logomachy--1. A dispute
about words. 2. A dispute carried on in words only; a battle of words.
logomachon--1. One who argues about words.
2. A word warrior.
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Logomachon
Sen. Kennedy leaves behind a legacy of shame and irresponsibility, of always taking the easy, expedient way, from his cheating in college and his self-indulgence at Chappaquiddick to his abandonment of babes in the womb and his defaming and bullying of designated victims of his political colleagues. Although his Catholic upbringing is often cited as though that nominal and residual affiliation were informative and meaningful, the connection was only an embarrassment and scandal to the Church. Not once in his life did he ever defend a Catholic principle or even the Church itself from assault by its public enemies. One wonders what his sister Eunice thought of his fervent enthusiasm to spread abortion into every hospital and clinic in this country. One wonders what his brothers would have thought.
I remember watching him in 1972 chair a committee hearing on amnesty for draft dodgers. A witness from the Vietnam Veterans for a Just peace rebuked him for abandoning the cause of freedom in South Vietnam that his brother—and he at one time—had championed. Was it Emerson, Sen. Kennedy replied, who said "consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds"? Actually, Emerson said “a foolish consistency". The self-serving misquote is of a piece with the essential falsity of his character.
That falsity was further revealed in the way he dealt with his guilt—his inappropriate guilt—that his inherited affluence gave him advantages that other lacked. He sacrificed nothing to improve the lot and fortune of others. Instead he basked in the plaudits of the wicked for using his political influence to promote social schemes that debased their targets, impoverished the public forced to fund them, and corrupted the Constitutional character of our Republic. He justified himself by “trying to help people”, but whatever his averred intentions, in fact he devastated four generations of the black community, killed 45 million unborn infants, weakened our national security, and in innumerable ways assaulted the character of the American people by tempting where he did not force them to be less responsible for themselves, their families, and their communities.
We cannot know the state of another person's soul, but we can be sure that in whatever state of grace that Edward Kennedy died, the legacy of his political life is such that he shall regret it for all eternity.
Are there really, as we are told, 18,000 deaths among the uninsured that could have been prevented had the dear departed had employer-funded medical insurance?The “18,000 deaths per year because of a lack of insurance” claim is from a 2002 study.The estimate has recently been updated to 22,000.
Let’s think about this a little bit.
First:How many of those uninsured could not get insurance because government mandates for covered items made the cheapest policy unaffordable, while the states forbid buying insurance from states with less oppressively expensive mandates?And how many deaths occurred because government regulation, demanded by unions and liberals, kept them from getting a health savings account with a high deductible policy?(John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, by the way, suggests removing these restrictions in his infamous WSJ op-ed.)
The first government reform should be to get out of the way.
Second:Let’s put the 22,000 estimate in context.The crude US death rate is 8.38 per 1000 population.That means we would expect 377,100 deaths per year among the putative 45 million uninsured.So upwards of 94% of the uninsured who died did so for reasons utterly unrelated to insurance.There are about 2,574,400 deaths per year in the US.22,000 is 0.85% of 2,574,400.So Obama wants the government to take over (i.e., stifle) a productive, creative, vibrant, fast-growing sixth of the economy because he thinks it will fix less than 1% of the US annual mortality?And Obama thinks he knows how much the US should spend in toto for medicine, and the prices of all medical services, treatments, and medications!That’s not just insane; it’s megalomaniacal.
Which brings us to
Third:The 22,000 annual deaths caused by lack of insurance was not calculated by seeing whether the uninsured population had 22,000 more than the expected 377, 000 deaths per year.It was done statistically.This month PolitiFact published a correction to its affirmation of the 22,000 statistical estimate:When your statistical estimate adjusts “for a number of demographic and health factors,
such as status as a smoker and body mass index . . . the risk of subsequent mortality is no different for uninsured respondents than for those covered by employer-sponsored group insurance.In other words, once you compare death rates in an apples-to-apples fashion—comparing insured smokers to uninsured smokers, for instance—the likelihood of dying evens out. This, in turn, would mean that [the earlier] estimate of 18,000 deaths would drop essentially to zero.”
Poof! . . . goes your 22,000 deaths because of lack of insurance.This is just one more indication that the “completely-broken-health-care-system” hysteria is lying propaganda to cover a fascistic takeover of the US economy.
Ever on the cutting edge of culture, today Logomachon notes that along with all the defects identified by cineastes and historians, including Tom Hanks’ haircut, no one has mentioned that the movie seems to have made Audrey Tautou look like Laura Bush. (Not that there is anything wrong with that.) Audrey before DVC Which is Audrey, which Laura?
There is a strain of thought, if that is the word I want, that in America is peculiar to liberalism. At any signal success by national security forces, they warn us solemnly that in fighting our enemies we are in danger of becoming infected by them or just becoming them. It seems to be there all the time, perhaps because liberals are pretty much opposed to the U.S.’ fighting our enemies. Perhaps the word is cliché, or maybe prejudice.
Lee Siegel takes a ride on this trolley at The New Republic as he reflects, if that is the word I want, on the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi last week (Zarqawi's New Hostages). As is typical of non-Angry Left day-trippers, the monster down the track is evoked by projecting his own emotions upon the nation.
“[W]hy do I wince when I see the image of his death-face, bruised and distended, in all the papers and on all the airwaves?” he asks. Because we have “become inured to real images of death” he explains.
It's not just the face of this sick and sadistic man that you take in when you look at his lifeless features. It's the fact of violent death in general, beyond Zarqawi. As you look at the--truly obsessive--repetition of his image, you are not just enjoying the profound satisfaction of seeing evil defeated. You are experiencing a greater intimacy with the fact of killing . . .
Siegel is not only projecting his reactions on the rest of us, he is projecting his news-consumption habits on the vast majority of us who are not culture commentators and so do not have to read four newspapers and three news magazines before breakfast and obsessively surf news Web sites and cable channels. What struck me about the news coverage was how quickly the al-Zarqawi story disappeared or moved on.
The projection of his own guilty pleasure onto the general populace is even more obvious in his closing passage, which builds its case on utterly imaginary insights into the “national psyche”.
Zarqawi was the mastermind behind the beheadings of Nicholas Berg and other innocent victims of his rage, a rare savagery that sickened, horrified, and perhaps also fascinated Americans. The act of cutting off a person's head, an American person's head, traumatized the national psyche. That is one reason why the image of the dead Zarqawi, which consists of only the beheader's head, is so cathartic to (sic) so many people. [How many people? What people? No one I know.]
But the fanatically reiterated image is also a way for this rare savagery to creep through the back door into our vindicated psyches. Zarqawi made beheading real, and now this image of Zarqawi makes it familiar, and just, and ours. Eye for an eye is a militant Muslim thing; it is their thing. . . . Now, with Zarqawi's head in all the papers, on all the airwaves--on all the poles of our culture-- this insanely archaic type of justice is becoming ours. Believe me, I like seeing that image of bloody extinction, too. I feel worried, and ashamed.[emphasis added]
I think what Siegel really likes is pretending to flagellate himself because it shows how much more virtuous he is than the rest of us. His fervor carries him beyond coherence: What does he mean by “Zarqawi's head [is] on all the poles of our culture”? Oh, maybe he’s referring to the Philadelphia’s Symphony’s concert this weekend, where the stage was festooned with giant banners of Zarqawi’s bruised and distended mug.
I know the word for this, lots of words—horse-hockey, sentimental sludge, thumb-sucking blather—take your pick. Siegel has gone off to that special place that every liberals has, where he is purer and more sensitive and more virtuous than everyone else, and he can scold everyone else for how naughty they are.
I haven’t seen anyone comment on the fact that US special ops troops had Zarqawi’s safe house surrounded before the F-16s were called in. They could have tried to take him alive and so preserve computers and other items of intelligence value. Instead they flattened the house and occupants, and this seems to have been the plan all along; they held off doing it until the collateral damage could be minimized.
Why would they do that? Maybe they’ve figured out—after Gitmo, and Moussaoui, and “secret prison camps”, and Saddam’s trial—that Zarqawi in captivity would be almost as disruptive and more expensive than Zarqawi on the loose.
Arlen Specter is chairman of the Judiciary Committee. He’s all out of sorts because VP Cheney talked to Republican members of the committee without clearing it with him.
MSNBC reported: "Specter complained that Cheney was lobbying other GOP Judiciary Committee members to oppose efforts to subpoena phone company executives." He wrote Cheney a letter:
Specter said he was surprised that Cheney “sought to influence, really determine,” the committee’s actions without even calling first. “This was especially perplexing since we both attended the Republican senators caucus lunch yesterday,” Specter wrote, “and I walked directly in front of you on at least two occasions en route from the buffet to my table.”
Cheney replied, saying What’s the big deal. That’s how politics gets done. (Translation: Stuff it!)
Maybe Specter should remember the reputation he takes pride in:
The 73-year-old Specter is one of the Senate's best-known but least-liked members. . . .
Specter may not be the most unreliable GOP senator . . . but he is almost certainly the most harmful, because he is smart, ruthless, and influential.” . . .
[Lawmakers] regard Specter as one of the prickliest pols in Congress — a humorless man who is cold to colleagues and cruel to staff.” . . .
"There are two kinds of senators: Republicans who don't like Specter and Democrats who don't like Specter," says a former leadership aide. In a Washingtonian magazine survey, Hill staffers rated him the Senate's meanest member. This has given rise to one of Specter's nicknames: Snarlin’ Arlen.
An Aussie TV station recently got caught trying to make an interview in East Timor—and the general situation—look more dangerous that it is, and in the process demonstrated how the Western media have become the enemy of the West.
Jessica Rowe of Channel 9’s morning Today show was interviewing the General commanding the Australian peacekeepers there.
“I'm wondering how you feel about your safety given that you've got armed guards there standing behind you, armed soldiers," Rowe says. "Jessica, I feel quite safe, yes," Brigadier Slater says. "But not because I've got these armed soldiers behind me that were put there by your stage manager here to make it look good."
Not a problem, right? We just edit that out of the broadcast and no one will ever know.
Unless you are an Aussie TV station and your bitter rival gets the clip and releases it to your fellow ravening jackals of the media.
A h/t to the Belmont Club, where Wretchard notes that counter-insurgency theory downplays direct action against insurgents, because you can’t identify them. Instead, you attack them indirectly by snuffing out their local support system. Conversely, the insurgents can’t defeat Western military, so they too must act indirectly. The Channel 9 incident “suggests that since the media is part of the battlefield, the coverage of the media must be a vital part of” any theory of counter-insurgency.
