Comments on: Lieberman’s speech – Partisan Hell in Washington/Hope in Iran

By: Renzo

Renzo — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 19:14:12 +0000

With a New Yawk accent yet………..too funny.

By: Buddy Larsen

Buddy Larsen — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 15:57:49 +0000

“HEY! I’m respondin’ heah!”

–Ratso Renzo, “Midnight Commentboy”

By: Renzo

Renzo — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 05:11:54 +0000

For the record……

re: “name a single writer or political figure that you disagree with but listen to anyway because you find him to be intelligent and challenging.”

Camille Paglia, if I may be permitted a “her”.

re: “answered by someone that hasn’t seen your front of reasonableness crack yet”

I submit… “Ratso dislikes interacting with liberals”

By: Buddy Larsen

Buddy Larsen — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 03:36:55 +0000

good wiki on the geopolitics

By: Buddy Larsen

Buddy Larsen — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 03:31:50 +0000

Good thought–it IS a bookend–and truly saved Europe, and bought peace from the jihad, for a century. Which is probably about the best we can hope for today–tamp it back down for a few generations. IF we can do even that, what with the schizo politics.

(Chesterton’s poem “Lepanto”)

By: Steven Mitchell

Steven Mitchell — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 23:37:17 +0000

Buddy, funny I was thinking about Chesterton’s distinction between the Pessimist, Optimist, and Realist in “Orthodoxy”. I’d forgotten about his “Lepanto”. However, it crossed my mind yesterday that Lepanto is a very awkward battle for the modern mind to consider. One would think that people who considered the various Crusades terribly important to discuss would consider it somewhat of a bookend, but somehow it gets left out.

By: Buddy Larsen

Buddy Larsen — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 23:14:34 +0000

…the poem asks you (or implies that you must ask yourself) why it matters to you, who wins, who loses.

By: Buddy Larsen

Buddy Larsen — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 23:09:24 +0000

I agree–don’t throw the fabian out with the bath water. Chesterton ref is very apt, too, as his “Lepanto” brilliantly illustrates that neither side has to be right or wrong in a war, that the issue is do you win or does he.

By: Steven Mitchell

Steven Mitchell — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 22:24:51 +0000

“Steven — finally you engage me seriously. Let me think about what you wrote and get back to you tomorrow.”

Fair enough. I note for the “finally” part however that this is not the first time I have made this precise point. It’s the first time I’ve been this explicit or lengthy or personal about it, but it was pretty overt several times before. I’ve engaged you many time before on other issues. In the spirit of a fresh start, I’ll quite cheerfully grant you that I haven’t engaged you recently.

“You’ve been hijacked, and either don’t know it, or don’t want to face it, or are enjoying the (attempt at the) free ride.”

For Buddy or anyone else that might wonder why I would bother: Consider that it is also in the Marxist-Lenin playbook that one never lets the discussion become about oneself. That’s the last thing they want. If markus is willing to put himself on the line, then that is a clean break with that nasty crowd Buddy mentioned.

Maybe it is my Chestertonian practical realism (sometimes easily mistaken for wild-eyed optimism), but I don’t like to lose potential allies, either. I don’t think civilization can afford it.

By: Buddy Larsen

Buddy Larsen — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 21:58:44 +0000

…and not to pile on, but last night on the Hannity & Colmes show, Allen Colmes and Jane Fleming were explaining how all the nasty behavior coming from the left is basically trivial, and is due to “only a few fringe actors”.

This bears on your …people who hate Bush more than they hate radical Islamists. That’s not me, though it applies to others, which in turn bears on Mitchell’s ‘bonus points for policing your own side’.

IOW, Markus, you (& Allen Colmes, Jane Fleming, et al) can’t be the ‘third way’ in the Dem party–because (here it comes) Joe Lieberman is already the third way in the Dem party. He has broken with the radicals, and has done so at his own peril, and out of–what else can it be but–a sense of patriotic duty.

OTOH, you and Colmes & friends are simply the more polite, less feces-and-paint-spattered, fringe of something turning brutish and nasty before your very enabling eyes.

You’ve been hijacked, and either don’t know it, or don’t want to face it, or are enjoying the (attempt at the) free ride.