Infospigot: The Chronicles

This is good:

Kook for Senate.

Via Archpundit.

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune has decided that an ad that adds up the cost of the Iraq war in coldly quantitative terms — number of killed, number of orphans created, quarts of blood shed, and on and on — is in poor taste and not fit for its apparently easily upset readers. Well, the ad is confrontational and disturbing. But more disturbing is the apparent need of major media to filter views of the conflict that get to the horrible essence of the violence unleashed there.

By way of Austin Mayor.

Our semi-elected president, bless his heart, has released a campaign ad that pats us all on the back for ridding Iraq and Afghanistan of their resident evildoers and making it possible for both nations to send teams to Iraq. Well, the surprisingly successul Iraqi soccer team’s got a message for Mr. Flight Suit: Take your ad and shove it. As reported it by Sports Illustrated online:

[Midfielder Salih] Sadir had a message for U.S. president George W. Bush, who is using the Iraqi Olympic team in his latest re-election campaign advertisements.

In those spots, the flags of Iraq and Afghanistan appear as a narrator says, “At this Olympics there will be two more free nations — and two fewer terrorist regimes.”

“Iraq as a team does not want Mr. Bush to use us for the presidential campaign,” Sadir told SI.com through a translator, speaking calmly and directly. “He can find another way to advertise himself.”

Ahmed Manajid, who played as a midfielder on Wednesday, had an even stronger response when asked about Bush’s TV advertisement. “How will he meet his god having slaughtered so many men and women?” Manajid told me. “He has committed so many crimes.”

Iraq: blue state or red state?

Retiring Rep. Doug Bereuter, a Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, comes out with a stunner: A letter to constituents announcing he now believes the war in Iraq was unjustified and he wouldn’t vote again to support the war.

From the Lincoln Journal Star:

Bereuter pointed to a list of negative consequences arising from the war.

“The cost in casualties is already large and growing,” he said, “and the immediate and long-term financial costs are incredible.

“From the beginning of the conflict, it was doubtful that we for long would be seen as liberators, but instead increasingly as an occupying force.

“Now we are immersed in a dangerous, costly mess, and there is no easy and quick way to end our responsibilities in Iraq without creating bigger future problems in the region and, in general, in the Muslim world.”

This guy’s showing a lot more guts on the issue than Mr. Vietnam Valor Guy, John Kerry. Meantime, GOP damage control kicks in: Fellow House Republicans are saying Bereuter’s just getting even for not getting better committee assignments.

I admit I failed in my civic duty earlier in Alan Keyes’s career and never paid attention to who he was or what he was saying when he ran for the Republican presidential nomination. But now that I am reading about what he says and does, I think I finally get where he’s coming from: He’s nuts. The latest exhibit: His unhinged revelation, explicated Tuesday on CNN’s “Crossfire,” that the September 11th terrorist attacks were God’s way of telling us we’d better end abortion.

A couple of blogs are wholly or mostly devoted right now to chasing Keyes and keeping track of his latest certifiable utterances. I commend to your attention:

Archpundit
Truth About Keyes

Good stuff. Funny stuff. Which makes me wonder whether Keyes’s master plan is something everybody has missed: To put The Onion out of business by disintermediating absurdity.

First, the record needs to be corrected. Earlier I called Illinois’s new Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate Alan “I’m Movin’ to Peoria” Keyes. Turns out he’s actually Alan “I’m Movin’ to Calumet City” Keyes. The candidate says his swankless new address — he’s taken the upstairs unit in a two-flat in a tough neighborhood — will put him in touch with the day-to-day realities of people in his barely adopted state. Good on ‘im. Hope someone out there is keeping track of how much time he actually spends in his new digs.

Second, and more important: I want to be the first in the highly exclusive Internet pundit corps to congratulate Keyes for rewriting the history of slavery. Turns out it’s not a black thing, and we can all understand it.

Last night, I read the transcript of Keyes’s interview with NPR’s “Fresh Air” show. During his appearance, Keyes revealed that the key issue in the Illinois Senate race is — surprise! — the right of unborn Illinoisans to pursue life, liberty, and Huggies. And he talked all about how important it is for candidates to make rational arguments for their positions instead of resorting to name-calling and unsupported assertions. He’s so high-minded it makes you woozy.

Then he was asked about his statement that Barack Obama has taken “the slaveholder’s position” on the abortion issue.

The interviewer suggested that Keyes had introduced race into the campaign by using the slave rhetoric. Oh, no! Keyes said. Nothing could by further from the truth:

“One of the things I learned–because I had slave ancestors, and I, as I said, have deeply looked at, and thought about, meditated on the injustice involved in slavery. Slavery is not a racial issue. It’s an issue of human justice! And that means that when someone is enslaved, in violation of the fundamental premise of human dignity, we are turning our backs on our decent humanity.

OK, he’s right about one thing: Enslaving others demonstrates a “disregard for decent humanity.” But saying race wasn’t a factor in the American slave experience — because when he used the word slaveholder, I think he was thinking of Scarlett O’Hara’s pop, of slavery down yonder, not the ancient Roman guy who owned Russell Crowe in “Gladiator” — is like saying, “Murder’s not about violence! It’s about not caring for your fellow man.”

Of course race was a factor — the central factor — in American slavery. If you’ve got any doubt about the history Keyes is trying to wriggle out of, check out the Supreme Court’s excruciatingly rational argument in the Dred Scott decision. The court concluded that blacks, slave or free, could never be citizens. This “unfortunate” race was “separated from the white by indelible marks.” The decision defended the view, which it imputed to our founding white male parents, that blacks were “a subordinate and inferior class of beings”:

They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.

You’ve got to love that term “beings.”

So, slavery: Yes, a failure of decent humanity. But race is written all over it, and those ancestors Keyes talks about could have told him all about it.