Moderated comments?

On my blog comments every now and then an interesting discussion breaks out -- look at the first eight comments for this post -- but then, like toxic mold, one of my right-wing crazies posts something stupid and the blackness descends.
And boy, am I ever getting sick of them. I must admit, I barely read anything they say, its so garbled and meaningless and rude and bigotted.
I can't understand why they bother pestering me -- why don't they start their own blog, or go read Red State or Malkin or Dead Animals or the Blogging Tories or something? I don't read those blogs precisely because I am not interested in anything these people have to say -- so why do they keep putting comments on just about every post I put up, trying to insult me and the commenters whose opinions I do value? The only conclusion I can reach is that they're a bunch of 15-year-old boys who think its "fun" to annoy the grown-ups -- that seems to be about the mental age, anyway, and that's about the level of their reasoning
Anyway, I just can't keep up with banning them -- I try, but I think they're using library machines or something, because they keep getting back, often using new names.
So should I move to "moderated" comments?
I would likely only be able to check comments two or three times a day, once in the morning and maybe twice in the evening, so it moderating the comments would really slow down the conversation, but should I try it? Would people prefer this?

Decline and fall of the American Empire

Shorter Billmon:

We're fallen and we can't get up.

Great line of the day

Kos alerts everyone to the Democratic message leading up to the congressional mid-terms:

"You -- the Voters -- have ONE DAY to hold the Bush Administration accountable for what's happened in Iraq, and here at home. ONE DAY -- election day. If you like the way things are going, vote Republican. If you think things need to change, VOTE DEMOCRATIC. Seize the day. It's your very last chance."

Great lines of the day

From a comment on Kos, I found this piece from The Week magazine -- a relatively new magazine (started in 2001) which gathers up opinions and news from around the world and presents a weekly "summary". Here's their summary about Katrina:

Hurricane Katrina was the downfall of the George W. Bush presidency, said Reymer Klüver in Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung. The massive storm that destroyed New Orleans and ravaged the Gulf Coast last year also “cost Bush his credibility as guarantor of the nation’s security.” After the 9/11 attacks, the president looked strong and forceful, addressing firefighters through a megaphone at the smoldering rubble of the World Trade Center. Frightened Americans needed to feel protected, and Bush told them he would keep them safe. But Katrina blew away that facade. “Americans realized that the government was still unprepared for a catastrophe.” Katrina was a natural disaster, but something similar could have happened if terrorists had blown up the levees, or attacked another major city. The president’s approval ratings plummeted, and they have never recovered.
Bush had a chance to salvage the situation, said Spain’s El Pais in an editorial. When he toured the disaster zone a few weeks after the storm, the president pledged that the government would launch “one of the largest reconstruction efforts the world has ever seen.” He promised to rebuild New Orleans better than ever—just as he promised to rebuild Iraq. But “as the Iraqis discovered, allocating money and using it effectively are two different things.” A full year after the hurricane, half the residents of New Orleans are still displaced. Demolition hasn’t even begun on the rotting houses in the mostly black Ninth Ward.
It’s just another in a long string of Bush failures, said Ray O’Hanlon in Northern Ireland’s Irish News. “The man who talks so much about missions and completing them is surrounded by the wreckage of uncompleted missions.” Iraq is the most obvious, of course, but let’s not forget Afghanistan, where the Taliban is resurgent and Osama bin Laden still walks free. Even the domestic initiatives Bush tried to push, such as immigration reform and Social Security reform, are dead in the water. The real shocker would be if he had actually delivered for New Orleans.
The blame for New Orleans’ misery is not Bush’s alone, said Andrew O’Hagan in Britain’s Daily Telegraph. American aid agencies are incompetent, if not actively corrupt. Having witnessed international relief operations in Sudan, Mozambique, and India, I can honestly say that the much maligned U.N. is far more effective—and far more caring—than American-run relief efforts. It took UNICEF less than a year to build new hospitals in Mozambique after a severe flood. Yet Gulf residents are still “wallowing in mud,” and the U.S. government simply shrugs. When I went out on patrol with National Guard troops after Katrina, “I was amazed by their inefficiency and unwillingness when it came to helping people.”
That indifferent attitude comes from the very top, said Britain’s The Mirror. The president is guilty of “criminal neglect” of the hurricane victims. “And if cowboy Bush is so callous toward U.S. citizens in his Mississippi backyard, God help Iraqis and all the others he vows to bomb into freedom.”

Lies

After reading all about The Path to 9/11 controversy for the last week, here's the only conclusion I can make:
Republicans and the religious right wanted 911 to be Clinton's fault. They really, really wanted Clinton to be to blame.
But there are no actual facts to support this assertion. There is nothing which Clinton or any of his people actually did or didn't do which would make anyone think he was to blame.
So they made it up. To put across the idea that Clinton was to blame, they had to lie. Sad.

Canada rejects Pope

The headline in the Globe newspaper version for this story is "Canada rejects God, says Pope" -- well, here's the reaction in our family: Canada rejects Pope, says God.
And by the way, Bennie -- if Catholics actually think their religious views are more important than the views of the electorate then I, like thousands of other Canadians, will never again vote for a Catholic.

Bush wants a Mulligan

Raw Story alerts us to this NYT story about the Bush administrations's 'reset the clock' strategy. They want to return to a "simpler time" apparently -- when the towers were still on fire and men were men and women were women and pigs is pigs and Osama was evil -- you know, the good old days when the American public created a "president" suit and shoehorned Bush into it.
Actually, I think they want to go further back than that.
They want a Mulligan on the last 60 years.
All this World War II talk means, I think, that Bush actually wants to go back to the good old days of World War II -- the ones after Normandy, of course -- when Allied troops were greeted with flowers in France and Belgium, and when the the concentration camps proved to the world for all time the evils of the Nazi regime, and when the German people quietly surrendured and then went back to work and rebuilt their country. And when everybody loved FDR and Churchill and praised them as liberators of the world.
You know, like it was supposed to be in Iraq.

Great lines of the day

James Wolcott: Irrationalizations:

Twenty, thirty years from now a new generation of right wingers and armchair warriors will be contending that we could have won in Iraq had it not been for Michael Moore and prissiness over torture. . . . Robb writes, '[T]he simplest explanation for the outcome in Iraq is that we were just beaten by a better opponent (the Israeli's seem to be getting this, why can't we?).' Because such knowledge cuts too deeply into the pride of the American psyche. It's also too painful to consider that the U.S. is beatable. We'd rather believe that we beat ourselves, and then scapegoat liberals as the losers who made us lose.

Could it be possible that the whole Iraq mess might make the United States a more mature nation? Could a national discussion of lessons learned in Iraq result in a realistic assessment of America's weaknesses as well as strengths? Could their political leadership start thinking strategically about global problems instead of going off half-cocked? Could they actually become a nation that acts like most of the other nations on the planet already do, except for North Korea and Zimbabwe?
Naaaaaahhh!

Osama Bin Hollywood

Its just such a dull story, really, all about how a bunch of losers kill 3,000 people one sunny morning. Ya just GOTTA do SOMETHING to sex it up.
It needs yer 'narrative arc', see -- heroes and villians and drama and conflict and turning points and setbacks and tension and good guys betrayed and all that.
But I'm not sure whether turning Sandy Berger and Madeline Albright and the Washington Post into villians, and then making Bill Clinton into a coward, will be enough, really.

We've gone beyond "docu-drama" and "mocku-mentary" to reach the level of "info-tainment" -- by next week we'll be reading about how ABC has written Jason Bourne into the script to stalk Bin Laden.
Over at Hullabaloo they're promoting the 9/11 action figures give-away cross-promotion. Corrente's farmer writes about how excited all the Kewl Kids are:

I like pretty happy endings as much as the next history action movie fan. After the docu-thriller-movie-mini-series-event is over - whenever that is - me and Michael Ledeen and David Horowitz and Peggy Noonan are gonna hop in Peg's Nassau County Seclusion-3D Urban Camo-Pattern Hummer with UTV Floor Mount Kalashnikov Assault Weapon Rack and heated Sheepskin Rumble Seat and thunder on down the parkway to the local All-American drive through fast food slop-shoot for some Happy History Meals and our free ABC-Disney United Front Supreme Council for the Defense of the Motherland moveable mujahidin freedom fighter action hero figure sets which come free with each patriotic ABC/Disney Happy History Meal purchase.
You can bet your liberal ass on it . . .
if you want to get the whole Northern Alliance (United Front) moveable mujahidin action hero set you can just visit your local participating fast food All-american franchise each night following the ABC TV mini-series and get more action figures and then just keep coming back until you have all the action figures you want for your very own. Collect them all! The complete set! . . .

Can this really be true, you ask? How could ABC and Disney be so crude and cruel and crass as to turn 9/11 into a marketing opportunity? Well, who cares whether its actually true or not? Its fun! And its sexy!
The farmer continues:

... my historical pre-emptive recollections of the people and events and "overarching moments" I describe above, which follow the ABC-Disney documentary "the Path to 911," are completely true and accurate as I see them in a composite pre-emptive retrospective documatary dramatic info-tainment context.

So, that's OK then.

Oops

Non-sequitur:

Brave little boy

There are so many Katrina stories where we never find out what happened -- like, did that man and his grandchildren make it, the one who was interviewed by the CNN reporter and who told her about his wife drowning and calling to him to take care of the grandchildren as she was swept away? What about that little boy who cried so hard because they didn't allow him to take his dog on the bus? What happened to the teenager who commandeered the school bus and drove a bunch of people to Houston and they were talking about charging him with theft? What about that little group of survivors hiding in an apartment with their dogs who talked to the CTV reporter? Did that boy from the Convention Centre make it, the one who became a one-man publicist for the people stuck there?
But here's one where we find out some good news, thanks to Digby:

Sept. 5, 2005: In the chaos that was Causeway Boulevard, this group of refugees stood out: a 6-year-old boy walking down the road, holding a 5-month-old, surrounded by five toddlers who followed him around as if he were their leader.
They were holding hands. Three of the children were about 2 years old, and one was wearing only diapers. A 3-year-old girl, who wore colorful barrettes on the ends of her braids, had her 14-month-old brother in tow. The 6-year-old spoke for all of them, and he told rescuers his name was Deamonte Love.
...Deamonte volunteered his vital statistics. He said his father was tall and his mother was short. He gave his address, his phone number and the name of his elementary school.
He said that the 5-month-old was his brother, Darynael, and that two others were his cousins, Tyreek and Zoria. The other three lived in his apartment building. . . . Deamonte began to give more details to Derrick Robertson, a 27-year-old Big Buddy mentor: How he saw his mother cry when he was loaded onto the helicopter. How he promised her he'd take care of his little brother.
Thankfully, the mothers have now been found and they've all been reunited. Late Saturday night, they found Deamonte's mother, who was in a shelter in San Antonio along with the four mothers of the other five children. Catrina Williams, 26, saw her children's pictures on a website set up over the weekend by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. By Sunday, a private plane from Angel Flight was waiting to take the children to Texas.
But, how they got separated is every parent's nightmare: The helicopter came and there wasn't room for all. The helicopter personnel told the mothers to put the kids on board and they would return for the mothers.
The helicopter never returned. The kids went flown to Baton Rouge, and the parents ended up in Texas.

Digby writes the update:

Sept. 5, 2006: Here's the kid last February, doing well in the first grade in San Antonio.

February 2006: Alan Rochkus, principal of Harmony Hills Elementary School, watches Demonte Love, first-grader, complete a math puzzle while a KSAT-12 photojournalist films him. Love rescued six children, ranging in age from 5 months to three years, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, La. He received a Trumpet Award for his heroism.

Digby writes:

It does your heart good, doesn't it?

Yes. Yes, it does.

Great lines of the day

It will be interesting to see whether any other media figures stand up to be counted the way Keith Olbermann is doing.
The Bush administration is attacking the media to get them to shut up about the Iraq war, spying on Americans without warrants, Guantanamo, the Delay/Cunningham scandals, the Katrina chaos, the housing bubble bursting, sky-high oil prices, etc. etc.
Olbermann is dishing it right back at them:

. . . the President quoted a purported Osama Bin Laden letter that spoke of launching, “a media campaign to create a wedge between the American people and their government.”
Make no mistake here—the intent of that is to get us to confuse the psychotic scheming of an international terrorist, with that familiar bogeyman of the right, the “media.”
The President and the Vice President and others have often attacked freedom of speech, and freedom of dissent, and freedom of the press.
Now, Mr. Bush has signaled that his unparalleled and unprincipled attack on reporting has a new and venomous side angle: The attempt to link, by the simple expediency of one word—“media”—the honest, patriotic, and indeed vital questions and questioning from American reporters, with the evil of Al-Qaeda propaganda.
That linkage is more than just indefensible. It is un-American . . .
Whatever the true nature of al Qaeda and other international terrorist threats, to ceaselessly compare them to the Nazi State of Germany serves only to embolden them.
More over, Mr. Bush, you are accomplishing in part what Osama Bin Laden and others seek—a fearful American populace, easily manipulated, and willing to throw away any measure of restraint, any loyalty to our own ideals and freedoms, for the comforting illusion of safety.
It thus becomes necessary to remind the President that his administration’s recent Nazi “kick” is an awful and cynical thing.
And it becomes necessary to reach back into our history, for yet another quote, from yet another time and to ask it of Mr. Bush: “Have you no sense of decency, sir?”

And the funniest dog video

Again, so far...

Funniest cat video ever made

So far, at least.

Which way will it go?

By happenstance, Juan Cole and James Wolcott are one after the other on my blogroll. So I click on Woldott and read this:

. . . despite all of the Cheneyesque bluster, the Bush administration is pursuing the diplomatic route with Iran. To the dismay of the hard nosers, Bush is also reeling back his use of "Islamic fascists", which will be interpreted as a capitulation to political correctness. You even have Rumself whining that his recent appeasement slur was taken "out of context," and calling for "constructive" dialogue regarding the situation in Iraq. And then there's the happy novelty of Rudy Giuliani blowing the whistle and calling a foul on "partisan bickering", which will not endear him to the more strident dickheads in his party.
There has been a major shift in the mood climate, one which the War Party and its bloggers are resisting at the top of their lungs. But resistance is futile. As John Robb writes in an important post at Global Guerrillas, "Playing at War", we're not going to the get the grand, conclusive World War III (or IV) that same neocon ideologues crave. Conflict is being ratcheted down, dispersed . . . What we're hearing from pundits, bloggers, and likeminded belligerents this August is a baying to a false God, a nostalgic need for motivational clarity and a macho yearning for deliverance that the facts on the ground will deny them. Their commando belts tied up in knots, their umbrellas unfolded, they can turn on Bush, or on Condi Rice (as Richard Perle has done), but who can they turn to? Nobody. That's why they're egging each other on, flexing their biceps, and clinging to Mark Steyn for warmth. It's the only way to hold on to their fading relevance.

Whew! Well, that's a relief. But then I click to Juan Cole and read this:

The Times of London details Israeli planning for a war with Syria and Iran. Richard Perle, who sold the American people the fantasy that the US could march into Iraq, install corrupt businessman Ahmad Chalabi in power, and would be greeted with garlands of flowers, is disappointed that Israel did not attack Syria during its recent war on Lebanon. Hey, Perle, in case you didn't notice, the Israeli military did not do so great against 5,000 Hizbullah militiamen. So you wanted them to compound the failure by widening the war? The man never met a war he didn't love and never let reality interfere with his power fantasies. If there were no arms industry, people like that would never get to be on television.Note especially the ending grafs of the article:

Advocates of political engagement believe a war with Syria could unleash Islamic fundamentalist terror in what has hitherto been a stable dictatorship. Some voices in the Pentagon are not impressed by that argument.“If Syria spirals into chaos, at least they’ll be taking on each other rather than heading for Jerusalem,” said one insider.

Why assume that the Syrians would stay busy with each other? If the Muslim Brotherhood managed to come to power, backed by the vast Sunni majority in the country, it could fairly quickly establish order and begin concentrating on getting back the Golan Heights and "liberating" "Palestine". The Syrian MB would be even closer to Hamas than the Syrian Baath. It would also be closer to the Salafi Jihadis fighting in Iraq. And it might well angle to overthrow the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Israel might end up facing a massive, militant, fundamentalist Sunni state, aiming to unify all the Sunni Arabs in the neighborhood for a final drive against Israel, using Hizbullah guerrilla tactics and rockets and missiles. Sunni fundamentalists increasingly see themselves as caught in a pincers between Israel/the US on the one side, and Iran/the Shiites on the other, and would have lots of incentive to create a united front.You wonder if that phrase, “If Syria spirals into chaos, at least they’ll be taking on each other rather than heading for Jerusalem,” is how the Neoconservatives in the Pentagon feel about what has happened in Iraq. It is an astonishingly shortsighted perspective. And when did the US Pentagon begin caring who rules Jerusalem?

I wonder which will turn out to be right? As much as I hope it is Wolcott, I'm more afraid it will be Cole.