Billmon,
At a certain point, I-told-you-sos and you’re-just-getting-this-nows?!? get old, worn-down, passe. We’re not at that point. Regularly, we need to tell these “I was for the war before I was against it” fuckers that yeah, we were right. About everything. Fuck all y’all.

Posted by: Rowan | Jul 22 2006 9:19 utc | 3

At the risk of having dirty socks ashtrays full of fags and peanut shells thrown at me, I often wonder, nay, I’m convinced, Billmon trolls our board and uses snippets of commentary from here. Nothing wrong w/that I do it myself. Just an observation. He is master in his craft;often like the Japanese in that, he takes things and makes them much better. Cleverly molding and transforing them into his own art prose and performing dialogue.

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Jul 22 2006 10:13 utc | 5

Not for mine. Bunch of idiotic wankers. I know parrots that are smarter. The pity of it is that people listen to their ignorant, illogical, hateful crap, nod sagely, look triumphant or sorry, etc. It drives me insane.

Posted by: Noirette | Jul 22 2006 14:06 utc | 7

The analogy that applies is something like this. Your neighbor has a dog which for years has gone into a frenzy, snapping and biting and foaming at the mouth, everytime you walk by. Then one day, out of the clear blue, the dog approaches you, wagging its tail.
Now tell me, is a sane intelligent person going to reach down and pat the dog’s head and say “good boy?” Or is that person going to kind of slip by him and watch him carefully from then on. Always remember the fact that many dogs — and writers — instead of snarling and snapping, wag their tails just before attacking instead. Be wary.

Posted by: Ensley | Jul 22 2006 14:25 utc | 9

This one was too harsh for my taste…
Too harsh? Really? This is mild compared to what Sullivan and Djerejian really deserve – a forced tour of duty (or two or three…) in our new Iraqi protectorate.

Posted by: shinypenny | Jul 22 2006 15:11 utc | 11

As far as that mob goes who really cares. I’ve never met a rightist intellectual who wasn’t a toady. It goes with the territory because no sane person can intellectually justify a society that doesn’t spread what it has around. If only because such societies cant become self perpetuating from within. Much less taking into account the ethical considerations.
This is of course why these rightist toady columnists and professional opiners are the highest paid people in the media.
The rich pricks who own the media don’t have time to be talking when they could be making a quid so they have to pay others to do it. It being an ethically unjustifiable and intellectually dishonest spokesman who is ‘credible’. In other words someone who is desperately intelligent and morally dissolute is regarded as the epitome of a good conservative columnist. There is of course the major problem of ‘it is smarter to make money than talk about making it’, therefore the intellectual rightist commentator also requires a third even less pleasing attribute. They must have a character defect which prevents them from doing as they propose themselves.
The defect surfaces in appallingly drunken conduct or weird sexual promiscuity which is I suppose, entirely their business. However their resentment at not being as rich as the fortune 500 shareholder who they have just completed a flattering if somewhat condescending sketch of, does become everyone else’s business as these types inevitably become the arrogant, conceited and vicious personalities that they wrongly imagine that the ‘stretwise but not very smart’ billionaires they resent so deeply are.
Just like Auberon Waugh, or Christopher Hitchens these appallers spend their lives ‘putting the boot’ into those who they consider inferior and who lack the wherewithal to fight back. Never wanting to pick on someone who might get a few good-uns in first, these types inevitably put the ‘boot’ into those who are quite incapable of defending themselves.
Fuck em all! Put them into the charge of a conservative who realises humanity is far more important than material assets.
The Paul Craig Roberts chain-gang for ethically challenged arseholes, for example.
Old ‘Boss’ Roberts would knock them into shape.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Jul 22 2006 15:46 utc | 13

@Ms. Manners
May I suggest Gustaw Herling’s A world Apart: : Imprisonment in a Soviet Labor Camp During World War II
Studying Gustaw Herling, has taught me lessons in hope. It very much reminds me of the following which I collected from my virtual travels,

“The more I understand hope, the more I realize that all along it deserved to be in the box with the plagues, sorrow, and mischief; that it serves the needs of those in power as surely as belief in a distant heaven; that hope is really nothing more than a secular way of keeping us in line.
Hope is, in fact, a curse, a bane. I say this not only because of the lovely Buddhist saying “Hope and fear chase each other’s tails,” not only because hope leads us away from the present, away from who and where we are right now and toward some imaginary future state. I say this because of what hope is.”

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Jul 22 2006 15:56 utc | 15

Basically the US is already fucked so at this point, I look at the pundits sort of like I look at, say, the Audubon Society.
Pretty but not terribly relevant.
Best case scenario, even if the Dems win seats in 2006, nothing drastic will happen because they will be too afraid of 2008.
They might launch a few more investigations à la Fitzgerald but that’s it.
Realistically, no serious corrective course of action can be taken before 2009 at best.
Another 9/11 might possibly help the regime remain in power?
In any event, the political arena is the *least* important right now which is why I ignore Kos and his desire to retake power and all the punditry in general.
As was the case with the old USSR I believe economic events, i.e.: the price of oil, the unbearable cost of the war, the trade deficit, the weakening of the $, the return of inflation, the rise in bankruptcies, the failing health care system, to name but a few, will bring the country to its knees, no matter what the politicos do.
Add to this a powerful but crumbling military and a planet who overwhelming sees us as a global threat, and you’ve got a recipe for a massive collapse.
The major issue of the 2010-2020 decade will be, how to deal with the collapse of the United States.

Posted by: Lupin | Jul 22 2006 16:11 utc | 17

Yep, that’s me..Fool to the core. Thank-you sir, now I know.

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Jul 22 2006 16:30 utc | 19

Uncle $cam, I think Andy imagines himself some sort of wizard. I’m just not sure what kind yet. But I do think he perceives human lives as just so many bumpers in a pinball machine, so maybe that metaphor works.
I just read “Welcome to the camp” in Billmon’s original and “We’re Not Gonna Take It” sprang to mind…

Posted by: chris | Jul 22 2006 16:44 utc | 21

Razor, you’re getting awfully upset over a very small issue. Like you, I doubt Billmon needs to come here for material. Unlike you, I don’t think it’s worth getting upset about if someone else thinks differently.
As for Billmon, he’s a genius and some of the commentary at this site is a little weird for my taste, but I also recall seeing billmon fly off the handle at people for merely being a little to his left back in the days when he had a comment section. He’s not perfect. But again, who cares?

Posted by: Anonymous | Jul 22 2006 17:56 utc | 23

devil in the details — a minor editorial quip:
alternate link for dirty little neocon, Mike Ledeen

Posted by: manonfyre | Jul 22 2006 19:04 utc | 25

Bernhard, I had posted for a very long time over at the Whiskey Bar under my real name. When Billmon shut it down, I eventually found my way over here. But due to time constraints in my personal life, I lurked almost all of the time since rather than posting. It wasn’t until you threatened to shut down if there wasn’t more participation that I realized what a wonderful resource your blog is and how much would be lost if it stopped. So, I am trying to find more time now to be actively participating instead of just lurking. I am not sure the blog will be the better for it, though….(grin).
Thank you again for keeping it going. Don’t let the ungrateful (or seemingly ungrateful) rain on your parade.

Posted by: Ensley | Jul 22 2006 19:34 utc | 27

One day in the life has a certain -deserved- literary reputation.
It reaches for universality and makes it or not according to pov.
Being a single black mother without qualifications and with three children, one of whom is handicapped, in the US, is no BBQ.
They can’t even find time to write books and if they did they would never get them published. Ever.
But that is allright, heh, they are ‘free’ – to have a child or two die and themselves expire from exhaustion at age 40.
Gulags are not nice (ah the evil Commies!) but the modern politically correct, Orwellian version is nasty too. Worse in a way.
Any black people on THIS board?
Felons? Anarchist? Single mothers of three? Real opponents to the Gvmt.? Whores turning tricks to feed a baby? Cancer patient dying alone at age 35 for lack of medecine? Vet who can no longer speak but just write a bit? Homeless Dad, starving?
(send me mail, I will reply, and I know people in low places…)
Huh?
I don’t think so.
Why not knock Tamurlane (sp) ?
Heh, he was a real barbarian. Didn’t like result of the buildings he ordered, strung up the architects, hung them by the neck from the scaffolds they had built themselves.
Then he invited the guests to come have a meal and see the spectacle.
Quaint! Irrelevant today!
(rage…mine…)

Posted by: Noirette | Jul 22 2006 20:40 utc | 29

One of the funny things about the neocons it that they are actually members of the groups most hated by the true blue ‘conservative’ base. They are, one and all, Eastern based intellectuals moving among the elites. Or as I like to put it, pencil necked geeks who think they have figured out how to run the world.
If only Murtha or someone would just call Kristol a pencil necked geek to this face on national TV the whole edifice of neoconery might just diappear.

Posted by: rapier | Jul 22 2006 22:42 utc | 31

@Unca
Thanks for that #32 above. I was really starting to suspect that I was the only one who did not have a convenient label handy when asked point-blank (as happens more and more frequently) what my political leanings are. I’ve identified myself within the last few years grudgingly as “Left”, but I’m certainly not a classical Leftist of the “government regulation and oversight will make everything better” variety. Like you, I have come to identify authority with force; I see leadership as self-serving and nothing else and I don’t see any way around it. I’m Left by default since the Right has become a force of unrelenting corporate evil in the world. Somewhat ironically, I have ended up “Left” behind.
I abhorred self-proclaimed anarchists in my youth. To me, it represented a kind of political nihilism, rage and an intellectual laziness that came from the unwillingness (or inability) of a person to codify their beliefs. I admired Bertolt Brecht’s Marxist ability to ask the right questions, but felt strongly that his inability to prescribe a remedy for the problems that he criticised so well barred him from achieving the title of real genius. And now, like Brecht before me, I have only criticisms and no solutions. Like the nihilists and anarchists before me, I have rage and no faith in the ability of any school of political thought to alleviate our collective problems. There has been no synthesis; I have simply become what I used to oppose as, one by one, I have lost my faith in the efficacy of the things I formerly believed in. I, who have admonished everyone constantly about the dangers of enantiodromia, have been unable to avoid that trap myself.
It is a shame that the word “Libertarian” has, as you mentioned, become popularly used by individuals of extremely suspect ethos and/or intellect because that might be the direction I’ve been going. Individual accomplishment within a genuine meritocracy would be the closest to the childish ideals we’re raised to believe in. They certainly have some appeal. If we succeed or fail, it is by our own effort or wont of it. Everybody gets what they deserve. It’s a nice bedtime story, I suppose. A state is a collection of striving individuals, it’s true, but as long as those individuals are governed by a notably ungoverned corporate/political class, their efforts will always be frustrated. So I can’t believe in that, either.
One solution, I suppose, would be to become apolitical. To bury yourself in mundane, immediate concerns and to tune out anything more lofty than providing the next meal for your family. It goes without saying that this is the path the majority take. Another approach is to become hyperpolitical, as we do here. Eternally wringing our hands or lashing out because we know that something should be done if we could only synthesize all of our views. We fight, we bicker, we applaude, we support, we condemn… and we wait for that “Eureka” moment when that underlying sense that we are convinced must exist will reveal itself to us through our efforts. Both of these approaches are symptoms of the same disease that present as diametric opposites. Both are versions of what Sartre would have called “bad faith”. Both achieve nothing except to sublimate our despair and get us through these psychologically trying times.
You very appropriately mentioned the myth of Sisyphus, Unca. When Camus wrote about it, he presented us with the idea of an absurd Universe that did not contain the underlying truth we keep trying to beat out of it. There is no system, political or otherwise, that can reveal this perfect world to us because that world does not… can not… exist. And I’m beginning to think that it shouldn’t.
I wrote before that I wanted effective change; change that would genuinely minimize suffering. But what does this mean, exactly? We’ve seen the Fundamentalists trying desperately to eradicate sin from our world (and they just might) by turning it into a necropolis. But one thing that I still believe in is that once you remove our right to be wrong, we will cease to be human beings. We try to synthesize our ideas here and sometimes rudely disagree with one another, but these are our human efforts. This is what happens when humans are free to grow and mature. Sometimes we do grow and mature and sometimes we don’t. But we must be given the opportunity or we will spend our miserable lives in a coddled, infantile state. It’s true that an arrested state of emotional, psychological and intellectual development wouldn’t be as bestial as the one Hobbes envisioned, but as long as we are mortal, selection will continue to occur either naturally or unnaturally.
So here I am. I can’t abide suffering, but I can’t wish it away, either. Where’s the synthesis? Where’s the label for this kind of political (or apolitical) thought? What the past six years have taught me is that I can not beat the machine of the state. It’s also taught me that I don’t need to… the state will fall. All that I can do is to go my own way, grow as best I am able, and fervently wish that others would be able to do the same. Some are in a position to do so, some aren’t. I can’t change that. All that I can do as an individual in an absurd Universe is to practice compassion. If everyone did that, the suffering would be greatly abated.
I apologise for the long, existential ramble… but I haven’t had the fortitude lately to jump into any of the fights nor any tremendous insights to share with the group. Is there a label for the place I find myself now?

Posted by: Monolycus | Jul 23 2006 6:13 utc | 33

@Rowan
“Unfortunately, anti-something is easy for criticism, hard for solutions.”
Thanks. I agree with that. It’s all-too-easy (and all-too-ripe-with-internal-inconsistencies)to define a thing by what it is not rather than by what it is. Since it’s a given that we are anti-status quo by this point, the next question becomes: What are we?

Posted by: Monolycus | Jul 23 2006 11:18 utc | 35