Remember when this was the great hope for the teahadists: According to a tweet from NBC News’ Jamie Novogrod, Bachmann responded to the recent raiding of the British embassy in Iran, by saying that if she was President, she would close down the U.S. embassy there. There’s just one problem: The U.S. has not had …
Archives for November 2011
Worthless
Someone at CNN just wasted hundreds of words to state that Rick Perry called the NH primaries the NH caucuses by mistake.
Absence of malice
In the comments to my post on establishment motivation, Steve writes: There is a maxim that one should never ascribe to malice what can equally well be attributed to ignorance. That seems to apply here. A lot of these people just don’t have the faintest clue about Social Security. That point is central to my …
Can animals commit suicide?
A touching story sent to me a few days ago by reader JS, in response to an ongoing Sullivan meme. Fletcher was dying, born with an enlarged heart my parents had been told. I’d driven home to my parents where he lived because I didn’t know what else to do. I’d brought Fletcher home from …
Where is my motivation?
I know nothing about psychology, but I’m guessing this proposition is hardly novel: people’s underlying motivations are often misunderstood, even (especially?) by themselves. This is why I can’t believe in rational markets, altruistic Galtians, or impartial pundits. Even if people believe they’re being rational, altruistic, or impartial, there’s a good chance that they’re not, and, …
Republican Anniversary of the Week: Iran-Contra
Now that reports of Iranians storming embassies indicate that our national newspapers of record have been permitted to shake up the normal somnolence of their readers, an optimist might wonder if any aspiring journo would dare to mention the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Iran-Contra scandal. Few Balloon-Juice readers are optimists, but it did surprise me …
Republican Anniversary of the Week: Iran-ContraPost + Comments (57)
In Which I Find Myself In Total (and Gobsmacked) Agreement With Jeffrey Goldberg
If you want to know why supporting Israel — in any meaningful sense of the term — has to be different from supporting Likud/Netanyahu, check this out from Goldberg. (If you don’t think that supporting Israel in any context is a good idea — well, we disagree, but you can still marvel at the Netanyahu …