Of those wishy-washy people who could not choose between Kerry and Bush and thus were in danger of an eternity in Limbo:
Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: A Weblog: Limbo: And after [the banner] there came so long a train
Of people: I never would have thought
That Death had ever undone so many...
Then I understood, and I knew,
That this was the place of the cowardly wretches
Hateful to both God and to his enemies...
Daniel Drezner has escaped:
danieldrezner.com :: Daniel W. Drezner :: I've made up my mind: So I'm voting for Kerry.... [M]y anger at Bush for the number of Mongolian cluster-f**ks this administration was discovered to have made in the planning process in the run-up to Iraq was compounded by the even greater number of cluster-f**ks the administration made in the six months after the invasion, topped off by George W. Bush's decision not to fire the clusterf**ks in the civilian DoD leadershop that insisted over the past two years that not a lot of troops were needed in the Iraqi theater of operations.... Reading the New York Times recap of the postwar planning by Michael Gordon just brought all of this back to the surface. The failure by Rumsfeld and his subordinates to comprehend that occupation and statebuilding requires different resources, strategies and tactics than warfighting boggles my mind:
Military aides on the National Security Council prepared a confidential briefing... that examined what previous nation-building efforts had required.... But it underscored a basic principle well known to military planners: However many forces might be required to defeat the foe, maintaining security afterward was determined by an entirely different set of calculations, including the population, the scope of the terrain and the necessary tasks. If the United States and its allies wanted to maintain the same ratio of peacekeepers to population as it had in Kosovo, the briefing said, they would have to station 480,000 troops in Iraq.... More forces generally are required to control countries with large urban populations. The briefing pointed out that three-quarters of Iraq's population lived in urban areas. In Bosnia and Kosovo, city dwellers made up half of the population. In Afghanistan, it was only 18 percent....
Maybe, maybe someone could give administration officials a pass in making that assumption. But once they realized that the Afghanistan analogy wasn't working, they never questioned their assumptions.... One other thing -- reading the Gordon article, what's stunning is that the administration never solved this dilemma: "Rumsfeld, and the rest of the Bush administration's foreign policy team, face a clear choice. It can outsource peacekeeping functions to the United Nations or close allies, at the cost of some constraints on foreign policy implementation. It can minimize the U.N. role and develop/train its own peacekeeping force. Or it can do neither and run into trouble down the road...."
But Jonathan Rauch is still in peril. Advising his readers whether to choose Bush or Kerry, he writes:
Social Studies (10/22/2004): Most disturbing of all is that, with only days to go before the election, I still don't feel I have a handle on what [Kerry] is really all about.... Bush is a dynamic leader, but he lacks what a president most needs: guardrails. Kerry has guardrails, but where is the road? A dispiriting choice. What's a Swimmer to do? It helps to remember that the presidency matters a lot, but not quite as much as most people think. And that muddling through usually works out passably well. And that it is always darkest before the dawn, and you'll never walk alone, and tomorrow is another day. Think on that. And have a Prozac.
That Jonathan Rauch, sitting in the middle of Washington, D.C. at the National Journal, has not seen enough of Kerry in action over the twenty years that he has been senator--and cannot find enough people he trusts who know Kerry--to "have a handle on what [Kerry] is all about" is a devastating indictment of how our elite press corps spends its time. Kerry's ability to work with open-minded Republicans like McCain, Lugar, and Hagel; Kerry's record as a deficit hawk working hard to strengthen the safety net; Kerry's issue advisors--Rubin, Altman, Tyson, and Blinder on Treasury issues, Bianchi and Thorpe on HHS issues, Beers and Holbrooke on security issues--are picked from those who have proved themselves highly competent and effective; Kerry's successes as a boss of prosecuting lawyers, as an investigator of BCCI and POWs, as a member of the Democratic senate caucus--these tell us who Kerry is: a Massachusetts liberal believing in fiscal prudence and an active government, understanding both soft and hard power, and personally brave--both in Vietnam and after, in his courage to say what he believed needed to be said about our war in Vietnam. He's one of the thousand or so people in America best-qualified to be president.
And Bush? As Carlyle Group Managing Director David Rubenstein puts it, "...if you said to me, name 25 million people who would maybe be President of the United States, he wouldn't have been in that category." As Daniel Davies asked--and never received any answer--back at the start of 2003:
D-squared Digest: Can anyone... give me one single example of something with the following three characteristics: (1) It is a policy initiative of the current Bush administration. (2) It was significant enough in scale that I'd have heard of it (at a pinch, that I should have heard of it). (3)It wasn't in some important way completely f***** up during the execution?
The choice between a normal, highly-competent Democrat and George W. Bush--a man and administration of total reality-defying incompetence whose electoral strategy consists of trying to gay-bash his way to a narrow electoral-vote victory--should be an easy one.
Posted by DeLong at October 23, 2004 07:20 PM | TrackBackYes, but what is the weighted factor of denial in many people's mental equations? Self-delusion? What about long-term systematic disinformation via television?
As rational utility maximization is gamed by Madison Ave, so is rational presidential choice.
Best,
D
It's not exactly a gay-bashing electoral strategy. The strategy is broader than that: it's a strategy of fear -- fear of terrorists, fear of Muslims, fear of an attack, fear of gays, fear of liberals. As Mark Kleiman and others have so ably put it, Bush's motto is: "We have nothing to offer but fear itself."
Posted by: PaulB at October 23, 2004 07:43 PMSome people have a primary existential commitment to been non-liberal, non-Democrats. Negative identity, defining yourself as the non-Other.
I could feel sorry for some of those people if I were a different person, but actually I hate the moron shits.
BTW, is the word "clusterfuck" forbidden in some dialects of English? I scarecely could get through the day without it.
Posted by: Zizka at October 23, 2004 07:46 PMWhat's a Swimmer to do?
The mixed metaphors kill me. I get this image of Rauch trying to swim in the road and getting run over by an SUV.
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Posted by: Online Casino Games at October 23, 2004 09:09 PMOff topic, but I am concerned. There is the start of a Sun-spot minimum, this is usually accompanied by cooler temperatures, and heating oil supplies are low, why is nobody talking about it?
Posted by: old ari at October 23, 2004 09:10 PMAh, yes Zizka: I forgot your hypothesis, presented elsewhere. I like it - making the bad identity choice factor.
D
Posted by: Dano at October 23, 2004 09:10 PMThere are people, our press corp among them who have led a sheltered existence. They have never lived in a place where government did not function. If one comes from the POV that what the government does makes no difference in the lives of ordinary people, then I suppose one could view Bush as just another player in the latest TV reality game show. Real people are dying every day because of these clowns. Too many people have a stake in the outcome to have our country run by the winners of a frat boy popularity contest. Results matter.
Posted by: bakho at October 23, 2004 09:55 PMDon't be a sap, Brad! The NeoCons never had any intention of rebuilding Iraq or turning over the control of its economy to the Iraqi people. How can you look at the last few years and then presume that?
Besides, Don Rumsfeld is a founding member of PNAC, as is Dick Cheney. They're golden. George Bush, on the other hand, is only their straw-dog, and he knows that his Daddy won't rescue him.
Business is, after all, business.
So soon as the vote is over, and Bush-Cheney are "re-elected", the NeoCon's will go after Iran, using Israel as a proxy to rattle their sabers, while US covertly launches cruise missiles under their fighter attack. Who'd know? If only they had the UN (CIA) weapons inspectors to secretly log GPS coordinates of those Iranian targets! So they'll carpet bomb the ragheads! It's all so transparent if you backstory on mil history.
What you need to worry about more than Rummy's misjudged "incompetence" is global interference in oil and gas futures.
"The rally in heating oil has also spilled over into natural gas futures, which soared 50.3 cents Friday to $8.20 per TCF. (6%!) Natural gas futures are now about 67 percent higher than a year ago, even though analysts agree that supplies of this mostly-domestic produced fuel are ******ample******."
In other words, the market is being manipulated to strangle the US economy. Economic terrorism by the Saudis, the only family rich enough and close-knit enough to pull off a Huntesque heist! This is their October Surprise, the second 9/11!
Neither Bush nor Kerry has proposed a cessation of any futures trading in essential commodities except by legitimate domestic producers and refiners who can take actual physical delivery. Moral cowards.
Which merely proves Bush and Kerry are both Corporate shills for sultanic vampiroyals, no matter how you cut it. Red Army, Blue Army, it's all the same centrist socialist Corporate in sychophancy to the global elites. Business is, after all, business.
God may hold all undecided voters in limbo, but there is a special place in hell reserved for those who vote Republican or Democrat without following the money trail laid out before them.
It's a deliberate cabal. Connect the damn dots!
Posted by: Lash Marks at October 23, 2004 10:04 PMYeah, what ever happened to all those billions that Saddam had stashed in his Baghdad banks from UN oil-for-food skimoffs? Whatever happened to those 20,000-odd antiquities and rare ancient manuscripts looted in the first few days of war, by US-uniformed Special Service operatives? Why were all the contracts and legal land documents in Iraq either confiscated or destroyed? Why did they spare the grandest palace for the interim Iraqi Council formed exclusively of old foreign exiles loyal only to the US Republican Estate?
And whatever happened to all those coke billions Bush Sr stole from Noriega's Panamanian banks?
And what about the Nazi gold, and the Jewish life insurance accounts the Swiss plundered?
What about the Peace Dividend, and $100 BILLION in big bills printed up before the Y2K non-event?
Maybe they all got raptured off to Jesus, eh?
Absent these 1,100 lost kids of ours, and 6,000+ maimed and in some cases being sent back to Iraq on crutches and casts (true story), and another several 1,000's IRR's who have already done two tours and are being forced back in again, what ever happened to rebuilding Iraq, and what ever happened to $18B we paid Halliburton to do so? And why would anyone still believe that we are still going to rebuild it?
Aren't any of you Brad blog readers accountants? Don't any of you have a slightest comprehension of what Corporate looting looks like, both in Iraq and in the US, where a $200 BILLION surplus has become instead a $450 BILLION deficit, and another $535 BILLION stolen from Social Security to pay for the continued looting of Iraq by IGC, and the Executive snorting up the Federal Civil Service Pension Fund until after the elections when they'll take it out of our hides instead?
Do you think the Rape of America simply stopped because the SEC finally indicted Kenny Lay? Do you really believe that Mr. Alawi will receive a true mandate of the people, and then nationalize Iraq back again from the NeoCon rulers he serves?
Do you really think Kerry will be anymore than a lameduck President captive to a NeoCon Congress?
What kind of crack are you smoking in Bezerkly?
The solution? Institute a lottery system for all political elections. One candidate, one ticket. No more PAC's, no more negative TV ads, no more lying liars. Just roll the wheel, and "elect" the winner. Think of all the grief we'd save, Democrats, Republicans, Greens, Constitutionals all randomly chosen, randomly changing every two or four years. We can get on with the business of saving America from these Corporate banditos, and let government descend into complete chaos.
Instead, we still cling like children to an odd belief in freedom, in democracy and need to vote who will be our wardens for the next four years.
Is this a great charade, or what!?
Posted by: Harry Possue at October 23, 2004 10:38 PMI had a very interesting experience tonight. Took my daughers to the Demolition Derby at the Arizona State Fair. A NASCAR Dad sort of activity, right? Going on in a Red State, right?
Well car 88 was marked Cheney/Bush on the side of it. It was roundly and soundly booed each time it made an appearance in the pre-derby show. And during the Derby, wonderful cries of cheer went up each time it took a hit.
I didn't hear any cheers for the thing. Solid boos. Very cool.
On the other hand, even though it lost the derby and had to be taken out with a forklift, I will give the driver credit, he put on one of the better shows.
Posted by: jerry at October 23, 2004 10:56 PMAh yes, one must be either a hardened zealot,
unflinchingly seperating right from wrong, or
else wishy washy moderate condemned to limbo.
"Hateful to both God and to his enemies".
Those who think themselves on the side of God
take pleasure in the fact that some of us who
are not unqestionably on their side, are not liked
much by the other either. Which is fine, except
that the same sort of shadenfraude is characteristic of the enemies of God as well.
Reminds me of an anecdote:
Eldridge Cleaver to new BP recruits:
"Those who are not part of the solution, are
part of the problem!"
Some smart ass young BP recruit:
"Those who say that you're either part of the
solution, or part of the problem, are themselves
part of the problem"
EC:
"Fuck you!"
"Bush is a dynamic leader" - when was that, and how did I miss it? What I see now is a small, bitchy, petulant man who repeatedly trots out dumb-ass cliches like "he can run, but he cannot hide!", then smirks and pauses for the applause of a captive audience. That's not leadership, it's not even showmanship.
As I said in another post, only in America could the competition between Kerry and Bush be considered a "race".
Posted by: Steve at October 23, 2004 11:06 PMRight on, HP! Anybody who knows about structural engineering knows the myth of the WTC collapse is entirely that. A myth. It would be utterly and statistically impossible to bring down both towers vertically, (as well as WT7 hours later).
In ANY plausible fire scenario, the upper floors would have pitched off at some random angle and plunged down into the streets below as the one key column buckled first. Even if you accept the pancake theory, and utter impossibility of a vertical collapse of a 1/4-mile high structure, there are those huge sharp seismic spikes BEFORE the buildings hit the ground. High explosives!
(See also Pentagon 757 link following. And if you think a fully-loaded 757 can hit a concrete shell building and leave only an 8-foot hole, a smoking low-temperature fire, and ZERO debris, then you must believe in Tinkerbell and Peter Pan too! http://www.asile.org/citoyens/ numero13/pentagone/erreurs_en.htm )
WTC Brought Down by High Explosives?
http://www.theunjustmedia.com/9-11/seismic%20evidence%20points%20to%20underground%20explosions%20causing%20wtc%20collapse.htm
Seismic Evidence Points to Underground Explosions Causing WTC Collapse
Two unexplained "spikes" in the seismic record from September 11 indicate huge bursts of energy shook the ground beneath the World Trade Center's twin towers — just as the buildings began to collapse.
American Free Press has learned of pools of "molten steel" found at the base of the collapsed twin towers weeks after the collapse. Although the energy source for these incredibly hot areas has yet to be explained, New York seismometers recorded huge bursts of energy, which caused unexplained seismic "spikes" at the beginning of each collapse. These spikes suggest that massive underground explosions may have literally knocked the towers off their foundations causing them to collapse.
"MOLTEN STEEL"
In the basements of the collapsed towers, where the 47 central support columns connected with the bedrock, hot spots of "literally molten steel" were discovered more than a month after the collapse. Such persistent and intense residual heat, 70 feet below the surface, could explain how these crucial structural supports failed.
Peter Tully, president of Tully Construction of Flushing, New York, told AFP that he saw pools of "literally molten steel" at the World Trade Center. Tully was contracted on September 11 to remove the debris from the site.
Tully called Mark Loizeaux, president of Controlled Demolition, Inc. (CDI) of Phoenix, Maryland, for consultation about removing the debris. CDI calls itself "the innovator and global leader in the controlled demolition and implosion of structures."
Loizeaux, who cleaned up the bombed Federal Building in Oklahoma City, arrived on the WTC site two days later and wrote the clean-up plan for the entire operation.
AFP asked Loizeaux about the report of molten steel on the site. "Yes," he said, "hot spots of molten steel in the basements." These incredibly hot areas were found "at the bottoms of the elevator shafts of the main towers, down seven [basement] levels," Loizeaux said. The molten steel was found "three, four, and five weeks later, when the rubble was being removed," Loizeaux said. He said molten steel was also found at 7 WTC, which collapsed mysteriously in the late afternoon.
Construction steel has an extremely high melting point of about 2,800° Fahrenheit (1535° Celsius). Asked what could have caused such extreme heat, Tully said, "Think of the jet fuel."
Loizeaux told AFP that the steel-melting fires were fueled by "paper, carpet and other combustibles packed down the elevator shafts by the tower floors as they 'pancaked' into the basement."
Kerosene-based jet fuel, paper, or the other combustibles normally found in the towers, however, cannot generate the heat required to melt steel, especially in an oxygen-poor environment like a deep basement.
Eric Hufschmid, author of a book about the WTC collapse, Time for Painful Questions, told AFP that due to the lack of oxygen, paper and other combustibles packed down at the bottom of elevator shafts would probably be "a smoky smoldering pile."
Experts disagree that jet-fuel or paper could generate such heat. This is impossible, they say, because the maximum temperature that can be reached by hydrocarbons like jet-fuel, burning in air is 1520° F (825° C). Because the WTC fires were fuel rich (as evidenced by the thick black smoke) it is argued that they did not reach this upper limit of 825° C.
The hottest spots at the surface of the rubble, where abundant oxygen was available, were much cooler than the molten steel found in the basements. Five days after the collapse, on September 16, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) used an Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS) to locate and measure the site's hot spots. Dozens of hot spots were mapped, the hottest being in the east corner of the South Tower where a temperature of 1377° F (747° C) was recorded. This is, however, less than half as hot at the molten steel in the basement.
The foundations of the twin towers were 70 feet deep. At that level, 47 huge box columns, connected to the bedrock, supported the entire gravity load of the structures. The steel walls of these lower box columns were 4 inches thick.
CENTRAL COLUMNS SEVERED
Videos of the North Tower collapse show its communication mast falling first, indicating that the central support columns must have failed at the very beginning of the collapse. Loizeaux told AFP, "Everything went simultaneously."
"At 10:29 the entire top section of the North Tower had been severed from the base and began falling down," Hufschmid writes. "If the first event was the falling of a floor, how did that progress to the severing of hundreds of columns?"
Asked if the vertical support columns gave way before the connections between the floors and the columns, Ron Hamburger, a structural engineer with the FEMA assessment team said, "That's the $64,000 question."
Loizeaux said, "If I were to bring the towers down, I would put explosives in the basement to get the weight of the building to help collapse the structure."
SEISMIC "SPIKES"
Seismographs at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York, 21 miles north of the WTC, recorded strange seismic activity on September 11 that has still not been explained.
While the aircraft crashes caused minimal earth shaking, significant earthquakes with unusual spikes occurred at the beginning of each collapse. The Palisades seismic data recorded a 2.1 magnitude earthquake during the 10-second collapse of the South Tower at 9:59:04 and a 2.3 quake during the 8-second collapse of the North Tower at 10:28:31.
The Palisades seismic record shows that — as the collapses began — a huge seismic "spike" marked the moment the greatest energy went into the ground. The strongest jolts were all registered at the beginning of the collapses, well before the falling debris struck the earth. These unexplained "spikes" in the seismic data lend credence to the theory that massive explosions at the base of the towers caused the collapses.
A "sharp spike of short duration" is how seismologist Thorne Lay of Univ. of California at Santa Cruz told AFP an underground nuclear explosion appears on a seismograph.
The two unexplained spikes are more than twenty times the amplitude of the other seismic waves associated with the collapses and occurred in the East-West seismic recording as the buildings began to fall.
Lerner-Lam told AFP that a 10-fold increase in wave amplitude indicates a 100-fold increase in energy released. These "short-period surface waves," reflect "the interaction between the ground and the building foundation," according to a report from Columbia Earth Institute.
"The seismic effects of the collapses are comparable to the explosions at a gasoline tank farm near Newark on January 7, 1983," the Palisades Seismology Group reported on Sept. 14, 2001.
One of the seismologists, Won-Young Kim, told AFP that the Palisades seismographs register daily underground explosions from a quarry 20 miles away. These blasts are caused by 80,000 lbs. of ammonium nitrate and cause local earthquakes between Magnitude 1 and 2. Kim said the 1993 truck-bomb at the WTC did not register on the seismographs because it was "not coupled" to the ground.
Experts cannot explain why the seismic waves peaked before the towers hit the ground. Asked about these spikes seismologist Arthur Lerner-Lam, director of Columbia University's Center for Hazards and Risk Research told AFP, "This is an element of current research and discussion. It is still being investigated."
"Only a small fraction of the energy from the collapsing towers was converted into ground motion," Lerner-Lam said. "The ground shaking that resulted from the collapse of the towers was extremely small."
Last November, Lerner-Lam said, "During the collapse, most of the energy of the falling debris was absorbed by the towers and the neighboring structures, converting them into rubble and dust or causing other damage — but not causing significant ground shaking,"
Evidently, the energy source that shook the ground beneath the towers was many times more powerful than the total potential energy released by the falling mass of the huge towers.
TEST FOR EXPLOSIONS?
While steel is often tested for evidence of explosions, despite numerous eyewitness reports of explosions in the towers, the engineers involved in the FEMA-sponsored building assessment did no such tests.
Dr. W. Gene Corley, who investigated for the government the cause of the fire at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco and the Oklahoma City bombing, headed the FEMA-sponsored engineering assessment of the WTC collapse. Corley told AFP that while some tests had been done on the 80 pieces of steel saved from the site, he said he did not know about tests that show if an explosion had affected the steel. "I am not a metallurgist," he said.
SELLING THE EVIDENCE OVERSEAS
Much of the structural steel from the WTC was sold to Alan D. Ratner of Metal Management of Newark, New Jersey, and the New York-based company Hugo Neu Schnitzer East. Ratner, who heads the New Jersey branch of the Chicago-based company, quickly sold the WTC steel to overseas companies, reportedly selling more than 50,000 tons of steel to a Shanghai steel company known as Baosteel.
===========================
"Bush is a dynamic leader" . . . when was that, and how did I miss it?
The strutting phony in the flight suit on the Abraham Lincoln has been well and truly exposed for what he is, despite what seem to be the best efforts of the media.
During and since the debates George W. Bush has become more and more of a caricature, a petulant, empty little man who mouths dumb-ass cliches like "he can run, but he cannot hide", followed by a smirk and a pause to allow his captive audience to show their fervour.
As I said in another post, only in the United States could this contest between Kerry and Bush be called a "race".
Posted by: Steve at October 23, 2004 11:21 PMI didn't know that Kenneth Thorpe was working with Kerry. When did this happen? Was it recent, or has it been this way for a while?
Posted by: Brian at October 24, 2004 12:39 AMMust be hard living in a bubble.
Only a complete dunce who: a) hasn't read a single newspaper, b) left the house, c) listened to the radio d) answered an email e) read online news or f) watched tv for the last three years could not have formed an opinion on who to vote for.
Fine. He's apoplectic about voting for a liberal. Someone tell Rauch to vote for Michael Badarnik so he can get on with his life.
Posted by: Susie Dow at October 24, 2004 02:04 AMMust be hard living in a bubble.
Only a complete dunce who: a) hasn't read a single newspaper, b) left the house, c) listened to the radio d) answered an email e) read online news or f) watched tv for the last three years could not have formed an opinion on who to vote for.
Fine. He's apoplectic about voting for a liberal. Someone tell Rauch to vote for Michael Badarnik so he can get on with his life.
Posted by: Susie Dow at October 24, 2004 02:08 AMWell, look, if Rauch thinks Bush is a 'dynamic leader' it's hard to take his musings seriously. Following his logic from that premise is like watching 'Smack-Down' wrestling: amusing if you're in the mood but intellectually pointless.
Posted by: Dave Hollander at October 24, 2004 06:01 AMRauch thinks Bush43's fiscal policy is LESS reckless than that of Nixon? Unbelievable!
Posted by: pgl at October 24, 2004 07:17 AMThe fact that Drezner has escaped the train is really pretty small comfort. What took him so long? Every once in a while I see some of the real nutty right-wing in-denial stuff on some forum or another, but what is much scarier is the trotting out of pro-Bush cliches and "we're in a war with Islamofacism" rhetoric by articulate and supposedly intelligent people like Mr. Drezner and the people on his blog urging him to vote for Bush.
These are people who actually care about world affairs and domestic politics but yet have no clue about how great the dangers that are faced by the USA and the rest of the world because of US government policies.
How scary is that?
Even scarier is that I can't tell if Kerry understands. The code of silence that affects all practical politicians in the USA (the ones who want to be elected, I mean) leaves plenty of room for nervousness about what will happen when the "policy bubble" collapses.
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Posted by: Play Blackjack at October 24, 2004 08:27 AMErr, to the aluminum foil wearing dude who sez that it couldn't have been fire that brought down the WTC -- I got an architect (John Young) who says different. Now, John Young never met a conspiracy he didn't like (he runs cryptome.org, a repository of crackpot conspiracy theories lately). But he says, from his look at the way the WTC was designed, that the brackets at the core of the building would have melted first, causing the floor to pull inwards as they fell down, pulling in the outside walls as everything pancaked downwards, giving us the spectacle we saw -- buildings seemingly imploding upon themselves.
In any event, while you are correct that our choice is between one elite and another, you are incorrect in saying that this is no choice at all. It is, in my opinion, a choice between a spectacularly incompetent administration, that of George W. Bush, that fubar'ed everything it has attempted, and a man who has in the past at least proven to be competent and aggressive at taking the battle to the enemy. If I am to be ruled by someone, I far prefer that it be by someone competent. Nero Bush fiddling while Rome burns is not my idea of something I want to see anymore.
-Badtux the Disgusted Penguin
He's
swimming there in limbo waiting for the tide to turn.
But Brad Canto III is not about limbo which was a very dignified place.
Good case for Kerry and good point about the indictment of the elite press. If they cared about policy, they would know about Kerry.
Posted by: Robert Waldmann at October 24, 2004 08:25 PMThe problem Rauch and his ilk have is that to learn about Kerry, they have only listened to the Republican interpretation of Kerry rather than study the man himself, his record, and his policy statements. As soon as they ignore the spin, no the lies, and begin to pay attention to more straightforward information, they change. That was the lesson of the debates: many many Americans who had never learned anything about Kerry but the Republican characature got him straight and untainted . . . and were persuaded. t's pretty amazing that Rauch can't withdraw himself from his Karl Rove umbilical.
Posted by: paulo at October 25, 2004 03:53 AMRobert Waldmann is right. The City of Limbo, or the First Circle of Hell, was for virtuous pagans (including various Greek and Roman thinkers, and Saladin) and unbaptised children. It also, I think, held the Jewish Patriarchs until they were uplifted to Heaven at the time of the Harrowing of Hell.
I always thought it sounded like the sort of place Cyrano de Bergerac thought he would end up - "Et je retrouverai Socrate, et Galilee!"
The neutral angels were in Ante-Hell (banners, insects, etc) along with the cowards - those unworthy even of Hell. Rather like Tomlinson in the Kipling poem, who is first refused entry to Heaven on grounds of insufficient virtue, then to Hell on the basis of insufficient sin: Hell is already short of space and fuel, and the Devil would get all sorts of grief from his other tenants if he crowded in people who weren't really wicked.