Taranto hits one out of the ballpark.
Quote of the Century
"There are two Americas--and millions of the people already distinguish between them.
One is the America of the imperialists--of the little clique of capitalists, landlords, and militarists who are threatening and terrifying the world. This is the America the people of the world hate and fear.
There is the other America--the America of the workers and farmers and the 'little people.' They constitute the great majority of the people. They do the work of the country. They revere its old democratic traditions--its old record of friendship for the people of other lands, in their struggles against kings and despots--its generous asylum once freely granted to the oppressed."
-- John Edwards, 2004? Wrong! That's a quote by one James P. Cannon at the 1948 convention of the commie "Socialist Workers Party."
BY JAMES TARANTO
Friday, July 9, 2004 2:19 p.m.
.......Kerry's Priorities
The Drudge Report notes this exchange from Larry King's interview with John Kerry last night:
King: Tom Ridge warned today about al Qaeda plans of a large-scale attack on the United States, didn't increase the--do you see any politics in this? What's your reaction?
Kerry: Well, I haven't been briefed yet, Larry. They have offered to brief me; I just haven't had time.
We can relate! After all, there are only so many hours in a day, and it takes a lot of time to run for president. Why just last night, Kerry not only talked to Larry but attended a fund-raising concert at New York's Radio City Music Hall, where, as the New York Post reports, Whoopi Goldberg "delivered an X-rated rant full of sexual innuendoes against President Bush":
Waving a bottle of wine, she fired off a stream of vulgar sexual wordplays on Bush's name in a riff about female genitalia, and boasted that she'd refused to let Team Kerry clear her material.
"I Xeroxed my behind and I folded it up in an envelope and I sent it back with a big kiss mark on because we're Democrats--we're not afraid to laugh," she said. . . .
Kerry could be seen laughing uproariously during part of Goldberg's tirade --and neither he nor Edwards voiced a single objection to its tone when they spoke to the crowd.
They hailed the fund-raiser as a great event.
Edwards said it was "a great honor" to be there and insisted, "This campaign will be a celebration of real American values."
You can understand why Kerry doesn't have time to worry about a little thing like terrorism. He's too busy celebrating "real American values."
EDWARDS LIED!!!!
"I think Iraq is the most serious and imminent threat to our country."--John Edwards, "CNN Late Edition," Feb. 24, 2002
Red Alert
It turns out "Let America be America again" isn't the Kedwards campaign's only communist-inspired slogan. John Edwards's claim that we are "two Americas" echoes a speech given by James P. Cannon to the 1948 convention of the Socialist Workers Party, a Trotskyite outfit:
There are two Americas--and millions of the people already distinguish between them.
One is the America of the imperialists--of the little clique of capitalists, landlords, and militarists who are threatening and terrifying the world. This is the America the people of the world hate and fear.
There is the other America--the America of the workers and farmers and the "little people." They constitute the great majority of the people. They do the work of the country. They revere its old democratic traditions--its old record of friendship for the people of other lands, in their struggles against kings and despots--its generous asylum once freely granted to the oppressed.
This is the America which must and will solve the world crisis--by taking power out of the hands of the little clique of exploiters and parasites, and establishing a government of workers and farmers. The workers' and farmers' government will immediately proceed to change things fundamentally--
Throw out the profit and rent hogs, and increase the living standards of the people who do the useful work.
Assure freedom and democratic rights to all, not forgetting those who are denied any semblance of them now.
Call back the truculent admirals from the seven seas--and ground the airplanes with their dangling bombs.
Hold out the hand of friendship and comradely help to the oppressed and hungry people in the world.
It really makes you wonder about the convention of coloring Republican states red.
Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow
Yesterday we noted that John Kerry, who by the way served in Vietnam for four months, said he is qualified to be the leader of the free world because "we have better hair." We're not sure why this is important, but in any case it may not be true.
Oh, we suppose a case could be made for John Edwards's mop over Dick Cheney's pate--if you want a Beatle as vice president. But a new poll from Wahl Clipper Corp., "an international industry leader in the manufacture of products for the professional beauty and barber salon trade, consumer personal care and animal grooming," finds that "the majority of Americans overwhelmingly voted for Bush's hair over Kerry's."
Of the 1,009 adults surveyed, the company's press release announces, 51% preferred the president's hair, vs. just 30% for Kerry's. Ten percent said "neither," and 9% didn't know.
Again, in our view this isn't terribly relevant to the choice of a president. But Kerry may be fooling himself if he thinks his stony visage will one day grace Mount Brushmore.
A Saddam Supporter
One of the most baneful ideas to come out of the 1960s is that it is acceptable for an American to root for his country's enemies in times of war ("Ho ho Ho Chi Minh, Ho Chi Minh is gonna win!"). Nowadays, some Americans root for the country's enemies even after we've won a war. A case in point is Los Angeles Times columnist Robert Scheer, who the other day penned a bizarre defense of the erstwhile dictator titled "Even a Dictator Is Entitled to Due Process."
Now, due process is all very well, and Alan Dershowitz made the case for due process on this very Web site the other day. But Scheer--who is best known for repeatedly and falsely claiming that the Bush administration provided financial aid to the Taliban before Sept. 11--objects to the substance of the charges against Saddam:
Has anyone noticed that the charges leveled last week against Saddam Hussein bore no relation to the reasons offered by President Bush for his preemptive invasion of Iraq? Not a word about Hussein being linked to terrorist attacks on the United States or having weapons of mass destruction that posed an imminent threat to our nation's security. . . .
It's a travesty, if you think about it.
Scheer doesn't mention that Saddam is charged with not only having weapons of mass destruction but using them to commit genocide against the Kurds. After World War II, no American defended Hitler, save for a few crackpot Holocaust deniers. How come the Los Angeles Times gives space to the World War IV equivalent of Holocaust deniers?
Talking Flags
Everyone else is linking to James Lileks's fisking of Michael Moore's recent piece in the Los Angeles Times, so we might as well do so too. The whole thing is worth reading, but we especially loved this hilarious bit:
Moore: "For too long now we have abandoned our flag to those who see it as a symbol of war and dominance, as a way to crush dissent at home. Flags are flying from the back of SUVs, rising high above car dealerships, plastering the windows of businesses and adorning paper bags from fast-food restaurants. But these flags are intended to send a message: 'You're either with us or you're against us,' 'Bring it on!' or 'Watch what you say, watch what you do.' "
Lileks: "I knew a paranoid schizophrenic once. He believed that the New York Times was sending him personal messages through its front-page headlines. He might also have believed that car-dealership flags were telling him to watch what he said."
Stephen Den Beste, meanwhile, has a fine essay on why Moore is good for the GOP (ellipsis in original):
Moore has planted his flag smacko in the middle of the Holy City of anti-Americanism. To defend that position, the LL's [loony left] will now vocally proclaim something many have long believed but avoided admitting: they hate America and everything it stands for. That is not a message that will sell well to the broad electorate. They will proclaim that they love this nation, but . . . and then make clear that they despise most of the people who live in it, and despise the very features of this nation that the majority of us see as its greatest virtues. And they will poison the leftist political position even for non-loonie leftists. (Since Moore's supporters constitute a significant base of support for the Democratic Party, they're going to represent an ongoing headache for the Kerry campaign by their antics. And that will force him to continue to equivocate about his position major issues, to avoid alienating them, and at the same time avoid alienating the broad electorate.)
People Who Should Go Away
Cynthia McKinney, the erstwhile congresswoman defeated in a primary two years ago after she made a series of anti-Semitic and otherwise inflammatory remarks, wants her seat back. The primary is July 20, and the seat is open, as McKinney's successor, Denise Majette, is making an ill-advised Senate run. McKinney's Web site tells her story of why she lost last time around:
Cynthia McKinney became one of the first Members of Congress to demand a thorough investigation into the events of September 11, 2001 and responsibly asked the question, "What did the Administration know and when did it know it about the events of September 11th?" she was vilified and targeted by Georgia and national Republicans. As a result of her thought-provoking question, an estimated 40,000 Republicans voted in the Democratic Primary to oust Cynthia. It is called "crossover" voting and her supporters have filed a lawsuit against this practice so that no voice of the people like Cynthia's will ever be silenced again in such an unfair electoral practice.
That's right, the "voice of the people" was silenced by . . . people voting!
Oh, She's White. Never Mind
A kerfuffle broke out in California after Richard Riordan, the state's secretary of education and a former Los Angeles mayor, made a stupid and rude comment to a little girl:
The conversation, videotaped by KEYT-TV, took place July 1. The girl, 6-year-old Isis D'Luciano, asked Riordan if he knew her name meant "Egyptian goddess."
Riordan replied, "It means stupid dirty girl."
After nervous laughter in the room, the girl again told Riordan the meaning of her name.
"Hey, that's nifty," he said.
A day later, Riordan issued a statement that said he "teased" the girl. "I immediately apologized to her, and I want to do so again for the misunderstanding," Riordan said.
Assemblyman Mervyn Dymally "scheduled a protest by civil rights organizations. . . . Dymally was quoted in the San Jose Mercury News Thursday saying the child was 'a little African-American girl. Would he (Riordan) have done that to a white girl?' "
It turns out, however, that Isis is a person of pallor--indeed, a blonde.
Dymally, who had issued a statement Wednesday calling Riordan's remark "outrageous and irresponsible," put out another statement yesterday, saying, "To err is human; to forgive divine":
"Race is not a factor in this issue," Dymally said in Thursday's statement, adding that Riordan had apologized a second time. "It is time for us to move on."
So being mean to a little black girl is an outrage against civil rights, but being mean to a little white girl is forgivable? The incident is a window into the absurdity of so much racial politics in America.
What Would Parents Do Without Blairite Thinktanks?
London's Guardian reports on a new study that finds that raising children is hard. That's not the only earth-shattering revelation:
According to the Blairite thinktank the Institute for Public Policy Research, it is parents of teenagers who have the hardest time. And they are feeling isolated and anxious, beset by "a yawning gap in support for those who seriously struggle to cope."
A majority of parents "worry about whether they are doing a good enough job," and 20% "find it difficult to discipline their teenage children." The study urges "greater support through the provision of affordable and accessible activities for teenagers" and "additional financial support" for "parents on the lowest incomes."
In other words, the welfare state will never be big enough until no one has to endure the ordinary struggles of life.
What Would Teens Do Without Experts?
"Experts: Porn Sites Distort Teens' Views on Sexuality"--headline, Internet Broadcasting Systems, July 9
Weapons of Math Instruction Again
Boy did we open a can of worms with our Wednesday quip about geometry. Our follow-up item yesterday brought another slew of responses. This from reader Dan Warrensford:
Not a tip, but a follow-up to the carping of the anal retentive mathematics weenies who lambasted you about the 3-4-5 triangle.
"Engineer" is my name; writing for pleasure is my game. However, I've slung enough slide rules and worked enough LaPlace transforms to know that the triangle caper was nothing more that a studied attempt to blind-side Jeb Bush. In my years of studying algebra, trigonometry, plane geometry, descriptive geometry, analytic geometry, differential and integral calculus, vector analysis, statistics and probability, etc., I never ran into a need to memorize the characteristics of the 3-4-5 triangle. It would be nice--but not necessary--to remember that the included angles are 90, 36.86989764584, and 53.13010166661 degrees, I suppose, but what would be the point of doing so?
The only respondent who made sense at all was the construction estimators, who noted that the 3-4-5 triangle is useful for roughing out corners of buildings and other structures. The saddest submittal was from an alleged mathematician, who wrote that the point of the exercise was to find the arctangents of 0.6 and 0.8. Nay, nay to that nattering, make-believe Newton; 'tis the arctangents of 0.75 (3/4) and 1.333333 (4/3) that one seeks to find, i.e., the angles whose tangents are 0.75 and 1.333333 (ad infinitum), to wit, 36.86989764584, and 53.13010166661, respectively.
Well, gee, this is so much fun it's hard to stop.
Warrensford would appear to agree with reader John Bartlett, whom we quoted yesterday as observing that "the 3-4-5 triangle question is about as useless as mammary glands on a boar." But not so fast, says reader Jami Lynn:
I would suggest to Mr. Bartlett that he stay in his boat, as he has no knowledge of animal science. The mammary glands of a boar have a very large purpose. As an animal scientist (bachelor's and master's degrees in production and meat science, respectively) and former hog farmer (4,000 head of hogs on the farm), I can say, as a scientist, that the number of mammary glands is very important, and it has been demonstrated that they are highly heritable and a good indicator of the mothering ability of the females sired by the boar. In my experience as a hog farmer, the number of mammary glands on the boar was also very important. The more the boar had, the more there were on sows he produced. This had a direct effect on the number of pigs surviving to market age and, thus, the profitability of the farm.
That saying and people's ignorance about the actual importance of the mammary glands has been one of my pet peeves over the years!
We also received numerous questions about why we refer to the author of this column in the first person plural, such as this one from reader David Brown:
No, Mr. Taranto, you're not a math nerd. You can't even count to 1. Is "James Taranto" an "I" or a "we"? You clearly use we to refer not only to your newsletter team or to the Journal, but to you yourself alone. But we is a plural noun unless you're the king or a nurse taking somebody's temperature.
How can youse guys do calculus or any math if you don't know the difference between one and more than one? The fact that a single unit is not the same as more than one unit is crucial to the whole numbering system. And there is no math without numbers.
Here's why we use we: Best of the Web Today was originally an unsigned column, so if we said I, it wouldn't have been clear to whom we were referring. We began affixing our name to the column in 2001 and decided to continue using the editorial we out of deference to tradition. Now, as our colleague Tunku Varadarajan puts it, we've got a whole sui generis arch style thing going, and how could we possibly give that up?
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