Free Sean Penn

I hate to chat about celebrity stupidity in this space.  But God-damn it do they make it easy sometimes.  Here is Sean Penn, on Bill Maher’s show, defending Hugo Chavez.

PENN: The collaborative opportunity in Haiti, when you talk about Hugo Chavez, and some of the other people who are demonized [think Castro], and you know, when some of these countries accuse us of an occupation—where I believe this was strictly a humanitarian action by the United States military, and an incredible one – I’m a little sympathetic. Because every day, this elected leader [Chavez] is called a dictator here, and we just accept it! And accept it. And this is mainstream media, who should – truly, there should be a bar by which one goes to prison for these kinds of lies.

There’s Sean, calling for journalists to be imprisoned for calling Chavez what he is.  I can see the logic.  Chavez is already well on the way to doing that in his own country.  But we have that pesky First Amendment here and all that.

(And to address this election business: It’s true that the OAS and Jimmy Carter’s group have claimed that the Venezuelan elections were on the level.  On the other hand, Chavez has complete control of the economy and the media and has shut down TV stations and newspapers that criticize him, as I linked above.  Chavez’s loathsome rule is a perfect example of why “democracy” is not a synonym for “freedom” and why the latter is more important the former.)

Now to be perfectly fair, I think Penn is using hyperbole here.  He’s not actually suggesting that journalists be jailed.  And if that were all there was to this interview, I’d shrug it off.  But that’s just the tip of the stupid iceberg.  He also defends Chavez’s rule, claiming that Venezuelans now have access to dreams that only one in five Americans does.  Apparently, George W. Bush was controlling our dreams!  God damn it, why did he want me to keep having that dream where I have to take an exam in high school and haven’t shown up all quarter?  Bastard!

Anyway, I’ll let the Best Magazine on the Planet have its say on this:

As Penn says, the population of Venezuela now has “access to dreams” they never had in the past (could Penn even name the previous president of Venezuela?); a funny little formulation that unconsciously acknowledges that after 10 years of chavismo, the poor are still amazingly poor, the rich are now in Miami, having been replaced by members of the Bolibourgeoise, and the economy is a mess. The poor may have aspirations, but, as Venezuelan economist Francisco Rodriguez discovered, they have seen no real material gains.

In short, Venezuelans can dream all they want about prosperity.  But, under Chavez, those dreams are no more likely to come true than my dreams about Lucy Pinder.  Equality is useless when it just means equal oppression.

And, of course, Penn’s latest outgassing gives me a chance to link to one of Lee’s best jabs at Penn watching an anti-American rally in Iran:

Check out the picture of this wormy fuck.  He’s crouching in that position so you can’t see the erection he got when he heard thousands of Muslims chanting “Death to America.”

Nothing changes, does it?  Penn was a wormy fuck five years ago when Lee wrote those words.  And he’s still a wormy fuck.  And long after we’ve all joined Lee in that Great Jack Daniels Distillery in the Sky (and Penn has gone to that Red Carpet Show Down Below), future generations will still think of him as a wormy fuck.

Defining Terror

I want to throw this out for discussion. Via Glenn Greenwald, I find what is, to me, a surreal discussion at Newsweek about whether Joe Stack—the Austin airplane guy—was a terrorist or not.  To me, this isn’t even a question.  I have a fairly solid definition of a terrorist—someone who uses violence or the threat of violence outside the legitimate theater of war against the innocent to advance a political agenda.  Joe Stack meets that definition.  He crashed a plane into a building and killed innocent people to advance whatever lunacy was in his statement.  But Newsweek seems confused:

Did the label terrorist ever successfully stick to McVeigh? Or the Unabomber? Or any of the IRS bombers in our violence list?

Yes, yes and yes.  McVeigh was a mass murderer, but he was certainly a terrorist.  Someone protesting against big government or even a government they consider evil can organize politically, can write, can agitate, can defect to another country, can defect to an enemy.  Those last may be treasonous, but they are not terrorism.  But when you drive a truck-bomb up to a building full of innocent people because you want to foment a revolution, that’s pretty much the definition of terrorism.  I haven’t completed my study of the colonial era, but I have yet to find an instance of the Patriots protesting taxes by blowing up buildings.  The closest they got to terrorism was the occasional tarring and feathering.

Right or wrong, we definitely reserve the label “terrorist” for foreign attackers. Even the anthrax guy (not that we ever found him) wasn’t consistently referred to as terrorist.

Maybe not be Newsweek, but I certainly think the American people thought it was terrorism.  ALF goons who firebomb animal research labs are terrorists.  And men who murder abortion doctors are terrorists.  Why are we even having this discussion?  Why is Newsweek playing the “it’s not terrorism when Americans do it” game?  Where does that game even exist outside of their office?

But maybe I’m a whinging lefty wingnut pansy.  Do you guys see the distinction?  Did someone mix crazy pills in with my Azithromycin?  Is Joe Stack a terrorist or not?

Update: Just as I wrote this, a friend sent me this definition of a terrorist from the Patriot Act:

activities that (A) involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the U.S. or of any state, that (B) appear to be intended (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion, or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping, and (C) occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the U.S.

How does this not apply?

To be fair, Newsweek may be arguing a cultural theme—whether Americans consider guys like Stack to be terrorists, not whether they are terrorists.  Their discussion is very confused and obtuse—it’s hard to know what they’re arguing about.  In either case, however, they’re full of shit.  Joe Stack was a terrorist and I think most Americans would consider him a terrorist.  Just not the media, I guess.

Update: Ta-Nehisi:

By Isikoff’s lights--and by the lights of several of his colleagues--the Ku Klux Klan, an organization responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent people, the men who turned Birmingham into “Bombingham,” who hurled molotov cocktails into the homes of Detroiters who dared moved west of Woodward, who lynched black men in the streets, who brought food, children and wives to the spectacle, who smiled next to smoking corpses in post-cards for far-off relatives, who displayed the knuckles and testicles of black men in pickle jars, were not terrorists, but “Ethnic Intrusion Protesters.”

This is not merely about semantics. I deeply suspect that our inability to grapple with and understand our own history of home-grown terror, indeed defining it as something else, inhibits our understanding of the very terror we now face and claim to be at war with.

The Hypocrisy of Nader

The problem with Ralph Nader is not just that he’s dead wrong about so much, it’s that he’s so hypocritical while being wrong about it.  Nader has his thong in a bunch about the Citizens United decision.  But as Radley Balko points out:

It’s funny to see a PIRG organization complaining about corporations that take political positions without first consulting shareholders. Shareholders can sell. College students forced or tricked into donating to PIRG, on the other hand, don’t have that option.

When I was in college, I had to go to the treasurer’s office to specifically request that MPIRG donations not be taken out of my tuition.  I had to do it every quarter, too. It wasn’t that I minded what MPIRG was doing, specifically.  It was that I objected to having donations forcibly extracted from my college fees.  And the PIRGs have pulled this scam with many many colleges and universities.

Nader is simply one of those people who thinks his cause is so noble and just that the rules don’t apply to him.  If you’ve read Do As I Say, Not As I Do, you’ll know that he has also fought to keep his organizations from being unionized, is an overbearing and demanding boss who relentlessly overworks his employees and is, in fact, quite wealthy.  You can read a first-hand account of the PIRG’s worker abuses from McCardle’s Jane Galt days.  And numerous disillusioned liberals have told me almost identical stories.

Anytime a culture conservative is caught with his pants down, off or around another man’s neck, we get a media firestorm about his hypocrisy.  But Nader is walking talking hypocrite. His organization is so abusive that, if it were someone else’s, he be pushing legislation against it.  But he’s treated with reverence.

RFK Jr. Wastes CO2

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is one of my absolute favorite whipping boys.  It’s not just that he’s as dumb as a lamp post.  It’s not just that he’s the pompous scion of the most over-privileged and over-rated family in American history.  It’s not just that he’s an anti-scientific ignoramus who flogs dangerous ideas such as the now thoroughly debunked notion that vaccine cause autism.  It’s that he’s a flaming hypocrite.  This is a man who flies around on a private jet telling us to conserve.  This is a man who is constantly telling us we need to go all-out on alternative energies but opposed the Cape Winds projects because it might clutter his view.

(OK, to be fair, he cites environmental concerns in opposing the Cape Wind project.  And they may actually be legitimate concerns.  But his worry about the environmental impact of big wind farms disappears when it’s somebody else’s backyard.)

Anyway, right now this area is being buried in snow.  DC has been completely hammered.  As I noted in a previous post, this doesn’t disprove global warming.  Weather fluctuations will always exist and cold winters will become rarer, not non-existent, if AGW is real.  But the flip side is true as well.  A hot summer or a warm winter doesn’t prove global warming either, Algore theatrics not withstanding.  Even if we were sliding into an ice age, we would still expect weather fluctuations would produce warm winters, just more rarely.

Well, RFKJ has been caught being really stupid on this subject.  Here’s what he wrote last year after a warm winter.

In Virginia, the weather also has changed dramatically. Recently arrived residents in the northern suburbs, accustomed to today’s anemic winters, might find it astonishing to learn that there were once ski runs on Ballantrae Hill in McLean, with a rope tow and local ski club. Snow is so scarce today that most Virginia children probably don’t own a sled. But neighbors came to our home at Hickory Hill nearly every winter weekend to ride saucers and Flexible Flyers.

It gets worse when he starts named-dropping about this uncle.

If the greens really want to make inroads on environmental issues, the first thing they need to do is ditch idiots like RFKJ, who latch onto every news story as proof of whatever agenda they happen to be flogging.  And if RFKJ wants to do any good for the environment, the best thing to stop blowing out so much hot air.

Tebow Beats Down NOW

When the infamous Tim Tebow anti-abortion ad ran last night, the reaction of the room—spanning the gamut from rock-ribbed conservative to pantywaist liberal was, “That’s it?” It was very low key and didn’t actually say the A-word at all.

NOW was, of course, terrifically disappointed.  They’d geared up to denounce the ad and then it didn’t say anything?  Oh, well.  They’ll try the next best thing: accusing it of promoting violence.

Yeah, you knew that was coming.

In an attempt to fall in line with the humorous nature of most Super Bowl commercials, the Focus on the Family in-game ad shows Tebow tackling his mom and his mother playfully scolding him for interrupting her.

In remarks that are raising eyebrows from pro-life advocates, NOW president Terry O’Neill said that bit of the ad glorified violence against women.

“I am blown away at the celebration of the violence against women in it,” she told the Los Angeles Times. “That’s what comes across to me even more strongly than the anti-abortion message. I myself am a survivor of domestic violence, and I don’t find it charming. I think CBS should be ashamed of itself.”

O’Neill’s reaction drew guffaws even from hardcore abortion advocates.

Frances Kissling, the former president of Catholics for Choice, told the Times that NOW is way off base.

“It’s absurd to claim that this is an endorsement of violence against women,” Kissling said. “These people came across as affectionate, loving, funny and happy.”

NOW wasn’t alone in trying to play the domestic violence card.

Abortion advocate Amanda Marcotte had this post on Twitter that has drawn a reaction from pro-life advocates: “Hey Mom! Tried to kill you from the womb and failed. How about a blind side tackle? Violence against Moms.”

Really?  Really?!  You really think this ad was telling people to beat up their mothers?

You just can’t win with these people.  In the end, the crime that Tim Tebow has committed is that he disagrees with them on their signature issue. And he does so much more reasonably than they defend their signature issue.  So whatever it takes, his opinion must be degraded.