WALL STREET JOURNAL: Wisconsin Unions vs. The Tea Party: A Classic Double Standard. As James Taranto said the other day, all the lies the press recited about the Tea Party being violent, racist, homophobic, etc. actually describe what’s been going on in these labor protests — only when it actually happens on the left, it’s not reported. That’s only for when it’s imagined to happen on the right.
Of course, many journalists are union members themselves.
JENNIFER RUBIN EXPLAINS how Young Ezra Klein was snookered on voter ID.
CNBC: Has MERS captured the government? “Economists use the phrase ‘regulatory capture’ to describe this dynamic. But that’s a misnomer. It implies that at some point regulations and regulators were free and had to be captured. In fact, they are typically born captives, remain captive, and die captive deaths.”
LEFTISTS RAGE as Gov. Walker’s budget bill passes the State Assembly.
MICHAEL GRAHAM: Labor Brute Force Rules. “The only person who had worse press coverage this week than organized labor was Moammar Gadhafi — and he had to bomb his own people to get it.” And that’s even though the press has soft-pedaled the violence, racism, and homophobia demonstrated at the labor protests in a way it would never have done if, say, the Tea Party were involved. Of course, more journalists are union members than Tea Partiers, I suspect.
GIRLS JUST WANNA HAVE GUNS. No, really. Just visit Regis Giles’ GirlsJustWannaHaveGuns.com.
HEY, SO ARE WE: “Iraqis are fed up with cronyism, corruption, and graft.”
AT THE EPICENTER of the New Zealand earthquake.
BEING OWNED BY THE GOVERNMENT HAS ITS ADVANTAGES: G.M.’s Sweetheart Tax Deal.
MORE JEWS moving to Israel.
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD ON THUCYDIDES AND FOREIGN-POLICY “REALISM:” Thucydides Hates “Realists.”
Reading Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War this semester I’ve been reminded rather forcefully that ‘realist’ is one of those words in common discourse without any consistent or secure definition attached to it. Thucydides is often invoked as the father of realism in foreign policy, but his approach to the way the world works has little to do with the way this term is frequently used by political scientists today. . . . For Thucydides, the internal politics of a state are crucial to understanding and anticipating the policies of that state. Sparta has a set of interests that are not dictated by the nature of the international system so much as by the structure of Spartan society. The need to keep the Spartan population on a constant military footing and the need to keep the armies close at home derive from the need to keep the Helots under control. Another kind of city standing where Sparta stood, and with exactly the same powers and great powers around it, might well have had a completely different set of interests and adopted a completely different set of policies. . . . Theoretical realism would strike Thucydides as barking nonsense — the kind of idea that could only appeal to people with little experience of actual affairs. Thucydides was not a realist in this sense; he was something much smarter. He was realistic.
In the world Thucydides writes about, interests matter. State interests, personal ambition, family and clan interests, the perceived interests of piety and religion, party and factional interests, economic interests: they all matter. But Thucydides seems more agnostic about which of these matter most at any given time.
Read the whole thing.
REMINDER: Iranians are not Arabs.
PATRICK RICHARDSON: Hey, what happened to that Maxine Waters ethics trial?
JAMES TARANTO: ‘Take ‘Em Down:’ Would Saul Alinsky approve of the SEIU’s new anthem?
Is this what the SEIU means by “civil discussion”? The song does not identify the bastards we gotta take down, but there are only two possibilities: the taxpayers of Wisconsin or their elected officials. As Andy McCarthy notes at National Review Online, “public-sector employees work for us–they are not beaten down by ‘the man,’ ‘the system,’ or whatever bogeyman the lefties are using today.”
McCarthy also observes that “the Obama/Alinsky Left has demonstrated to an appalled country just how ugly they intend to make things–thug leaders calling for blood in the street, the Nazi/Mubarak/Mussolini rhetoric, lawmakers abdicating their duty and shutting down the legislative process when they can’t get their way.”
Which leads us to say a word in defense of the oft-misunderstood Saul Alinsky, whose 1971 book, “Rules for Radicals,” we recently read. It’s true that Alinsky used some of the same obnoxious tactics employed by the left today. Specifically, he sometimes organized demonstrations outside the homes of antagonists. More generally, he often sowed chaos–or threatened to sow it–as a means of winning concessions.
But he was a lot more strategic about it. If today’s left appalls the country with its ugly tactics, it has failed by Alinsky’s standards. . . . The most crucial disjunction between Alinsky and today’s left is that his tactics aimed at wresting away institutional power, whereas their imperative is to preserve it. Government employees in Wisconsin, with their generous pay, lavish benefits and legal privileges, are in no sense “have nots.”
Read the whole thing. Including this:
Speaking of which, do you remember the middle-aged white man with the mustache who said that Justice Clarence Thomas should be put “back in the fields,” that Justice Samuel Alito “should go back to Sicily,” and that Fox News chief Roger Ailes “should be strung up and–but, ah, I don’t know. Kill the bastard”? Breitbart has now identified him as Don Wallace, a former president of a public-sector union, the United Firefighters of Los Angeles.
Good grief.
COMMUNICATIONS WORKERS OF AMERICA UPDATE: Tabitha Hale talks about being assaulted by a hostile union goon.
PUNCHING BACK TWICE AS HARD: Media Bloggers Association Challenges Righthaven.
JOHN HINDERAKER: Still No Word From Eric Lipton.
MORE PREEMIE NEWS at Rambling Rhodes.
IF THIS MOM HAD SHOT THE JUDGE, I’d consider that fair. He’ll probably get a stiff sentence, but drawing-and-quartering isn’t severe enough for this kind of a betrayal of responsibility. Really, nothing is.
UPDATE: C.J. Burch emails: “Would anyone else be out on an unsecured bond? Anyone? No, I didn’t think so either.”
JOHN HINDERAKER: No Retreat, No Surrender. “If you were concerned that Charles and David Koch, two of the very few billionaires who support the conservative/libertarian side of the political spectrum, might be frightened off by the vicious attacks that have been launched against them by the Left, from the Obama administration down to the deepest cesspits of the internet, you can rest easy. The Koch brothers aren’t going anywhere.”
ROGER SIMON on today’s reactionaries. And the gullibility of Harvard’s Stephen Walt.
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