def Sparse(Matrix):

It’s been a while since I’ve gotten my hands dirty poliblogging, but since this is a particularly influential election season, I figured I might as well give it another go around. So, this is my shout from the dry, dusty corner of the blogosphere announcing my return to the obscure, peripheral place I once had.

For those that might give a hoot, I used to blog back before and during the 2004 presidential election. I even got an instalanche on the post linked above (the 15 minutes are well and truly over), soon after which I registered this site and started cranking out as many posts as I could. I had every intention of giving it a go and trying to make a writer of myself. Alas, it didn’t happen. I got tired of the negativity of it all, much of which I took part in and indulged myself in, and just burned out. Well, that and I started playing World of Warcraft, which I’m now trying to ween myself off of.

I guess we’ll see how things turn out. Maybe it’ll be fun and I’ll get a few good links, who knows?

Start with the top shelf, if you want the breakdown of events. Best part of the post, and most telling:

Update (Ian): 9:33. Chris Matthews called Lamont very “calm”, “casual”, and not “that bad”. On the other hand, Lieberman is a “schmaltzy ethnic guy”. Geez, Chris, could you make it any clear?

Schmaltzy ethnic guy? What the heck is a “schmaltzy ethnic guy” anyway? Definition, via Dictionary.com, of schmaltzy:

schmaltz·y also schmalz·y (shmält’sē)
adj. Informal., -i·er also -i·er, -i·est also -i·est.

Of, relating to, or marked by excessive or maudlin sentimentality.

How exactly is Matthews’ darling, Bill Clinton, not schmaltzy? Well, I guess Clinton isn’t ethnic. Oh wait.

In her now-famous defense of a scandal-plagued Bill Clinton, Nobel prizewinner Toni Morrison, went so far as to call him “our first black president. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime.”

I should think ethnic schmaltz would be right up Matthews’ alley. Then again, ethnic is probably a code-word for zionist pig jooo now, anyway. In any event, anti-war and hard-left Lamont was Matthews’ man, so we can’t expect too much even-handedness.

Teh funny aside, this is a watershed moment for both the Democratic party and the United States of America. A number of folks think that this will have some serious negative consequences for the Democratic party, possibly even disastrous, but I don’t think so. Like it or not, the Democratic party has been steadily moving to the hard left since the late 1960s. The only difference now is that they aren’t trying to do it stealthily. The sane moderates in the Democratic party put their feet forward during the civil rights and early environmental era and did some good things. After accomplishing these things, by motivating through rational argument the conscientious center of the United States, they began leaving behind the center in a dust cloud of self-sufficient arrogance. When they had reason on their side, they gained the center, and power. Once they had the power, they left both reason, and the center.

The American middle-class and their bourgeois values were a pitstop in flyover country between academic speculation and the promised land of collectivist utopia. It wasn’t until 1995 that the entrenched socialist pilgrims realized they were wandering in the desert, sans provisions, sans direction and sans litter bearers. The plebes had run off after another god back in the 1980s, a golden, Brillcreamed bovine in the form of Ronald Reagan, and now his priests were taking away the pilgrims’ place as the arbiters of progress.

This little brouhaha in Connecticut isn’t a guerilla war by a rabid minority to capture the soul of the Democratic party. It’s Daily Moses storming down Mount Sinai, eyes ablaze, glorious Freshmaking radiance in his countenance, ready to cast the tablets of the law upon heads of the adulterous generation that dared to betray its right and proper masters. Whether or not those tablets will actually open up the earth and swallow anyone other than Joe Lieberman (if it’s even swallowing him), time will tell, but it’s a mistake to think of this as some kind of new breed of Democrat. The netroots are the true roots of the Democratic party and have been for decades. The church mice have just awoken.

Why then is this a watershed moment if the socialists’ influence has waned so much through inattention to the public discourse?

Forty years of near-complete power might dull the senses through complacency, but like a 500-pound couch-ridden man whose flesh has long sense begun to mingle with the fabric of his sagging throne, the inertia of influence does not turn on a dime. All those decades of building a culture in Washington D.C., New York, et al. centered around the necessity of collectivism, a culture that existed long before its zenith of influence in the 1960s, will not, cannot come to a screeching halt just because a few yahoos in 1994 from Middle America thought it was loony toons. It’s this culture that is driving the netroots, and it’s this culture that’s feeding and watering the netroots via gardeners like Soros and Peter Lewis.

What is so distinctive and startling about this race is that a party which only a few years ago nominated Joe Lieberman to be their Vice-Presidential candidate, is now so thoroughly under the thumb of men like George Soros and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, that they would throw him overboard to appease their funding sources. To see Hillary Clinton, of late one of the most hawkish members of the Senate Democrats, duck and cover in the presense of the Kossacks just makes their assumption of mastery over the party that much more breathtaking. Like their ideological forebears, the Kidz are purging the party of all its un-persons.

Why is this so important that a decidedly minority party whose ideology is clearly to the left of the mainstream would undergo such a politically violent upheaval? Because the majority status of the congressional Republican party has historically been tied to positive economic health. Heck, this Republican party only maintains a tenuous hold on the Congress, even with a vibrant economy. It’s a fairly defensible contention that democratic peoples tend to use the ballot box as punishment for poor performance, either through active participation or purposeful passivity, regardless of their ideological similarities with the party in power.

If the economy goes south, the Democrats are in like Flynn, and thanks to the Kidz and their Daddy Warbucks Soros, the Democrats that will assume power won’t be the go-along-get-along, finger-in-the-wind Clinton types. They’ll be the slavering purge and jack-boot brand with vodka in their veins and trigger fingers itching for political dissidents. If today’s Democratic party assumes power, our country’s government will plunge head-long into the socialism and moral indeterminacy of Europe, or worse, be pushed towards the edge of proto-soviet marxism à la the netroots’ darling, Hugo Chavez.

In a densely constructed column at Townhall.com (via Instapundit), Michael Medved goes to great lengths to explain what, to him, are the three main reasons why “even people of good will” struggle with a kind of latent proto-antisemitism.

This central, primeval charge that arrogant Jews seek global dominance originates from three distinct historical factors:

1- The emphasis on the “Chosen People” concept in the Bible

2- The prominence and prosperity of Jews in most nations in which they’ve established significant communities, and

3- The startling successes of the State of Israel in the mere 60 years of its existence.

In a painstaking attempt to disarm these false signposts to Jewish superiority so as help integrate them into society in the minds of his readers, I can’t help but feel that he’s betraying his own private sense of cultural superiority and also an historical myopia. The Jewish people have been one of the most successful ethnic groups in the world’s history, so if there exists any level of passive condescension in his article, any thinking person could easily forgive him for it. The Jews have every right to feel proud of their culture and its achievements. The real mistake of his article, one that is just as invisible to the popular historical construct built by mass media, is that of unnecessary multiplication of hypotheses.

The Jews are not hated for their Jewishness. Nor are they hated for their success per se. While the third thesis is one that seems valid, it is a matter of state and politics, not culture, for Medved knows quite well that Israel is as much Arab as it is Jewish, at least in terms of identity, if the blood of Arab Israeli soldiers dying at Hezballah’s hands is any indication. That is to say, those that hate Jews for Israel’s success do so using Israel as a convenient excuse for their underlying hatred of Jews. So, the context of this is one of culture and ethnicity, specifically that of the Jewish people, and deals with Medved’s first two theses. Why then are the Jews hated so especially, so uniquely in history, if it isn’t their Jewishness?

In an essay by Thomas Sowell, Is Anti-Semitism Generic?, an adaptation of ideas first worked through in 1994’s Race and Culture and later Migrations and Cultures, he describes how the persecution of the Jews throughout history is neither unique, nor is it a function of their identity. In essence, it is a function of their function in the societies to which they belonged. Using the term “middlemen minority” to describe this function, Sowell points out various cultures throughout history, some even existing in the mean streets of America’s urban environments today, that have shared the same persecutions and the same successes of the Jews.

Lethal violence against middleman minorities has been on a scale seldom approached by violence against other kinds of minorities, such as conquered indigenous groups or formerly enslaved people. All the blacks lynched in the entire history of the United States do not add up to as many people as the number of Chinese slaughtered by mobs near Saigon in 1782, or the Jews killed by mobs in Central Europe in 1096 or in Ukraine in 1648, much less the slaughters of Armenians by mobs in the Ottoman Empire during the 1890s or during the First World War. Only the Nazi Holocaust exceeded the slaughter of Armenians and, while the Holocaust was the ultimate catastrophe for Jews, it was also the culmination of a long history of lethal mass violence unleashed against middleman minorities around the world.

His argument is that because of the role played by middlemen minorities, that of facilitator between the producers and consumers, and because achievement in this role is predicated upon certain behavioral traits best encapsulated and nurtured by cohesive (and ultimately exclusionary) familial relationships, cultures that have enjoyed the greatest success in the role of middleman have been the most persecuted.

Consider again the case of the Korean immigrant or Vietnamese refugee who has set up a small business in one of America’s black ghettos. Although this small-scale entrepreneur may have begun with very little money and may never become fluent in English or polished in manner, nevertheless his growing prosperity over the years may become manifest to ghetto residents, and his American-born children are likely to be heading off to colleges, perhaps prestigious colleges, while the children of many of the people in the community around his shop have prospects of low-paid jobs or unemployment, and many face prospects of jail.

It is this raw political framework for scape-goating a minority culture that emboldened Hitler to open Bergen-Belsen to implement his “final solution.”

Add in the factor that this community lives in an atmosphere where “unfair” disparities are resented by those who set the tone in both the general society and in the local ghetto. All the ingredients are there for attitudes and actions which are called “anti-Semitism” when directed against Jews but which are very similar to the attitudes and actions to which other middleman minorities have been subjected in many times and places around the world.

There is no doubt that antisemitism is a very real and highly dangerous social pathology, dangerous obviously for Jews but just as dangerous for America in general. This irrational hatred, sown in rank selfishness and reaped through political manipulation, is bringing forth fruits of injustice and bloodshed in both the Middle East and in our nation. That it is a problem is a fact beyond reproach. That this kind of persecution is a problem unique to Jews is most certainly not.

Why then point this error on Medved’s part out, given that antisemitism is by far the most dominant form of persecution of middlemen minorities, and certainly the most popularly recognized? The purpose is to point out that the problem lies not in the special identity of Jews; if it did, then there would always be some cause, some justification, however slight and tenuous, based on that uniqueness alone, to single out the Jews, whether for persecution or praise. It is only by recognizing that the problem is unjustified egoism, rank, selfish excuse-mongering, that any real reconciliation can begin.

The street thug hates the Korean shop keeper because the thug knows he’s a profligate spendthrift, not because the shop keeper is Korean. The Ottoman Turk hates the Armenian merchant because the Turk is unsuccessful, not because the merchant is Armenian. Conversely, the Jew is successful because he works hard, not because he’s Jewish; if a man is to be praised for his success, do so in the context of hard work, not cultural pride, for in the end it is his hard work, not his culture, that garnered him his laurels.

It is plain and simple jealousy at the root of antisemitism, and until it is exposed and conquered in the hearts of those that harbor it, no amount of rationalization is sufficient to battle the demagogues waiting in the wings to fan the embers of jealousy to a wild fire of genocide.

It seems that some don’t agree with my crepe hanging about Connecticut.

The spectacle in Connecticut was ugly and mean-spirited, and in the end the progressives tried to oust a poltician with a solidly liberal voting record for a rich novice who bought himself an election, something that not even Karl Rove could have cooked up. However, they’re not trying it in Florida, Nebraska, or West Virginia. The Left isn’t even trying it in New York. When they try to take this show on the road, then we can talk about 1972. Until then, Democrats should be embarrassed enough by this debacle.

I’ve always been the apocalyptic sort, so it’s not too surprising. There are others out there have a positively jovial attitude about the whole thing.

A Lieberman win as an independent will send democrats in Connecticut and across the nation a very clear message, “What you’re doing still isn’t working.” I can’t wait until it happens.

On the other hand, Short agrees on the severity of the Kossacks gaining mastery, though his context is one of control of the government, not just of the Democratic party.

I think Senator Lieberman knows, just like us Conservatives know, an anti-war left running this country is about the worst thing that could happen to it; not because the anti-war left would pull us out of Iraq but because they would run this country into the ground with its attempts at socialism and power-building.

While Captain Ed’s skepticism of dark prophecy is justified, and Short’s optimism is certainly laudable and proper, I don’t think either of them would agree that a Democratic party controlled by the Kidz is a real threat. It’s on this point that I must disagree with them, and most of the folks on the right that are understandably crowing over last night’s spectacle in Connecticut. Just because Daily Moses has yet to smite the unbelievers with emrods doesn’t mean he won’t soon enough. All the money is on, in and with the netroots and their matted web of special interest comrades. Politicians go where the money is, and +the Democrats are a party in desperate need of money.

In a world where being “bad” is good, indeed a world where good and bad are seen as a distinction without a difference, it should come as no surprise that the concepts of heroism and villany would fair no better. Looking at the comics of the day, perhaps not the most effete sources of insight, but certainly one of the rawest, one gets a sense that the only real good seen by the fashionable world is that which goes furthest in violating what is deemed right and proper by the most number of people.

It’s like a hunger, on the part of our intellectual and artistic aristocracy, to continually find and conquer new territory in the collective moral conscience of everyday people. A “go west young man” mentality effuses among these, the wise and prudent, where each new mountain range of mores on the horizon sprouts entire movements of literature, dance and music, and the indigenous folkways are corralled in reservations meant not to preserve, but to placate with the eventual goal of forced assimilation. The engine of this progress, as the process of destruction is usually called, is deconstruction. By taking the highest conceptions of man and deconstructing them, a power is granted that allows these conceptions to be made base, ostensibly so that they can be “more human” and therefore more endearing. Of course, after this high concept is made more human and satisfying to the artist and his audience, what remains is only a shell, a husk whose insides have been devoured, which is promptly cast away. The Madonna is made a whore, and the artist searches for his next virgin landscape. Conversely, the least is made higher than the best, though certainly not in the sense Jesus meant when speaking of the “least of the kingdom.” In this case, the mean, nasty and spiteful are put upon pedestals next to the kind and productive as a matter of course; the former painted in his best possible light with the latter his worst, all so that the two are seen as equal or inverted.

This rapacious desire has been making strange bedfellows of artists and tyrants for some time. Where before artists’ relationships to autocrats were generally bound up in the stale and at times contentious contract of patronage, the current model is one of a strange mutual admiration society. From the 60s onward, there has a real affection on the part of artists and intellectuals for some of the most vile, most bloody thugs and dictators of the 20th century. Note the godlike status of Che, enshrined on numerous t-shirts at rock concerts and gallery openings in the West. Note the warm sentiments expressed by the intelligentsia for Castro and Hugo Chavez. The men of the 20th century best known for their open disregard for the unalienable rights of man are treasured and adored by those that depend wholly, for both their lives and their livelihood, on those very same rights. You’d would think they would take stock of the fate of one Maxim Gorky, a brilliant writer turned Bolshevik, forced out of Russia by Lenin, then lured back to Stalinist Russia with the promise of fame and artistic freedom, only to be forced into the role of mouthpiece for the regime and eventually poisoned along with his son.

So, today, the post-modern man searches the landscape for heroes to deconstruct and villains to glorify. Where do his eyes rest? The old guard of Soviet Marxism is gone, though their lesser satellite lackeys and ideological descendants still remain. The Western world has for the most part given up the threadbare trappings of revolution and replaced it with the sometimes temperamental rotary engine of free market capitalism and democracy, a satisfying enough target of deconstruction, though ultimately too pragmatic and worldly to be as rich a vein as the rigid Victorian autocracy of the nascent 20th century or even the childlike innocence of the 1950s born of a generation seeking comfort for their souls weary of war. What vile thing then is left for the enlightened man to put on the pedestal and praise, to the approbation of his enlightened peers?

Enter September 11, 2001 and the emergence of Islamic radicalism. Violent jihad set to destroy not only the artist’s highest and most delicious target of deconstruction, America and its consumerist economy, but Western civilization itself in fire and screaming chaos. This wasn’t a Fascist Hitler that wished to save Western civilization from its money-grubbers and lesser men and elevate it to a new Roman glory, free of defect; it wasn’t even a Soviet Stalin that wished to remake the West into a socialist Utopia under world-wide Communism. This was a mad beast, completely free of reason and prideful in its lack thereof, that wanted nothing less than complete annihilation of the West and everything it has ever stood for. As was put into stark, clear language by Hussein Massawi, formerly part of the Hezballah leadership:

“We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you.”

This statement was nominally made regarding the Jews of Israel, but it clearly applies to that which created Israel and has provided a haven for the Jews for 2000 years, the West, as evidenced by the events in New York and elsewhere in the world over the past 15 years.

What could possibly be more enticing to post-modern Man? Here is an object so vile, so antithetical to our collective conscience, that it would be difficult, if not impossible, for the post-modernist to imagine something more satisfying to his refined concupiscence. If aligning oneself with Soviet Russia with its gulags and mass purges was thrilling to the academic encrusted with idle boredom, then putting on the mantle of the jihadi would be positively rapturous. To preach the elimination of Western civilization while comfortably situated among the fineries bought with and protected by the laborious centuries-long application of its principles is to finally and gloriously cross that asymptotic boundary beyond which exists no light or good thing. Mathematicians have long insisted that it is impossible to divide by zero, but artists and academics have been struggling for decades now to do precisely that, and may have finally found their divisor.

In a brief jaunt through the leftosphere, I was amused by the speed at which southpaws can punch themselves in the mouth:

The point to drive home is that the Republican Party is the party of the extreme right. They represent the business elite and the Taliban wing of American politics. They represent the fattest cats and the most vicious dogs. They’re the party of idiotic war and unprotected cities. They’re corrupt, bigoted, and inept.

I’m assuming by Taliban wing, he’s referring to the “Christianists,” which implies that the Christians in government are as bad as the Taliban. Or, Christian conservatives that govern as such are no different than Muslims reactionaries that govern as such. Last time I checked, Tom Tancredo does not regularly have the women in his state stoned to death for adultery, nor would he ever want to. Given that Mr. Todd Gitlin thinks that all Christian conservatives want to do so (otherwise, how can his moniker for them be meaningful?), how exactly is that not both an extreme and bigoted position to hold? This statement is made all the more hillarious when you take a long look at the Left, or as Mr. Gitlin puts it:

Sects are always in need of heretics to blame, expel and punish. First, fervor takes hold, then rigidity. Righteousness dictates uniformity. Dissent seems dangerous, even treasonous. The spirit hardens: You’re either with us or with the evildoers.

This is nowhere more true than on the left.

Also, by business elite, does he include Messrs. George Soros and Peter Lewis? Or Bill Gates? Or the founders and CEOs of Google? Does he not know that in 2004 Democrat doners made up the lion’s share of big spenders, contributing tens of millions of dollars to electioneering organizations that Todd Gitlin supports? We have our millionaires while you have your billionaires. The fattest of cats, indeed.

Vicious dogs, huh. We are dogs, then? That rhetoric sounds familiar. Shall you be giving us the bullet or the needle when you get power? Pretty extreme of you, Mr. Gitlin.

Of course, it’s no surprise the guy “professes journalism” at Columbia University.

I get the impression sometimes that my inability/lack of desire to eat at the media table on a regular basis will make blogging harder. Bleh..

Via Ace, Thomas Sowell gets to the root of a topic I’ve brought up on a couple of occasions regarding the Muslim psychotics. First, the crux:

After we, or our children and grandchildren, find ourselves living at the mercy of people with no mercy, what will future generations think of us, that we let this happen because we wanted to placate “world opinion” by not acting “unilaterally”?

We are fast approaching the point of no return.

This closer sums the theme of much of what is being mulled over by many Americans in general and conservatives in particular. The root that Sowell deals with, that of human envy, or as he puts it, the inevitable outcome of such envy in humiliation, is the unifying element that his research into human sociopolitical dynamics has sometimes captured in the person of “middleman minorities.”

Humiliation and hate go together. Why humiliation? Because a once-proud, dynamic culture in the forefront of world civilizations, and still carrying a message of their own superiority to “infidels” today, is painfully visible to the whole world as a poverty-stricken and backward region, lagging far behind in virtually every field of human endeavor.

In this case, it is less about the middlemen minorities and more about the humiliation of lost, and ultimately unrecoverable, glory, but the canker of envy is still there.

There is no way that they can catch up in a hundred years, even if the rest of the world stands still. And they are not going to wait a hundred years to vent their resentments and frustrations at the humiliating position in which they find themselves.

This same envy-begets-humiliation-begets-hatred is apparent in the rabid anti-Americanism of Europe, where their once-proud and dynamic past is darkened by their stagnant and hemophilic present.

There’s quite a bit of social pathology at work both on the arab street and on the Left, here in America and abroad. It’s becoming tedious to keep up with who will go further to destroy Western civilization, the infantilized hyper-violent zombies or their weak-minded apologists in the West. Like some kind of creepy lovers’ suicide pact involving cannibalism.

Probably needs more cowbell.

It’s been 5 years. I still remember pulling out onto the road, on my way to work. I remember that it was sunny and beautiful outside. I remember hearing on the radio that a plane had hit the towers, thinking Oh great, another wacko in a Cesna… Then I hear that it’s a jetliner, that it’s an attack.

I get to work, and the TV is on in the conference room. They’re watching the poor suiciders jumping from the buildings. I can’t take it, so I go to my desk. Those two memories, just pulling out onto the street and watching the suiciders, are the only two I have from that day. I don’t like having them in my head.

I guess we’ll see whether the Democratic party will feel the heat for this little Freudian slip from John Kerry.

“You know, education, if you make the most of it, if you study hard and you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, uh, you, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.”

Michelle, Ace have the skinny.

I predict this will have no effect. The rub of this election season is turnout, i.e. whose base is more energized. Undecideds don’t vote in mid-terms, and since they’re the only ones that might not already know about Kerry’s and the left’s contempt for the military, the fact that he’s now being honest won’t make any difference.

The only way it might is if it energizes military families. We’ll see.

Update (1:40pm CST): Interesting en passant by Kerry. He insults the troops, then takes the understandable outrage as an excuse to ratchet up his rhetoric against the President in his press conference. Might just be a good move; it’ll certainly get the frothing lefty base worked up.

Update2: Ace brings heap big funny.

U3:

Brilliant