At the end of the last episode of Real Time with Bill Maher, noted Razzie Award winner Ben Affleck delivered a riveting monologue that damn near erased the memory of “Pearl Harbor” from my psyche. Paraphrasing, he basically said that Democrats are so afraid of being pussies that they capitulate…

When white people say "justice," they mean "just us."

-- Black American folk aphorism

I've spent the bulk of the past two days in wheezing golf carts, shuttling Little Richard and other minor celebrities, so no time for blogging.  And I won't say much on the two recent discraceful get-out-of-jail-free…

That Ezra Klein is a sharp-witted, baby-faced health care policy wonk, writing fellow at The American Prospect, and significant player in the larger liberal new media world is unimportant.  What is important is that he and I are coincidentally on the same wavelength: politics + psychology = compelling.  From his personal blog:

Drew Westen, a political psychologist with a focus on neuropsychiatric research, brings a bit more value to the process [of advising Democrat strategists]. And so I highly recommend that folks read his book excerpt focusing on how voters experience politics, and how Democrats all too often speak on another plane entirely.

"The vision of mind," writes Westen, "that has captured the imagination of Democratic strategists for much of the last 40 years -- a dispassionate mind that makes decisions by weighing the evidence and reasoning to the most valid conclusions -- bears no relation to how the mind and brain actually work...Our brains are nothing but vast networks of neurons. Of particular importance for understanding politics are "networks of associations" -- bundles of thoughts, feelings, sounds, images, memories, and emotions that have become linked through experience. People can't tell you much about what's in those networks, or about what's likely to change them (which happen to be the central determinants of voting behavior). They can't tell you because they don't have conscious access to them, any more than they can tell you what's going on in their pancreas. And if you ask them, they often get it wrong."

So here's another equation for you: political agency - illusion of "dispassionate" objectivity = feminist territory.  Explanation after the jump.

After returning to Cambridge not too long ago, just as all underclassfolk were leaving, many friends have asked me what I learned/did/enjoyed in the three months in Nicaragua I substituted for my Harvard spring. I've found it nigh on impossible to 'summarize', let alone describe, my time abroad - not because the depth or awesomeness of the experience makes conveying it impossible (doubtless that's how some very nice people have interpreted my inability to list 'lessons learned'), but really only because a few sentences, well thought-out or not, can never do justice to a whole semester (whether in Managua or in Harvard Yard). For those reasons I think it may not be best to post here about what happened there - at the very least, I'd be 'forcing it', a habit which my campers last summer made me promise to kick. Furthermore, all that's relevant about my trip, in the cambridgecommon sense, will probably make itself explicit in the course of posting soon enough.

For example: my final paper for the program I was enrolled in tried to discuss the 'gutting' of politics that follows from today's forced coupling of 'democracy' and capitalism. I looked at the Free Trade Zone in Nicaragua with this theme in mind - in my opinion, the premises of these types of mega-Projects - the idea, however expressed, that development can be planned by an educated, 'expert' elite - make clear the emptiness of what passes for democracy today.[1] I recently came across this news story looking at past speeches given by America's commander-in-chief (excerpt below), notable not merely because his words are shown to be flatly absurd, but also because his posturing demonstrates excellently the weakness of this country's democratic fabric.

In a "Rose Garden news conference", Bush is quoted as saying (on Iraq):

I really need to see 28 Weeks Later (it’s playing at Harvard Square, btw). And once I see this movie I need to definitively figure out if this is a left-leaning or right-leaning zombie movie.

The first one 28 Days Later is legitimately one of my favorite movies. First, zombie films are awesome. Second, Cillian Murphy is ridiculously hot. And I mean ridiculous, like he could be a legit serial killer.

OK, so perhaps that’s TMI on my part. But, take a look at this post from The Weekly Standard blog by Sonny bunch. He’s objecting to the way in which liberals have claimed this zombie franchise as a reflection of American occupation in Iraq. And actually it’s not even liberals, it’s media outlets like USA Today which talk about American agression. But Sonny is arguing that this can be viewed at from a conservative perspective, I mean the whole zombie thing was precipitated by a bunch of liberals: 

In the original, the film kicks off when a group of do-gooding PETA/Earth Liberation Front types break into an animal testing lab to free some cute, cuddly monkeys. Except these cute, cuddly monkeys are infected with the Rage virus, the disease that ends up destroying England. Instead of listening to reason, the radicals threaten the scientist who discovers them with bodily harm and release the animals.

And for reasons I won’t divulge here Sonny makes the point that the sequel continues in the liberals-are-the-ones-who-are-idiots-and-cause-the-Rage-virus. After I see the movie I'll report on my findings. Alas, Cillian Murphy is not in the sequel. Drats.

So it's not everyday I have a link to The Weekly Standard (it's ok to click, you won't get cooties), but I've been thinking lately that Reid and Pelosi are making some terrible mistakes for the Democratic Party.

First Pelosi is declining to meet with General Petraeus, who will be at The Hill…

That's the day Congressional Democrats are hoping to force President Bush to start withdrawing troops from Iraq through a new spending bill to the tune of $124 billion. Bush has said that he will veto any bill that sets a firm date for pullout since it will send the wrong message to the…

If you've been worried that the War on Terror is an inherently unwinnable campaign that will go on forever, you'll be happy to know that it's been quietly ended by Congress.  There's The House has made a formal decision to stop using the phrase "Global War on Terror" in the defense budget for…

The new Democrat-led Congress may soon be reconsidering mandatory minimum sentences that send first-time offenders to jail for signficant amounts of time on the basis of small infractions. Great call if it happens seeing as how the laws for mandatory minimum sentences disproportionately impact…

Tonight, the president goes before his people to announce his new plan for Iraq. Apparently, "given the powers of a commander-in-chief", congressional 'unease' at his plan is of minimal importance. His proposal is, of course (as earlier admitted) an eminently "political" decision (in the IOP-sense…