or Powell's or me• • •
"Mike and Jon, Jon and Mike—I've known them both for years, and, clearly, one of them is very funny. As for the other: truly one of the great hangers-on of our time."—Steve Bodow, head writer, The Daily Show
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"Who can really judge what's funny? If humor is a subjective medium, then can there be something that is really and truly hilarious? Me. This book."—Daniel Handler, author, Adverbs, and personal representative of Lemony Snicket
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"The good news: I thought Our Kampf was consistently hilarious. The bad news: I’m the guy who wrote Monkeybone."—Sam Hamm, screenwriter, Batman, Batman Returns, and Homecoming
September 09, 2007
Our Leaders: Thank Goodness They're Completely Different From Saddam Hussein
This is from a new New Yorker article on Iraq:
White House officials are determined to present the surge as a dramatic turn in the war—as if the war could still be won....Peter Wehner, a former adviser to President George W. Bush...described Petraeus as a man who could enter the military pantheon next to Grant, if only the American people would give him the chance. “What happens if, at the eleventh hour, we’re witnessing one of the most remarkable feats in American history on the part of a general?” he said. “If that’s the case, why do you want to give up now?”
This is Kenneth Pollack in The Threatening Storm, explaining why Saddam Hussein was so incredibly dangerously dangerous:
Saddam has a twenty-eight year pattern of aggression, violence, miscalculation, and purposeful underestimation of the consequences of his actions that should give real pause to anyone...Even when Saddam does consider a problem at length...his own determination to interpret geopolitical calculations to suit what he wants to believe anyway lead him to construct bizarre scenarios that he convinces himself are highly likely.
EARLIER: Peter Wehner focuses his "intellectual seriousness" on Social Security.
Posted at September 9, 2007 12:13 PM | TrackBack“…Petraeus as a man who could enter the military pantheon next to Grant,...”
If we put Centurion Petraeus in Grant’s tomb we might finally solve the mystery of Grant’s tomb and at long last we shall know who is buried there. Should be a winner.
It's Lincoln.
Posted by: Mike Meyer at September 10, 2007 12:52 AMI'll read this post later. Right now I gotta take care of these Scratch 'n' Win tickets, which I'm pretty sure are going to make me really wealthy.
Posted by: saurabh at September 10, 2007 10:17 AMIf there were a 1% chance of "winning", whatever that means, I'd say, go ahead.
But, there's not even.
Posted by: IntelVet at September 10, 2007 11:30 AMmaybe we should develop a pill for this ...can it be cured?
should we be building treatment centers?
ooops, i meant that as a response to this report, which may help explain this conservative silliness. The LA Times is reporting that recent research published in the journal Nature Neuroscience indicates that liberals and conservatives have different cognitive styles.
Here's a quote:
Frank J. Sulloway, a researcher at UC Berkeley's Institute of Personality and Social Research who was not connected to the study, said the results "provided an elegant demonstration that individual differences on a conservative-liberal dimension are strongly related to brain activity."
Analyzing the data, Sulloway said liberals were 4.9 times as likely as conservatives to show activity in the brain circuits that deal with conflicts, and 2.2 times as likely to score in the top half of the distribution for accuracy.
Apparently, this research shows that conservatives have a cognitive style that is error prone when dealing with conflict.
Posted by: joe in oklahoma at September 10, 2007 01:05 PM
