Instapundit Glenn Reynolds notes that he’s “not going to reward lies with traffic.”
Well there goes my plans for reporting his sordid love triangle with Scarlett Johansson and Megan Fox…
Instapundit Glenn Reynolds notes that he’s “not going to reward lies with traffic.”
Well there goes my plans for reporting his sordid love triangle with Scarlett Johansson and Megan Fox…
Instapundit Glenn Reynolds was forced to get a new campus ID, so he showed his readers the 20-year “before and after pics.” Actually, he looks older but pretty much the same, almost as if he has a painting of himself hidden away in his attic that ages instead of him.
However, my sources at the University of Tennessee have uncovered the shocking fact that the “after” picture up on his blog is in fact a shameless lie. Thanks to their efforts, I can now reveal the horrifying truth.
Here’s the before picture:
And here’s the real portrait of what you look like after teaching law school for 20 years:
According to historian Frank Dikotter, who examined hundreds of documents across China from 2005-2009.
Dikotter is author of Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962, which I haven’t read yet. But some of the descriptions of the famine echo those that Robert Conquest relayed in The Harvest of Sorrow, his book on Stalin’s terror famine in the Ukraine.
Between 2 and 3 million of these victims were tortured to death or summarily executed, often for the slightest infraction. People accused of not working hard enough were hung and beaten; sometimes they were bound and thrown into ponds. Punishments for the least violations included mutilation and forcing people to eat excrement.
One report dated Nov. 30, 1960, and circulated to the top leadership — most likely including Mao — tells how a man named Wang Ziyou had one of his ears chopped off, his legs tied up with iron wire and a 10-kilo stone dropped on his back before he was branded with a sizzling tool. His crime: digging up a potato.
When a boy stole a handful of grain in a Hunan village, the local boss, Xiong Dechang, forced his father to bury his son alive on the spot. The report of the investigative team sent by the provincial leadership in 1969 to interview survivors of the famine records that the man died of grief three weeks later.
Starvation was the punishment of first resort. As report after report shows, food was distributed by the spoonful according to merit and used to force people to obey the party. One inspector in Sichuan wrote that “commune members too sick to work are deprived of food. It hastens their death.”
As the catastrophe unfolded, people were forced to resort to previously unthinkable acts to survive. As the moral fabric of society unraveled, they abused one another, stole from one another and poisoned one another. Sometimes they resorted to cannibalism.
The overall 45 million figure Dikotter comes up with is slightly lower than the previous figures for the death toll by Mao’s communist government I’ve reported here:
My working assumption is that Dikotter’s research is solid, and that his estimate of 45 million is probably the floor for the number of people killed under Mao. A total twice that high is also possible.
Somehow, despite an ever-dwindling pool of apologists contending otherwise, communism has been more congenial to genocide as a instrument of policy than any other transnational ideology in the 20th century. The Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Mengistu’s Ethiopia; different countries, same results. Communism, everywhere and at all times, is a ticket to oppression and death.
(Hat tip: Instapundit, who has several other readers and bloggers chiming in on the issue.)
Several commentators on yesterday’s post and video about a man being assaulted by liberal thugs for the crime of videotaping Democratic gubernatorial candidate John Kitzhaber at an event open to the public at Emmanuel Temple Church in Portland, Oregon, opined that no crime had been committed, since the videographer was on private property, and thus should have complied with a request demand to stop filming.
I’m not a lawyer, so I am not clear on the issue, namely: Does a political event open to the public, but set in a private space, count, for the sake of the law, as occurring in a public space or a private space? I can see how both might apply, depending on the circumstances and on individual state law.
To clarify the issue, I asked two of the leading legal lights of the blogosphere, Eugene Volokh of the Volokh Conspiracy and Instapundit Glenn Reynolds for their opinion on the issue.
Volokh’s response:
Neither the press nor other speakers have a right to stay in a church when the owners or the agents tell them to leave. The same is true for other private property, except in a few states as to large shopping malls. Moreover, the owner of property has the right to use reasonable, nondeadly force to eject trespassers. But if the event is billed as open to the public, then trespassers wouldn’t be trespassers until they’re told to leave and refuse. I haven’t seen the video, so I can’t speak to the facts in this case.
Reynolds’ response:
I agree with Eugene. As a practical matter, if I were the filmer in question I would probably sue for assault, etc. on general principles. Fear of lawsuits causes people to do all sorts of things; it might as well make them more reluctant to hassle photographers. But that’s just me following the “punch back twice has hard” philosophy propounded by a great man.
Thanks for both gentlemen for clarifying some of the legal issues involved.
A few points:
Maybe I just wasn’t paying attention, but I didn’t notice that the Obama Administration had approved a $60 billion (with a B) arms sale to Saudi Arabia until Instapundit linked to that Jonathan Tepperman piece.
I have mixed feelings about the deal.
On that basis, the arms sale should probably be approved. But it’s no substitute for actually taking out Iran’s nuclear program, or the mullahs pushing it.
According to this story,
Convicted DC sniper Lee Boyd Malvo tells actor William Shatner on a cable TV special that he and his partner tried to recruit fellow shooters for their 2002 spree and that his accomplice killed one man for backing out, according to the program set for airing Thursday [on A&E].
That little tidbit raises a number of interesting points:
I guess we’ll have to get used to saying “William Shatner, Investigative Journalist” in the same way we’ve gotten use to saying “Emmy-Award-winning actor William Shatner.”
(Hat tip: Glenn Reynolds, although I think Instapundit buried the lede here, leaving out the all-important Shatner Angle.)
Given the huge upheaval in the political landscape following Scott Brown’s upset victory in the Massachusetts senatorial race, I thought it was time to revisit what many in the liberal punditocracy were saying following Obama’s victory in 2008. There may very well have been some liberal commentators advising caution and restraint, least liberal ambitions and hubris lay the Democratic party low. However, I don’t remember any of them. What I do remember is numerous notables bandying about phrases like “the Republican Party is finished” and “permanent progressive majority.” Let’s exhume that commentary from its dusty vaults (some over a year old; very dusty indeed in Internet years) and see who might be dining tonight in Hell on a generous, tasty helping of fricasseed crow.
For example, here’s The New Republic‘s John B. Judis in an article entitled “America the Liberal” published November 19, 2008 explaining how Obama’s election heralded a fundamental realignment in American politics:
If Obama and congressional Democrats act boldly, they can not only arrest the downturn but also lay the basis for an enduring majority. As was the case with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, many of the measures necessary to combat today’s recession will also help ensure long-term Democratic electoral success. Many Southerners remained Democrats for generations in part because of Roosevelt’s rural electrification program; a similar program for bringing broadband to the hinterland could lure these voters back to the Democratic Party. And national health insurance could play the same role in Democrats’ future prospects that Social Security played in the perpetuation of the New Deal majority.
-snip-
The Republican Party will be divided and demoralized after this defeat. And, just as the Great Depression took Prohibition and the other great social issues of the 1920s off the popular agenda, this downturn has pushed aside the culture war of the last decades. It simply wasn’t a factor in the presidential election.
If, however, Obama and the Democrats take the advice of official Washington and go slow–adopting incremental reforms, appeasing adversaries that have lost their clout–they could end up prolonging the downturn and discrediting themselves.
Or alternately, ObamaCare could doom that same realignment in less than a year after he took office. And of all the complaints about the Obama-Reid-Pelosi policy initiatives that Massachusetts voters voiced, I’m pretty sure that “going too slow” wasn’t among them. (Also, I think Sarah Palin and company might take issue with the assertion that the culture war “simply wasn’t a factor in the presidential election.”)
For another example, take Judis’ sometimes-collaborator, liberal demographer Ruy Teixeira, who has been predicting a “permanent democratic majority” for about as long as I can remember. In March 2009, his study “New Progressive America: Twenty Years of Demographic, Geographic, and Attitudinal Changes Across the Country Herald a New Progressive Majority” had this to say:
“At this point in our history, progressive arguments combined with the continuing demographic and geographic changes are tilting our country in a progressive direction—trends should take America down a very different road than has been traveled in the last eight years. A new progressive America is on the rise.”
Sunset seems to have come remarkably quickly for that “new progressive America.”
For the wisdom of another old Democratic party hand, let’s see what Robert Shrum (who managed just about every losing Democratic presidential campaign in living memory) had to say in The Week on September 22, 2009 about the political climate:
“After this summer of discontent, Republicans think they can ride a wave of bitter tea to electoral victory. Once the tide runs out, they will be left high and dry. After health reform passes, probably with the help of Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine, Republicans will crawl out of their hole to assail it in the campaigns ahead as ‘socialism’ or worse.”
With such vaunted prognostication skills, I can’t imagine how Schrum’s campaigns could possibly have failed.
The day after the 2008 election, Dan Conley of prominent left-wing blog MyDD proclaimed the “Death of the Center-Right Myth”:
“The CRM is dead. Long live the New Liberal America.”
However, he tempered his prediction with this: “Liberalism succeeds when Americans feel their faith in government restored. It won’t happen overnight … it’s a process that will probably outlive the Obama administration.”
Not only did Obama not restore America’s “faith” in government, the project itself didn’t make it a fourth of the way through Obama’s term.
Here’s another MyDDer, Todd Beeton, on November 9, 2008, saying that Americans had come around to the Democrat’s views on the virtues of big government, saying “Republicans Should Keep Running Against Big Government & Higher Taxes: That would be awesome.”
Well, Mr. Beeton, it appears that Scott Brown took your advice. I don’t think he garnered the results you were expecting.
(Confession: I went looking for similarly clueless pronouncements among the more prominent ranks of the Daily Kos Kids, and wasn’t able to find them, possibly because in the weeks after the 2008 election they seemed completely obsessed with ranting against the unimaginable perfidy of Joseph Lieberman.)
Here’s a story called “Requiem for the Republican Party” by a Mike Whitney (a self-proclaimed Libertarian) on a site called The Market Oracle on May 6, 2009. It’s, um, somewhat less than oracular:
“The poor GOP isn’t really even a party anymore; it’s more like a vaudeville troupe scuttling from one backwater to the next performing the same worn slapstick. They’ve simply become irrelevant, a ‘non-party’ that no one pays much attention to apart from the occasional zinger on the Daily Show or Letterman. In truth, the GOP is so deeply-traumatized from their shocking fall from power, they’d probably benefit from a spell on the couch. Perhaps if they spent a few weeks in therapy, they’d see what a mess they’ve made of everything….The Republican party is finished. Stick a fork in it.”
I don’t think I’ll be taking stock-picking advice from Mr. Whitney anytime soon.
In the more obscure corners of the web, take a look at the retrospectively hilarious map that one Dan Chmielewski offers up from Gallup on a site called The Liberal OC. It features Texas as a “competitive state” and Oklahoma as a “leaning Democratic” state. You know, the same Oklahoma that had just gone for McCain over Obama by 66% to 34%. It also notes that Massachusetts is the second most liberal state in the union.
How quickly things change.
Finally, it should be noted that it’s not only liberals who believed Republicans would be losing for the foreseeable future. Take perhaps the most singular example of that rarest of species, the “Pro-Obama Conservative,” New York Times columnist David Brooks, who proclaimed that “Traditionalists” would lead the party to defeat until “Reformers” (i.e., people who act, talk, and think precisely like urbane, mannered moderates like David Brooks) finally took control. “The reformers tend to believe that American voters will not support a party whose main idea is slashing government.” Mr. Brooks further states (and this is a real quote, not an Iowahawk parody) that “They cannot continue to insult the sensibilities of the educated class and the entire East and West Coasts.”
Heaven forfend that sensibilities be insulted! Why if they continue to do that, all they can hope to achieve is seizing Ted Kennedy’s old seat! Their failure is assured.
Gentlemen, dinner is served:
Postscript: Some may consider all the above a blatant case of schadenfreude. Well, yes. But that’s not the only reason to post it.
First, when your political opponents say something amazingly stupid, you have to call them on it. There’s a small chance they might learn better, and a larger chance that the populace at large will start to discount their opinions once they discover just how demonstrably divorced from reality those opinions are.
Second, I wanted to demonstrate how easy it was, in the flush of victory, to make unwise, sweeping statements that are very likely to look quite foolish at some point in the future. Generally, statements about the “unstoppable” electoral rise of one political faction or another (or, to use that hoary old chestnut of the left, “historical inevitability”) are going to be proven wrong sooner or later. There are no permanent political victories in a democratic society. It is possible for individuals (or even, as the Whigs found out, entire political parties) to lose so badly they never recover, but the game goes on. In this light, extrapolating Scott Brown’s win to proclaim the inevitability of widespread Republican gains this November would be equally foolish and ill-advised. Such gains now look entirely possible, especially if Republicans, tea party members, conservatives, etc. are willing to put in the time, effort, and hard work to make it so, but they are by no means inevitable. Or, to paraphrase Instapundit: “Great win, kid. Now don’t get cocky.”
Some The New York Times employee took time out from their busy schedule of losing money and praising Obama to tell Instapundit Glenn Reynolds to “STFU.”
This is indeed amusing. However, I think it’s high time we stopped trotting out the “look at the mighty newspaper taking on the lowly blogger” cliches, even for the sake of irony. The stark fact of the matter is that Instapundit has more readers than The New York Times. If i wanted to reach readers outside the Greater New York Area (and, more honestly, Manhatten), I’d rather get a link from Instapundit than a profile in the The New York Times.