82 thoughts on “Kos, Pwned”

1. This storyboard is hilarious:

   http://www.allamericanblogger.com/12544/sarah-palin-schools-the-libs-comic/

2. Turks are Arabs!?

   I’m guessing he hasn’t even seen ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, nor heard of Lawrence, nor WWI, or who fought on which side, over what, or how that ‘what’ got split up after WWI.

   But that would put him in the same league with most ‘mericans now.

3. For a group of people who are so vocal about their moral and intellectual superiority, they’re really not very bright. Probably not very moral, either.

4. Prof. Reynolds calls them “credentialed, not educated.” I guess if they avoid education it helps them also avoid re-education later.

5. At least Kos isn’t running for the Senate.

   == Off-topic alert ==

   Rand, since you are traveling, I wonder if you missed this story:
   http://www.aolnews.com/surge-desk-elections/article/christine-odonnell-first-amendment-question-floors-audience-video/19680390

   For those who hate video, the text suffices. For those who tolerate video, the most interesting portion is near the end.

   =====

   The O’Donnell camp has an explanation, but for those who are sure that Markos really didn’t know that Turks aren’t Arab and didn’t just misspeak and mean “Muslim ally in the middle east”, I wonder if the O’Donnell campaign explanation will be enough?

6. # MattOrtega @RevDrEBuzz @tahDeetz @iowahawkblog You people are fools. I wasn’t questioning the date of the original Tea Party. about 4 hours ago via TweetDeck Retweeted by iowahawkblog and 5 others

   What a crybaby.

7. Hey guys, could we please stop talking about this and continue the witch-hunt (tee-hee) against O’Donnell, instead? Puleeeeeez???

8. Funny thing is, Bob, she’s right. There IS a difference between no establishment and separation. Why didn’t you mention Coons couldn’t name the other 4 freedoms in the 1st amendment? Why did you try to deflect for Markos by going after someone else? Ah, the smug superior air of the left. Too bad it’s just hot.

9. No, I’m not saying that at all. This did seem tangentially related, but I mostly wanted Rand to see it. Please go on talking about Kos. I look forward to enjoying the commentary.

10. An on-topic commen: I found Gwen Ifill’s “stand down” comment, but what was her original mock-worthy comment on Palin? Thanks!

11. Gwen’s original tweet was:

    “Sarah Palin: party like it’s 1773! ummm,”

12. I see. She was repeating Markos, or they were both repeating someone — doesn’t matter, it was a dogpile. Thanks.

    I just had what strikes me as a funny thought: I bet Tea Partiers could find inspiring defenses of the sanctity of private property that they would completely agree with — written in 1773 by the people who had invested in the dumped tea!

13. Yes, it doesn’t matter because they’re both idiots.

    But, hey guys, since that last red herring went nowhere, here’s another one – ain’t it funny?

14. I wonder if Ifell was commenting on the various reasons we wouldn’t want to party like it is 1773 — the lack of existence of the USA for one thing, the lack of all sorts of progress for another, but in particular, the lack of rights for people like Palin and Iffel who were not white males. Well, if that’s what Iffel meant, she can say so.

15. Ohh Bob, I had no idea she was so… nuanced.

16. You crack me up, Bob-1. Since you are making a herculean effort to avoid the obvious, I will use small words:

    Gwen clearly was ridiculing Sarah Palin’s reference to 1773, not “repeating someone”.

    With that tweet, Gwen revealed her own ignorance of when the Boston Tea Party occurred. That is why Ken Reynolds labels Gwen Ifill as “credentialed, not educated”.

    With that tweet, Gwen also revealed that her bias against Sarah Palin is blinded by emotion and not based in a logical thought process.

    Gwen is a newscaster for PBS and has moderated candidate debates leading up to national elections. PBS promotes itself as an unbiased and accurate source of news. Gwen’s “stand down” tweet is a rather shameless attempt to try and put the cat back in the bag, so to speak.

17. Ohh Bob, I had no idea she was so… nuanced.

    It’s obvious that when Palin admonished the crowd not to party like it’s 1773 just yet, she was clearly referring to the good old days of slavery and just used some random year to illustrate the point — teabaggers are all racists, you know.

    Ifel captured all this in a pithy and nuanced, “ummm,” which you knuckle-dragging Neanderthals are too dense to understand.

18. Even if you didn’t know much about history, you’d have to figure that since she was at a “tea party” there might be a clue there somewhere as to what she was talking about. A quick Google search later would have confirmed the connection. The fact that none of these people did that search to make that connection marks them as intellectually incurious.

19. I have no idea what Iffel was saying with her non-verbal utterance rendered in text on a cell phone, but maybe Ifell did acknowledge Palin’s historical reference, but wanted to comment on the retrograde outlook of the Tea Party. Maybe not. But that’s how I would react. The Tea Party does self-consciously look backwards toward the colonial era, and I think that position is both praiseworty and vulnerable to criticism.

20. I have no idea what Iffel was saying with her non-verbal utterance rendered in text on a cell phone

    Yeah, she’s got speech to text. She was remarking on the fact she likes 1773 candy bars.

21. I read “Ummm” as: “Shit, I knew she was dumb, but this?!?” So shocked that I have to highlight this for others, but unwilling to express such a view explicitly.

    And, her unwillingness to express her views openly has been rewarded by people too incurious and lazy to bother with independent thought or research.

22. Bob,
    While that is a possibility, you have to take into account that other liberal types jumped (as in, with both feet forward) into the “Palin is like so stupid for not, you know, knowing it’s like, you know, 1776 Dude” meme. That tends to indict her in that she jumped in without explanation also.

23. ummm,

    I mean, hell, it must be extremely embarrassing to have your obvious ignorance of 5th grade American history revealed by the likes of the Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas and PBS anchor & presidential debate moderator Gwen Ifill. HAHAHAHAHA, what a freakin’ dumb ass! What happened in 1773, indeed!

24. Am I the only one who finds Bob-1’s wide-eyed innocent act really irritating? Am I the only one who can hear the smarmy sarcasm behind the “oh this is so interesting!” and “I’m just alerting Rand” and I’m just trying to show both sides of the argument” b.s.? Cut it out, Bob. You’re not fooling anyone.

25. Someone should tell bob that shtick only plays if you aren’t simultaneously scrambling for desperate tu quoques every time this happens. I mean, that really tips the hand.

26. Well, O’Donell was quite correct that the Constitution does not establish any “separation” between church and state. The text is plain:

    “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;”

    This merely prohibits the Federal government from preferring one religion over another, as was done in England with the Church of England. It has only been later Supreme Court decisions that “discovered,” as the Supreme Court has done many a time, that what the Founders said was somehow not exactly what they meant, and they “meant” to establish a certain type of “wall of seperation” between church and state, the kind that disallowed prayer in public schools, if a local school board liked the idea, or before football games, and said statehouses couldn’t put Creches on their lawn at Christmas — although, ha ha, we can still have a Christmas holiday. You have to have a finely-trained legal mind to be able to split those kinds of hairs.

    As for Palin: it’s not remarkable that Ifill and Kos and the other stupidheads couldn’t remember the date of the Boston Tea Party. I would have to look it up myself. What’s interesting is that they were so confident of Palin’s ignorance and their own superior intellect that they didn’t look it up before embarassing themselves in public.

    Now in the case of O’Donnell, I doubt very much she is unaware the First Amendment has something to do with religion — she is likely just making the usual “originalist” objection to all this “discovery” the Supreme Court has done over the decades in the Constitution: apparently it’s the secular humanist’s Bible — you can “discover” any meaning you want, if you look hard enough, and with the right frame of mind.

    I should mention, perhaps, that I personally don’t give a damn if a candidate for the Senate knows exactly where in the Constitution it says what. They’ve got staffers for that kind of thing, and I am so so sick of this obscene un-American veneration of “brilliance” over character, integrity, or good common sense that has lately come over our media in assessing political candidates.

    What I would like is a candidate who knows there is a Constitution, who honors it exceedingly as the supreme law of the land, very important stuff, and not inclined to let his flaccid mind be filled up with instructions about what it says by the Supreme Court, past or present.

    One of the things I like about O’Donnell after that exchange is that I believe she would have a mind of her own with respect to the Constitution. I can see her, when a bill comes before Congress, the constitutionality of which she suspects, getting out the text of the damn thing herself and poring over it. Unlike that limp tool Coons, she isn’t just going to rely on what the Speaker tells her to think, or the President, or Justice Blackmun, or Professor Foo commenting on NPR, or the latest polls — or anybody. She is also apparently unafraid to speak her mind plainly in public, even if, as here, everyone laughs at her because she’s “stupid.” I like that kind of independent spirit, and so, I think, would have James Madison and Thomas Jefferson.

    Go Christine!

27. The part that’s fascinating about “The Wall of Separation” is that atheism has been ruled by the courts to be a religion.

    We’re doing far more to establish atheism as the state religion that for any other religion at any point.

28. Titus, when I mentioned O’Donnell, I wasn’t making a logical argument, so “red herring” and “tu quoque” don’t apply. Andrea, I’m not showing both sides of the argument – O’Donnell’s debate performance has no bearing on Kos, Ifell, Palin, or the Tea Party movement as a whole.

    I think key criteria when commenting here should be “Would this comment be interesting or otherwise enjoyable to Rand?” Sometimes I say things that I worry Rand might find rude, but I’m hope he’ll find it enjoyably provocative. This “tu quoque” business has come up twice recently, once with the war reenactor, and once with O’Donnell’s statement about the 1st amendment. Both times, I looked forward to Rand’s commentary on subjects that I thought Rand could have fun with. Both times I said as much in a place that seemed thematically related (inappropriate clothing, ignorance of American fundamentals). Also note that neither story is a really a classic case of left vs right – both are the sorts of story that Rand could run in a lot of different directions with, if he felt like it. Bill Maron’s comment hints at the possibilities in this case.

    Postscript: and I see Carl and Al decided to run with the subject. It is up to Rand to decide if this was value-added.

29. Oh, and I ran across a video over a private Saturn V launch. Er, 1/10 scale. But cool.

30. Don’t be s suck-up, Bob. Stand tall.

31. Excellent comment, Carl Pham, as usual.

    Andrea Harris: “Am I the only one who finds Bob-1’s wide-eyed innocent act really irritating?”

    No. But, that is why he does it. Best not to feed the troll.

32. Al @ October 20th, 2010 at 11:31 am

    OT but, very cool. Where do people get the time and money to do stuff like that?

33. Is there some fundamental reason why, even though that beast was 1/10 the size, it had far less than 1/10 the performance? Or is it just that regs (or common sense) prohibit putting the kind of engines in that would do the job?

34. Titus, when I mentioned O’Donnell, I wasn’t making a logical argument, so “red herring” and “tu quoque” don’t apply.

    Sure they do — they describe what you do.

35. Area versus volume for one. An engineering “scale test model” quite often has deliberate variations from a modeller’s authentic “to scale” model. But I can’t imagine the skill of the engine was in the same league either.

36. Titus, regarding your last comment, please read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bare_assertion_fallacy

37. Carl, no, I won’t stand up in the sense that you mean. I’m commenting on Rand’s private blog and I’m making the good faith assumption that he will find it interesting (or when I get it wrong, at least tolerable.)

    Wouldn’t it have been wonderful if O’Donnell had pulled a Robert Byrd impression and pulled out a well-worn copy of the constitution and cited it? And wouldn’t it have been wonderful if O’Donnell had known where the phrase “wall of separation” originated and discussed it? I think so, but I fear you would find that just a little too brilliant.

    Your blanket rejection of all the Supreme Court’s decisions seems a bit groundless but alarmingly sweeping — do you think Congress and the Executive Branch should be equally rejected, or do you hold out the Supreme Court’s decisions for special contempt?

    Regarding the establishment clause, no, it doesn’t mean that the government can’t pick one official religionlike the Church of England. If a representative of the US Govt (or any state government) stands up and officially says a Hindu prayer at 9 AN and a Muslim prayer at 9:05AM, and a Jewish prayer on 9:10AM, and so forth, the state has temporarily, for the duration of the prayer at least, established an official religion. Changing the official religion every five minutes just means that the Constitution gets violated three times in fifteen minutes. Alternatively, one could argue that an inclusive religion akin to Baha’i (but not identical to it) is being established. If I was more brilliant (or less lazy) I would cite which supreme court cases you could ignore while rejecting my argument.

38. (But I do agree with you that it takes guts to do what she is doing, and kudo to her for running for office.)

39. Heh.                                               

40. Al, how’d you get that past the too-short filter?

41. Heavens, I don’t reject the Supreme Court’s decisions en masse, Bob. Wherever did you get that idea?

    What I reject is the concept that the Supreme Court alone is the final arbiter of Constitutionality. I’m with Andy Jackson: I think the Founders quite clearly meant the three branches to be co-equal, and that means they each have the power and duty to examine the constitutionality of what they and the other branches do. I see no special authority to interpret the Constitution in the Supreme Court — and if you can find me some, in the text itself, do please oblige.

    If nothing else, you see, that gives the people themselves a much stronger vote in how the Consitution is to be interpreted. We can vote every two years and send to Congress folks who think like us. We don’t need to wait 10 or 20 years for the next Supreme Court justice to die, and hope that we’ve elected an appropriate President and Senate in the meantime, and hope that among the lawyers and judges the President might appoint, steepted as they are in the “law professors” understanding of the Constitution, might preserve a glimmer of understanding of what it was like when they were in front of the bench, not behind it.

    You might say: eek! What happens when interpretations conflict? Well, as a rule, deadlock and paralysis. None of the thre branches can — or rather could, if we stripped away the Supreme Court’s unique supreme power — dominate the others. If interpretations violently conflict, then as a rule nothing gets done, or at least much less than the one “rogue” branch had wished to accomplish.

    That suits me just fine. I’m all for the idea that if government is split on the constitutionality of some action or other, it should essentially be prohibited from moving forward on that action. I’m all for the idea that if laws are not obviously constitutional, such that any clown can see they are (and splits are unlikely), then they shouldn’t happen. Limited government! Whiskey and beautiful girls in bikinis! w00t!

42. Also, bob, I believe your interpretation of the FA is wrong here. AFAIK, a city could, indeed, put a Creche and a Menorah and a Mulsim thingummy on the lawn at Christmastime, as a “cultural display” and be free of FA restrictions.

    Or maybe not! You see what I mean? If reasonable and intelligent men can be confused about exactly what the hell the Supreme Court said the FA means, maybe it’s time to stop treating the Supreme Court as some God-damned oracle, and just read the text plainly. I know what it means for Congress to pass a law favoring one religion over another, and I’m sure you do, too. We’d recognize it instantly if we saw it. Perhaps we should restrict the FA to just that reading, what’s plain as a pikestaff.

    Any other result people want to achieve — banning crucifixes, say — they can achieve by the old-fashioned political process: elect mayors and city councilmen who promise they won’t put crucifixes on the town square at Christmastime, or school board members who will ban prayers before football games. SImple as that. Treat the Constitution as a last-ditch ultimate defense against tyranny, gross injustice, and the breakdown of civil order. Not as a remote-control device which lazy political couch potatoes can use to make tweaks to their comfort level in civil society.

43. I cheated. There’s a valid HTML symbol that’s sometimes available called the “non-breaking space.” On the Mac, I can make it with the modifier “option” combined with the spacebar. Since it is technically a completely different symbol than “space”, even though they’re visually mighty similar, many simple filters ignore it. So there’s basically invisible padding on there. I’ll test if the direct ‘ampersand-NBSP-semicolon’ method of inserting HTML characters works between here                   and           here. (The who bolded words are spaced widely in preview anyway.)

44. Gwen who?

    And why?

45. Bob, regarding your last comment, please read this:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non_sequitur

46. I hope everybody commenting on the “wall of separation” phrase realizes that it was first used by Thomas Jefferson in 1802 (i.e., while Jefferson was President) in the famous letter to the Danbury Baptists. I haven’t seen it mentioned yet (maybe I skimmed too quickly, though). Link: http://www.usconstitution.net/jeffwall.html

47. Yes, I think we’re all aware of that. We’re at least somewhat aware that Jefferson’s (and others’) big fear in the day was more that the nation-state would start taking over the church and forcing its policies to be preached from the pulpit, rather than the other way around, which is the “threat” proclaimed by media and politicians today.

48. Al, that’s quite interesting. I wonder if the plain   hex  codes work? They do! Eνρηκα! ☭☮☯!!

49. Whoa — not all of them do.

50. In my experience, Liberals are, for the most part, pompous windbags who think they are well-educated, but who are in fact woefully ignorant of anything save “history” as concocted by Howard Zinn (may Purgatory’s flames cleanse his black soul). Stack the typical “educated” liberal up against a person with a classical education (or a degree in a hard science) and watch the fun. Any given two-year undergrad at Christendom College could skeletonize the arguments of the average Kos-klown in under a minute.

    Why? Garbage in, garbage out. At Liberal U. one spends four years deconstructing texts, learning new words for black people, homosexuals, and homosexuals, and reading Darwin, Marx, Dawkins and Al Gore. At Classical college one spends four years conjugating Latin verbs, studying Socratic and symbolic logic in exhaustive detail, and reading Plato, Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas.

    This is why Liberals typically ditch straight-up argumentation for emotional appeals and name-calling. Reason + evidence = truth; if you’ve got neither, just call your opponent a racist and/or blow him up with the Big Red Button.

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