So what, then, should we make of the booing of Michelle Obama at a NASCAR event?  We can look at the video.

To recap, in case you aren’t interested in watching the video: a veteran is introduced, along with his family; his accomplishments as a sniper recounted and he gets applauded; then Mrs. Obama and Jill Biden were introduced; then some booing; then everyone announced, “Start your engines.”

The whole stadium, thankfully, wasn’t booing, but there was clearly a significant number of upset fans.  Unfortunately, we quite literally don’t know what they were upset about. Would there have been booing if Mrs. Obama were white?  Or a man?  Or a Republican? Or would any politician shoehorning in on the tribute to a veteran have gotten booed?  We don’t know.

What has been far more interesting is the reaction of pundits and their interpretation of the boos.  The debate has focused on race: did the fans intend a racial insult or no?  There’s no way of asking the fans what they meant by booing, so the only thing pundits can do is project their own meaning onto the event.

Two friends of mine, Robert and Dan, were tweeting about the event.  Twitter is good for many things, but nuanced debate isn’t one of them.  Dan made a couple of tweets that I’d like to address a bit further. First:

@mikeahub @DCbigpappa it’s inappropriate to boo the first lady for any reason. I don’t care if it’s racial or not.

Dan is utterly right that it’s inappropriate, but whether it’s racial is the whole reason things blew up on Twitter and the blogosphere.  First ladies from Lady Bird Johnson to Hillary Clinton have been booed.  It was wrong then and wrong now.  On first amendment grounds, they have the right to speak.  Common courtesy alone should dictate that we listen politely to what they have to say.  Booing is nearly always the wrong reaction; it’s inarticulate mockery, more worthy of barnyard animals than humans.  It was particularly inappropriate on when Mrs. Obama was ceremonially starting a stock car race.

But since Mrs. Obama is the first black first lady, the question of race comes into many things she does.  You may not care if the booing is racial, but many people do.  Bad manners don’t get tons of commentary, but racism does.

Dan also made a second, rather more inflammatory tweet:

@mikeahub @DCbigpappa how do a group of people claim to be patriotic then publicly disrespect the first lady?

The booing fans are unquestionably guilty of bad manners, but a lack of patriotism? That seems overstated and unprovable. Measuring patriotism is tricky, for the most valiant soldier may have achieved his deeds not through love of country but through love of his own glory; we cannot measure patriotism without God’s abacus.

The booing of Michelle Obama has become a Rorschach test.  What we see in it says more about how we view NASCAR fans than it does about what the NASCAR fans actually think.  Going back to the old political hand, it’s pretty clear that booing politicians at sporting events is relatively common.  We can’t know if the fans are racists, but we can know what you think of them.

***

You can follow me on Twitter, which where this blog post got started. I’m usually much less long winded there for some reason.

Second Proposition: While Yoo says that “One can argue over the costs, or about the benefits of any individual intervention,” one will always be called names by John Yoo if one argues over the costs and benefits of any individual intervention. Because if he will call you an “isolationist” for not wanting to intervene in a civil war against a cooperative tyrant, there is no foreign conflict in which one can oppose intervention without being an “isolationist.”

Third Proposition: If I can fit into Yoo’s definition of an “isolationist,” at least three-quarters of the American people are “isolationists.” I’m such an “isolationist,” I was supporting the Iraq war before it started and through its darkest months, and supported the Iraq and Afghanistan surges (and believed the fatal flaw in the latter was the president’s call for a timed withdrawal). I hung a 6′ x 6′ sign on my 8th floor dorm window in Februrary 2003 that read simply “WAR NOW.” Indeed, I’m not sure one could be more interventionist than me while still being able to draw lines between places where we should and shouldn’t intervene. Yet Yoo thinks I’m an “isolationist.”

Fourth Proposition: After reviewing the prior three propositions, it’s time to reduce our military budget. The easiest way to prevent future presidents from going egomaniacal in their foreign interventions, and also to reduce our deficit at the same time, is to give future presidents fewer military resources.

But there seems to me to be a large overlap between the people decrying Perry’s support for an abortion amendment and an FMA as being hypocritical on 10th Amendment grounds, and people who would vote against those amendments as a matter of policy preferences. What I’d like to figure out is whether the people using the 10th Amendment as a club against Perry are serious about it, or whether it was simply the first weapon at hand to attack something they disagreed with on policy grounds.

So here’s the question I’d like you to answer: Which of the 17 post-Bill of Rights amendments would you have opposed because they ran afoul of federalist principles?

Looking at them, the 14th Amendment is an obvious and undeniable limit on the power of states. With its imposition of the Bill of Rights onto the states, this amendment severely undercuts the 10th Amendment.

The 13th, 15th, 19th, 25th 24th, and 26th Amendments set national policies for matters that had traditionally been left to the states.

So I’ll make a list: 13, 14, 15, 19, 25 24, and 26. Which of those would you have voted for and which would you have voted against on federalist grounds?

Personally I would have voted against 19 and 26, and I’m undecided on 25 24, even though I support the policies that these amendments achieved. I like 13, 14, and 15, but then I’m obviously a fair-weather federalist because I’d support an amendment restricting abortion, and might vote for a well-crafted FMA.

Dear Every Single Liberal Who Bitched About Citizens United,

Screw You!

Sincerely,

Jamie

P.S. If I could find you all and kick you in the nuts I would.

P.P.S I can’t wait for the scene where Obama personally authorizes the attack to take down Bin Laden over the objections of hackish conservative military advisers. While standing in front of a waving American Flag. With a bald eagle on each shoulder. While personally punching Hitler.

Well, state intervention is no guarantee of a good outcome, but to do nothing is also not an answer.

Ah, the therapeutic world view, where there always needs to be “an answer.”

So let’s say you’re the heavily Republican Texas legislature. And let’s say that Lloyd Doggett’s (D-Austin) continued employment in Washington D.C. really peaves you off. But Austin is already split into three congressional districts that, combined, sprawl out to include all of 17 counties and parts of 4 others. So we’ve already got large swaths of Travis County included into two Republican districts. Most people would say that’s enough.

But not these guys. Under the new plan Travis county will be split into five districts. You would be able to travel from Fort Worth to San Antonio (more than 250 miles north to south), or from Houston to Leakey (over 250 miles east to west) while remaining exclusively in congressional districts that include parts of Austin. Talk about cracking! Almost certainly four of these disctricts would be Republican, and the fifth would combine the most Democratic portions of Austin with the most Democratic portions of San Antonio. East Austin and south San Antonio! Now that’s packing!.

Whatever your thoughts on gerrymandering – I’m ambivalent; it has its pros and cons – you’ve just got to admire the artistry and chutzpah behind this map.

One can speculate for hours about the reason why people answered this way. Perhaps it’s a bunch of right-wingers believing they’re Lot, living on the outskirts of Soddom. Perhaps it’s gays who live in gay neighborhoods? Perhaps it’s straights who live near gay neighborhoods? Perhaps it’s casual observers of politics who don’t give a flying frack but, having seen the amount of national discussion of gay issues over the last decade, simply presume there’s got to be a lot of them or else we wouldn’t talk about such a yucky topic so often?

At any rate, regardless of your social circle or political views, it doesn’t take a moment’s thought regarding the demographic consequences of homosexuality to realize that there can’t be many of them. If more than a quarter of our population simply didn’t reproduce, that would be something quite noticeable.

But people don’t think before they answer polls. Only 4% of people got the answer right (NB: I would have been one of those), and a vast majority gave answers that were wildly wrong. So the next time you get upset about a poll showing that 75% of Republicans believe that Obama is a Hindu who was born on Jupiter, or 60% of Democrats believe that George Bush used items he ordered from the Acme catalog to blow up the Twin Towers, or that 99% of Americans believe that God created the universe in a single day because the Biblical seven days seems awfully slow for an omnipotent being, remember that 1 out of 3 people believe that more than 1 out of 4 people are gay.

Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then, I contradict myself;
(I am large–I contain multitudes.)

Recently, NRO’s David Kahane sounded eerily similar:

In fact, he reminds us very much of a certain someone we adore — a say-anything kind of guy who’ll throw a principle under the bus in a heartbeat if he thinks it will curry favor or benefit him politically. A guy whose motto is: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself,” and goes right on singing his song of himself before the cameras without the slightest embarrassment.He is large, he contains multitudes, Mr. Newt does, and you wingnuts ought to cut him some slack. After all, look how well it all turned out for Barack Hussein Obama.

Perhaps the only way to describe the Newtster is to rehash old Walt.

He’s right, obviously. After watching this, Dorothy argued devil’s advocate: “But if you’re arrested, you have a right to counsel. Why isn’t that slavery?” Comparing the right to counsel to the “right” to medical care is instructive.

The right to counsel only arises because the state is prosecuting you. Neither prosecutions nor de fense attorneys occur in nature. The right to counsel is a right the state gives you because of something the state is doing against you. If there weren’t enough lawyers to represent all the criminal defendants, then the state could either slow down the trial system so that the remaining lawyers would be able to handle all the cases, or simply stop prosecuting people. If no one was prosecuted, no one’s right to counsel would ever be violated.

Health problems do occur in nature, but doctors do not. Cancer is a natural phenomenon, but to become an oncologist a human being has to willfully spend years of his life working very, very hard. If there weren’t enough oncologists, the state would have no way of vindicating a “right” to health care other than to force people to perform a job. The state can’t simply “drop” your cancer the way it can drop your prosecution.