Time for bad history
The second full-fledged issue of the Carnival of Bad History is up over at Science and Politics. It's bigger and badder than ever before. Coturnix has gathered fourteen posts from twelve writers (including one by the Liberal Coalition's own Trish Wilson). What are you waiting for? Go. Read. Comment. Get inspired and write a contribution to the next carnival.

Wallowing in self-pity
Saturday, I wrote a great post. I worked on it off and on all afternoon. It had a little of everything. It had wit and compassion. It had contemporary significance and historical perspective. It tied the American experience into the international scene. It and multiple strands of meaning and narrative that that balanced out in the end to form a satisfying tapestry. It had personal revelations and it was perfectly suited to send to a carnival. It had pathos, bathos, portos and d'artangan. It had illustrations. When the text was done, I still needed to prepare those illustrations, but it was time to fix dinner, so I closed the file without saving it and turned off the computer.

Sunday morning, I got up and worked on the illustrations. When I had them all scanned and sized and colored just so I opened the text file to put it all together and found... three short paragraphs where there should have been about 1500 words. I tried all of the file recovery tricks I know, but sadly, those tricks only work for deleted files and computer crashes. None of the tricks in my repertoire work for misplacing my brain and deliberately closing a Notepad file without saving my work.

I loudly informed the computer that yellow legal pads never did this to me, but deep in my heart I knew it wasn't the computer's fault. I did it to myself and there was no way to escape the responsibility for my dumb actions. It was gone, gone, gone and there was nothing I could do about it. I went over to where my little cat, Mehitabel, was sleeping, hoping she would have some words of wisdom and comfort to soothe my fevered mind. I bent over and tore the seat out of my pants. I spent the rest of the day in an increasingly dark and nasty funk.

It wasn't that the post had been that great. It had been good, very good even, but it wasn't the best post ever. The problem was that I haven't been writing very good posts lately. Regular readers will attest that I've been in an increasingly deep writer's slump for about two months. My posting has become infrequent and shallow. There are a variety of personal and professional reasons for this slump, the most significant being the return of my mother's cancer. Creative concentration just hasn't been my strong suit lately.

Into this came a three-day weekend with no major crises or duties to fill it. That meant I had two days to take care of normal weekend business and one whole, free day just to spend on writing. I did a little yard work, to get a head start on the responsibilities, and turned to the computer. And it worked. Words flowed. Ideas came. It was exactly the kind of writing I had been trying to do, but had been unable to do since about February. Sigh. It wasn't the loss of the piece itself that caused such a crisis for me, it was the loss of the frame of mind that the piece represented.

Writers will probably understand the frustration I'm describing, but let me try a metaphor for the non-writers. It's like I baked this really great cake, with soft green icing, from a very complicated and borrowed recipe. Then some idiot leaves the cake outside and it rains and the cake is destroyed. I invested so much of my being into that cake that I don't think that I can take it, 'cause it took so long to bake it, and I'll never have that recipe again. Or something like that.

Anyway, I feel better having vented about it. I hope your weekend is going better. I'm going to fix something yummy and comforting for dinner and buy a new pair of pants.

Big crybabies of NASCAR
Rookie Danica Patrick came in fourth at the Indianapolis 500 yesterday, chalking up the best finishing time ever for a woman driver and one of the best for a rookie. This should be something to cheer about for anyone who like racing, roots for the underdog, and likes to see records fall, but some people, predictably, see it as something to grouse about.

Robby Gordon accused Danica Patrick of having an unfair advantage in the Indianapolis 500 and said Saturday he will not compete in the race again unless the field is equalized.

Gordon, a former open-wheel driver now in NASCAR, contends that Patrick is at an advantage over the rest of the competitors because she only weighs 100 pounds. Because all the cars weigh the same, Patrick's is lighter on the race track.

"The lighter the car, the faster it goes," Gordon said. "Do the math. Put her in the car at her weight, then put me or Tony Stewart in the car at 200 pounds and our car is at least 100 pounds heavier.

"I won't race against her until the IRL does something to take that advantage away."

You see, it's not because she's a woman that he's playing the conservative persecution card; it's because she's small. Any expert on racing will tell you that this is an issue with deep roots. It has long been a tradition that all drivers weigh the exact same 205 pounds. In all the history of auto racing, no male driver has ever weighed less than any of the others. Any divergence from this is seen as taking unfair advantage of genetics and a sure cause for all of the other drivers to stay home and pout.

In fact, that's probably why she did so well. All the other drivers stayed home in protest--as the long established tradition dictated they should. I'll bet there were only three other drivers. That's why she came in fourth. It couldn't be because she's a better driver. After all, she's a girl.

Fortunately, NASCAR is a manly red state sport un-polluted by those un-American blue state values like equal opportunity and rooting for the underdog. I'm sure Robby Gordon will find plenty of other persecuted conservative white males to comfort him.

Make Michelle Malkin cry
David Neiwert's new book Strawberry Days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community is finally out and I've ordered my copy. David has been working on this book for about thirteen years and the research he did formed the basis of his excellent repudiation of Malkin's pro-internment revisionism.

The flyleaf blurb describes the book this way:

Strawberry Days tells the vivid and moving tale of the creation and destruction of a Japanese immigrant community. Before World War II, Bellevue, the now-booming "edge city" on the outskirts of Seattle, was a prosperous farm town renowned for its strawberries. Many of its farmers were recent Japanese immigrants who, despite being rejected by white society, were able to make a living cultivating the rich soil. Yet the lives they created for themselves through years of hard work vanished almost instantly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. David Neiwert combines compelling story-telling with first-hand interviews and newly uncovered documents to weave together the history of this community and the racist schemes that prevented the immigrants from reclaiming their land after the war. Ultimately, Strawberry Days represents more than one community’s story, reminding us that bigotry's roots are deeply entwined in the very fiber of American society.

David says the book includes an epilogue specifically addressing Malkin's claims.

By the way, Strawberry Days is now number 1,416 at Amazon while Michelle Malkin's In Defense of Internment: The Case for 'Racial Profiling' in World War II and the War on Terror is now at 15,319. I'm sure we can drive David even higher than that. After you buy and read your own copy, get another copy and donate to a local high-school library.

Protecting our morals; destroying our language
L. Brent Bozell of the Parents Television Council thinks a silly television ad ad starring a scantily clad Paris Hilton, a water hose, and a cheesburger should be banned.

"This is erotica. It's a quantum leap down this pike where we try to scrape the bottom of the barrel," Bozell told NBC "Today."

Tbogg explains what that sentence means:

Because once the horse is out of the barn you've got to get on your high horse and run with the pack until the cows come home or you're left with your pecker in your hand because beggars can't be choosers when you're buying the milk even though the cow is giving it away for free.

Who can argue with that?

This is frightening
Everybody loves to bitch about bad and stupid drivers. Someone has finally produced hard scientific data on where the stupid drivers are located.

When faced with a written test, similar to ones given to beginning drivers applying for licenses, one in ten drivers couldn't get a passing score, according to a study commissioned by GMAC Insurance.

[...]

Drivers in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic states did worst. Twenty percent of test-takers failed there.

The state of Rhode Island leads the nation in driver cluelessness, according to the survey. The average test score there was 77, just eight points above a failing grade.

Those in neighboring Massachusetts were second worst and New Jersey, third worst.

Northwestern states had the most knowledgeable drivers. In those states, just one to three percent failed the test. Oregon and Washington drivers knew the rules of the road best. In Oregon, the average test score was 89.

I live among the most knowledgeable drivers in the country, and most of them are unaware that their cars came equipped with that fancy turn-signal option. If I leave my little corner of the continent, they just get dumber. That's one more reason never to leave the house.

This study reports figures whether people know the rules, not whether they obey them. And it only measured the lower 48. I'd love to know where Alaska fits into the picture. As a state of rugged individualists and iconoclasts, Alaskans neither know the rules nor follow them when they do. When I lived there, Alaska had more dinged up cars than any place I'd ever been. Having two working headlights was a clear indication that you were an outsider.

Polling question
It's now been over six months since the election. For that entire six months the advice on how to win the last election hasn't stopped. In general, the advice comes in two forms. We either need to be more like our enemies in some way or we need to distance ourselves from our friends. The former is the demand that we need to embrace red state values, wear religion on our sleeves, be more war-like, and stop fussing about civil rights. The latter is the demand that we stop talking like intellectuals, stop defending homos, start bashing Hollywood, and denounce Michael Moore. Both sides agree that we must mention the superiority of the "heartland" in every speech and never hurt a Southerner's tender feelings by being different from them.

Everyone can produce some poll to prove their point. And none of it convinces me.

Most of the post-mortem polls from the last election examine why people voted the way they did. Setting aside the issue of people lying to the polls, these polls still are not very helpful. They do not explain why people didn't vote a different way. "I voted for the Republican because he shares my religion," does not mean the same as "I would have voted for a Democrat if there had been one who shared my religion." Polls that tell us what people say they value and what they say was the deciding factor in how they voted does not give us a clear indication of what would have made them change their vote. (If such polling does exist, I'd love it if someone would point it out to me.)

This is the core of my problem with most "be more conservative" advice (well, that and the fact that I'm not a moderate; I am a liberal). If people think they want Republicans, why should they vote for fake ones when they can have real ones? We can only win by being unapologetically who we are and convincing people that we are what they want. We need some leftist populism. We need a little class warfare. We need to stop looking at the important swing group du jour as defined by lifestyle columnists. Why on earth did anyone think "Nascar dads" were swingable; they're a Republican core constituency. We need to figure out who the real swingable groups are (like conservationist hunters) and work them.

Call for bad history
Coturnix at Science and Politics will be hosting the next Carnival of Bad History. It's been a while since the last one and I was on the verge of giving it up whaen Coturnix volunteered to start it back up and give me the benefit of his vast experience hosting carnivals.

Have you seen lately an egregious example of misunderstanding or misuse of history? Was history botched in a movie or TV show you just saw? Was a book or article trying to rewrite history for artistic or political purposes? Does watching History Channel drive you crazy? If so, write about it on your blog, and send me the permalink by late May 30th (midnight EST) to be included in the carnival. You may also want to recommend someone else's blog post.

Based on Coturnix's advice, we'll try running Carnival of Bad History on a quaterly basis. That means anything you've written since early March is fair game for inclusion. Send your links to Coturnix at his place, to me here, or to The Carnival of Bad History.

The Deal
Within minutes of the deal being announced, most everything that could be said had been said. There were no surprises and the outline was pretty the same as had what had been publicly discussed since Friday.

I'm not real happy with the deal, but I'm not outraged either. Unless we had a guaranteed win, taking the deal is better than going all the way to a showdown. Frist's plan was illegal and unprecedented. Even if it would have failed, voting on it would have put most of the Republicans on record as being in favor of trashing the constitution for a momentary advantage. If it had passed, it would have irreparably damaged the principle of constitutional government in the United States and, by bad example, in the world. In the long run, avoiding the vote was the better course.

That said, what about the terms of the deal? What does it mean in the short term? At first glance, allowing Pryor, Brown, and Owens to pass, seems like an odd compromise. My impression has been that they are the worst of the lot, though that might be because I'm more familiar with their records than I am with the others'. I'm assuming our negotiators thought saving the filibuster for the Supreme Court fight was worth giving in on all three. They are right, but I still would feel more that it was a more equal deal if we had been able to get them to pull at least one of those three off the table.

As to who won and who lost, we need to wait for all the recriminations to fly to be sure. Frist's presidential aspirations have been damaged and McCain's have been bolstered in an almost equal trade off. The Senate itself won, in not lowering itself the level of the House, but that might be a Pyrrhic victory considering how low it have already allowed itself to fall. The principle of constitutional balance has won and the principle of brute strength has lost. The deal is a slap in the face to Bush, Frist, the religious extremists who bet so much on this, and the DeLay method of conducting government. Dobson is gnashing his teeth this morning; that’s good.

This breach of discipline within the Republican camp will not go unchallenged. Those who think that they are in charge (Bush, Frist, Dobson) will reach for both carrots and sticks to restore their control. To maintain power for the next eighteen months, it will be most important to bring the straying Senators back under the influence of party discipline, but with a majority of 55, they can afford to make a horrible, bloody example out of one, or even two, as a warning to any others who might be tempted to stray. This is where the vagueness of "extraordinary circumstances" bothers me. The deal essentially reads, they will allow us to keep the filibuster as long as we promise not to use it. If we make so much as a filibustery peep, the compromising Republicans will come under terrible pressure to declare us in violation and to invoke the nuclear option.

This is not the long awaited "split" in the Republican Party that foolish optimists (like me) have been predicting for years. At best, it's sign that the GOP is still made up of individuals and has not quite become a Borg-like group mind. The drive of their extreme wing to convert the United States into a one-party state is not over. We have not won the war or even one battle. We fought one battle to a tie. On the other hand, things have been going so quickly and consistently bad for the last four years that "not worse" is almost worth celebrating.

What is Santorum babbling about?
John Byrne at Raw Story has this quote from Rick Santorum on the floor of the Senate about an hour ago.

Some are suggesting we're trying to change the law, we're trying to break the rules. Remarkable. Remarkable hubris. I mean, imagine, the rule has been in place for 214 years that this is the way we confirm judges. Broken by the other side two years ago, and the audacity of some members to stand up and say, how dare you break this rule. It's the equivalent of Adolf Hitler in 1942 "I'm in Paris. How dare you invade me. How dare you bomb my city? It's mine." This is no more the rule of the Senate than it was the rule of the Senate before not to filibuster. It was an understanding and agreement, and it has been abused. In a sense, what we see here on the floor of the United States.

Byrne reads it as Santorum comparing the Democrats' attempts to keep the filibuster to Hitler's moves in 1942. I read it as Santorum saying the Democrats are calling him a Nazi. That's sort of a reverse invocation of Godwin's Law. This is from the closed captioning, so it is not an official transcript and the punctuation is just guesswork by someone trying to take very fast dictation. The punctuation is the problem, especially the placement of the quotes. Where does the quote really begin and end?

Should it be "how dare you break this rule?"--in which case his interpretation is correct. Or is it "how dare you break this rule. It's the equivalent of Adolf Hitler in 1942 I'm in Paris. How dare you invade me? How dare you bomb my city? It's mine."--in which case my interpretation is correct.

In either case, it's outrageous hyperbole. And Santorum is an idiot for thinking the conquest of Paris took place in 1942 (it took place in June 1940). Maybe he thinks the war in Europe didn't begin till after Pearl Harbor.

Update: Those who have seen the video (I still haven't) say Byrne's reading is the correct one. I can live with that. It doesn't make Santorum any less of an idiot or national embarassment.