Month: February 2005

After this spittle-flecked screed (and it keeps going) from a commenter at Liberty & Power, resident AWC-basher Steven Horwitz adds the following Deep Thought:

As someone who thinks ALL foreign aid should disappear, including, of course, aid to Israel, I still believe there are criticisms of Israel that cross the line into anti-Semitism. Dershowitz’s definition of anti-Semitism with respect to Israel works for me: being opposed, even strongly opposed, to Israeli policy is not anti-Semitism. Holding Israel to standards that no other country is held to, or continually singling out Israel for problems [th]at are as bad or worse elsewhere, is.

First off, Dershowitz? Sure you want his representation, professor?

Anyway, who’s picking on Israel? I have never heard a single American of any stature – not even the shrillest critic of Zionism – ever suggest that the U.S. should aggress in any way against Israel. All my life (and especially the last four years), I have heard “respectable” folks call for the U.S. to bomb and/or invade practically every country on the planet – certainly every Arab country – yet I have never come across even a joking suggestion that Israel should be targeted. I’m sure Professor Horwitz can pull such a suggestion from his grievance clip file, but it certainly won’t bear the mark of Antiwar.com or the other libertarian organizations he and his pal smear as anti-Semitic.

So he can stop his whining about “singling out Israel” – if Israel’s singled out for anything, it’s American goodwill.

What libertarian critics of Israel have called for at most is an end to the subsidies, and there’s no crypto-Nazi logic behind such demands. If Israel comes up more often than other countries in critiques of foreign aid, it’s first and foremost because Israel gets more foreign aid than anybody else (see Figures 3 & 4). (Excluding the recent spike in “aid” to Iraq, which only cost the Iraqis tens of thousands of dead. As for longtime #2 recipient Egypt, you can go ahead and count them at least partly as an extension of the Israel budget. As the ultra-anti-Semitic Cato Institute put it in a 1986 report: “As part of the Camp David peace accords of 1978, the United States promised to give Egypt and Israel billions of dollars of aid to compensate them for forgoing the privilege of fighting each other.”)

Yes, I’m for abolishing foreign aid, period, as are all of the libertarians Horwitz hates. As I advised the Bush administration almost a year ago,

Kick Israel off of the dole.

There’s no reason to be nasty about it. You don’t have to single out Israel, nor should you. Simply announce an end to all foreign aid (as I recall, that used to be a major goal for conservatives). See ya, Egypt. So long, Uzbekistan. Later, Haiti. The handouts benefit neither them nor us.

And yes, I would applaud any reduction in foreign aid, including whatever pittance we give to Moldova or Fiji. But I’m not going to pretend that all foreign aid packages are equally inimical to my interests as an American citizen and taxpayer. For a domestic policy parallel, defunding the National Endowment for the Arts would be a step in the right direction, but defunding the Drug Enforcement Agency would be a giant leap. Obviously, the NEA bleeds taxpayers far less than the DEA. But much more important than immediate costs is blowback. The NEA litters the country with a few lousy sculptures, some boring shock photography, and a bunch of performance artists bathing in Hershey’s syrup. The DEA fuels drug-related violence, incarcerates thousands for victimless crimes, erodes the privacy of all, destroys the lives and livelihoods of people guilty only of being born in the wrong place, etc. If Congress abolishes the NEA, I’ll clap. If it abolishes the DEA, I’ll rejoice. Both are wasteful, stupid government programs, but they are not equivalent.

To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever claimed to attack the U.S. because of its support for Moldova or Fiji. President Bush has not assured the world that he will back a Moldovan preemptive strike against Russia, thereby putting U.S. foreign policy in foreign hands, as he has done with Israel. And while I’m sure there’s some pro-Fiji Laurent Murawiec out there agitating for the U.S. to annihilate Fiji’s enemies, he’s had no success thus far.

As for “holding Israel to standards that no other country is held to,” I haven’t even touched on Israel’s internal affairs – though I don’t dig how any self-professed libertarian can champion a hypersocialist theocracy – because it’s not necessary. Even if Ariel Sharon and all the settlers waiting to Yitzhak Rabin him have gilded wings and halos, and the Palestinians really are just a bunch of horned devils who arose ex nihilo in 1948, it’s not my country. Neither is France, despite my surname. I am under no moral obligation to subsidize (or suffer the consequences of subsidizing) either. Anyone who wants to contribute to the Israeli military is free to do so – hell, it’s tax-deductible! Just don’t force me to, don’t tell me it’s the same as subsidizing Fiji, and don’t call me an anti-Semite for noticing the difference.

And if Professor Horwitz truly thinks “ALL foreign aid should disappear, including, of course, aid to Israel,” I’d be pleased to update this post with any links in which he has advocated any such thing. My preliminary Google search turned up nothing. Surely that’s not just a stock caveat he tosses off before libeling others, is it?

I think Jonathan Schwarz of A Tiny Revolution has figured out the answer to The Great Perfume Atomizer Mystery.

I’m mad at Hunter S. Thompson. I’m mad at the way he lived his life, whacked out of his gourd, so to speak, on any chemical you can think of, and how he met his death, apparently a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. Either way, it was a waste. After becoming a counterculture icon in the 60s and 70s, Thompson faded into obscurity, where he has remained, locked away in a “compound” in Aspen, Colorado, for most of my lifetime. Reading his “Hey Rube” columns occasionally in the past few years, it was reasonably clear to me that Thompson was insane, and the most obvious culprit was drugs. It is literally impossible for most people to believe the amount of junk Thompson did in his adult life. In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Thompson writes:

The sporting editors had also given me $300 in cash, most of which was already spent on extremely dangerous drugs. The trunk of the car looked like a mobile police narcotics lab. We had two bags of grass, seventy – five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high – powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi – colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls.

Continue reading “Hunter S. Thompson, 1937-2005”

Radley Balko, one of the “credentialed bloggers” at CPAC (CPAC stands for Bush Cult-now you know) writes in response to Yglesias and Atrios expressing “alarm” over a speech given by Rep. Chris Cox. Cox’s remarks seem to indicate that he suffers under the Fox Delusion that “we” have found WMD in Iraq. Here’s the relevant paragraph in Balko’s transcript of Cox’s speech:

We continue to discover biological and chemical weapons and the facilities to make them inside of Iraq, and even more about their intended use, including that a plan to distribute sarin, and the lethal poison ricin — in the United States and Europe — was actively being pursued as late as March 2003. The facility where the weapons were being made also housed a large inventory of perfume atomizers of various shapes and sizes to mimic the brands on store shelves in the United States. It doesn’t take a wild imagination to understand the chilling implications. It does take imagination to combat it. And that’s why we’re lucky have an administration that gets it.

Radley says:

Seems the first clause in the first sentence of the last paragraph is the doozy. It’s the first I’ve heard of the perfume atomizers too, though I could very well have simply missed those stories. Iraq’s not my beat, so I don’t have the time to read up as thoroughly as I’d like.

Well, Iraq is my beat and I haven’t heard the perfume atomizer story. Maybe it was on Fox or Talon News or someone on FreeRepublic made it up – I must admit to having skipped alot of those “news” sources. Any readers have a clue where Cox got the atomizer story?

Quotable – Tom Knapp: Has it occurred to anyone that George W. Bush appointing a “national intelligence director” is sort of like Larry Flynt appointing a “national abstinence czar?”

Bruce Gagnon is reporting, on his blog “Organizing Notes”, that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has come out in favour of a long-term occupation of Iraq;

Hillary Clinton, who hopes to become president, is on the Sunday morning talk shows saying that our troops might be in Iraq for some time to come. “We’ve been in Korea for 50 years,” she said. “We are still in Okinawa,” she told the TV cameras. Right wing Sen Lindsay Graham (R-SC), sitting next to Hillary during the interview on Faze the Nation, chimed in that even though “Sen Clinton and I are on different ends of the political spectrum, we both agree that our troops will be here for a long time.

Gagnon goes on to say;

Hillary will try to rehabilitate herself with progressives by talking about social programs in the U.S. But how can we have social programs in the U.S. when we are spending our national treasury on an over bloated Pentagon and a disastrous war in Iraq?! How long will we be fouled by those “progressives” who claim that we can afford “guns and butter”?

I cannot confirm what Hillary said, since I have the Jon Stewart disease; I cannot watch punditry shows, where party hacks trade internal memorandum-inspired party-line talking points. It’s good work if you can get it, I suppose, but I will only consult these shows if I have a doctor-certified incurable case of insomnia (the shows do provide that one service, but I have to ask; is it worth the abyssal boredom inflicted on the unsuspecting audience?)
Nevertheless, one must wonder what anti-war Democrats will think of this sort of thing. HRC is making her big push for 2008, and this is part of it. The War Party, with its dual headlock on the two parties, must be appeased. I know what some of you anti-war Dems are thinking – she doesn’t really mean it; she’s just saying what she has to say at this point. Maybe, but I doubt it. Besides, how valuable can she be as a candidate if she can’t even stand against the War Party at this early date?