i always thought juan williams was almost completely uninteresting, just peddling bromides or conventional political positions. but i will certainly defend him in this case. the stuff he said comes up far far short of any sort of a firing offense for any sort of news organization that does not regard itself as the bastion of a particular ideology. as i say, we're rolling into a renewed era of extremely narrow, completely self-righteous, and utterly useless political correctness. y'all have fun!

seriously that's why we need to elect sarah palin, carl paladino, christine o'donnell. it's astonishing, but they appear actually to say things. in information theory, info is inversely related to redundancy: you can't be informed of what you already know. that's why there is no sense at all in listening to a speech by obama, for example. his take on the gulf oil spill, e.g., consisted of an undifferentiated hum well below the range of human hearing. but palin and o'donnell hold themselves to a higher standard: they are unpredictable. this opens up the possibility that they are actually communicating something. now that is a problem, because if you say something someone might disagree with it. it might turn out to be false, etc. but at least it's not nothing. i admit that that's a pretty low standard for political discourse, but it's also much better than we were doing up to that point. 

it may be strategically useful for the american state to take the position, or to maintain the rhetorical stance, that islam is hyper-mellow religion of peace. that doesn't make it true. and the fact that it is a useful thing to say does not entail that all of us, inside the war machine or outside it, must pretend to agree with what hillary clinton pretends to believe. 

i like the form of this. williams was saying that, like, when he's flying, seeing folks in muslim costume makes him nervous. he was reporting a personal experience, one that is surely typical in post 9.11 america. it's an experience we all have - well i wouldn't say 'nervous' but i also wouldn't say i don't notice at all. right? it's an experience we all have that cannot even be mentioned, like pretending there is no such thing as masturbation. the whole idea of these restrictions is to make it impossible to tell the truth or even to relate your own experiences.