POLITICS: The UAE Port Deal

(Note: effective immediately all political posts will be clearly and obviously tagged with the all caps “POLITICS” prefix so as to alert my lefty pals that now is a good time for them to avert their rolling eyes from my public displays of neosimpletonnaziconservareactionaryness.)

Ahem. Now, then.

I’m not sure I get all the fuss, and I’m decidely suspicious of all the latest screeches from the Democrats. When last I checked, they were huffing and puffing continuously that the President was using fear to whip us all into submission, and yet the reactions from the liberals (and, to be fair, an alarming number of the conservatives) fairly scream of paranoia and xenophobia, with more than a little bit of election year opportunism on the part of the Democrats thrown into the mix.

Blizzard Blogging: The Swell Neighborhood Kids In Brooklyn

As the reluctant superintendent of my apartment building, a job that I generally despise, it is my responsibility to shovel the snow in front of the building.  At the height of the storm, I’d shoveled twice, hoping to eat away at the task little by little in order to avoid the inevitable heart attack that would come from shoveling 12+ inches of thick heavy snow all at once. 

Blizzard Blogging: The Aftermath

The Nor’easter that walloped New York City over the weekend was a record breaker, according to the official sources, but I suspect shenanigans in that declaration because it just doesn’t seem as bad as the blizzard of 2003.  What kind of chicanery?  I dunno.  It’s just that back when the 2003 blizzard hit I was living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and remember emerging from my building to waist deep piles of unshoveled snow on 80th Street.  I remember struggling through to Columbus Avenue and being rewarded with a shoveled pathway that ran beside snow piles that rose chest high.  Am I misremembering this, confusing my memories of New York 2003 with pictures of Japan from last month that I saw online, pictures like this:

That’s not the picture I was hoping to post by the way.  I spent an unseemly amount of time just now trying to find one I remembered of a lone man wandering in between two towering snowrises.  It was awesome and impressive and lonely in a solitary way that a gaggle of giggling Japanese schoolgirls will simply never be able to capture.

Democrat Congressman Predicts War “Right Before the [2006 Midterms]“

Caught another gem in one of Roger Ebert’s Sundance diaries:

You see some unexpected moviegoers at Sundance. In the audience at “The Night Listener” was Rep. Rahm Emmanuel (D-Ill.), the Democratic strategist: “We have four couples who come to the opening weekend of Sundance every year.” Did he say anything else? Only, “We’ll have another war right before the next election.” He seemed prepared to elaborate, but the lights were doing down and the ushers told us to take our seats.

Emphasis added.  I would love to know what representative Emmanuel was referring to.  What does he know that the rest of us don’t, and if he’s spilling the beans to Roger Ebert, shouldn’t he let the rest of us know, too?

Roger Ebert Assumes Minute Men Are Bigots

Roger’s recent series of Sundance essays is a pretty entertaining and informative read, overall, but includes a bizzarre critique of the Minute Men, citizens who patrol the Mexican border to identify people attempting illegal immigration into the United States.

Whilst reviewing the new film Man Push Cart about a former rock and roll star from Pakistan who operates a vending cart on the streets of Manhattan, Roger had this to say:

I wish “Man Push Cart” could be seen by the Minute Men, self-anointed patriots shown in the Sundance documentary “Crossing Arizona,” who man the Mexican border with night-vision binoculars and hope to repel illegal immigrants without whom Arizona’s agricultural economy would collapse. I wonder if the Minute Men see themselves as the children of immigrants. Can they see Ahmad as an American?

I like Roger Ebert very much, but he is no stranger to moonbattery, and it never fails to mystify.  The ignorance he displays in this particular excerpt is mindboggling.  He reflexively conflates opposition to illegal immigration with opposition to immigration, as though there is no difference between the two.  He then seems to assume that no Minute Man is capable of appreciating that every American is, somewhere down the line, the child of an immigrant.  Imagine that.  He then compounds the insults by suggesting that the Minute Men are bigots incapable of seeing a Pakistani man as an American.  How he justifies equating opposition to illegal immigration with general xenophobia is not clear, though to be fair it might have something to do with Crossing Arizona, a documentary that Roger wrote about earlier in the festival which apparently presents the Minute Men in an unflattering light, although I get the sense based on his writing that Roger didn’t take much convincing.

Note also the sneering reference to the Minute Men as “self-anointed patriots.”  I’d be curious to know how Roger defines patriotism, and furthermore what he believes is wrong with “anointing” oneself as a patriot.  It seems to me that taking legal action to reinforce the security of your country is a legitimate form of patriotism, but the left often seems to sneer at this.  To rely upon them, you’d think that real patriotism is defined by how aggressively one hates President Bush or sides against the United States in the world arena.

Roger Ebert’s reviews were must-reads when I was a boy.  I fantasized about being a film critic, and Roger and Gene Siskel were so influential to me that I kept a scrapbook of their writings from 1980-1982.  I still think he’s an excellent writer, but his politics stink.