My 1½ Years At LGF, Part III: Gaping Disconnect On The Iraq War

As I mentioned earlier, my primary intention when joining LGF was to find a place where I could debate the validity and reasonableness of the Iraq war and Bush’s role in the matter.  I found out early on that my views on the subject represented a tiny minority of registered LGFers.  This was a situation that I was hoping for, since I was looking for something a little more challenging than the relatively friendly confines of fearbush.com.  So, debate I did, and it was good.

As the war dragged on a while longer, however, I noticed that there were fewer and fewer threads on the subject. Why?  I don’t know for sure. I can only offer conjecture…

I think that LGF was like a lot of war blogs in that the support for the war from the beginning stemmed not from the idea that Saddam posed a tactical threat to the US or that the Iraqi people deserve to be liberated.  The underlying justification was much less cerebral, i.e. we were attacked on 9/11 by Arabs, and the appropriate response was to kick some Arab ass.  Or, according to Mr. Johnson:

In the Arab/Islamic shame-honor mindset, this is interpreted as weakness — and it was. It was that perceived weakness that was directly responsible for 9/11. The only way to rectify this is to demonstrate superior force; and that’s what President Bush did after 9/11, smashing the Taliban and dethroning Saddam Hussein.

So, in the run-up to the invasion, blogs like LGF would routinely run with the theme that pro-war views were appropriate and anti-war views were “weak” (usually delivered in the form of mocking protesters). We invaded, and as the war progressed (from the “kicking ass” phase of “shock and awe”, to rounding up the Baathists and capturing Saddam, to facilitating elections and helping the Iraqis establish a government, to training defense forces and attempt to build infrastructure), the mission began to look less and less like the one that the warbloggers originally advocated.  So, they’ve shifted the rationale a bit so that we’re now “kicking ass” on al Qaeda, and they’ll occasionally post a thread when something significant happens on that front.  Eventually, however, one begins to look a little silly when there’s a celebration for the umpteenth killing of AQ’s “#2” guy.  That might mean that there’s less to talk about overall.  Again, just conjecture.

These days, the mission that our troops are engaged in primarily involves counterinsurgency operations and facilitating the diplomats’ efforts in bringing about some sort of political stability.  Now, if you read anything about effective counterinsurgency tactics or diplomacy, you’d see that it has a lot less to do with “kicking ass”, and a lot more to do with building alliances, gaining the trust of the population, observing cultural sensitivities, etc. Gaining trust and observing the cultural sensitivities of Arabs is something that appears to be the polar opposite of what’s going on at LGF.

So, here you have warbloggers who continue to claim that they support the troops and their mission, all the while repeating the “us against Islam” meme that the State Dept. and the commanders on the ground are desperately trying to discredit.  The cognitive dissonance that results when they post things like Michael Totten’s report that our troops are winning the hearts and minds of the residents of Anbar makes my head hurt.  I mean, the realization that this kind of success wasn’t made possible by advocating Koran dunk-athons or mocking the Muslim’s dislike of pork products is still outside the grasp of most of them, but occasionally a lizard will post something especially profound…

#117 Pro-Bush Canuck

One look at the people in Totten’s essay is enough to remind us that not every person who happened to be born into Islam is our enemy.

We have two enemies: Islamists and the Left. Al Qaeda appears to be much more evil, but if I had to choose I would definitely say that the Left is the more evil force in the greater scheme of things. Al Qaeda can be defeated; the Left is like a cancer, and will be a life or death battle for us for many decades to come, long after Islamism has subsided.

…or not.

(the “reminder” scored a modest +4 on the rate-my-post-o-meter, however)

It all kinda gives one the impression that they don’t really know what we’re doing there (or why) any more than anyone else does.  For the most part, they seem to follow whatever the administration talking point of the week happens to be, just with their own twist.  If you ask me, it takes some pretty stellar mental gymnastics to make that work.  But, like the general Weekly Standard-ish crowd, it doesn’t seem to bother them that these people we’re fighting really weren’t a threat to us before we invaded, and that most have only taken up arms because we’re there.  It’s much simpler just think of them all as the 20th hijacker, of course.

Tomorrow’s topic:

The 2 Faces Of LGF

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John Bolton Gets Nostalgic

I’m picking this for quote of the week, delivered by John Bolton while discussing what should be done about the Iran situation:

“If we were to strike Iran it should be accompanied by an effort at regime change … The US once had the capability to engineer the clandestine overthrow of governments. I wish we could get it back,” he said.

What Bolton is referring to, of course, is this.  Nothing quite like the spooks of yesteryear, compared to the moonbats that are inhabiting the CIA these days, right?

I’m not sure why he thinks of the exercise as a dead practice though.  There’s word that Bush and Cheney at least making an effort at it in Iran currently.

And Johnnyboy, it isn’t particularly “clandestine” when you’re telling the media about it, is it? 

Digg Search RSS Feeds Seem To Work For Every Keyword Except ‘Moonbat’

This is the oddest thing…

 A few months ago, I had this semi-snarky idea to use one of my 9 allowed RSS feeds to display a Digg search for the word ‘moonbat’ (see my post New Feature: Moonbat Watch).  For a while, it worked pretty well.  It was actually kinda neat to see how many Digg stories contained the word in the title or description.  Then, all of a sudden, it stopped working.  After a couple of attempts to re-do the widget, I finally gave up.  I guess I just assumed that Digg had changed something in their search RSS’s that was incompatible with WordPress or something. 

Today, I tried a different keyword for the search:  Bush.  I clicked on the little , copied the url, and pasted it into the RSS widget.  Guess what?  It works like a charm!  What’s going on here?

So, someone please tell me that I’m not crazy.  Go to Digg, search for any keyword, click , and you should see the feed page.  Then try ‘moonbat’ (or even ‘moonbats’) and see if it works.  When I try it, I get this error:

The XML page cannot be displayed

Cannot view XML input using XSL style sheet. Please correct the error and then click the Refresh button, or try again later.

---

The following tags were not closed: rss, channel. Error processing resource ‘http://www.digg.com/rss_search?search=moonbat&area=all&type=both§ion=news’.

 

I can’t seem to get that error for any other keyword. What happened Digg?  Did you sabotage me?

Update: I tried a few more words, and I did manage to get the error code for the word ‘witch’. I’m not sure if there’s any logic to what works or doesn’t. It should be noted, I guess, that ‘wingnut’ works just fine, however.

WordPress.com Political Blogger Alliance

I had an idea (strange, huh?). Originally I thought it would be neat to add political WordPress.com blogs in a special section of my blogroll, and create my own little community of amateur pundits that use the service. In a way, ALL WP.com bloggers are part of a community already, but I thought I’d start a club just for those who like to talk politics.

Most political bloggers will have blogs from other services in their blogroll.  Not everyone uses WP, after all.  There are advantages to staying within the community, however. One advantage would be ease of commenting. Once you’re logged in, you can hop from blog to blog without having to enter in tedious email info and quickly drop a comment (nice to have avatars too), and all discussions can easily be kept track of through the “my comments” section of our dashboards.  Another advantage: you don’t have to do a lot of work to ping these blogs.  All you have to do is link to a post, and it pings them immediately (leaving a pingback in the comments section).  With other blogs (or blog services), you may have to copy/paste trackback urls, and that can be a bit of a crap shoot.  It can work real slick for some blogs and not work at all for others (or at least I’ve discovered). Yet another advantage is how easy it is to search for tags within the community, but that is less special because services like technorati seem to be dialed into it as well. Anyway, you get the idea….

So, every so often, I’ll click on the WP ‘politics’ tag and check out what people are posting.  If I stumble upon a blog that I haven’t seen before, I’d just add it to the blogroll.  I’ve been adding a couple a week since I started it.  I’m sure there are more, so as time goes on this list will grow in my sidebar (under “wordpress political blogs”)

Then I started thinking. What if we formed some semi-formal alliance? A ‘club’ made up exclusively of WP.com political bloggers (right, left, and center) who could regularly exchange ideas and comment on others’ posts. So far I haven’t seen anything like that. Maybe it’s worth a shot?

I whipped up a ‘club’ button that we can put in the sidebar. You’ll have to forgive my photoshopping skills, but here goes:

If you want to add the button to your blog (it links back to this post), here is the code (with border):

<a href="https://chenzhen.wordpress.com/2007/05/25/wordpress-political-blogger-alliance"><img src="https://chenzhen.files.wordpress.com/2007/05/wppoliblog1.jpg&quot; alt="WordPress Political Blogger" /></a>

…and without a border:

<a href="https://chenzhen.wordpress.com/2007/05/25/wordpress-political-blogger-alliance"><img border="0" src="https://chenzhen.files.wordpress.com/2007/05/wppoliblog1.jpg&quot; alt="WordPress Political Blogger" /></a>

Update 11/2:  The alliance has become interactive!  The lowdown:

What I’m attemping to create here is a tool that we can use to make our blogs more lively and entertaining.  I’m not really forcing any obligations on anyone, so I don’t want you to get the impression that going along with this means that there’s going to be a whole list of expectations (beyond etiquette).  You don’t have to respond to every ping.   Just so you know.  

If you want to participate, there are just a few details…

1. In order for this to work smoothly, everyone needs to create a page that can be pinged.  It took me about 2 min. to make mine: https://chenzhen.wordpress.com/wp-political-blogger-alliance/ .  And I need to know the link so that I can consolidate them, so just post it in that thread or respond in email once you’ve whipped it up.  That’s really the only requirement.  A handful of you already have done this, and the pings work beautifully.  The idea here is to compose a code that is easy to paste in your post that allows you to ping everyone in the alliance at the same time.*
2. I don’t really like the idea of any one blogger “abusing” the tool by using it to try to dominate the discussion.  In other words, if you’re calling out and pinging the alliance 3 times a day it might get a little annoying.  Sure, it’s easy enough to just ignore such a thing, but nevertheless I think it would be akin to blog whoring just for the sake of blog whoring.  It’s kind of a fine line, and we’ll probably tweak the guidelines as we go forward, but for now I’ll stick with a rule of 1 per day max.  No minimums, since some of you might prefer to comment only.  And, it probably goes without saying, but we don’t want to double up on a topic either, so try to make sure that a story or headline hasn’t already had pings sent by someone else first.  If it has, and you’ve got your own unique analysis that you just spent like 2 hrs on, just link to that thread in your post instead.  We’ll see it.  Make sense?
3. Be somewhat civilized.  This might be the hard part, ’cause a) there’s a very diverse crowd being pinged and b) it’s the internet.  In debate, you win by attacking the argument or idea, and you lose once you resort to attacking the person (there is a difference).  Keep that mindset, and we’ll be fine.  That’s not to say that I don’t enjoy a good blog war.  This will be a bit of a free-for-all, so I hope people are relatively thick-skinned when it comes to having  logic, facts, position, etc. challenged.  We’ll just have to see how this goes, cause I’m not sure if anyone has really tried anyting like this before. 
4. This is about “politics”, so use the “politics” tag/category when you post, and only send the pings when you post about “politics”.  You might have a cool car, for example, but please don’t ping the whole group to show off the latest pics you just posted.  Also, consistent use of the “politics” tag in general means more views from the wider wordpress.com audience.

Luckily, it’s pretty easy as individuals to block urls and IP’s if #2 or 3 becomes a problem for someone.

* The up-to-date code can always be found in my sidebar (——>): 

Founder of the WordPress.com Political Blogger Alliance

Simply copy the “WordPress.com Political Blogger Alliance” and paste it at the bottom of your post. Once your post is published, it will send a ping back to everyone in the alliance.  Easy!

Update 11/4: A tag (category) specifically for the alliance:

WordPress Political Blogs

Create the “WordPress Political Blogs” category and add it to your alliance-oriented posts.  In2thefray and I have already added the RSS feed for this tag in our sidebars, so we can see the latest offerings right on our blogs:

WP.com political blog alliance

Even better, if everyone uses the tag consistently, the above link will provide a great chronological record of the posts within the alliance. In addition, you will have a record of your own contributions to the alliance in your sidebar (assuming you have added the “categories” widget).  Remember to use “WordPress Political Blogs” exactly (alternate spellings and abbreviations will be a different tag, technically)

What’s With All The Impeachment Talk?

Digg quote:

Vermont’s senate in an honorable and patriotic move, voted to Impeach Bush Friday

read more | digg story

The skinny:

MONTPELIER, Vt. Apr 20, 2007 (AP)— Vermont senators voted Friday to call for the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, saying their actions have raised “serious questions of constitutionality.”

The nonbinding resolution was approved 16-9 without debate all six Republicans in the chamber at the time and three Democrats voted against it.

Moonbats! 

Update:  Found another WP blogger lookin’ at the Cheney angle:  Scholars and Rogues PING! …looks like a good one for the blogroll too

Righty Blog Of The Week: Moonbattery

There is just something about the term ‘moonbat’ that fascinates me. I’m not quite sure why. Perhaps it’s because I’ve seen it used to label anyone from Cindy Sheehan to John Murtha to Arianna Huffington to George Clooney, without seeing anything really consistent to link the term with the behavior described.  I’m beginning to think that ‘moonbat’ is just a catch all term that’s thrown out there by righty bloggers when someone is perceived as acting in some ‘leftist’ manner (by someones definition) or expressing an opposing viewpoint.  That covers quite a broad range.  In fact, at this point, the wielders of the slur would most likely apply it to a majority of America, as 54% of the population now believes that Bush/Cheney deliberately misled the nation about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein in the run-up to the Iraq war.  Since the “Bush lied” meme is consistently labeled as ‘moonbattish’, it’s apparent that there are literally ‘moonbats’ around every corner.  Watch out!

When it comes to where the term is used on the blogs, there is undoubtedly none that use it with more impunity than this one:

Moonbattery

The Moonbattery blogger, Van Helsing (get it?), was presumably curious about my “What The Hell Is A Moonbat?” post and decided to stop by last week. Here’s what he (I assume) had to say:

Another possible definition of a moonbat is “a smug liberal who adopts a smirking tone without really knowing what he’s talking about.”

I’d have to disagree with that statement.  Smugness online is a tell-tale sign of an Ideologue, a flame warrior that  also has a conservative variation.  But who am I to say?  I’m dealing with a blogger with a PhD. in moonbatology.  Maybe I should just shut the hell up before I get a ‘vampire bomb’ dropped on my smug ass, eh?

Anyway, click the link if you think you’re ready to enter the den of the web’s crusader-in-chief against all things ‘moonbat’.

Saturday Showdown In D.C.: Wingnuts Vs. Moonbats

A big ‘moonbat’ event has been spotted by ‘moonbat watch’….and it has trouble written all over it…

A collection of various anti-war groups have banded together and decided to mark the 4th anniversary of the Iraq war by organizing a march in Washington D.C. on March 17.  Members include Code Pink, Gold Star Families for Peace, Cindy Sheehan, etc.  In response to this, a grassroots-level organization of concerned citizens, veterans groups and bloggers have formed the base for a counter-protest, dubbed the Gathering of Eagles.

VS

I’m not going to pick sides on this one. I can tell you that the battle has already begun, however, and it’s lookin’ ugly. In fact, the GOEers accused the ‘moonbats’ of hacking their website last week: Having Fun, Leftards?

And to the pus blisters who apparently finally took their hands off their wing-wing long enough to rub two tired, pot-saturated brain cells together and infringe upon our right to free speech, may I just say that I hope you die a horrific death, filled with every manner of sexually transmitted disease known to man. If it’s even possible to get an STD from self-wanging too much. And if the parties responsible for this little escapade plan on being in D.C. next weekend, stop by and say hello, that is if you haven’t rubbed all the skin off your balls from overhandling.

Now that’s some pretty unhinged cyber-rage!  I’m not sure if it’s all going to be out of everyone’s collective systems by Saturday afternoon, but we’ll see.  Out of fairness, I’ll post youtube vids representing both groups.  So….

In this corner, you have the ‘moonbats’:

And in this corner, the ‘wingnuts’:

One of the bloggers at Jawa report seems to think the wingnuts have the edge (naturally):

(Besides, I’d put my cash on a pissed-off veteran against any 100 stink-ass hippies.)

Hhhmmm….these veterans?

Any bets which side does more to embarrass themselves on Saturday?

Update:  Well, it seems that things went fairly smoothly yesterday in D.C.  There is an excellent photo essay up on The Redhunter: A Gathering of Patriots

New Feature: Moonbat Watch

The search for the elusive ‘moonbat’ continues…..

 moonbat watch 

• Gathering of Eagles – Moonbat Saftey Video
• Leftisphere shrieks; Nevada Democrats blink
• Rosie Says She’s Treated for Depression
• Most ethical Congress in history and other Moonbat jokes
• Moonbats in Vermont towns seek to impeach Bush, pull U.S. troops

I’ve decided to take advantage of Digg’s cool RSS capabilities. and place a feed that searches for ‘moonbat’ sightings.  I’ve placed as the second to the last RSS feed in the sidebar.  I’m using this powerful tool to track stories that have ‘moonbat’ in the title or description, in the hope that it will lead me to the holy grail.  That is, solve the riddle, find the truth, and answer the eternal question:

What the hell is a moonbat? 

Update:  Wow, this thing realy works!  Today I noticed a netizen that has a particular fetish with all things ‘moonbat’, having submitted a handful of ‘moonbat’ entries to Digg within a few hours of each other: cleanshots. It was a very busy day on Digg for this person.  In fact, ‘moonbat’ was thrown around with such reckless abandon that I think we actually got a little further from finding the true meaning of the term. 

Update:  OK, I’ve located another expert in the field of moonbattery.  The blog Pirate’s Cove has two categories for ‘moonbats’: Raving Moonbats (211), and Beyond Moonbat (78) …can’t get enough of ’em.

Update:  Well, the RSS feed for the digg search for ‘moonbat’ doesn’t seem to work anymore.  I’m not sure why, but I’ve removed it from the sidebar.  I know, it stinks.

Blogosphere Dark Comedy Hour

Check out the right wingers morbidly listening for the phrase  “Allahu Akbar” in the cell phone vid taken of the Salt Lake City mall shooting.  With all their might, they can’t tell for sure.  Darn it!:

A Muslim allegedly behaving violently? Does Brit Hume know about this?

But seriously, that’s some really sketchy audio. The 1:39 shouting could be one of the cops. I just listened to the thing five times, and I have no idea what that outburst is. “Allahu Akbar” might be a little too good to be true…

Enrique on February 15, 2007 at 7:30 PM

I’m not sure if the verdict is in.  The affirmation of bigotry may have to wait for another day.  Stay tuned!

Breaking:  The Red Lake High School shooter was a Native American!

 

Iraq: Money Pit

Of all the problems that the Iraq war brought us, perhaps the most ignored is the element of rampant fraud and war profiteering.   One would hope that the recent changes in Washington would lead to some investigation into whether or not the American taxpayer is getting completely shafted by Bush’s little Mid East experiment. 

I just read a post by digby that gave me some hope.  It looks like Henry Waxman is looking into it a bit:

Chairman Waxman Invites Witnesses for Waste, Fraud, and Abuse Hearing

Rep. Waxman has requested the testimony of three key witnesses regarding Iraq reconstruction efforts at an Oversight Committee hearing on waste, fraud, and abuse, to be held the week of February 6th.

L. Paul Bremer, former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, has been requested to testify regarding reconstruction activities during his tenure at the CPA, as well as an audit report from January 2005 that concluded that more than $8.8 billion in cash under CPA’s control was disbursed without adequate financial controls or accountability.

Stuart Bowen, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, has been requested to testify regarding the audits and field inspections conducted by his office related to reconstruction activities in Iraq.

Timothy Carney, Coordinator for Iraqi Transitional Assistance, has been requested to testify regarding the newly created position of Coordinator, his role in assisting the Iraqi government with reconstruction efforts, and his prior service in Iraq.

February 6th is, of course, Tuesday.  Should be interesting. I think we’ll see why Bush apparently wanted the cronies to be in charge of the reconstruction. 

For a documentary about the war profiteering going on in Iraq, check out Iraq For Sale:

What The Hell Is A Moonbat?

I cruise a lot of blogs.  You really don’t need to visit too many before you run into this word on virtually any right-leaning blog out there.  A lot of those sites hardly go a day without talking about some ‘moonbat’ did, or is doing, somewhere.  In fact, there are bloggers using it in their handles, and even whole sites dedicated to it.  As widespread as it seems, the term is used almost exclusively on the Internet.  So what does it mean?  According to wiki:

Moonbat (also “barking moonbat”) is a term often used as a political epithet. Some Iraq War supporters use it to insult opponents like Noam Chomsky and Pat Buchanan. More generally, it is used as a pejorative for extremists, especially those who believe in conspiracy theories.

Some sites that use the phrase often, like LGF, actually have their own definition:

moonbat – An unthinking or insane leftist — in other words, most modern leftists. Moonbat can also be used as an adjective, e.g. a moonbat professor. According to the Wikipedia entry for moonbat, the word was coined in 2002 by the Editor of Samizdata, Perry de Havilland, and was a variation on the name of radical British activist and columnist George Monbiot. Originally, the term “moonbat” was intended to be more politically neutral, and described wackos on the left and the right, but it quickly acquired its current usage of being applied almost exclusively to those on the left. The term also references the moon much in the same way that “lunatic” refers to the insanity-causing powers of the full moon (luna = moon). LGFers occasionally analyze the behavior patterns of various moonbat “species” as if they were actual animals, and even give them satirical Linnaean taxonomical names, such as moonbattus berkeleyensis. According to Charles: “Moonbat was originally coined by Perry at Samizdata, I believe. But LGF probably played a much bigger part in popularizing it.” The entry in the Samizdata glossary indicates that Perry originally coined the full phrase “barking moonbat”; apparently “moonbat” is just a subsequent shortened version of “barking moonbat,” rather than being a pre-existing term that was lengthened to barking moonbat.

I suppose it’s worth noting that the wiki entry has changed since LGF’s dictionary entry was written, and they have since traced the word back to the 19th century.  No matter.  Its just a political slur here in the 21st.  An ad Hominem.  A childish way of projecting inferiority onto others and their viewpoints as a substitute for validating one’s own (in this case, the viewpoint that the Iraq war was a good idea).  No wonder you see it everywhere.

During my travels through message boards and blog comments, I have been referred to as a moonbat many times.  It just makes me chuckle.  There’s something amusing about some poster out there calling people moonbats, who turns around in the next post to spout some rant about how the entire American media is conspiring to do everything it can to make sure that the U.S. loses the war (and by extension, destroy America).  The term has been used so liberally, and has become so watered down that I’m really not sure what it means anymore (hence this entry).  Any of my fellow bloggers want to help me out?

Maybe, the real moonbat is the person who thinks everyone else is a moonbat.

Update:  Good to see I wasn’t the only one who was wondering.  Here’s an old post from Chris Clarke: A token of my affection for my fellow moonbats

 Update: In addition to Moonbattery, there is also Barking Moonbat Early Warning System