Another couple of keepers from the last month of Pandagon:

Dec. 7: The Hard Good Idea

I think one of the key differences between liberals and conservatives is that conservatives are willing to go all or none on systems of operation - for instance, if a particular government bureaucracy doesn't work, conservatives will tend to impugn the idea of bureaucracy to begin with (public bureaucracy, at least). Liberals will tend to point out that the purpose of the system is noble, even if the execution is bad, and try to fix it, or else come up with something that replaces it and does a better job with the same goal...

...This all goes back to an Opinion Journal piece on Tennessee's health care system, which is by their account poorly run and wasteful. (How that differs from private health care, you tell me! Ba-dum-bum.)...

The problem I have with this is that even if they're telling the truth about the system's problems, the system (altered) obviously works in numerous other countries around the world. The problem isn't the idea, but the implementation. But in order to combat supposedly radical left-wing ideas, the implementation becomes the idea...

One reason I think the Republicans have had so much success as an opposition party is, they are very skillful about using any mis-step by any part of something to loudly condemn the whole, which is one of the classic fallacies (Hasty Generalization, or what I think of as the Some vs. All problem).

What has surprised me is their continued success with this tactic even though they now run things... I was hoping the poverty of their dominant tactic would be clear to more than 49% of the population this year, but I was sadly wrong.

Dec. 28: Everybody Focus

Jack Balkin wisely says:

The real challenge for the left is making people care about torture, even when torture is not on the front page.

That's mostly right. The real challenge for the left is making people care about anything once it slips off the front page.

Hey America? What happened to those stolen munitions?
What about that bureaucrat who got browbeat into concealing the true cost of Medicare?
Come to think of it, who did out Valerie Plame?
What was all that stuff about Tom DeLay's ethics?
Didn't the troops need more armor or something?
And wasn't there some controversy over Bush knowingly using bad intelligence to lead us to war?

Was the Kerik withdrawal nanny excuse a lie, or not?
Will they correct the faulty advice they give teens about sex?
What the hell does Bush mean when he says "we will prevail over this destruction", anyway? Can he bring back over 120,000 people from the dead?

Who in Congress is using either their statutory power or their access to news shows to pursue ANY of these topics, besides Henry Waxman?