Tuesday, November 21, 2006

Rangel

From the always-fascinating Neo-Neocon, an analysis of Charlie Rangel’s call yesterday for the reinstatement of the draft. She begins:

It seems to me that Representative Charles Rangel’s suggestion to reintroduce the draft should get some sort of prize for cynical ploys in Congress. Granted, he’s got a lot of competition, but this one is designed to offend almost everyone, including the vast majority of his fellow Democrats, and even Rangel doesn’t think for a moment that his proposal has a chance of passing.

Yup, that’s about where I’d start (though I’d never be able to say it quite so wonderfully). But look where she ends up:

But if — as I suspect — Charles Rangel understands and is operationalizing all of this, he’s got some heavy-duty intellectual chops to go with his heavy-duty audacity.

You’ll want to read the whole thing to understand how someone very smart herself could think Charlie (the buffoon) Rangel is an intellectual heavyweight. She invokes the Hegelian dialectic in her argument — it’s worth reading her piece just to see that!