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(Done with Mirrors)
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(Statistical blah blah blah)
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(Obsidian Wings)
Tuesday, June 22, 2004Darcy, bless his heart, continues to write letters to Benzene even when it's obvious how far behind I am in printing them. Several of these I was planning to just omit, but on second thought, none of them is any less pertinent than it was two weeks ago, so in they all go.
This is perhaps a good time to reiterate Benzene's philosophy that anything that doesn't stay relevant for at least a month probably wasn't worth discussing in the first place. That the nature of their medium obliges newspaper journalists to pretend the opposite is a big part of their problem, I believe.
The most interesting and distinctive Canadianisms actually come from Montreal and other areas where Francophones and Anglophones mix freely. The most striking one for me was the way Montreal anglos end their sentences with "fuck," e.g.:
"Hey, while you're up, get me a beer, fuck."
"What's your problem, fuck?"
"Let's go, fuck!" [Obviously, the meaning would be quite different without the comma.]
It's hard to glean this from the written examples above, but "fuck" is definitely not being used to indicate a person -- i.e., short for "you fuck." [A noun, not a verb, I assume.] When you hear it, it's quite clear it's just being used for emphasis. I think this is because in Québecois French, curse words often go at the end of the sentence, e.g., "Donne-moi une bière, hostie" or "C'est quoi ton problème, tabernac?" Whereas English speakers from elsewhere are likelier to use "fuck" for emphasis either at the beginning of a sentence ("Fuck, let's go!") or in the middle of one ("What's your fucking problem?").
Montreal anglos also sometimes borrow French words even when the borrowed word already exists in English, but means something completely different -- for instance, you hear people use "manifestation" instead of "protest" or "demonstration," "notes" instead of "grades," and so on.
Keep in mind, the speakers I refer to aren't native Francophones who happen to make the odd mistake when speaking English. These are native English speakers -- they speak English at home, they went to English schools, their friends are mostly English, they may even work in English if their business is small enough. (In Quebec, businesses above a certain size are required to conduct their affairs in French.)
[The fact that tabernac doesn't appear there suggests that it's probably pretty tame. I'm guessing it has something to do with a tavern. Merriam-Webster tells me that both tavern and tabernacle derive ultimately from Latin taberna=hut, shop.
[I'm also intrigued that, apparently, it felt natural for you to capitalize "Anglophone" and "Francophone" while leaving the noun "anglo" lowercase. I probably would have done the reverse.]
Interesting Atrios entry today:
Excerpt:
[Dr Burgess, Dr Weiss and I said essentially the same thing on Benzene a few days earlier, which of course was Darcy's point.
[This reminds me of another item that's been on the backburner for about two months now. In brief, the idea is to apply that "free market" logic, which you found so novel when applied to health care, to public education.
[But that will have to wait for another day. Today's task is to get caught up on the letter column.]
Some comments on your comments -- and BTW I still think you should allow comments on your blog to allow us to "talk amongst ourselves." If you get an especially interesting comment that you want to promote to the main page and respond to it there, you can still do so. But it would allow the discussion to continue even when you're too busy to post. I find I don't like going to blogs without comments -- I make an exception for yours because we're friends, but I still think comments would help your blog, especially since you seem to have a pretty diverse audience.
[Your feelings about comments are noted. I do sometimes contemplate making the change, but I'm not there yet. That's just not my vision of Benzene. I still can't let go of the notion that it's really a zine and not a blog. Perhaps some day I'll change my mind, but not today.]
Anyway:
Majority Report (Janeane and Sam Seder's show) is a different kind of show. Frankly, it's an outlet for liberals who are sick of explaining their positions thoroughly and meticulously only to have their opponents come back with shit like "So, what you're really saying is you hate America/religion/freedom and you love al-Qaeda/Saddam/communism." After years of this crap, it can be very therapeutic to listen to someone actually come right out and say that Bush is, in fact, a douchebag. I doubt Janeane and Sam are making many converts, but it's not about gentle persuasion, it's about riling up the base. Also, it's not like the show is 100% name-calling, 0% content -- they do back up their assertions with facts and they do talk about issues in the news -- although, admittedly, not always in a way that would be clear to someone who hadn't already read the story they're referring to. It's also true that neither of the hosts have any prior radio experience, and it shows -- painfully, at times -- but that's to be expected. They are getting better, though -- their recent interview with Alan Dershowitz (with Atrios on the line as well) was great. I also like that they regularly feature bloggers as guests.
Franken is the one with the "moderate moderate" show. He has a fair number of conservative guests, he has a "resident dittohead" he checks in with pretty much every day, he has a segment where they send a correspondent down to a BBQ joint in Bee Cave, Texas, to find people who really hate Al Franken and put them on the air with him ... the whole tone of the show is much more conversational and less, well, "shrill". But I don't think every show on Air America must necessarily be like Franken's.
Well, good, because there's been a concerted effort by the right to paint him as the left-wing equivalent to Ann Coulter. (Remember my libertarian friend, Jason? He actually made the Coulter-Krugman comparison at one point. I don't believe he had actually read any Paul Krugman columns, though, he was just getting all this crap from Donald Luskin's site.)
Also, one thing I wanted to say earlier, on bias -- what makes the whole "media bias" debate so tiresome is fact that people seem to think accusations of bias are a slam-dunk argument-winner. For instance:
A: Did you know that George Bush is going around the campaign trail promoting federal programs he intends to cut if he's re-elected? Stuff like Head Start, homeland security, nutrition for children...?
B: Where did you hear that?
A: I read it in Paul Krugman's latest column.
B: Well, I don't believe it then. Paul Krugman is biased.
The proper response for A at this point would be, "Sure he is, but so what? That has nothing whatsoever to do with whether the facts he cites are correct, or whether his argument is sound."
These aren't all related to Bush economic forecasts, but they are all original posts broadly about economic issues:
That said...
This is true.
This is hardly limited to Atrios -- in fact, I would say that links in blog entries and online columns rarely give you much of an idea what they link to. This is why tabbed browsing is so great. I will go through Atrios, reading the day's entries and command-clicking all the links (which, if you turn on tabbed browsing in Safari, causes the link to open in a new tab in the background). By the time I'm done reading the main entries, all of the links will have fully loaded in the background, so I can then go through them quickly, see exactly what they are, and decide whether I'm interested in reading them or not.
[Here's an example of how it ought to be done, from Political Animal (formerly CalPundit) today:
[He doesn't make a discussion out of it, just a simple sentence or two to let you know what Krugman is writing about today. By buddy Pete also does a lot of traffic directing on his RaptorMagic blog, and he too always gives a nice descriptive sentence.
[In contrast, here are the first (ie, last) two posts by Atrios yesterday:
and
Why oh why won't those who write for the editorial page at the Post read what's on their news page before they embarass themselves?
[How hard can it be to formulate a sentence that is more informative than "good read"? The presumption seems to be that every reader will simply follow the link because Atrios says so, with no regard to the reader's own preferences. There's no excuse for this. It's lazy and it's rude. Another Atrios habit that annoys me is his propensity to use codewords and unexplained acronyms. I find it cliquish and unwelcoming, as if to say "ha ha, you don't know the secret code".
[Then again, I suppose Benzene has its own insider information. Perhaps some day I'll make a glossary.]
Well, yes. Paul says Bush's competence is "constantly questioned by the media" (instead of, say, "regularly questioned by liberal pundits and bloggers"). To me, that statement implies that Bush gets asked aggressively tough questions by the White House press corps and that news stories (not just columns) questioning Bush's fitness for office appear every day in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, AP, Reuters, and on ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN and Fox News.
For instance, at the height of the Lewinsky scandal, it would be fair to say that Clinton's fundamental honesty was "constantly questioned by the media." Following the "Dean Scream," it would be fair to say that Dean's judgment and, yes, sanity, were "constantly questioned by the media." Bush has yet to receive anywhere near that kind of saturated, 24-hour-a-day barrage of "does-this-incident-mean-he's-not-fit-to-be-president?" criticism.
Uh, no. It's not parallel at all. I'm kind of stunned you would even consider making that comparison.
On the one hand, we have an incident that occurred in private between Clinton and Broderick. It all comes down to Broderick's credibility -- she changed her story several times and was caught lying in her affidavit to the Starr Commission. And of course, she never filed criminal charges. Bill Clinton's basically said "I'm not going to dignify these accusations with a response," which I think was entirely reasonable under such circumstances.
Here's what Dave Neiwert [aka
The core facts of the incident, beyond Broaddrick's Rashomon-like telling, are this: In order to get bumper stickers, she phoned Clinton at his apartment and set up a one-on-one meeting at her hotel. Her roommate was out of the room to "go shopping". The venue of the meeting "changed" to her room. Moreover, other clinical data, as well as witness accounts, strongly suggested that whatever sex they had was consensual.
And finally, just which version were we supposed to believe? Her 1992 deposition, or the version she told once the Clinton-haters had made a national campaign out of smearing him?
People who dug into Bill Clinton's past, particularly his dealings with women, know this: He was (and still is) a very attractive man with a great deal of power and charisma. Unsurprisingly, a lot of women threw themselves at him, many of them of obviously questionable character. Clinton, to his ill credit, was not prone to refusing them.
But to leap from that to an accusation of rape is, frankly, beyond the pale.
(The original post seems to have vanished, but Google has the archive.)
On the other hand, you have the allegations that Bush did not fulfill his National Guard duties. This was not a single incident that occurred between two people behind closed doors. If Bush did show up for duty in the last year of his National Guard service (or if he showed up at all in Arkansas), there ought to be some record of his service, and there ought to be people in the Arkansas national guard who remembered him. If he didn't show up, there ought to be some evidence of that as well.
Again, Dave Neiwert's got it covered here: [link]
and here: [link]
Salient quote:
These facts have never been disputed since they were uncovered, and in fact were acknowledged by Bush's spokespeople. Moreover, as Joe Conason has already noted, Bush actually falsified this aspect of his service in his ghost-written autobiography, A Charge to Keep, describing his pilot's training in some detail, then concluding: "I continued flying with my unit for the next several years." In fact, Bush was suspended from flying 22 months after he completed his training -- a period that does not even generously fit Bush's description.
I had been looking for this post by Dave N.
But I couldn't find it because I had been spelling Juanita Broaddrick's name wrong.
Anyway, here's his assessment:
The facts: This accusation was raised in 1999, after the impeachment fiasco, by an account of a woman named Juanita Broaddrick who said she had been sexually assaulted by Clinton in 1978. She told her account for a writer on the Wall Street Journal's editorial page (after NBC News, which originally interviewed her, sat on the story -- for good reason). The charges gradually evaporated as it became clear that Broaddrick (who had previously filed an affidavit denying any sexual contact with Clinton) was not a reliable witness, and may have had a profit motive for changing her story. The facts of their encounter have never been definitively established, but there is no sound evidence to suggest that any encounter he may have had with Broaddrick was not entirely consensual.
That's what I thought too, when I first saw it in print, before I heard an Iraqi pronounce it. Anyway, the closest equivalent using English phonemes would be "Aboo Greb" (rhymes with "Deb"), although of course that's only a rough approximation. There's a more detailed pronunciation guide, a recording of an Iraqi saying it, and an explanation of why it's not "grah-eeb" here:
(Unfortunately, the audio is in the infernal Windows Media format and will not play on Macs, which is no big surprise when you look at who owns Slate.)
[A few hours after I posted that comment about the pronunciation of "Ghraib", it occurred to me that the same vowel combination occurs in sheikh, Hussein, Kuwait, and Bahrain, and none of those is pronounced "ah-ee". The one word I know that is pronounced like that (Sa'id, the port at the north end of the Suez canal) I now see has a 'ayn between the vowels. Presumably Edward Said's last name, in the original language, does too. So I guess this is one of those cases where the TV journalists really did know better and I was just a dope.]
11:38:49 PM [permalink] comment []
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