Overconfidence

With a week to go until Election Day, I think we're all fairly familiar with the stakes, issues, and tropes. Democratic momentum building vs. an entrenched Republican GOTV machine in gerrymandered districts; Macaca vs. Modern Romance Fiction, etc. To cover up my nagging feeling that the Democrats will find some way to blow this election at the eleventh hour, I present a one-week exploration of battles where pride and the vagaries of chance snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

1. Salamis

The battle of Salamis featured the massed fleet of the Empire of Persia against a fractured and weak coalition of Greek city-states. Occurring in September of the year 480 BC, approximately 1,000 Persian triremes were defeated by approximately a third that number of Greek ships between the Athenian port of Piraeus and the island of Salamis. On the open ocean and on paper, the sheer number of Persian ships should have overwhelmed the Greek fleet, whose morale was already suffering after the end of the battle of Thermopylae and the destruction of Athens.

However, in the event, the Greeks prevailed against the odds. Jammed into a narrow bay by their eagerness to pursue the retreating Greek fleet, the Persians were robbed of much of their advantage of numbers. As the resulting catastrophe unfolded, the Persian fleet began to disintegrate and flee, while the enraged Persian emperor Xerxes watched the unfolding disaster from a golden throne set atop a nearby hill.

Relationship to the 2006 elections:

Depends. You could see Karl Rove as a kind of Xerxes, observing the perfect storm of Athenian triremes sweep over the Republican 72-hour program and fundraising advantages. But Xerxes wasn't really a cheerleader, trying to keep a happy face on events; he really expected to win the battle of Salamis and executed many of the survivors. If you believe Karl Rove genuinely expects to retain control of the House because of the double secret White House polls he's seeing, and Democrats achieve victory in November, this would be the best fit. On the other hand, if Democrats blow it in November, blue leaders like Rahm Emanuel and Howard Dean could be atop the golden throne, vainly striving to make their absolute numeric advantage in the polls felt in the narrow confines of gerrymandered house districts.

Go ahead and shred it all, Dick. You're still an asshole.

In preparation for next Tuesday's Democratic takeover of the House (& Senate?), Dick Cheney has contracted with the Mid-Atlantic Shredding Service to take care of destroying evidence of crimes against humanity....I mean, his garbage.

Here's a link (with blood-boiling picture goodness....)

School vouchers and race

I read a book called White Flight, by Kevin Kruse. The subtitle's "Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism." It's great. (All quotes are from it, p. 132.)

The first time I read this, I had to stop because I was blown away.

In 1953, a full year before Brown, [Georgia] Governor Talmadge advanced a constitutional amendment giving the General Assembly the power to privatize the state's system of public education.

Hey! Let the market have it's way! That's cool!

In the event of court-ordered desegregation, school buildings would be closed, and students would instead receive grants to attend private, segregated schools. "We can maintain separate schools regardless of the U.S. Supreme Court," Talmadge promised, "by reverting to a private system, subsidizing the child rather than the political subdivision."

WTF?! Wasn't this exact same idea, minus the explicit racial rhetoric, what "Conservatives" were pushing in the '90s?

The General Assembly and the voters agreed, ratifying the amendment in the next elections. ... During the 1956 legislative session, ... the General Assembly strengthened the plan with several new laws. No detail was left untouched. ... If the courts ordered their schools to desegregate, the governor could thus switch everything to a nominally "private" system without missing a beat.

Shiiiiiiiiiiiiit.

The book's convincing and does an excellent job explicating Conservative rhetoric and its racial/racist roots. It's so disturbing and so great.

End strong

"You’d think that for once [Bush]’d want to consider devoting his time to making things better instead of worse." (NYT)

Youch. Snippy, yet so true. I challenge anyone to name one way that the country's been improved or made stronger in that man's* presidency. Yeah, I didn't think so.

* I have a better understanding now of how Republican's in the 1930s felt about FDR. Of course, they were wrong. What FDR accomplished, while revolutionary, did some great things for the country, and paved the way for other good, right, and necessary acts. Sure, it wasn't a complete success--what is?--but the solution is not and has never been to undo the New Deal and what followed. But the Republicans have been trying to do that for decades.

Mount Misery (to be filed under, "You had to see this coming."

So it turns out that Donald Rumsfeld's vacation home is a place called Mount Misery, an estate owned by a slave-owner named Edward Covey. Mr. Covey was "famous for breaking unruly slaves for other farmers." One of the slaves that Mr. Covey tortured and beat into submission was none other than Frederick Douglass, who said of Mount Misery "I shall never be able to narrarate the mental experience through which it was my lot to pass during my stay at Covey's. I was completely wrecked, changed, and bewildered; goaded almost to madness at one time, and at another reconciling myself to my wretched condition."

Um, Alright. Why would anyone want to vacation there, you ask? Well, I think the answer is obvious. Donald Rumsfeld is a SICK FUCK.

Election season

As far as I can tell, at least 50% of all political speeches nowadays could be replaced by the following mantra:

Listen: Cut and run, cut and run, cut and run, hard work, hard work, hard work, cut and run, stay the course, hard work, cut and run, understand, cut and run, hard work, hard work, hard work, stay the course, cut and run, hard work, flexible, dependable, unacceptable, can't change, cut and run, horses in mid-stream, hard work, stay the course, cut and run, cut and run, cut and run, hard work, understand, horses in mid-stream, can't change, cut and run, hard work, cut and run, can't change, cut and run, can't accept, hard work, cut and run, hard work, understand, cut and run, cut and run, cut and run, hard work, listen, last throes, cut and run, we've tried, cut and run, stand up, cut and run, stand down, cut and run, hard work, stand up, stand down, cut and run, cut and run, cut and run.

Repeat ad nauseam. One might as well have a tape player on the podium.

Evil Ninjas

It seems that the ninjas that I have eluded for so long have finally tracked down my current location. This morning, 4 ninjas broke into a gas station in my hometown of Tampa, Florida, and stole an ATM machine.

No doubt, they will use the funds garnered from this daring escapade to build the ultimate weapon with which to hasten my death. I must begin to train.......

What-the-heck, redux

If you had asked me Tuesday to bet whether the bodyguards of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Prime Minister of Turkey, would accidentally lock his unconscious body in the prime ministerial limousine in the hospital driveway, I would have lost a lot of money.

Apropos of nothing, I know some bodyguards from Turkey who will probably be looking for new jobs on Monday.

Questions only Steve Wynn can answer

How the hell do you punch a hole in a Pablo Picasso (worth, to be crass, about $139 million)? And do you feel as stupid as possible immediately, or does it build?

The High Point

The Mets may have lost the game, but this is perhaps the most amazing double play I've ever seen. Really.

I really like how the crowd goes apeshit as soon as it's apparent he caught the ball.

Watching the game, I went apeshit too.

Tee hee

Somehow, David Hasselhoff retains his charm.

The game's afoot

So far, my job resembles nothing so much as Jabez Wilson's in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Red-Headed League." I guess, after three years of law school, I can't really complain. I just hope I'm not actually being shiftless... there just doesn't seem to be much to do thus far other than study the manual.

Speaking of what-the-heck

Decided to begin blogging at work. What the heck.

I was struck by this quote from a Slate.com article on South Korean perceptions of the North Korean nuclear crisis:

Kim also blamed the United States for having divided Korea more than 50 years ago without taking the nation's wishes into account. In essence, she thinks the United States brought the North Korean nuclear pest upon itself and the world.

I don't even know what that first sentence is supposed to mean. I'm hoping it's some sort of horrifying translation error, because my understanding of the history is that there wasn't really time available for a referendum, or at least not more than a very rough and Socratic one.

For, after having brought you into the world, and nurtured and educated you, and given you and every other citizen a share in every good that we had to give, we further proclaim and give the right to every Athenian, that if he does not like us when he has come of age and has seen the ways of the city, and made our acquaintance, he may go where he pleases and take his goods with him; and none of us laws will forbid him or interfere with him. Any of you who does not like us and the city, and who wants to go to a colony or to any other city, may go where he likes, and take his goods with him.

I'm not going to be an annoying American, and whip out the we-saved-your-ass-and-you-should-be-grateful card. I don't expect gratitude for events over half a century ago. I am a little alarmed that Ms. Kim seemingly believes that some sort of peaceful reunification process was on track until non-Korean forces derailed it. It bodes badly for an actual peaceful reunification that Ms. Kim would recognize, or find acceptable.

PS: This is perhaps the funniest thing I've read all week.

One reaction typical of young South Koreans came from Kim Min Jeong, a teacher at a Seoul language school who focused on the injustice of the balance of power: "I was quite surprised that North Korea really tested the nuclear bomb. But all the superpowers have nuclear weapons, so why not North Korea? Because Kim is a maniac? It doesn't make sense.

Something doesn't make sense, right enough. Zing!

A what-the-heck?! roundup

This counts as apologizing? Saying, more or less, "I was mad at the Jews because 'they' said mean things about me?" Also, I'm imagining how different was of saying this sentence would change its meaning: "I don't believe that Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world." My own biases, plus the way the BBC article positions it, have it coming out, "I don't believe that Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world." Just some of them.

Celebrate the EU by celebrating a battle that a) you lost and b) had somewhere around 50,000 casualties. Napoleon, the proto-EU'er. Weird.

They continue to drop like flies

Emily Bass and Liam Flaherty. Yes: super-sub Liam.

Eww

This picture kinda scares me. Dude, Curt, don't cut your neck, and stop with the rubberized face.

(From ESPN.)