As one might expect, Dave wrote another post about health care today, and it’s really outstanding.
It’s direct, it’s respectful of those who disagree, and it focuses rather than obfuscates the issue.
I still don’t agree with him, but this is the direction the discourse in this country needs to go.
Excellent post, Dave.
More of Dave’s “empathy”:
if you have a heart, and think about it, I don’t see how anyone could be against universal health care and still sleep at night.
Allow me to spill some knowledge on Mr. Winer.
First, it must be said that I am personally in favor of government-funded health care for children. They don’t have a choice in the matter, so we need to protect them from their parent’s poor choices.
There are at least three very reasonable arguments against “universal” health care.
Dave Winer on Twitter today:
davewiner: One of the reasons I am so angered by Jorn Barger’s annointing as the leader of the blogging movement is that he’s an anti-semite. about 1 hour ago
davewiner: Being against a race is anti-blogging, imho, which is about inclusion not spreading hate. I wonder if the people who promote him know this. about 1 hour ago
davewiner: To take something so good and apply it to such a bad purpose is tragic. about 1 hour ago
davewiner: Jorn blames jews for lots of stuff we’re not to blame for. Pretty classic race hate, the stuff we’ve been dealing with for hundreds of years about 1 hour ago
davewiner: @eastgate, ask NPR or the BBC, or other MSM outlets. They’re careful to say he coined the name, but I doubt if many catch the subtlety. about 1 hour ago
davewiner: Look, I don’t care if Barger uses his blog to spread hate. I object to the idea that I am following him somehow. It’s the other way around. about 1 hour ago
davewiner: The jew-hater is using the medium pioneered by a jew. How about that for irony. Missed totally by the MSM people because they’re lazy, imho. about 1 hour ago
davewiner: @krisguy, i didn’t say anthing about this for ten years. the msm ought to know who they’re promoting. obviously they haven’t read his blog. about 1 hour ago
Winer’s going deep into the wayback machine for this attack, referring to a scandal that arose in 2000 when Barger used the following two headlines on news stories about events in Israel and Palestine: “Is Judaism simply a religion of lawless racists?” followed by “Are Jews incapable of polite discourse? (Was: Response to my critics).” As the second headline demonstrates, a lot of people were mad as hell at Barger over the first headline.
None of this changes the fact that Barger coined the term weblog.
For someone who plays the anti-Semite card as hard as Winer, it’s interesting how he’s blogged about the same subject:
So Winer’s been an outspoken critic of Jews and Israel in the past, even to the point of speaking up for Hezbollah. As a Jew his criticism comes from a different place, but if you put his words in the mouth of a gentile, that person would be called a Jew hater.
Here’s where it gets weird. After Barger posed the questions that will forever tar him as an anti-Semite, Winer defended him: “I’m glad that Jorn Barger, who’s not Jewish (apparently) asked these questions. It’s reasonable to want to know if there’s a difference between being Jewish and being from Israel.”
Oy vey.
I’m not sure I follow the ‘logic’ of this post:
Bush and Cheney knew what was going to be in the NIE for months. That’s not a stretch. It’s completely unbelievable that they didn’t ask or weren’t told what was coming.
Alright, so another barely coherent political rant is incoming… let’s see what we’ve got:
Hoping to rush us to war. Then the NIE would come out and they’d say that no one knew that there was no nuclear program in Iran.
The only question is why they didn’t start the bombing.
Could it be that they gave the order and the military didn’t do it?
Okay, so ignoring the typical tactic of political argumentation: assume a premise that suits your case, assume that’s the only possibility, and then progress to your soapbox — we have this: the heads of the military ignored an order from the President because they didn’t feel like doing it.
Uh, what?
Oh, sure, if you’re a civilian this could work. Your boss tells you to do something and you don’t like it, so you decide to just ignore it. Happens all the time. Consequences range from nothing to losing your job (one that you probably didn’t like anyway). But we’re not talking about Userland, here, we’re talking about the military. Things aren’t quite so simple there. It’s, quite literally, against the law to not follow orders, and Dave wants us to believe that the President gave an order, a whole bunch of people chose not to follow it, and both (a) there were no consequences, and (b) we haven’t heard about it yet?
I mean, even if we start from Dave’s cherry-picked premise, the most likely reasoning is probably that getting congress to sanction the bombing would save his increasingly unpopular administration some headache when the NIE came out.
More interesting quotes from Dave:
The first speaker of the morning, Robert David Steele Vivas, was a Rush Limbaugh class idiot. I know Chris has some nutty libertarian ideas, I think he’ll outgrow them eventually.
I don’t know much about Robert David Steele Vivas I do know that his background makes it a near certainty that he is not an idiot. More likely, Dave just disagrees with his politics, and (as we’ve discussed before) Dave is somewhat known for his ability to simply ruin political discourse.
What boggles my mind is how people can find fault with libertarian (note the lower-case) ideas to the point that they’d call them “nutty.” In today’s world, I’d think we’d be MORE interested in freedoms, rights, and liberties… not less.
I guess this shouldn’t come as a shock to me, but I’m fairly certain that Dave has Bush Derangement Syndrome. He reminds me of all of those idiot conservatives who went on and on about moving to Canada if Clinton won re-election.
Anything out of the man’s mouth was greeted with invective and anger. It never really made sense to me. Now we’re seeing it to an even greater degree from the other side of the aisle with respect to President Bush. The difference in severity likely has it’s roots in the fact that Bush is a lot less centrist than Clinton was but I don’t think it’s any less silly or irrational. Take this run of Twitter updates from Dave.
9:47 :: Number of times I’ve said “fuck you” during the Bush press conference: 181.
9:50 :: 287
10:01 :: 1,297
10:04 :: 1,508
10:09 :: 4,743
10:21 :: I had to turn off the press conference. All the foul language was bumming me out.
The anger doesn’t shock me. After all, listening to someone you hate say things you disagree with and being powerless to respond can produce anger in anyone. What’s more disappointing, though, is that Dave was either a) so mad or b) so proud of his anger that he had to twitter how many times he hurled foul language at his television set.
I think we should have left screaming “fuck you” at people we didn’t like back in junior high school.
The problem with politics in our country today has nothing to do with who’s in charge and everything to do with how polarized the discussion is. As if anything could possibly be as black-and-white as Dave makes it.
People like Dave ruin discourse by saying things like this:
[T]he thought of more people dying, Americans and Iraqis, so [McCain] can hold on to a sliver of hope that he might win an election someday, suggests that he never really had any morals
Think of the litany of assumptions that Dave has to make to reach that conclusion.
Dave assumes that he knows the “truth”, that it’s “obvious” to everybody, and that anyone who doesn’t agree with him is wrong, stupid, or lying. This type of lunacy takes place on both the left and the right day-in and day-out.
I’d rather read a blogger who disagrees with me on every issue but understands that reasonable people can differ than one who agrees with me about everything but thinks that everyone who disagrees is stupid.
I don’t always disagree with Dave’s politics, but I always disagree with how he presents his opinion as The Truth and portrays everyone who disagrees with him as somehow blind to The Truth. Today, though, his post about Harry Reid’s comments is unintentionally humorous:
I don’t think there was any way for Reid to win by saying what he said.
But then we get this: “Reid is to be applauded…”
Sounds like he won with Dave… and probably anyone else who’s really set on hearing how Bush lost the war. Of course, how one can win or lose a war that’s not yet over is a little beyond me. It sounds a lot like the “Mission Accomplished” banner.
Personally, I’d rather hear about good, safe ways to get the troops home without causing a regional melt-down or; if your politics are slanted the other way; ideas to bring about success in Iraq… but that’s not really what partisans are about.
*sigh*
“How long before Bush connects what happened at Virginia Tech with the global war on terror?”
Apparently Dave’s need to bring Bush into the equation is much greater than Bush’s need to connect one senseless act of violence to some greater agenda. Looks like Bush is less of a partisan hack than Dave is. That’s a scary, scary thought.
I’m also bizarrely intriqued by Dave’s opinion that nothing but Iraq counts as news. Where does that come from?
I was not surprised when Dave came out in defense of a book about Israel and Palestine that he hasn’t read, but I was disappointed. He bases his support for the book not on reading and research, but on his opinion that “I don’t know what it is about Jews, but when it comes to Israel they lose all sense of perspective.” He might be the first anti-semitic Jew that I’ve ever come into contact with.
I guess the thing that’s hard for Dave to grasp is that his idol wrote a book and people who have been studying this thing, academically, for years are coming out of the woodwork to say that Carter has basically done a smear-piece on Israel by playing fast-and-loose with the facts. This is something that a lot of lefties, who support generally Palestine — though I have no idea why that correllation exists, really hate to see.
Have a look at this interview by NPR with Emory History Professor Ken Stein. He seems to have boat-loads of perspective. His thesis seems to be (paraphrasing) “Yes, Israel has done some horrible things, but they are combating a group that resorts to terrorism, and most of Israel’s worst behaviors are in response to that.”
Essentially, the argument that most critics of Carter’s book are making is that there’s enough blame to go around in that area of the world, and slanting the facts to make Israel look bad doesn’t really help anyone.