On 24 May 2005 21:13:28 -0700, "Rebecca" wrote:

Well, I can see not much has changed around here. The proven liar is
still hanging on to the Zimmerman fable. One posted pic would have
cleared it up long ago, but I guess its in the same batch of pictures
with the fabled Hatteras. Given the tall tales of the POS Parker, the
quote "I dont ride in anything smaller than 36'" speaks volumes.
Proven liar, either way, once again.

Becky

Welcome back from where ever you've been. Actually, Harry was pretty good for a
couple days. He got caught in some fables about a fishing trip, but other than
that he was on good behavior for all of two days.



--
John H
On the 'PocoLoco' out of Deale, MD

"Divide each difficulty into as many parts as is feasible and necessary to resolve it."
Rene Descartes (A true binary thinker!)

On Tue, 24 May 2005 22:52:24 -0400, "Harry.Krause"
instead of posting trash, should have written:

Nightfall, Jan. 30. Eight-million Iraqi voters have finished risking their
lives to endorse freedom and defy fascism. Three things happen in rapid
succession. The right cheers. The left demurs. I walk away from a long-term
intimate relationship. I'm separating not from a person but a cause: the
political philosophy that for more than three decades has shaped my
character and consciousness, my sense of self and community, even my sense
of cosmos.

I'm leaving the left -- more precisely, the American cultural left and what
it has become during our time together.

I choose this day for my departure because I can no longer abide the
simpering voices of self-styled progressives -- people who once championed
solidarity with oppressed populations everywhere -- reciting all the ways
Iraq's democratic experiment might yet implode.

My estrangement hasn't happened overnight. Out of the corner of my eye I
watched what was coming for more than three decades, yet refused to truly
see. Now it's all too obvious. Leading voices in America's "peace" movement
are actually cheering against self-determination for a long-suffering Third
World country because they hate George W. Bush more than they love freedom.

Like many others who came of age politically in the 1960s, I became adept
at not taking the measure of the left's mounting incoherence. To face it
directly posed the danger that I would have to describe it accurately,
first to myself and then to others. That could only give aid and comfort to
Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and all the other
Usual Suspects the left so regularly employs to keep from seeing its own
reflection in the mirror.

Now, I find myself in a swirling metamorphosis. Think Kafka, without the
bug. Think Kuhnian paradigm shift, without the buzz. Every anomaly that
didn't fit my perceptual set is suddenly back, all the more glaring for so
long ignored. The insistent inner voice I learned to suppress now has my
rapt attention. "Something strange -- something approaching pathological --
something entirely of its own making -- has the left in its grip," the
voice whispers. "How did this happen?" The Iraqi election is my tipping
point. The time has come to walk in a different direction -- just as I did
many years before.

I grew up in a northwest Ohio town where conservative was a polite term for
reactionary. When Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of Mississippi "sweltering
in the heat of oppression," he could have been describing my community,
where blacks knew to keep their heads down, and animosity toward Catholics
and Jews was unapologetic. Liberal and conservative, like left and right,
wouldn't be part of my lexicon for a while, but when King proclaimed, "I
have a dream," I instinctively cast my lot with those I later found out
were liberals (then synonymous with "the left" and "progressive thought").

The people on the other side were dedicated to preserving my hometown's
backward-looking status quo. This was all that my 10-year-old psyche needed
to know. The knowledge carried me for a long time. Mythologies are helpful
that way.

I began my activist career championing the 1968 presidential candidacies of
Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy, because both promised to end America's
misadventure in Vietnam. I marched for peace and farm worker justice,
lobbied for women's right to choose and environmental protections, signed
up with George McGovern in 1972 and got elected as the youngest delegate
ever to a Democratic convention.

Eventually I joined the staff of U.S. Sen. Howard Metzenbaum, D-Ohio. In
short, I became a card-carrying liberal, although I never actually got a
card. (Bookkeeping has never been the left's strong suit.) All my
commitments centered on belief in equal opportunity, due process, respect
for the dignity of the individual and solidarity with people in trouble. To
my mind, Americans who had joined the resistance to Franco's fascist
dystopia captured the progressive spirit at its finest.

A turning point came at a dinner party on the day Ronald Reagan famously
described the Soviet Union as the pre-eminent source of evil in the modern
world. The general tenor of the evening was that Reagan's use of the word
"evil" had moved the world closer to annihilation. There was a palpable
sense that we might not make it to dessert.

When I casually offered that the surviving relatives of the more than 20
million people murdered on orders of Joseph Stalin might not find "evil'"
too strong a word, the room took on a collective bemused smile of the sort
you might expect if someone had casually mentioned taking up child
molestation for sport.

My progressive companions had a point. It was rude to bring a word like
"gulag" to the dinner table.

I look back on that experience as the beginning of my departure from a left
already well on its way to losing its bearings. Two decades later, I
watched with astonishment as leading left intellectuals launched a
telethon- like body count of civilian deaths caused by American soldiers in
Afghanistan. Their premise was straightforward, almost giddily so: When the
number of civilian Afghani deaths surpassed the carnage of Sept. 11, the
war would be unjust, irrespective of other considerations.

Stated simply: The force wielded by democracies in self-defense was
declared morally equivalent to the nihilistic aggression perpetuated by
Muslim fanatics.

Susan Sontag cleared her throat for the "courage" of the al Qaeda pilots.
Norman Mailer pronounced the dead of Sept. 11 comparable to "automobile
statistics." The events of that day were likely premeditated by the White
House, Gore Vidal insinuated. Noam Chomsky insisted that al Qaeda at its
most atrocious generated no terror greater than American foreign policy on
a mediocre day.

All of this came back to me as I watched the left's anemic, smirking
response to Iraq's election in January. Didn't many of these same people
stand up in the sixties for self-rule for oppressed people and against
fascism in any guise? Yes, and to their lasting credit. But many had since
made clear that they had also changed their minds about the virtues of
King's call for equal of opportunity.

These days the postmodern left demands that government and private
institutions guarantee equality of outcomes. Any racial or gender
"disparities" are to be considered evidence of culpable bias, regardless of
factors such as personal motivation, training, and skill. This goal is
neither liberal nor progressive; but it is what the left has chosen. In a
very real sense it may be the last card held by a movement increasingly
ensnared in resentful questing for group-specific rights and the
subordination of citizenship to group identity. There's a word for this:
pathetic.

I smile when friends tell me I've "moved right." I laugh out loud at what
now passes for progressive on the main lines of the cultural left.

In the name of "diversity," the University of Arizona has forbidden
discrimination based on "individual style." The University of Connecticut
has banned "inappropriately directed laughter." Brown University, sensing
unacceptable gray areas, warns that harassment "may be intentional or
unintentional and still constitute harassment." (Yes, we're talking
"subconscious harassment" here. We're watching your thoughts ...).

Wait, it gets better. When actor Bill Cosby called on black parents to
explain to their kids why they are not likely to get into medical school
speaking English like "Why you ain't" and "Where you is," Jesse Jackson
countered that the time was not yet right to "level the playing field." Why
not? Because "drunk people can't do that ... illiterate people can't do
that."

When self-styled pragmatic feminist Camille Paglia mocked young coeds who
believe "I should be able to get drunk at a fraternity party and go
upstairs to a guy's room without anything happening," Susan Estrich spoke
up for gender- focused feminists who "would argue that so long as women are
powerless relative to men, viewing 'yes' as a sign of true consent is
misguided."

I'll admit my politics have shifted in recent years, as have America's
political landscape and cultural horizon. Who would have guessed that the
U.S. senator with today's best voting record on human rights would be not
Ted Kennedy or Barbara Boxer but Kansas Republican Sam Brownback?

He is also by most measures one of the most conservative senators.
Brownback speaks openly about how his horror at the genocide in the Sudan
is shaped by his Christian faith, as King did when he insisted on justice
for "all of God's children."

My larger point is rather simple. Just as a body needs different medicines
at different times for different reasons, this also holds for the body
politic.

In the sixties, America correctly focused on bringing down walls that
prevented equal access and due process. It was time to walk the Founders'
talk -- and we did. With barriers to opportunity no longer written into
law, today the body politic is crying for different remedies.

America must now focus on creating healthy, self-actualizing individuals
committed to taking responsibility for their lives, developing their
talents, honing their skills and intellects, fostering emotional and moral
intelligence, all in all contributing to the advancement of the human
condition.

At the heart of authentic liberalism lies the recognition, in the words of
John Gardner, "that the ever renewing society will be a free society
(whose] capacity for renewal depends on the individuals who make it up." A
continuously renewing society, Gardner believed, is one that seeks to
"foster innovative, versatile, and self-renewing men and women and give
them room to breathe."

One aspect of my politics hasn't changed a bit. I became a liberal in the
first place to break from the repressive group orthodoxies of my
reactionary hometown.

This past January, my liberalism was in full throttle when I bid the
cultural left goodbye to escape a new version of that oppressiveness. I
departed with new clarity about the brilliance of liberal democracy and the
value system it entails; the quest for freedom as an intrinsically human
affair; and the dangers of demands for conformity and adherence to any
point of view through silence, fear, or coercion.

True, it took a while to see what was right before my eyes. A certain
misplaced loyalty kept me from grasping that a view of individuals as
morally capable of and responsible for making the principle decisions that
shape their lives is decisively at odds with the contemporary left's
entrance-level view of people as passive and helpless victims of powerful
external forces, hence political wards who require the continuous
shepherding of caretaker elites.

Leftists who no longer speak of the duties of citizens, but only of the
rights of clients, cannot be expected to grasp the importance (not least to
our survival) of fostering in the Middle East the crucial developmental
advances that gave rise to our own capacity for pluralism, self-reflection,
and equality. A left averse to making common cause with competent, self-
determining individuals -- people who guide their lives on the basis of
received values, everyday moral understandings, traditional wisdom, and
plain common sense -- is a faction that deserves the marginalization it has
pursued with such tenacity for so many years.

All of which is why I have come to believe, and gladly join with others who
have discovered for themselves, that the single most important thing a
genuinely liberal person can do now is walk away from the house the left
has built. The renewal of any tradition that deserves the name
"progressive" becomes more likely with each step in a better direction.

Keith Thompson is a Petaluma writer and the author of "Angels and Aliens"
and "To Be a Man." His work is at www.thompsonatlarge.com. Contact us at
.

[Borrowed from Ted]

--
John H
On the 'PocoLoco' out of Deale, MD

"Divide each difficulty into as many parts as is feasible and necessary to resolve it."
Rene Descartes (A true binary thinker!)

Harry, you reap what you sow.

What you should have written:

Nightfall, Jan. 30. Eight-million Iraqi voters have finished risking their
lives to endorse freedom and defy fascism. Three things happen in rapid
succession. The right cheers. The left demurs. I walk away from a long-term
intimate relationship. I'm separating not from a person but a cause: the
political philosophy that for more than three decades has shaped my
character and consciousness, my sense of self and community, even my sense
of cosmos.

I'm leaving the left -- more precisely, the American cultural left and what
it has become during our time together.

I choose this day for my departure because I can no longer abide the
simpering voices of self-styled progressives -- people who once championed
solidarity with oppressed populations everywhere -- reciting all the ways
Iraq's democratic experiment might yet implode.

My estrangement hasn't happened overnight. Out of the corner of my eye I
watched what was coming for more than three decades, yet refused to truly
see. Now it's all too obvious. Leading voices in America's "peace" movement
are actually cheering against self-determination for a long-suffering Third
World country because they hate George W. Bush more than they love freedom.

Like many others who came of age politically in the 1960s, I became adept
at not taking the measure of the left's mounting incoherence. To face it
directly posed the danger that I would have to describe it accurately,
first to myself and then to others. That could only give aid and comfort to
Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and all the other
Usual Suspects the left so regularly employs to keep from seeing its own
reflection in the mirror.

Now, I find myself in a swirling metamorphosis. Think Kafka, without the
bug. Think Kuhnian paradigm shift, without the buzz. Every anomaly that
didn't fit my perceptual set is suddenly back, all the more glaring for so
long ignored. The insistent inner voice I learned to suppress now has my
rapt attention. "Something strange -- something approaching pathological --
something entirely of its own making -- has the left in its grip," the
voice whispers. "How did this happen?" The Iraqi election is my tipping
point. The time has come to walk in a different direction -- just as I did
many years before.

I grew up in a northwest Ohio town where conservative was a polite term for
reactionary. When Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of Mississippi "sweltering
in the heat of oppression," he could have been describing my community,
where blacks knew to keep their heads down, and animosity toward Catholics
and Jews was unapologetic. Liberal and conservative, like left and right,
wouldn't be part of my lexicon for a while, but when King proclaimed, "I
have a dream," I instinctively cast my lot with those I later found out
were liberals (then synonymous with "the left" and "progressive thought").

The people on the other side were dedicated to preserving my hometown's
backward-looking status quo. This was all that my 10-year-old psyche needed
to know. The knowledge carried me for a long time. Mythologies are helpful
that way.

I began my activist career championing the 1968 presidential candidacies of
Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy, because both promised to end America's
misadventure in Vietnam. I marched for peace and farm worker justice,
lobbied for women's right to choose and environmental protections, signed
up with George McGovern in 1972 and got elected as the youngest delegate
ever to a Democratic convention.

Eventually I joined the staff of U.S. Sen. Howard Metzenbaum, D-Ohio. In
short, I became a card-carrying liberal, although I never actually got a
card. (Bookkeeping has never been the left's strong suit.) All my
commitments centered on belief in equal opportunity, due process, respect
for the dignity of the individual and solidarity with people in trouble. To
my mind, Americans who had joined the resistance to Franco's fascist
dystopia captured the progressive spirit at its finest.

A turning point came at a dinner party on the day Ronald Reagan famously
described the Soviet Union as the pre-eminent source of evil in the modern
world. The general tenor of the evening was that Reagan's use of the word
"evil" had moved the world closer to annihilation. There was a palpable
sense that we might not make it to dessert.

When I casually offered that the surviving relatives of the more than 20
million people murdered on orders of Joseph Stalin might not find "evil'"
too strong a word, the room took on a collective bemused smile of the sort
you might expect if someone had casually mentioned taking up child
molestation for sport.

My progressive companions had a point. It was rude to bring a word like
"gulag" to the dinner table.

I look back on that experience as the beginning of my departure from a left
already well on its way to losing its bearings. Two decades later, I
watched with astonishment as leading left intellectuals launched a
telethon- like body count of civilian deaths caused by American soldiers in
Afghanistan. Their premise was straightforward, almost giddily so: When the
number of civilian Afghani deaths surpassed the carnage of Sept. 11, the
war would be unjust, irrespective of other considerations.

Stated simply: The force wielded by democracies in self-defense was
declared morally equivalent to the nihilistic aggression perpetuated by
Muslim fanatics.

Susan Sontag cleared her throat for the "courage" of the al Qaeda pilots.
Norman Mailer pronounced the dead of Sept. 11 comparable to "automobile
statistics." The events of that day were likely premeditated by the White
House, Gore Vidal insinuated. Noam Chomsky insisted that al Qaeda at its
most atrocious generated no terror greater than American foreign policy on
a mediocre day.

All of this came back to me as I watched the left's anemic, smirking
response to Iraq's election in January. Didn't many of these same people
stand up in the sixties for self-rule for oppressed people and against
fascism in any guise? Yes, and to their lasting credit. But many had since
made clear that they had also changed their minds about the virtues of
King's call for equal of opportunity.

These days the postmodern left demands that government and private
institutions guarantee equality of outcomes. Any racial or gender
"disparities" are to be considered evidence of culpable bias, regardless of
factors such as personal motivation, training, and skill. This goal is
neither liberal nor progressive; but it is what the left has chosen. In a
very real sense it may be the last card held by a movement increasingly
ensnared in resentful questing for group-specific rights and the
subordination of citizenship to group identity. There's a word for this:
pathetic.

I smile when friends tell me I've "moved right." I laugh out loud at what
now passes for progressive on the main lines of the cultural left.

In the name of "diversity," the University of Arizona has forbidden
discrimination based on "individual style." The University of Connecticut
has banned "inappropriately directed laughter." Brown University, sensing
unacceptable gray areas, warns that harassment "may be intentional or
unintentional and still constitute harassment." (Yes, we're talking
"subconscious harassment" here. We're watching your thoughts ...).

Wait, it gets better. When actor Bill Cosby called on black parents to
explain to their kids why they are not likely to get into medical school
speaking English like "Why you ain't" and "Where you is," Jesse Jackson
countered that the time was not yet right to "level the playing field." Why
not? Because "drunk people can't do that ... illiterate people can't do
that."

When self-styled pragmatic feminist Camille Paglia mocked young coeds who
believe "I should be able to get drunk at a fraternity party and go
upstairs to a guy's room without anything happening," Susan Estrich spoke
up for gender- focused feminists who "would argue that so long as women are
powerless relative to men, viewing 'yes' as a sign of true consent is
misguided."

I'll admit my politics have shifted in recent years, as have America's
political landscape and cultural horizon. Who would have guessed that the
U.S. senator with today's best voting record on human rights would be not
Ted Kennedy or Barbara Boxer but Kansas Republican Sam Brownback?

He is also by most measures one of the most conservative senators.
Brownback speaks openly about how his horror at the genocide in the Sudan
is shaped by his Christian faith, as King did when he insisted on justice
for "all of God's children."

My larger point is rather simple. Just as a body needs different medicines
at different times for different reasons, this also holds for the body
politic.

In the sixties, America correctly focused on bringing down walls that
prevented equal access and due process. It was time to walk the Founders'
talk -- and we did. With barriers to opportunity no longer written into
law, today the body politic is crying for different remedies.

America must now focus on creating healthy, self-actualizing individuals
committed to taking responsibility for their lives, developing their
talents, honing their skills and intellects, fostering emotional and moral
intelligence, all in all contributing to the advancement of the human
condition.

At the heart of authentic liberalism lies the recognition, in the words of
John Gardner, "that the ever renewing society will be a free society
(whose] capacity for renewal depends on the individuals who make it up." A
continuously renewing society, Gardner believed, is one that seeks to
"foster innovative, versatile, and self-renewing men and women and give
them room to breathe."

One aspect of my politics hasn't changed a bit. I became a liberal in the
first place to break from the repressive group orthodoxies of my
reactionary hometown.

This past January, my liberalism was in full throttle when I bid the
cultural left goodbye to escape a new version of that oppressiveness. I
departed with new clarity about the brilliance of liberal democracy and the
value system it entails; the quest for freedom as an intrinsically human
affair; and the dangers of demands for conformity and adherence to any
point of view through silence, fear, or coercion.

True, it took a while to see what was right before my eyes. A certain
misplaced loyalty kept me from grasping that a view of individuals as
morally capable of and responsible for making the principle decisions that
shape their lives is decisively at odds with the contemporary left's
entrance-level view of people as passive and helpless victims of powerful
external forces, hence political wards who require the continuous
shepherding of caretaker elites.

Leftists who no longer speak of the duties of citizens, but only of the
rights of clients, cannot be expected to grasp the importance (not least to
our survival) of fostering in the Middle East the crucial developmental
advances that gave rise to our own capacity for pluralism, self-reflection,
and equality. A left averse to making common cause with competent, self-
determining individuals -- people who guide their lives on the basis of
received values, everyday moral understandings, traditional wisdom, and
plain common sense -- is a faction that deserves the marginalization it has
pursued with such tenacity for so many years.

All of which is why I have come to believe, and gladly join with others who
have discovered for themselves, that the single most important thing a
genuinely liberal person can do now is walk away from the house the left
has built. The renewal of any tradition that deserves the name
"progressive" becomes more likely with each step in a better direction.

Keith Thompson is a Petaluma writer and the author of "Angels and Aliens"
and "To Be a Man." His work is at www.thompsonatlarge.com. Contact us at
.


--
John H
On the 'PocoLoco' out of Deale, MD

"Divide each difficulty into as many parts as is feasible and necessary to resolve it."
Rene Descartes (A true binary thinker!)