is now available at Pajamas Media Politics Central !

This week the Squad discusses enemies foreign and domestic. We delve into radical Islam as well as the somewhat radical behavior of a certain Senator from Massachusetts who reportedly conspired with our cold war enemies to undermine a sitting President.

Join Neo-neocon, Shrinkwrapped, and Siggy, and I as we pontificate, opine, and otherwise loosely associate our way through domestic and international politics. We are always sure to piss off someone (especially Siggy).

I guarantee you'll either love us or hate us!

Previous podcasts of The Sanity Squad can be found here; and you can also download them from iTunes.

(The Sanity Squad cartoon drawn by Eric Allie, whose political cartoons can be found here)
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 4:24 PM |

 
A NATION OF OSTRICHES?
Thomas Sowell realistically looks at the prospect that Democrats may take the majority in the House in the upcoming elections. Rather than offer credible alternatives or a coherent program, he argues, the Democrats are simply second-guessing, denigrating,and undermining Republicans even as the country deals with some of the most threatening challenges in its history from two irresponsible and undeterrable regimes.

He concludes:

That fate hangs grimly in the balance as two irresponsible regimes in North Korea and Iran seek to gain nuclear weapons. Neither leader of these regimes can be deterred by threats of nuclear retaliation, as the Soviet Union was deterred.
Both are like Hitler, who was willing to see his own people decimated and his own country reduced to rubble rather than quit when it was obvious to all that he could not win. If you can imagine Hitler with a few nuclear weapons to use to vent his all-consuming hatreds in a lost cause, you can see what a nuclear North Korea or a nuclear Iran would mean for America and the world.

It is obscene that our media should be obsessed with some jerk in Congress who wrote dirty e-mails to Congressional pages -- and was forced out of Congress for it -- when this nation faces dangers of this magnitude.

It would be worse than obscene for some voters to cut off their nose to spite their face by either staying home on election day or actually voting a blank check from America for a party with a decades-long history of irresponsibility on national defense.

Even today, Democrats are arguing for more talks with North Korea and Iran, as if talk is going to stop such regimes from going nuclear, any more than talks with Hitler in the 1930s deterred him.

This is no longer about hawks and doves. It is about ostriches who bury their heads in the sand -- and about those voters who are prepared to give a blank check to ostriches.

Sowell does not say that Republicans deserve to win. Indeed, he argues pretty much that any voter anger toward the current majority is justified, since they betrayed the voters that elected them and have not resolutely implemented the agenda they once promised.

Today, there is much to be grim about if you are a person who thinks that the continued appeasement of regimes like North Korea; and the refusal to stand up against Islamic fundamentalism are strategies that are likely to get us many of us killed in the not too distant future.

George Bush started doing what needed to be done in both areas. After decades of appeasement and ostrich-like behavior, he has boldly changed America's stance in dealing with these growing threats. For that he has been excoriated, demonized and unceasingly attacked.

But there is really only one reason to critique Bush, in my opinion. And that is because, while he clearly sees what needs to be done, even he has not had the strength or ability to break out of the politically correct mindset that keeps this country time and again from acting decisively or making difficult choices. At every turn, Bush has pulled his punches, limited American capabiltiy and been conciliatory when strength and determination was called for. He has tried to coax the opposition in this country into taking their heads out of the sand only to be rebuffed again and again. I suspect he has given up and is now willing to let things slide until the end of his term.

And that is precisely what he must not do if he is serious about protecting this country. Yet, it is precisely what the Democrats demand that he do.

Not only has he been rebuffed by the opposition by trying to be conciliatory, his attempts to bring them onboard have only strengthened their psychological denial and made them more ferociously attack him. Democrats are convinced that Bush is the real enemy; hence their only strategy for dealing with the world's problems is to get rid of Bush and all will be well.

If they win in November, they will be in for a very big surprise. The problems of the world will not magically go away by pretending they do not exist. They won't even go away if the MSM decides not to report them (though they will undoubtedly try in their neverending attempts to make Democrats look good).

I wonder if America will ever again have a leader who is able to stand up and do what is right to protect and defend this country--or if the will, fortitude, and attention span of this country has deteriorated to such an extent that any such leader would be instantly vilified and harassed by the ostrich herd?

We certainly do not need an Ostrich-in-Chief to lead us into more denial and keep us from acknowledging or dealing with the real threats our country and the world faces.

This election in November is all about whether we will keep our heads in the sand and vote for the ostriches, or if we as a people will finally get serious and deal with the reality that threatens us.

I am still hopeful we will pull our heads out of the sand in time to tackle reality. As I have written before, it may be true that the Republicans deserve to lose; but it is even more true that the Democrats do not deserve to win.

Not unless we want to become an entire nation of ostriches.
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 7:30 AM |

 
LARWYN BLOGS !
Larwyn is guest blogging today over at Fausta's:"Like teenage girls with "secrets" DEM's leak their own, too". Go check it out!

Sometimes I wonder what we would all do without Larwyn, whose indefatigable efforts to keep us all informed are always very much appreciated by this blogger.

Keep up the excellent work!
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 9:12 AM |

 
YVONNE STRANGELOVE, Or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Veil
Stop me if you've heard this argument before:

These cultural issues and customs have nothing to do with Islam. A careful reading of the Koran shows that just about everything that Western feminists fought for in the 1970s was available to Muslim women 1,400 years ago. Women in Islam are considered equal to men in spirituality, education and worth, and a woman's gift for childbirth and child-rearing is regarded as a positive attribute.

When Islam offers women so much, why are Western men so obsessed with Muslim women's attire? Even British government ministers Gordon Brown and John Reid have made disparaging remarks about the nikab -- and they hail from across the Scottish border, where men wear skirts.

When I converted to Islam and began wearing a headscarf, the repercussions were enormous. All I did was cover my head and hair -- but I instantly became a second-class citizen. I knew I'd hear from the odd Islamophobe, but I didn't expect so much open hostility from strangers. Cabs passed me by at night, their "for hire" lights glowing. One cabbie, after dropping off a white passenger right in front of me, glared at me when I rapped on his window, then drove off. Another said, "Don't leave a bomb in the back seat" and asked, "Where's bin Laden hiding?"

Yes, it is a religious obligation for Muslim women to dress modestly, but the majority of Muslim women I know like wearing the hijab, which leaves the face uncovered, though a few prefer the nikab. It is a personal statement: My dress tells you that I am a Muslim and that I expect to be treated respectfully, much as a Wall Street banker would say that a business suit defines him as an executive to be taken seriously. And, especially among converts to the faith like me, the attention of men who confront women with inappropriate, leering behavior is not tolerable.

I was a Western feminist for many years, but I've discovered that Muslim feminists are more radical than their secular counterparts. We hate those ghastly beauty pageants, and tried to stop laughing in 2003 when judges of the Miss Earth competition hailed the emergence of a bikini-clad Miss Afghanistan, Vida Samadzai, as a giant leap for women's liberation. They even gave Samadzai a special award for "representing the victory of women's rights."

Indeed, it probably takes a "Western feminist" to be so completely clueless (and indifferent, I might add) about the real issue here.

You can take your hijabs, nikabs, burkhas or whatever and put 'em on where the sun don't shine for all I care, sister. If that's what turns you on, far be it from me to point out how ridiculous you sound. It's your life.

The fact that 1,400 years ago, Muslim women had a great deal of liberty within their religion is hardly an argument to justify the religious police in Saudi Arabia who preferred to let little girls burn to death rather than rescue them because they were not fully clothed. It doesn't justify the thousands and thousands of acts each day that are religiously sanctioned, whose only purpose it to subjugate, humiliate, and oppress women in the Muslim world. The truth is that most women under Islam have about as much freedom as a slave, unless they are fortunate enough to live in a westernized country.

Just because Yvonne Ridley chooses to delude herself about modern-day Islam ("A careful reading of the Koran shows that just about everything that Western feminists fought for in the 1970s was available to Muslim women 1,400 years ago.") doesn't mean that I intend to.

See here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here-- I could go on like this, but hopefully, you get the point. Over the centuries, Arab culture and Islam have become one entity, each supporting and justifying the psychopathology of the other. This is particularly true when it comes to women's rights.

I wrote in an earlier post:
It is astonishing to me that there are women who justify Islam and even describe it as "liberating" because it "frees" women from having to worry about issues like fashion or looks. By that line of reasoning, you could say that Death "frees" people from having to worry about Life.

When I started my career in psychiatry, one of my earliest and most difficult cases was a woman--I'll call her Alice--who was seen frequently in the ER because her husband used to beat her fairly regularly. She had been hospitalized several times because of internal injuries from these beatings, but despite our trying to convince her to get help, Alice vehemently refused, claiming that she loved her husband and that he loved her. Her hospital room would be filled with flowers and cards from the repentant spouse. Both Alice and her husband would have nothing to do with us, and denied they even had a problem.

The last time I saw Alice, she was unconscious and being wheeled into the operating room after a particularly savage beating from her loving husband. She never made it off the operating table. I thought of how we tried desperately to warn her that the violence would not stop unless something changed. We literally had pleaded with her to let us help her the last time she was discharged from the medical unit.

Rarely since then have I felt so helpless or impotent as a professional. Rarely have I felt so angry about the kind of psychopathology and lack of insight that lead to situations like Alice's.

Since then I have come to realize you cannot force someone to change psychologically. The professional part of me understands that Alice had many opportunities to make a change in the toxic relationship she had with her husband. She had the opporutnity to get help; she could have stopped accepting his way of expressing his "love". She could have faced the reality of her situation. But she didn't, and now she was dead. The husband was convicted of her murder. And Alice, who was without doubt a tragic victim of domestic abuse, was at the same time a willing accomplice to her own murder.

Alice might have chosen differently. Most women in Islam cannot choose their fate. From birth to death they are ruthlessly oppressed and subjected to the medieval, misogynist attitudes of their religion and culture. In many Muslim countries they have as many rights as the family dog--perhaps less. I have little sympathy for apologists of this situation, whether they are male or female; religious or fanatic.

To those who claim that Islam is compatible with women's rights and self-determination, I say: DO SOMETHING ABOUT THE INSTITUTIONALIZED ABUSE AND OPPRESSION OF WOMEN UNDER ISLAM.

Individual cases of domestic violence clearly cannot be prevented in every case; and there will always be women like Alice and men like her husband in every culture or creed. But Muslims can stop justifying this psychpathological behavior as compatible with and sanctioned by their religion. Until that religious sanction is withdrawn, claims that Islam is a religion of peace--or even that it is civilized--are laughable.

How Islam was practiced in the 1400's is totally irrelevant to how it is practiced today. Today, anyone who doesn't have their eyes shut (even a former Western feminist) sees a religion that has found much in its religious writings to justify the institutional acting out of male fantasies of superiority, potency and power at the expense of women.

The key to moderating the current Islam lies precisely in empowering women who have been routinely subjugated and made into second-class citizens.

One prisoner of Islam has been outspoken with her criticisms; and because she has dared to question this wonderful religion that, according to Ridley "offers women so much", she has now been marked for death. But Ridley, who is either completely brainwashed and a product of identification with the aggressor; or who is deliberately and malignantly choosing to ignore the facts for her own personal gain and status is only able to summon up ridicule for any Muslim woman who courageously attempts to escape the prison of shar'ia and Islamic law. She appears to think she is somehow morally superior to them simply because of the clothes she chooses to wear.

One can only imagine the contempt she feels for non-Muslim women.

Neo-neocon writes:
"...some people just seem to have a deeper integrity than others, and feel driven to speak out no matter what the personal consequences may be. They are heroes of a very special sort"--whether it is to enter a beauty pageant, or go on al-Jazeera and debate Muslim clerics on women's rights and the primitive practices of Islam.

Yvonne Ridley is no hero. Nor does she have much integrity. She has willfully and cravenly become exactly what her Western feminist buddies are fond of calling "an oppressor." Only, unlike the imaginary oppressors the ideologically pure feminist/marxists rage against, Ridley is the real thing.

UPDATE: Reason's Nick Gillespe has more, as does Merle Yourish, Dinocrat, Shot in the Dark, and Flopping Aces.

UPDATE II: The Anchoress:

Ridley makes a heady defense for the veil and - in fine Western feminist fashion - she lashes out at the Western men who dare to critique the mandatory wearing of it. She conveniently forgets to mention that Western men have been trained over decades - by women like herself - to find this Muslim garb objectionable. She also seems not to realize that one of the first Western voices raised against enforced coverage was a woman’s voice, as Mavis Leno, wife of Jay Leno, worked for years to bring attention to the subjegation of Muslim women.

Her piece is a fascinating hodgepodge of past and present prejudices all jumbling about as Ridley works to justify her conversion from a feminist standpoint.

And, of course Siggy doesn't hold back:

In a culture that prides itself on faith and morality, many think nothing of rape as a mode of religious expression. On the one hand, they insist that women dress modestly- and if they refuse, violent sex is the weapon of choice to instill religious punishment...

What Ms Ridley and others fail to see is that what goes in the head is far more important than what goes on the head. After a number of years, we know what has gone into the head of Yvonne Ridley.

Ms Ridley is a propagandist pig- and nothing less. Soliciting her opinion on the 'morality' of the veil is as relevant as soliciting the opinion of a whore on family values.

- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 7:37 AM |

 
CARNIVAL OF THE INSANITIES
Time for the weekly insanity update, where the insane, the bizarre, the ridiculous, and the completely absurd are highlighted for all to see! This has been a week of rare idiocy (as always!). So, if you want to remain sane, the best thing is to poke some fun at the more egregious absurdities.

Send all entries for next week's carnival to Dr. Sanity by 8 pm ET on Saturday for Sunday's Carnival. Only one post entry weekly per blogger, please. And you might read this before submitting an entry.

Thanks for all the submissions. I try to use as many as possible! SO MANY INSANITIES! SO LITTLE TIME!!!

1. Advisors to our enemies...clearly they are deeply committed to diversity and social justice. And don't leave out any of the media's descriptors--especially "fiesty"and "firebrand".

2. Does anyone think that training in "diversity" and "social justice" will produce competent teachers? Let alone politicians?

3. The new French conceptualization of "Free Speech". Hey, Roger's moving there as soon as possible! Meanwhile, French elites strike back against EuroDisney.

4. Celebrity status symbol shopping. The new "must-have" accessory! Uh-oh, this can't be good for the status of the symbol! Meanwhile there are Islamic ladies and their liberation sacks... Maybe these will become the new must-have celebrity accessory soon!

5. Yes, apparently they are free to choose to commit suicide....

6. The 7 Political Wonders of the World! (tasteless, so you'll like it!)

7. Imagine tastelessly humming the soundtrack from "Rocky Horror Picture Show" as you view this little gem. And they say not a single man complained about it! Of course, some people seem to think that men should evolve beyond masculinity; but then, would that make them...girls?

8. For those who love to be scared at Halloween. For those who just like to be scared, period.

9. Who says bloggers aren't having an impact??

10. Putin unplugged! (or rather, still plugged...). I bet he wishes he had one of these things.

11. This sounds exactly like what today's liberals would say, don't you think?

12. Bring out your dead! 1 on 1 with The Lancet. (sort of). 300 million = 957 trillion, if you work for The Lancet

13. The growing Republican homo menace! This, from the supposed "champions" of Gay Rights? I know! Let's give these people the Congress!

14. Taxicab tango...with cows?

15. This is the kind of political theater that is actually entertaining. As is this political blog theater!

16. The true culprit was blazingly apparent! The true culprit was blazingly apparent! The true culprit was blazingly apparent! No he didn't; the true culprit was always blazingly apparent.

17. Tree climbing goats? Fauxtography, anyone?

18. Economic doom and gloom... or truth deficit? This doesn't inspire much confidence in Kazakstan's monetary system (or their educational system for that matter) !

19. Either this guy chose poorly; or he was passing himself off as KJI's estranged distant cousin. The North Korean luxury good supply line

20. New health hazards identified and making peace with plastic grocery bags!

Carnival of the Insanities can also be found at The Truth Laid Bear's ÜberCarnival and at the BlogCarnival.

***************************************
If you would like to Join the insanity, and add the Carnival of the Insanities button to your sidebar (clicking on it will always take you to the latest update of the Carnival), click on "Word of Blog" below the button to obtain the html code:


- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 8:17 AM |

 
THE POLITICAL LEFT AND THEIR TOTALITARIAN DREAMS
When I wrote this post about the current, overt manipulation of news, I didn't imagine that this information would be coming out, which, if true, shows the levels to which the political left and the Democrats have been willing to sink to achieve their ideological agenda:

The antipathy that congressional Democrats have today toward President George W. Bush is reminiscent of their distrust of President Ronald Reagan during the Cold War, a political science professor says.

"We see some of the same sentiments today, in that some Democrats see the Republican president as being a threat and the true obstacle to peace, instead of seeing our enemies as the true danger," said Paul Kengor, a political science professor at Grove City College and the author of new book, The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism.

In his book, which came out this week, Kengor focuses on a KGB letter written at the height of the Cold War that shows that Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) offered to assist Soviet leaders in formulating a public relations strategy to counter President Reagan's foreign policy and to complicate his re-election efforts.

Hot Air quotes this little tidbit:

If the proposal is recognized as worthy, then Kennedy and his friends will bring about suitable steps to have representatives of the largest television companies in the USA contact Y. V. Andropov for an invitation to Moscow for the interview. Specifically, the board of directors of ABC, Elton Raul and the television columnists Walter Cronkite or Barbara Walters could visit Moscow. The senator underlined the importance that this initiative should be seen as coming from the American side. (emphasis mine)

Stickynotes and ajacksonian and Clarice Feldman each have more to say about this information.

What interests me is the transformation of the Democratic Party into a tool that every major enemy of this country--from the North Vietnamese, to the Soviets, to the Syrians all the way up to the present day-- has been able to use to advance their objectives at the expense of America. As Feldman notes, this does indeed give new meaning to the term "opposition party".

It also give new clarity to one of the issues that I have talked about on this blog repeatedly, and that is the complete betrayal by the political left in this country of the values and freedoms upon which the U.S. was founded.

How easily they deceived themselves (if it was deception at all) into thinking that they had more in common with the communist party leadership of the USSR than with the duly elected president of the U.S. How easily people like John Kerry supported and enabled the dictators of North Vietnam. Is it any susrprise at all that today, in our war on terror, that this same political party and the same deluded base that animates them see the terrorists as the oppressed victims and the US as the evil oppressors?

Good grief, they have been acting out this drama for over half a century now, and they've got the "good guys" and the "bad guys" clearly identified in their own minds it seems.

And the U.S. has NEVER been the "good guy" from their point of view. This rather incredible consistency on their part demonstrates a dedication and committment to the principles of tyranny, as well as both a hatred for this country and an unquenchable lust for power, that is difficult to imagine could originate in the heart of any American--let alone elected representatives of this country.

From Kerry during Vietnam, to Kennedy during the Cold War; to Rockefeller and Murtha (along with many others) today, we can see a pervasive pattern of hatred for the values of this country, and a willingness to sell those values to whatever enemies we happen to be fighting at the moment.

And yet, psychologically, they have managed to deceive themselves into thinking that what they are doing is for the "good" of the country. That their behavior is actually "patriotic". That their machinations are selfless and necessary in order to "protect" this country -- from what they have always perceived as the "true" evil.

Kerry believed that the "true evil" was American and the U.S. Military--not the communist North Vietnamese; Kennedy believed that the "true" evil was Ronald Reagan apparently--not the USSR. We all know who most of the recent crop of Democrats believe is the "true" evil in the world today.

I submit, that if you are looking for evil, then you couldn't find better representatives of the darkness than the two senators from Massachusetts, whose sell-outs of this country have been going on for some time.

But let's move on to some of the people who encourage and support the likes of Kennedy and the Democrats.

Here is a sweet little piece that gives Americans just a hint of what is to come, should they vote the wrong way in November--i.e., if for some unimaginable reason not enough Democrats are voted into office:

All week I’ve been reading in disparate sources from Drudge to US News and World Report about Bush, Rove and Cheney being overly confident about the midterm elections. Even Republican strategists are increasingly concerned because the White House doesn’t have a plan if they lose. This lack of planning shouldn’t surprise anyone, but if you really think about it a creepy, crawly feeling grows in your gut.

Here are some questions: Are these guys simply narcissistic idiots Rove-ing around in some never-never land bubble or do they know something we don’t? Have they planned a grab bag nose punch of an October/November surprise? Or have Diebold, ES&S, and local state secretaries assured them that they will do “whatever it takes” to get a Republican Congress elected again? Or are they just planning to outspend us? Karl Rove recently told the Washington Times, “For most Americans, particularly the marginal voters who are going to determine the outcome of the election, it started a couple of weeks ago… Between now and the election we will spend $100 million in target House and Senate races in the next 21 days”. That is $30 million a week in 15 or 16 key races. Knowing this group, the answers must lie in a clever blitzkrieg combo of all of the above.

When I asked Gore Vidal at dinner why the White House seemed so serene and at ease about the vote, he replied that, this time around, the Bush-Cheney henchmen could simply call on martial law. He glumly noted that we are so far down the road toward totalitarianism that, even if Democrats do win back the Congress, it would take at least two generations before the last six years of damage to the nation could be reversed. Gore frankly despaired that any amount of time could ever return the country to where and what it previously was. This prediction left me reaching for some Fernet Branca.

We all know the neocons won't cede power easily. They have to be aware that if the tide of Congress turns, Bush's last two years will be mired in gridlock and perhaps even be punctuated by several embarrassing congressional investigations. Of course, Cheney did say last week that everything in Iraq is hunky dory, which leads one to believe that after James Baker's devastating report and the escalating mass destruction of the war, Dickey-boy has simply lost it. But whether it is hubris, loony tunes, or both, the White House's freakish calm about the elections makes me as nervous as the hell we seem to be headed for. Therefore we should all be on alert. If for whatever reason we don't win back Congress in November the only real answer will be to take to the streets.

Can you hear the guns, Fernando?

The individual who wrote this is a Ph.D. psychologist; and yet is so wrapped up in the hysteria of the neo-marxist drama , that she is completely unable to appreciate the psychological projection--and unbelievable irony--of her words; let alone the paranoia.

"We all know the neocons won't cede power easily."

Let me ask you to consider which side of the political spectrum has had problems "ceding power" over the last 50 years? Which side whines and fusses and creates complicated conspiracy fantasies whenever they lose elections?

Their hatred and denunciations of Ronald Reagan and George Bush seems to know no bounds, even as they embrace, coddle, and encourage dictators, thugs, and terrorists around the world.

This is the same political party that constantly accuses their opposition of being fascists and totalitarians...? I wonder if they are even capable of appreciating their own totalitarian dreams, disguised as they are under a cloak of concern and compassion for others?

Better examples of psychological projection, paranoia, delusion,and denial you will be unable to find in any psychological textbook.

UPDATE: Sigmund, Carl & Alfred remind us about other well-known Democrats and their questionable interactions with enemies of the US, and then asks a very pertinent question:

If Democrat luminaries such as Teddy Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, et al, had no trouble looking outside the US for political help and campaugn money, why on earth should we not assume that some Dems are dealing with Iran, Syria, Al Qaeda, Hizbollah and Hamas, to further their political aims and ambitions?

Read it all. And check out Sister Toldjah, Riehl World View and Blue Crab Boulevard while you are at it.
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 9:22 AM |

 
A CALIPHATE WORSE THAN DEATH
Two news reports caught my eye today. The first was from the thug who is referred to as the "president" of Iran:

Mr Ahmadinejad called Israel's leaders a "group of terrorists" and appeared to threaten any country that supports it.

Even if we assume the Holocaust is true, then why should the Palestinians pay the price for it

"You imposed a group of terrorists... on the region. It is in your own interest to distance yourself from these criminals... This is an ultimatum. Don't complain tomorrow."

The "ultimatum" was directed at European states in particular.

"We have advised the Europeans that the Americans are far away, but you are the neighbours of the nations in this region," Mr Ahmadinejad said.

And, in other axis of evil news, even as little Kim was supposedly abjectly apologizing to China for conducting a nuclear test:

A North Korean official, meanwhile, defended last week's nuclear test and said Pyongyang would "crush U.S. imperialists' schemes with its self-defensive power."

"No matter how the U.S. imperialists try to stifle and isolate our republic ... victory will be on the side of justice," said Choe Thae Bok, secretary of the Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea, according to the North's official Korean Central News Agency's Korean-language report.

Choe made the comments at a rally in the North Korean capital in which tens of thousands of citizens and soldiers cheered the nuclear test, according to KCNA _ the first known celebration directly tied to the explosion.

By now, it should be clear to anyone who is paying attention that the leaders of North Korea and Iran are bad people. Evil, even.

Yes, that involves a value judgement on my part -- the worse of all secular sins in our PC world, where the only value judgement that is allowed goes something like this: on the one hand, all cultures are equally deserving of respect; on the other, Western culture is uniquely destructive and bad.

Variations on the above theme are that the real terrorism in the world emanates not from the mullahs (and their puppet Ahmadinejad) of Iran or the President of North Korea, but from the Bush-Hitler administration.

Those who promote this point of view think that Bush--not Kim and not Ahmadinejad--is the real evil of our time.

Meanwhile, in France:

In Lyon, a car was rammed into a synagogue and set on fire.

In Montpellier, the Jewish religious center was firebombed; so were synagogues in Strasbourg and Marseilles; so was a Jewish school in Creteil — all recently.

A Jewish sports club in Toulouse was attacked with Molotov cocktails, and on the statue of Alfred Dreyfus in Paris, the words “Dirty Jew” were painted. In Bondy, fifteen men beat up members of a Jewish football team with sticks and metal bars. The bus that takes Jewish children to school in Aubervilliers has been attacked three times in the last 14 months.

According to the Police, metropolitan Paris has seen ten to twelve anti-Jewish incidents per day in the past thirty days.

Do you imagine that the chilling words of Ahmadinejad and the duplicitous grandiosity of Kim are evidence of their peaceful intentions and demonstrate what good people they are? Do you imagine that the behavior of those attacking the Jews in France are not enabled and encouraged by the likes of the leaders of Iran and North Korea?

Some clueless imbeciles are more concerned with the supposedly imminent fascist state/ theorcracy/ totalitarian regime about to be imposed by Bush, than they are by what is going on outside the U.S.. Get a grip, people. Such incredibly histrionic behavior is a phenomenon that is defined here.

It is essential to keep one's moral compass in good working order because value judgments require being able to distinguish between "good" and "bad" pretty regularly.

Gagdad Bob discusses the relationship between tradition, or orthodoxy, and progress, or evolution and makes the following statement:

...good people will use technology in a good way, while bad people will use it for bad ends. Nevertheless, there are many idiots who ask the question--I recently saw the idiot Wolf Blitzer ask it of President Bush--”Israel has a nuclear bomb. Why can’t Iran?” Good question, Wolf. Wolf Blitzer has a cable news show. Why can’t a morally insane sociopath have one? Oh, wait a minute.... Olbermann does have one.

But do we really want to have the dissemination of information in the hands of madmen? Well, we do. It’s called wackademia, or the leftist looniversity bin, where parodies of truth are disseminated by parodies of scholarship to a slackjawed but diverse flock of sheep. For the academic left, time stands still no less than it does for the Islamists, except that it is always 1967 instead of 1267.

What we are facing (using a phrase that Bob employs) is a "caliphate worse than death" if we allow ourselves to be confused about who and what are "good" versus who and what are "bad".

Sometimes it's necessary to go back to the beginning; all the way to Atom and Evil in the Garden of Deathly Delights:


- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 8:36 PM |

 
THE MANIPULATION OF "NEWS" GOES INTO HYPERDRIVE
This week on The Sanity Squad podcast, Siggy, Neo, Shrink, and I discussed the increasingly prevalent phenomenon of "news" stories whose only purpose seems to be to proclaim loudly and almost hysterically (ok, I added the latter adverb) that there is absolutely, positively NO WAY that the GOP can win in November's elections; or a variation on that theme to the effect that the Republicans are hopelessly conflicted with each other and that various and assorted groups of them will actually vote for...you got it!...Democrats in the coming election!

Sample headlines from just this week (all purporting to be "news" as opposed to opinion):

Republican Woes Lead to Feuding by Conservatives (NYT)

Republican Money Can't Stave Off New Peril in Senate (WSJ)

Opposition to GOP Rises in Ohio, Poll Says(WashPost)

Big Democratic Wins Likely On Election Day MSNBC

GOP'S Hold on Evangelicals Weakening (WashPost)

And, of course, there is also setting up the fall-guys, should the GOP pull it out come November:
In Close Races, GOP Holds Advantage of Funds (WashPost) - subtext: the only reason the GOP could win these races is because of [evil] money money money. Issues have nothing to do with it.

Funding Constrains Democrats (WashPost) - other wise they would WIN!

Moderates in Kansas Decide They're Not in GOP Anymore (WashPost)

New Laws and Machines May Spell Voting Woes NYT

And, of course, concerned Democrats are already beginning to question the security of electronic voting (see here, for example) - we all know that those evil Republicans would surely stoop to election fraud; nevermind that we demanded electronic voting so that they couldn't cheat and not count the chads....

Now, the above was just a sampling that I obtained over the last few days from Memeorandum, and doesn't even count all the giddy lefty bloggers who are busily going about counting their chickens before they are hatched; and who cite wildly erratic polls as if they were absolute objective reality.

Having been a psychiatrist for quite some time; and having specialized in dealing with the masters of emotional manipulation in the personality disordered realm, I can say without any doubt that I know when I am being manipulated.

And the manipulation of this "news"--i.e., the artful and deliberate managing of what are purported to be objective "facts" by the news media--has gone into hyperdrive as the November midterm elections approach.

Can you guess the purpose of this manipulation? There are actually two purposes. The first sets up a clear expectation in the minds of the American population:

There is no way that Republicans can hold onto the House or the Senate. Everyone is abandoning ship. The Republicans are in complete disarray. The polls clearly demonstrate that Republicans are going to lose bigtime.

The second purpose is to deliver the fall-guy and establish blame in advance in case the reality on November 7, 2006 does not go the way the MSM (and the Democrats) planned.

Those RICH Republicans can only win if they spend more money than the POOR Democrats (who by the way, are just like Joe Sixpack and have to struggle every day with money woes because the evil [rich] Republicans only support the rich and oppress the poor; nevermind about millionaires Soros, Kennedy, Kerry, etc. etc. and most of the Hollywood elite who support Dems--they don't count). Oh, and the other reason that Republicans might win is if they CHEAT.

Turning to another issue on which the manipulation is only just beginning, I noted in this post that:

Remember the mass hysteria that ensued when Bush described Iraq, North Korea, and Iran as the "Axis of Evil"? Well, with the recent activities of two of the countries in that Axis , many pundits and intellectuals bemoan the fact that by attacking Iraq, the third member of the Axis, we essentially "attacked the wrong country." The context of such remarks is that the U.S. should have gone after North Korea and Kim Jong Il; or after the mullahs of Iran--all people who really really meant us harm-- and not poor, innocent, misunderstood Saddam.

Now they say, we are in deep trouble because we didn't--and it is all Bush's fault, of course.

But you see, if we had say, gone for regime change in North Korea --what they now insist we should have done--then only the names of the dramatis personae (especially the character of "The Oppressed") would have changed in this leftist drama.

Instead of the poor helpless victims of American oppression in Iraq that we hear so much about; we instead would be hearing about the poor, helpless, starving North Koreans -- victims of... American Imperialism/Capitalism!

Well, that meme has already begun, even as the US takes a visible lead in enforcing the UN Security Council's unanimous vote for sanctions on North Korea!

At any rate, look to see any interception as yet another proof of "US imperialism". Pajamas Media notices that the sympathetic portrayal of North Korea has already begun.

The "Human Face" of North Korea: Diane Sawyer interviews a senior North Korean general who asks President Bush to stop humiliating his nation. Former Spook says the message is “They want nothing more than a better life for their children, and to live in peace, yada, yada, yada.”

Expect to see this sort of thing quite a bit in the months to come. We'll be hounded by stories of how our imperialism and desire to "dominate" the world is causing suffering and death in North Korea and Iran (just as the sanctions on Iraq cause so many children supposedly to starve). Expect to see studies published in The Lancet that demonstrate how...evil...diplomatic sanctions (enforced by the US for the international community). Expect to see human interest stories in the MSM about the pitiful plight of the innocents caught up in the machinations of the imperialistic US. Expect to see the wailing and blaming of innumerable "human rights" organizations whose only consistency will be in pointing the finger at the US.

All good poltical theater--in fact, all good political manipulation-- like the above, requires setting up at the beginning of the play the good guys and the bad guys, so that by the climax and denoument the moral of the story is clear. We have been set up for one of two endings in these two dramas:

NOVEMBER ELECTION DRAMA:
Ending #1: The virtuous Democrats have defeated the evil GOP who tried every despicable method in their arsenal as they attempted to thwart the rightful return to power of the Democrats. Good has triumphed over Evil at long last.

Ending #2: The virtuous Democrats were robbed by the evil GOP who used (gasp!) filthy lucre to buy their way to another undeserved victory; and, the Republicans also blatantly cheated and stole the election from the rightful winners. Virtue and Goodness cannot succeed where there is Evil and Corruption.

THE "AMERICA IS ALWAYS EVIL" DRAMA:
Ending #1: The U.S. is responsible for murdering and causing untold suffering of innocents by pursuing a diplomatic policy that oppresses the poor and helpless in countries like North Korea and Iran, who are not imminent threats. We wanted a diplomatic solution, but didn't want anyone to have to suffer!

Ending #2: The U.S. is responsible for murdering and causing untold suffering of innocents by pursuing a military policy that is disproportionate and excessive when you consider that North Korea and Iran have never really been threats to the U.S. We told you we wanted a diplomatic solution! But no, you had to resort to brute force and this is the result of your evil, imperialistic mind-set.

Possibly, there are other acceptable endings for the authors of this little play; but you can count on one common theme : The Bush Administration, Republicans, and/or the U.S. are always--always--the bad guys.

And one overriding plotline: The world, sadly out of kilter; and America, at the beginning of its end, will only be rescued and set back on its proper path when Democrats (read: the political left) regain their rightful place in the hallowed halls of political power.

THE END
(roll credits and...thunderous applause!)

The next day, the MSM will be sure to feature the rave reviews.

UPDATE: Even more!
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 8:55 AM |

 
POLITICAL MASS HYSTERIA AND THE NEO-MARXIST DRAMA
Hysteria is a concept characterized by a wide variety of physical and mental symptoms resulting from dissociating one's cognitive functioning from one's emotion and/or behavior. The psychological defense that makes this happen is known as dissociation.

For the hysteric emotions are primary and are not subject to an objective reality. Historically, this psychological phenomenon has been associated with women (hence the uses of the word "hysteria", indicating an association with the womb), but although the clinical syndromes are more commen in women, men are hardly immune from behaving hysterically (watch any sports event for confirmation of this). The newer term that is often used to get away from female/womb association is "histrionic".

When we speak of someone becoming "hysterical" or "histrionic", we are talking about behavior that exhibits overwhelming or unmanageable emotional excess.

Welcome to the wonderful world of feelings, nothing more than feelings (cue the music), where there really is nothing more than feelings at play.

This is a world where there is no objective reality or truth; a world where, if you believe something is true, then it is. In other words, it is a world where something can be considered "fake but accurate" or where captured enemy combatants in the middle of a war are considered in a "gulag"; or, where a "religion of peace" beheads people; is so terrified of women's sexuality they must "liberate" them by forcing them to wear sacks over their bodies; and which promotes blowing yourself up in a crowd as a devout religious act.

A variety of altered states of consciousness may result from the dissociative process. In one dissociated or hysterical state, sleep-walking (sonambulism), the person appears to be out of contact with his environment, is seemingly unresponsive to external stimuli, and in many cases appears to be living out a vivid, hallucinated drama.

That particular emotional state essentially describes the political left and the marxist/ socialist/communist/pick your utopian fantasy/ dead-enders.

Mass hysteria occurs when large groups of people engage in psychological dissociation; and political mass hysteria is the appropriate name when all the emotional excitability and excess happen to serve a political function or ideological agenda. Most of political theater is histrionic--appealing to the emotions (usually the baser ones -- like envy, greed etc.)

Drama of any sort suits the hysteric's modus operandi extremely well.

One of the most persistent dramatic productions of the last century, which unfortunately is still playing to certain easily amused crowds in this one, is the same old- same old Marxist passion play titled "Oppressor vs. Oppressed" which remains on the billet in spite of the catastrophic reviews it continues to receive.

When Act I of this sad little drama began, the world was about to be saved from the horrible evils of the American Capitalist Oppression of the masses by the brave Soviet Socialist Republic.

Unfortunately for the heroic workers of the Socialist Republic, reality reared its ugly head, and by the time the curtain was about to go up on Act II, the deaths and thorough subjugation of millions under the boot of the heroic utopian Socialist Republic resulted in most of the intelligent members of the audience quickly departing the theater. The incredible economic successes of capitalism and the freedom that fires it, compared to the pathetic lives of most under the yoke of communism, made most people who were not in the grip of some intense emotion realize that Marxism in all it's iterations was a complete dead end--a really bad one act play that deserved a final curtain.

"That's why it's interesting that the neo-Marxists have carefully rewritten the play and are presenting the revival all dressed up in a new postmodern wardrobe. The play's the thing after all--reality be damned! [I described the rewriting and editing process in this post on the four pillars of the socialist revival].

Armed with postmodern philosophy and rhetoric, the neo-Marxists of the left continue to churn out the same message in their revised play. The role of "evil" has been reprised by American Capitalist/Imperialist Oppression. The only differences in the rewrite from the original are the identities of some of the poor, helpless victims of these evil oppressors. The original victims--the "workers of the world" had cleverly invested in the capitalist systen and made managed to make their way out of victimhood status (much to the dismay of their leftist overlords), and pretty much loss interest in revolting against their "evil oppressors" who were making it possible for them to prosper.

Let us consider a recent comment by someone who is routinely annoyed at this blog for suggesting that the left has betrayed any claim it might have once had that it champions the poor and oppressed. He writes with a pathos that comes from his soul:

Why are little ones born only to suffer for the want of immunity or a bowl ofrice?

Well, that is a very good question. Why are they? What are the political forces that keep this little one down? If this commenter really wanted to alleviate the little ones' suffering, you might think he would look at what policies have had the most effect in bringing people out of poverty. You might think he would support such policies. That would be rational. But the sad truth is that he doesn't seem to care about what actually works in the real world. He cares mostly about what make him feel good. He also undoubtedly supports the same vapid policies that assuage his guilt and make him feel righteous and a champion of the poor; but that also guarantee that these little ones--and all the little ones after-- remain in poverty and victimhood their entire life (and, of course, remain dedicated Democrats or leftists).

I'm very sure it makes him feel really good to demonstrate how much he cares. I'm even sure he considers himself a caring and compassionate person -- especially compared to those evil- Republican-neocon-warmongering-hate-filled-bastards-whose-only-goal-is-to-oppress everyone-under-the-yolk-of- the-evil-capitalist-imperialist-United-States.

Gagdad Bob in his post "The Triumph of the Will and the Reign of Nothing" has this to say:

...concrete reality has a way of clearing aside so much abstract intellectual theory. There is a reason why Marxism only exists in universities, and that you will never find a businessman who operates his business along the lines of Marxist doctrine.
[...]
It is one thing for an adult to believe such leftist claptrap. If they want to ruin their lives in their adolescent rebellion against God, that’s fine by me. But to ruin a child’s life by inculcating him with these dysfunctional values is an unforgivable sin. For example, to raise a black child in contemporary America by telling him that this is a racist country, that white people hate him, that he is a victim from the start, and that his efforts will be for naught, is soul murder pure and simple.

Likewise, to brainwash an Arab child into believing that 15 million Jews in the entire world are the cause of a single problem among the world's billion Muslims--let alone all their problems--is a heinous form of abuse, because when you create a victim, you create a nihilist. Why? Because once victim status is secured, then you are no longer burdened by a conscience. You may destroy and kill plentifully, because the order of the cosmos is unfair and illegitimate, and anything you do to set things right is inherently moral, no matter how immoral. One is sanctioned to abandon oneself to one’s most primitive instincts. And the violence will not end until the Old Order is overthrown and the New Man is created, free of the existential categories that define man to begin with.

Meaning has been vanquished. Man is liberated from himself. The Triumph of the Will and the Reign of Nothingness are complete. God and man are dead. Long live the Beast!

As I suggested in mulitple previous posts, the political left acutally believes in nothing. In fact, they have almost reached the natural endpoint of their postmodern intellectual journey and arrived at the core nihilism that animates their belief system. Once reason and reality are finally jettisoned as a basis for human action, one is left only with our passionate feelings and the wonderful postmodern emotional universe.

Let us take a peek at just a small part of the political mass hysteria of today's left as it is applies the plotline of the neo-marxist drama to all events.

Remember the mass hysteria that ensued when Bush described Iraq, North Korea, and Iran as the "Axis of Evil"? Well, with the recent activities of two of the countries in that Axis , many pundits and intellectuals bemoan the fact that by attacking Iraq, the third member of the Axis, we essentially "attacked the wrong country." The context of such remarks is that the U.S. should have gone after North Korea and Kim Jong Il; or after the mullahs of Iran--all people who really really meant us harm-- and not poor, innocent, misunderstood Saddam.

Now they say, we are in deep trouble because we didn't--and it is all Bush's fault, of course.

But you see, if we had say, gone for regime change in North Korea --what they now insist we should have done--then only the names of the dramatis personae (especially the character of "The Oppressed") would have changed in this leftist drama.

Instead of the poor helpless victims of American oppression in Iraq that we hear so much about; we instead would be hearing about the poor, helpless, starving North Koreans -- victims of... American Imperialism/Capitalism! (Good guess)

Even now, we get some glimpses of this meme, which the MSM--the opiate of the leftist masses-- is ready to insert into the psychodrama at a moment's notice. If only the U.S. would negotiate in good faith with Kim Jong Il! The deadlock with North Korea could all have been prevented! All the dear leader wants is to talk directly with the U.S.! Is that too much to ask for? And so on, ad nauseum.

Replay and insert same tragic plot line for Iran, Syria, or any other country that is a potential "victim" of the U.S. Replay and insert any other recognized and established victim group and the storyline is fundamentally unchanged. The sole source of the power of the left comes from convincing anyone who disagrees with them and their agenda must be: a) Islamophobic; b) homophobic; c) sexist; d) racist etc. etc.

That's the beauty of the eternal neo-marxist drama. It does not depend on reality. It does not require truth. It does not even require thought! All it requires is a surplus of emotion spread around to the masses, a few slogans liberally splattered on posterboard, and heaps of self-indulgent and self-righteous nincompoops to buy tickets for the next performance.

Oh, and take a look at what the histrionic Democrats have planned for this country if they win the House in November. This fine example of hysterical political theater is merely the next act in the left's little power play waiting in the wings for the right moment.

I'm sure we can all rest comfortably in our beds knowing that the neo-marxist left (who have become mainstream in the Democratic party) has such a wonderful and coprehensive plan to deal with the imminent threats facing civilization in these troubled times.

The Triumph of the Will and the Reign of Nothingness will be then be complete. Long live the Beast!

UPDATE: Victor Davis Hanson has more to say on the pathological hysteria of the liberal establishment.
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 7:30 AM |

 
A MENTAL HEALTH DAY--Not Mine, But Yours !
I've just been too busy all day to post, and now I'm feeling a bit under the weather. I'm sure all my readers (especially the lefty trolls) are pleased that I've given them a mental-health day.

Back to the blogging grind tomorrow.

If you haven't checked out The Sanity Squad's latest podcast, feel free to do so now!
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 8:11 PM |

 
I CAN QUIT ANYTIME I WANT, YOU KNOW
Blogging will be light today as I have a lot of work to catch up on and a number of meetings to go to. Besides, I can quit any time I want....

IS THIS A FUTURE DSM VI DIAGNOSTIC CLASSIFICATION ??

INTERNET ABUSE: The essential features of the abuse syndrome are:
A maladaptive pattern of internet use causing clinically significant distress or impairment of social or occupational functioning.

Maladaptive use will include high daily internet use, regular heavy weekend internet use, binge internte use(staying online for days, often after periods of abstinence).
One or more of the following must have occurred as a result of recurrent internet use within a 12 month period:
1. failure to fulfill major role obligations e.g. repeated absences or poor work performance related to being on the internet; suspensions, or expulsions from school; neglect of the children or household.
2. exposure to physical hazards e.g. driving an automobile or operating a machine while trying to respond to email.
3. legal problems e.g. arrests for internet-related disorderly conduct.
4. social or interpersonal problems e.g. arguments with partner about consequences of internet use, physical fights while online.
A diagnosis of an abuse syndrome is not made if the person is dependent on the internet or computer.

INTERNET DEPENDENCE: The key features of the internet dependence syndrome are:

A maladaptive pattern of computer and internet use leading to clinically significant impairment or distress, as manifested by three (or more) of the following, occurring at any time in the same 12 month period:
1. tolerance, as defined by either:
(a) a need for markedly increased amounts of time on the internet to achieve that "internet or world-wide-web high"
(b) continued use of the same amount of internet time with markedly diminished effect (i.e., not raising your TTLB rankings or traffic)
2. withdrawal, as manifested by two or more of the following occurring after cessation or reduction of heavy prolonged internet browsing:
(a) autonomic hyperactivity such as sweating or heart rate in excess of 100 beats per minute
(b) hand tremor and an intense desire to type rants
(c) nausea or vomiting when re-entering the real world from the virtual
(d) transient visual, auditory, or tactile hallucinations
(e) psychomotor agitation
(f) anxiety that something will happen and YOU WON'T KNOW ABOUT IT!
(g) grand mal seizures or perhaps just tics as you longingly look toward the shut-off computer
3. time on the internet or computer often consumes a longer period than was intended
4. there is a persistent desire or unsuccessful efforts made to cut down or control the amount of time online
5. a great deal of time is spent in activities necessary to connect to the internet, such as finding ways to insure connection when your server is down; having backup computer systems in the event of power failure, etc.
6. important social, occupational or recreational activities are given up or reduced because of time spent on the internet
7. internet or computer use is continued despite a physical or psychological problem that is likely to have been caused or exacerbated by being online.

NOTE: IF YOU MEET THESE CRITERIA -- GET HELP FAST! Immediately sign on to the internet and go to www.drsanity.blogspot.com for therapeutic support-- and good, old-fashioned enabling!
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 7:16 AM |

 
THE SANITY SQUAD : Telling It Like It Is!
This week, The Sanity Squad Podcast is sure to offend practically everyone! (We're so proud!)

“The Republicans are… just a bunch of spineless, pathetic, idiots.”
—Dr. Sanity
“The Democrats have as much political creativity as a canned ham.”
—Siggy

As you can see, The Sanity Squad doesn’t hold our domestic breed of politician in much higher regard than a certain “finely coiffed whackjob” from north of the DMZ. This week’s episode covers both topics in the restrained and retiring manner that we’ve come to expect from our group of four highly trained professionals

Check out the latest adventures of Neo-neocon, Dr. Sanity, Shrinkwrapped, and Siggy at Pajamas Media Politics Central!

And be sure to listen to all the previous Sanity Squad podcasts helpfully archived here, for your listening enjoyment. You can now also download them from iTunes.
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 6:55 PM |

 
IT'S CALLED PSYCHOLOGICAL DISPLACEMENT
Displacement:separation of emotion from its real object and redirection of the intense emotion toward someone or something that is less offensive or threatening in order to avoid dealing directly with what is frightening or threatening


- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 6:38 PM |

 
MOVED BY PRINCIPLE AND IDEALISM
PJ O'Rourke is completely, thouroughly, and unforgivingly disgusted with the behavior of Republicans, and clearly details all the reasons why. He goes on to say:

I am so moved by principle and idealism, so indignantly high-minded, that I'm changing sides. At least the Democrats aren't hypocritical about being scum. After Gerry Studds was censured for molesting an underaged congressional page, he was reelected six times. Therefore, in the mid term elections, I'm working to get Demo crats into office.

And work it is. There's the problem of putative speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, whose very name summons images of children coming home from day care madly scratching their scalps. Then, when you see Pelosi speak, it's impossible not to think of Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown (ed. note: I guess this image in one's brain is inevitable these days!). I hope her campaign slogan isn't "A New Kick-Off for America."

There is also the problem of issues for the Democrats to run on. You're going to elect Democrats to control government spending? And you're going to marry Angelina Jolie for her brains. The privacy issue--government spying on U.S. citizens--isn't going to work. True, NSA has been collecting all our telephone information, but anyone who's answered the phone during dinner knows that every telemarketer on earth has that information already. Illegal immigration? When the Democrats were in charge, the illegal immigrants were from al Qaeda. And as for Iraq, the best the Democrats have been able to do is make the high school sex promise: "I'll pull out in time, honest."
[...]
No price is too high to pay for principled idealism. And as soon as high-minded indignation has defeated the Republicans, there will be the impoverishment from protectionism, the horror of nuke-wielding petty dictators, and the increased killings by terrorists to prove it. Deep-thinking people will be relieved that Dennis Hastert can no longer cover up misbehavior in the congressional page program.

Gee, I wonder if PJ is being sarcastic or something?

I made much the same arguments in my last two posts. But I wasn't being particularly sarcastic in those posts, and I'm not anywhere near as funny as PJ.

However, like PJ--and most other adults in this country--I generally try to anchor my own principles and idealism (such as they are) to some sort of objective reality.

Hysteria and appeals to emotion are sooooo unbecoming. Just think of Nancy Pelosi.
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 6:41 AM |

 
HOW TO GET PRESS COVERAGE OF THE BOOMING ECONOMY
The closing bell just sounded a little while ago, and the Dow has soared to yet another world record high.

For some peculiar reason (/sarcasm) the good news about the excellent state of the economy doesn't seem to be of much interest to the MSM.... Cartoonist Eric Allie proposes a tried-and-true method to make such uninteresting information more compatible with the MSM news agenda:


- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 4:10 PM |

 
ENABLING TERROR - What I Hate Most About the Democrats and Their Leftist Base
A little while back in a comment thread that I had to shut down because of the uncivilized behavior of some determined trolls sent via The Daou Report, a commenter asked me, "Don't you ever get tired of bashing the left?"

"No," I responded, "I see it as my calling in life. But thank you for asking."

I would like to expand on my brief response, because the commenter brings up a very important issue about why I focus so much on the left and their political wing, the Democratic Party.

I am primarily (but not exclusively) concerned in my blog with Islamofascism and the war on terror. September 11th was the defining moment that mobilized me and woke me from a long-time disinterest in things political. Contrary to what most of the trolls who come here assume, I have never been a registered Republican; nor have I ever been a registered Democrat. I am still not.

Many of the posts on this blog deal with what I consider the essential "side-issues" of the war on terror; such as the obstructionist behavior of Democrats with regard to that war; the bias of the mainstream media; the deterioration of academic institutions and postmodern thought; the political left and the remnants of communism and socialism; and modern-day feminists (part of the political left,sadly, but destructive enough in their own right); as well as a variety of other topics as the whim moves me.

Most of these topics are relevant to the rise of Islamofascism and the prosecution of the war on terror.

Since I am a psychiatrist, I try to look at the big picture. In my practice, not only must I address the thoughts, feelings and behaviors of my patients; but I would be professionally remiss if I did not also address those psychosocial issues that I think are important factors enabling, supporting, or facilitating the psychological problems of my patients.

It is my contention that the Democrats, the MSM, the Left (including feminists, communists and socialist dead-enders) and various other assorted groups I choose to comment on do exactly that: wittingly or unwittingly, they enable, support, or facilitate terror and terrorists.

Prior to 9/11, I had mostly ignored these groups because of my libertarian orientation. I never cared one way or the other what such idiots thought as long as they left me and mine alone.

However, in their current toxic iteration; and because they seem to have taken over the previously tolerable Democratic Party, I can no longer ignore them. Their unbelievable behavior over the past 5+ years has consistently provided aid and comfort to an enemy that is simply the greatest threat to civilization in my lifetime. Whether their behavior is conscious or not, I really don't care. The results are the same.

And, if you don't think that their enabling behavior has caused considerable death, destruction and other serious consequences to our country and our military, then you are not looking at the big picture of what is going on in the world today. If you do not understand that all their activity and bluster; all their slogans and hysteria are designed to make the United States lose this war, then you are extremely naiive. Take a look at what they are doing. They have attempted to obstruct the prosecution of this war on every front. They have deliberately and with malice aforethought managed to create the impression that our military forces are composed of brutal thugs; while at the same time they coddle the real brutal thugs we are fighting. Rather than being the "loyal" opposition, they have descended at times, I believe, to actual treasonous behavior. The Democrats, in particular, have shown repeatedly that they hate George Bush and Dick Cheney more than they love this country. The Republicans, as I have said many times are bad enough with their slippery and opportunistic behavior patterns, but the Democrats are completely despicable.

As one commenter put it: the Republicans suck like Hoover vacuum cleaners, but the Democrats are a veritable bleeding black hole of corruption, opportunism, and malignant narcissism.

Just as it is not enough for a psychiatrist to focus on just the drinking of an alcoholic, a good therapist must also deal with the environment of the alcoholic and people in that environment(the psychosocial supports) that enable that alcoholic--i.e., who buy him the alcohol, who encourage him to drink it etc. If you and the patient fail to address these issues, then the intervention is usually in vain.

We are in a war! The Democrats, the left, and the MSM would have you believe that it is all a figment of GWB's imagination. That he created it in order to consolidate power and institute a Christian theocracy, fascist state [insert suitable leftist slogan here]. Bush=Hitler; Iraq=Vietnam; Listening to terrorist communications=violation of our fundamental free speech rights; Making terrorists uncomfortable=torture; and so on, ad infinitum.

I'm fed up with such insane moral equivalence.

I have a patient who comes in depressed and feeling victimized because her "ex-boyfried" won't stay "ex". It turns out that she regularly phones him, picks him up from work,lets him come to her apartment, buys him things and so on--but she simply can't understand why he would think that she still wants to be with him. Why, indeed.

How does one deal with a situation like the above? Well, you try to get the patient to look within and take responsibility for their own behavior; and to recognize that their behavior has consequences.

And, make no mistake, the irresponsible and frequently hysterical behavior of today's Democrats and their lunatic left base; combined with the provocative and hostile journalism of the MSM--all have serious consequences that the parties refuse to even acknowledge.

They already carry the responsibility for enabling the deaths of many by giving the barbarians a cheerleading/apologist section on the world stage.

As a result of their continued thoughtless and malevolent facilitation of terror and terrorists, many, many more will ultimately die.

And, as long as the Democrats and the left continue to engage in enabling behavior for terrorists, I will continue to unreservedly and unabashedly bash them.
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 7:50 AM |

 
THE REAL QUESTION FOR NOVEMBER
The voices of Republican October angst grow louder each day as we approach the November mid-term elections. Fred Barnes notes:

If politics were fair, Democrats would be in as much trouble as Republicans. And they'd be just as vulnerable. They've been obstructionist, anti-tax-cut, soft on terrorism, and generally obnoxious. On top of that, Pelosi is the most unpopular national politician in America. But in the sixth year of the Bush presidency, with a GOP-run Congress, Democrats aren't the issue. Republicans are.

But the truth is that the sport of politics is not fair, and emotion often rules, rather than common sense. It is entirely possible that the Democrats, who have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams in making sure their vapid and empty talking points are constantly highlighted in the press will get their majority in the House and Speaker Pelosi will be a noxious reality.

If they do win, then we can count on pretty much everything getting worse both here at home and around the world; even as we are fed reports to the contrary. They loudly trumpet the ushering in of a new age of peace and prosperity and propagandize how wonderful everything is--as they did through what we now see was the "Clueless 90's" under St. Clinton and Gore.

Just two examples of Democrat distortion and bias:
The first is captured by this blogger and (reported in The Weekly Standard)who noted a headline in the Chicago Tribune about the new record high for the Dow Jones Industrial average. The headline read: "As Dow Surges, Many Left Behind". She then did a lexus search to see how the same kind of news of surging stocks in the Dow was handled back in 2000 under St. Bill, and found the following headline: "Bull Market Spreading the Wealth in America."
The second example of distortion and bias can be found today in this op-ed piece, masquerading as a "news" article that trumpets: "Bush Keeps Revising War Justification".

Despite the fact--the FACT--that the justification for the Iraqi war was made in this Joint Resolution (Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq) in 2002; and lists a plethora of reasons for war with Iraq, it somehow has never penetrated the consciousness of the Democrats, even those who voted enthusiastically for it at the time. The one lone Democrat that has stood by his guns...well, you can see how the Party of Nothing rewards him for his principles.

And all the distortion and bias cannot erase the one critically important reality for me, which I wrote in this post:

Al Qaeda's fortunes have sunk so low in the Moslem world that he is being mocked, via jokes about his demise.

Thank you George W. Bush. Thank you, Dick Cheney. Thank you, Donald Rumsfeld. Thank you, men and women of the U.S. Armed Forces. Thank you for these last 5 years. Keep up the good work; and faster, please. No thanks on my behalf will go out to the left or to the Democratic leadership, who have all done their best to impede, undermine, obstruct, demoralize, and otherwise obscure this remarkable achievement.

Think back for a moment and remember that no one--NO ONE--imagined for even a brief moment after 9/11 that there would not be more attacks on this country that would be even worse than what occurred on that September day in 2001.

No matter what happens in the days and months to come, the policies of the Bush Administration--however imperfect, and including invading Iraq--have resulted in no attacks on U.S. soil since that day.

And for me that is the bottom line.

Regarding the outcome of November, 2006, I have a strong optimistic bent that continues to believe in the common sense of most Americans, but having watched the insanity of the Democrats and their lunatic left base for the last 6 years or so, I realize that anything is possible. Even the worse case scenario.

Let me say that I think the Republicans in both Houses are a bunch of pathetic, spineless idiots.

The real question for me isn't "Does the GOP deserve to lose in November?"--there are many reasons why they do (read the three linked articles at the beginning of this post for specifics if you need them); the real question is: "Do the Democrats deserve to win?"

And, the answer to that is what I have been writing about for the last two years (see here, here, here, and here, for a sampling). Nothing in the recent behavior--either moral or intellectual--of the Republicans has raised my esteem for them as a group in the slightest, and it never was very high to begin with. They are hypocritical, arrogant, petty and downright stupid at times.

But today's Democrats and the leftist base that drives them have Republicans beat by a wide margin in all the aforementioned areas.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but in my humble opinion, today's Democrats are completely intellectually bankrupt and have nothing to offer this country except the consistent appeasement of evil and the willing betrayal of American values.

But sometimes, things just have to get much worse before they get better.

The upside (or rather the "upside-down side") of a Democratic win in 2006 is, I predict, that having the lunatic left dictating policy during these dangerous times will finally wake-up certain portions of this country as 9/11 failed to do.

And in the long-run, that will be a good thing for everyone--except, of course, for the Democrats themselves.
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 1:52 PM |

 
CARNIVAL OF THE INSANITIES
Time for the weekly insanity update, where the insane, the bizarre, the ridiculous, and the completely absurd are highlighted for all to see! This has been a week of rare idiocy (as always!). So, if you want to remain sane, the best thing is to poke some fun at the more egregious absurdities.

Send all entries for next week's carnival to Dr. Sanity by 8 pm ET on Saturday for Sunday's Carnival. Only one post entry weekly per blogger, please. And you might read this before submitting an entry.

Thanks for all the submissions. I try to use as many as possible! SO MANY INSANITIES! SO LITTLE TIME!!!

1. Somehow, this doesn't surprise me. Do you think the MSM has noticed? They haven't noticed this, that's for sure.

2. You gotta admit he was consistent.

3. Godless...Souless...Clueless? What do liberals believe these days anyway? Another liberal myth bites the dust. It explains the decline of neighborliness! Have they become the unreality based community? Whatever it takes to get elected, I guess.

4. If this is true then the Committee is completely insane. And yet another Nobel wannabe? They are insane!

5. Ultimate definition of "shock troops"? Maybe we should just watch the temperature of their naughty bits (instead of the whites of their eyes, I guess).

6. This probably violates at least a thousand different laws under shar'ia. This OTOH is acceptable. As is this.

7. "Jihad Against the Crusaders" goes platinum? Somehow you gotta figure this crosses a line. Has DC Comics crossed the line too? How about this?

8. Announcement of glorious nuclear achievement to gangster stooges of blogsphere!

9. But she was saving kittens! That's why it's inappropriate to make fun of her, Satire makes people pay attention! See the advertisement here.

10. The "Whoops" factor. If you're cynical and you know it, clap your hands! Dividing everything into its component Democratic or Republican essence.

11. Foleyed out. Surely everyone is Kerryed out, too? Please? Please?

12. Air America's listener is interviewed.

13. Is it her, or does this sound completely fair to you, too?

14. This does NOT sound like true love.

15. This may be in poor taste, but at least it's funny.

16. Another Friday the 13th come and gone.

17. School madness?

18. Indeed, being wealthy solves a host of problems, doesn't it?

19. Another poor victim of a pants-stuffing youth...


Carnival of the Insanities can also be found at The Truth Laid Bear's ÜberCarnival and at the BlogCarnival.

***************************************
If you would like to Join the insanity, and add the Carnival of the Insanities button to your sidebar (clicking on it will always take you to the latest update of the Carnival), click on "Word of Blog" below the button to obtain the html code:


- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 8:10 AM |

 
DIPLOMACY: The Light at the End of the Tunnel?

- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 6:36 PM |

 
SHARP INTAKES OF BREATH AND STRONGLY WORDED COMMUNIQUES
Gerard Baker wonders how the world has come to the scary place where states like North Korea and Iran have nuclear weapons:

Of course the world’s pundits are sure it is all America’s fault. The US has failed to be sufficiently engaged. The refusal to talk directly to Pyongyang and to focus all its efforts on Iraq have allowed North Korea to cruise unmolested to nuclear status.

This is, essentially, drivel. The problem with North Korea has not been an insufficiency of multilateralist diplomacy in the past ten years but an overabundance. Beginning in 1994, the Clinton Administration started the US down a course of an engagement with Pyongyang that was all carrots and no sticks. Every time the North Koreans thumbed their noses at the US and its allies, they were punished with — what? Sharp intakes of breath and shakes of the head.

Not only was the US unwilling to make good on its threats, but effective multilateral action also required serious efforts by other countries with real leverage over North Korea to do something. But for the past six years China has been playing a dangerous double game. It never wanted North Korea to become a nuclear power but it was quite happy that its ally kept the US, Japan and South Korea off balance with its burgeoning ambitions.

The same story of hand-wringing futility has been played out with Iran. Russia and China have both placed short-term diplomatic and commercial gain over long-term stability. The Europeans were, well, European.

As for Iraq, I don’t recall the Russians, Chinese or Europeans urging the US to divert its regime-changing attentions to North Korea. They wanted the US to perform the same foot-dragging, futile, pointless dance with Baghdad that they were pursuing over Pyongyang. Would that have been any better? Now, belatedly, the talk is of tough UN sanctions against Iran and North Korea. But it is too late.

Not only is it too late, but it ain't gonna happen, late or not. The international community (i.e., the UN) could not deal with Iraq; it isn't dealing with Darfur; it won't deal with Iran--why should it deal decisively with North Korea? There is no reason for either China or Russia to support and sanctions that would be effective, precisely because of the game they are playing with regard to Iran--that is, they don't want sanctions on Iran, so why should they set a precedent with North Korea? No, they still believe it is to their national advantage to oppose the US on this issue.

And, why would we have any confidence that, even if the world got its act together, that sanctions would work? What does Kim Jong Il care if his starving population continues to starve? Any sanctions that might be imposed won't last for long due to "humanitarian" concerns.

Meanwhile, this action might blow some sand in the face of the bully Kim, but is far from altering the reality of his nuclear weapons capability.

The world is indeed scary as Baker suggests. But not because of current US policy toward either North Korea or Iran. Previous administrations have brought us to this point in time and it was already too late when US diplomats over two decades believed that North Korea could be stopped by words and promises (see here).

Diplomacy has not and will not work with regimes like North Korea or Iran--unless such diplomacy is backed up by credible threats that personally threaten the power of their megalomaniac leaders. These guys are way too good at splitting and manipulating. They will exploit even the tiniest of loopholes in any agreement and when there are none, they will outright lie because they think it is their perogative to do so.

The game currently being played by both North Korea and Iran with the international community is not much different from the trickery and haplessnes that characterized Lucy and Charlie Brown from the old Peanuts comic.



Charlie Brown, dupe that he is, believes Lucy every time she promises that next time it will be different. So, he keeps going back for more only to discover that, no matter what the promises, Lucy does not change her behavior.

I always felt sorry for poor Charlie Brown. He was, after all, a kid; and kids have a hard time learning this sort of life lesson.

Still, the supposed adults of the west should know better. Lucy is persuasive in her maliciousness; and I have doubts that Charlie Browns in the UN or the Democratic party in this country will ever grow up or learn from past experiences and betrayals. That would require some self-reflection and insight--psychological characteristics they are not strong on; as well as requiring the courage to confront a difficult and messy reality.

As Baker suggests, it is far easier to blame the current US administration for the short-sighted and incredibly delusional and counterproductive behavior of previous administrations and the entire world community.

"Lucy" has the ball set up for us to try to kick yet again.... When Kim and Ahmadinejad laughingly pull the ball away again will we once again react with a sharp intake of breath and more strongly worded communiques? Engage in the hand-wringing and blaming with endless whining that the Charlie Brown Democrats are particular good at these days?

Or will we finally face the reality of who and what we are dealing with, and act accordingly?
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 9:15 AM |

 
IRAQ AND THE NOT-READY-FOR-PRIME-TIME-PLAYERS
Two excellent analytical posts by Siggy regarding Iraq that should read be read. This is his area of expertise and he does it so well. In "From Green to Yellow: Is it Time To Reconsider Iraq", he evaluates reality and concludes:

By their actions- or lack thereof- Iraqis will in the end, clearly define themselves and the kind of nation they want for themselves. If they will not act in their own best interests, we cannot force democracy where it is clearly not valued.

If democracy is of little value to the Iraqis, we need to leave. That will result in tragedy and great suffering, of course, but the blood of Americans and coalition forces cannot continue to be used to purchase democracy for Iraq.

The people of Eastern Europe did not need to be convinced of the merits of free societies over tyrannies. We must be prepared to face the reality that much of the Arab world will remain backward for a very long time, incapable of understanding how free governments are always better than oppressive ones. While there is nothing we can do about that, we can hope that the next generation, or the one after that, will see more clearly.

The tragedy is that yet another generation of Arabs will be lost to dysfunction and neglect. The greater tragedy is that most of them don’t even know it. That said, we must always remind them that America and the free world will be there for them when they call.

Then in his next post he goes on:

We are not submitting that the goals of this administration are flawed. As we have noted, they are not. The real issue is whether or not the Iraqis are even capable of digesting democracy. When allied troops liberated the Nazi death camps in 1945, it became clear almost immediately that over feeding the wretched starving and emaciated inmates was a death sentence. After the horrors they had survived, it became clear they needed to be nursed back to health, slowly. Notwithstanding the instincts of every allied soldier to to give up all their own rations to alleviate the suffering if these walking skeletons, that would only have exacerbated the situation.

It is the same in Iraq. It has become clear that notwithstanding the feast that is democracy, the Iraqis might simply be unable to digest the richness. After decades of deprivation and oppression, it is quite clear- and understandable- that they are stil too timid and weak to stand up for themselves. That may change in decades or it may change in a few months- we do not know. No one does- and only a fool bets on a lame horse. Simply stated, the Iraqis are not yet ready for prime time.

Indeed, all of the above is why I find this post at The Belmont Club about a federal Iraq rather interesting.

We must not ignore the reality that some--actually many--of the power players in Iraq do not share our democratic values, however much simpler that would make things. We do already know that the Kurds have taken the democracy ball and run with it (and are doing very well, thank you very much). They have been successful because the U.S. was able to give them breathing space from oppression so that they could develop the necessary institutions for a free society. They have done smashingly well over the last decade, and indeed have become "the other Iraq"--the one we don't hear much about in the news.

I can't say whether federalism would be a good thing or not in the long-run for all of Iraq; but the idea, as Wretchard reminds us, is not a new one; but is already a part of the Iraqi constitution as ratified in 2005. That means that there may be ways around the current situation in Baghdad that involve giving more autonomy to provinces joined together into regions that would hold considerable self-rule powers, as in Kurdistan.

Baghdad with Sadr's Shia militia and the Sunnis and all the outside terrorists would remain the not-ready-for-prime-time-players while other areas of the country could possibly follow the lead of Kurdistan.
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 5:43 PM |

 
RECENT HIGHLIGHTS OF THE MORAL AND INTELLECTUAL BANKRUPTCY OF TODAY'S LEFT
Some time ago I wrote the following in a post discussing the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the left:

At this very moment, every issue supported by the Left, and almost all of the behavior exhibited by the Left is completely antithetical to classical liberal philosophies. There is no longer a commitment to personal liberty or to freedom. The Left is far too busy to promote freedom for the common man or woman, because their time is taken up advocating freedom for tyrants who oppress the common man; terrorists who kill the common man; and religious fanatics who subjugate the common woman.

The intellectuals who once promoted the IDEA of freedom, now are ensnared in an IDEOLOGY that depends for its very existence on the silencing of speech; the suppression of ideas; and the persecution of those who dare to refute its tenets.

What we have witnessed over the 30- 45 years since the Left ascended to dominate political thought in the mid 20th century, is its rapid and unprecedented decline into wholesale intellectual and moral bankruptcy. The noble values and ideals they once claimed they stood for have been completely abandoned; and almost as if a surreal cosmic joke was being played on them, they have—without even noticing!-- embraced the exact opposite.

Peggy Noonan details several recent exapmples of their contradictory and deeply disturbing behavior, including the aggressive silencing of speakers at Columbia; the "outrage" that views they don't agree with should be aired on TV; and the usual narcissistic prattlings of overpaid, undertalented, and extremely entitled Hollywood superstars.

She doesn't even mention this little piece of totalitarian fantasy, which undoubtedly expresses the true feelings of the global-warming-is-caused-by-evil-humans crowd. Although the statement has now been "retracted", you can be sure that the sentiment hasn't been.

What is so amusing about all this is that in all these examples, the people involved believe, without any doubts whatsoever, that they hold the moral high ground. They truly believe that they are champions of freedom!

In fact, they even believe that they are part of some "reality"-based community.

The problem is that none of them would recognize reality even if it smacked them on the side of the head (which reality often does).

The one thing you can say for the left as it has transformed itself into a vehicle enabling for the implementation of evil throughout the world, is that at least they are consistent.

They consistently trounce on freedom of speech (except their own, of course); they consistently support dictators and thugs; they consistently denigrate any attempt to confront or deal with said dictators and thugs; they consistently are unable to see how their ideological positions are in direct conflict with fundamental human rights; human freedom; or even human dignity--even as they shrilly proclaim that their contradictory behavior supports such noble ideas.

The left has degenerated into a movement that has not only abandoned reality, they have jettisoned reason and critical thinking. They prefer to hold onto the dogmatic axioms of their secular religion; shout the mantras and slogans of that religion; and refuse to acknowledge the catastrophic consequences of their behavior in the real world.

The mind of the left has turned to mush. All they have left are the inchoate--but quite passionate- emotions that help them to feel warm and glowing about their own superior intellectual and moral righteousness. A superiority, they have concluded, that entitles them to rule over all the rest of us lesser mortals.

And, make no mistake, that is what it is all about now for these bleeding narcissists. They don't care about human freedom. They don't really care much about human rights or dignity. Their desire is very simple: they want to rule.

No wonder they can identify with and reflexly support--consistently--every dictator and tyrant in the world.
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 7:38 AM |

 
OUR SURVEY SAYS !
From Cox and Forkum, and apropos with the last post:


- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 9:21 PM |

 
A VOICE OF REASON SPEAKS
Dr. Wafa Sultan, who you might remember from this video here (and who I wrote about here) was recently interviewed by Ynet:

In a special interview with Ynet, Dr. Sultan described her life in Syria as 32 years lived in fear, “32 years stolen from me by fanatic Islam.”

In the March TV debate, Sultan called on Muslims to learn from the example of the Jews, who endured the tragedy of the Holocaust and forced the world to respect them for their knowledge and not by terrorism.

“By their hard work – not with crying and shrieking,” she said. “Only Muslims defend their religion by burning churches, killing people and bombing embassies. The Muslims need to ask themselves what they can do for the human race before they demand the human race to respect them,” she added.

Since the televised interview, she has been barred from Arab television networks, but she manages to penetrate the Arab and Muslim world through her website and with daily emails she sends to her supporters.

“You may not see an immediate effect to what I do, but I believe it will be possible to see it in two to three generations. In 300 years, the Muslim world will remember the name Wafa Sultan,” she is convinced.

Sultan cannot return to Syria, as she is certain she would be arrested on the spot. She would like to visit Israel, though, and expects to do so soon, she told Ynet.

Dr. Sultan escaped her confinement from within the prison of Islam. In completely unambiguous terms, she represents a voice of reason and moderation sorely needed in that backward culture.

It is typical that they cannot bear to hear what she is saying. See the entire interview here.
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 3:15 PM |

 
SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS GOES BOINK, Part II
Gagdad Bob imagines how Palestinian psychiatry would work:

Imagine a Palestinian going to a Palestinian psychiatrist and free associating. “You know, I’ve been having these weird thoughts.... I don’t think that Jews are responsible for all my problems.... In fact, I’m starting to think that they’re an admirable people, and that we should be imitating them instead of murdering them.... Let’s be honest, Doc, Arabs have contributed nothing to the world, but just by being in proximity to Israel we were the most prosperous Arab ecomomy, but we stupidly destroyed all of that with the meaningless intifada. We actually cheered when those planes went into the Twin Towers, but now I’m starting to have second thoughts, Doc. Am I crazy?”

“Yes. Not just crazy but evil. As a way of curing you, I am recommending that you be hung by your ankles from the nearest lamp post and be disemboweled by an angry mob.”

Do you think this is far-fetched, and that he is exaggerating? Let me reiterate what he says earlier in the same post: "...science, properly understood, can only exist in a free society."

Remember Soviet Psychiatry, which I wrote about here? Or, how about another example of Islamic science--like the time they demonstrated how Neil Armstrong "proved" that Mecca was the center of the universe?

Truthfully, I think that Bob is being way too restrained about how "Palestinian" psychiatry--or any psychological science in the backwaters of the Middle East-- would warp and distort science.

Don't get me wrong. There are some very unscientific activities that go on even in free societies; but it is only in the kind of collectivist/totalitarian societies that the very basic principles of science are manipulated to conform to the ideology of the state.

Anyone can distort science and the scientific method; but it takes a fanatical totalitarian state (and it doesn't matter if it is secular or religious--as long as they have absolute power over others) to mount an all out assault on truth, reason, and reality and ensure that none of those three can have a negative impact on their delusions.

UPDATE: Omar of Iraq the Model demonstrates how, in a free society, one is able to counter science whose goal is, not knowledge or even truth, but political ideology. And, let's say you happen to think the researchers in the article are honorable scientists...well, you should have listened to their interview yesterday when they blatantly admitted that they wanted their "study" to be published before the mid-term elections in the US so they would have an impact. That is very scientific of them, you must admit. The Lancet, once a reputable medical journal, seems determined to publish political fluff these days to advance their editors' political agenda. Sadly, this is getting all too common, even in the West.

Instapundit has a round-up of appropriate skepticism of their scientific probably ideological claims.
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 7:10 AM |

 
THE CLEVER PSYCHOLOGICAL DISGUISES OF THE LEFT
I found this post on liberal paranoia at The Corner interesting:

In response to today's column, a reader writes:

What scares me the most is that throughout my life whatever the Left
says the Right is going to do, is exactly what they try when they have
the power and the opportunity. In psychological terms it is projection.
The louder they shout these things, the more I become a "broken glass
Republican"

Me: I think there's an important point here. So much of the demonization of conservatives from liberals in the last fifty years has worked on a formula which goes something like this: "I want use the state to impose my dreamy good intentions. Conservatives are evil. So, if they get ahold of government they will use government to do evil in the same way that we would do good."

The column in question, written by Jonah Goldberg discusses the fears (read: paranoia) of the left about a variety of things that make no sense to anyone with a firm foundation in reality. For example, the idea promulgated energetically by the left that an imminent Christian theocracy is about to be imposed on America.

As Goldberg says, "One is tempted to invoke Orwell’s dictum that some things are so stupid, only an intellectual could believe them. But, the truth is, lots of otherwise normal people believe this stuff."

Paranoia in American society indeed strikes deep--in recent years particularly so. And, the person quoted in The Corner has identified the correct psychological mechanism at work here.

First, let's get one thing out of the way. There is no evidence that a Christian theocracy is about to be imposed on the American people. In fact, the religious rhetoric of this administration is not significantly different from that of any other previous admministration in the last 100 years or so. You would have to go back to the Founding Fathers and that era in American life to see real religious preoccupation (why they even used the word "God" quite liberally in writing important American documents--what in God's name were they thinking??)

I wrote in this post:

A definition of Christianophobia or Christianity Derangement Syndrome (CDS), could be formulated thusly:

"The excacerbation of acute and severe paranoia about the imminent imposition of a Christian theocracy in the U.S.; in an individual already suffering from Bush Derangement Syndrome as a reaction to the very existence of (1) the Christian religion; (2) the practitioners of Christianity; and (3) symbols of Christianity anywhere within the culture; while simultaneously completely ignoring and dismissing any threat from the religious fanatics of Islam who repeatedly and clearly have stated that their goal is the imposition of a world-wide Islamic theocracy (or "Caliphate")."

So, as a result of this interesting disorder, here we are in a war with Islamic fundamentalism, and many on the left seem to think that the U.S. is at risk in having a Christian theocracy imposed and that the Bushitler is more dangerous than Bin Laden.

During the 2004 Presidential campaign, one of my friends was so pre-occupied by this issue, she literally could not understand why I would vote for Bush, since it was clear to her that he intended to usher in a religious state.

Since that time, I can't help but have noticed that all the women of my acquaintance are now wearing nun habits; that holy communion is being forced down the throats of unrepentant leftists; and that there has been a dramatic decline in sexually explicit material everywhere as the purveyors of same have been rounded up and summarily executed by the religious police.

Why, last week I (a professed, unrepentant agnostic) was forced to enter a church to obtain sustenance (they were having a bake sale).

And I wondered then-- as I do regularly about the lunatic left and its fears that now infect some otherwise reasonably normal people--how does a person make sense of symptoms of paranoia so bizarre? So....displaced....from the real threat?

If you read that post, you will see that the psychological displacement of affect from the real threat of barbaric Islamic fascism onto Christianity, which poses no threat at all in modern times, is a way of dealing with intense anxiety.

By and large, displacement is a merely neurotic psychological defense mechanism. With a little insight and self-awareness, it is possible to easily come back in touch with reality as time goes on and the evidence before your eyes becomes more obvious.

But projection (which is the basis of paranoia)is far more primitive, and what it defends against is usually a devastating aspect of reality--one that is threatening to the very foundation of one's sense of self.

And that is what is at stake should the left come to grips with their paranoia and projection--the carefully constructed reality bubble they have created in their minds would come crashing down around them.

The left's paranoid style develops new strategies for concealment every day.

Psychologically, it is very difficult to abandon paranoia once it is taken on by a particular group, since it--and the accompanying delusions that it generates-- serves the purpose of accounting for an unacceptable status quo. Without a scapegoat who is considered to be racially, sexually, physically, or intellectually inferior, onto which your own fears can be projected; it would be horrifying and untenable to look inside one's own heart and soul for the source of the fear.

This is the nature of projection and paranoia. The unacceptable thoughts or feelings are denied ("not owned") by the person experiencing them, and instead are projected onto another individual or--as in this case--a group. Thus, the person who originally had the offensive thought or feeling becomes the helpless victim of the evil "other" and they do not have to cope with the fact that the evil lies within themselves. This is the origin of almost all acts of racism, sexism, anti-semitism, etc. It is the source of most prejudice in the world; and certain prejudices that become socially acceptable--like the casual anti-semitism of the Middle East; or the causal anti-Republicanism adopted by the intellectual "elite" of this country.

The commenter on Jonah's column above is exactly correct. The left believes that Republicans are imminently going to impose their belief system on the American public because that is exactly what they would do--and did--when they were in power. That is their modus operandi. They don't want their ideas adopted by reasoned debate or even by democrat majority rule.

They are the one's who constantly seek to impose their values on others by fiat or judicial decree. They are the ones who claim that all morality is relative, except for their ideas, which represent absolute truth. They are the ones who, to put it bluntly, wish to impose their religion of multicultural diversity and political correctness upon America, and have been doing so at every level of society for decades. Just try to violate the dogma of their religion and see the outrage that is generated, if you have any doubts about their level of committment to free speech and thought.

Projection is never a good long-term psychological strategy--nor is it healthy--in an adult; and using such a defense mechanism represents a primitive attempt to shirk the responsibility for one's own feelings, thoughts, and actions. It causes and has caused much human misery, death, destruction and some of the most horrific acts that humans are capable of. When entire countries subscribe to a projected delusion (e.g., the "Jews" are to blame; the "Blacks" are the cause of all of our problems; "Republicans" are evil; Bush=Hitler) it can lead to genocide and other behaviors that are paranoid and psychotically delusional. Full-blown paranoia occurs when one's mind severs the connection with reality entirely.

The recent altercations at Columbia are just one example on how far and how violent the left is willing to go to protect themselves from the knowledge that they are the totalitarians; they are the fascists; they are the racists; and they are the tyrants who seek control over others. And through the years, they have developed many clever psychological disguises and behavioral manipulations to keep themselves ignorant of this reality.

Christianity hasn't been much of a problem for over thousand years. The left, however, has been at the forefront of thought control, supression of speech, and enslavement of the individual for the "good" of their utopian societies for the last hundred.

Just remember this old psychiatric maxim when dealing with the real threat to freedom in our time: you aren't paranoid if they really are out to get you.
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 12:55 PM |

 
PRIORITIES !

- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 7:24 AM |

 
MALIGNANT GRANDIOSITY AND THE SHAME CULTURE
There seems to be some doubt out there that the North Koreans actually tested a nuclear device (see here and here, for example).

I, of course, have no way of personally knowing the truth of this, but I can think of a lot of reasons why the U.S. might go along with any North Korean deception in this area.

What interests me is the psychology behind a North Korean deception--if it is a deception; which in many ways would be not dissimilar from the same kind of deception about WMDs that Saddam Hussein foisted on the world (and may be the same kind of game being played by the Iranians).

What is the point of such provocation and brinkmanship on the part of Kim? What was ever the point of Saddam's trickery and subterfuge with the international community?

For at least part of that answer, we must go back to the essentials of a "shame" culture--the type of culture that not only dominates the world of the Middle East, but also is rampant in many Asian countries. I discuss "shame" versus "guilt" cultures here.

What ties the three megalomaniacs of North Korea, Iraq and Iran together is their obsessive shame-avoidant behavior, a cultural attribute which is the flip side of their individual malignant grandiosity.

Let me first address the narcissistic grandiosity that is characteristic of all dictators and tyrants, particularly the three mentioned above. Typical symptoms of grandiosity that can be observed in your typical autocratic ruler/megalomaniac like Kim, Hussein, or Ahmadinejad are:
• Continual claims for attention and admiration
• Cold and uncaring behavior toward others
• Other people are seen only as an extension of the self to be manipulated and/or eliminated as needed; an inability to relate to people as people or separate from oneself
• Inflated/exaggerated sense of self-importance
• Hypochondria, or an obsession with individual body parts and illness

ShrinkWrapped has this to say about these individuals:

In more severe cases, the existence of the other person’s mind and life is simply of no consequence. For the Malignant Narcissist, other people are mere props in the pageantry of their lives. A tyrant can throw someone into a shredding machine without a second thought because the victim only matters in relation to how he can support the grandiosity of the tyrant; beyond that, he is faceless, nameless, worthless. It was no accident that Saddam Hussein was surrounded by sycophants who all grew mustaches to look just like him.

These kind of personality characteristics certainly can occur in any type of society; but appear to be more easily cultivated in shame cultures, which by their very nature are usually collectivist-oriented. Thus, it is not unusual to find the toxic combination of individual narcissistic personality traits with those behavioral attributes encouraged within a shame culture; specifically, preserving honor and avoiding shame at all costs.

For both the grandiose and shame-avoidant person, reality itself must be distorted in order to protect the self from feeling low self-esteem or shame. Blaming other individuals or groups for one's own behavior becomes second nature, and this transfer of blame to someone else is an indicator to the observer that such individuals are experiencing internal shame.

Most psychological theorists see shame as a more “primitive” emotion (since it impacts one’s basic sense of self) compared to guilt, which is developed later in the maturation of the self. Without the development of guilt there is no development of a real social conscience. Most of western culture is predominantly a "guilt"-type culture

In a typical shame culture, what other people believe has a far more powerful impact on one's behavior than even what the individual himself believes. These powerful, preening dictators, who hold complete power over people and who present themselves as little gods, are totally wrapped up in what other people think of them. Humiliation and shame are to be avoided at all costs; and this cultural imperative is only emphasized by the individual grandiosity of the near-omnipotent "great" or "dear" leaders.

From a psychological perspective, it is ridiculous to maintain that it is America's --or any other country's-- "fault" when such leaders behave badly. This distorted view arises from a perverted notion of what self-esteem is really all about.

The excessive self-esteem you see in a bully comes from a distortion of reality that person has with regard to their self. It was widely believed that low self-esteem could be a cause of violence, but in reality violent individuals, groups and nations think very well of themselves. Do you really suppose that people like Kim Jung Il or Saddam Hussein or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad suffer from poor self-esteem? On the contrary. Exaggerated self-esteem is one of the hallmarks of a pathological narcissist or psychopath. Such individuals turn violent toward others who fail to give them the inflated respect they think they deserve.

Nor does high self-esteem deter people from becoming bullies, according to most of the studies that have been done; it is simply untrue that beneath the surface of every obnoxious bully is an unhappy, self-hating child in need of sympathy and praise. Rather, it is more consistent with exactly the opposite--a narcissistically inflated sense of self that much be preserved at all costs.

Let's remember that these tyrants are not psychiatric patients. They do not seek help; nor do they believe that anything is wrong with them. They believe they are entitled to unlimited praise and deference. They believe that their will and their desire is all that is important. Many people who enthusiastically surround such dictators and admire them are sycophantic and self-abasing appeasers (these people genuinely admire the power and ruthlessness of the omnipotent dictator and want some of that aura to rub off on them--see an example here).

One of the most important expressions of the shame culture, as well as shame-avoidant and grandiose persons in general, is the rampant psychological projection and refusal to accept responsibility for any inappropriate behavior--up to and including the most disgusting of atrocities. It is always someone else's fault. In this way the shame-avoidant person can successfully avoid the shame that is inevitable when a mature individual takes responsibility for their own malignant behavior.

Iran's latest press release, blaming the US for North Korea's nuclear test (even if the test turns out to be non-nuclear) is just a part of the classic shame-avoidant dance that leads into the blurry realms of delusion.

Iran's leader clearly understands this dynamic, because he suffers from it himself. It is always someone else's fault that forces you to behave insanely when you are humiliated. There is no responsibility for one's own actions; or even for one's own thoughts or feelings.

Psychological health (which dictators, tyrants and thugs clearly lack, since their operating principle is to obtain power over others, rather than exert power over their own aggressive impulses) and healthy self-esteem depend on overcoming shame by progressing to a level of maturity that recognizes objective reality and truth; a level where taking responsibility for one's actions and accepting that the truth about one's self is not determined by other people's opinions. When that level of maturity is reached individually and culturally, both shame and guilt become important reality checks to an individual--or to a culture.

When a culture determines that the avoidance of shame is necessary no matter what the cost, the result is a culture of fanaticism, bizarre behavior in the name of "honor"; and simultaneously the cultural oppression, subjugation, and humiliation of women and others perceived as "weak" (and therefore "shameful"). It also inevitably results in the projection of one's own unacceptable behavior and shameful feelings onto another individual or an outside group. When a narcissistic and grandiose individual is steeped in such a culture, they easily become monsters and think of themselves as "gods" (or the special envoy of a god in the case of Ahmadinejad).

The issue for western nations is how one addresses such cultures and their grandiose and often irrational, but cunning, leaders.

SC&A in his usual direct manner have this to say:

Diplomats do not solve problems, they effect useful compromise. That is nice when we are dealing with Canada, France or Luxembourg. Diplomats are ineffective when comes to dealing with evil, because evil must be defeated, not compromised with. Evil must be addressed, head on and relentlessly. If you are unsure about what is and isn’t real evil, you are indeed an idiot.
[...]
In fact, as those who insist we establish a ‘dialogue’ with North Korea, that very regime has been at the fore of arms proliferation, selling nuclear and missile expertise to the highest bidder. No amount of ‘dialogue’ will cause the North Koreans to ’see the light.’ They know very well the difference between right and wrong. They have deliberately chosen to starve their nation so that they might field the world’s 4th largest military and they have deliberately rebuffed the civilized world with threats of catastrophe.

It should come as no surprise that North Korea has for decades, counted among it’s allies terrorists and rogue nations and regimes that openly call for the destruction of other nations and entire peoples.

Compromise and negotiation are not a valued part of any shame culture. There can be no compromise with their concept of "honor", for any compromise brings "shame". Thus, in order to maintain honor, lying and any other kind of deceit is completely acceptable--even encouraged. Multiply this times ten when dealing with the malignant narcissistic leader of the culture or nation.

This reality is hard to grasp for the western mind which places a higher value on truth and honesty. Thus, western diplomats seem incredibly naiive and laughable to both Asian and Arab minds because they believe in the sanctity of agreement, treaties, and the like. The idea that deliberate deceit or lying as a political strategy is considered acceptable--even honorable --in some places of the world doesn't seem to occur to them.

Kim Jong Il cannot back down now. He has brought things to the brink, where he (and most narcissists and psychopaths) like to operate. In fact, he is counting on the West and in particular, the U.S. to take the step back. He has every historical reason to be encouraged that this will happen. Jimmy Carter did it; Madeleine Albright did it; Bill Clinton did it. The Democratic leadership currently in Congress is dying to do it.

However there are several key psychological points one needs to keep in mind when dealing with both the narcissistic grandiosity of the dictator/tyrant and the shame-avoidant culture that nourishes him.

First, in dealing with the narcissistic grandiosity it must be remembered that what you are confronting is basically a bully (a bully with nuclear weapons for sure, but still a bully). And a bully will only stop bullying when it is absolutely clear to him that he cannot win. In other words, a show of overwhelming force that is direct, clear and unambiguous is what is needed. The bully must understand that he will not get away with his bullying; that it will not be tolerated-- or there will be catastrophic consequences for him personally.

Bullies like Kim Jong Il will watch carefully to see if the West really means what it says in this area, and if he senses any ambiguity or lack of resolve on the part of the international community or within the US, he will hold his ground because he thinks he is stronger and can exploit our indecision.

That is what Saddam believed would happen in Iraq. That is what Ahmadinejad and the malignant mullahs believe will happen in their own confrontation with the West. They have seen the indecision and the lack of will and are certain they will prevail against such weakness.

So it is incredibly important that militarily the US or the international community step up to the plate. (I suspect we can likely forget the latter).

The second part of the strategy must address the shame-avoidant culture that Kim controls. Some sort of "carrot" must be offered to the regime that can help them save face. It does not necessarily have to be anything that is high on the North Korean priority list; but it must be something of significance internationally that will increase their status in some way that does not reinforce their already over-emphasized military grandiosity.

This sort of dual behavioral management strategy takes into account both the individual and the cultural psychological dysfunction that underlies the pathological brinksmanship often seen such regimes. Showing any sign of military weakness, willingness to appease or tolerate bad behavior, or a lack of resolve will only empower malignant narcissists like Kim; and failing to offer a way to save face (or reinforcing the worst aspects of the regime in the face-saving) will leave Koreans with an intolerable degree of shame that may be manipulated and cause future problems.
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 4:47 PM |

 
GET SERIOUS
Some common sense (what else?) from Thomas Sowell:

With a war going on in Iraq and with Iran next door moving steadily toward a nuclear bomb that could change the course of world history in the hands of international terrorists, the question for this year's elections is not whether you or your candidate is a Democrat or a Republican but whether you are serious or frivolous.

That question also needs to be asked about the media. In these grim and foreboding times, our media have this year spent incredible amounts of time on a hunting accident involving Vice President Cheney, a bogus claim that the administration revealed Valerie Plame's identity as a C.I.A. "agent" -- actually a desk job in Virginia -- and is now going ballistic over a Congressman who sent raunchy e-mails to Congressional pages.

This is the frivolous media -- and the biased media. Republican Congressman Foley was wrong and is out on his ear. But Democrats in both Congress and the White House have gone far beyond words with a page and an intern. Yet the Democrats did not resign and Bill Clinton's perjury, obstruction of justice, and suborning of perjury by others were treated as if these were irrelevant private matters.

Even when serious issues are addressed, they can be addressed either seriously or frivolously. If you are content to see life and death issues of war and peace addressed with catch phrases like "chicken hawk" or to see a coalition of nations around the world fighting terrorism referred to as "unilateral" U.S. action because France does not go along, then you are content with frivolity.

You may deserve whatever you get if you vote frivolously in this year's election. But surely the next generation, which has no vote, deserves better.
[...]
More than twice as many Marines were killed taking one island in the Pacific during World War II than all the Americans killed in the four years of the Iraq war. More Americans were killed in one day during the Civil War.

If we are going to discuss war, the least we can do is be serious.

Since my father was wounded on one of those islands in the Pacific during WWII--one where over 5000 U.S. troops were killed in the space of a few weeks--I happen to believe that Sowell is absolutely on the mark. Pop never once doubted that what he fought for was worth preserving. Nor did he ever want to fob his own responsibility off on future generations.

The reason we can't get serious about this war is because this country now seems to prefer "freedom lite"; meaning that there are many in the MSM and in certain political parties, who have forgotten --if they ever knew--what it means to be free. They want all the perks; they want to get elected; but they don't want the responsibility of making hard decisions and difficult choices.

Our enemies are willing to violently die in the name of their fanatical death cult; --are we, the American people willing to make any sacrifices anymore to preserve our way of life and promote freedom for our children and their children? Or, are we willing to let the 21st century's reincarnation of human evil take root and destroy Western Civilization while we sit around and argue about the number of pages on the head of a pin?

A war cannot be won without cost.

I wrote in an earlier post this counter to all the moral posturing of the left and the Democrats who seem to think that nothing is worth fighting or dying for:

... in order to combat and defeat this new barbarism, we must confront it and be willing to do whatever it takes to defeat it.

If we appease or ignore it, it will continue to menace everything we hold dear; and sooner or later, it will sink us--no matter how moral we are or how much restraint we demonstrate to their provocations. Morality and restraint will not win this conflict. We must be sure in our own hearts and minds of the endurance of our own values in order to do what is necessary.

Our uncertainty is sinking us already. Value by value. Look how willing much of the West was to compromise our freedom of speech in the Danish cartoons (no matter how "offensive" they might be taken) in order to accommodate the enemy's threats. Soon, we will have compromised away all that matters to us; and our civilization will drown, little by little as it is taken over by the barbarians.

If we continue to appease them, we will drown in their ruthlessness and love of death.

The cost of this war will be more than all the lives lost; it will also be for the humanity and civilization we must temporarily abandon to win. I love to read fantasies as much as anyone, but in the real world, the good and virtuous whose cause is just do not always win.

When we are finally cornered and must allow our own barbarism to surface to combat theirs head to head, then we must be prepared to live with the consequences, including the agonizing guilt that will ensue--or everything we hold dear, everything we aspire to become, will forever perish from this earth.

With North Korea's madman thumping his chest and likely supplying our enemies with the weapons they so desire to kill us; with Iran's thugocracy threatening to wipe Israel off the map; with the chaos and death al-Qaeda are joyfully ushering in both in Iraq and Afghanistan--can we please get serious in this country?

Or, we could embrace the frivolity--and suicidal stupidity--of the political left.
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 6:34 AM |

 
PERVERTS, NARCISSISTS AND THIEVES
To pick up on the theme of The Sanity Squad this week:

PERVERTS, PUNKS* AND THIEVES

We were born in the shadow of our great Uncle Sam
But the elephant and donkey no longer give a damn
They both do much less than whatever they should
And virtuously prate about the 'common good'.

Chorus
Perverts, punks and thieves--
Go hear it from the shrinks of the Sanity Squad !
They call 'em perverts, punks and thieves--
Because both parties screw around,
You can count on them to let their country down.

One emailed a page just south of D.C.
Another used cigars for deniability
Both push the pork and just wanna have fun
And get re-elected
Without a thought to the harm that they've done

Chorus
Perverts, punks and thieves
Go hear it from the shrinks of the Sanity Squad !
They call 'em perverts, punks and thieves--
Because both parties screw around,
You can count on them to let their country down

Get elected and you think you're so great,
Entitled for whatever you please;
Soon you hallucinate that you are the state
A major symptom of the narcissist's disease (uh-huh)
A major symptom of US congressman's disease (uh-huh)

We were born in the shadow of our great Uncle Sam
But the elephant and donkey no longer give a damn
They both do much less than whatever they should
And virtuously prate about the 'common good'.


*"Punks" scans much better than "narcissists" don't you think?
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 7:30 PM |

 
THE RHYMES OF HISTORY ***Updated***
"History does not repeat itself, But it does rhyme." - Mark Twain

It should be fairly clear this morning after the major event of last night and its analysis today , that the world has been blissfully composing historical blank verse (history that is written in unrhymed iambic pentameter) only to discover that some rhyming (or at least assonance) is definitely going on.

Iran, interestingly turns out to rhyme beautifully with Nazi Germany. After last night, we can suddenly hear the correspondence in sound between North Korea and Imperial Japan.

In this poetic anapest (or possibly dactyl--it is unclear which syllables will be stressed, but I suspect that Iran is the most dangerous), it remains to be seen which state will become the third syllable--though there are some leading contenders for the unstressed syllables of the meter.

Which country will take complete the rhyme and become the third Axis (of Evil) power? Will it be Hugo Chavez'Venezuela? He'd really like that kind of attention and he sort of sounds like Mussolini, don't you think? Will it be Syria? Assad likes to kiss up to Iran just as Mussolini liked to kiss up to Hitler. Or, will the conglomeration of political dysfunctionality we usually refer to as the Palestinian Authority eagerly take up the meter? Maybe, if Iraq or Afghanistan go further down the poetic road to hell, they might join the developing rhythm?

Stanley Kurtz has this to say:

What will it take to wake up the West? Will a nuclear explosion beneath a North Korean mountain be enough? The threat of nuclear terror has been rumbling beneath the surface since 9/11, yet still we’re in denial. Make a deal? President Clinton tried that and failed, accepting a bogus deal, with a porous inspections regime. North Korea flouted the agreement at the first opportunity. Keep negotiating? At this point, the prospect that North Korea is simply positioning itself for negotiations is dim. More likely they’ve given up on the hope of another Clinton-style bonanza (on which they would have simply cheated again), and have decided instead to defy the world, with all the attendant risks. Those risks are huge. If the U.S. and China cooperate now in seriously sanctioning North Korea, the regime could collapse. That would be both welcome and deeply dangerous. On the other hand, if the U.S. and China refuse to cooperate in sanctioning Korea, and break with each other instead, we face yet another sort of destabilizing regional conflict. On top of all this, American interdiction of ships bound for North Korea could lead to war. On the other hand, failure to interdict would reveal the weakness of our position, and would make it that much easier for the North Koreans to smuggle out weapons and nuclear material to terrorists and the rogue regimes of the Middle East.

But there is no doubt in my mind, at least, that the denial will continue unabated. Even louder than usual, actually, since there is an election coming up. Foleygate should be relegated to the political trashbin, where it can join the ever-growing list of Democratic distractions that have tied this country up in knots and undermined its ability to use its military in an optimal manner to deal with the growing threats.

Except that it won't.

You and I know that everything is Bush's fault! Or Cheney's. Or Rumsfeld's. That will be the Democratic Party line (I've already read it in several of the usual lefty blogs)--you can put money on it.

The simple solution they will put forth is that if the American public gets rid of Bush and the evil Republicans, then everything will be wonderful again like it was in the Clinton years, hallejulah!

Some American's will buy that line of crap very easily. The state of denial can be so blissful and peaceful-- and even politically and financially rewarding.

Expect to hear the Democrats continue on their opportunistic way, intent only on achieving a majority in the House or Senate so they can focus on those really really important issues of our day--like impeaching Bush and trashing America's ability to respond to the threats of the 21st century.

And peace. Don't forget peace. We've got to have peace at any price. Peace in our time.

We can probably rest much more easily in our beds at night as senior Democratic leadership ensures that there will be no illegal listening in on NOKO conversations with anyone in this country; and as they dutifully protect everyone in the world's right to attack the U.S. with impunity. The "shrieking of American doves" will continue shrieking unabated (even louder!) and add to the ongoing alliteration of the lunatic left.

Cindy Sheehan and Michael Moore will compose a stanza or two to encourage that the drumbeat of peace peace peace marches on (or was that doom doom doom?).

Interestingly, even the appeasement and stupidity of the left and the Democrats; even their gross opportunism and pervasive psychological denial are rhyming beautifully in this historical couplet.

I just haven't decided yet which of the many choices within the Democratic party rhymes best with "Neville Chamberlain".

This historical rhyming is likely to continue; and this time I fear that the envoy, or final stanza of the emerging poem, will conclude-- not just with a nuclear bang, but with a nuclear whimper.

And even that has a certain internal rhyme that isn't difficult to appreciate anymore.

UPDATE: A reader at The Corner writes to Jonah Goldbeg

So you’ve hired the Republican Pest Control Co. to get rid of your pests, and 5 years latter, you’ve still got an infestation. Do you:

A) Reflect on how difficult it is to cure and infestation?

B) Hire the Democrat Pest Control Co. who’s Yellow Pages add talks about “metaphorically killing ‘uninvited guests’ in your home with kindness” and “uses only non-lethal traps so that they can be relocated to the flower beds in front of your home.”

I’ll stick with A).

See the comment thread for an example of A) and B) in real life! This is what always happens when I am linked to by certain sites.

UPDATE II: What is it about the message, "We intend to kill you" that some people don't understand? Osama said it in his 1998 Fatwa. Zawahiri takes every opportunity to say it. The 9/11 hijackers said it very clearly. Other two bit thugs like Kim Jong Il and Hugo Chavez tend to be less direct because most of the time they are paranoid and out of touch with reality; so they indulge in a little projection (claiming we intend to kill them); but every so often, they emit a carefully nuanced expression of their real feelings.



Oh, and comments on this thread have been shut down.
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 7:56 AM

 
OVER THERE, OR OVER HERE - You Get To Decide on November 7 !
Charles Krauthammer has this to say about the Iraq war making us less safe here at home (hat tip: Betsy):

The question posed -- does the Iraq war increase or decrease the world supply of jihadists? -- is itself an exercise in counting angels on the head of a pin. Any answer would require a complex calculation involving dozens of unmeasurable factors, as well as construction of a complete alternate history of the world had the U.S. invasion of 2003 not happened.

Ah, but those seers in the U.S. "intelligence community," speaking through a leaked National Intelligence Estimate -- the most famous previous NIE, mind you, concluded that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, slam-dunk -- have peered deep into the hypothetical past and found the answer. As spun by Iraq war critics, the conclusion is that Iraq has made us less safe because it has become a "cause celebre" and a rallying cry for jihad.

Become? Everyone seems to have forgotten that Iraq was already an Islamist cause celebre and rallying cry long before 2003. When Osama bin Laden issued his declaration of war against America in 1998, his two principal justifications for the jihad that exploded upon us on Sept. 11, 2001, centered on Iraq: America's alleged killing of more than 1 million Iraqis through the post-Gulf War sanctions and, even worse, the desecration of Islam's holiest cities of Mecca and Medina by the garrisoning of infidel U.S. soldiers in Saudi Arabia (as post-Gulf War protection from the continuing threat of invasion by Hussein).

The irony is that the overthrow of Hussein eliminated these two rallying cries: Iraqi sanctions were lifted and U.S. troops were withdrawn from the no-longer-threatened Saudi Arabia. But grievances cured are easily replaced.
[...]
Moreover, does anyone imagine that had the jihadists in Iraq remained home they would now be tending petunias rather than plotting terror attacks? Omar al-Farouq, leader of al-Qaeda in Southeast Asia, escaped from a U.S. prison in Afghanistan a year ago and was apparently drawn to the "cause celebre" in Iraq. Last month he was killed by British troops in a firefight in Basra. In an audiotape released Sept. 28, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq said that more than 4,000 of its recruits have been killed there since the American invasion. Like Omar al-Farouq and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, they went to Iraq to die in Iraq.

It is clear that one of the reasons we have gone an astonishing five years without a second attack on the American homeland is that the most dedicated and virulent jihadists have gone to Iraq to fight us, as was said during World War I, "over there."

Does the war in Iraq make us more or less safe today? And what about tomorrow? The fact is that no definitive answer is possible. Except for the following truism: During all wars we are by definition less safe -- and the surest way back to safety is victory.

I don't have a lot to add to his analysis, but I do think that if some people would rather count angels on the head of a pin instead of appreciating the fact that no attacks on the homeland have taken place for the last 5 years, then they are probably so far beyond the reach of reality; and steeped in Bush hatred too deeply to appreciate the bottom line. As I said in this post:

Think back for a moment and remember that no one--NO ONE--imagined for even a brief moment after 9/11 that there would not be more attacks on this country that would be even worse than what occurred on that September day in 2001.

No matter what happens in the days and months to come, the policies of the Bush Administration--however imperfect, and including invading Iraq--have resulted in no attacks on U.S. soil since that day.

And for me, that is the bottom line.

Meanwhile, you get to decide which scenario you prefer this coming November!


- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 10:06 AM |

 
CARNIVAL OF THE INSANITIES
Time for the weekly insanity update, where the insane, the bizarre, the ridiculous, and the completely absurd are highlighted for all to see! This has been a week of rare idiocy (as always!). So, if you want to remain sane, the best thing is to poke some fun at the more egregious absurdities.

Send all entries for next week's carnival to Dr. Sanity by 8 pm ET on Saturday for Sunday's Carnival. Only one post entry weekly per blogger, please. And you might read this before submitting an entry.

Thanks for all the submissions. I try to use as many as possible! SO MANY INSANITIES! SO LITTLE TIME!!!

1. "You sound reasonable ~ time to up my medication"-- and many other glorious insults in this handy dandy library reference guide! They all sound better when expressed with one of those magnificent British accents, too!

2. Live from New York! It's Saturday Night Ramadan!

3. Al Gore is not going to like this.

4. Ready for more insanity? Ready for some extremely wishful thinking--not to mention some psychological projection thrown in! Ready for some BDS masquerading as "art"?

5. What is virtual sex versus what is real sex (or does it depend on the meaning of "is"?) Maybe you are on "The List" ? Welcome to the Congressional Page tip line! Ephebophilia??

5a) The GOP is definitely not the "Gay Old Party"! People like Foley need to be members of a political party that rewards their behavior, instead of condemning it!

5b) This guy clearly has priorities in life. And sex of any sort isn't one of them.

6. Either a person grows up intellectually and morally; or they remain adolescents well into geezerhood..

7. The obvious political solution! Perhaps, laughter is the best medicine even for this disease!

8. Suggestions for getting your own Big Brother operation going. However, this is a much faster way to achieve world domination.

9. Inactivists of the World Unite Just Do Nothing!

10. One on one with someone who proves you don't need talent to make it in showbiz! Oh, and speaking of showbiz persons living in an alternate reality....

11. She rests her case....

12. Strange, but this does this sound completely fair ! It must be wrong.

13. A pox on both parties--not only here, but in Britain. Are people beginning to get fed up??
Meanwhile, Politics gets nekkid--and a little ridiculous in this particular state!

14. False alarm.... and more false photography!

15. A connection between height and earning potential? I think they must be measuring the wrong physical attributes....

16. Help! Help! I'm being oppressed! Send in the troops! These guys being oppressed, too! Oh, the horror!

17. Heinous issues with flatus--and in an Emergency Department, too!

18. Email insanity and regular old mail insanity!

19. Valuable lessons learned from....coffins?? Life is not a drill. It’s more like a compound miter saw.

20. For the common good?

Carnival of the Insanities can also be found at The Truth Laid Bear's ÜberCarnival and at the BlogCarnival.

***************************************
If you would like to Join the insanity, and add the Carnival of the Insanities button to your sidebar (clicking on it will always take you to the latest update of the Carnival), click on "Word of Blog" below the button to obtain the html code:



- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 6:21 AM |

 
THE SANITY SQUAD SPEAKS - About Perverts and Narcissists and Thieves, Oh My!
The new Sanity Squad Podcast is now up at Pajamas Media, and we think you're going to either like it or revile it--we don't care which really! But we guarantee you won't be bored if you join Neo, ShrinkWrapped, Siggy and I as we delve into the Foley Scandal, and along with the vast majority of sane Americans, we are rather disgusted with DC .

In the immortal words of Siggy, “DC is a den of thieves and clearly this means both parties. They’re both degenerate. And a den of thieves will attract thieves. It’s no longer Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Now it is Mr. Son-of-a-Bitch with a Gambling Habit and Big Debts Goes to Washington.”

We've tried to tell Siggy to express what's really on his mind, but he persists in holding back.

Check out the podcast, and tell us what you think!
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 1:53 PM |

 
THE NEW RELIGIOUS SOCIALISTS
I found this to be an interesting news article for several reasons, not the least of which is the title and the attitude of the writer. However, I would like to focus more on the content:

The Columbia College Republicans are at it again. On the heels of an event they hosted Wednesday, during which the founder of a group that patrols America's borders was attacked and forced offstage by angry protesters, the group is slated to host an even larger event next week, this one featuring two ex-terrorists and a former Nazi.

On Wednesday evening, the gathering came to an untimely demise when, a minute into the remarks by the founder of the Minuteman Project, Jim Gilchrist, students stormed the stage, overturning tables and chairs and attacking Mr. Gilchrist and fellow Minutemen Marvin Stewart and Jerome Corsi. Having taken control of the stage, the students, led by the student chapter of the International Socialist Organization, unfurled a banner that read, in both Arabic and English, "Nobody is Illegal."

Although the hired security did little to prevent the students from shouting down or physically intimidating the invited guests, they escorted the Minutemen out, unharmed, through a back door.The protesters savored their victory before security ushered the audience out of the auditorium. Students jumped from the stage, chanting in Spanish and pumping their fists triumphantly. "These are racist individuals heading a project that terrorizes immigrants on the U.S.-Mexican border," a Columbia junior who took part in the protest, Ryan Fukumori, said. "They have no right to be able to speak here." (emphasis mine)

Every American who values freedom of speech and an open, fee society should be absolutely horrified at the actions of these Colombia students. Let us consider the organization that orchestrated these events--and I don't mean the Columbia College Republicans, who, according to the author of the article, are "at it again". No, I am referring to the International Socialist Organization of which these pathetic students appear to be members.

Socialism and its various incarnations, as I have written before, is a completely discredited utopian fantasy that was responsible for the death and misery of literally millions of people around the world in the last century. To the extent that any society has implemented its ideology, it has led to the impoverishment of material wealth and progress for that society as well as to a sickness of the soul that infects all the individuals within the society.

The end of the 20th century should have seen the relegation of this perverse,anti-human social system to the dustbin of history. And yet, it continues to flourish in academic environments such as Columbia. A new generation of useful idiots are being cultivated on the university campuses of the West. Instead of being taught about the history of this particularly malignant idea, our children are being indoctrinated into its ideological perversities and encouraged to act them out.

And, if you think this is a good thing, think again. These college thugs are learning that the concept of free speech means to prevent the speech of those you disagree with; they are learning not to use reason to argue their point of view, but to use violence and intimidation to impose it on anyone who happens to disagree with them.

Gee, doesn't this sound familiar? Aren't we now at war with the fanatical adherents to a religion that intend to impose their beliefs at the point of a sword? That don't want to tolerate any differences from thier ideology?

Multiculturalism and political correctness are two of the fundamental pseudo-intellectual, quasi-religious tenets-- of the new! improved! socialist and communist movements. This new ideological dogma has been widely disseminated by intellectuals in the academic environment, who are unable to abandon socialism even after its crushing failures in the 20th century.

These tenets of the new socialist religion have been slowly, but relentlessly absorbed at all levels of Western culture in the last decade or so--but primarily since the end of the Cold War.

Multiculturalism and political correctness have been incorporated into most K-12 curricula and all other learning environments. They have been at the forefront of attempts by leading academics and academic institutions to rewrite most of history and undo thousands of years of Western cultural advancement. And further, as the culture has been completely saturated with this toxic brew, any attempt to question the tenets' validity or to contest their value is met with hysterical accusations of racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, imperialism, bigotry, or--worse of all --intolerance or insensitivity.

It just so happens that multicultural, political correctness (and a third--radical environmentalism) are three of the four pillars that are the foundation of an evolving epistemological, ethical and political strategy that the socialist remnants of the 20th century have developed and are using to prevent socialist/communist ideology from entering the dustbin of history.

Please notice that the banner unfurled by these students was written in English and Arabic. I have had people write to me saying that it is "absolutely ridiculous" and that I am "hatemongering" because I have dared to suggest that the left has made common cause with the Islamic jihadists. Is it? If you read the news article in its entirety, what do you suppose these caring, compassionate "justice"-seeking individuals who triumphantly prevented people they disagreed with from speaking intend to do with the next set of proposed speakers; speakers whose message does not happen to agree with their distorted view of reality? Speakers, who are sure to be classified by the International Socialist Organization as "racist" and therefore "not entitled to speak at Columbia (or anywhere, I presume, if these student totalitarians have their way).

If you object to banning the Mohammed cartoons, you will be labeled as "Islamophobic"; if you dare to consider the physiological and psychological differences betweeen men and women, you are sure to be labeled as "sexist"; and of course, if you even question any aspects of the Gay lifestyle, you must be "homophobic". It is in this way that socialism has managed to stay alive--by using postmodern rhetoric to manipulating words so as to undermine any criticism of their own contradictory behavior or discourses. By worshipping at the altar of multiculturalism, a religion that believes all cultures are good--except, of course, for the unique evil that is Western culture.

Anyone who is unable see that the behavior of these clueless and deluded students is antithetical to everything this country stands for had better be prepared to assume the position as our new Islamic overlords are ushered in by the International Socialist Organization to take control of our lives (instead of "national socialism" or the old-fashioned Naziism, we will have "religious socialism" or the new, improved Reziism version). Anyone who fails to understands that the violent behavior exhibited by these young thugs toward dissenting ideas is not at all different in any principle from the behavior of those who intend to spread Islam at the point of a sword.

Which of the two tyrannical ideologies do you wish to live under? The one being implemented by the leftist socialists? Or the one by the rightist religious fanatics of Islam? It hardly makes a much of a difference it seems to me, which particular boot heel--left or right--crushes individual freedom as it obliterates Western civilization and values.

As SC&A noted yesterday in a post:

Appeasement is antithetical to the values of a free society. In a free society, we all have the right to offend whomever we please. As a balance to those who exercise their right to appease, others have an equal right to offend. Both rights are equal. No matter what view is espoused, we cannot allow our expression of those rights to come under the threat of a cave dweller in a far away country.

Nor can we allow it to be threatened by latter day academic cave dwellers in our own country.

UPDATE: The epidemonology and treatment for the illness described above.
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 8:58 AM |

 
THE NEW MORALITY IS BUSTIN' OUT
Watch out, world! The Anchoress has outed herself! She's apparently in good company, along with Roger Simon and Gerard Vanderleun. The new morality is bustin' out all over! Hallejulah, brothers and sisters!
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 7:38 PM |

 
PRIVACY CONCERNS ?
The irony is ongoing...

See here. And here (scroll down particularly to "Survival of the Slickest")

An anonymous commenter in the last thread brought up this issue:

Mark Foley is a homosexual pedophile pervert, and those who are so quick to support him ignore mountains of evidence. Discuss.

I don't support Foley. He has resigned. End of story. HOWEVER, how about the following proposition:
Islamic fanatics are lying, butchering and barbaric psychopaths, and those who are so quick to support their purported "rights" during war are ignoring mountains of evidence that they intend to kill or subjugate anyone who doesn't agree with their religious views. Discuss.

UPDATE: Another proposition to discuss: North Korea is being run by a lying madman who has close ties to Iran, and who would like nothing better than to provide the nuclear means by which said Islamic fanatics (mentioned in the previous proposition) are able to kill lots of Americans. Discuss

Discussion starts here and here.
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 6:25 AM |

 
BLOGGING LIGHT, BUT HAVING FUN ANYWAY !
Sorry about the light blogging, but things are more hectic than I thought they would be and the social obligations (not to mention the fun) are keeping me hopping. And, oh yes, I do have to present a paper tomorrow!

I hope things will be back to some degree of normality by Saturday (meaning that I will find some time to blog) but I'm not guaranteeing anything!
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 10:03 PM |

 
HYPOCRISY AND META-HYPOCRISY
Apparently if you shun heroism in yourself, a successful career in Washington awaits you!

One of the lessons you can learn from any Woodward book, dear reader, is the answer to the question: "Why have I not been more successful in my Washington career?" From his books, you can draw a composite profile of the powerful Washington player. That person is highly circumspect, highly risk averse, does not make waves, eschews new ideas, flatters his colleagues to their face (while trashing them to Woodward behind their backs), and is always careful to keep avoid career-threatening confrontation. We all admire heroes, but Woodward's books teach us that those who rise to leadership are precisely those who take care to shun heroism in themselves.

And all you have to do to know the truth of this keen observation is to think of both political parties and both houses of Congress. This country's political elite are seriously deficient in the heroism department--which is to say they are about as far from being heroes as it is possible to be.

In fact, the only heroic striving we see in most of the leaders on both the Democratic and Republican side is in their continual attempts to outdo each other in hypocritical behavior and rhetoric.

I am not someone who happens to believes hypocrisy is confined to one side of the political spectrum or the other. It is clear that it exists on both. But there are distinctions that can be made.

In particular, an interesting observation was made last year during an interview with Peter Schweitzer , author of the book Do As I Say (Not As I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy. Schweitzer makes a distinction between liberal vs. conservative hypocrisy:

Yes, we are all hypocrites and I talk about that in the book. But liberal hypocrisy and conservative hypocrisy are quite different on two accounts. First, you hear about conservative hypocrisy all the time. A pro-family congressman caught in an extramarital affair, a minister caught in the same. This stuff is exposed by the media all the time. The leaders of the liberal-Left get a complete pass on their hypocrisy. Second, and this is even more important, the consequences of liberal hypocrisy are different than for the conservative variety. When conservatives abandon their principles and become hypocrites, they end up hurting themselves and their families. Conservative principles are like guard rails on a winding road. They are irritating but fundamentally good for you. Liberal hypocrisy is the opposite. When the liberal-left abandon their principles and become hypocrites, they actually improve their lives. Their kids end up in better schools, they have more money, and their families are more content. They're ideas are truly that bad.

This observation seems to hold true with the recent Foley scandal that is getting big play in the media. So it is worth remembering certain Democratic hypocrisies--which somehow never seem to receive the prominent play in today's media or reach the level of public awareness that those involving Republicans do. SC&A has helpfully put together a list of such scandals and the people involved; and many of the examples seem to follow Schweitzer's rule.

In fact, what we begin to see is a sort of "meta-hypocrisy" that defines Democratic behavior. Gagdad Bob notes:

The left has been at the leading edge of the mainstreaming of every deviancy and perversion into society over the past 40 years, to such an extent that they would be offended at the idea of calling someone a deviant or a pervert, because it implies a standard of sexual maturity. Yesterday, for example, I heard Bill Maher sneer something to the effect that Foley would not be chasing after young men if only we would allow him to marry. How then to explain 50 year-old Maher’s preference for dating porn stars, hookers, and Playboy bunnies, and substituting dogs for children?

Maher clearly regards himself not as pathetic or immature, but “sophisticated” and far beyond the narrow minds of cultural conservatives. He has even made the idiotic statement that Republicans are only concerned with sexual propriety “because they’re bad at it.” Here is the actual quote: “This is always what happens with that Republican party. They are somehow able to conflate real morals and values with sex. Because they're Republicans, Larry. They're bad at sex. They're pasty, unattractive white people, and if you had to have sex with them it would be over in an excruciating three minutes. So what they always like to do is conflate sex with morals." That is typical of the “sophisticated” attitude of the left. Only those who are moral relativists and who have no standards at all, are fit to pronounce on those who do.

The meta-hypocrisy, or the rampant hypocrisy over their own hypocrisy, becomes evident when you realize that even as they "mainstream deviance and perversity" of all sorts, the Democrats very badly also want to be the party of "family values" in America.

Thus, they claim to support Gay Rights and want to advance the Gay cause in all social areas, but at the same time they just happen to have a certain list coyly mentioned by David Corn and described by Vanderleun thusly:

...the rich and full aroma of deep irony revolves around what can only be seen as a Democratic initiated and driven effort to purge Congress at all levels of homosexuals because they are, well, Republicans or work for same. Coming from a party that is first and foremost about advancing gay and lesbian rights on all fronts, it seems especially shameful that -- to settle all their old scores and gripes and grievances -- they are going willing to sacrifice the lives, careers and reputations of their fellow Americans on the altar of their derangement.

It is extremely ironic, isn't it? On the one hand there is a certain kind of hypocrisy, defined as not living up to the values that one espouses; and then there is what I would call meta-hypocrisy, or not having any real values to live up to in the first place, but self-righteously appropriating some when it is expedient to do so.

UPDATE (10/6): Jonah Goldberg has this to say:

Overnight, Nancy Pelosi has emerged as the nation's soccer grandmom, leading the mob alleging a GOP cover-up of a supposed sex predator and pedophile. (Foley may or may not be a predator, but pedophiles don't dig post-pubescent teens; ephebophiles do.)

Almost as instantaneously, Democratic candidates denounced their opponents for taking money from Foley, as if acceptance of such funds constituted support for pederasty.

Let me be clear: I carry no water for the House GOP. Less than a month ago, I wrote that it would probably be a good thing if the Republicans lost the House, so I'm hardly inclined to rally to their flag because of their handling of this Foley mess. But let me make a prediction: Despite the moral panic sweeping Washington right now, this will backfire on Democrats, liberals and the gay left.

Self-described progressives are great at whipping up a moral frenzy when it serves their purposes, and hilariously indignant when moral majority types return fire. Remember the national St. Vitus' dance over sexual harassment in the late 1980s and early 1990s? Liberals made sexual harassment their signature issue, rending their clothes and gnashing their teeth over Sens. John Tower and Bob Packwood and Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, among others. The puritanical zeal of these inquisitions cannot be exaggerated.

Then came Bill Clinton, who was, by any fair measure, a worse womanizer than Thomas or the rest of them. The Paula Jones sexual harassment lawsuit led, inexorably, to revelations of alleged rape and scandalous behavior with an intern. Forced to choose between power and principle, liberals and feminists held an impromptu fire sale on principles.

Just what I was saying. Read it all.
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 9:37 PM |

 
OUT OF THE LOOP TILL TOMORROW AFTERNOON
I am going to be getting up at some ungodly hour to go to NYC tomorrow morning, where I will be presenting a paper at a psychiatric meeting. Realistically, I probably won't get around to blogging until sometime late tomorrow afternoon or evening when I get settled in the hotel.

In the meantime, you can amuse yourselves by visiting my fellow Sanity Squad compatriots (Neo, Shrink and Siggy); or The Anchoress, or Gagdad Bob at One Cosmos, or some of my other favorite bloggers at The Gates of Vienna, Fausta , GM's Corner--or any of the fine blogs on my various blogrolls!

I'm sure I'll have a lot to say later on, so feel free to use this as an open thread to comment on issues of the day!
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 9:18 PM |

 
A POTENTIAL PATH TO VICTORY...
...has been discovered by the enemies of civilization and they intend to exploit it for all it is worth:



(from Cox and Forkum)
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 2:17 PM |

 
IS IT ALL ABOUT THE NARRATIVE...OR ALL ABOUT REALITY?
Austin Bay makes some excellent points as he considers recent evidence that Al Qaeda believes it is losing the Iraq war both on the battlefield and in the hearts and minds of the Iraqis:

Information Age media -- swamped with ideological and political Sturm und Drang -- are a key battlefield in this war.

In America's open society, people constantly take public counsel of the fears. Sowing doubt about current leadership is a fundamental opposition tactic in every democratic election.

Thus America's "narrative of doubt" tends to dominate the global media -- with a corrosive effect on America's ability to wage ideological and political war.

Though war's doubt and uncertainty affect all sides, dictators and terrorists can control their "message." As a result, there is no balance to media portrayal of American doubt.

The American "narrative of doubt" plays into the business model of sensationalist media, which rely on hyperbolic and emotional display to attract an audience. (CNN's Anderson Cooper, with his "show rage" coverage of Hurricane Katrina, is an example.)

Which is why the rare glimpse, like Atiyah's letter to Zarqawi, is truly big news.

Bay's analysis is important because if one follows the MSM one could easily lose track of the bigger picture. That bigger picture has been pretty much obscured since 9/11 by our own media, whose ideological agenda ever more desperately attempts to control the narrative about Iraq and the war on terror.

Personally I fail to see why a book like Bob Woodward's, which was specifically written and whose release was deliberately timed precisely to maintain control of this "narrative" at a critical time in American politics, should trump either reality or reason when it comes to assessing the status of the overall war on terror or the battlefield of Iraq in that war.

Ruben Nararrette in this op-ed piece points out the mistakes a secretive Bush Administration has made, as well as the opportunism of the Democrats who care little about winning either in Iraq or the GWOT,and appear to only be concerned about winning elections (read the whole thing):

The NIE report seems to confirm that Iraq has become a magnet for terrorists from around the world who are flocking there to lock horns with U.S. troops.

But what do we do now? It's the responsibility of those troops to eliminate the terrorists, and, if many of those terrorists are gathered in one spot, then so much the better. Regardless of how we arrived at this point, or the politics involved, this may yet prove to be an effective military strategy for defeating the insurgency -- provided, of course, we have adequate troop strength.

Yet it's not clear that Democrats care about weakening the insurgency in Iraq. They seem more interested in using the war to weaken Bush and the Republican Party here at home.

Bush was right to remind the opposition last week that they can't have it both ways. They constantly insist that the Iraq War is a distraction from the war on terror. And yet, the minute it serves their purposes, they seize upon intelligence information that says the war has been a boost to terrorism. Which is it?

I can't decide which is worse -- that Bush made his own reality in Iraq, or that Democrats are ignoring reality altogether.

Undoubtedly there is psychological denial in the Bush Administration. It does not take a Bob Woodward to tell us this. Within the Administration people (gasp) actually disagree on the best way to do things in this war. How unusual! How unbelievable! Or, as Woodward would have us believe, how sinister! We are, after all, dealing with human beings and human beings are flawed.

What matters more than the fact that mistakes are being made is that efforts are ongoing to correct identified errors and stay on a path toward victory. The best evidence we have that we are on the correct track are the words of the enemy themselves--not the propaganda videos of Zawahiri, timed like Woodward's propaganda to have an effect on the opposition--but the memos they write to each other that reveal for all to see the enemy's own "narrative of doubt" and weaknesses.

The situation in Iraq is far from optimal. Obviously the fact that innocent Iraqis are dying daily in the brutal violence there is not a good thing and the blood and chaos we are witnessing should prod us to refine and continue to improve our plan for victory. We must pay attention to the reality of that chaos, just as we must factor in the reality of the enemy's propaganda narrative versus it's real narrative.

Navarette can't decide which type of denial is worse in the quote cited above. Hands down, I would have to reply that ignoring reality altogether is the greater problem here. Which side is denying that we are even in a war and continually downplays terror as a threat; which side has taken the ridiculous position of pretending that if we hadn't gone to Iraq the terrorists would not have attacked us on 9/11?

I'm sorry, but the fact is that the Bush Administration has acknowledged an extreely unpleasant reality and taken steps to address it, and it is even possible to disagree with the implementation of their strategy. But it is the Democrats and the left who have a lock on psychological denial, and are glancing in the rear view mirror at reality, even as they hustle away from it as quickly as possible.

What we have are dueling narratives. What we need is a healthy appreciation of reality; and a willingness to face it and act accordingly. Austin Bay reminds us that "five years of continual defeat (and that is what the record is) have shaken the 9-11 certitude of al-Qaida's senior fanatics". It is really too bad that those five years of success on our part have not also shaken the Bush-hating, perpetual doom and gloom of senior Democratic Party fanatics.

Instead of convincing them that they should be working together with the administration--and not implaccably against it--to enable a final victory in Iraq and ultimately the war on terror for the sake of the American people, it has only made them more determined than ever to lose and abandon Iraq; and to even deny the existence of a war on Islamic totalitarianism (not a legal battle), all so that they may defeat what they incorrectly perceive as the "real" enemy--George Bush.

But then, rhetoric has always trumped reality for the Democrats. And that is a true state of denial.

UPDATE: Victor Davis Hanson takes on the "narratives" of the Iraq war that are currently being presented as some sort of historical fact:

But when you write history, and especially history of a contentious nature about Iraq, in which so much is at stake, it is incumbent to identify primary sources. The last three books about the supposed mess in Iraq—Cobra II, Fiasco, and now State of Denial—violate every canon of intellectual courtesy. Check who said what in Cobra II and you find the following: “Interview, former senior military officer”, “Interview, former senior officer”, “Interview, former Centcom planner,” Interview, Pentagon Officials,” “Interview, U.S. State Department Official,” or “notes of a participant.”

When the readers encounter the most controversial and damning of verbatim quotes in Fiasco, they are presented with “said a Bush administration official” or “recalled one officer.” Woodward is ever more derelict, in imagining not just the conversations, but even the thoughts of characters. And lest one think I am unduly critical in questioning the veracity of these unnamed sources—whose authenticity can never be checked by anyone other than the journalists who now write out popular histories—examine the recent record of journalists at the New York Times and Washington Post, and more recent stories such as the Koran flushing at Guantanamo or the photshopped pictures from Lebanon.

He then goes on to observe:

Finally, note the silence from the numerous critics of the “Path to 9/11” who objected to the film’s adaptation of the 9/11 report. But that docu-drama clearly identified itself as a fictionalized rendition of a document, and made no claims as history. In contrast, this new genre of journalistic exposé purports to give us the real story of Iraq, but denies us the very tools of determining whether what we are reading is true, half-true, or simply made up.

Please read it all.
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 7:38 AM |

 
THE LEFT AT CROSS-PURPOSES WITH ITSELF
The Anchoress calls it political expediency:

Now, of course, it is politically expedient to cast suspicion and doubt upon a gay man communicating with a 16 year old boy, and the Dems love what is politically expedient. Which causes even this center-left journalist to call them a party without principles.

Don’t get me wrong. Foley is a creep and good riddance, and I wish he’d take Denny Hastert with him…but my, there’s a Dem player throwing gay men under the bus in order to make political points. Well, why not? They know they can count on the gay vote…no risk there, right? Gagdad Bob writes about homophobes on the left.

And, as Siggy so painstakingly documents, "the culture of corruption is as much an issue for Democrats as it is for Republicans"

In the post that Anchoress links to above, Gagdad Bob notes:

It is interesting to read the hysteria coming out of the left regarding the situation with Congressman Foley, who I wholeheartedly agree is a pervert. Furthermore, it is fascinating to hear the left using this normally shunned word so freely and openly. Normally, the left specializes in defining deviancy down, so they are definitely at cross purposes with themselves in this matter.

In fact, someone left a shrewd comment about Foley on La Shawn Barber’s blog, that “Twenty years from now, he will be able to marry a 16 year old boy.” Seriously, who could argue with this comment? Is this not the trend that the left has been working toward over the last 40 years? Twenty years from now this might be an epic story of forbidden love overcoming the hidebound, benighted, and unprogressive attitudes of sexual oppressors.

But there is a much deeper reason the left is at cross purposes with itself. They keep stridently referring to Foley as a “pervert.” While I certainly agree that he is a pervert, I am quite sure I don’t understand why they do. Is it because he is attracted to young men? If that is the case, why is he a pervert, when all normal heterosexual men are just as attracted to young female flesh? Can I get a witness? I'm hardly excusing it. "Is" is not synonymous with "ought." In fact, this is why society must have "oughts" in place that acknowledge the problematic nature of male sexuality. (emphasis mine)

And, with his usual acumen, Bob has honed in on the essence of the problem we are dealing with here. The left is at cross purposes with itself.

The Anchoress sees it clearly. Siggy documents it. Bob confronts it in his post. I am going to discuss why it is so; because, like a broken record, I keep coming back to this fundamental issue that must be dealt with if Western Civilization is to prevail over the barbarians at the gate. The questions are: Why has the political left abandoned all pretense of the liberal tradition? Why is it that they say one thing and do the opposite? Why have they been able to delude themselves into thinking that they are "reality-based" and that they stand for "family values"? Why have they struggled so fiercely and angrily to impede and undermine this country's ability to fight Islamofascism, while at the same time enabling the terrorists and their plotting?

There is one answer to all those questions. Postmodernism.

Reality, truth, reason, consistency, integrity and almost all the values of the Enlightenment that I discussed in the previous post have been abandoned--cheaply surrendered--by the intellectual elites of Western Civilization. (also discussed here , here and here for the interested)

Victor Davis Hanson (if I may quote from his piece from my earlier post) again cuts to the chase:

Europe boldly produces films about assassinating an American president, and routinely disparages the Church that gave the world the Sermon of the Mount, but it simply won’t stand up for an artist, a well-meaning Pope, or a ranting filmmaker when the mob closes in. The Europe that believes in everything turns out to believe in nothing.

The political left believes in nothing. In fact, they have finally reached the natural endpoint of their postmodern intellectual journey and arrived at the core nihilism that animates their belief system.

Once we have rejected reason and set aside reality as a basis for our actions, we are left with our feelings and the postmodern emotional universe. Is it any wonder that the same people who aggressively champion gay rights one minute, will--when it is expedient--"throw gay men under the bus to score political points"? Why should we expect them to behave reasonably? Reason plays no part in their ideology or thought, such as it is. Forgetting about the many Democrats who behaved as perversely as Foley (and excellently documented by SC&A) is not simply a benign lapse on the part of the left; it is a perfectly acceptable tactic in a conflict where the only goal is power at any price. Truth be damned.

Consider for a moment by what slender margins, as Wretchard puts it in discussing the Foley case, civilization survives from one day to the next?

Hanson replies confidently:

Those in an auto parts store in Fresno, or at a NASCAR race in southern Ohio, might appear to Europeans as primordials with their guns, “fundamentalist” religion, and flag-waving chauvinism. But it is they, and increasingly their kind alone, who prove the bulwarks of the West. Ultimately what keeps even the pope safe and the continent confident in its vain dialogues with Iranian lunatics is the United States military and the very un-Europeans who fight in it.

How long, though, can these courageous bulwarks of the West last against the twin enemies of civilization--those anti-reality, anti-reason, and anti-truth fanatics of postmodern leftist jihadism on the one front; and the violent, anti-reality, anti-reason, anti-truth Islamic jihadists on the other?

One by one, the slender threads that hold civilization together are being severed, either by the rhetoric of the fanatic left or the sword of the Islamic religious terrorist.

If you think there is no connection between the left's hysterical, self-righteous and calculatingly shrewd reaction toward Foley; and the reason why the values of Western Civilization and the legacy of the Enlightment are falling easily under the onslaught of a religion of barbarism and tyranny--then you would be very wrong.

There is a connection. The left is at cross purposes with itself because they foolishly believe they stand for something when when they actually stand for nothing.

Postmodernism is nihilism dressed up in academic robes; but the rejection of reason, reality and truth doesn't have to be dressed up; and in fact, with the violence and brutality exhibited by the Islamic terrorists, we see the essentials of postmodernism in all its nakedness.
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 4:11 PM |

 
CHEAP SURRENDER
Victor Davis Hanson reflects on 2500 years Enlightenment values in Western thought, and those who are traitors to that tradition:

The new enemies of Reason are not the enraged democrats who executed Socrates, the Christian zealots who persecuted philosophers of heliocentricity, or the Nazis who burned books. No, they are a pampered and scared Western public that caves to barbarism — dwarves who sit on the shoulders of dead giants, and believe that their present exalted position is somehow related to their own cowardly sense of accommodation.

What would a Socrates, Galileo, Descartes, or Locke believe of the present decay in Europe — that all their bold and courageous thinking, won at such a great cost, would have devolved into such cheap surrender to fanaticism?

Just think: Put on an opera in today’s Germany, and have it shut down, not by Nazis, Communists, or kings, but by the simple fear of Islamic fanatics.

Write a novel deemed critical of the Prophet Mohammed, as did Salman Rushdie, and face years of ostracism and death threats — in the heart of Europe no less.

Compose a film, as did Theo Van Gogh, and find your throat cut in “liberal” Holland.

Or better yet, sketch a cartoon in postmodern Denmark, and then go into hiding.

Quote an ancient treatise, as did the pope, and learn your entire Church may come under assault, and the magnificent stones of the Vatican offer no refuge.

There are three lessons to be drawn from these examples. In almost every case, the criticism of the artist or intellectual was based either on his supposed lack of sensitivity or of artistic excellence. Van Gogh was, of course, obnoxious and his films puerile. The pope was woefully ignorant of public relations. The cartoons in Denmark were amateurish and unnecessary. Rushdie was an overrated novelist, whose chickens of trashing the West he sought refuge in finally came home to roost. The latest Hans Neuenfels adaptation of Mozart’s Idomeneo was silly.

But isn’t that precisely the point? It is easy to defend artists when they produce works of genius that do not offend popular sensibilities — Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa or Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws — but not so when an artist offends with neither taste nor talent. Yes, Pope Benedict is old and scholastic; he lacks both the smile and tact of the late Pope John Paul II, who surely would not have turned for elucidation to the rigidity of Byzantine scholarship. But isn’t that why we must come to the present Pope’s defense — if for no reason other than because he has the courage to speak his convictions when others might not?

Note also the constant subtext in this new self-censorship: fear of radical Islam and its gruesome appendages of beheadings, suicide bombings, improvised explosive devices, barbaric fatwas, riotous youth, petrodollar-acquired nuclear weapons, oil boycotts and price hikes, and fist-chanting mobs.

In contrast, almost daily in Europe, “brave” artists caricature Christians and Americans with impunity. Why?

For a long list of reasons, among them most surely the assurance that they can do this without being killed. Such cowards puff out their chests when trashing an ill Oriana Fallaci or Ariel Sharon or beleaguered George W. Bush in the most demonic of tones, but prove sunken and sullen when threatened by a Dr Zawahri or a grand mufti of some obscure mosque.

Hanson suggests that if we want to see what "boutique socialism, utopian pacifism, moral equivalence, and cultural relativism" have wrought, we need only look to the cheap surrender of Enlightenment values and the reflexive cave-in to the demands of Islamic fanatics--all routinely a part of European life now, and done in the spirit of multicultural tolerance and politically correct feeling.

Europe, having given up any objective standard by which to mediate the vastly different perspectives and feelings of its varied populations; having abandoned reason altogether in favor of the expression of feelings no matter how destructive or unreasonable; and, finally, having endlessly touted the critical importance and essential need to "belong" to one's race, tribe, religion or group first and foremost; the outcome is what Stephen Hicks refers to as "group balkinization" --with all its inevitable and inescapable conflict.

That politically correct road which the left has taken us all down--billed as the path to peace and harmony--has instead led to a land dominated by emotions; a place where barbarism of the most primal sort is tolerated and excused.

And, why should we be surprised at this destination? Why would peaceful coexistence result from a movement that has done everything in its power to eradicate universalism and foist multiculturalism into the public consciousness?

Multiculturalism after all celebrates--not belonging to the family of humanity--but to one's sexual, racial, ethnic, or religious identity above all else. Political correctness simply provides the eggshells that everyone can walk around on so as to not offend the feelings in other groups (unless, of course, you belong to that one particular culture that is given a pass because of its unique evil; and for which offending is obligatory--you know which culture that is, don't you?)

Like many ideas of the left, it should now be apparent to anyone with a brain, that--in the case of multiculturalism -- the exact opposite of what was promised ends up being delivered.

Just as the false promises of socialism and communism were found to lead to misery instead of happiness; poverty instead of wealth; enslavement instead of freedom--so too, have multiculturalism and political correctness, instead of harmony, brought lethal discord.

The cheap surrender of 2500 years of Enlightenment values is slowly leaving all of Europe in an impenetrable intellectual and moral darkness. Here in the New World, we need to recognize what is happening there, before that same darkness envelops and paralyzes us.

The very first time we allowed the adherents of a medieval and primitive religion to believe that their feelings about that religion trump all the values of western civiliztion; the minute we began to apologize for our successes and make excuses--or even blame ourselves--for their failures; we stepped onto the same path taken by Europe. That path leads to the same place the Europeans find themselves in now.

It is a place where Reason cannot be appealed to; nor tolerance--for the Islamists believe in neither. So here we are, all of us, on the PC highway to hell.

It may be late in the journey, and it may be too late for Europe, but perhaps it is time for us to get off this path while we still can--if we still can.

I personally have no objection to Islam reaching their final destination of hell alone.

No surrender.

UPDATE: Is it already too late? Wretchard makes this related point:

The frontline of the War on Terror has gradually spread to encompass every activity, place and clime. Its shadow lurks whether one is traveling by air, speaking at a public forum, writing a book, applying to teach at a university or giving a Papal speech, working as a nurse or teaching philosophy. Today you have to be really, really careful. The really ironic effect of multiculturalism in both the Islamic world and the West is that it has brought the return of the clandestine act and secret speech. No longer is it possible:

To live undaunted, unafraid
Of any step that I have made;
To be without pretense or sham
Exactly what men think I am.

To be that was to enjoy a freedom we have already lost; and it was never free.

As they say, read the whole post.
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 6:43 AM |

 
BOTTOM LINE
There is finally some humor in the muslim world..and apparently, the joke is on Osama! According to Strategy Page, since 9/11:

...there were no more attacks in the United States, and only two in Europe. In 2003, the U.S. invaded Iraq, causing many Islamic terrorists to hustle back to the Middle East, to "defend the homeland." There they died in the thousands. But worse than that, the terrorist tactics they continued to use was now killing thousands of Moslem men, women and children. The negative publicity caused Islamic terrorism to sink in the opinion polls. This was very bad news. The terrorists depend on public approval, in the Islamic world, for new recruits, protection (from local police) and financial support. The dead Iraqis were killing al Qaeda.

By 2006, Iraqis were turning on al Qaeda, informing on al Qaeda leaders, and any operatives that did not hide carefully from the people they believed they were fighting for. Westerners, unless they observe Arab media closely, and have contacts inside the Arab world, will not have noted this sharp drop in al Qaedas fortunes. It's in the Western media's interest (financial and political) to pump up al Qaedas current standing. But the reality is that al Qaeda is desperate for a big score. The terrorist chatter this year, on several occasions, has indicated that another major attack was imminent. The intelligence agencies did not release any data on what, if any, major attacks were thwarted. But that's normal, because sometimes attacks are called off, not because the intel agencies have intervened, but because the terrorists decided that things were not quite right. In situations like that, the CIA, FBI or whatever, doesn't want to let the bad guys know how close they are.

The chatter is on again. This time there is talk of an al Qaeda video featuring the long unseen Osama bin Laden. The recent reports of his death began as rumors in Arab countries about bin Laden passing away in some inglorious and painful fashion (Typhoid was mentioned.) Actually, many of the "death reports" were actually jokes. Al Qaeda's fortunes have sunk so low in the Moslem world that he is being mocked, via jokes about his demise.

Thank you George W. Bush. Thank you, Dick Cheney. Thank you, Donald Rumsfeld. Thank you, men and women of the U.S. Armed Forces. Thank you for these last 5 years. Keep up the good work; and faster, please. No thanks on my behalf will go out to the left or to the Democratic leadership, who have all done their best to impede, undermine, obstruct, demoralize, and otherwise obscure this remarkable achievement.

Think back for a moment and remember that no one--NO ONE--imagined for even a brief moment after 9/11 that there would not be more attacks on this country that would be even worse than what occurred on that September day in 2001.

No matter what happens in the days and months to come, the policies of the Bush Administration--however imperfect, and including invading Iraq--have resulted in no attacks on U.S. soil since that day.

And for me, that is the bottom line.
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 9:26 AM |

 
FIRST PERSON PLURAL
Michael Barone is correct:

The second person plural used to come naturally to all Americans. G.I.s in World War II were "our boys" (the second word now politically incorrect and also inaccurate), whether you were a Republican or a Democrat, from the North or the South, black or white. But the Vietnam War got liberals out of that habit. U.S. troops were "the military." They were sent into Lebanon and Grenada not by "the president," but by "the Reagan administration." (Did anyone say that troops were ordered to Normandy or Iwo Jima by "the Roosevelt administration"?) The Gulf War in 1991 was regarded by most Democrats and liberals as "their war."

The success of the Gulf War and the election of a Democratic president the next year got Democrats back into the habit of thinking of the government and the military as "ours." They reveled, especially during the Clinton impeachment proceedings, in portraying themselves as the champions of "our troops." They howled in anger, I think justifiably, when House Minority Leader Dick Armey, looking over to the Democratic side of the aisle, referred to Bill Clinton as "your president."

Today, Democrats are pretty much back to the third person plural. Yes, they still talk of "our troops" from time to time, but usually only to call for them to be "redeployed" from a mission that has been more successful than not, but has not been completed. They seldom mention any soldier's heroism unless they can persuade him to run for office on the Democratic ticket. They talk, instead, about George Bush's war, even though most Democratic senators and nearly half of House Democrats voted to authorize it and -- remember? -- said that they believed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

And most Democrats are willing, even eager to take unprecedented stands that will retard the fight against terrorism. More than four-fifths of House Democrats voted against the military tribunals bill this week, though military tribunals have always been used to try unlawful combatants, and the bill gave those charged more protections than in the past.

America, they appear to feel, does not include them unless they happen to be in power. This can be seen clearly in the rhetoric used, as Barone notes (read it all), which carefully avoids the first person plural--the "us" or "we" or "our".

There are very real issues--both nationally and internationally-- that require the goodwill and common sense efforts of Americans--both Democrats and Republicans. Disagreements are expected and spirited debate has always been an important part of our heritage. Republicans are certainly no saints; but the Democrat's insistence that the Iraq war is some sort of "distraction" from the GWOT (which doesn't really exist in the first place because terrorism has been used as a fear tactic by the Bush Administration); the way they prance and posture over issues like the Guantanamo detainees or the need to obtain intelligence on our enemies; and their constant need to exploit every negative event in this war--all of this is simple opportunism and maliciousness demonstrating neither goodwill nor common sense.

Even in the Foley affair--which should make any American shudder in disgust--the relentless attempts to portray the scandal as a uniquely Republican perversion is breathtaking. Their joy in this "October surprise" is illuminating of their own character.

Do they perhaps forget a recent president's shameful sexual behavior and pathological lying that led to national disgrace? Have the Democrats forgotten Barney Frank's censure not too long ago? Have they forgotten a certain Democratic governor who recently resigned because his sexual inappropriateness interfered with performance of his job? It goes without saying that they have deeply buried in the recesses of their mind the knowledge that one of their party's leaders deliberately and with conscious intent some years back let a young woman drown to save his own ass.

Perversion is part of the human condition and not exclusive to one political party or the other. But they would have you believe this is not the case and that they represent moral purity and righteousness. How typical.

But I will tell you what is truly perverse in my estimation. It is the continual betrayal of the "we" that characterizes today's Democratic Party and its increasingly amoral leftist base. It is symptomatic of a serious illness of the soul that both have become so anti-American; so irrational; and so distorted by hatred that they are willing to sacrifice America--us--and all we stand for to the savages we are fighting.

And all because they can't get over the fact that they have been losing elections for over a decade now. Well, I think they will be continuing to lose them. It may be the only wake-up call they are capable of understanding.

I predict that this unconscionable irresponsibility will not help the Democrats very much in the elections this year; in fact, it may even hurt them much to their shock and surprise. But whether it does or not, their current behavior and rhetoric will haunt our country for generations to come.

I always liked the motto 'e pluribus unum'. But it sure ain't the motto of the left and the Democrats today. They prefer 'e pluribus solus Democratum'

UPDATE: Interesting:

I'm not saying that Republicans are at all better, and of course elections breed some policy timidity. But the infuriating thing about the Democrats is that, just a decade ago, they knew how to empathize with voters' economic insecurities without collapsing into irresponsibility; they combined attractively progressive social policies with sensible pro-market fiscal responsibility. Now many in the party have lost interest in this necessary balance. If the Democrats win a measure of power next month, it's hard to see what they will do with it.

As I have said before, The Democrats have become the party of nothing and more nothing. Even some of their own are beginning to understand this basic truth.

UPDATE II: "Bastards - all of them" - so says SC&A in a must-read post. He seems to be in a very bad mood which bodes ill for both Democrats and Republicans. And did I mention that he doesn't like hypocrisy?

UPDATE III: The Democrats' conundrum...



(visit Michael Ramirez' cartoons here)
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 7:40 AM |

 
ALL I WANT TO KNOW...
about this is, where do I get one?


UPDATE: I bought two. Get yours here. Oh, did I piss someone off?? Tsk. If you are deeply offended, maybe you'd like to purchase one of these?

Or, you could get a life. Up to you.
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 6:35 PM |

 
ERROR MESSAGES WE CAN ALL RELATE TO
These were sent to me in an email, so they must be making the rounds! (hat tip: OBH)










- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 1:20 PM |

 
CARNIVAL OF THE INSANITIES
Time for the weekly insanity update, where the insane, the bizarre, the ridiculous, and the completely absurd are highlighted for all to see! This has been a week of rare idiocy (as always!). So, if you want to remain sane, the best thing is to poke some fun at the more egregious absurdities.

Send all entries for next week's carnival to Dr. Sanity by 8 pm ET on Saturday for Sunday's Carnival. Only one post entry weekly per blogger, please. And you might read this before submitting an entry.

Thanks for all the submissions. I try to use as many as possible! SO MANY INSANITIES! SO LITTLE TIME!!!

1. Channeling Samuel L. Jackson: "I have had it with these mother****ing hamsters on this mother****ing plane!"

2. Compelling reasons to believe that Osama is not dead. Darn. And I was convinced he was.

3. Donate NOW to The 12th Imam Foundation!

4. Audio evidence that #2 really does try harder!

5. The definitive explanation of why dogs bite people. It is simply unnatural. As is this.

6. Maybe leaving food out does create cockroaches...

7. Exclusive! Tearful detainee details American torture techniques!

8. I just don't understand this story. You'd think they'd like the severed head part! There's no pleasing some people indeed.

9. How dare he! Meanwhile, Byzantine emperor apologizes for remarks about Mohammed!

10. Why it's not ok for the Times to distort it's ME coverage. You knew this, didn't you?

11. Now this is really good news.

12. Oh dear! It really was only the beginning. And now smokers are even being blamed for....global warming!

13. What has that kid been smoking??

14. The reformist's dilemma, or how he stopped worrying and embraced American imperialism?
15. Leftist sudoku? Or just more folksy empathy from Bill Clinton? An Ode to the 42nd Prez. He doth protest too much? Or, hopelessly unserious? Of course, you aren't really paranoid if they are out to get you. Just delusional.

16. Cinematic flatulence? A short movie review.

17. Bloggers are "men of letters"? However, I consider myself a "woman of words--maybe even whole paragraphs".

18. And speaking of letters... here's a recently discovered letter that changes history!

19. If we have love in the time of cholera, what do we have in the time of bird flu? That's a damn fine question, if you ask me.

20. What one marine did after the big war.

21. Choosing darkness.

22. Some sage words of advice about perspective.

23. Self-Help Corner: Good greed and bad greed. Disorganizing your life. A chocolate nugget of insight..or was it a nugget of insight about chocolate? How about trying these chocolate options then?

24. Only 97 reasons they can't be trusted?


Carnival of the Insanities can also be found at The Truth Laid Bear's ÜberCarnival and at the BlogCarnival.

***************************************
If you would like to Join the insanity, and add the Carnival of the Insanities button to your sidebar (clicking on it will always take you to the latest update of the Carnival), click on "Word of Blog" below the button to obtain the html code:


- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 7:57 AM |