Two Thumbs, er, Up

David Brooks, "Remaking The Epic Of America", Sunday, February 5:

On this, our holiest day of the year, when Americans gather, overeat and enjoy the outpourings of our greatest advertising agencies, it is fitting to reflect upon the core myth that animates our nation. No, I don't mean the western, which is so 19th century. I mean the sports movie, the epic that defines contemporary America.

Okay, I know what you're thinking: Riley, this post has already written itself. Just give him the Golden Knob of the Week or something and be done with it. Fair enough, but just play along for one more paragraph:

Over the past several years, theaters have been inundated by a series of films that all have the same plot. Whether it is "Hoosiers," "Glory Road," "Coach Carter," "Remember the Titans," "Miracle," "The Replacements" or a hundred others you've barely heard of, the core elements are always the same. A tough, no-nonsense coach, usually with a shadow-filled past, takes over a shambolic, underfunded team. He forces his players to work harder than they ever thought they could. He inspires them to sacrifice for the greater good. Finally, he leads them to glory over richer and more respected rivals.

Even granting Brooks the only escape path Sanity Herself has available here--that he's speaking with tongue planted firmly in cheek (he ain't)--how are you supposed to look at that list without laughing in his face (you aren't)? Hoosiers may be about as good as that sort of movie can get. It's also twenty years old, which places it about two generations ago in cultural terms. Of the rest, well, Remember the Titans did decent box office for utter dreck, Glory Road is new, and I had to look up the rest. The only reason I didn't think The Replacements was the name of that Irish band movie was I know who The Replacements are. That was The Commitments, a better movie than any of Brooks' and one which oddly enough sort of follows that parse of his, although, not being American, it wasn't required to end cheerily. No, The Replacements features Canoe Reeves as a football player. It's a comedy. As for the "hundreds of others you've barely heard of", I've never heard of 'em.

(Here's an odd little factoid I'll use since I bothered to look it up: none of those movies--Glory Road excepted since 2006 has just begun--is even the highest grossing sports movie of its year. Hoosiers was trounced by Karate Kid, Part II, Coach Carter by the flak' sid remake of The Longest Yard, and Miracle's patriotism-stirring take was nearly doubled by Dodgeball, not to mention Fahrenheit 911. I grant that you have to call Gladiator a sports movie to beat Remember the Titans, but why not? More people apparently found Big Momma's House and Traffic more inspirational, as far as that goes.)

But it won't go far with Brooks, of course, who's on the trail of another Boboesque revelation:

When a story is repeated this often, and when it continues to attract audiences time after time, it is because it affirms certain values precious to the culture. The values these movies affirm amount to a brick-by-brick destruction of the values that were prevalent 30 years ago.

Lawd God A'mighty, is this was comes out of those Burke and Hobbes weekends Brooks and his True Conservative buddies are always havin'? Did they invite Benji Shapiro up for a special Pop Culture seminar? What's next, Dave? "Popularity of Elvis on velvet shames Leftist art critics?"

Aw, hell, Bobo's on a roll:

•Thirty years ago, young people were told to question authority. But the heroes of these movies are coaches who are unabashed authority figures.

•Thirty years ago, there was a revolt against traditional manliness, but these coaches are stereotypical manly men.

•Thirty years ago, students were warned of the dangers of conformity, of the crushing banality of the Organization Man. But in this world success comes only when individuals subordinate themselves to the team.

Two things piss me off here, and neither of them is Brooks' evident stupidity on the subject, which I take as a given. First, thirty years ago is precisely the time movies changed, thanks to the twin successes of Jaws and Star Wars. Money and marketing, in other words, not moral values. The only thing those movies were urging young people to do was buy tickets. And action figures. And it's been that way ever since. Some counter-revolution.

Prior to that we might note that Patton won an Oscar™ in 1970; The French Connection in '71. Neither is constructed of the cardboard Mr. Brooks prefers, but they're hardly Do Your Own Thingfests. And the Dirty Harry films were enormously popular. They might not have urged good clean self-deprecating team play, but they sure upheld the cartoon manliness Brooks craves, and their villains were little more than a litany of 60s anti-authority clichés with legs. And firearms.

Second, we had a brief period from the later 60s to the mid 70s when more great films were produced in Hollywood than before or since: Bonnie and Clyde, Cool Hand Luke, Midnight Cowboy, The Wild Bunch, Medium Cool, M*A*S*H, Five Easy Pieces, Patton, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Little Big Man, The Ballad of Cable Hogue, The Last Picture Show, The Godfather I & II, Chinatown, Badlands, Taxi Driver, and Network, just to name the ones that come to me as I type. None of them may be a "conservative's" wet dream exactly (though the Godfather served as a management training film for a certain tiny Indiana governor), but they're far from simple minded exhortations to Youth Culture. You might mention Easy Rider and The Graduate as films that fit Brooks' scheme (and if so, why didn't he name any?), but so what? You can shake movies, or books, or whathaveyou through the cultural sieve of your choice and "prove" what you will. Disney was cranking out Hailey Mills movies, John Wayne was still working steady, and Spaghetti Westerns and Bond films were packin' 'em in.

The choice of "thirty years ago" isn't casual; Brooks wants to pretend the world wised up, elected Reagan, and recognized anew the true wisdom of whatever values the "conservatives" are pushing this week. Bullshit. Rebellion ebbs and flows, but bootlicking is always in fashion.

The heroes in these movies stand for deference and order over liberation and self-esteem.

So did the White Citizen's Councils.

Audiences embrace coaches who enforce an insane work ethic on their teams, who scream and punish their players until they have performed that final, soul-cleansing push-up.

In movies, maybe. When real-life audiences are confronted by coaches who abuse their actual children the opinion tends to be a bit more mixed.

In the world these movies create, there never has been a championship game contested by two teams with similar sociodemographic backgrounds. Instead, the poorer, harder-working team triumphs over the richer, self-satisfied one. When Texas Western, Rocky or Seabiscuit wins, the American ideal of social mobility is confirmed.

At, we might at, the same personal risk to their adoring audiences that Brooks accepts when he urges the imposition of democracy in the Middle East.

In short, these movies embrace the civil rights part of the 1960's and 1970's. Women and minorities should be given full access to the competitive world of the meritocracy. But they take the therapeutic, progressive, New Age part of the 1960's and 1970's and they crush it dead. They create a culture of all-inclusive traditionalism.

Which is about where American society as a whole has settled after all the tumult. The 1960's happened. Vince Lombardi won.

I'm pretty sure Lombardi wouldn't have been too pleased with being #54 on the box office charts. But it's nice to see we get back to the 60s in time for last call.

And it's nice to get to the comfortable little fable about civil rights that keep Brooks and his ilk warm at night while their party tramples constitutional rights, demonizes gays and lesbians for votes, and tries to assert federal control over the nation's Strategic Ovary Reserves. Glad you enjoyed the flicks, Mr. Brooks.

Damn, I Had a Yard on Michelle Kwan

Just in case you didn't catch it, Ohio's John Boehner will replace Tom DeLay as House majority leader. Thursday, Boehner beat out Missouri Rep. Roy Blunt on the second ballot, 653-487. Results certified by Arthur Anderson, LLP.

Lucky Thing For Us Western Civilization Already Collapsed

Excuse me, but is that a pleat?

Rachael Ray expands her reach

By Michael Hill

The Associated Press

LAKE LUZERNE, N.Y. -- Rachael Ray makes lousy coffee. She doesn't bake too well either. It's all the measuring. It clashes with her beat-the-clock cooking style. "I can never remember if it's one heaping, or two little or two big, or whatever," she said....

Not everyone is won over, though. Ray has attracted a cadre of vehement critics who complain she is slapdash, ignorant of culinary basics and says goofy things like "Yum-O." Grousers on Web forums pillory her for cooking escarole in bacon fat, for her clothes and everything in between. Says one Web poster: "Somebody gag her with a bottle of E.V.O.O., already."

Ray shrugs at the personal criticisms.

"I have no argument with them because they're correct," she said. "I'm very loud. I have a sharp voice. I do laugh and giggle too much -- for some people's taste. What am I going to do? Stop being me?"

Okay, it is reassuring to know I'm not the only one, and it's even possible there are others out there who agree that the fact that someone who cannot be bothered to learn how to bake nevertheless becomes a colossal media food enterprise (something which for some reason requires posing in lingerie from the Al Capp Collection while holding a pie someone else must have made) because she's likeable is, somehow, a metaphor for how we wound up in Iraq. But it is nice to see some evidence, however small, that the folks at Harpo have decided to give honesty a shot, even if it's only when there's no way around it.

Peggy, You Need To Inform Your Doctor About the Drowsiness

Sure, I said a couple of weeks ago I'd decided to make Nooners part of my regular Thursday program, along with the added fiber, and sure, I already regret it. Jesus, lady (or Jesus Lady), you write one column a week. Is it so difficult to come up with a single good idea?

After a couple paragraphs about how flak' sid the SOTU was, lines which were remarkably evocative of the thing they referenced, she takes on--oh, wait for it--Hilary Clinton!

There was only one unforgettable moment, and that was in a cutaway shot, of Hillary Clinton, who simply must do something about her face. When the president joked that two people his father loves are turning 60 this year, himself and Bill Clinton--why does he think constant references to that relationship work for him?--it was Mrs. Clinton's job to look mildly amused, or pleasant, or relatively friendly, or nonhostile. Mrs. Clinton has two natural looks, the first being a dull and sated cynicism, the second the bright-eyed throaty chuckler who greets visiting rubes from Utica. The camera caught the first; by the time she realized she was the shot, she apparently didn't feel she could morph into the second. This canniest of politicians still cannot fake benignity.

Now, honestly, if I could do that post category thing here, "Good Things About Hillary" would most likely be empty. But I saw the clip on The Daily Show, and if I may, Bush does his semi-literate reading of a semi-joke (Bill Clinton is one of my dad's favorite people! Har har har, that's a good one, ain't it?) and right side of the aisle erupts into hysterics. It was a moment of High Baloney, and Hillary's expression conveyed that perfectly. But to Peggers it was an obvious moment where she was supposed to pretend to be amused! C'mon, you're supposed to play along! You're a Democrat, and it's a Republican speaking. It's not like it's your husband up there, and all rules of decorum have been suspended by Natural Law.

Of course, had Hillary yukked it up like a cast member of Hee-Haw, Noonan would have written about how phony it was. She's got six column inches to fill every week, after all.

[Which reminds me. I love Peter Daou anyway, and I love his recent bits going after this sort of thing in the guise of a different Pro-Bush/Anti-Dem narrative every day.]

After a perfunctory swipe at the Democratic party as revealed by Kos' commenters (does this sort of thing not yet rate as criminal mischief? Jesus, lady, why don't you get a blog, open it to comments, and let's see what crawls out of the ooze, shall we?) Pegs takes out after Tom Shales, whose review of Flight 93 failed to include any flag waving. That it included praise for earlier CBS and HBO documentaries on the subject was of no importance. If it's about 9/11 it must be praised. That's one of the reasons we went through it in the first place. And it ends, just as I'm about to get up for some Advil, with this:

You wonder at the intemperance of angry young lefties and then think of the example set for them by exhausted old lefties.

Which, assuming I've racked up any good karma lately, was apparently the reason I read her, so I'd have a segué into this. It's a comment from the great Meteor Blades, part of a long comments thread at Hullabaloo in response to this post by tristero.

When I started out in politics, blacks couldn't vote, 18-year-olds couldn't vote, abortion was illegal, feminism was something that had happened in the '20s and professors at Harvard Law School and elsewhere regularly told women they had no right to be there. "Gay" meant happy, environmental advocacy was a dream, kids were openly punished for speaking Spanish or Lakota on the playground, college students were ruled by in loco parentis and only 200 soldiers had died in Vietnam.

We had a lot of struggles on our hands and no wwwLand to fight it with. We didn't just protest and scream chants. We organized against the draft, we fought for the 18-year-old vote, we walked the precincts for candidates, we founded alternative newspapers - today's version, I suppose, of blogs - we stood arm-in-arm against racism and misogyny and militarism in a society not eager to uproot them.

We made mistakes. Some of us succumbed to pernicious ideologies. And a tiny fraction, like the Weather Underground, did worse than make mistakes.

But we also had an impact. To give one example: the fact that there was opposition from the get-go to the Iraq War in Congress can, I believe, be traced to our opposition. Remember only two Senators opposed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.

I'm all for turning things over to a new generation. (As if I had a choice.) And I hope that generation will learn from our errors. But, first, it needs to have a good sense of our achievements, and not buy the distorted version of what we did and how we did it or make assumptions that we're all like Ward Churchill in word or deed.

To which, may I add that all of you pups who want to lecture us about what it takes to win elections might try winning one first, just for practice.

Really? So Who's This Malcolm the Tenth Guy I Keep Hearing About?

Eugene Robinson, WaPo: No One Will Fill Her Shoes

In creating that legacy for his widow, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. also shaped the relatively brief historical moment in which it was possible to talk of a black leadership group that spoke with one voice for black America. For me, and for many others, it has been hard to let that golden moment slip away. But let it go we must. Otherwise we cling to a comfortable illusion rather than face a much more complicated reality.

Far be it for me to interrupt a eulogy, but, um, no. King was fought on all sides: by Roy Wilkins and the "Maybe if we act dignified for another fifty years they'll let us vote a little" NAACP: by the more hot-headed SNCC, and the still more hot-headed Malcolm and the Panthers. Sure, a memorial to Mrs. King is not the place to hash out differences, but it's possible to be reverent to her and the truth at once. MLK is, rightly, the idol of the fight against segregation, but there were other, opposing voices in black America all along, and whether we care for the use of violence to confront violence or not, it still played a part. This seems part and parcel with Jonah Goldberg pretending the racism of white America was a matter of a couple of bad-tempered guys with firehoses. We need people to understand just what was going on in those days, and how it affects what's going on now, and not just install Martin Luther King as the patron saint of racial harmony and wring our hands about the present.

Economic Summit

So I go to Kroger this afternoon, on account'a it's one of the two large groceries I have to shop at to find all the basic national brands I, as a consumer, have a preference for. It's a curious thing, seeing that Competition is supposed to be the wonder drug of Capitalism, and supermarkets are perhaps the most highly competitive of retail environments.

I know I've explained this before, but I'm thinking ahead to next year's "Best Post" Koufax nominations and this baby needs some background. The particular tearing point right now--there's a new one every few months--is Twinings tea. I drink "Prince of Wales". I'll settle for "China Black". Beloved and beleaguered Kroger competitor Marsh Supermarkets used to carry the whole line, but when they did a major reset a few months back ("To serve me better") they simultaneously expanded the tea section and got rid of all the Twinings except Orange Pekoe and Earl Grey. This did not exactly meet my needs, which they apparently define as the desire to drop what I like every couple months and try something they get a better deal on. Which right now is a line of fourteen different flavored chais.

It isn't like they never sold the other varieties. They were out of "Prince of Wales" every third time I needed it.

Anyhow, I walk into Kroger, wheel my way to the cheese aisle, which I find blocked by four people instantly identifiable as Suits. All four seem to be talking at once, but two of them are conversing on cell phones, though they do exhibit the good breeding to sort of half-turn away from their fellows for the duration.

It need not be noted that none of these people--two of whose suits apparently were Kroger-affiliated--made any effort to get out of my way or even be aware of their surroundings. And because I'm not quite as familiar with the layout there, I had to return a couple minutes later in search of something I'd forgotten, and they and their cell phones were still frozen in place, still oblivious.

Tomorrow's my wife's birthday, so I made a trip down the card aisle. The card aisle is one of those little reminders the culture tucks away in places just in case you get too complacent about monogamy. "Oh, happily married, are we? Good, then you won't mind spending ten minutes looking through soul-deadening dreck." To be fair, I know people who are very good at negotiating the card aisle, and God Help Us All there are people who seem to actually thrive in it, but I'd rather shop in a tutu.

And damned if there aren't three more suits in that aisle! They're deep in a discussion of some Strategic Display Initiative, although they were good enough to actually move aside far enough for me to squeeze my cart by them.

How many suits does it take to sell a card? Or a hunk of Double Gloucester? Maybe one of you could have gone over and opened a second register for the five cart-fillers waiting at the one you did have open. I'm gonna remember this next time Kroger conducts its union negotiations in the papers.

But Kroger seems unfazed by the cutthroat competition that has brought Marsh to the verge of corporate tears and crocodile sales rumors. So it was with no small amusement that my wife waved an article from Tuesday's Business Section under my nose. One Jodi Marsh (it's a remarkable coincidence how many top Marsh execs share a surname with the company), VP of corporate relations and the company spokesorganism, resigned last week. This follows by about a month the announcement of her impending divorce from David Marsh (!), the company president. She informed the company a couple weeks ago she'd be taking a job with Sease, Gerig & Associates, Marsh's public relations firm for the last decade. And a week after that, Sease Gerig got a call from the Marsh board informing them their services were no longer required.

It's always good to get a peek behind the scenes at how the Grownups operate. And we get that thanks to our bulldog press and the fine reporters who endure the occasional overcooked shrimp cocktail to get that info to us. The Star's headline for this Grace Metalious tale of high finance? "Spokeswoman leaves Marsh, joining PR firm." I can only guess that "No Fucking Wonder They Can't Turn a Profit" didn't quite fit.

Every time I return from the grocery I have to wonder what percentage of the people who tout the Business Model as the answer to every problem actually do their own shopping.

One Had A Dream, The Other Had A Doughnut

Okay, I probably should have something to say about the SOTU, like how I slept through it, or how cracking it is that the wealthy may soon be able to afford health care, or even to ask what happened to the Mars mission, Laura Bush's war on gangs, or that adorable freedom-loving Iraqi woman who saved Pvt. Jessica or saw Iraqi soldiers using bassinets for target practice or something. Sorry. I missed it, and I feel personally responsible that regular readers of this blog will have no idea what Bush's major proposals are, the ones which will shape the Free World for possibly as long as the next 48 hour news cycle.

But dammit, that Dough E. Pantload column on Sacco and Vanzetti, the one I missed by about three weeks, is stuck in my head. And Mrs. King died, and it was especially his steaming load about the late Reverend that's been following me around:

To be sure, Martin Luther King Jr. deserves his place among American heroes. But it's worth noting that what makes him an American icon, as opposed to purely a liberal one, is his vision for a colorblind nation. And colorblindness is no longer a core tenet of the American left. President Kennedy was hardly the liberal of Oliver Stone's imagination. And his brother, Bobby, was more hostile to civil liberties than John Ashcroft, eagerly wiretapping Americans, including King.

Last point first. No one will ever accuse me of being a Kennedy idolator, and the extent to which I find Bobby inspirational it was his capacity for change and his lost promise, not his career as a Red baiter. But he didn't wiretap King. He signed off on the FBI doing so because John Edgar "Does This Dress Make Me Look Fat?" Hoover had the goods on brother Jack and a Russian woman. The Bureau took it from there, and its methods far exceeded what's covered by mere "wiretapping". Jack was assassinated shortly after the project began, and Agent Tolson's roommate declined to share any of the intel with the Department of Justice, though he did tip off LBJ. Hoover wasn't pleased when Johnson nevertheless developed a close personal relationship with King.

One is now tempted anytime Jonah states an opinion or displays a "fact" to ask him to name one book on the subject he's read. So it is here. I'd like to know just what grants Goldberg the right to expound on King's career, on the Civil Rights movement or the history of the US from 1954-1968. I think that "colorblind" is a dead giveaway he's just pooping the papers of his parrot's cage. Colorblind is the anti-"reverse discrimination" code word. Dr. King wasn't colorblind. He worked to free his People. He wasn't a racist, but that's a different thing. Events did eventually move him toward a greater concern with economic justice, something I doubt we'll ever hear the gang at the Corner sing his praises for. The idea that he and the guy who suggested New Orleanians "grow some gills" share a virtual vision of a 21st century America where black poverty is due entirely to African-Americans' insufficient contact with their own bootstraps is just odorous.

Which, I guess, is only to be expected. As I said somewhere, it's interesting that "colorblind" is a term of high praise for a black man in 1950s and 60s America, but the overt racism of The National Review of that era, like this editorial on the tenth anniversary of Brown, doesn't tarnish the idols of the Right:

"But whatever the exact net result in the restricted field of school desegregation, what a price we are paying for Brown! It would be ridiculous to hold the Supreme Court solely to blame for the ludicrously named 'civil rights movement' – that is, the Negro revolt . . . . But the Court carries its share of the blame. Its decrees, beginning with Brown , have on the one hand encouraged the least responsible of the Negro leaders in the course of extra-legal and illegal struggle that we now witness around us. . . .

"Brown , as National Review declared many years ago, was bad law and bad sociology. We are now tasting its bitter fruits. Race relations in the country are ten times worse than in 1954."

or, more to the point, Bill Buckley on Dr. King in 1979:

"When it was black men persecuting white or black men – in the Congo, for instance – he was strangely silent on the issue of human rights. The human rights of Chinese, or of Caucasians living behind the Iron Curtain never appeared to move him."

or for that matter, the unfettered racism in the Corner and elsewhere that followed Katrina like a levee breech.

Happy Birthday

Isaac Donald Everly: born February 1, 1937

(Ahem)

"In politics, looks matter."
-Ezra Klein

Help

Please check in with eRobin, the hardest-working blogger in Blogostan, today, and learn about the Fitzgerald Amendment, the Coalition for Voting Integrity, and what you can do to help. Because, difficult as it may be to believe, sometimes snark is just not enough.

Happy Birthday

John Joseph Lydon
born January 31, 1956

Burke and Hobbes and...

"Conservative" Philosophers in the News:

• Debbie Schlussel (link via TBogg; please do not click the first one if you suffer from heart disease, tender digestion, are pregnant or nursing or nursing a hangover, or have a mouthful of liquid and a monitor or keyboard nearby) gets tricked into reading a NY Times science feature because the phrase "Ear Wax" appears in the headline, and concludes that Europeans couldn't have stolen the Americas from Native Americans--whom she refers to as "Native" Americans--because they came from Asia.

I know, I know. The idea is so incredibly stupid it's practically impossible to convey it in words. Just for the hell of it I tried without success putting it in grunts, wacking it out on the seat of my chair with a yardstick, and finally ramming it directly into my skull via a brick wall. Nothing worked. This single post may wind up requiring us to scrap the totality of Post-War linguistic theory.

There's much humor, if you can stand it, to be gleaned from her repeated defense that saying:

So whom did THEY steal the land from? Somebody else, obviously.

doesn't mean she's claiming there was somebody else. But for me the real howler sorta got lost in the shuffle:

But the paper glosses over the most important finding. The study found that Europeans and Africans tend to have wet ear wax, sweat more, and have more under arm body odor than Asians, who have dry ear wax and don't sweat much. But the study also found that "Native" Americans have dry ear wax and body odor similar to Asians, proving they migrated here from Asia.

The paper glosses over the important point that this is further proof of what has been an accepted explanation for at least a century, except in parts of Utah! Meanwhile, Debs has sorta glossed over her own collision with Aristotelian logic (he rides on blithely, she suffers a massive head wound, which fortunately in her case is a trifling matter): the Asian/Native American ear wax connection doesn't prove anything whatever about settlement of the New World; the two could be unrelated, a point which is actually made in the article, though not overtly because, well, it was of necessity written for the literate.

And these are the people who want to tell us how to teach science.

• Dennis Prager explains that the Palestinian elections "reveal more about the left than about Palestine", because, you know, he always knew the Palestinians were bloodthirsty Muslims who won't rest until Israel is destroyed, but this business about the Left equivocating around the point caught him by surprise.

This is the spot where I'd normally lead into a quote roughly outlining Dennis' thesis, but there doesn't seem to be one. He seems actually to believe that the elections do reveal more about the Palestinians than about the Left. Hell, let's just cut to the cognitive dissonance:

So the Palestinian vote reveals the falsity of the worldwide Left's view of the Palestinians as committed to peace. It likewise reveals the falsity of the Left's belief that Palestinian terror is supported by a small minority of the Palestinian population.

That is one reason why the Bush doctrine -- we need to spread democracy everywhere possible, including, or even especially, in the Arab world -- is so valid. You cannot deal with any problem in life -- from the most personal to the most macro -- by engaging in wishful thinking and denying reality.

I gotta tell ya, when I got through that second paragraph I immediately went back and reread Schlussel just to bask in her superior reasoning skills for a moment.

It seems that Den's on the cutting edge of a new wingnut talking point regarding Hammas, namely that the elections prove the Bush doctrine is working; now, whenever there are democratic elections in the Middle East we'll know from the results whether we need to kill them all or not. But my real reason for bringing up the soon-to-be-available Mr. Prager was his handy-dandy guide to the beliefs of one Norbizness:

On just about every issue, the Left lives in a childlike fantasy realm. Their views are expressions of what they wish for, not what actually is.

Here is a small sample:

-- Support for terror represents a tiny sliver of the Muslim world.

-- All cultures are essentially morally equivalent.

-- The United Nations is a wonderful institution and the best hope of mankind.

-- Men and women are basically the same.

-- It makes no difference whether children are raised by a loving man and woman or by two loving parents of the same sex.

-- Violent criminals in our society are pushed into crime by socioeconomic circumstances, not because of their own flawed characters and values.

-- War is not the answer.

The list of leftist positions based on a rejection of reality is as long as a list of leftist positions.

War is the answer, Mr. Left. How many more missions do we have to accomplish before you just fucking admit it?