BeldarBlog

Remember Gordon and Shughart

If you're an American and you don't know who Gary Gordon and Randy Shughart are, you should educate yourself about them.

If you're an American and you don't know how the circumstances came about in which they earned this country's highest honor, you should educate yourself about that.

Reading this would be a good way to perform that self-education.

When you know who Gordon and Shughart are and how they died, and when you've learned who's responsible for the lack of meaningful armor support and overall firepower on scene at that time, you should consider what lessons ought to be drawn from their heroic deaths — lessons that are incredibly relevant today, this week, this month, this year.

God bless and rest them, and all their comrades and forebears who bought with their precious blood the liberty we enjoy and so often take for granted. 

Recommended reading from blogger Tacitus

"Tacitus" runs a highly regarded right-of-center blog that generates a high volume of comments on anything and everything, and he is also a frequent and articulate commenter on various other blogs.  This post from him, entitled (misleadingly, I think) "Failure of Nerve," is gracefully written but painful to read.  He writes of his experiences as an Army officer and the complications caused by a long bout of clinical depression, but there's no "failure of nerve" in the history he relates — and it must have taken a huge amount of "nerve" to post something so personal and revealing.

I agree with his comments regarding the ugly term "chickenhawk" as used to describe pro-Bush administration supporters of the Battles for Afghanistan and Iraq in the War on Terrorism who have not themselves served in the military. 

I do not condemn or second-guess, but I very strongly disagree, with the last explanation he gives for why he wrote this post:

I am writing this because you should know. It's certainly not right that people who may take my opinion seriously on war-related matters not know the full background. Now you do.

I feel no such obligation to readers of this blog.  When and as I've thought it relevant, I've posted a fair amount of personal information about myself here, in one thread or another and on my biographical page.  I've done so because one's training, background, experience, and overall situation — viewed from a reader's perspective — can obviously affect one's credibility.  My history as a lawyer — and not just as a lawyer, but as a trial lawyer, from Texas, from a particular generation, and with a particular career path — very much shapes the topics that I write about.  But I don't view myself as having thereby authorized my readers to insist upon knowing everything about me.  There have been several occasions when I've refrained from blogging on topics because after thinking about them for a bit, I've decided they are just too danged personal for me to get into here.   

Knowing that Tacitus has a background that includes military service does affect my evaluation of his credibility when he gives opinions on war-related matters, but knowing that he also suffered through clinical depression certainly isn't necessary for my evaluation of his credibility, nor even particularly pertinent to that particular evaluation.  (His history with depression might be more relevant for purposes of evaluating opinions he expresses about depression or mental illnesses in general, but even then, I don't think he was ethically or morally required to reveal the personal details that he did.)

Another photographic smear attempt

In a post entitled "No Girls Allowed," and in a follow-up post entitled "'No Girls Allowed' Gets Legs," my young and liberal friends at Burnt Orange Report republished this photo of Dubya signing into law the "Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003."  Referring to the people in the photograph who are standing behind the President, they argue that it's "really important that we emphasize that the people behind banning a women's health care procedure are a bunch of old white men."  (They in turn credit this post on Taegan Goddard's Political Wire, a blog I hadn't seen before, for the original observation.)

Referring to a similar photo of the bill signing ceremony (one apparently taken from a different angle and cropped to display fewer legislators), New York Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg makes the same argument in a column in yesterday's "The Week in Review" section entitled "A Bill Signed, but It's Not Picture Perfect":

The ink from President Bush's signature was barely dry when the photograph of him signing the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act began circulating on the Internet. There he was, surrounded by the bill's Congressional sponsors:   a bevy of white men wearing dark suits and smiles.

Ms. Stolberg reports that when asked about the all-male photo, Claire Buchan, a "White House spokeswoman," said that "too many members of Congress, including women, attended the ceremony to invite all on stage with Mr. Bush."  As a result, according to Ms. Buchan, "only the 10 sponsors, all men, were invited" on-stage for the ceremony.  But reporter Stolberg also reports that others, especially "[liberal] advocacy groups [acting like] Kremlinologists," are skeptical of the "happenstance" explanation, and instead theorize that the all-male composition of the photo-op "was no accident."

Not to be left out, WaPo has a similar take on the subject:

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said she found the picture — "of a group of men celebrating depriving women of a medical procedure that could save their health and their lives" — "disconcerting."

I've written before about "photographic smears" — the deliberate, out-of-context use of a photograph that has a powerful visceral impact to make an argument that would dissolve and evanesce once the missing context is supplied.  In that post, I argued that when taken in context, a photograph of then-General now-candidate Wesley Clark wearing the hat of a Serbian war criminal fails to prove that Clark supported, or was even "soft on," war criminals; likewise, a photograph of Dubya accidentally dropping his dog in front of an astonished girls' softball team fails to prove that the President is cruel to animals.  The same is true of the fallacy that, according to the NYT column, liberals would like to use this bill-signing photo to promote:

David Sirota, spokesman for the Center for American Progress, theorized that the picture was no accident. "Karl Rove is too brilliant to allow a mistake like that," he said, referring to the president's senior adviser. "The question for them is, did they ask women to be in the picture and couldn't find any?"

Well, duh.  Of course they could have found women who support the statute being signed into law who would have gladly shared in the photo op.  For instance, about two minutes of Googling brought me to a screencap photo of Congresswomen Sue Myrick of North Carolina "leading debate on the House floor against Partial Birth Abortion."  As part of that debate she said,

As an original cosponsor of this legislation, I am very pleased to see this conference report reach the floor of the House of Representatives. I have been waiting for this day to come since 1995.    I am sure that President Bush is eagerly awaiting the opportunity to put an end to this horrific act of human violence by signing this legislation into law. Finally, we have a President in the White House who will not veto this monumental legislation.

There's probably no other issue on which Americans are so deeply conflicted; depending on how you phrase your questions, you can easily commission polls that "prove" any imaginable proposition regarding public opinion. 

But to suggest that no women are "pro-life" or "anti-abortion" is just stupid — as stupid as it'd be to assert that all women are "pro-life" or "anti-abortion."  Everyone who has half a brain — and yes, I know that's a loaded but very unfunny double entendre in this context — knows better than to think that all women or all men have a monolithic and uniform position on this statute, or on the abortion rights issue more generally.  The spectrum of beliefs in our society about abortion rights is extremely broad, and there are voters distributed all along it.  I'm not entirely sure where I myself am along that spectrum — although I've almost certainly moved rightward on it since I was in law school.  Nevertheless, the notion that only "old white man" support, or are responsible for passing, this particular statute is absolutely a nonstarter — and this photograph absolutely fails to establish anything of the sort.

I wish that when they trot out some photograph as "proof" of something, folks from both the left and the right of center would ask themselves "what racist or sexist stereotypes am I indulging in when I argue that this photograph shows ____."  Life is rarely that simple, friends and neighbors.  And when it comes to the abortion controversy, nothing is even remotely that simple.  To suggest otherwise is to insult your audience and the public as a whole.

UPDATE (Mon Dec 10):   Here's a photo from the White House's website that shows more folks, and yup, they are indeed white males. 

 

 

Ahoy there, "Master and Commander"!

I'm looking forward to watching "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World" when it's released this month.  I haven't yet read any of the historical novels by Patrick O'Brian on which this film is based, but the advance buzz is pretty favorable.  And it's been quite a while since the last big seafaring motion picture with a hunky Australian lead, 1984's The Bounty — a film that altogether lacked sea combat scenes and instead emphasized the bare-breasted South Pacific maidens swarming over the gunnels.

I've read somewhere that the secret of Russell Crowe's success is that he somehow manages to seem like enough of a regular fellow to avoid alienating (or generating homosexual-panic impulses within) his male viewers, while providing the looks and attitude that cause his female viewers to swoon.  I'm not quite sure how he pulls it off.  But for instance, in a puff piece in today's Houston Chronicle in which he opines that Aussies and Texans "share a sensibility" or a "certain viewpoint of the world" from "[growing] up in a place with that much room," he certainly scored big points with a male interviewer.  My leg feels like it's being tugged on a bit, though, when he claims to have bonded with then Lt-Gov. Rick Perry some years ago when Crowe's band was clearing paperwork hurdles to permit it to play in Austin.  But I suppose anything is possible.  And surely Crowe will be a more convincing Royal Navy captain than Johnny Depp was as a pirate.

Farewell to comments on BeldarBlog

I've very much enjoyed reading and often responding to the comments folks have left on BeldarBlog.

However, I'm weary of clipping comments that are off-topic — usually someone trying to use my bandwidth to sell \/14Gr4 or some such.

Accordingly, I've closed off the comments option on all past threads, and that will now be the default for new threads.  If there are particular topics that I especially want to invite comments on, I may leave those individual threads with open comments, at least for a few days, after I post them.  And anyone who'd like to engage in some dialog on anything I post is welcome to email me with your comments, which I may then append to the relevant thread. 

Also, I still have Trackbacks enabled, so if you have your own blog and want to comment on something I've posted, BeldarBlog can readily cross-reference to your post that way.

UPDATE (Mon Dec 10):   I'm only mildly surprised that Will Baude of Crescat Sententia has such a good memory.  Will's right, of course, in noting that I'm changing my position regarding comments, but he and I are still not on exactly the same wavelength about them.  Although I've changed my default setting to not permit comments, I may well leave particular threads open for comments, or indeed, explicitly invite them on a case-by-case basis.  And I continue to be a fan of the "trackback" procedure, which is a useful way of encouraging dialog among responsible bloggers (although it leaves readers who haven't made the jump into writing their own blogs in the lurch — if there's actually anyone still left in that category).  If Will had trackbacks enabled, for instance, I'd have pinged his post about my dispensing with comments — as I am in fact now doing with respect to Prof. Bainbridge's post on his blog in which he also noted my switch to no-comments-by-default.

Poker Night

I'm home safe & sound after the proverbial "Saturday night out with the boys playing poker."  The online games can be fun at places like Pokerstars or Truepoker, playing with either real or play money, and you can practice and learn a fair amount online. 

But for a genuine "blow off some steam" evening, nothing beats playing in a real, face-to-face game with folks who know enough to take the game semi-seriously and whose pride makes them competitive, but who aren't so intense about the game that they get bent out of shape if they don't win.  (And even if you're pretty good, there will be the nights when you don't win.)

I'm going to have to find an appropriate housewarming/thank-you gift for my colleague who hosted tonight at his new place .... Since he also has a new dog, maybe a doggie toy?  (Basset hounds being easier to buy for than lawyers, methinks, as a general proposition.)

And yes, this time I came out ahead by a nice margin, although IIRC that's the first clearly winning night I've had in the last few outtings.  A few extra bucks is nice to take home, but that wasn't the main point for anyone who played tonight.