Parrot Cage

Obligatory Lieberman comment

We don't much care for Democrats, and Joe Lieberman is pretty much the reason why.  Therefore, it comes as some relief that he lost his primary election.

Lieberman has enabled Bush to turn a flawed government into a nightmare.  He deserves to spend the rest of his days as a Fox News contributor.

He'll run as an independent, and he'll lose again.  And Ned Lamont will undoubtedly prove a disappointment to "liberal" Democrats and morph into Barak Obama (not in a good way with all that charisma, but in a bad way with all that fellating of business interests).

That said, we woke up to a truly bizarre reading of the Lieberman accusation that hackers took down his web site.  Amy Robach, bubble-headed MSNBC newsreader, apparently wanted to cast the "hacking" story in a direction other than the very obvious answer that Lieberman's campaign relied on a cheap web service that was unable to handle the traffic and subsequently shut down.

Robach's guest was Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal.  Her first belligerent question posed to the Attorney General was intoned as an indictment:

"Is there any doubt" that Joe Lieberman's web site was hacked on the eve of an election?

Richard Blumenthal was wise enough to respond that he was taking the charges seriously, but that yes, there was plenty of room for doubt.

Is this all part of MSNBC's attempt to snag some of that "trailer-trash pie"?  How else could you explain Ann Coulter's calling Al Gore a "total fag" to the amusement of Chris Mathews, whose response was to gush about how he couldn't wait to have her back.

"Our Being is Becoming, not stasis. Our Science is Utopia, our Reality is Eros, our Desire is Revolution"

Last week Murray Bookchin died.  Bookchin's work fills a good portion of our library and his disappearance from this world is a profound loss.

Bookchin was a prolific author and perhaps the most distinguished American anarchist theorist.  His introduction of social ecology into the philosophical landscape and political language will probably be his most lasting legacy.  We think Bookchin might appreciate our suggestion that he was the great Oracle of American anarchism.

Beyond his social theory, Bookchin was also a stellar historian, writing extensively about the rise of socialist-libertarianism in Spain throughout the 19th and 20th centuries before Franco's extermination.

For those unfamiliar with his writing we recommend an interview he gave to Harbinger.  And an informative tribute.

We noticed that the best compliment that the religiously capitalist libertarians at Reason Magazine could pay to Bookchin was to compare him to fucking Murray Rothbard!  We created a bit of a stir with Rothbard disciples when we mocked President Bush's solutions for post-Katrina New Orleans as more a tribute to Rothbard's chaotic capitalism than FDR statesmanship.  It's not that we don't appreciate Rothbard's contribution to libertarian thought and anti-authoritarianism, but ultimately the irrational faith which his brand of chaotic capitalism demands warrants the prefix "fucking" before every mention of his name (at least on this blog).  There are far worse people than Rothbard to be paired with, but the Bookchin/Rothbard comparison possibly maligns Bookchin's contributions.

The differences between left anarchists and right libertarians might seem trivial to those who share little with either, but to us lefties those differences are probably irreconcilable.  Bookchin didn't always think so; he may have even seen those right libertarians as possible allies in the struggle against the state.  Sadly, we aren't so optimistic.