Haire of the Dog

Yesterday, I stopped by the Eighth Annual Abbeville Scholar's Conference, a gathering of secession-minded scholars and lay folk. Fun times. I'll report on it for the City Paper on Wed.

For now, you can read this report by yours truly for AOL News. Click on over to check it out.

Here's a taste:

While there are certainly neo-confederates in attendance — such as Jim Hanks, the former head of the South Carolina branch of the League of the South — there are plenty of others who in no way are affiliated with those preoccupied with the Late Unpleasantness.

Take for instance conference speaker Yuri Maltsev, a professor of economics at Carthage College in "the People's Republic of Wisconsin." Maltsev feels he knows the dangers of an over-extended and debt-ridden empire all too well: He was born and raised in the former Soviet Union.

"The Soviet Union was definitely 'too big to fail,'" he said. "It had 11 time zones, one-sixth of the world's surface. And it failed miserably. I think that what would be interesting to discuss is 'too big not to fail' because bigness is not necessarily a good thing. Bigness in many cases leads to excessive centralization, depriving people of their liberty.

"We have a government that is spending like a drunken sailor," Maltsev added. "This is a slander against a drunken sailor because he spends his own money."

If it wasn't bad enough that has-been terrorist Osama bin Laden is taking credit for the Christmas Day airline near-bombing, now a U.S.-based terrorist-monitoring outfit IntelCenter is claiming that the wording of a recent message from the Saudi evildoer indicates that an attack appears to be imminent.

According to global news org AFP:

The group said it considered the language "a possible indicator of an upcoming attack" in the next 12 months.

"This phrase, 'Peace be upon those who follow guidance,' appears at the beginning and end of messages released in advance of attacks that are designed to provide warning to Al-Qaeda's enemies that they need to change their ways or they will be attacked," the group said.

IntelCenter's proof:

The center said similar language attributed to bin Laden was made in a March 19 2008 condemnation of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed which was followed by an attack on the Danish Embassy in Islamabad on June 2, 2008.

The phrase also was used in bin Laden's April 15, 2004 European truce offer, which was followed by Al-Qaeda attacks in London in July 2005, according to the IntelCenter, which said the 14-month lapse could be explained by the "difficulty" in actually putting an attack into operation.

Hmm. Let's see.

First starters, two incidents certainly don't indicate a trend.

And in regards to the attack on the Danish Embassy, that shouldn't have been too big of a surprise in the first place, following the Mohammed cartoon controversy stirred up by a Danish newspaper. It was quite a shitstorm. Heaven forbid, I'm going to source Wikipedia:

This led to protests across the Muslim world, some of which escalated into violence with police firing on the crowds (resulting in more than 100 deaths, all together), including setting fire to the Danish Embassies in Syria, Lebanon and Iran, storming European buildings, and desecrating the Danish, Dutch, Norwegian and German flags in Gaza City. While a number of Muslim leaders called for protesters to remain peaceful, other Muslim leaders across the globe, including Mahmoud al-Zahar of Hamas, issued death threats. Various groups, primarily in the Western world, responded by endorsing the Danish policies, including "Buy Danish" campaigns and other displays of support. Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen described the controversy as Denmark's worst international crisis since World War II.

Even more damaging to this fear-mongering theory is the fact that the second "proof" involves a 14-month difference between the time of the warning and the time of the attack. An indicator indeed.

Oh, and if you want to buy a wall-chart showing terrorist activity in Yemen, or perhaps a wall chart featuring the faces of known jihadists, IntelCenter has plenty for sale at $29.95. Real hardcore types can buy the World Terrorist Groups Intel Update for $649.

Jack Bauer doesn't hawk posters. Jack Bauer is not Tiger Beat.

You know, I've always thought that Pat Buchanan was a white racist and an anti-Semite who wrote columns that in a not-so-veiled way presented a racist and anti-Semitic point of view. I think I was wrong, at least judging by his most recent column "Has Obama lost white America".

See, Pat Buchanan isn't a racist, he just understands the mind of the average white racist. (The jury still out on the anti-Semitism.)

Buchanan's central argument is this: the Scott Brown victory in Massachusetts is a product of racial discontent among the overwhelmingly white population of the Bay State. (According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the population of Massachusetts is 86.2 percent white and 7 percent black, compared to South Carolina's 68.7 percent white and 28.5 percent black.)

What's funny about this is that I almost made this exact same argument the other day. Like my fellow columnist Jack Hunter (an unrepentant Buchananite), I lived in Boston for a spell. And during that time, one thing became crystal clear: Even when Beantown ain't covered in snow, it's all white all the time. In fact, the area of town in which I lived and played, Allston and Brookline, you could probably go an entire day and never see a black person. Well, except for Mr. Butch, God rest his soul.

Of course, I didn't write that post. There had to be reasons for Brown's victory other than white discontent. (Jon Stewart paints a pretty convincing case about why Bay Staters turned against the tone deaf Martha Coakley. Hint: The Red Sox and Yankees rivalry is involved.)

But Pat has changed my mind. He writes:

Republicans have won three major races — two of them upsets and one a Massachusetts miracle — because the white share of the vote in all three rose as a share of the total vote, and Republicans swept the white vote in Reagan-like landslides.

What explains the white surge to the GOP?

First, sinking white support for Obama, seen as ineffectual in ending the recession and stopping the loss of jobs.

Second, a growing perception that Obama is biased. When the president blurted that the Cambridge cops and Sgt. James Crowley "acted stupidly" in arresting black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates — a rush to judgment that proved wrong — his support sank in white America and especially in Massachusetts, where black Gov. Deval Patrick joined in piling on Crowley. Deval is now in trouble, too.

Then there was Obama's appointment of Puerto Rican American Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. Her militant support for race and ethnic preferences and her decision to deny Frank Ricci and the white firefighters of New Haven a hearing on their case that they were denied promotions they won in competitive exams because they were white caused 31 GOP senators to vote against her.

Buchanan also has a theory about where those white voters were in 2008, back when Sen. John McCain needed their vote:

In 2008, the working and middle class had had a bellyful of the Bush-McCain Republicans. They were seen as pro-amnesty for illegal aliens and pro-NAFTA, when U.S. workers had watched 5 million manufacturing jobs disappear in a decade — and reappear in China. They were willing to give Obama a chance because Obama had persuaded them by November he was not just another big-spending utopian liberal.

You know, maybe I'm wrong here, but if memory serves me correctly, but it wasn't that these anti-McCain, anti-immigrant, Archie Bunkers cast a vote in favor of Obama over the Republican Party's candidate. Nope. These voters either didn't vote or they cast a ballot for third partiers like Chuck Baldwin or Bob Barr.

Now, things have changed. With the rise of the Tea Party movement, the Angry Archies have a reason to get their fat asses up off of their well-worn recliners: with Bush out of the White House and the Republicans no longer in control of Congress, it's safe once again for middle-age right wingers to denounce the federal government and shake their fists and bitch and moan about the injustice of everything. And for some of them, yeah, the fact that a black man is president makes this all the easier.

Thanks for clearing that up, Pat.

The right has long been infatuated with keeping folks from having a good time. Sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll, Cinemax after dark, these have long been no-nos for the hard righters. But now Democratic Party shill machine Arianna Huffington and her increasingly self-referential website are taking a puritanical turn as of late.

And in this case, it's all about discrediting senator-elect Scott Brown.

First up: Bashing Brown for a "centerfold" in Cosmo many many moons ago.

Next: His wife's appearance in a quaintly scandalous music video from the '80s.

And finally: A photo of Brown with his two bikini-clad daughters.

Evidently, Arianna forgot that being on the left means you aren't afraid to show a bit of skin.

Let's leave the puritanical huffing and puffing to the, um, party of abstinence-only education and promise keepers, all right, Arianna.

You can count me as one of the many who would like to see the GOP, and government in general, adopt more business-minded principles.

If it was up to me, all decisions made by our elected officials would be based on cost and cost alone. No rhetoric. No morality. No party line. Just money. Profit.

A war in Afghanistan. Not worth it. That is unless, you take into account the coming oil crisis. And quite frankly, we need our hands on as many pipelines as possible. I've watched Dune enough times to know that he who controls the spice controls the universe.

Incarcerating pot heads and minor drug offenders. Really, do we need to keep building prisons to house these guys? Seriously, I don't like the idea of paying for daycare for my own kid, much less somebody else's.

"I Believe" license plates, Christmas carols at schools, Intelligent Design in the classrooms. The courts have been pretty clear on these — and any legislator who pushes them in order to win the support of his constituents simply doesn't care about wasting taxpayer money. He is a douche. And a hypocrite.

Public education. Yeah, it's expensive. But the better it is, and the better educated the populace is, the better society as a whole is. Crime is tied to poverty, and poverty is tied to education. An educated populace is a productive populace. And when you're being productive, you don't have time to steal cars and break into your neighbor's house. At least not until your lunch break.

Now, ideally, the Tea Party should take a similar point of view. They claim to be all about the money. Time will tell. But already it's become clear that the religious fundamentalists who've helped marginalized the GOP, in some ways reducing it to a party of warmongers, anti-abortionists, and angry white guys, have already establish a foothold in the movement (Really, guys? The war on Christmas? That's so 2004.)

And that's a shame.

We can't continue to spend at the levels we do today and hope to remain prosperous. That is, unless we continue to expand the reaches of our empire.

See, an empire sustains itself by bringing in new territories, leveling new taxes, and, most importantly, increasing trade amongst its various holdings and making sure those pathways remain secure.

Now, Jim DeMint doesn't understand what we are. He still thinks the U.S. is a tiny isolated nation, and he's afraid that we're turning into a socialist one at that. And he's afraid that this socialism will rob us of our freedom. He's wrong. For one, capitalism isn't going anywhere. And two, what's so bad about empire?

An imperial government doesn't care what you do, as long as they get a few ducats in taxes. Taxes are just the price of business, whatever your business may be. It's like that fee you have to pay when you use an ATM that isn't at your bank. You may not like paying it, but dammit if the service isn't a lifesaver. Businesses have to be fairly compensated for providing transaction routes and governments have to be paid for making sure those routes are secure.

Just because the United States is an empire, and will continue to be, doesn't take away from the freedom that you and I possess. In order to survive, empires have to be tolerant of its citizens; they have to let the people buy and sell, feast and fondle what they want and when they want it. That's just business. That's freedom.

And what's the function of business but to run free. To get bigger. To grow. To bring in more revenue. To increase profits.

And that's more or less the direction the U.S. been heading since, well, we were founded, and it's not going to change. (Do I really need to list all the instances of our imperial expansion? The Louisiana Purchase, Florida, Texas, the West Coast, Alaska, Hawaii, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, Samoa, Iraq, Afghanistan ... hell, you can probably through Japan too. Any country where the U.S. is the standing army, that's ours and has nuclear weapons, for all intents and purposes, it's ours.)

So let's all raise a glass to the Pax Americana. The economy might stink right now, but business is good. And it's going to get even better.