‘Copius Dissent’ Critiques Noam Chomsky & Michael Parenti

Noam Chomsky Critique

Michael Parenti Critique

‘Copius Dissent’ Critiques Noam Chomsky & Michael Parenti

Noam Chomsky Critique

Michael Parenti Critique

‘Copius Dissent’ Critiques Noam Chomsky & Michael Parenti

Noam Chomsky Critique

Michael Parenti Critique

‘Copius Dissent’ Critiques Noam Chomsky & Michael Parenti

Noam Chomsky Critique

Michael Parenti Critique

‘Copius Dissent’ Critiques Noam Chomsky & Michael Parenti

Noam Chomsky Critique

Michael Parenti Critique

‘Copius Dissent’ Critiques Noam Chomsky & Michael Parenti

Noam Chomsky Critique

Michael Parenti Critique

A Fisking of Obama the Orator

John Derbyshire friom the NRO has gotten a great fisking of the great orator Barak Hussein Obama.  Every pseech that Obama says is nothing more than  fluff and has no substance and when it does it reminds me of socialism. 

Gas Attack   [John Derbyshire]

I dunno, I must be missing a gene or two. Everybody, including even some conservatives, is telling me what a fine uplifting orator Barack Obama is. All I see is great gusts of hot air. When he says something that actually has any semantic content, either it is just false, or else it is naked socialism.

I was just looking through Obama’s latest oratorical masterpiece. It strikes me as obnoxious, where it is not just flatulent.

… we’ve got young people all across this country who have never had a reason to participate until now.

The "reason to participate," for people of any age, is the sense of citizenly duty. This sense didn’t exist before Obama showed up?

We’re up against the belief that it’s all right for lobbyists to dominate our government, that they are just part of the system in Washington.

But lobbyists are part of the system in Washington. It says so in the First Amendment: "… to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." Obama wants to repeal the First Amendment?

We’re up against the conventional thinking that says your ability to lead as president comes from longevity in Washington or proximity to the White House.

That’s the conventional thinking? So how did Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush get elected President? None of them had any "longevity in Washington" — not even as much as you, Senator. Sure, I understand, this is throwing some of Hillary’s stuff back at her, but it’s still nonsense.—NRO

Thomas Hearings Shame the Dems – not Vice Versa

Today I heard Rush cite this article in the Wall Street Journal On-line Opinion Journal feature "Best of the Web Today". It’s a great article by James Tarranto about the new trashing people are doing of Justice Thomas – claiming that he a bitter man for no reason.  Rush’s money quote: 

"They imagine him to be "angry" and "bitter" because he holds up a mirror to the darkness in their own souls." 

Here’s the whole thing – he’s got it nailed.

BY JAMES TARANTO
Thursday, October 4, 2007 2:51 p.m.

Here Is a Strange and Bitter Crop
In the coverage of and commentary about Justice Clarence Thomas’s new memoir, "My Grandfather’s Son" (buy it from the OpinionJournal bookstore), a predictable theme has emerged: that Justice Thomas is a "bitter" and "angry" man, who really has no reason to feel that way. After all, as a USA Today editorial sneers, "Are we meant to feel sympathy for the plight of a Yale-educated Supreme Court justice with enormous power, long summer holidays and seven-figure book contracts?"Copyright © 2007 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Perfectly encapsulating this attitude is a letter to the editor that appeared in yesterday’s New York Times (second letter):

If Justice Clarence Thomas had lost his bid in 1991 to be appointed to the Supreme Court as a result of Anita Hill’s testimony about his behavior as her supervisor, it might be understandable that he remembers that testimony with anger and bitterness. However, he was appointed in spite of Professor Hill’s allegations.

It seems that Justice Thomas has spent the last 16 years reliving that testimony and nurturing his wounds, as he reports in his memoir, "My Grandfather’s Son." Perhaps no one warned the Supreme Court nominee that those hearings would be political and acrimonious.

To Justice Thomas, I say: You received the appointment you sought. You are being "touchy" and overreacting to "slights." It is time to move on. The country needs you to focus your energy, attention and intelligence on the work of the Supreme Court.

Janet G. Puente
Newtown, Pa., Oct. 2, 2007

A point of personal privilege: We know Justice Thomas, having met him in 1993; and the caricature of him as "angry" and "bitter" is wildly at odds with our own experience. We have always found him to be warm, gracious and avuncular. The last time we saw him, at the Heritage Foundation on Monday, he was ebullient, smiling widely and laughing often. When we arrived, he greeted us with a vigorous handshake and a "Hey, buddy!" If he is bitter and angry, he certainly hides it well.

This is not to say that he has always been at peace with himself and the world. As a younger man, he went through periods of rage and confusion, as many intelligent and intense young men do. Yet his memoir–which ends in 1991, with his taking a seat on the Supreme Court–is not a lament but a story of struggle and redemption.

It has its bitter chapters, and the bitterest is Chapter 9, "Invitation to a Lynching," in which, in a last-ditch attempt to prevent Thomas’s appointment to the high court, a disgruntled former employee named Anita Hill reappears on the scene with tales of ribaldry. This was a bitter experience not, as USA Today and Janet Puente smugly suggest, because it was an effort to thwart Thomas’s ambitions, but because it was an attempt to destroy him personally. As Thomas testified on Oct. 11, 1991:

I think that this today is a travesty. I think that it is disgusting. I think that this hearing should never occur in America. This is a case in which this sleaze, this dirt was searched for by staffers of members of this committee, was then leaked to the media, and this committee and this body validated it and displayed it at prime time over our entire nation.

How would any member on this committee, any person in this room, or any person in this country would like sleaze said about him or her in this fashion? Or this dirt dredged up and this gossip and these lies displayed in this manner, how would any person like it?

The Supreme Court is not worth it. No job is worth it. I am not here for that. I am here for my name, my family, my life, and my integrity. I think something is dreadfully wrong with this country when any person, any person in this free country would be subjected to this.

This is not a closed room. There was an FBI investigation. This is not an opportunity to talk about difficult matters privately or in a closed environment. This is a circus. It’s a national disgrace.

And from my standpoint, as a black American, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree.

Justice Thomas says that Hill’s claims were false. We believe him because we know him to be a man of character and integrity. Also because there was no evidence to substantiate her claims, because (as National Review Online’s Matthew Franck points out) his corroborating witnesses were persuasive, and because, as we noted Tuesday, her statements since the release of his book reinforce his portrayal of her and undermine her credibility further.

You are under no obligation to believe him or to disbelieve her. But no one has suggested that her charges were substantial enough to hold up in court, even civil court. To be sure, Senate confirmation is a political proceeding, not a judicial one, so that the standard is political: not reasonable doubt or preponderance of the evidence but merely whether enough senators can be induced to switch their vote. This standard is so low as to be almost subterranean, but Hill failed to meet even it. Her testimony changed at least three votes; she would have needed three more.

Even by political standards, Justice Thomas was treated unjustly, for Hill’s charges never should have seen the light of day under the procedures designed to protect nominees from unsubstantiated accusations.

To our mind the most telling detail about Hill in Thomas’s book is something he mentions only in passing, on page 242: that when she approached the Judiciary Committee with her accusations, "she initially requested that her name be withheld from the members." Anonymous character assassination was too low a tactic even for Joe Biden, who said no.

Hill gave a confidential statement to the FBI, which conducted an investigation and presented the results to the committee. The charges became public not because senators, after due deliberation, decided they were worth airing, but because some rogue senator or staffer decided to leak them to reporters.

Just days before–and we’d completely forgotten about this, as it was overshadowed by the Hill circus–someone at the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, where Thomas then served, leaked a copy of a draft opinion Thomas had written. As he explains on page 246:

This breach of confidentiality was unprecedented. One of the hallmarks of the federal judiciary had always been the absolute secrecy in which it worked. Leaks were unthinkable–until now. The case in question involved preferences given to women by the Federal Communications Commission in awarding radio-station licenses, and it was clear that my opinion had been leaked by a person or persons who wanted to portray me as unsympathetic to women’s causes.

With this pair of leaks, Thomas’s political foes managed to violate the integrity of the FBI, the Senate and the D.C. Circuit–that is, of all three branches of government. This behavior was unethical, unconscionable and possibly criminal, and no one has ever been held to account for it.

Thomas’s opponents believed that the end justified the means, as a former foe tells the justice’s wife on page 232:

Years later a young woman who had worked for one of the many groups opposed to my nomination approached Virginia. "We didn’t think of your husband as human, and I’m sorry," she said, tears streaming down her face. "We thought that anything was justified because our access to abortions and sex was at risk." The woman went on to explain that she had subsequently had a religious conversion and now felt that it was her duty to apologize to us.

Now, those who remain unrepentant are reduced to arguing, pathetically, that Justice Thomas–and the rest of us–should countenance the means because they failed to realize the end.

They are uncomfortable being reminded of this travesty because they know it implicates them. In "On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the Twenty-First Century," Sherrilyn Ifill writes of the impunity with which people committed that atrocity:

The willingness of lynchers to act publicly is tremendously significant. It reflects the lynchers’ certainty that they would never face punishment for their acts. The willingness of the crowd to participate in lynching–to cheer, to yell their encouragement, or just to stand and watch without intervention–is perhaps equally terrible.

To be sure, the lynching of Clarence Thomas was only a figurative one, and he managed to slip the metaphorical noose. But we can understand why those who cheered his tormentors on would now feel put upon by his refusal to pretend the whole thing never happened. They imagine him to be "angry" and "bitter" because he holds up a mirror to the darkness in their own souls.

Bar and Hill
Is the District of Columbia Bar Exam one of the hardest, as Anita Hill, who not only passed the D.C. Bar but also graduated from Yale Law School, claims? Or is it one of the easiest, as several of our readers wrote us yesterday? This comment, from a reader who prefers not to be identified, may shed some light on the subject:

The D.C. Bar Exam had a very low pass rate. That does not mean it was necessarily harder than other bar exams (it’s actually not terribly challenging). The low pass rate is explained by the fact that those most likely to pass the exam didn’t have to take it.

Most members of the D.C. bar waived in, without having to take the exam, by virtue of doing well enough on the multistate. So the people actually sitting for the bar were those who hadn’t done well enough on the multistate to waive in. In other words, those who had to take the exam were already more likely to fail than the average candidate elsewhere.

There are a significant number of candidates who take the D.C. Bar Exam as their first exam, of course, and so don’t have a previous multistate score that would get them waived in. These candidates are more likely to be similar in ability to the average candidate elsewhere. But those who take the exam because they didn’t qualify for the waiver certainly skew the pass rate dramatically downward.

If this is right, then passing the D.C. Bar shows Anita Hill that she is smart in the same way that infant-mortality rates show Nicholas Kristof that America isn’t so great.

One complication in all this, though, is that–as even Media Matters acknowledges–Hillary Clinton failed the D.C. Bar. Although maybe that means Miss Hill is better qualified to be president than Mrs. Clinton!

Julia

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Newsbusters does a good Fisking on Newsweek

Newsbusters does a complete fisking of this Newsweek article about the Global Warming "deniers".   There is so much factually wrong with the article, it hard to tell if this is real article or a spoof. 

Newsweek Disgrace: ‘Global-Warming Deniers: A Well-Funded Machine’

By Noel Sheppard | August 5, 2007 – 13:43 ET

Manmade global warming alarmism took a disgraceful turn for the worse this weekend when Newsweek published a lengthy cover-story repeatedly calling skeptics "deniers" that are funded by oil companies and other industries with a vested interest in obfuscating the truth.

In fact, the piece several times suggested that publishing articles skeptical of man’s role in climate change is akin to misleading Americans about the dangers of smoking.

Despicably titled "Global-Warming Deniers: A Well-Funded Machine," the article painted a picture of an evil cabal whose goal is to thwart science at the detriment of the environment and the benefit of their wallets.

Worse still, the piece’s many authors painted every skeptical scientific report they referred to as being part of this cabal while including absolutely no historical temperature data to prove that today’s global temperatures are in any way abnormal.

Maybe most disingenuous, there wasn’t one word given to how much money corporations and entities with a vested interest in advancing the alarmism are spending, or who they are. Yet, in the very first paragraph, one of the main participants in this evil cabal was identified (emphasis added throughout):

As [Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-California)] left a meeting with the head of the international climate panel, however, a staffer had some news for her. A conservative think tank long funded by ExxonMobil, she told Boxer, had offered scientists $10,000 to write articles undercutting the new [IPCC] report and the computer-based climate models it is based on. "I realized," says Boxer, "there was a movement behind this that just wasn’t giving up."

But that was just the beginning:

Since the late 1980s, this well-coordinated, well-funded campaign by contrarian scientists, free-market think tanks and industry has created a paralyzing fog of doubt around climate change. Through advertisements, op-eds, lobbying and media attention, greenhouse doubters (they hate being called deniers) argued first that the world is not warming; measurements indicating otherwise are flawed, they said. Then they claimed that any warming is natural, not caused by human activities. Now they contend that the looming warming will be minuscule and harmless. "They patterned what they did after the tobacco industry," says former senator Tim Wirth, who spearheaded environmental issues as an under secretary of State in the Clinton administration. "Both figured, sow enough doubt, call the science uncertain and in dispute. That’s had a huge impact on both the public and Congress."

How utterly disgraceful. So, scientists all around the world who have devoted their lives and their careers to studying and writing about climate and related issues who don’t feel man can or is impacting such are akin to folks who misled the public about the potential dangers of cigarette smoking.

How disgusting. Frankly, these "journalists" should be asked by every skeptical scientist on the planet for an immediate apology.

Sadly, as one won’t likely be forthcoming, these folks were just getting warmed up with their disgraceful accusations:

"As soon as the scientific community began to come together on the science of climate change, the pushback began," says historian Naomi Oreskes of the University of California, San Diego. Individual companies and industry associations-representing petroleum, steel, autos and utilities, for instance-formed lobbying groups with names like the Global Climate Coalition and the Information Council on the Environment. ICE’s game plan called for enlisting greenhouse doubters to "reposition global warming as theory rather than fact," and to sow doubt about climate research just as cigarette makers had about smoking research.

Disgusting. But it gets worse as the authors then began to personally attack prominent skeptics:   

Read the whole thing here.  It is very good.

And be sure to call the Goracle if you find Manbearpig.

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H/T to Gateway Pundit

Elizabeth Hasselback doesn’t back down from Rosie on the View.