For those of you who “regularly” read my blog… I apologize, I have nearly abandoned my passion for political commentary and nuanced discussion due to my hectic work schedule, my desire for fellowhip, and a series of unfortunate events that have taken alot out of me the past 6 months.  You will be pleased to know then that I hope to resume blogging on a much more regular schedule from this day forward.

I did want to pass along a short story, however, in the hopes that it might be just as much of an encouragement to you as it has been to me.  Today at work, a co-worker handed me a book and thought I would get a kick out of the rather crazy writing style of the author (which is itself almost an oxymoron when it comes to books about marketing… but I digress)

In a chapter discussing experimentation and failure in the business world, he referred to a quote by Michael Jordan… it really floored me:

I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career.  I’ve lost almost 300 games.  26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed.  I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life…

… and that is why I succeed.

- Michael Jordan

There is some degree of comfort to be garnished from someone who has failed so often… but who has persevered through those failures to become a success… I think we can all learn from that.

I can’t decide whether to love or lothe this sort of prose.   It’s… it’s just SO READABLE.

America is a constant tug-of-war between order and chaos. When you smoke, that just shines out at you as a fact. People glare. They hustle past. Nonsmokers. Bah! To them, my smoking represents lawless inconsideration. The brainlessness of an animal. The order of the world once lay in the absolute calming pleasure of the smoke. But they reordered it, and now smoking is the upset, the smokers stand on street corners, at the fringe of everything, stamping their dead soldiers against their shoe bottoms. When I drive past, I feel them. That’s my country right there. They remind me of the updraft, of the stovepipe of heat, they make me want to smoke! And yes, I even like the coughing. I actually like the hurt in the chest plate. It lights up my brain. It sets me into a state. But — that’s just because I’m new to it. For a real smoker, it provides calm, it provides order against the chaos of their lives. Columbus! He didn’t discover anything, except cigarettes. There were no cigarettes in Europe before him. That fucking guy. And the Puritans! Those guys made rules. They wanted to lay order on the land and stamp out what they didn’t understand. That’s the smoking-ban people. Puritans. Black and white. Smoking is the essential American rip — the need for moral order versus the instinct for exploration.

It’s a long article… but it’s worth reading…  via First Time Smokers – How to Start Smoking Cigarettes – Esquire.

Life isn’t much fun when you have 200+ unread articles to get through every day in your RSS reader.  In light of this rather burdensome (albeit self-imposed) condition, I’ve decided to re-evaluate my news-gathering activities.   I’ve dropped some RSS feeds that were not really that informative and have added some others (most notably the American Spectator Blog).  Additionally, I’ve moved off of eventbox (which I did like) back to NetNewsWire (which now has google reader integration AND an iphone app!).

During this transition, I went back and read through some old posts from Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism blog (which he is no longer maintaining, to my chagrin), one of which I particularly enjoyed.  If I were this kid’s father, I would be pretty proud!

From a reader:

Hi—

A couple months ago I took my teenager, a freshman in high school, to hear your lecture to the Leadership Program of the Rockies at the Broadmoor Hotel. I thought at the time your talk made a great impression on him, and now I know it did. He came home from school the other day chortling about his “take-down” of what he described as “the liberal at the lunch table.”

Seems someone alleged Obama has socialist tendencies…The liberal student retorted, “At least he’s not a fascist, like Bush!”

My son James, who has been taught always to ask for examples when arguing with someone’s opinion, asked what, exactly were Bush’s fascist policies? Liberal student couldn’t come up with any, but sputtered that Fox News was full of lies (isn’t it amazing that even teenagers resort to this non sequitur when challenged?), so James asked for examples of Fox’s dishonesty. Here I gather the sputtering and stammering became more pronounced.

But the best part was when my son said, “And then I had to go into the whole thing since they didn’t understand socialism and fascism.”

What whole thing, I asked.

“You know, the whole thing we heard in that guy’s  [that’s you] speech. About Mussolini, and how he was trying to nationalize things, and that nationalizing something means socializing it, and the Nazis were actually the National Socialist party and that Obama is taking over the banks and car industry and healthcare and that is anti-capitalist and more like fascism than anything they could tell me Bush did.”

Not your most eloquent fan, perhaps, but a pretty serious application of your arguments for a 15-year-old!

via Liberal Fascism on National Review Online.

Mark Steyn is really an interesting character.  Whether its discussing rather obscure points of british cultural humor on national radio or just zinging one-liners at liberals… he is one of the most enjoyable personalities in media today.  He’s the kind of guy who finds the irony in everything… which tends to make his humor a bit dry… but that’s the way I like my humor these days… extra dry.

His recent book, “America Alone, The End of the World as We Know It“, is really a book about demography, or, to be more precise: demographic decline in Europe, the rise of Islam in Europe,  and its consequences for both Europe and the United States.  I don’t think it is a stretch to say that Steyn is a student of Oriana Fallaci… its clear he has at least familiar with her book “The Force of Reason”… and draws on similar themes.  This isn’t to say that I am in full agreement with either author, but the parallels were immediately clear.  As Christopher Hitchens might say: there is something just a bit disconcerting about an obsession with the birth rates of any particular people group.

Nevertheless, even with a healthy skepticism of the practical limits of demographic study, I find that Steyn makes some rather persuasive arguments.  He first points out the dramatic, unsustainable birth rates in most of Europe: Ireland is in first with 1.9 children per woman; Canada only has 1.5; Germany and Austria are at 1.3; Russia and Italy, 1.2; and Spain, 1.1.  When the replacement level is 2.1 children per woman, I think it goes without saying that this poses serious problems for Europe’s future.  As Steyn points out:

By 2050, Italy’s population will have fallen by 22 percent, Bulgaria’s by 36 percent, Estonia’s by 52 percent–or more… In theory, those countries will find their population halving every thirty-five years or so.  In practice, it will be quicker than that, as the savvier youngsters figure there’s no point sticking around a country that’s turned into an undertaker’s waiting room.  Not every pimply burger flipper wants to support entire old folks’ homes single-handed…

One of the things Steyn tries to accomplish in this book is to explain WHY these countries are in free-fall.  The primary culprit?  European Social-Welfare systems.  It turns out that when you live in a social-welfare system… where all responsibilities of adult life are subcontracted to the state… there is very little incentive to actually grow up:

The real issue, though, is not whether you like Euro-statism.  Regardless of how you feel about it, it’s kaput.  The un-American activities in which Europe has invested its identity are deeply self-destructive.  Secondary-impulse states can be very agreeable–who wouldn’t want to live in a world where the burning political priorities are government subsidized care, the celebration of one’s sexual appetites, and whether mandatory paid vacation should be six or eight weeks?  But they’re agreeable only for the generation or two they last.  And, as we’re about to see in demographically barren, economically ossified Europe, for good or ill it’s the primal impulses that count. Europe’s belief that you can smooth off the rough edges of Anglo-American capitalism and still remain wealthy has trapped it in societal structures predicated on false arithmetic whose disastrous consequences can’t be postponed much longer.  Unchecked, government social programs are a security threat because they weaken the ultimate line of defense:  the free-born citizen whose responsibilities are not subcontracted to the Government.

This raises the obvious question: from what does Europe need to defend itself against?  Well, nothing… YET.  But behind the rather peaceful facade of modern politics, Steyn sees very troubling signs of a culture war in the making: a war between western, enlightened values, and 7th century values of radical Islam.  And to a certain degree, that makes sense: if Europeans are dying off… and Islamic couples in Europe are vastly out-producing European couples (he claims the birth rate for muslim women in the EU is 3.5 children) than it is quite forseeable that the majority of the French or Germans could be Muslim at some point in the future.  And perhaps it is at this point where I am the most critical of the book:  Steyn doesn’t provide any citations for these figures… and does not address the great difficulties in calculating these figures… so we have no idea whether his figures are on the high or low end of the spectrum.  It is often frustrating to simply “take his word for it”.

But lets assume that Steyn is right and that the muslim birth rate is far higher than that of western women.  SO WHAT!?  What’s so bad about a religion of peace?  Most Muslims don’t buy the whole “jihad” thing, right?  Well, Steyn doesn’t buy this argument:

[I]slam is not just a religion.  Those lefties who bemoan what America is doing to provoke “the Muslim world” would go bananas if any Western politician started referring to “the Christian world.”  When such sensitive guardians of the separation of church and state endorse the first formulation but not the second, they implicitly accept that Islam has a political sovereignty too….

So it’s not merely that there’s a global jihad lurking within this religion, but that the religion itself is a political project…

And not only is Islam a political project, but Europe is the perfect petri-dish for its growth:

While its not true that every immigrant on welfare is an Islamic terrorist the vast majority of Islamic terrorists in Europe are on welfare, living in radicalized ghetto cultures with nothing to do but sit around the flat plotting the jihad all day at taxpayer’s expense…

Abu Qatada, a leading al Qaeda recruiter, became an Islamist big shot while on welfare in Britian, and only when he was discovered to have £150,000 in his bank account did the Department for Work and Pensions turn off the spigot

This notion of a “nanny-state” seems to be a central component of Steyn’s argument throught the book: with it, society crumbles, without it, society becomes stronger.  In fact, in the last chapter of the book, Steyn is rather critical of the American slide into dependency.  The more responsibilities we turn over to the State, the less able we are to fend for ourselves:

[T]he only reason “a box-cutter can bring down a tower” is because on September 11 our defenses against such a threat were exclusively the province of the state. If nineteen punks with box-cutters had tried to pull some stunt in the parking lot of a sports bar, they’d have been beaten to a pulp.  The airline cabin, however, is the most advanced model of the modern social-democratic state, the ski-high versions of the wildest dreams of big government… So on September 11 on those first three flights the cabin crews followed all those Federal Aviation Administration guidelines from the seventies.  By the time the fourth plane got into trouble, the passengers knew the government wasn’t up there with them.  And, within ninety minutes of the first flight hitting the tower, the heroes of Flight 93  had figured out what was going on and came up with a way to stop it.  That’s been my basic rule of thumb since September 11:  anything that shifts power from the individual judgment of free citizens to government is a bad thing, not just for the war on terror but for the national character in a more general sense.

There is obviously much more in his book, I merely hit the major points.  While I think many perceive the book as anti-Islamic, I think it perhaps better to say the book is a warning to the West… a warning against complacency and dependency.

Francis Schaeffer has been, for most of my adult life, a person of considerable interest.  As a curious teen, Schaeffer introduced me to the world of reformed theology and the provided reasonable explanations to the often challenging doctrines of predestination and grace.  Even apart from his theological ideas, Schaeffer had a gift for communication; his writing is substantive yet very approachable and his various speeches are indicative of an Oxford education.  One cannot help but be reminded of CS Lewis when reading Schaeffer — their style, intellectual capacity, and heart for the Lord seem to me very similar.

Each of these traits and impressions have left me with a certain fondness for his writing.  On somewhat of a whim, I have decided to re-read through many of his books I rushed through as a high-school student and have long since forgotten.

The first of these books — or in this case a small pamphlet titled “Art & The Bible” — is an overview of Schaeffer’s understanding of Art and it’s place in the Christian worldview.  The entire first half of the book is essentially a recitation of all the references to art in the Old Testament.  Shaeffer systematically points out that much of the art God commanded of the Israelites was for purely asthetic purposes.  Schaeffer references certain elements of the Temple in particular:

Then in verses 16 and 17 [of 2 Chron 3:7]we read, “And he made chains in the oracle, and put them on the tops of the pillar; and set the pillars before the temple, one on the right hand, and the other on the left.”  Here are two free-standing collumns.  They supported no architectural weight and had no utilitarian engineering significance. They were there only because God said they should be there as a thing of beauty.

I think Shaeffer’s point here is that even in the Old Testament, God was ’sanctifying’ “Secular art”.  Schaeffer is careful not equate “secular” art with”sacred” art, but he is very clear that art need not be sacred to have value.

After having established that secular art can be pleasing and acceptable to God (in fact, Shaeffer goes as far as to say that a work of art is “a doxology in itself”), Schaeffer then begins to establish a framework with which Christians should approach art.  His first approach: Art as Art.

You see, for Schaeffer, art has a certain intrinsic value; its worth is in the fact that it is a product of creativity and that creative impulse mirrors the character of God:

As a Christian we know why a work of art has value.  Why?  First, because a work of art is a work of creativity, and creativity has value because God is the Creator.  The first sentence in the Bible is the declaration that the Creator created… so too the first words of the prologue of the Gospel of John…

He continues:

…[I]t is part of the image of God to be creative, or to have creativity…  All people are to some degree creative.  Creativity is intrinsic to our manishness.

Schaeffer’s next framework has to do with art as worldview.  He posits that a person’s ideas are inexorably linked to their worldview (although he seems to make a certain exception for purely abstract art).  Schaeffer explains that all art uses a certain language or vocabulary that is universally understood… in many cases, the created world we In some cases this “subtext” or implicit communication is sometimes more powerful than the image itself:

When Giacometti pictures the awful alienation of man, he makes figures which are alienated, but he is still living in God’s world and is still using the common symbolic forms no matter how he distorts them.  He plays with the vocabulary, but the vocabulary is still there.  So there is a communication between Giacometti and me, a titanic communication. I can understand what he is saying and I cry.

One wonders if we all would have such strong reactions if we really understood the ‘language’ the artists are speaking.  Music has certainly had this effect on me, and perhaps art could as well if I had the training.  I suppose there is a reason we build massive monuments to house, display, and protect art… it is perhaps the purest form of communication — and therefore the most valuable.

Interestingly, Schaeffer is not at all hesitant to make astetic value judgments as to the quality and value of a particular work of art.  In fact, he puts forth several criterion by which we should judge a work of art: 1) technical excellence, 2) validity, 3) intellectual content, and 4) the integration of content and vehicle.

Technical excellence is an objective inquiry and I will not elaborate on it here.  Validity, on the other hand, is worth explaining.  To Schaeffer, a work is valid if the work in question is a natural outflow of an artists own creative ideas and philosophy.  In other words, it is valid if it is representative of an artist’s OWN creative impulse.  According to Schaeffer, “commercial art would” would be an example of art lacking in validity.  Unlike ‘pure’ art, commercial art does not require an artists’ worldview to be incorporated in the work and therefore, the work lacks the same ‘power’ it otherwise might have.  Now, I must say I’m not entirely sure I agree with Schaeffer on this point:  Whether or not the artist’s own ideas come through does not mean that there is not the communication of a worldview.  I would at least argue that a work of commercial art could communicate any philosophy to any viewer with as much effect as the artists may himself be capable of.  These creative impulses and their relation to the message is certainly an interesting aspect of the creative process, but I am not convinced on the basis of Schaeffer’s argument that there is an objective difference between the communication in each instance.

Next, Schaeffer explains how a work’s intellectual content is to be addressed:

If we stand as Christians before a man’s canvas and recognize that he is a great artist in technical excellence and validity — if in fact he is — … then we can say that his worldview is wrong.  We can judge this view on the same basis we judge the views of anybody else…

The ability to objectively assess art is pivotal for Schaeffer because he recognizes the communicative power of art – especially art meeting the aforementioned criteria.  Schaeffer recognizes that when art communicates moral principles contrary to those of scripture, these principles must be addressed from a Christian worldview:

We should realize that if something untrue or immoral is stated in great art it can be far more destructive and devastating than if it is expressed in poor art or prosaic statement.  Much of the crude art, the common product of hippie communities and the underground press, is laden with destructive messages, but the art is so poor that it does not have much force.  But the greater the artistic expression, the more important it is to consciously bring it and its worldview under the judgment of Christ and the Bible.

Finally, Schaeffer distinguishes technical excellence and message from style.  To Schaeffer, “there is no such thing as a godly syle or an ungodly style”.  In fact, he sees the use of modern style as an imperative for the Christian artist.  He is very explicit on this point:

Christian art today should be twentieth-ctentury art.  Art changes, Language changes… [I]f a Christian’s art is not twentieth-century art, it is an obstacle to his being heard. It makes him different in a way in which there is no necessity for difference.

But Schaeffer is careful to provide one important guideline:

“we must use twentieth-century styles [but] must not use them in such a way as to be donimated by the world views out of which they have arisen.

This is a really interesting thought, but I cannot help but to read it without some degree of criticism.  Is a piece of art valueable only because of its message?  Schaeffer himself says that art has value as aesthetic expression alone… would it then be inappropriate for a Christian to paint a still-life with techniques popularized in the 1800’s? — styles which are still displayed in museums to this very day?  Perhaps Schaeffer means to imply that art created with the purpose of communicating a christian worldview should be expressed in a manner designed to be as clear as possible to its audience… and purely aesthetic art need not meet the same criteria.

Schaeffer presents an interesting and helpful introduction to art from a Christian perspective.  Short enough to be finished in a day, it is certainly worth your time should you want to broaden your framework on Christ and the arts.

You know we’re in trouble when the mere suggestion of parents caring for their own children is hailed as a “novel” ideal.

Supervisors suggest putting unemployed parents to work caring for their own children as part of proposed changes to CalWorks and other state government aid programs.

via L.A. County officials offer a novel idea to save millions – Los Angeles Times.

Charles Kesler’s insight on modern liberalism is really quite amazing.  Highly recommended.

I highly suggest you watch the complete series here:

When Mr. Axelrod was asked how involved he was in the selection of Bo, he jokingly answered that he “only got called in for the final three.”

But as Mr. Axelrod was trying to set the record straight – he actually was not consulted – Mr. Sagal asked about the two runner-ups.

“One was Miss California,” Mr. Axelrod cracked to the audience’s laughter.

Wow.  Um… what else is there to say?  Keep on demeaning people who have conservative values… and we’ll see where it gets you.  As Christopher Hitchens once opined… this is the kind of joke stupid people laugh at.  In this instance, nothing could be further from the truth.

via Axelrod Ruminates on Rove and Miss California

Wow, I really wish I would have read a piece like this before going to lawschool.  I never looked at the law as an intrusion into religious and personal reality before.  Very interesting, albeit disturbing.

What is culture? Sometimes we use that word as the opposite of economics or law. Here I mean something very specific. Culture, as James Davison Hunter put it, is the power to name reality.

If you doubt that, think about divorce for a minute…

When the law actually endorsed unilateral divorce, it changed the terms of everybody’s marriage. Now the happily, romantically married may not notice this in practice. But not only the bad marriages, but the so-so marriages, the good-enough marriages were and are profoundly affected by the law — not only directly, but by the cultural changes in the public understanding of marriage that the law only partly caused and but certainly reinforced and institutionalized.

If you have a right to divorce at will, what you lose is the right to make an enduring marriage — at least if you live in consensual (shared) reality.

I can still hold the view that divorce is wrong — that I have no right to divorce because I made a vow to stay married. But with the advent of unilateral divorce, my views became a privatized view of marriage, not part of the shared reality defined by the law. We privatized this view of marriage precisely when the law privileged the progressive view of divorce.

Maybe you think this was a good change. I will not stop to argue the point now. What I’m trying to point to (for those geniuinely striving but challenged to understand my argument) is that the law mattered. And that the consequences of this legal change was not, in a simple sense, the expansion of liberty, but a change in power, driven in significant part by the cultural power of the law’s power to name reality…

So yes, if you follow the analogy to divorce, parents will still be able to teach their children their own views about what marriage is. But the law will be constantly repudiating that view in a number of public visible ways. Parents are having a very hard time fighting the progressive views of sexual culture, enshrined at law, in any number of ways. This will make it much harder.

When people say the “law is an educator,” that’s true, but it doesn’t go far enough. In this case, the law is an arbiter of reality: Who is really married? Who is really divorced? Who is having an out-of-wedlock child? Who, for that matter, is committing adultery?

The law’s power to name reality matters.

via The Amazing Power of The Culture (Part 3) – Maggie Gallagher – The Corner on National Review Online.

For those of you who are unaware, I recently got into a huge blog-fight with a friend of mine on her blog. Her post, entitled “Ban Books…..yeah….fu** you!!!” was essentially an expletive-laced, rant about how backwards and dangerous Sarah Palin is for ‘banning’ books from her local library. She concludes, in a moment of exasperation, “What century is this crazy as* bi*ch living in?”

Being the good friend that I am, I thought some illumination was necessary. I proceeded to explain to her that:

What’s wrong with certain books being banned by library staff anyway? Surely even YOU would ban certain books if you were a librarian… for example, I doubt you would get a hustler subscription for your local library…

Librarians MAKE EDITORIAL SELECTIONS TO THEIR BOOK CATALOG ALL THE TIME. That’s why you have any given book in your library is BECAUSE of a conscious choice to PUT IT THERE.

This obviously was not convincing enough for her as she proceeded to say:

What the hell do you mean? Please tell me which power enumerated in the Constitution of the US or in Alaska’s laws give that idiot that right to ban books… I’d love to see Sarah Palin even begin to comprehend a casebook, lmao!!! She can’t handle children’s books in the local library, without getting offended. What a simple minded fool.

Banning books, wanting to teach a non science like creationism in schools, knowing nothing about how the constitution or goverment works, time and time again showing that she thinks she can be the arbiter of values for people who have the right to choose those things for themselves, I consider that i huge fuc**ng issue.

But I guess that’s why I’m a libertarian Joel, I believe in freedom, and people’s right to choose for themselves, and not have some half wit poorly educated blow hard tell me what I can or can’t do.

I’m sure you are getting the picture here; my logic didn’t make a dent. But, being the good friend I am, I concluded I just hadn’t explained it clearly enough:

libraries are not protected by the first amendment you IDOT. People are. Go ahead… explain to me how the constitution prohibits taxpayers from voicing their opinions about how their tax dollars are spent… LIBRARIES do not have first amendment rights!!!!!

Freedom of expression isn’t at issue here. Local communities can decide what they want in their library and what they DON’T want. Why is Palin unable to voice her opinion about what is in her community’s libraries??? Why should HER OPINION about this be stifled? You want to talk about stifling… let’s talk about the assumption SHE CAN’T GIVE HER INPUT. This is Orwellian doublespeak here.

[T]his whole thing is basically an argument that non-religious people are better-suited to decide what we should be learning at our local library than religious people. This is al basically just an attack on Christians and christian beliefs…

This was about as much as I could take. After a few more exchanges of (mostly) personal attacks, I felt my time would be better spent on other things).

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There is a certain paradox to political language. While the ideas to be communicated are often complex and nuanced, the way these ideas are expressed are often in elusively simplistic terms.   The political messages  often get boiled down into single words or phrases, creating an eerily understandable message–a message left often (intentionally) to the listener’s assumptions and wishes rather than to any substance the speaker intended.  In fact, each sound-byte or slogan most often most often exists to hide true intentions rather than to serve the education of the voting populace.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Obama campaign.  The entire campaign promises one thing: CHANGE.  There is no qualifier, no explanation, no plan… just the promise that things will change.  The utter obscurity of what this word might mean reminded me of a quote from my favorite French philosopher, Jean Baudrillard.  Allow me to re-word the quote just slightly with this political message in mind:

‘CHANGE’: the message we hear, see, and experience at every Obama campaign is mysterious, because we really have no option to not change.  If you elect a new president, change is inevitable..  It is like saying ‘I am the candidate of inevitability’  It is stupid, and yet it is enigmatic.  You could read it to mean that you should vote in order to realize destiny, but that is banal.  Following the model of ‘change or no change’, ‘the future or the present’, it would become ‘the future is the future!”.  Stupid again, since you cannot exchange the future for itself.  And yet there is poetic force in this implaceable tautollogy, as there always is when there is nothing to be understood.  In the end, the lesson of this political message is perhaps: ‘if you are stupid enough to vote in change, you get obama!

As I was researching a previous post, I came across a number of interesting blog posts and interviews I found quite interesting. In particular, I wanted to bring your attention to a great interview with my favorite liberal feminist, Naomi Wolf, author of the infamous “a room of ones own” (and the subject of possibly the best television prank in the last year). She is promoting her new book “The End of America” –a book that lays out the ‘Ten Steps to Closing Down an Open Society’ and “exposes” the ways in which America is mirroring the closed societies of history.

Allow me to begin this discussion by first complimenting Ms. Wolf. First, she just looked great during that interview. I was all about that red thing she was wearing (but I digress!). In all seriousness, I think this book is a valuable addition to the discussion and brings an important (albeit selective) historical context to modern politics. At the risk of cliche, I would remind you that those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it. By reminding us of the evils of history Ms Wolf is, shockingly enough, being helpful… and I wish to encourage this kind of behavior.

This being said, I think it is fair to say that Ms Wolf’s conclusions are lacking… in any number of ways. It isn’t that she is always wrong, but that her foundational history is in many cases only loosely connected with modern practice. She begins with an assumption of guilt (primarily with the Bush administration… many times implying he is a ‘wannabe’ despot), finds similar parallels to dictators with completely different motivations and purposes, and then imputes those motives to Bush because factual circumstances were the same. Although a stretch, in some cases I found myself thinking that if two people washed their laundry, that would be enough for her to draw a comparison. I am, of course, exaggerating; but I do so to point out that to end one’s analysis at factual similarities without further analysis can lead to very irrational conclusions.

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