UPDATE / CORRECTIONS ON LAST POST
Charles Johnson has asked that I "update your post to correct those distortions about me, I'd appreciate it. Without correcting them, the falsehoods will continue to spread...." He writes:

Please note that there are numerous lies about me in the emails from Dymphna.
* I do not have the stealth comment deletion system she alleges -- I created a proof of concept for such a system, to demonstrate how the SF Chronicle was doing it, and disabled the concept a day later. And I announced it all publicly with front page posts at LGF.
* When the article about Bat Ye'or appeared in the Times, I was contacted by someone from Bat Ye'or and told about it, and I offered to delete my post. They said it did not matter because it was already out in the New York Times. Yet now, here comes the story, slanted to make me look bad.
* Dymphna and Baron Bodissey have never been banned at LGF.
There's more too, but it's too irritating and depressing to read her demented emails. She is engaged in a campaign of deliberate, dishonest character assassination against me.

He also notes:

You should know that the assertion that Dymphna and Baron Bodissey are banned from LGF is NOT TRUE. They were never banned. Fjordman is banned, but only after he pulled two dramatic exits, announcing he wouldn't be back -- then came back, spewing insults....

Another lie in her email: I never accused vigilantfreedom.org of "mounting a DOS attack." That's completely ridiculous.

Even Baron Bodissey insists on correcting some errors in Dymphna's first email. He writes:

The first concerns what she wrote that Bat Ye'or had written in a private email, an insulting reference to Charles Johnson. In fact it was not Bat who said it; it was Andrew Bostom. It was below Bat's text, in the "Original Message" section of the email. I had misread it originally - I went back and checked, and hence this correction.We try hard to correct errors immediately, even in private communications. I know you are meticulous about this yourself.

If LGF had the same policy it would benefit their readers and resolve much of the ongoing debate. Also, Dymphna said Filip Dewinter was a member of the "Belgian parliament", when he is in fact a member of the Flemish parliament. This mistake is understandable, since I was the one who went to Belgium for the conference, and not her. There are actually *three* parliaments in Belgium -- the Flemish, the Wallonian, and the European Union parliament. It can be confusing.

Indeed. Additionally, Siggy writes:

It is ironic that posting corrections seems to be the topic du jour.

In three different exchanges, I noted my heartfelt mea culpa after I referred to Vlaams Belang in the third person singular. Why my errors are continually referenced remains a mystery, especially after I admitted to them and corrected them.

Prior to the podcast I had been doing some research on Belien and Dewinter and absentmindedly referred to the political party in that way.

Further, let's be clear. In the private conversation in question, you gently asked me if Vlaams Belang was also a person (knowing I was in err!). I said that I realized I had misspoke. How your reference was twisted is curious, given that only one side of the conversation was recorded.

I would only hope that the requests for accuracy be applied to myself and my remarks as well.

Lastly, while I have never claimed to be an expert on the maze that is Belgian politics, I do have sightly more than 6 months experience in the European theatre.

Frankly, this is all so ridiculous, I hardly know what to say--and that's definitely a rare occurance, believe me.

Sheesh, we must be dealing with imperfect human beings here....imagine that.
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 2:35 PM

 
MY RESPONSE TO BLACKMAIL THREATS
It is with great reluctance and sadness that I address the following issue; but I have been forced to respond because I have been threatened.

Some years ago when I started blogging, two of the first friends I met in the blogsphere were Dymphna and The Baron from The Gates of Vienna blog. Since those early days I have linked to their posts, quoted them, corresponded with them and have had nothing but respect for them. After all, we share the same values, goals and objectives and are on the same side of the political and ideological fence.

So I was somewhat distressed when I observed the growing feud between the folks at GOV and Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs. Since it was my turn to host the podcast for The Sanity Squad, I asked my fellow Squad members if we could discuss what Shrink had called a "family squabble" in one of his posts.

The primary goal of that podcast was to talk more about the bad feelings that had come about because Charles had disagreed with Dymphna and The Baron, and had questioned the advisability of supporting European political organizations that had some shady neo-Nazi connections in their past. Things apparently escalated after that and then Charles banned them and Fjordman (who blogs at GOV) from his site.

Of course The Sanity Squad could not talk about the psychological/emotional aspects of all this without discussing some of the background.

Frankly, I don't particularly care which side turns out to be right or wrong on this issue. As far as I can tell, there is no objective way to tell at this point in time whether the European groups in question have really reformed and renounced their past not only rhetorically, but in action; or if they have only disguised their agenda in order to gain more followers. Time will tell, and my personal opinion is that Charles is right to be leery.

Nevertheless, I also think that banning a friend from your site (as Charles did)--is not a good thing to do generally.

During the Sanity Squad podcast Dymphna phoned in and was given a great deal of time to voice her opinions. What followed after the conclusion of the podcast is something I take full responsibility for.

Those of you who listened to the entire podcast know that there is an "extra" 23 minutes that go beyond the usual 30 minute limit. I logged out of BlogTalkRadio, but apparently had not hung up the phone. Consequently, when I was skyped by Siggy and Shrink and we continued our conversation post-podcast (as we usually do), there was a live mic picking up ONLY my end of the conversation. Shrink left after about 5 minutes and then Siggy and I talked for a while after that.

It was clearly a private conversation and was not meant to be public. But there was nothing said in that conversation that I am ashamed of or embarassed by. In it, I expressed my opinions about the feud we had just discussed in the podcast. I happen to think that Charles had every reason to question the bona fides of the European groups that GOV is consorting with. I can appreciate that Dymphna and The Baron don't like that opinion, but I AM ENTITLED TO IT, just as they are entitled to theirs. As I said before, time will tell if these groups have really abandoned their Nazi philosophy--their behavior and policies will eventually make it clear. So, I prefer to wait and see.

I also spoke to Siggy about Dymphna's emotional state during the podcast. I believe I said that her voice "quivered" --with anger or outrage or some other intense emotion. I wondered if she was afraid of something. I said I hoped a way could be found for everyone to come out of this with their dignity and reputation intact. That is because it saddens me to see people who should be on the same side fighting against the Islamofascists, fighting each other.

Siggy and I also talked about other issues, including Hugo Chavez and some future posts, then said goodbye.

Shortly after the podcast was posted, I became aware of the extra 23 minute segment and received an angry letter from Dymphna, who felt I had insulted her. I immediately went back and listened to my side of the conversation with Siggy and, while it was clear that I disagreed with her and The Baron's position in this matter, I could not see how she could possibly take my compassion about the situation as an "insult" or that I had "turned her into a victim". If she had not made a choice to phone into the live podcast, it is doubtful I would have even discussed her emotional state in my later conversation with Siggy.

I most certainly regret that my private conversation was recorded (at least my side of it, anyway). What I said was not meant to be public, but I will not apologize for it, nor will I delete the entire podcast because of it (it is not possible to delete just the 23 minutes). I never meant to insult Dymphna in any way, shape, or form.

I decided to let things slide, foolishly thinking that friends could reasonably disagree on this issue.

I was wrong. Apparently it is not possible to be a friend to Dymphna if you disagree with her.

Her next letter to me came last night and can only be described as an attempt to blackmail me. What she imagines she can blackmail me with is beyond my comprehension. So, in order to pre-empt her threats, I have decided to encourage my readers to go and listen to the podcast and the one-sided conversation after its completion; or, if GOV publishes the transcript as Dymphna threatened to do, feel free to read it at your leisure and make up your own mind.

Shrink was absolutely correct when he wrote:

I have not carefully studied either side's arguments because we have long since left the realm where any facts can resolve the differences. As with most familial disputes, the dispute has now devolved to an irresolvable question of whose judgment is more right than whose.

I am not saying that my judgment is perfect, nor that GOV (and Dymphna particularly) is wrong in the factual statements made. That was never the issue in the podcast, or in the conversation I had with Siggy afterwards that was mistakenly captured (at least one side of it) on mic. But I will not change my judgment or my opinions because someone--even a friend threatens me with blackmail.

Below are the the two emails I received from her.

This is the first one, received shortly after the podcast:

Pat,

Do you remember Donald Rumsfeld’s famous (or infamous) line about our state of
knowledge? He said, more or less—

“… as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know."

Sounds like Christopher Bollas, doesn’t he?

The broadcast on 11/19 was a perfect reflection of some of the gaps — one might even term them chasms — in the knowledge of the hosts of your broadcast regarding European politics and the information Charles Johnson claims to have about it.

I hardly know where to start, and I couldn’t possibly cover all the unexamined premises your broadcast assumed as some kind of gospel, but let’s deal with a primary point: Vlaams Belang.

Siggy kept referring to VB as “he” — in fact, your European “expert” repeatedly used the third person masculine singular for what is the largest and most popular Flemish political party. Siggy didn’t even know who or what he was referring to. Then, at the end, when the broadcast is over, you reveal the black hole when you ask him “is Vlaams Belang a person?”

What do any of you know about politics in Belgium or Brussels or Strasbourg? Do you know that there are only state contributions allowed to political parties? If the state does not fund you, then the party does not exist; it has neither seat nor voice. Marginalization is total.

What do you know about Dewinter, who is one of the members of the Belgian Parliament representing Flanders? Do you know that his father and grandfather served in the Resistance in World War II? The man is forty six — what earthly use or respect would he have for neo nazis, given his family history and his age? This is who Charles Johnson is attacking. It’s shameful. If Dewinter cared, he would be within his rights to sue Charles for defamation...at the very least.

Did you know that the party which preceded Vlaams Belang was dissolved by the Belgian Parliament for being “racist”? They wanted to preserve their Flemish culture and they wanted the great tax burden they bear — which goes to support the socialist French-speaking Walloons welfare progarms — lifted. The latter loathe and despise the Flemish and so Vlaams Blok was successfully dissolved by the Parliament and courts in a coalition among the Walloons and some of the splinter parties.

The Brussels mayor has on occasion used the Walloon police to brutalize the VB parliament members. Can you imagine the mayor of D.C. having Congress members beaten and hauled off to jail because they met outside the building to commemorate our 9/11? Well, that’s actually what Freddy did. The pictures are on my blog to prove it. The Baron’s boss was there and filmed one of the videos.

When VB formed again, it was called Vlaams Belang. In order to cut off its oxygen supply all the other political parties formed what they called a “cordon sanitaire” —a refusal to ever make a coalition with VB in Parliament for any reason. Yet VB’s popularity continues to grow because it represents its voters hopes for the future.

Ironically, they hold the same political principles you do: smaller government,lower taxes, local rule, and a requirement for assimilation for immigrants so that they learn the language and the culture of their new country and become citizens. One of their most radical ideas is that a person ought to be allowed to protect their property. Right: currently that is against the law.

This is a simplified overview, just to give you the basics…I expected that as the hosts of a program on this subject you would know these basics, but that didn't turn out to be the case. Thus, what you decided you heard in my voice — being “scared” is how you described it — was in actuality great anger that anyone would hold this “discussion” with next to no information about the people they tarred and feathered with any number of casual slanders.

I wasn’t scared. Of what?? I was frustrated at the total lack among you of any context about the situation in Brussels and in Belgium and how their political system operates. And I was angry because I did not think any of you listened, that you’d already made up your minds that Charles’ character assassinations of a whole group of people are right. I believe you said his was the “principled” position, using a character out of Ayn Rand to make your point.

So as it turned out, my intuition was correct: in your long, supposedly private phone conversation with Siggy, you proceeded to analyze my feeling state, and expressed pity for the situation the Baron and I are in, and hoped we could find a dignified exit.

Have you ever sat for ten minutes and listened to a live broadcast of a person dissecting you, while you knew they were so far off base they might as well have been talking from Mars? It’s an interesting experience. I listened all the way to the point that you discussed your plane travels for the next day. I also heard you speak disrespectfully of someone who committed six months of her life and some hefty financial resources to bring off that first conference. She was rude? Siggy kept interrupting her. You guys had a leisurely amount of time to defame what we had accomplished, and SHE was rude because she asked Siggy to let her finish her sentence. Have you ever noticed he has trouble with that? With everyone? It was even apparent in your phone conversation.

Unfortunately, I'm in a double bind here. If I "protest too much" about your opinions of me, then I am questionable because I'm too intense and invested -- or whatever tenditious opinion you offered about me. Yet if I leave what you said to stand unchallenged, I am not standing up for myself. That's quite a dilemma, isn't it?

What factual information do you have about the conference in Brussels? Did you read up beforehand? Do you know who the speakers were or why they agreed to come? Do you realize how Charles endangered Bat Y’eor by permitting her real name to be revealed on his site? The New York Times beat him to it, but that’s the company he keeps.

Come to think of it, do you know who Bat Y’eor is? Or Andrew Bostom, M.D.? Or Robert Spencer? These were just some of the speakers at the conference, all happy to be there. I won’t tell you what word Bat Y’eor used to describe what Charles Johnson has done — only because I don’t have her permission. Let’s just say it’s a body part and leave it at that. And if a 75 year old petite little woman who happens to be the world’s expert on Eurabia thinks this of Charles, then might it be a more accurate appraisal than yours?

Pat, there were representatives from 14 European countries at that conference, plus the US and Canada. The Italian contingent chose the occasion to present the national Oriana Fallaci annual award to Bat Ye'or. During her last months, Fallaci turned more and more to Bat; they spoke on the phone several times a day right up to the final hours of Fallaci’s death.

Robert Spencer is carefully silent about all this because…well, because he hasgood reason to be careful. We all have to make a living.

Andrew Bostom is disgusted. He was the one who sent me the hat tip on the American Thinker essay suggesting that Charles had been taken in by Belgian intel psyops. He probably was: he had information up and ready to go instantly. Charles was prepped and prepared. I was blindsided by his hostility and refusal to discuss any of it. It was Charles’ way or the highway.

The Flemish don’t know who Charles Johnson is and they don’t care. He can neither hurt them or help them and they are trying to free their country. He’s simply another American who doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The Walloons and the rest of the socialists in the Belgian Parliament can harm them and that is the center of their concern. The Walloons don’t want to surrender their welfare assistance, which is largely supplied by the more industrious and creative Flemish. They will hang onto the golden goose even if they have to wring its neck to do so…

In the long run, Charles can’t hurt us either. CVF Europa is growing by leaps and bounds. More countries are in, more members are joining. More distributed network activities are taking place. CVF in this country is also vital and robust. We are tired of sitting in front of our computer screens simply bloviating. So we put our money where our mouth is and did something.

As a psychiatrist, I am sure you are aware of the common phenomenon of envy. When you start something new, or you go up against authority, there will be people waiting to bring you down a level. That’s all Charles’ “principled” stand amounts to. And if you look at his falling numbers, you can see a possible reason for his need to create another Rathergate.

http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?c=1&f=555555&u=littlegreenfootballs.com%
2Fweblog&r=5y&y=r&z=3&h=300&w=610

Meanwhile, what to do about your conversation with Siggy in which I am discussed in not very complimentary terms? And, no, I don’t find condescending pity a compliment. Victimhood doesn’t appeal to me. Your actual words were (about the Baron and me): "what would be helpful is to find a way for them to get out with their dignity intact."

I have no plan to “get out” since I’m not trapped anywhere. I plan to continue with my work and to expand it. Charles Johnson has absolutely no influence on that.

What I do want is a public apology from you and Siggy both. No, his voice couldn’t be heard but it was obvious from the context who you were talking to. I don’t mind if you do it on your blog or on the next radio broadcast. If it is the latter, I would like a transcript of the apology sent to my email address. In other words, I want an apology in writing, addressed to me. It can be a transcription, or it can be a post. Or each of you could decide to do one or the other. I'm also open to any other public venue you might consider.

If that simple request is forthcoming, we can let the matter end here.

Dymphna

This next one is the email attempt to blackmail me if I don't delete the entire podcast:

Dear Pat,

When I received the following email from RedState, it gave me the idea of asking you one more time to --

(A) delete your podcast about Gates of Vienna — due to the content of your comments in the extra 23 minutes that was supposed to be off mike,

And,

(B) to post a brief apology concerning the podcast. No need to take sides in this debate, just some vague reference will do.

I will have to act if I do not hear from you from you by Friday evening, 11/30.

As an example of what I'm talking about, here is what RedState sent today about
CNN:

————————————

Dear RedState Reader:

RedState is calling for CNN to fire Sam Feist, their political director; and David Bohrman, Senior Vice President and Executive Producer of the debate.

During last night's debate, which CNN billed as "a Republican debate, and the goal was to let Republican voters see their candidates," CNN either knowingly or incompetently allowed hardcore left wing activists to plant questions and Anderson Cooper willingly gave one of those activists a soapbox so he could harass the Republican candidates about military policy.

Simple googling would have revealed these left wing activists.

Had CNN done its homework, this would not have happened. They either willfully let it happen, or incompetently bungled it. Either way, heads should roll.

————————————

Obviously, amateur podcasters are not in the same boat as the MSM. However, if we say that we are better than the MSM, or have higher standards, then it behooves us to stand by our words…and that podcast didn’t do it.

I haven’t had a reply from you since my first request, but I have had emails on the subject from others. They say you and Siggy appear unprofessional, and I’m sure that is not the perception you want to leave.

Since you did not reply, the Baron has transcribed the extra twenty-three minutes and if you don’t delete the podcast, we will be posting them and will include opinions from others re both the process and content of your regular program and the unintentional Afterword.

If you are unable or unwilling to settle this, then I will post the significant excerpts with a link to the whole transcript on our domain site.

I will also add a link and exposition of the Cyberjounalism’s Code of Ethics, which your podcast violated in myriad ways.

Despite how you framed it, this is not a “family squabble.” Charles has dropped some of his allegations and has been forced by our insistence to retract online his comments accusing us — CVF — of attempting to mount a DOS attack on him (a denial of service). CVF did no such thing.

And despite your opinion that Charles has the “principled” position in this, he does not. — James Lewis in the American Thinker believes he’s a tool of the Belgians. So do I.

Did Neo share with you the comments she received from one person who happens to be quite knowledgeable re the situation in European politics? If not, here they
are:

————————————

1. Dear Neo,

that was very hard for me to listen to. I had to stop after appr. 15 minutes cause I couldn’t muster the patience for this total mix-up of facts, factoids, beliefs, assumptions and downright disinformation.

The spat in the blogosphere was definitely about two groups that participated in the Brussels anti-jihad conference in October. These groups were Vlaams Belang from Flanders, Belgium and the Sweden Democrats. Both groups are no different from classic US conservatives and there are no statutes, programs or people in these parties that you could reasonably call fascists or nazis. The European socialist politicians, media and academia call everybody a nazi who speaks up against the islamization of Europe. That means, that people like Charles Johnson do the dirty work for the European Left by denouncing European conservatives as Nazis. To the European left, everybody is a nazi that does not embrace the most foolish political correctness and multiculturalism.

Let me tell you that Bush and Cheney are being called fascists and Nazis too. So, there you go, prove them wrong …

The groups that have been mentioned in that radio show, like the BNP or LePen’s Front National EMBRACE ISLAMISM in Europe, BECAUSE IT IS ANTI-JEWISH!

Vlaams Belang and the Sweden Democrats are the most pro jewish and pro Israel parties you will find in all of Europe. As opposed to all the mainstream parties in all of Western Europe.

I have created my own blog just yesterday and just for the purpose of creating a new marketplace of ideas for a better understanding of Conservatives on both
sides of the Atlantic. I would love to participate in this debate and to bring
some knowledge and facts to the table.

I have left Europe just after 9/11, after spending decades of my life there. Europe will need the US and the US will need Europe. We have a culture in common and a common enemy. This is an important discussion that has to happen.

————————————

And to another commenter he says:

————————————

1. konservo

I honestly don’t understand how you can equate Paul’s writing with the mud slinging of CJ. What’s wrong with what Paul wrote?

And I never said that “LGF called Vlaams Belang or the Sweden Dems “neo-Nazis” because they spoke out against radical Islam”.

I presume you are American. Let me tell you that your political templates do not work for the present situation in Europe. That’s what I tried to make clear in my comment above.

VB and Sweden Democrats are neither antisemites nor are they racists. There are parties in Europe, like the German NPD that are only antisemite and attract huge followings of skinheads and original nazis. These parties are also openly pro islam because islam is anti jewish. That is a very old alliance. Hitler already allied with the Great Mufti of Jerusalem and there were thousands of muslim SS.

Parties like the NPD have nothing in common with the European Anti Jihad movement and VB or SD. And BNP and the FN seem to be well on their way to exclude all their admittedly black sheep.

————————————

So one good thing has come out of your podcast: the blogosphere has a new and credible blog that really knows the situation in Europe and will be refuting the misconceptions of European parties. If you want to see what he has up, it’s called “Transatlantic Conservative.”

And people understand that Charles Johnson is not only engaging in mud-slinging but has banned us, Atlas, Fjordman, and anyone who disagrees with him or agrees with us. Various group blogs have been formed by people who have been banned, often without any reasons given. They’re just gone.

Lately, CJ has introduced a new tweak: he can delete a comment in such a way that the commenter can still see it but the others on the thread see it has been deleted. It’s Kafkaesque — you should have seen what a scare it threw into his followers… and he enjoyed the game.

And he stays in the comments — or did until a couple of days ago — in a manner I’ve never seen before. He would make allegations of things “smelling bad” — sending the faithful into either reassurances he was the greatest or asking for reassurance it wasn’t them.

So for you to say he has the “principled” position is not only wrong, it’s damaging to your own credibility. Given his drastic changes in behavior, I think he’s quite fragile.

If you will agree to delete the podcast and put out a one line comment of apology, I’m willing to drop the whole thing. If not, I can only presume you are operating by MSM standards and I will address that publicly, using the cyberjournalism code of ethics to demonstrate my points.

You see, I have nothing left to lose here. You have made me look bad — “scared,” “angry”, “protesting too much”, etc. But if it goes public, then I will at least have company — to wit, you and Siggy. Your lack of due diligence will be apparent from the first moment off the unofficial podcast , when you ask “is Vlaams Belang a person?” It goes downhill from there.

Thus I ask you to reconsider this and delete the podcast and offer an apology. Otherwise, I have no choice: if I do nothing, in the future, yours will be the only record of this set-to, and when people are searching for material, they will find your podcast. If it doesn’t come down, then my response must of necessity go up to counter your own viewpoint. I am obliged to preserve some historical accuracy here.

If I have not heard from you by tomorrow afternoon, Friday, I will presume your position is the same. So the post will go up on Saturday.

I respect our previous friendship, and hope that this rift can be mended.

Dymphna

Let me reiterate what I said earlier. I have no intention of deleting the podcast, despite the fact that my side of a private conversation was also recorded. I am not ashamed of or embarrassed by any of the opinions I expressed after the podcast. I'm sorry Dymphna's feelings were hurt, but if she can't stand someone disagreeing with her, or suggesting that she felt "'scared', 'angy' or 'protesting too much'" -- then maybe she shouldn't be blogging.

I can't help thinking that for someone who "hates" to be a victim, she's playing it for all its worth.

The world's greatest intellectual achievements sometimes come about as the result of disagreement--even passionate disagreement. Demanding that we all walk in lockstep on an issue is a sure path to intellectual mediocrity.

The worst that can be said about my private comments made public is that I felt bad for the position she and The Baron had gotten themselves into with regard to Charles at LGF (and vice versa).

But clearly there is a pattern developing here. First GOV is fighting with Charles. Then they "end" their connection with the Infidel Blogger's Alliance after feeling slighted (see here and here). The first comment on the latter post is something I can completely agree with:

If anything is pointlessly alienating anybody it has to be this pointless neurotic self analysis.

Stick to you original tenets and those who don;t like it can go their own way.

Stop wasting time and energy on the futile.... get on with business.

And now they seem to be set on completely alienating both me and Siggy if we do not fall into line and agree with, as well as apologize....or else. Their first step was to remove me from their blogroll. Hey! Way to pull a "Charles Johnson." Well, in the end, that is their prerogative.(UPDATE/Correction: Apparantly, I am still on the GOV blogroll...I should point out that GOV will remain on mine whatever).

Well, Dymphna, do whatever you feel you must--as I have just done. I'm sorry our friendship has to end like this, if it ever really was a friendship to begin with. I did nothing of a deliberate or malicious nature that could possibly be construed as "attacking" you--if anything, your exaggerated emotional response to the entire affair only gives more credence to my judgement of your emotional state.

You, on the other hand, have crossed a line with your threats of blackmail and "exposure", simply because I don't happen to agree with you on this one issue.

I find it sad that people who I liked and respected seem to be on a campaign to deliberately sabotage relationships with friends and allies.

I wonder what other friends they will attack next?

Postscript- NO COMMENTS WILL BE ALLOWED ON THIS THREAD. NOR WILL I MAKE ANY FURTHER POSTS ON THIS ISSUE. As far as I am concerned, the matter ends here.
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 9:41 AM

 
THAT'S RICH !
From a Washington Times article a few days ago:

Democrats like to define themselves as the party of poor and middle-income Americans, but a new study says they now represent the majority of the nation's wealthiest congressional districts.

In a state-by-state, district-by-district comparison of wealth concentrations based on Internal Revenue Service income data, Michael Franc, vice president of government relations at the Heritage Foundation, found that the majority of the nation's wealthiest congressional jurisdictions were represented by Democrats.

He also found that more than half of the wealthiest households were concentrated in the 18 states where Democrats hold both Senate seats....

Mr. Franc's study also showed that contrary to the Democrats' tendency to define Republicans as the party of the rich, "the vast majority of unabashed conservative House members hail from profoundly middle-income districts."

In the 30's and 40's it became increasingly clear to Marxists that something was fundamentally wrong with the master's economic hypotheses. Like the followers of Jesus, they had been waiting a long time for the second coming,and they expected the collapse of capitalism at any moment. In fact, they were greatly encouraged by the Great Depresion and were certain that it was imminent.

But like a bad dream, capitalism just wouldn't go away, and instead of collapsing, it rebounded stronger than ever.

Why, they wondered anxiously, are the proletariat not rising up in rebellion against the oppressive forces of capitalism?

Far from rising up against their "oppressors", that same proletariat were buying into the capitalist system and the "American Dream" in large numbers. The sharp differences between the classes were slowly eroding, and more and more of those in poverty were finding their way into the middle class, thus gaining hope for themselves and their children.

Not only that, to the great astonishment of the socialists etc., the "oppressed" proletariat seemed relatively happy and content with their lot!

Happy and content people do not generally initiate violent revolutions nor rise up against their so-called oppressors--particularly when they don't feel oppressed, but feel empowered.

And, furthermore, much to the puzzlement and subsequent rage of these same intellectuals, in those places in the world where socialist and communist theory had triumphed, wealth was disappearing; initiative was in decline; and the human misery index was climbing. This was the legacy of Marx's "social justice".

Instead of creating a utopia for the proletariat, Marx and his theories only generated the conditions for societal suicide.

The clever capitalist system was actually co-opting the oppressed workers, and helping them enter the dreaded "middle class"!

Marx always expected that the middle class would disappear as capitalism developed, since he believed that the only sustainable positions were the ones of his dialectic.

That is not what actually happens in the real world as it turns out.

Whenever people are given political liberty and allowed to pursue their own happiness (and not the mandates of the state), the ranks of the middle class expand and grow stronger.

In fact, the values and ideals of this particular economic group have come to anchor society in the United States.

Far from wanting to ignite a worker's revolution as Marx predicted, they enjoy the creature comforts of the capitalist system and feel themselves empowered by it. Worse (from the communist/socialist's perspective anyway), the typical person in the middle class believes that he or she can better themselves by using the many opportunities offered by a liberal, capitalistic democracy.

Even in Communist China, capitalistic pursuits and entrepreneurship have become the true "opiates" of the masses--in the sense that to the degree people are free to pursue their own happiness and work for their own interests--i.e., where they have economic freedom, even if they don't have political freedom-- they are relatively content, and are unlikely to fulfill the ardent communist/socialist's revolutionary fantasies.

From a joint post written by Dr. Sanity and SC&A some months ago:

...a successful middle class demands that government answer to them, and not the other way around. Democracies are not developed or sustained by the political extremes- they are the trust and legacy of a vibrant, functioning middle class....

In the most successful societies there is a large middle class, and anyone has the potential to succeed if they have a good idea, commitment to work and plenty of drive. America, Canada, the UK, Australia and Israel are all examples of societies that while very different, are very successful. As barriers to entry into the middle class becomes more onerous and difficult, requiring expensive and hard to obtain permits and licenses; societies are less successful and become progressively more likely to fail. The nations of the Arab world is a good example of that. There is no middle class in most of the middle east; only an elite, plundering class who are the beneficiaries of the oil wealth the land is blessed with; and a lower class, condemned by the elites to poverty, ignorance and oppression.

When there are few barriers to entering the free market, then the middle class can thrive; and the more successful the entrepreneurs and community becomes, the greater the stake the people have in maintaining peace and prosperity.

Thus they become true conservatives. Is it any wonder then that the backbone of society--the hard-working middle class, middle-income Americans-- lean toward the Republican party?

So, how do we explain those many wealthy individuals who make up the ranks of the Democrats--the closest thing we have to the socialist party here in the U.S. (and they are certainly backed by legions of lunatic leftists who wholeheartedly subscribe to Marx's discredited theories)?

Having achieved a degree of success and/or wealth in our free society, a person who has worked their way out of the middle class (or out of poverty) is then subjected to a constant barrage of both subtle and overt messages created to make him/her feel guilty for doing so. Propaganda aimed at discrediting "the rich" (who actually pay a disproportionate amount of taxes to begin with) is pervasive and unrelenting. The Democrats use this rhetoric all the time to stoke the fires of class warfare.

This was not always the case. Once upon a time in America there was a certain pride that came with the "rags to riches" story that many Americans lived. Both Democrats and Republicans believed that this was a country where it was understood that if you worked hard, you could get ahead; make something of yourself and even become President someday! There were no social or class restraints imposed in America and that's why people came to this country to begin with. Equal opportunity meant that anyone with an idea or talent could make a successful life for themselves.

But equal opportunity gradually morphed into a demand for equality of outcome. And that if you don't have what the other guy has, then it must be becaused you have been oppressed by the other guy--after all, you can only get ahead by stepping on someone else. Your gain MUST be someone else's loss.

Here is where the Marxist garbage of "oppressor vs oppressed" has had the most impact on American society. Having been taught from kindergarden on that capitalism is a zero-sum game (and by definition evil) many Americans have difficulty in thinking of resources or wealth as ever-expanding, and tend to think that someone else's gain must be their loss. If you have only two choices--to be either an "oppressor" or one of the "oppressed", most people would generally prefer the latter because it means they must be nicer people.

This kind of thinking inevitably leads to envy, and a cult of victimhood with all the associated social and political conflicts those emotions generate. Envy, in particular, is the lovely human emotion that drives all socialist systems; and it exists in pure, unadulterated and vicious form in those systems. And, in answer to the unspoken question, yes; capitalism also thrives on envy-- and even greed.

But, capitalism within a democratic and politically free system of government offers a healthy channel for the redirection of negative emotions like envy and greed into something positive for both the individual and the larger society.

Something, I might add, that marxism, socialism and all its malignant variants completely fail to do. You cannot escape the reality of this dark side of human nature. You can either channel that dark side and use it constructively to benefit the individual and incidentally the society he lives in; or you can encourage and facilitate it in all its destructive power, and by doing so create the hell on earth we've come to associate with communist and marxist societies.

I'm sure that the usual accusations will instantly be hurled at me for saying such a thing. The victims of the world will rise up against intellectual oppressors like me someday and....wait a minute! Doesn't that proposed scenario sound strangely familiar? Since I started writing this blog, I have been taken to task by the left about how everything economic position I take is "socially unjust" and that policies like that will "impact the poor most of all..."; that conservatism is racist, sexist, or some other such nonsense. I'm sure I will get emails describing how such insensitive suggestions will result in harming little children and puppies disproportionately and without compassion.

But, no matter what they say about my motives, it remains a fact that poverty and misery have a cure; and that cure is capitalism and freedom.

Now, that's rich, isn't it?
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 8:24 AM |

 
THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY 2008 PLATFORM: "Truth Doesn't Exist and We Possess It"
This is what the Democrats have so far as a platform for 2008...


[More Cartoons by Bob Gorrell ]

...and all they need to do is:

Continue to vigorously deny that any progress is being made in Iraq; and even if there is progress being made, insist it is irrelevant because American soldiers have died

Keep on focusing on anything negative in the economic news and suggest that imminent economic collapse is upon us--as they have been doing for the last 8 years

Insist that the reason the U.S. has not been attacked since 9/11 is because there was NO REAL THREAT TO BEGIN WITH !

And, like Bill Clinton did just the other day, rewrite history to make their fantasies all come true. The first step is to fix things so its clear to everyone that their motives have always been pure. Even when Clinton was denouncing Saddam Hussein and voicing his support of Bush's decision to go to war, he was really opposed to it in principle!

That is how life is lived amidst the postmodern ruins:

This is one of the reasons that the left habitually attacks motives instead of substance, for they first undermine the idea that you can know anything objectively, and then insist that the purpose of knowledge is domination and oppression anyway. For the last several years, "job one" of of the left has been to make us doubtful of our aims in Iraq, in the hope that we will simply become demoralized and surrender.

But they do this so selectively that it is mind-boggling. For example, surely there was more credible evidence that Saddam had WMD than that the earth is undergoing catastrophic manmade warming. But in both cases, their main argument is that people who disagree with them have venal motives. In the case of President Bush, he really wanted to invade Iraq because he thought it would somehow enrich his already wealthy "friends." And in the case of global warming, those who reject the theory are simply on the payroll of Bush's wealthy friends. So for all practical purposes, humility is not possible on the left, since their conspiratorial form of thought means that they always have the answer. And it sounds humble to the stupid, since they are always opposed to the intrinsically racist-sexist-homophobic America.

So, just as the left engages in the moral inversion of detaching virtue from tradition, they engage in a weird "cognitive conversion" that combines "intellectual helplessness" with a kind of monstrously arrogant omniscience. This is how you can spend some $100,000 plus on an elite university education, only to learn that truth doesn't exist and we possess it.

What they possess is a moral and intellectual confusion that is so pronounced, I hesitate to even call it psychosis. It is more like a deliberate dementia.
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 7:44 AM |

 
"REAL" DEMOCRACY FOR THE "REALITY-BASED"
The violence begins in Venezuela:

Several media outlets in Caracas have reported today that the new protests where thousands of students from all over the country participated against Chavez's Constitutional "reforms," left many students wounded. There were violent confrontations with the police in many Universities and there are reports of protesters having bullet and pellet wounds. Allegedly, one is in critical condition. Some newspapers have published news that many students have been detained by the authorities.

Demonstrations also occurred in other cities: Maracay ,Valencia ,Yaracuy and Puerto La Cruz and there is information that many professors joined their students. For this Sunday, all the student leaders will join their forces and will march in a huge demonstration to reject Chavez's plans to turn Venezuela into an oppressive and tyrannical country.

Protein Wisdom reviews the left's response to Chavez "shredding the [Venezuelan] constitution":

Results 1 - 20 of about 662 for chavez “shredding the constitution”. (0.16 seconds)

Results 1 - 20 of about 22,200 for bush “shredding the constitution”. (0.30 seconds)

And lists some of the fawning praises the left has had for this thug. Here's just two:

So, is Chavez a dictator? Bush, Fox, and the Venezuelan oligarchy will tell you that he is. But they live in a looking-glass world where conquest is called liberation, aggression is called defense, and economic domination is called free trade. A world where real democracy is called dictatorship[emphasis Dr. Sanity].

Venezuela’s media, owned largely by the country’s wealthy elites, is arguably the most rabidly anti-government media in the world. In the past, opposition figures have appeared on television openly calling for a coup against Chavez, who says he is leading a revolution on behalf of Venezuela’s majority poor. Chavez’s decision not to renew RCTV’s license is not exactly akin to George W. Bush shutting down CBS or NBC because they ran a few stories critical of him. If RCTV were operating in the United States, it’s doubtful that its actions would last more than a few minutes with the FCC.

Yes, we can clearly see that Chavez has installed a "real" democracy; and that people in the U.S. are living under a brutal and oppressive dictatorship. So sayeth the reality-based community.


- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 7:07 AM |

 
THE PATH TO SELF-DESTRUCTION
A long time ago I attended a seminar run by noted philosopher and author Dr. Tibor Machan, and during the course of the discussion, he asked us to consider the question (and I'm paraphrasing), "In a democratic and free society would it be legitimate to vote in a dictatorship?"

The question took me by surprise because I had never even considered the possibility that free people would consciously and deliberately choose a totalitarian system.

Of course I was wrong about that. Modern history gives us many examples of exactly that scenario transpiring (consider the Palestinians and what passes for democracy in Iran, or the "99%" of the vote in Iraq for Saddam. (Consider Jimmy Carter smiling and blessing such travesties if you really want to be ill).

My friend Siggy has said repeatedly that democracy is more than just voting, and I completely agree with him... but this article is the exception to that rule because in this case, all of democracy in a great nation hangs on a vote:

On Dec. 2, Venezuelans will be asked to vote on a whopping 69 constitutional amendments that would greatly reduce the country's democratic governance, strip citizens of still more individual liberties and thus expand President Hugo Chavez's power even beyond what it is today. The sad reality is that voters will probably approve the amendments, as Chavez's opponents have been bumbling around, discredited, disorganized and intimidated.

The vote will be bad not only for Venezuela but for the rest of Latin America. Chavez-style demagogues -- Chavistas -- are taking control throughout the region, persuading frustrated voters to jettison their often unresponsive democratic governments for the promise of something better, even if that something is a populist dictatorship.

Chavez already has assumed some of the powers he wants legitimized in the upcoming referendum. Approving the changes will merely legalize what is already in place and further reduce the options and safeguards available to those who disagree with him and his vision of "21st century socialism."

One of the most disturbing ballot items would allow Chavez to run for president as often as he wishes and make it more difficult for voters to recall a president. He could become, in effect, president for life.

Recently, the polls suggest that Venezuelans are not going to give up their democracy without a protest; but does anyone doubt for one minute that the egoistical, incredibly malignant narcissist Hugo Chavez will allow the Venezuelans to dismiss him by a vote? Already, he is calling anyone who doesn't vote for the referendum a "traitor".

Venezuela is on the path to self-destruction.

Dear Hugo is having what I would compassionately call a nervous breakdown. Frankly, he is completely melting down, even comparing himself to Jesus Christ. From the Investors Business Daily link above:

Weekend polls showed that ever since the king of Spain publicly told him to "shut up" in Chile two weeks ago, support for Chavez's move to seize absolute power in Venezuela has fallen below 50%.

Student protests have engulfed Caracas and other towns in protest against his dictatorship. Chavez has denounced them as "rich spoiled brats." But in reality, they often are a pivotal political force, particularly since they include young people from Marxist and lower-class backgrounds.

Meanwhile, the shelves at food stores are empty and TV shows run by shuttered station RCTV have been canceled.

For Chavez, this could be a long, hard winter of discontent. Globally, he's become a laughingstock. He's fighting with Chile's socialist leader, Michelle Bachelet, over high oil prices while at home he is facing some of the strongest challenges yet to his iron rule.

The usual nutjobs at the DU have leaped to the defense of their socialist hero by claiming that he only used a "metaphor" (yeah, right: just like all paranoid delusional patients I treat) and that, since the poor victimized President of Venezuela was viciously attacked and demeaned by the fascist King of Spain, he is justified in his anger.

Imagine, if you will, what they would say if the Bu$hHitler used a Christ metaphor to describe the attacks the left have made without cessation since Bush was elected.

But all that happened to Chavez was that someone finally told the bigmouth who has been badmouthing everyone else to shut up. I wouldn't have even said it so politely, considering the BS that regularly comes out of that mouth. The forebearance and polite patience displayed by any normal person who has to interact with Hugo the clown must be of majestic proportions.

In my professional opinion, the man has crossed over the borderline into the realm of the psychotic. His malignant narcissism/psychopathy is evident to anyone willing to look; and he will not ever give up power easily or willingly. Chavez will either win the "election" that would make him PresidentDictator for life, or there will be hell for the Venezuelans to pay.

As with all thugs of Chavez' ilk, eventually dead bodies will fill the streets, and when they do, the morons of the Democratic Underground along with all the morally bankrupt political left will scramble to rationalize and excuse his behavior.

The path to self-destruction is so very easy to follow. Either the Venezuelans will voluntarily walk down that path by "voting" to essentially terminate democracy in their country; or Hugo will order his goons to force them down that psycho path that consolidates his complete power over them.

In either case, the people of Venezuela will eventually have to fight to keep the freedoms they so cavalierly voted away when they entrusted their future to this pathetic man.

UPDATE: Another "metaphor"?

In a speech at an air base west of Caracas on Tuesday, Chavez said Venezuelans will vote "yes" in the referendum to "open the path to a new nation."

"On Saturday, the final attack begins, and Sunday ... it's written: the people will vote and will say yes to the call we're giving to open the path to a new nation," Chavez said, alluding to the referendum that aims to modify 69 of the 530 articles in the constitution.

"We can't go backward, we cannot fail! We're obligated to victory, to continue triumphing. This is a battle of world proportions. And Venezuela, there, modestly there, is playing a very important role," Chavez said.

Or a threat?
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 3:26 PM |

 
PAKISTAN'S OTHER BHUTTO ON THE SANITY SQUAD
Yesterday evening, The Sanity Squad had a very interesting conversation with Fatima Bhutto in Karachi. Bhutto's famous aunt, Benizir, is one of the major players in events going on there now, and Fatima, who was schooled in the West has a unique perspective on the situation. She skillfully handled a number of questions about her writings and about the upcoming presidential elections.

You won't want to miss this podcast!

Ms. Fatima Bhutto clearly has a political future and could very well become a major player in Pakistani politics. You can read some of her controversial pieces here and here. In several of those pieces, she expresses an admiration for both Hugo Chavez and for Hezbollah--neither of which are exactly monuments to democracy or freedom; but Ms. Bhutto handled herself with grace, honesty, and insight while answering in detail some of the hard questions put to her by members of The Squad.

Join Siggy, Shrink, Neo and me as we have a lively discussion with Pakistan's "other" Bhutto!

Click on the button to listen:


- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 7:49 AM |

 
TONITE'S SANITY SQUAD: Fatima Bhutto
The Sanity Squad will be podcasting live on BlogTalkRadio tonight beginning at 9:30 pm. PLEASE NOTE THE TIME CHANGE...due to time difference between here and Karachi, Pakistan.

In what promises to be a fascinating podcast, The Sanity Squad will interview Fatima Bhutto, niece of Benizir Bhutto who is one of the opposition leaders in Pakistan. We will discuss the state of emergency in Pakistan; upcoming elections and the prognosis for that country and its relations with the U.S. and the West.

Ms Bhutto recently penned an important editorial for the LA Times.

Her Website can be found here; and More from wiki, with links and From MSNBC .

She will undoubtedly be a player in Pakistan in coming years, depending on the fortunes of her famous aunt.

You will be able to call in live starting at 9:30 pm (until then, if you click on the link it will play the podcast recorded last Monday) .

The call-in number for the live program is (646) 716-9116

Listen live!

- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 4:03 PM |

 
THE STRATEGY OF THE NEW BARBARIANS
One of the most distressing aspects of the war on terror we have all witnessed since 9/11, and the many acts of Islamic terrorism since that date, is the rush by Western intellectuals to justify and legitimize/rationalize the backwardness, oppression, and anti-human medievalism promulgated by the Islamic fundamentalists of the Middle East.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, for example, recently spoke at length to a Muslim magazine where he sharply criticized and heaped scorn on American foreign policy and "imperialism" (and was given a "political blessing" by the political establishment in Britain) in no uncertain terms, but then very mildly criticized Islamic societies:

In Pakistan he was “surprised by how the extremely small Christian minority there is perceived as so deeply threatening by an overwhelming Muslim majority which ought to be more confident and generous about its identity”. He urged the Muslim world to acknowledge that its “present political solutions aren’t always very impressive”.

Very sporting and, of course, oh so moral of him to gloss over some issues highlighted by Victor Davis Hanson at The Corner in a post appropriately titled "Why You Can Believe all Those Warnings About The Death of the West":

...if he [Williams] is worried about the soul of civilization in general, and the U.S. in particular, he might equally ask his Muslim interviewers about the status of women in the Muslim world, polygamy, female circumcision, the existence of slavery in the Sudan, the status of free expression and dissent, and religious tolerance (i.e., he should try to visit Mecca on his next goodwill, interfaith tour).

Mark Steyn further highlights the confusion of the Archbishop; but Rowan Williams is not alone in his moral and intellectual bankruptcy when it comes to dealing with the barbarism and horrors of the jihadists, whose goal is nothing less than the complete destruction of Western civilization and its replacement by the utopian Caliphate where oppression of women, killing infidels, and religious intolerance are all celebrated as the highest form of worshiping God.

The conundrum that many on the left in the West seem to run into is the concern that, by fighting back against those manly modern barbarians who cavalierly behead innocents and slaughter fellow muslims with abandon; hide behind women and children and use children and babies as human bombs to murder infidels; and even by voicing a condemnation of such acts or criticizing the fanatical intolerance of Islam toward other religions--they are being, well...intolerant. And not politically correct; and--let's face it--really really mean.

Especially when you finally wage a war back against barbarians who formally declared war on you in 1996 and have been fighting and killing your people for decades with relative impunity.

In a comment on this thread at The Belmont Club, Wretchard notes:

The brilliance of the new barbarism is that you cannot fight it without destroying your own value system into the bargain.

Traditionally the solution has been to consider wartime a discontinuity, when civilization's rules are suspended. It becomes possible, for example, to lay waste to the Monte Cassino Abbey. Berlin was bombed without regard for its buildings, churches or people.

The alternative is to create methods of fighting so discriminating that we can literally shoot between the raindrops. But that creates a different problem, for we will need an intelligence system so comprehensive that it will become intrusive.

Either way, the war cannot be won without cost. And the fundamental fraud foisted on the public is to claim we can have war without horror, conduct an intelligence war without dishonesty and cunning and obtain victory without sacrifice.

Amen.

I am confident that we in the West are not in danger of losing our fundamental values; and that our overall moral heading can be recovered should we need to temporarily deviate from the course of the moral compass that guides us. Because, in order to combat and defeat this new barbarism, we must confront it directly 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. Moral virtue and saintly restraint will not win this conflict, at least not without the help of pure, unadulterated brute force to back them up.

But, first we must be sure in our own hearts and minds of the endurance of our own values in order to use whatever force is necessary. Morally vacuous intellectuals; and historically ignorant churchmen are not the kind of leaders that will help Western values and Western civilization triumph over the new barbarians. They are plagued by pervasive doubts about the worth of our civilization, and are not troubled by the idea of its demise and replacement. In fact, they rather stupidly believe that their own little socialist version of utopia will win over the new barbarians to their way of thinking; that, their lovely tolerance and good intentions will convince the jihadist that he can safely live in peace with them.

The moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the intellectuals of the political left and their postmodern nihilism is spreading uncertainty and fear--not directed at those who want to kill and enslave us, but toward ourselves and our own motives. This uncertainty is already having a profound effect, and is enabling and encouraging the new barbarians to think they can defeat us--in Iraq; and everywhere. Value by value is already being undermined. Look how willing much of the West was to compromise 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 disappear, little by little as it is taken over by the barbarians.

If we continue to appease them, we will be overcome by their ruthlessness and love of death--which in the end, is more than a match for our humanity and love of life and freedom. Can we in the West not even be certain that life is a higher value than death? That freedom is more desirable than oppression? And that life and freedom are causes worth sacrifice?

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. Is it worth this kind of sacrifice to preserve the blessings of liberty for our posterity?

Those who fought in the two World Wars of the last century thought so.

I've said it before, but this reality is what I hate and despise most about these Islamic fanatics--who do not let reason or life interfere with their jihad; who abide by no treaties, follow no rules, and scorn the very values upon which Western civilization is founded. We could have lived with them they did not insist that we must become what they are or die. But they have defined the groundrules (or the non-rules) of this conflict; and eventually, we will have to meet them at their level--or they will win. We should hold tight to the thought that it is they who have set the playing field.

The best strategy of these new barbarians seems to be to unleash their own barbarism, then let the intellectuals of the West make the appropriate apologies for them.

"Good people sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf." - There is controversy over who said this, but for a discussion of this quote, see Mudville Gazette.

One of the leaders of the new barbarians had this to say :

In the message broadcast by Al-Jazeera television, Ayman al-Zawahri, second in command to Osama bin Laden, said that al-Qaida now views "all the world as a battlefield open in front of us."

The Egyptian-born physician said that the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah and Palestinian militants would not be ended with "cease-fires or agreements."

"It is a jihad (holy war) for the sake of God and will last until (our) religion prevails ... from Spain to Iraq," al-Zawahri said. "We will attack everywhere."

So, what should civilization's response be? Should we pretend we don't hear him? Should we agonize about our own imperfections and shout mea culpas as they continue to kill us? Should we pretent that thugs like Zawahiri and Ahmadinejad don't really mean it? Even if you hate the idea of violence and death --and what sane and rational person doesn't?-- isn't it time to get really serious about this threat and stop pussyfooting around pretending it doesn't exist?

I think so.
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 10:59 AM |

 
IT'S GOOD TO BE BACK HOME
We arrived back late last night from sunny, WARM, California to snow, sleet, and COLD Michigan.

Blogging should resume later today!

It's good to be home!
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 6:28 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.

**NOTE: I am now getting many more submissions than I can possibly include in the weekly Carnival. Please don't be offended if your submission is not used (oh, okay, be as offended as you like) as it only means that for a variety of reasons I wasn't able to fit it into the "flow" as I put together each Carnival.

REMEMBER, THERE ARE SO MANY INSANITIES AND SO LITTLE TIME!!!

1. Want to bet that he will become dictator for life whether he "wins" the vote or not? Let's hope the country is full of "traitors". Not beguiled describes very well how I feel about that infantile clown and his soul mate.

2. Defending the undefendable...but it's the Israelis who have cooties...all of which leads to insanity of Biblical proportions?

3. The state of intellectual property in the Arab world. Unforgivable thoughts.

4. Code Stink? Do it for the children...then do it for the planet! Clearly we must also be willing to do it for the sake of the universe!

5. Meanwhile, Nature is fighting back!

6. Naming names...the purpose of immigration is to make America less American? What ever happened to diversity?

7. She voted the strait Republican ticket...heh heh. The Former-Presidents-Wives Club?

8. The Wile E. Coyote phenomenon...Finally! Scientific proof that Bush and his Administration is responsible for everything that has gone wrong! The impeachment circus never takes a holiday.

9. Oh yeah, this really makes me want to visit London. Not charming, or very cosmopolitan!

10. So many holiday horror stories, so little time.... Thankstaking holiday...a new left creation? How about the new left math: spanking = waterboarding = evil violence?

11. The penalty for pruning trees without a license!

12. Nothing is deeper than a gratuitous laugh!

13. Sesame Street was intended for adults? And its all because of cow farts.

14. Sounds like a Google translation... Perhaps this is another Google translation?

15. Ick. Licking toads to get high? You've got to be kidding. Testesterone-crazed men? Isn't that redundant?

16. The new Winter Olympic motto: citius, altius, sanguius (swifter, higher, bloodier)....

17. Sell the Picasso! Or, say goodbye to affordable luxuries!

18. Great green gobs of greasy grimey gopher guts, mutilated monkey meat....


***************************************
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 @ 2:47 AM |

 
COGNITIVE DISCONNECT ALERT
This must really irk many on the political left in the same way any success in Iraq does:

Scientists have made ordinary human skin cells take on the chameleon-like powers of embryonic stem cells, a startling breakthrough that might someday deliver the medical payoffs of embryo cloning without the controversy.

Laboratory teams on two continents report success in a pair of landmark papers released Tuesday. It's a neck-and-neck finish to a race that made headlines five months ago, when scientists announced that the feat had been accomplished in mice.

The "direct reprogramming" technique avoids the swarm of ethical, political and practical obstacles that have stymied attempts to produce human stem cells by cloning embryos.

Some will say it is unfair of me to suggest that there are quite a few people upset at the above development, but like Kevin Drum, they are far too indulgent toward those well-meaning and oh so caring persons of the leftist persuasion. Without a doubt, there are a sizable number who are deeply committed to the wonderful causes of the left (call them the lunatic fringe, if you like), who "prefer embryonic research for its own sake and will keep fighting for it even if this new approach proves itself completely successful. But why? Inertia? Political bloody mindedness? A demonic delight in destroying embryos for its own sake?"

No, none of the above actually.

In case it has escaped Drum's notice, there are many who take such "a demonic delight in destroying" and dismissing anything at all related to George W. Bush, that they long ago lost all perspective, reason and sanity about such things--i.e., they suffer from BDS, which I long ago came to appreciate is a real political psychological disorder that describes a real pathological phenomenon of our time and is not simply a clever witticism.

This political pathology has had such a major impact on some people's cognitive functioning capabilities, they will not be able to cope with the possibility that anything supported by Bush might triumph.

The President is, after all, the real enemy that must be defeated--they have based their entire world view, as well as their definition of who they are, on that belief.

I offer apologies to the few leftists still able to think clearly about any issue which might show the evil and despised Bu$Hitler or his policies in a (gasp) positive light.


- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 7:10 AM |

 
SOMETHING WONDERFUL
In the movie 2010: The Year We Make Contact, (the sequel to 2001:A Space Odyssey), just before Jupiter expldes, becoming a new star making the moon Europa able to sustain life; an apparition of the astronaut Frank Bowman appears to Heywood Floyd, warning him that they must leave Jupiter within two days. Floyd asks what will happen at that time and Bowman replies, "Something wonderful."

He meant that the conditions for intelligent life to develop on Europa now exist.

Wretchard at The Belmont Club writes about the recent turn of events in Iraq, which has the left and the Democrats somewhat discombobulated :

The Times Online reports that large numbers of refugees are returning from Syria to Iraq. "The numbers are certainly large enough, as we report today, for a mass convoy to be planned next week as Iraqis who had opted for exile in Syria return to their homeland." Can Iraq be getting better?

Further, he notes that:

The current calm in Iraq represents not only a 'partial peace' but a huge victory. For the first time since Algeria at least, a Western army has defeated the combined efforts of a terrorist insurgency, a global radical Islamist attack and the intervention of two neighboring countries in less than five years. Al-Qaeda in Iraq made an explicit effort to precipitate a civil war in Iraq and failed. Syria backed the Sunni insurgency in its effort to restore dominance in Iraq and failed. Iran backed the Shi'ite militias, including the Special Groups and may be failing too....

Victory is far from completely achieved in Iraq, but most especially with respect to radical Islamism throughout the region and across the globe. We need to know what went right to figure out where to go from here.

But that understanding must begin with the realization, which the returnees from Baghdad may understand better than the pundits in Washington, that something very wonderful may have been achieved in Middle East.

When that concept finally penetrates the thick skulls of the political left and the leadership of the Democratic party, both of whom suffer from the bizarre delusion that they are the ones who keep and protect the flame of traditional liberal ideas such as freedom and democracy, I wonder what will happen?

Victor Davis Hanson has a thought or two about that. In his essay, "With Iraq Improving, Will Neocon Ideas Return?" Hanson states:

...for a variety of unforeseen reasons, the furor and partisan bad blood over Iraq are lessening here in the States. The debate over Iraq seems to be changing from "we can't win" to whether victory is worth the aggregate costs.

Expect this new battle to be more retrospective, as each side tries to inflate or deflate how much blood and treasure have been spent on the Iraq War - and whether the cost has led to greater American security both in and beyond Iraq.

As fear of defeat in Iraq recedes from the political landscape, look to a growing consensus elsewhere. "Neocon" - the term often used to describe "new" conservatives who today support fostering democracy in the Middle East - may still be a dirty word.

But if you take the anger about George Bush out of the equation, along with the Iraq war and the fear of any more invasions by the U.S., why not support democratic reform in the Middle East? We know the alternatives only play into the hands of terrorists.

That's why presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., recently said that America needed to support democracy and pressure Gen. Pervez Musharraf to restore elections in Pakistan.

Few Democrats or Republicans would disagree with his idealistic rhetoric. Although Obama wouldn't express the same support for the struggling Iraqi democracy, he sort of sounded like a softer neocon - more worried about the lack of freedom in Pakistan than the fact we might undermine a strongman with nukes and a restive population.

Indeed, if exporting democracy is such a discredited idealistic concept, they why worry about Pakistan with Musharraff consolidating his power? Hanson further argues that:

A year from now, neither George Bush nor a quieter Iraq will inflame Democrats. And without these familiar bogeymen, they will to have to state what they are for, rather than what they are against.

If Democrats keep Congress and win the presidency, they probably won't do things much differently in Afghanistan. America's role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict also won't change much. And if the next president is a Republican, it's a safe bet he won't invade any new countries.

As the Democrats move closer to the controversial neoconservative position of actively supporting democratic reform in the Middle East, they will claim that their strong idealistic diplomacy is the proper corrective to the Bush administration's unilateral misadventures.

In other words, the Democrats will end up arguing that they were for neoconservatism before they were against it; that it was only the incompetent application of those idealistic principles that they were opposed to, not the idealism itself.

What Hanson calls the "soft neocons" are really the "utopian neocons", a fair-weather version of neoconservatism, which can only support freedom and democracy when there is no imperfection, no mess, and absolutely no sacrifice present in the process.

You can bet that the Democrats will appropriate neocon ideas the minute they believe those ideas are popular. Then they will proceed to distort them in the same manner they have distorted all the other great ideas of liberalism; and continue to believe that freedom is free and requires nothing but rhetoric to exist in the world.

The neoconservative philosophy has always understood that it takes more than rhetoric to counter the forces that would destroy western civilization; and that the pervasive nihilism of the postmodern infection that has spread throughout the once liberal left and which is now promulgated and promoted by the West's own intellectual elites, only facilitates tyranny.

Neoconservatism is the only intellectual remedy developed in the last five decades to nullify postmodern philosophy and rhetoric and stand up to the forces of de-civilization.

Something wonderful is happening in the Middle East amid all the violence, chaos and turmoil.

The conditions for freedom to develop in Iraq now exist.

UPDATE: Relevant commentary by Charles Krauthammer: "On Iraq, A State of Denial"
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 6:52 AM |

 
HAPPY THANKSGIVING ! Some Food For Thought
What are you doing reading blogs today???

Go eat something yummy!

If you haven't committed to a certain menu, here are three of my favorite holiday dessert recipes. Consider them food for thought, as well as sustenance for the soul and body!


DEATH-BY-CHOCOLATE CAKE
(Surprise! A real WMD )

It's very simple to make and my family really likes it. I've been making it for several years now and probably originally got the recipe from some magazine, which one I've long forgotten (otherwise, I'd mention it). I prefer to eat it either unadorned, or with a high quality vanilla ice cream, but if you are a purist, you are free to use chocolate ice cream instead.

1/4 c. oil
2 eggs
1 1/3 c. water
1 chocolate cake mix (get your favorite--I like devil's food chocolate cake)

Mix the above ingredients by hand (do not use electric mixer). Pour into greased 9x11 inch pan. Sprinkle 12 ounces Semi-Sweet Chocolate Chips on top (I like Hershey's). Bake at 350 degrees for 30-35 minutes.

Cool about 5 minutes. Poke holes in cake (it should still be warm) and spread with 1 large jar of Smuckers Hot Fudge Topping. ENJOY

AXIS OF EVIL FRUITCAKE
(In honor of all the ding-dongs and nutjobs out there)

1 C sugar
1/2 C butter, melted
1 egg
pinch of salt
1 1/2 C applesauce
1 t cinnamon
1/2 t cloves
1/2 t nutmeg
2 t baking soda
2 C flour
1 1/2 C golden raisins
1 C currants
1 C candied fruit mix for fruitcake
1 C pecans
1 C red candied cherries for fruitcake (one small container)
1 C candied pineapple chunks for fruitcake (1 small container)

Blend ingredients in a large bowl. Pour into 2 or 3 loaf pans (depending on the size of the pan) lined with wax paper. Bake in 350 degree oven for 1 hour, or until knife inserted in middle comes out clean. Let cool completely. Refrigerate for a day or two before serving. Can be frozen, too. Wrap well in foil and ziploc bags and store in the refrigerator or freezer. You can spike it with brandy, but the applesauce base keeps it moist. Enjoy.

Moral: Handled properly, a variety of candied fruits and nuts can be extremely delicious after they are all democratically mixed together and baked in an oven possessing a steady temperature.

THE BOO'S BREAD PUDDING
(For all the Angels out there!)

5-6 C day old Challah bread cubes
4 C scalded milk
1/2 C butter, melted and cooled
1 C sugar
1/2 t salt
4 eggs, beaten
1 t cinnamon
1 t nutmeg
1 C raisins

LEMON SAUCE
1/2 C white sugar
1/2 T cornstarch
1 C hot water
3 T lemon juice
1 T lemon zest

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Spray an 8x11 inch casserole with nonstick spray. In a large bowl combine bread cubes, 1 C sugar, salt, cinnamon, and nutmeg. Mix in raisins. In another bowl, blend milk, melted butter, and eggs. Add wet ingredients to dry and mix together without turning bread mixture into mush. Pour mixture into prepared casserole dish. Place casserole dish into a larger baking pan. Pour hot water into baking pan about 1/2 up the side of the casserole dish, creating a water bath. Bake for 45- 50 minutes. Sauce: In a small saucepan, combine 1/2 C sugar, cornstarch, hot water, butter, lemon juice, and lemon zest. Cook on medium heat until bubbling and thickened. Stir constantly to avoid scorching. Serve with bread pudding.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING !
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 7:00 AM |

 
SPLIT PERSONALITY
This cartoon captures exactly what I was saying the other day about Ms. Hillary, whose "split personality" alternates between the "Wonder Woman" persona and the "Little Bo Peep" one, depending on which is most advantageous in the moment:

I can hear people saying now, "Oh, Doc that's not fair! She's a person in her own right..." Exactly. I don't like that person. I don't like how she's used her relationship to a powerful man to leverage her own power. There are brilliant, capable women out there who could do a superb job as the leader of the free world, and who have never, ever used their marriage or relationship with any man--, either positively or negatively to get ahead. And Hillary does both--she plays the "Bill card" to push how much experience and qualifications she has to be president; and at the same time routinely plays the "victim card"--poor little woman burdened with an unfaithful man; or poor little woman abused by the oppressive male power structure--whenever it suits her purposes. Yuck and double yuck.

I'd just as soon vote for Monica Lewinsky for President.

- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 6:33 PM |

 
IN CALIFORNIA
Blogging will be light for a few days because I am in California for Thanksgiving. Shockingly, I may not even watch the news while I'm here....
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 10:06 AM |

 
I WRITE THE SONGS ! (Sort of)
Well, I might not write the songs that make the whole world sing, but Dr. Sanity has had one of her poems (not the song parodies!) set to music and recorded by the European group 32Crash. this unique group performs straight futuristic electronic tunes with a retro touch and with the unmatched vocal talents of Jean-Luc De Meyer.

Their latest album "Weird News From An Uncertain Future" is now at Amazon .com and downloadable from iTunes. The more expensive version is in stock and is a limited 2 CD set with remixes by such prestigious artists as: David Carretta, Punx Soundcheck, Tim Schuldt, Nid & Sancy, Helmut Kraft, Millimetric, The Penelopes and Lifelike.

Here's what one on-line reviewer wrote about the album, giving it 5 Stars:

Oh, It's just another excellent work with Jean-Luc De Meyer in the middle of it. Really, JLDM knows how to pick the people he's gonna work with and knows how to put out incredible music. The songs on disc 1 start out being good, and they just get stronger as the disc plays on. My first go was on earbuds at my job, but then I got it home and put it in the stereo system. Truly wonderful!

The exception to me is the song Propaganda on disc1, which seems weak and fluffy. There are a couple of filler pieces, too, but they do serve a purpose, and that is to tell a story which you can read about in the description above.

I encourage you to go ahead and invest in the ltd 2 disc set because otherwise you will miss out on some incredible remixes, and also the song Anger. Anger sounds like it could have been at home on Cobalt 60's TWELVE album, one of my favorites. Dont get me wrong, this is not a rehash of JLDM's other projects, this is an entirely new thing. Get the Humanity EP if you want to go on a test drive first, it is well worth the $10 or so and has stuff not on the LP. Also, in the 2CD set, you get 32CRASH postcards and a mini-poster which I fully intend to dry mount and hang (above the computer, of course).

These guys have experience and talent on their side, and De Meyer's voice never gets boring. The concept, packaging, production, attention to detail, and sheer creativity are all here.

Click on one of the links below:






Dr. Sanity's song is titled "Spacemen and Poets", and is the third track on the album:

SPACEMEN AND POETS

Can spacemen fall in love in space?
Can they kiss? Can they embrace?
Will love last long at speeds of light?
Can it survive an endless night?

Will poets ever walk on Mars,
And write to Earth from dying stars?
Will life be better, or be worse
As spacemen rhyme the universe?
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 7:31 AM |

 
SANITY SQUAD PODCAST
I'll be traveling all day to California for Thanksgiving...so, if you have nothing better to do, then listen to The Sanity Squad Podcast from last night.

We discussed the "Family Feud" going on in the right blogsphere regarding the possible neo-Nazi connections of some European antijihad political groups. Tempers and passions are pretty high on this one! See this post for some links that summarize the issue.

Click on the link below to listen!

- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 7:30 AM |

 
IF IT'S MONDAY, IT MUST BE THE SANITY SQUAD ON BLOGTALK RADIO
The Sanity Squad will be podcasting live on BlogTalkRadio tonight beginning at 8pm. Our topics tonight include a discussion of the ongoing debate (which is at time somewhat acrimonious) between several conservative, anti-jihad blogs regarding Vlaams Belang, the neo-Nazi's, and and the Islamization of Europe. The three blogs primarily involved (though the bitterness is spreading) are Charles Johnson's Little Green Footballs and Gates of Vienna, operated by The Baron and Dymphna; and Pamela's Atlas Shrugs.

For those of you who don't know what's been going on, you can see LGF's perspective (and here); that of Atlas Shrugs; and Fjordman's take at the Gates. ShrinkWrapped has already penned some words about the whole mess (or "Family Squabble" as he terms it).

Time permitting, we will also be discussion the lethargic Democrats who are sleepwalking through history (see also the post just prior to this one for my take).

Join Siggy, ShrinkWrapped, Neo, and me for what is sure to be a lively discussion of all these recent political happenings from a psychological perspective only the Sanity Squad can provide!

You will be able to call in live starting at 8pm (until then, if you click on the link it will play the podcast recorded last Monday) .

The call-in number for the live program is (646) 716-9116

Click on the link below to listen between 8:00 pm and 8:30 live!

- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 3:43 PM |

 
SLEEPWALKING THROUGH HISTORY
Michael Goodwin in the NY Daily News:

Whew, that was a close one. We suffered a big attack and were in mortal danger for a while, but we are safe now. Thank God, the war on terror is over. There are no Islamic extremists. Homeland security is not an issue. The only problem in Iraq is how to get out.

Wait, this is news to you? Then you didn't watch the Democratic debate Thursday. Or maybe you did watch, but since those unpleasant topics were completely or mostly ignored, you assumed the war was over and went to bed believing peace is at hand and Santa Claus is busy making toys at the North Pole.

It's not your fault. It's the Democratic presidential candidates who are sleepwalking through history.

Actually, it would be more accurate to say that the political left in this country is rewriting history and that the Democratic candidates are willing to go along with the rewrite as long as they think it will help them regain power. They have shrewdly calculated that a large majority of Americans would prefer to pretend that there is no danger; there is no war; and that everything would be hunky dory if it weren't for that Republican monster in the White House.

My goodness how the nation has suffered over the last 7 years!

The Constitution is practically in shreds and every day Hollywood stars are being imprisoned for their courageous efforts to stand against the evil Darth Cheney and BusHitler. Those Christofascists have taken over and we are all forced to go to church, praise the Lord, and carry to term those pestiferous unwanted babies. Everywhere, gays and women are persecuted and oppressed.

The economy is obviously in the toilet, and if it weren't for all those ridiculous economic indicators that have shown it is strong and growing, we'd all be in the poor house. Even though Bush said at the outset that this would not be a short or easy war, WE'RE STILL FIGHTING IT! Bush must have lied. How insane is that?

And, let's not forget the historically large numbers of troops who have been killed fighting an enemy against whom it is just not possible to win! Doesn't that moron Bush know that people die in wars and that the war is LOST? What a monster. And not only are those poor, oppressed suffering troops dying for a lost cause, they are also raping, pillaging and torturing innocent civilians (just go to the movies and you'll see it all there in black and white and color).

What about our deteriorating our national image and alliances! Ruined and in tatters. The French and Germans [used to] hate us. The UN always seems to be very pissed off at America; as are almost all those peace-loving, terror-sponsoring states in the Middle East and around the world! We'll be lucky if we ever get our credibility back.

And don't forget that the fabulous international star and politician extraordinaire, Hugo Chavez, doesn't like us either! Now here's a man who is tearing up his country's constitution in the proper socialist manner.

Clearly the only solution to all these horrible problems is to Get. Rid. of. Bush., Get. Out. of. Iraq., and Elect A Democrat. Only then can we go back to the peaceful sleep of the Clinton WonderYears.

In my profession, this strategy used to be referred to as psychological denial, but these days postmodern pundits of the left egged on by psychology eLITEists have repackaged psychological blindness as reality-based progressivism.

Not only are these people sleepwalking through history, but they are sleepwalking backwards through history, trying to return to those thrilling days of yesteryear when they were firmly ensconced in the seat of power and "dealing with terrorism" and "being tough on terrorists" was simply a matter of bombing a few aspirin factories in the 3rd world and standing up to Saddam Hussein. Whatever.

It made so much more sense when Bill Clinton did it and said it; and his tough actions prevented any attacks from happening in the U.S., didn't it?

Don't answer that last question. I don't want anyone's head to explode,

Real history moves forward in time, not backwards; and the implications and consequences of what happens today can't always be assessed for years to come....but you try to stay awake and do the best you can in the moment.

Goodwin concludes with this observation:

...one woman [told] USA Today that Germany's refusal to fight in Iraq lulled the country into thinking Islamic terrorists would focus elsewhere; "we assumed that if we behaved well in the world, nothing would happen to us," the woman said.

Ah, if that woman lived here, she could run for President of the United States. I know which party would have made her feel right at home.

Psychological denial can make you feel good in the short-term--that's why it is a coping mechanism that will never go out of style.

But it can also be the death of you.


- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 7:30 AM |

 
CARNIVAL OF THE INSANITIES - Happy Thanksgiving!
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.

**NOTE: I am now getting many more submissions than I can possibly include in the weekly Carnival. Please don't be offended if your submission is not used (oh, okay, be as offended as you like) as it only means that for a variety of reasons I wasn't able to fit it into the "flow" as I put together each Carnival.

REMEMBER, THERE ARE SO MANY INSANITIES AND SO LITTLE TIME!!!

1. The postmodernists war on Thanksgiving....all history, really.

2. Ooops. Double ooops....

3. I'm with Mr. Bean. On a lot of issues apparently!

4. A dummy hand and the dummies holding it. Oh wait...maybe we should look a little closer at the sign!

5. Not so swift! So, who can MoveOn blame now?

6. The love song of W. Jefferson Clinton. It's not a plant, it's a f***ing garden. The Karl Rove of the left? Does this portend the fall of America?

7. Homer Simpson and contract law. Life imitates art. The missing link!

8. Noblesse oblige. Paranoid psychosis.

9. The Saudis in facebook! Saudis in real life....More Islamic hot air...extremely phallic, don't you think? And, speaking of symbols....

10. Good luck, Hook (PBUY). JihadMan--to the Islamobile! Here's a few words for you....

11. Mailer and some others are soooo yesterday. Reflections on the death of a writer. Translating it into what he meant to write....

12. The "Abbott and Costello of the sardonic and the erudite" Ludicrously pointless. But nothing is more shitty than this!

13. The greatest scam in history? How about this? (More here). Or, is this? Are we taking individual nominations...or can we just nominate today's left in toto for the award?

14. Hankering for a ham soda? Or an egg "donation"? And speaking of food, you might want to skip the dessert on Turkey Day (unless you like mice).Massive doses of Old Spice won't help these guys.

15. Realistic sheep for realistic perverts. Lions for lambs....slaughtered! The end of the movie war hero? Imagine a movie that supports your country?

16. Oh yeah, they support the troops and they love America. Really!

17. Reality? We don't need no stinkin' reality. Diagnosis, anyone? Don't tase me, bro !

18. For that matter, what is truth anyway?

19. Personality diagnosis, anyone?

20. Imposter syndrome...behind some women's financial self-sabotage? Definitely NOT an imposter..the real thing.

21. This is your brain on politics. Uh-huh. A mind is a terrible thing to waste. And, here's a no-brainer.

22. The check really is in the mail. That's government service for you! Government grading parents? Don't be absurd.

23. It fun to stay at the YMCA! (OK, I'm easily amused)



***************************************
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 @ 8:33 AM |

 
OH, PLEASE
There are many things to dislike about Hillary Clinton, Presidential candidate. Mainly, I disagree with her fundamental ideology about the role of government; and I happen to think that, at her heart, she is basically a socialist/collectivist. There is probably nothing anyone can do to convince me to vote for her under any circumstances.

As a woman, however--and one who was involved in the Women's Movement back in the 70's before I came to realize it had been taken over by the cult of victimhood and the proponents of gender insanity (see here for a discussion of that issue)-- this article is precisely what I have always despised about Hillary Rodham Clinton, the woman:

If a CEO of a fortune 500 company were to retire, would anyone seriously consider his wife to be an adequate replacement simply because she was married to him when he ran the company? What about a Super Bowl winning football team? What do you think the reaction of their fans would be if their coach's wife was being seriously discussed as his replacement?

It sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? Yet, Hillary Clinton has practically been anointed by the press and the punditocracy as our next President, despite the fact that her run at the presidency is almost entirely based on being Bill Clinton's wife.

By that, I mean that if Bill Clinton had meant the sweet nothings that he whispered in Monica Lewinsky's ear and he had divorced Hillary and married Monica, today Monica would be planning her Senate reelection campaign while Hillary would probably be working as a lobbyist for the Chinese toy manufacturers association.

But isn't Hillary Clinton is a brilliant politician in her own right? Oh, please.

Oh, please, indeed.

Sure, Hillary is fairly bright. But that is trumped by the fact that she married a philanderer and has stayed with him through public humiliation after public humiliation. That is not "love", nor is it "constancy", nor is it in any way laudable in my estimation. Frankly, it reeks of incredibly poor judgement, particularly since Bill has not apparently reformed since the Lewinsky affair; though admittedly he's less public about it since his wife began her run for the White House.

OK, fine. She has chosen to stick with the jerk. What goes on in their bedroom (or doesn't) is none of my business. It's her problem and her cross to bear....but...but she seems to think--no expect, that I, as a woman, should be excited and revved up that she is running for President.

Sorry, not interested in that line of propaganda. As far as I'm concerned, she's a complete loser as a woman and not at all a role model I'd hold up to my daughter. I don't care how many people she cons with this "I am woman, hear me roar" bullshit.

Hillary Clinton is nothing more than a postmodern gold digger whose preferred "gold" happens to be political power.

I can hear people saying now, "Oh, Doc that's not fair! She's a person in her own right..." Exactly. I don't like that person. I don't like how she's used her relationship to a powerful man to leverage her own power. There are brilliant, capable women out there who could do a superb job as the leader of the free world, and who have never, ever used their marriage, either positively or negatively to get ahead. And Hillary does both--she plays the "Bill card" to push how much experience and qualifications she has to be president; and at the same time routinely plays the "victim card"--poor little woman burdened with an unfaithful man; or poor little woman abused by the oppressive male power structure--whenever it suits her purposes. Yuck and double yuck.

I'd just as soon vote for Monica Lewinsky for President.
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 9:21 AM |

 
BS PROTECTOR
I'm told this veteran was listening to the Democratic debate the other day....


- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 4:07 PM |

 
MORAL INSANITY AND A COMPULSION TO LOSE THE WAR AT ANY COST
Victor Davis Hanson, who just yesterday was one of the honorees receiving the National Medal of the Humanities from the President (see photo below) sees the Democrat's Iraq "debate" shifting:

Now that the Democrats suspect that the U.S. is not only not losing Iraq, but may well “win”—victory being defined by stabilizing the country with a radical cessation of violence—expect the critique suddenly to morph as well.

We will soon hear that the war, while granted that it may be winnable, was not worth the commensurate cost, from liberal critics who have embraced much of the realist and neo-isolationist creed of the past (at least apart from Darfur). That is a legitimate debate—as long as opponents accept that it is a fallback position, and Harry Reid was mistaken when he announced the war “lost”.

Also expect Democrats to find ways to exaggerate the aggregate costs (like counting the rise from 20-100 dollars a barrel for oil entirely due to the Iraqi war without notice of the new Chinese/Indian demand, unrest in Africa, and declining production from the UK to the US), while Republicans will claim that Iraq is part of a larger existential war against Islamic extremism. How to resolve the dispute?

It depends on whether Iraq is stable—and the effect it has on Lebanon, Iran, Syria, the Palestinians, etc. I know such thinking is now dubbed “Neocon” warmongering and worse, but should the constitutional government in Iraq encourage reform in the region, then it would be impossible to compute all the multifarious ways in which that would contribute to world stability and US security. We’ll see, and 2008 for a variety of reasons will be interesting to say the least.

Personally, I don't see it as debate, so much as the usual rhetoric whose primary purpose is to distort and obfuscate reality. The Democrats have never shown the slightest interest in debating policy--especially if the purpose of the debate would be to come up with better ways to win the war in Iraq. From the beginning, they have only been interested in losing that war and discrediting President Bush.

The latest congressional Democatic insanity is so cut off from reality; so destructive and so typically pathetic, that you begin to suspect Code Pink must be holding Harry Reid's balls (assuming he has any) hostage.

The Code Pink lsdies and their comrades in anti-war arms cannot be bothered to concern themselves with true evil and oppression or with those whose barbarism is on display day in and day out.

Meanwhile, Gagdad Bob can't help noticing an important fact about all this:

Sometimes I think that if the liberal media just reported accurately what these monsters actually do, there would be much more support for the war. As it stands, they shield Americans from the horrors they perpetrate, so the only way to be informed is to consult websites such as LGF on a daily basis.

After all, there is a proper use of propaganda in wartime -- and any other time, really. For some reason, the word has taken on wholly negative connotations, but obviously there is good propaganda and bad propaganda. We couldn't have prevailed in World War II without a great deal of positive propaganda that helped Americans keep the nature of the enemy at the forefront of their minds. Our present enemies are no less evil, but you would never know it from the MSM. If you relied upon them, you would likely think that America in general and George Bush in particular are uniquely evil.

On Labor Day I watched Saving Private Ryan again. In the beginning, there was a scene in which a few Germans wanted to surrender, but the American GIs casually shot them and chuckled about it. Now, it would take a far better -- or possibly worse -- man than I to have not done the exact same thing. After all, these were men who, just moments ago, were creating all the carnage on the beach below, leaving your living and breathing friends to die on the sand and in the water.

Today, because of the insane "moral perfectionism" of the left (which we have been discussing in recent posts), the behavior of these American GIs would have, in the words of Senator Dodd, given Hitler the "moral high ground." After all, Dodd and his ilk insist that the Islamofascists can claim the moral high ground based upon our three instances of waterboarding terrorists, while the New York Times published dozens of front page articles about the hijinks at Abu Ghraib, explicitly arguing that we had morally sunk beneath our enemies.

Again, it is not hyperbole to say that these people are literally morally insane.

Indeed, Moral Insanity is the perfect phrase to describe the behavior of the leadership in Congress; in the Media and on the political left these days.

Let's recall, shall we, what the likes of Pelosi, Kennedy, Kerry and Rockefeller said a few short years ago (assembled from Power Line and an earlier post of my own) :

Nancy Pelosi, December 1998:
"Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons of mass destruction technology which is a threat to countries in the region and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process."

Ted Kennedy, September 2002
"We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction."

John Kerry, October 9, 2002:
I will be voting to give the President of the United States the authority to use force -- if necessary -- to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security.

Jay Rockefeller, October 10, 2002:
There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years... We also should remember we have always underestimated the progress Saddam has made in development of weapons of mass destruction.

And, how about those Democratic presidential wannabes past and present:

Hillary Clinton, October 10, 2002:
In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al Qaeda members .. It is clear, however, that if left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons.
We could go on and on, but I'll close with one more from

John Kerry, January 23, 2003:
Without question, we need to disarm Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal, murderous dictator, leading an oppressive regime... He presents a particularly grievous threat because he is so consistently prone to miscalculation... And now he is miscalculating America's response to his continued deceit and his consistent grasp for weapons of mass destruction... So the threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real...
That was then, I guess, and this is now. Democrats seem to have short memories.

John Edwards, 2002
“I think Iraq is the most serious and imminent threat to our country. And I think Iraq and Saddam Hussein present the most serious and most imminent threat.”

Al Gore, September, 2002:
"We know that he has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country" and "Iraq's search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to deter and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power."

As I have mentioned before, the Democratic Party has lost whatever anchor it once had in the real world and is blowin' randomly in the wind. It has become the party of nothing; led by vapid nothings, who stand for nothing, and whose opportunism appears to know no bounds. They have said and will say whatever they happen to think in any given moment is necessary in order to obtain or keep political power.

As they continue to intellectually approach the complete moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the leftist base they pander to, we will have the continuing pleasure of watching these moral pygmies, currently even more intoxicated with power because they have a majority in Congress, as they actively undermine (all with the help of their media propaganda wing) any and all American interests around the world; impede and vilify US military actions (while saying they "support" the troops), and generally behave as prototypical leftists are wont to do--all, of course, in the name of "peace".

Though they have been prattling and whining about the use of executive powers by President Bush for some years now, please note that they actually have no real understanding or appreciation of the constitutional separation of powers and have no problem with trying to usurp that of the other branches.

Hanson, in an post from earlier this year had this warning:

Democrats and liberals should likewise realize that for all their hatred of George Bush and the partisan points to be gained by coddling up to the libertarian and paleo-conservative Right, George Bush’s embrace of freedom was far closer to their own past rhetoric than almost any Republican administration in history. And such an effort to foster democracy was in the long run smart as well, since ultimately a free Iraq would be the worst nightmare of the Islamic jihadists — as we read repeatedly in the rantings of Dr. Zawahiri.

In short, the next Democratic president who wishes to do something about the genocide in Darfur or another mass murderer in the Middle East, will find no support from Republicans, or — in no small part due to liberals’ slurs against the war they voted for — from the country at large.

Yes, we may see thousands killed, displaced, and maimed if the United States flees from Iraq. And that tremor in the foundations of American power may embolden everyone from Hugo Chavez to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

But that is only the half of it.

Leaving Iraq prematurely will also damage the credibility of the Democratic party, the reputation of American ground forces, and the idealism of American foreign policy — just those principles that the critics of the war oddly claim they will be saving by fleeing.

I predicted back then that the politically opportunistic and hysterical leaders of of today's Democratic Party were already too far gone to heed that warning.

Clearly, I was correct.

Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory is just another day's work for the Democrats who suffer from a compulsion to lose the war at any cost.



Hanson accepting the Humanaties Medal from President Bush, November 15, 2007.



The Democratic leadership in Congress, November 15, 2007
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 6:24 AM |

 
INCOMPREHENSIBLE CARNAGE
There are the grim milestones that the MSM and the left like to point out when discussing American deaths in Iraq; and then there are grim milestones that they studiously ignore:

The establishment media is seemingly obsessed with “grim milestones” in the War on Terror, as the Associated Press reminds us this past weekend. But in the next week those same establishment media outlets will probably stand mute when yet another “grim milestone” is reached – the10,000th attack by Islamic terrorists and militants since 9/11, which is responsible for approximately 60,000 dead and 90,000 injured.

The chronicler of this bloody tally is Glen Reinsford, editor of TheReligionofPeace.com, who began compiling and updating daily a detailed list of reported incidents of violence and terrorism around the world targeting non-Muslims and Muslims alike. Because of space limitations he only posts the past two months worth of attacks on his websites main page, though he has archived all of the incidents from past years (2001-2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007). He also maintains a banner graphic with the updated number of attacks, which people can post on their own websites....

In his explanation of his methodology, he notes that he doesn’t include combat-related statistics, and acknowledges that the death toll may increase in the days and months following the attack as victims die from their injuries, which almost never get reported. The list also doesn’t account for the genocide in Darfur committed by the Islamist government in Sudan and their Janjaweed marauding militias, which the UN estimated last year had resulted in 400,000 dead and 2 million displaced.

With such seemingly incomprehensible carnage, I ask Reinsford if there were any particular incidents that stand out, and he identified three (qualifying that he could easily identify 15 more)....

You will have to read the whole thing to really appreciate the level of psychological denial that must be sustained and constantly nurtured in order to ignore the incredible human toll that Islamic terrorism has wrought--and these data have only been collected since 9/11.

If it were up to the the MSM, the Democrats, and the political left, everyone would be required to bury their heads in the sand and pretend that Terrorism is NO BIG DEAL and anyone thinks it is, is the worst sort of fearmonger!

"The 9/11 attack was a crisis that has largely passed"! By calling it a global war on terror we've only helped that which must not be named and hurt ourselves!

Clearly, if we pretend it doesn't exist, it will go away. Better still! If we convince ourselves that it is the Bu$hies, then the solution to the carnage is just to get rid of Bush and his evil sidekick Cheney! Simple! Thus the epidemic of insanity that is psychological displacement at its finest (and least subtle).

And when he is no longer President, then who will shift the blame to? When the denialists finally get around to looking at reality, it may be too late for all of us.

To put it in complicated psychiatric terms, fear can make people stupid and blind to reality. The issue is, of course, who among the fearful is more stupid? Those who are so incredibly afraid of terrorism that they have to pretend it doesn't even exist? Or those who admit to a rational fear of the Jihadists and choose to face it and fight?


- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 2:55 PM |

 
STAND BY BEHIND YOUR MAN


STAND BEHIND YOUR MAN

Sometimes its hard to be a Clinton
Pretending you adore that cheatin' man
You'll have bad times,
When Bill has really good times
Doing things the MSM has banned.
But if you want to win the White House
You'll have to hold his wanderin' hand;
Yes, you still need his mojo
So you smile and stroke his ego
'Cause after all he's just a man

Stand behind your man--
Give him some rope to hang on
And someone else to bang on
When nights are cold and lonely;
Stand behind your man--
And tell the world you love him
Then dump him first chance that you can,
Stand behind your man!

Stand behind your man
As long as he can help you;
The dreams of Women's Lib have sure come true....
She stands behind her man, don't you?
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 6:39 AM |

 
SUCCESS IS NOT AN OPTION
The Democrats continue to live up to their New Year's Resolution:



Success is simply not an option for them. Betsy notes that they have "doubled down on defeat":

In the midst of indicators out of Iraq showing an improving situation since the surge started, the Democrats are trying to double down on their insistence that we withdraw now. Although the situation is still dicey, it is improved. But the Democrats continue to want to call the war a defeat and come home. They haven't adjusted their position at all since earlier this year and now they're contemplating forcing the Republicans to stage a filibuster of their newest pullout proposal.

The possibility of success in Iraq or (gasp) the idea that America may actually win a war, is so horribly distressing to them (and their narrative of American defeat) that you can look for them to escalate their attacks on the troops and military personnel, portraying them as either monsters and horrific killers--or alternatively as terribly victimized by the Bush Administration. Watch for even more "piling on" President Bush, including increasingly hysterical demands for impeachment from all those really really "progressive" types--they are desperate for God's sake! Progress in Iraq was not what they had in mind....; You will see emphasize the cumulative death tolls in Iraq, instead of the ones that demonstrate a reduction in violence; and seize any negative story from that country (if there are no negative stories they will simply count on the MSM not to report any positive ones). Also, I wouldn't be surprised if Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo become central again in the news cycle.

Lone voices crying out in the wilderness will only be marginalized and mocked by the lunatic left base that the Democratic leadership seems intent on pandering to.

Success is simply not an option.

UPDATE: Here we go! The tactic of the day is: Soldiers are poor helpless victims of the uncaring and oppressive Bush regime! Jules Crittendon takes on this myth.

And, Guantanamo!
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 7:31 AM |

 
LISTEN UP !
To listen to last night's Sanity Squad Podcast on BlogTalkRadio, click on the link below:


We talked about Veteran's Day; the postmodern present-tense culture; and recent events in the Middle East.

For the podcast archives of The Sanity Squad at BlogTalkRadio (and for upcoming shows), go here;
For the archives of The Sanity Squad at Pajamas Media, go here. The PJ podcasts can also be found and downloaded by searching for Pajamas Media on iTunes.
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 3:59 PM |

 
THE PARTICULARS ARE RELEVANT
A must read post at The Belmont Club as Wretchard contrasts Ralph Peters "12 Myths of 21st Century War" with 12 ideologically consistent parallels. He concludes by noting:

The key to understanding why it is possible to form statements which contradict individual myths yet remain consistent within the ideological universe is this: the only essential myth it is necessary to accept is the guilt and worthlessness of Western civilization. The particulars are irrelevant. (emphasis mine)

Stephen Hicks wrote about the phenomenon of these seeming contradictions in Explaining Postmodernism. He termed this leftist strategy as "using contradictory discourses as political strategy":

In postmodern discourse, truth is rejected explicitly and consisteny can be a rare phenomenon. Consider the following pairs of claims. - On the one hand, all truth is relative; on the other hand, postmodernism tells it like it really is.
- On the one hand, all cultures are equally deserving of respect; on the other, Western culture is uniquely destructive and bad.
- Values are subjective--but sexism and racism are really evil
- Technology is bad and destructive--and it is unfair that some people have more technology than others.
- Tolerance is good and dominance is bad--but when postmodernists come to power, political correctness follows.

As I noted in a recent post on The New Political Discourse, there is a common pattern to the illogical assertions: subjectivism and relativism in one breath, and dogmatic absolutism in the next.

In other words--it is a waste of time looking for any sense in the contradictory demands and rhetoric of today's political postmodernists

Compare and contrast the positions of each of the 12 myths and its counterpart provided by Wretchard. Both are firmly held as holy writ in the minds of the believer. Imagine, if you will, the degree of cognitive dissonance that would be necessary to have both beliefs in one's consciousness; and to act on them with equal religious fervor.

Take just the first two sets:
(1)
War doesn’t change anything.
and
War is capable of achieving liberation from the clutches of America.

(2)
Victory is impossible today.
and
Victory over America is not only possible, but inevitable.

You begin to see how the nihilism of the postmodern, neo-fascist left dovetails nicely into the fanaticism of the Islamofascists; and how the one sets the stage for and completes the other perfectly.

Postmodern rhetoric evolves into, and seemlessly becomes, the post-medieval terror of the Islamic fanatics. The circle is unbroken. The contradictory discourses of the former pave the philosophical path for the barbarism of the latter.

As Wretchard notes, the particulars are irrelevant--if the destruction of western civilization is your ultimate destination.

In The Four Pillars of the Socialist Revival and the Rise of Islamofascism, I wrote:

Observe how easily Islam has been able to subvert key Western values--such as freedom of speech and expression--with a degree of invincibility and outraged virtue, capitalizing on a tactical opportunity that they have never before had in history. And worse of all, many on the political left--particularly the remnants of utopian socialism-- are aiding and abetting the Islamofascists.

With that in mind, is it at all surprising that Islam is able to take maximum advantage of this Achilles heel within Western culture and use the vulnerability to optimize their own religious, political, psychological, and military objectives?

Multiculturalism and political correctness are two of the fundamental pseudo-intellectual, quasi-religious tenets-- along with a third: radical environmentalism--that have been widely disseminated by intellectuals unable to abandon socialism even after its crushing failures in the 20th century. These tenets 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.

All three 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 these tenets represent three of the four pillars that are the foundation of an evolving epistemological, ethical and political strategy that the socialist remnants in the world have developed and are using to prevent their ideology from entering the dustbin of history.

And, what is most interesting is that, even as they encourage and enable Islam with the first three pillars; the Islamofascists are aiding and abetting them by using the fourth pillar- Terrorism. We can think of the four pillars as the reason for both the socialist revival (particularly in the western hemisphere recently) and the rapid advancement of the Islamic Jihad.

Click on the link to see the philosophical flow chart that explains how this comes about. For people anchored in the real world, the particulars are extremely relevant.

Having granted the philosophical premises of postmodernism (truth and morality are relative; reality is unknowable; and life's a bitch and then you die--without purpose, meaning, or sense) ; then the complementary premises of a pre-primitive terrorist suddenly are quite simple to grasp.
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 7:18 AM |

 
LISTEN LIVE TO THE SANITY SQUAD TONITE
The Sanity Squad will be podcasting live on BlogTalkRadio tonight beginning at 8pm. Our topics tonight will include Frank Rich's assertion that President Bush has executed a "quite coup" more insidious than Musharraf's power grab in Pakistan; the 20th anniversary of the publication of The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom; and the Democratic Party's rather vicious trashing of Sen. Joe Lieberman, who just a few short years ago was their beloved VP nominee. All this, and as a special treat, Siggy will be the host for the evening's festivities!

Join Siggy, ShrinkWrapped, Neo, and me for what is sure to be a lively discussion of all these recent political happenings from a psychological perspective only the Sanity Squad can provide!

You will be able to call in live starting at 8pm (until then, if you click on the link it will play the podcast recorded last Monday) .

The call-in number for the live program is (646) 716-9116

Click on the link below to listen between 8:00 pm and 8:30 live!

- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 4:14 PM |

 
VETERAN'S DAY, 2007 (Observed)


My father was a veteran who proudly served in the US Marines during WWII. He saw action on Iwo Jima, and was wounded there. Some of my earliest memories of him were his showing me his photo album from that time in his life. It was a special album, decorated with the Marine emblem and contained pictures of him and his fellow marines posing for shots in various exotic locales during the war. Each picture had a story attached to it and a lot of memories.

My father passed away in 2004, and I know that he considered his time as a Marine as one of the most important parts of his entire life. At his funeral, the local Marine unit in Fresno, California--where my Dad lived-- performed a very moving flag ceremony and formally presented me with the flag in his honor. I am sitting here looking at that flag as I write this.

Once a Marine, Always a Marine. Semper Fi!

And on this Veteran's Day 2007, May all those who today courageously and proudly serve this country; and all who have ever served be remembered and honored. And may America and Americans always deeply and humbly appreciate the sacrifice that such service requires, and always be faithful to the memory of those who died protecting our great nation.

U.S. Marine PFC (sometimes Sgt.) Frank Santy - World War II


- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 7:02 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.

**NOTE: I am now getting many more submissions than I can possibly include in the weekly Carnival. Please don't be offended if your submission is not used (oh, okay, be as offended as you like) as it only means that for a variety of reasons I wasn't able to fit it into the "flow" as I put together each Carnival.

REMEMBER, THERE ARE SO MANY INSANITIES AND SO LITTLE TIME!!!

1. A picture worth a million words.

2. Obviously they just disguise themselves as Christians and Jews when they win all those Nobel Prizes.... Two of the "[post]modern discoveries" they've made are (1) the most effective methods of blowing yourself up and killing as many people as possible in the process; and (2) the best ways to beat your wife. Goodness, if it weren't for their science, they'd all be living in caves...oh, wait! Even if you season it with special shit, it's LOL nonsense.

3. Now even the UN is a Zionist tool...the paranoia never stops! If it is safer in Israel than in Britain, then here's the reason why. Having become accustomed to living with Israel's freedom (and money), they don't want to have to live in a 'Palestinian' state reichlet.Ahhhh...the absolute hell that is Israel :)

4. Hey, don't worry, America, Israel is behind you!

5. A beauty contest fatwa? Don't these terrorists have women to oppress, children to teach hate to and innocent Americans and Israelis to blow up? Talk about an unbelievable sense of entitlement... I want my...I want my MTV Walkman!

6. Curse you!

7. Voice your support to end women's suffrage!

8. The blame game! Even her husband sees her as a victim! Blame someone else and sue! Have we lost all common sense? Well, yes. Just look who's running for President.

9. New findings from the Journal of Irreproducible Results--or a publication like it!

10. Sometimes you just need a little camouflage.... or some inspiration!

11. Sucked into the vortex of the great misconception !

12. Ruffling the royal feathers....leads to a new vagina monologue! A bit overwrought, indeed! Were they planning on keeping it secret throughout its run? Somebody really dislikes her a lot...

13. Meanwhile, here are some 'Ultimate Political Cage Matches'---caged Democrats and caged Republicans.

14. Fat cats and skinny Santas! What is the world coming to? It's being run by nit-wits. It's that Global Warming! It even makes Bambi mean and vicious.

15. It's ALL BUSH'S FAULT ! An example of 'American Cowboy Bonkerism' if there ever was one.

16. Must be an example of progressive Cuban medicine that Michael Moore missed. Living in a gangsta's paradise.

17. A new Olympic sport that combines all the excitement of team sports, shooting, and moving human targets!

18. Do you blog? You need professional help! Michael Jackson for Halloween? You need professional help! RRS? You need professional help! Ouch! Dropped organs are very painful.

19. How to become a "virtual bastard"! Definitely not a drug for "the long ride home"....Just charge it!

20. Just one financial shocker after another after another ! What's a COTI to do?

21. Channeling your 'inner European'!

***************************************
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 @ 8:03 AM |

 
THE NEW POLITICAL DISCOURSE
James Kirchick who is on the editorial staff of TNR writes in City Journal about what can be described as "leftist McCarthyism"--or, the "anti-neocon fervor" that is sweeping the left:

Today, no other political label gets thrown around as frequently, or with as much reckless abandon, as “neocon.” The most popular liberal blogs name and shame neocons, real or imagined, on a daily basis. The term is used in a fashion similar to the way “communist” was during the 1950s—an all-encompassing indictment—this time indicating an imperialistic and “warmongering,” even an “insane,” worldview. The anti-neocon fervor has reached truly McCarthyite proportions: just a few months ago, Steve Clemons of the left-wing New America Foundation argued in favor of “Purging the Neocons from the American Soul.”

...By now, “neocon” has mutated into a political curse word to discredit not just those who happily accept their status as neoconservatives, but also anyone who merely believes that the West should respond in muscular fashion to national security threats, such as those posed by the cooperation of Iran, Syria, and North Korea on nuclear weapons technology and the equipping of terrorist groups around the world. The chief purpose of this emergent rhetorical style is to cast aspersions on anyone who believes, say, that Iran must not attain nuclear weapons, even if it requires war.

Kirchick then details a perfect example of the new political discourse:

When Joe Lieberman, whose positions on domestic policy are indistinguishable from those of the majority of his colleagues in the Senate Democratic caucus, makes mere mention of Iranian or Syrian support for armed elements in Iraq, Matthew Yglesias—one of the most popular leftist bloggers, writing from his perch at The Atlantic—duly calls the senator a “neocon,” a “psychotic rightwinger,” and a “warmongerer.”

And then notes (regretfully, I think) that:

The long tradition of liberal anti-totalitarianism thus appears to have come to an end, at least in mainstream political rhetoric.

Just yesterday, Lieberman delivered speech at a Center for Politics and Foreign Relations/Financial Times breakfast at The Johns Hopkins University Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, which should have the leftists up in arms (or is that too militarily aggressive a description for them?). Lieberman said:

“Since retaking Congress in November 2006, the top foreign policy priority of the Democratic Party has not been to expand the size of our military for the war on terror or to strengthen our democracy promotion efforts in the Middle East or to prevail in Afghanistan. It has been to pull our troops out of Iraq, to abandon the democratically-elected government there, and to hand a defeat to President Bush.

“Iraq has become the singular litmus test for Democratic candidates. No Democratic presidential primary candidate today speaks of America’s moral or strategic responsibility to stand with the Iraqi people against the totalitarian forces of radical Islam, or of the consequences of handing a victory in Iraq to al Qaeda and Iran. And if they did, their campaign would be as unsuccessful as mine was in 2006. Even as evidence has mounted that General Petraeus’ new counterinsurgency strategy is succeeding, Democrats have remained emotionally invested in a narrative of defeat and retreat in Iraq, reluctant to acknowledge the progress we are now achieving, or even that that progress has enabled us to begin drawing down our troops there.”

Senator Lieberman also indicated, “…there is something profoundly wrong—something that should trouble all of us—when we have elected Democratic officials who seem more worried about how the Bush administration might respond to Iran’s murder of our troops, than about the fact that Iran is murdering our troops. (full text at the link)

My thoughts on neoconservatism can be found here ; and I recommend this book by Douglas Murray and this article from Commentary by Joshua Muravchik. These exceptionally articulate and provocative discussions are the sort of discourse deemed "psychotic" by the political left, without any objective evidence--and usually, in the face of evidence to the exact contrary-- to back up the claim.

As a psychiatrist I am often on the receiving end of this particular rhetorical technique. Many paranoid and delusional patients use it when they declare that it is not themselves who are delusional, but the psychiatrist evaluating them!

And, who in the postmodern world of the political left--steeped as they are in all sorts of conspiracy theories (simply check out the Democratic Underground for the conspiracy du jour) ; awash in exaggerated emotionalism; and drowning in paranoia and denial--is still capable of making a distinction between reality and psychosis, since it's all just relative anyway, isn't it? One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, after all. Bush is worse than Bin Laden; and U.S. military bases are terrorist training camps, etc. etc.

For them, all assertions are simply a matter of opinion--infused with strong feelings, of course--and their opinion is just as good as yours--no, better! Because they adhere to a "higher" truth and subscribe to a "higher" reality! A reality that is made from wishes, feelings, and fantasy.

A disinterested observer looking at both the political left and right as they engage in discourse would see the following kind of accusatory exchanges:

"You are projecting!" or "You are the one in denial!"
"No, you are!"
"Who's paranoid now?"

Thus we come to a fundamental question. How does one assess if either left or right is speaking truth? Or, how does a reasonable person evaluate opinions and political discourse in general for connectedness to reality?

Here are some clues, and it is how psychiatrists (at least competent ones) are able to assert, not only that a person who believes aliens have implanted monitors in their brain (an obvious delusion); but also that persons who maintain that Bush=Hitler, or that a Christian theocracy is about to be imposed on the US or that there is no threat from Islam, are also flirting with outright psychotic (i.e. out of touch with reality) delusions. The former are frank, truly psychotic delusions for which people often seek medical help; while the latter are some of the everyday delusions and self-deceptions that are used to maintain one's sense of self and perserve a dysfunctional worldview.

The "new" political discourse is just a more malignant and rather desperate iteration of the usual type of political discourse that has always been a part of human interaction ("politics as usual"). Only today, it involves an even more maladaptive style of communication (i.e., postmodern rhetoric) that is symptomatic of severe psychological dysfunction, as well as the ideological disintegration of certain groups.

The new political discourse makes it imperative that each individual must be able to determine, rationally and without prejudice or self-delusion when he or she is using maladaptive psychological defenses to disguise his or her own biases and unacceptable feelings.

George Vaillant in The Wisdom of the Ego makes the following pertinent observation:

“…whether a defense is normal or abnormal depends on the eyes of the beholder. We always regard our own vigilance toward our enemies as adaptive, but we view their mistrust of us as an unwarranted projection of their own shortcomings”

Feeling strongly that your particular position is the correct one is not relevant to the truth. While feelings may be useful pieces of data with which to understand reality, they are an extremely unreliable method for assessing what is true and what is not. An overreliance on them to the exclusion of reason and critical thought is a strategy that is fraught with pitfalls and almost always leads to self-deception and delusion. The worship of feelings is never a good long-term survival strategy. Nevertheless, with that said, sometimes feelings are all one has to go on.

This is not a trivial issue since the experience of emotion and the conscious application of reason are both very fundamental aspects of being human.

While each person's perception of the world is, in part, determined by their own subjective experience, one of the unique aspects of learning psychiatry is learning how to use one's own feelings and subjective reactions to glean information from reality. In a previous post on "Feelings, Countertransference and Reality", I wrote:

To make an assessment of the gut feeling's appropriateness, the contents of the unconscious must be explored and brought to the conscious level and considered. Those unconscious internal conflicts can easily mask the inappropriate aspects of the feelings, making them worthless as a means of understanding the external world.

Taking this kind of action as a method of checking and understanding one's own feelings is a process called "insight" or "self-awareness". Some people do this quite naturally and honestly. Some learn in therapy or when they are in crisis. But if insight is absent then one's feelings have the potential to do great harm --both to one's self and to others.

Some unconscious factors, or psychological defenses, that can make one's feelings untrustworthy are: 1) the person you are responding to has become symbolic of someone else in your life (displacement, fantasy, or perhaps distortion); 2) focusing on one particular aspect of a person, you ignore other, more objective data that are available to you about the person (denial); 3) you place your own unacceptable feelings onto the other person--e.g., I'm not an angry person, -- he's an angry person! (projection or full-blown paranoia).

The truth is that there are countless ways that unconscious processes within ourselves can distort our responses to others and to reality itself.

Growing up and attaining maturity requires that we take a moment to consider such factors playing a role in our emotions before we act on those emotions. If we come to know ourselves and understand our own weaknesses, vulnerabilities, limitations and secrets; then our emotional responses to people or to the world can be very valuable tools to help interpret the world. But they are only tools, and if not used wisely, they can do more harm than good. Feelings cannot be used in a court of law--for good reason. And they are not ultimate truth in the court of reality, either.

As I have gained experience in psychiatry, more often than not, when I trust such feelings and proceed to analyze what is bothering me about the situation, I discover a wealth of information that would have otherwise remained hidden. Sometimes that "wealth of information" is only about myself; but even in that case, I learn something new --frequently something insightful that I didn't want to know--about myself.

Even with all the training; and even if one possesses self-awareness and a keen insight into one's own motivations and interpersonal dynamics, when it comes to implicitly trusting one's feelings above and beyond all other data; one has to be very cautious. All too often, mistakes are made; feelings can simply be wishes that have nothing whatsoever to do with the reality. If we are lucky, we discover this before too much damage is done.

The key to gaining control over behavior that is motivated by maladaptive, unconscious psychological processes is to make them conscious. This requires that a person be able to reflect on his or her behavior or feelings and on the contents of one's mind; and with honesty and forthrightness develop some insight into why one feels, thinks, or acts a certain way. This is particularly important if the way one is thinking, feeling or acting is causing serious problems to one's self or to others.

Returning to the acrimonious political debate mentioned earlier, how can a reasonable person decide if someone is "projecting" or in "denial" versus accurately responding to and interpreting objective reality? In other words, how do you tell if the use of a defense is a symptom of some underlying psychological problem versus whether it is adaptive and healthy?

In order to be adaptive, a psychological defense:

• should regulate, rather than remove affect – that is, instead of totally anesthetizing a person, the defense would just reduce the pain (and therefore make it easier to cope; rather than to avoid coping altogether); or, instead of facilitating emotional hysteria or emotionalism, it should keep emotional responses real and not exaggerated--i.e., either too little emotion or too much.

• should channel feelings instead of blocking them - i.e., allow a healthy expression of those feelings in a way that can discharge them in socially acceptable ways rather than keep them hidden and yet motivating behavior.

• should be oriented to the long-term; and not simply short-term comfort or avoidance. That is, feeling good in the short term is maladaptive if it prevents you from recognizing the long-term dangers or consequences for your behavior; and in a political context, doing what is expedient to win an election or score political points without acknowledging the negative consequences or impact one's behavior will have on the nation as a whole is clearly maladaptive (and literally deranged).

• should be oriented toward present and future pain relief; and not focused past distress.

• should be as specific as possible - that is, as a key is to a lock; not as a sledgehammer applied to a door.

• the use of the defense should attract people and not repel them (Vaillant points out that the use of the mature defenses --i.e., humor, altruism, sublimation etc.-- is perceived by others as attractive and even virtuous; while the immature defenses are generally perceived as irritating, repellant, and even evil). Watch this video, for example, and try to imagine how many of the political leaders in either party could be this comfortable making fun of themselves. It is a sign of psychological health when a person can take his or her foibles and appropriately mock them in a pleasurable manner.

For the purposes of answering the key question about which side of the political spectrum today is primarily behaving in a paranoid and delusional manner (remember, everyone uses maladaptive and dysfunctional psychological defenses at one time or another. The difference is a pervasive and persistent pattern of use that suggests a desperate attempt to escape reality) ; and which side is in denial and projecting their own unacceptable feelings onto the other side-- to the detriment of both?

Consider the articles linked to at the beginning of this post:

-The political left asserts neocons are "psychotic" and evil; when, in fact, the neoconservative movement carries on the most fundamental aspects of the liberal tradition (life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness)--a tradition which, once upon a time, the left claimed as its own.

-The fervor and exaggerated emotionalism of the left's hatred of neocons is light years out of proportion to any possible reality. Neocons do not claim perfection; nor is perfection even possible in dealing with human events and interactions. But the left has put forward the claim--based on something like "The Protocols of the Elders of Neoconservatism", I assume-- they are responsible for all the evil in today's world; even as they studiously ignore the groups and ideologies that actively promote the subjugation and destruction of western civilization.(DYSREGULATION OF EMOTION INSTEAD OF PRODUCTIVE CHANNELING)

-They don't just dislike President Bush or rationally criticize his policies and offer rational alternatives to winning a war; they compare Bush to Hitler; say he is worse than OBL; and viciously denounce anything he does; or alternatively doesn't do because they know who their real enemy is (SLEDGEHAMMER INSTEAD OF KEY).

-They are willing to declare defeat and surrender in Iraq; continue to appease Iran and use almost any issue if they think it will get them votes (SHORT-TERM GAIN VERSUS LONG-TERM)

-They put everything into a the Vietnam template because they feel most comfortable using what they consider to have been a "winning" formula to achieve power; they have been traumatized by their losses in the 2000 and 2004 election cycles and exhibit all the signs of PTSD (FOCUS ON PAST PAIN)

-They frequently use tactics that are (and ought to be) repellant to most dispassionate observers to forward their ideological agenda and, in doing so, see themselves as "clever", "creative", and even "humorous" (see here for multiple examples of this). In a sense, they are humorous, but not in the way they imagine. They talk about being "inclusive" but their entire ideology demands that people be categorized and put into categories that foster racism, sexism, classism, anti-semitism; and, of course, they emphasize, promote and glorify victimhood as a primary political strategy.

Clearly, the use of immature and repellant psychological strategies is not confined to the political left --consider how a lot of the humor of Ann Coulter falls rather flat at times. But for every Ann Coulter on the right, there seems to be a dozen or more malignant Al Frankens, Michael Moores or Rosie O'Donnells. It wasn't always so; and there was a time in American politics when the right could justifiably claim the title for most dysfunctional ideology (see here).

A discussion of the factors that influence the development of mature, i.e. functional, defenses and healthy adaptation can be found here.

Probably the first prerequisite for accusing someone of engaging in self-delusion is that one must accept that there is an objective reality, external and independent to one's self; one's beliefs or one's emotions or feelings. Without such a fundamental epistomological foundation, it is completely meaningless to accuse anyone of being "delusional", "paranoid", "psychotic" --or of using any other immature psychological defense or strategy.

That is because if you believe that reality and truth are both relative; and that one person's reality and truth is as good as anyone else's, then when you impute delusion, denial or paranoia etc. to others--you have effectively demonstrated the invalidity of your own philosophical premises.

That is why it is so amusing to observe the left's arrogant appropriation of the term "reality-based community" -- when they don't believe in any reality except for the one defined by their own emotions.

Whether the left likes it or not, there is a world that exists outside their heads and outside their emotions and wishes; and that the entire purpose of reason --which they reject in favor of the "superiority" of their feelings --is about understanding that world. And that just because they feel a certain way doesn't mean that it has anything to do with reality.

The social subjectivism and moral relativism that forms the foundation of their ideological position maintains that our minds are disconnected from reality to begin with. And, isn't that the definition of psychosis? And, isn't it the preferred state of being for today's postmodern leftist?

If everyone's point of view is equally valid and good, then why is so much hatred and animosity directed toward "neocons", conservatives, etc.. Their POV should be considered as valid as anyone else's and to insist otherwise completely invalidates the ideology.

There is a common pattern and obvious logical contradiction in all the rhetoric of the political left: subjectivism and relativism in one breath, dogmatic absolutism in the next.

The left's "new political discourse" is marked by a grim determination to avoid reality at all costs, and to evade looking at themselves and their own unconscious motivations for as long as possible.

UPDATE: Now this is an excellent suggestion! Joe Lieberman is the kind of Democrat I could vote for --or at least live with--once upon a time, in spite of the fact that I disagree with much of his social agenda. He was once good enough to be a VP candidate for the Dems; if he became one for the Republicans in 2008, then the "Grand Old Democratic Party" would surely make a comeback and marginalize the current crop of losers--or at least let them remain in deep space where they can't hurt anybody.
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 7:45 AM |

 
PHYSICIAN, HEAL THYSELF
Sorry for the non-existent posting, but I just got home from the emergency room where I've been since about 4 am. Things move slowly there, but I have been diagnosed, treated, and am alive (barely). I'm going to take the rest of the day off. Should be back tomorrow.
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 2:05 PM |

 
FAUSTA HOSTS....
...the "Return of The Sanity Squad" !

Listen in as we have a group therapy session and discuss all the important political issues of the day:


- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 8:26 AM |

 
THE DOGS OF THE LEFT
Ok, you know the drill, class.

QUESTION: Why is this bad bad bad; and the worse thing for democracy in the history of the world according to the left; and this, as well as all the events leading up to it, is completely ignored and/or dismissed by the same (I wonder if Sean Penn and/or Naomi Campbell are proud) ?

ANSWER: Because, class, in the former case of Pakistan, you can simultaneously get mileage out of bashing Bush, his administration's policies, and America in general as you loudly bemoan the loss of democracy; while in Venezuela, the thuggish tyrannical leader there hates Bush with a passion and regularly throws the raw red meat of that hatred to the dogs of the left to keep them happy and distracted!


Meanwhile, back in Iraq...the left doesn't have the Surge to kick around any more, does it?
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 7:20 AM |

 
THINGS THE DEMS CAN ALL AGREE ON !

- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 7:25 AM |

 
IT'S CARNIVALE TIME AGAIN !
Fausta has the round-up for the second Carnival of Latin America and the Caribbean !
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 7:23 AM |

 
SANITY SQUAD PODCAST
I almost forgot to mention that the latest Sanity Squad podcast at BlogTalkRadio is up. Our topics are Hillary and Pakistan (what a combination!) and ShrinkWrapped is the host. Join, ShrinkWrapped, Neo, Siggy and me for a lively discussion of current political happenings from a psychological perspective!

Click on the link below to listen:



Join us live every Monday evening at 8:00 PM. You can always access the latest podcast by clicking on the links on my sidebar.
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 2:06 PM |

 
EGO-STROKING MADNESS
John J. Miller at The Corner tells an interesting story about his daughter:

She Shoots, She Scores, Shhhh!
So my 8-year-old daughter made her soccer league's all-star team. Normally, I wouldn't bother sharing this kind of personal news, gentle readers. But here's the thing: We're supposed to keep her achievement a secret, apparently to preserve the delicate self-esteem of her teammates. We'll respect the wishes of the coach because we respect him, but this policy is a bit of egalitarian, ego-stroking madness. There was a time when we praised kids in public for their accomplishments; we now live in an age that sometimes seems to care more about protecting them from hurt feelings.

The "madness" Miller mentions is just another example of how the "self-esteem gurus" now dominate the education of our children.

Consider this study :

Today's college students are more narcissistic and self-centered than their predecessors, according to a comprehensive new study by five psychologists who worry that the trend could be harmful to personal relationships and American society.

"We need to stop endlessly repeating 'You're special' and having children repeat that back," said the study's lead author, Professor Jean Twenge of San Diego State University. "Kids are self-centered enough already."
[...]
The researchers describe their study as the largest ever of its type and say students' NPI scores have risen steadily since the current test was introduced in 1982. By 2006, they said, two-thirds of the students had above-average scores, 30 percent more than in 1982.

Narcissism can have benefits, said study co-author W. Keith Campbell of the University of Georgia, suggesting it could be useful in meeting new people "or auditioning on 'American Idol.'"

"Unfortunately, narcissism can also have very negative consequences for society, including the breakdown of close relationships with others," he said. The study asserts that narcissists "are more likely to have romantic relationships that are short-lived, at risk for infidelity, lack emotional warmth, and to exhibit game-playing, dishonesty, and over-controlling and violent behaviors."

Twenge, the author of "Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled and More Miserable Than Ever Before," said narcissists tend to lack empathy, react aggressively to criticism and favor self-promotion over helping others.

[If you want to understand the pros and cons of narcissism, I refer you to this series of posts.]

Amazing, isn't it? Thinking you're hot stuff isn't the cure-all promised by the self-esteem gurus!
Most competent psychiatrists could tell you this, except that many of them also worship at the fountain of self-esteem these days.

Nevertheless, at the risk of wounding someone's feelings about this issue, here are some findings from multiple studies on the issue :

A generation — and many millions of dollars — later, it turns out we may have been mistaken. Five years ago, the American Psychological Society commissioned me and several other experts to wade with an open mind through the enormous amount of published research on the subject and to assess the benefits of high self-esteem.

Here are some of our disappointing findings. High self- esteem in schoolchildren does not produce better grades. (Actually, kids with high self-esteem do have slightly better grades in most studies, but that's because getting good grades leads to higher self-esteem, not the other way around.) In fact, according to a study by Donald Forsyth at Virginia Commonwealth University, college students with mediocre grades who got regular self-esteem strokes from their professors ended up doing worse on final exams than students who were told to suck it up and try harder.Self-esteem doesn't make adults perform better at their jobs either. Sure, people with high self-esteem rate their own performance better — even declaring themselves smarter and more attractive than their low self-esteem peers — but neither objective tests nor impartial raters can detect any difference in the quality of work.

Likewise, people with high self-esteem think they make better impressions, have stronger friendships and have better romantic lives than other people, but the data don't support their self-flattering views. If anything, people who love themselves too much sometimes annoy other people by their defensive or know-it-all attitudes. Self-esteem doesn't predict who will make a good leader, and some work (including that of psychologist Robert Hogan writing in the Harvard Business Review) has found humility rather than self-esteem to be a key trait of successful leaders.

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. They 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.

High self-esteem doesn't prevent youngsters from cheating or stealing or experimenting with drugs and sex. (If anything, kids with high self-esteem may be more willing to try these things at a young age.)There were a few areas where higher self-esteem seemed to bring some benefits. For instance, people with high self- esteem are generally happier and less depressed than others, though we can't quite prove that high self-esteem prevents depression or causes happiness. Young women with high self- esteem seem less susceptible to eating disorders. In some studies (though not all), people with high self-esteem bounce back from misfortune and trauma faster than others.

High self-esteem also promotes initiative. People who have it are more likely to speak up in a group, persist in the face of failure, resist other people's advice or pressure and strike up conversations with strangers. Of course, initiative can cut both ways: One study on bullying found that self-esteem was high among the bullies and among the people who intervened to resist them. Low self-esteem marked the victims of bullying.

In short, despite the enthusiastic embrace of self-esteem, we found that it conferred only two benefits. It feels good and it supports initiative.

For years now, pop psychology and the ego-stroking madness of the self-esteem gurus have mesmerized the culture at large with their theories about how exceptionally vulnerable children are to not feeling 'special'. . Like the do-gooders at the school John Miller's daughter goes to, they are preoccupied at how psychologically damaging it is for a child to accept that other children might actually possess superior skill, talent, or intelligence than they do. Protecting them from such awareness (i.e., from reality) is felt to be the greatest and most caring achievement that educators can do these days.

Those are the out-of-touch-with-reality, but oh-so-caring-and-compassionate egalatarian premises that have percolated through the K-12 educational curricula and beyond. They have been accepted wholeheartedly by the cultural elite of Hollywood and the intellectual elite of academia and foisted on parents like Miller all across the country.

Specifically, there are three delusions that underlie the teachings of today's self-esteem gurus. This triumvarate of contradictions includes the hyping of
(1) self-esteem (increasing your self-worth without having to achieve anything;
(2) hope (achieving your goals without any real effort) and
(3) victimhood (it's not your fault that you haven't achieved anything or made any effort).

In a previous post, "Self Esteem Is Not Necessarily Good For You" I stated:

Our cultural focus on enhancing "self-esteem" has resulted in the near-worship of emotions and feelings at the expense of reason and thought; on emphasizing "root causes" and victimhood, instead of demanding that behavior be civilized and that individuals exert self-discipline and self-control--no matter what they are "feeling".

In discussing the elevation of victimhood to an exalted status -- both for individuals and groups; another post of mine pointed out:

[...]those searching for an expedited pathway into the exalted status of Victimhood. Becoming a victim --as we all have learned from famous TV stars, prominent politicians; religions, races, and even nations--is an advantageous state of being in many ways, several of which are:

-You are not responsible for what happened to you
-You are always morally right
-You are not accountable to anyone for anything
-You are forever entitled to sympathy
-You are always justified in feeling moral indignation for being wronged
-You never have to be responsible again for anything

As you can see, these are some heavy-duty privileges; and they are not given to just anyone. This list is not exclusive.

Steve Salerno, writing in the LA Times wrote about the third leg of this holy psychological quest --the hyping of hope in the "self-help" movement. It seems the intellectual impoverishment of all these pseudoscientific psychological deceptions are now becoming apparent:

Over a 20-year span beginning in the early 1970s, the average SAT score fell by 35 points. But in that same period, the contingent of college-bound seniors who boasted an A or B average jumped from 28% to an astonishing 83%, as teachers felt increasing pressure to adopt more "supportive" grading policies. Tellingly, in a 1989 study of comparative math skills among students in eight nations, Americans ranked lowest in overall competence, Koreans highest — but when researchers asked the students how good they thought they were at math, the results were exactly opposite: Americans highest, Koreans lowest. Meanwhile, data from 1999's omnibus Third International Mathematics and Science Study, ranking 12th-graders from 23 nations, put U.S. students in 20th place, besting only South Africa, Lithuania and Cyprus.

Still, the U.S. keeps dressing its young in their emperors' new egos, passing them on to the next set of empowering curricula. If you teach at the college level, as I do, at some point you will be confronted with a student seeking redress over the grade you gave him because "I'm pre-med!" Not until such students reach med school do they encounter truly inelastic standards: a comeuppance for them but a reprieve for those who otherwise might find ourselves anesthetized beneath their second-rate scalpel.

The larger point is that society has embraced such concepts as self-esteem and confidence despite scant evidence that they facilitate positive outcomes. The work of psychologists Roy Baumeister and Martin Seligman suggests that often, high self-worth is actually a marker for negative behavior, as found in sociopaths and drug kingpins.

We see the people who have inhaled this "psychology-lite" everywhere around us, and in all levels of society. Particularly we can notice it in the elites of Hollywood and Academia; who alternate between acting out their narcissistically empowered superiority -- demanding to be noticed, admired and loved (by you); and playing the narcissistically empowered victim -- demanding their inalienable rights and priveleges (at your expense).

Most people confuse "self-esteem" with what I will refer to as a "sense of self". It is the latter--not the former, that is so often screwed up in the angry, violent, grandiose, and generally narcissistic people in the world. If you have a healthy "Self", you are likely to have a healthy self-esteem--which is not the same at all as a high self-esteem.

A healthy self-esteem is one that can handle a realistic appraisal of one's own particular capabilities.

The psychological defect that leads to so many problems in today's world is not a lack of self-esteem, but a defective or distorted sense of one's SELF. 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 once widely believed that low self-esteem was a cause of violence--and you see that idea reflected today in the platitudes and rationalizations of terrorism-- but in reality violent individuals, groups and nations think very well of themselves.

Do you really suppose that people like Ahmadinejad, Nasrallah, Bin Laden or Kim suffer from poor self-esteem? On the contrary. Exaggerated self-esteem; a belief that one is far more capable, intelligent or gifted than reality would indicate, is one of the hallmarks of a pathological narcissist or psychopath.

The cultural focus on enhancing a child's "self-esteem", instead of helping that child to appreciate his or her own strengths, weaknesses, and limitations (i.e. at the expense of reality) , has resulted in the near-worship of emotions and feelings at the expense of reason and thought; on emphasizing "root causes" and victimhood, instead of demanding that behavior be civilized and that individuals exert self-discipline and self-control--no matter what they are "feeling".

But the real victims of all this hype are our children, because these foolish notions, without a scintilla of scientific evidence and only becaue it makes some people feel good about themselves, have become the pop psychology dogma of public policy in education.

The psychological nonsense promulgated by the well-meaning and destructive self-esteem gurus only serves to reinforce the inappropriate grandiosity of young children; even as the "we are the world" antiwar, anti-capitalist, environmental doomsayers reinforce their malignant and self-serving idealism. (Both are discussed here)

Between the two influences unleashed on the vulnerable minds of our children, is it any surprise that by the time they get to college, kids are either dysfunctional self-absorbed narcissists, naively malignant do-gooders, or completely and irrevocably cynical about the pervasive indoctrination and anti-intellectualism they have been subjected to in their educational careers?

As a writer in the LA Times said a while back somewhat understatedly, "Gen Y's ego trip is likely to take a nasty turn". Yes, it is --along with the society they will inherit.


- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 9:39 AM |

 
LISTEN LIVE TO THE SANITY SQUAD TONITE
The Sanity Squad will be on BlogTalkRadio live tonight beginning at 8pm. Our topics will be Hillary and Pakistan (what a combination!) and ShrinkWrapped will be the host. Join, ShrinkWrapped, Neo, Siggy and me for a lively discussion of current political happenings from a psychological perspective!

You will be able to call in live starting at 8pm. The call-in number is (646)716-9116

Click on the link below to listen between 8:00 pm and 8:30 live!


- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 4:05 PM |

 
THE POSTMODERN, 'PRESENT-TENSE' CULTURE
Mark Steyn has a really excellent piece in The New Criterion discussing the 20th anniversary of Allan Bloom's book, The Closing of the American Mind.

Bloom's controversial exposé of the shallowness and meaninglessness of American pop culture was a bombshell when it first was published in 1987; and, his analysis seems even more prescient when one considers the evolution of that pop culture over the last 20 years.

Bloom was the quintessential academic and a true liberal intellectual (in the traditional meaning of that word), and he could not help noticing that the university--which used to see its mission as the maintainence and transmission of civilization and learning--was failing in that mission. Instead of countering the pervasively vapid "pop" psychology that passed for deep thought about the meaning and purpose of life, it gave credibility to the emptiness and facilitated and celebrated the shallowness.

Instead of preparing young minds with the great ideas and thoughts that had preceded the modern day and which were the very foundation of western civilization; it was deconstructing those ideas willy-nilly; dismissing those thinkers and invalidating their ideas, because they lacked 'modern' sensibilities.

In a previous post I wrote:

By using the now-common relativistic formula, all individuals and thinkers in the past are ridiculed, demeaned, and scorned because they fail to live up to postmodern and politically correct standards of conduct. Thus, their ideas are considered meaningless and described as "hypocritical"--the absolutely worse possible sin from the leftist perspective.

Thomas Jefferson, George Washington--all the Founding Fathers for the most part--did not have the consciousness of the postmodern intellectual: they were slaveholders! Yet they dared to consider the problem of human freedom, bound as they were to the cultural norms of their time. That they could not entirely break out of the culture of their time, but still could push the envelope of civilization forward is irrelevant to the postmodern left. From the left's perch of moral superiority they blithely dismiss these "white males" as hypocrites with no moral standing. Thus are the foundations and the generationally built constructs of civilization invalidated and destroyed. Is it any wonder that all that is left is the nihilistic garbage that postmodernism deems as "reality"?

But consider, if we do not understand the past; if we abandon the ideas that underlie our values and our morality-- how can we appreciate who we are today? If we are only allowed to think of Thomas Jefferson as a hypocritical colonial slaveholder, then we are forced to pronounce his ideas on the struggle for human freedom as no better and no worse than Hitler's Kampf.

And so, Jefferson's mind-blowing, paradigm-shattering declaration, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" has no more meaning or worth than Yasser Arafat's statement that, "Since we cannot defeat Israel in war; we do this in stages. We take any and every territory that we can of Palestine, and establish sovereignty there, and we use it as a springboard to take more. When the time comes, we can get the Arab nations to join us for the final blow against Israel." Both are either completely meaningless; or both are examples of freedom-fighters--who cares which? Bush = Hitler; Good = Evil; Freedom = Slavery; there is no way to judge because the nihilistic relativism we subscribe to has taken away our ability to morally distinguish and discriminate between right and wrong.

By disgarding reason and reality; by abandoning the past and embracing moral and cultural relativism, the left has brought us to this place where we are morally and physically paralyzed and cannot distinguish between the deliberate targeting and killing of innocents and the accidental killing of innocents despite herculean efforts to avoid it; between waging war to give people a chance at freedom and democracy; and waging war for domination and imperialism; between standing up for what is right and accepting the consequences, and abandoning one's values and surrendering with "honor" to the scum of the earth.

By mocking intellectual giants like Thomas Jefferson and dragging him through the postmodern mud; by equating Bush with Hitler; or the behavior of the Palestinians with the behavior of the Israelis; the actions of the U.S. military with the actions of the Islamofanatic terrorist thugs-- the left is desperately trying to numb the mind of the West. Who are we to judge? they scream, desperately trying to prevent history from judging their own unbelievable and pathological destructiveness, their own morally repugnant behavior and ideology.

This is their quest. To establish themselves as the arbiters of moral behavior by behaving immorally; of being "reality-based" without the necessity of having to acknowledge reality; of speaking "truth" to power, without being capable of recognizing truth (isn't all truth relative, after all?).

Bloom argued persuasively in his book that the modern mindset is running on empty compared to the ancient and enlighted thinkers of history. His argument struck me forcefully when I first read his book some years back; and it has even more meaning for me today when I consider the complete corruption of the academic world and ascendency of those marxist and postmodern nihilistic forces within it who see education only as a tool for the indoctrination of young minds into politically correct ideology and who have transformed academia into an educational gulag.

The rich complexity and depth of understanding that can be gleaned from studying the classics of western intellectual thought has been swept away by today's almost exclusive emphasis on the more shallow and infinitely more convenient modern ones. And like Bloom's students in the 80's, who were programmed to seek 'relevance', they still can't be bothered to care about the ideas of the past. Today, however, this is also the mindset of the faculty who teach them.

Thus, both students and teachers are cut off from the great history of ideas and are tossed about by relativistic winds like intellectual feathers.

Are human beings created in the image of God and capable of reason; choice and both great good and evil; or are they merely alive to follow their animal instincts; without free will or a higher consiousness; incapable of rational thought and a servant to emotion?

America was founded on the idea that reason rules emotion; that religion and brute force are not primary; and it was the concrete example of the abstract ideas of Enlightenment philosophers such as Thomas Paine, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and David Hume. These philosophers built upon the ideas of those who had gone before. They questioned the role of religion and the state; but also argued that societies are not sustained by reason alone. And the Founding Fathers were inspired to create a society that promoted life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Bloom's discussions of both culture and values were--then and now--breathtaking in their acuity and insight. As I read somewhere once, we Americans may quote the words of Jefferson, but we have really come to believe those of Nietzsche.

Getting back to Steyn's excellent essay, he notes:

Popular culture” is more accurately a “present-tense culture”: You’re celebrating the millennium but you can barely conceive of anything before the mid-1960s. We’re at school longer than any society in human history, entering kindergarten at four or five and leaving college the best part of a quarter-century later—or thirty years later in Germany. Yet in all those decades we exist in the din of the present. A classical education considers society as a kind of iceberg, and teaches you the seven-eighths below the surface. Today, we live on the top eighth bobbing around in the flotsam and jetsam of the here and now. And, without the seven-eighths under the water, what’s left on the surface gets thinner and thinner.

Steyn next focuses on the part of Bloom's book where he rips apart modern "pop" music:

So Bloom is less concerned with music criticism than with what happens when a society’s incidental music becomes its manifesto. The key to what’s happened is in the famous first sentence of the book. “There is,” writes the author, “one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.” To quote the African dictator in a Tom Stoppard play, a relatively free press is a free press run by one of my relatives. A relative culture ends up ever shorter of any relatives to relate to. In educational theory, it’s not about culture vs. “counter-culture” but rather what I once called lunch-counterculture: It’s all lined up for you and you pick what you want. It’s the display case of rotating pies at the diner: one day the student might pick Milton, the next Bob Dylan. But, if Milton and Bob Dylan are equally “valid,” equally worthy of study, then Bob Dylan will be studied and Milton will languish. And so it’s proved, most exhaustively, in music.

He recounts an MTV interview of John Kerry in 2004:

The interviewer asks his guest: “Well, we know that you were into rock and roll when you were in high school, and we know that you play the guitar now. Are there any trends out there in music, or even in popular culture in general, that have piqued your interest?”

And the guest—presidential candidate John Kerry—replied: “Oh sure. I follow and I’m interested. I’m fascinated by rap and by hip-hop. I think there’s a lot of poetry in it. There’s a lot of anger, a lot of social energy in it. And I think you’d better listen to it pretty carefully, ’cause it’s important. I’m still listening because I know that it’s a reflection of the street and it’s a reflection of life.”

Really? John Kerry is “fascinated” by rap and “listening” to hip-hop? Think if you broke into the Kerry household and riffled through John and Teresa’s CD collection you’d find a single rap album? I didn’t mind Senator Kerry when he was being mocked as a flip-flopper, but I find him even less plausible as America’s first flip-flopper hip-hopper. You can smell the fear in his answer.

And consider his recitation of rap’s virtues: there’s “a lot of anger, a lot of social energy … it’s a reflection of the street.” That’s something else that happens in a relativist culture. First, if Tupac Shakur is just as good as Milton, then everybody drops Milton. Then comes the second stage: once Milton’s dropped, and Bach and Keats and Mozart, you no longer have a very clear idea of who exactly Tupac Shakur is meant to be as good as. It’s not comparative anymore: he’s all there is. The argument is that, oh, well, you uptight squares are always objecting to stuff: you thought Sinatra exciting bobbysoxers was dangerous, and the Viennese waltz was the mating dance of a hypersexualized culture. No. Benny Goodman, noted by Bloom, was a huge pop star but he could play the Mozart clarinet concerto. Popular culture used to be very at ease with the inheritance of the past. One of the trends of the last forty years is not just the vanishing of “high culture” but of low-culture jokes about high culture—the variety-show sketches in which Schubert’s mates urge him to come down the pub with him and he says “No, I’ve got to stay in and finish my symphony.” It assumes a residual familiarity—from some half-recalled school lesson—with a bloke called Schubert who wrote an “Unfinished Symphony.”

Likewise, P. G. Wodehouse is stuffed with literary and classical and Biblical allusions: “He conveyed to young Mr. Rastall-Retford the impression that, in the dear old ’Varsity days, they had shared each other’s joys and sorrows, and, generally, had made Damon and Pythias look like a pair of cross-talk knockabouts at one of the rowdier music-halls.” Wodehouse assumes you know who Damon and Pythias are: They were best pals back in the fourth century BC. Ran into a spot of bother with Dionysius of Syracuse. You could junk Damon and Pythias and replace them with Damon and Affleck—Matt Damon and Ben Affleck: They’re also best pals, they make movies together. But eventually you dwindle down to a present-tense culture unable to refer to anything beyond itself. You can make the argument that, say, Jerome Kern, the first great Broadway composer of the twentieth century, is at his best as harmonically sophisticated as Schubert. But to do that you would first have to know something about Schubert. I think it’s harder to make the claim to harmonic sophistication in the Beatles, but William Mann, the music critic of The Times of London, gave it a go in 1963, comparing the Aeolian cadence in “Not A Second Time” with the end of Mahler’s “Song of the Earth.” But, as I said, to do that you have to know about Mahler.

And once Mahler’s gone and Schubert’s gone, you can no longer make musical claims for rock and rap, so all you do is hail it for its authenticity and its energy and, as John Kerry did, its copious amounts of “anger.” Thus, the loss of a high-culture aesthetic eventually undermines your pop culture, too

Now, I quoted from Steyn's piece at length (and you need to read it all) because it really captures the relativism and nihilism of postmodern philosophy and demonstrate the consequences those ideas have had on art; and specifically, in this case, music.

Once the genie of postmodern moral relativism was released into Western intellectual thought, it was necessary to undermine history, reality, and truth in order to maintain it.

Without a rational metaphysics--or worldview--that explains the nature of existence and reality; and without an epistemology that says our minds are able to acquire knowledge of that reality; then it is easy for the postmodernists to enforce conformity of ideas (while preaching 'diversity'), totalitarian policies (even as they tout 'free speech'), and 'social justice' (even as they perpetuate victimhood).

Ethics, the study of how man should behave in the world--or, what is good and what is evil--is totally dependent on both metaphysics and epistemology, because it is impossible to make choices without knowledge; just as it is impossible to have knowledge without a reality that can be known and understoody by our minds.

What matters in the postmodernist's convoluted thinking is not truth or falsity--only the effectiveness of the language used. Lies, distortions, ad hominem attacks; attempts to silence opposing views--all are strategies that are perfectly satisfactory if they achieve the desired effect. Ideas and reason must make way for reification of feelings; and freedom is replaced by thought control.

Esthetics is a branch of philosophy that studies art; and it is dependent on metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. The essence of postmodern esthetics is the destruction, often deliberate, of beauty and meaning--two of the greatest and most significant aspects of art.

In the shallow, nihilistic blackness of postmodern art, all one is usually left with in place of beauty is a pile of negative emotions--usually of the anger and rage variety; and, the place of meaning has been appropriated by the opiate of the neo-marxist masses, i.e., the ever-useful concept of "social justice", which can always be pointed to as the "deep" meaning of the work, be it painting, music, literature, or whatever.

Art can be thought of as a selective recreation of reality. Its basic purpose is to take an abstraction and make it concrete; and thus to bring an idea or emotion to physical life. Since it is 'selective' in its recreation, the values of the painter, musician etc. are key to understanding its meaning.

Music is an extremely powerful medium that unlocks and expresses emotion through patterns of sound.

And, as Steyn comments, "It was twenty years ago today, sang the Beatles forty years ago today, that Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play. Well, it was twenty years ago today—1987—that Professor Bloom taught us the band had nothing to say."

Most of the 'present-tense' culture that Bloom wrote about in 1987 has become even more cut-off from any esthetic and intellectual roots; and is even more shallow, meaningless, repulsive and mind-bogglingly ugly than would have been thought possible a mere two decades ago. By looking at the postmodern evolution of popular music, we can begin to understand the enormity of the cultural problem we face.

I used to get mad at my school
The teachers who taught me weren't cool
You're holding me down, turning me round
Filling me up with your rules.

The children of postmodernism are now the teachers, professors, and administrators who run the schools. How long do you suppose it will take before the recent atrocity promulgated at University of Delaware is elevated and accepted as a progressive beacon of 'intellectual' and 'moral' clarity?

Ideas have consequences in the real world. And very bad ideas unfortunately have very bad consequences. I suspect that fact has something to do with reality, truth, and reason....
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 6:20 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.

**NOTE: I am now getting many more submissions than I can possibly include in the weekly Carnival. Please don't be offended if your submission is not used (oh, okay, be as offended as you like) as it only means that for a variety of reasons I wasn't able to fit it into the "flow" as I put together each Carnival.

REMEMBER, THERE ARE SO MANY INSANITIES AND SO LITTLE TIME!!!


1. Everyone needs a good laugh!

2. Top NY Times headlines on declining troop deaths in Iraq....Uh oh! Disaster for the Dems! How do you ask someone to be the last man to march for a mistake? Heh heh. Foggy bottom is called that for a reason....but maybe it should be soggy bottom.

3. Has Al Qaeda lost their mind ? (a rhetorical question, really) Has Dennis Kucinich? (another one)

4. My country, piss on thee. Sweet land of moonbattery, apparently.

5. Darth Vader in the real world? Then who's the real Emperor? Tales from the Cantina...

6. Hillary, because.... (after you read this, you may have to consider your opposition to her--or at least your violent hostility). Is the problem with women is that they want to transfer a dependence on men to a dependence on government? Do you suppose that is feminist political correctness?

7. Leave Hillary alone! Because she'll either get really pissed and play the gender card; or develop a case of the "vapors"!

8. 'Breathtakingly misleading' --how very true. He's a real pro at misleading, after all.

9. Transform the debates into a steel cage death match? This is definitely the next proposal for illegals! Advice for Democratic presidential wannabees: Hillary=George, Rodham=W, Clinton=Bush. At least this president is "Better Than Hitler", according to some.

10. Here's a case of the 'advanced tizzies'... And how's this for "reverse inverse sockpuppeting propasockistsophistry"?

11. Is this the type of leadership we look for in our truthiness candidates ? Or our congress critters, for that matter? We know many are against waterboarding, but would they be against this... you decide! Would it really be torture?

12. He ain't nothing but a hound dog.

13. Nuanced ways to beat your wife. Just the sort of education teen males need. How much do you really care about "the children"?

14. The greatest story never told. But here's a snapshot. The motto should be "united we spend, divided we don't" ! Who knew? When is a millionaire worth only $1.00? On what issue can Dems and Repubs; gays and straights and left and right agree? OK, maybe not left and right.

15. Mother nature has played a cruel joke. A well-drawn map of the soler system !

16. Not apathetic...just in an existential crisis. Hmmmm. Phytoterrorism ? The root of insanity, indeed. Insanity goes underground.

17. Guess! Is she a Democrat or a Republican? Her party affiliation is never mentioned...look it up.

18. Attention KMart Shoppers! Christmas has been downgraded. So, apparently, has G.I. Joe, ...Global Integrated Joint Operating Entity?? Give me a break.

19. Brainwashing your children? Nickelodean and Hamas TV working in tandem-- one teaches kids to hate and kill; and the other teaches them to believe that it is America that is behind all the hating and killing. Lovely.

20. The British send us David Beckham and we send them...the Miami Dolphins. Talk about unequal exchanges! Now they are outsourcing medical care! Perhaps Beckham has a serious illness? Since he got here, he's been on the injured list.

21. The real Mighty Mouse ! They probably didn't feed it edamame.

22. Good Mourning, Germany!

23. Ain't the silence sublime?

***************************************
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 @ 7:55 AM |

 
SHE IS A FEW OF HER FAVORITE THINGS
The Anchoress emails me and asks if I can come up with a few good lyrics for Hillary?

But of course! Anything for that dear lady (I mean The Anchoress) ! In her post, she has Madame President singing Mama Rose from Gypsy. I picture her singing a variant of Maria from The Sound of Music. So let me just PILE IT ON the Democratic frontrunner!

I AM A FEW OF MY FAVORITE THINGS

Missing law records and Whitewater dealings;
Enemy files help me break those glass ceilings;
Taking donations that come 'without strings'--
These are a few of my favorite things !

Cream-colored memos and crisp doubletalk chick
Paula and Monica playing with Bill's dick;
Someday he'll pay for each one of those flings--
Cause I am a few of my favorite things

Girls in bright pant suits with no-nonsense flat shoes;
Patiently waiting--I've surely paid my dues!
Victimhood pandering while dreaming of kings--
I am a few of my favorite things !

When my spouse strays
With great finesse;
When I'm feeling sad...
I simply remember my wonderfulness
And then I don't feel so bad !
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 7:51 AM |

 
A PLEASANT SURPRISE
If this news report is true, then good for President Bush! It might also explain why U.S. authorities are being extremely tight-lipped about it.

But remember, this is being reported by Al-Jazeera via the Jerusalem Post. Both The Jawa Report and Confederate Yankee think it is just the beginning of yet another Arab conspiracy theory and/or the usual media incompetence.

But, if it is true, then this report from Al-Khaleej , published in the United Arab Emirates, would then be extremely relevant, don't you think?

Nevertheless, if the Arab/Islamic world even thinks it is true, then what happened in the Syrian desert on September 6 was exactly the proper message that needed to be delivered to certain mullahs and delusional heads of state in the region.

Either way, it was a pleasant surprise.
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 2:34 PM |

 
A HIGHLY DYSFUNCTION MARRIAGE AND A HIGHLY DYSFUNCTIONAL 'SHARED' PRESIDENCY
As if there weren't enough reasons to dislike the prospect of a Hillary presidency, Charles Krauthammer reminds us of yet another one. The psychiatrist and pundit notes that it is not the threat of another sex scandal--though that reality is always present with a Bill Clinton; nor is it about the idea of a "dynastic succession", which some have criticized about the Bush 43 presidency:

...[T]he father-son connection is nothing compared to husband-wife. The relationship between a father and an adult son is psychological and abstract; the connection between husband and wife, concrete and quotidian. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife. George Bush, pere, didn't move back into the White House in January 2001.

Which is why Hillary's problem goes beyond discomfort with dynastic succession. It's deep unease about a shared presidency. Forget about Bill, the bad boy. The problem is William Jefferson Clinton, former president of the United States, commander in chief of the Armed Forces, George Washington's representative on earth.

We have never had an ex-president move back into the White House. When in 1992 Bill Clinton promised "two for the price of one," it was taken as a slightly hyperbolic promotion of the role of first lady. This time we would literally be getting two presidents.

Any ex-president is a presence in his own right. His stature, unlike, say, Hillary's during Bill's presidency, is independent of his spouse. From day one of Hillary's inauguration, Bill will have had more experience than her at everything she touches. His influence on her presidency would necessarily be immeasurably greater than that of any father on any son.

Americans did not like the idea of a co-presidency when, at the 1980 Republican convention, Ronald Reagan briefly considered sharing the office with former President Gerald Ford. (Ford would have been vice president with independent powers.) And they won't like this co-presidency, particularly because the Clinton partnership involves two characters caught in the dynamic of a strained, strange marriage.

The cloud hovering over a Hillary presidency is not Bill padding around the White House in robe and slippers flipping thongs. It's President Clinton, in suit and tie, simply present in the White House when any decision is made. The degree of his involvement in that decision will inevitably become an issue. Do Americans really want a historically unique two-headed presidency constantly buffeted by the dynamics of a highly dysfunctional marriage?

On some deep psychological level, Hillary needs Bill to give her credibility. For all her supposed capabilities, she is the one kind of woman that has always made the feminist in me shudder. She has always attached herself to powerful men to achieve power, rather than accomplish anything herself. From the first moment I saw her looking adoringly at Bill during the initial Clinton campaign for president, I felt a deep revulsion for her hypocrisy. This is a woman who desperately seeks power and is willing to do almost anything to achieve it, including selling her soul-- even to the act of looking adoringly at a husband who has always and everywhere cheated on her and humiliated her.

From her debut into the national consciousness, everything about her has been false and duplicitous. As Fred Barnes notes, Hillary's "double standard" was clear after the last Democratic debate:

It's the old feminist one in which women must be treated as equals - except when they're criticized by males. When men criticize, that amounts to unfair picking on a woman, or "piling on" as the Clinton campaign puts it, or "ganging up" in the metaphor used by others.

Her fear of revealing the real person beneath the public persona comes through in her unwillingness (read: abject fear) about releasing her university thesis and papers; and her papers and correspondence from her husband's term in office. Thus, both avenues of information which might betray her have been deliberately and unapologetically shut down for researchers and anyone seeking the truth.

After she gets herself elected President of the US, will be soon enough, she figures, to reveal the true Hillary. No one could bring her down then--after she has achieved the ultimate power.

But like almost all those individuals with the same kind of psychopathology, Hillary Rodham doesn't realize how much she "reveals" every day, and in every shift of position, about the unprincipled and desperate desire for power and domination over others that motivates her.

If elected President, the American people will always be able to count on Hillary to say and do what's right for the country--when and only when it will advance her own sense of entitlement and grandiosity. Once elected, of course, she won't need Bill anymore except perhaps as a figurehead for her authority and a reminder of how she ultimately used and bested him.

I have no doubt that her sad and equally grandiose husband understands this on some psychological level and is therefore working hard behind the scenes to ensure her defeat, or at least undermine it; even as he looks adoringly at her in public. After all, it does not further his essential narcissism to become the First Lady.

That's how dysfunctional marriages--and the people in them--operate.

UPDATE: Peggy Noonan has some comments about the Hill's personality, "Hillary Reveals Her Inner Self":

I spent a day going over the transcripts so I could quote at length, but her exchanges are all over, it's a real Google-fest. Here, boiled down, is what she said.

Giving illegal immigrants drivers licenses makes sense because it makes sense, but she may not be for it, but undocumented workers should come out of the shadows, and it makes sense. Maybe she will increase the payroll tax on Social Security beyond its current $97,500 limit, to $200,000. Maybe not. Everybody knows what the possibilities are. She may or may not back a 4% federal surcharge on singles making $150,000 a year and couples making $200,000. She suggested she backed it, said she didn't back it, she then called it a good start, or rather "I support and admire" the person proposing such a tax for his "willingness to take this on."

She has been accused of doubletalk and she has denied it. And she is right. It was triple talk, quadruple talk, Olympic level nonresponsiveness.And it was, even for her, rather heavy and smug. Her husband would have had the sense to look embarrassed as he bobbed and weaved. It was part of his charm. But he was light on his feet. She turns every dance into the polka. And it is that amazing thing, a grim polka.

- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 8:31 AM |

 
SHARIA ( شريعة )....
....REALLY IS A 'BLACK AND WHITE' ISSUE:




(hat tip: The Corner)
- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 6:51 AM |

 
THE EDUCATIONAL GULAG - A Special Podcast
UPDATE (and bumped to top): I'm going to be in meetings most of the morning and early afternoon, so I will leave you with a scintillating podcast that Siggy, Mamacita and I did late last night on the educational gulag of American schools. Click on the button below to listen:



Yes, you are right...we have been doing a lot of podcasts lately! It's a great medium and BlogTalkRadio makes it so easy to do. We're still ironing out the kinks for The Sanity Squad podcasts (click on the button on the top of the left sidebar here to listen to the most recent show), and Siggy has a series called "On The Couch" where he interviews various people and discusses current events.

More blogging later this afternoon!

-------------------------------------
Tonight, at the late hour of 10:00 PM Siggy will be hosting a special podcast on the subject of the Educational Gulag, specifically the indoctrination in political correctness and leftist ideology that is going on in college and university campuses all over the country.

This situation was most recently brought to light by the unbelievable brainwashing that is mandatory at the University of Delaware:

The University of Delaware subjects students in its residence halls to a shocking program of ideological reeducation that is referred to in the university’s own materials as a “treatment” for students’ incorrect attitudes and beliefs. The Orwellian program requires the approximately 7,000 students in Delaware’s residence halls to adopt highly specific university-approved views on issues ranging from politics to race, sexuality, sociology, moral philosophy, and environmentalism.

Joining Siggy and I will be Mamacita, educator extraordinaire and author of Weekly Scheiss. We hope to be able to include others in what is a very necessary airing of ideas and ideals and conversation about the role of education in our society. Listeners will be able to participate in the conversation.

The live call in number is 347-215-7863

CLICK ON THE BUTTON TO GO TO THE PODCAST:


- Diagnosed by Dr. Sanity @ 6:34 AM |