Had another thought I was trying to address in my blanket blog-post recapping last week. I started down this road, but I didn’t quite take it all the way. I made reference to this mindset that says…

The enduring meme is best expressed as “Right or wrong, we are going to win this argument, because X. Right or wrong.” And then X has something to do with something being given excessive weight in this little melee, which everyone understands deserves no weight at all, but hey reality is reality right? And so it’s an eight hundred pound gorilla that decides everything…right or wrong. Barack Obama is a brilliant speaker and seems like such a nice guy. Seniors rely on Social Security and they vote. Black people, and women who use abortion as a contraceptive method, are angry. Bill Clinton is perceived by these angry women as (somehow) a sexy guy.

But there’s something missing. It’s been festering in the back of my brain all week, ever since the embassy was invaded this last Tuesday, but not quite fully teased out. Today, at the gun range while I was loading up a .40 cal, I managed to fill in the details.

It has to do with another diary entry from last year.

It impresses me that, as I pass through this big valley…the ones whose names show up in the newspaper where the murders happened, overlay with remarkable precision the places serviced by light rail and by bus lines. It’s true in Sacramento, in Seattle, in Detroit, and every other “big” place I’ve ever lived or visited.
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The dependency-class is dependent. It depends on a service, and because it is dependent, anybody who denies the service, by action or inaction, is infringing on a fundamental human right. And, should this take place, this imbues the dependency-class with new rights it would not otherwise have. And so The System, which denied the service by inaction and failing to keep the machines in good working order, has it comin’. The rail hoppers will enter, again, that surreal region in which a crime is to be committed, but not really, because it is a “gettin’ even” for another crime that was committed. A written law will be violated, as redress of grievances for the violation of some other unwritten law.

Now, here is my epiphany:

We have, down at the shooting range, a “community” of sorts in which each participant holds in his hands, or has immediate access to, a mechanism that can cause instant death or permanent disability in a fellow human being. Because each one of us is a potentially lethal force, we observe rules. Some of these rules could arguably be called “stupid” rules, but nobody ever says so, nobody ever challenges them. We don’t think of them that way. We become very script-driven and process-oriented, even while we keep our wits about us as best we can, and make a point out of thinking things through as abstractly, as diligently, as we know how. We stay awake and alert and keep all the brain lobes lit up — but, at the same time, we follow the rules unflinchingly and unquestioningly.

So for those who are up on American politics, there is irony here. We think things through like right-leaning libertarians, but follow the rules like good statist collectivist liberals.

On the other side of the fence, where the light rail ticket station is busted so people just take what’s “theirs” so they can stick it to the system — there is also some irony. Their motives are “pure” libertarian, with each citizen looking out for his own interests. It crosses the line into anarchy, since it is clear why the most fundamental rule exists which is “when you ride the rail you must have a ticket to show you paid for the service.” And yet an unwritten, ethereal “jungle” rule has emerged to override this, the jungle rule says “if the machine is busted then you’ve been slighted by The Man and you have to get even to show you won’t take this lying down.”

In the dependency-class society, not only is the transportation all blue-statey and kiosk-driven, but the personal defense method is as well. If the burglar is breaking into your house at one in the morning, you dial 911. You do not have a gun. Proles cannot have guns; guns are for cops. That’s one of the rules. Whether that’s followed is another story.

But California is an exciting and intriguing patchwork of blue-staters and red-staters. The friction develops when the blue-staters make laws restricting the access of guns from the red-staters. This is a case of psychological projection. The blue-staters do not trust themselves with guns; therefore, they do not want anybody else to have guns either.

Now, these guys at the shooting range do have an ability to recognize “dumb” rules. We talk about them constantly. First and foremost is the dumb rule that says an automatic weapon owned by a California resident can’t hold more than ten shots. I’m sure there’s some fine “nuance” I’m missing there, regarding who lives where and on what side of the state line the weapon is being bought or brandished or whatever…but the law is somewhere around there. If you’re in the Golden State, ten is the max. Why this is a “dumb” law is an easy thing to establish (ten is a meaningless number, since if the criteria is that something could go wrong, the number that should have been chosen is nine less than that). Just about all of us agree on this. And yet, we follow it too. Without hesitation and without question. We follow that dumb state law, all the other dumb state laws, the not-so-dumb state laws, and we do exactly what the range-master tells us to do when he tells us to do it.

Those other people follow rules too. As long as it is convenient and they “feel” that the “system” is treating them “fair.” As soon as the machine stops dispensing tickets, the feeling flips around, the magneto-relay switch trips into anarchy mode, and it is “okay” to hop the turnstyle to “get even.”

With those observations then in place, I can boil this observation down to near bumper-sticker size.

One culture is in possession of deadly force, and as a consequence, it rejects the option of rule-breaking.

The other culture has embraced rule-breaking, and as a consequence it abjures deadly force.

My epiphany is: I think on both sides of this line, it is subconsciously realized that these two epoxy agents cannot be blended together — ever. People who flout rules on a whim, cannot have access to deadly weaponry, and people with access to deadly weaponry cannot flout rules. If those two luxuries come into contact with each other, the result is an abomination that will have to be eliminated if any system of law and order is to be maintained. And so the “half anarchists” permit themselves to steal a ride on the light rail, or a newspaper out of the busted machine, but will not avail themselves the use of deadly force; they will cross the line into anarchy but they do not want to become a threat. Because they live in a collectivist utopia, in which their entitlement to the staples of life depends on their social status. Naturally, in the land they call home, guns are outlawed — they have to be.

Those who make their way through life’s challenges by being responsible and capable, insist on the privilege and the right to defend themselves and their loved ones, with the option of deadly force being available just in case, God forbid, it is ever needed. But, for reasons mentioned above, they will not consider the option of breaking a rule. They, too, are properly fearing and avoiding that deadly epoxy.

How this pertains to the embassy incident: These turnstyle-hopper gun-avoiding blue-staters are all about “Winning the argument right-or-wrong, because X.” X being something dumb and stupid. College kids identify with Obama, women who can’t get their husbands to pay attention to them identify with Hillary, moderate/independent/centrist voters “feel” that Mitt Romney isn’t very approachable. Here in America, we have been seeing this all over the place and we’ve been seeing it for a long time. Teachers get so-much-of-a-raise, and so-much-vacation-time, not because it makes sense for them to get it, but because…they’re striking. Before them it was the garbage collectors, and the actors and the pilots and the sheet metal workers. Here, there and everywhere, someone is holding something hostage. We’re just suckers for a reasonable and logical exchange of ideas, followed by a rational compromise — which is then to be cut short because someone is holding something hostage. Like the lawyers say: Real justice is expensive, how much justice can you afford?

What holds the key to a peaceful resolution is this: Each community can make the decision about how it is to function, whether it is to preserve individual liberty and its associated responsibilities & follow rules; or, go full-anarchy, stripping the individual of the obligation to follow rules but also of the benefits of individual liberty. Communities can go either way. And with sufficient insulation from each other, they can live alongside each other…at a distance. They can even fit one inside the other.

And an anarchist, we-take-what-we-want community, can fit inside a liberty-preserved, live-by-the-rules community.

But — here’s the rub — not the other way around. If a law-and-order community lives inside a might-makes-right, turnstyle-hopping community, then the smaller law-and-order community is living on borrowed time.

The radical Islamists, who want what they want when they want it, constantly demanding things because of their ANGERRR!!!!, are trying to take over the world. All this talk about what percentage of the overall Muslim world population it is, how old Muhammed’s wives were, what passage of the Quran says what, is missing the point. The might-makes-right lawless can live in smaller communities of their own making, inside larger communities that function according to personal liberty, personal responsibility, and law & order. The reverse is not possible.

You have to grin at the elegant logic that is used here…

Now that the White House and State Department have made clear that they believe movies compel terrorists to terrorize, it’s time for them to get ahead of this problem. And one thing the White House can do immediately is to pressure Sony to stop the release of director Kathryn Bigelow’s “Zero Dark Thirty,” which celebrates the killing of Osama bin Laden.

I’m only saying this because, you know, the White House and the media told me movies inflame and cause terrorism.

Think about it: if the poorly produced and laughably bad trailer for “The Innocence of Muslims” results in chaos, murder, and the burning of foreign outposts all throughout the Middle East, how much rioting and mayhem is a big-budgeted, slickly produced, Oscar-bait blockbuster celebrating the death of the leader of al-Qaeda going to cause?

Yeah folks, you better get right on that.

And then that sister you have whose husband beat her within an inch of her life because the pasta was overcooked…take her in, let her spend a couple nights and while that’s going on, teach her how to cook pasta the right way because hey — the problem has to be there. It can’t have anything to do with a certain someone’s personality or alcoholism or impulse-control issues. Must be that damn pasta. And the beer wasn’t cold enough. But you see, therein lies the rub. If you’re going to prevent these spurts of violence by addressing all this penny-ante nonsense, ignoring the big problem, you’d better make sure that pasta is perfect from now until the end of time. And the remote can always be easily found. And the steak is cooked right. And the yolks aren’t popped in any of the eggs. And there are no spots on the glasses. And the dinner fork is to the right of the salad fork. And the napkins are properly folded. And, and, and…ya know what, it still isn’t gonna work.

Because you aren’t addressing the real problem.

Thought exercise: Imagine John “The Duke” Wayne running a blog. I can see this. Now imagine the blog prominently features a personal note to the blog audience, from The Duke, thanking them for taking the time to stop by and read. I can see this too. Now imagine The Duke posting a SNUL, apologizing profusely for not having posted any updates lately…this last one poses some problems.

Sorry about that, pilgrim, I’ve been just so unbe-LEEV-ably busy lately…

Nope, John Wayne would not SNUL. But more important than that, I just don’t have it in me. Seems too much like excuse-making.

However, I do think I should post an explanation. There were just too many objects in the hopper and they went and clogged it up by banging up against each other. Three thousand good men and women died eleven years ago; to say something about any matter unrelated, without first taking note of the occasion in some way, would have been gauche. That’s Tuesday. Monday, this week, there was a massive GoDaddy outage that temporarily took this blog out of existence; the page-hit statistics before & after indicate that this absence might have been felt, by some, and to leave it entirely unremarked-upon while flitting off to other subjects, would have been crass. And now we have the matter of the embassy in Libya being attacked. Details are still coming out about that. That’s three things. Oh yeah, we have the polls that put Skinny Nero up over Mittens by seven points or some such.

Well, let’s take the last first. Severian made a great comment to which I was going to post a response, when the outage happened sometime between 1057 and 1110 PDT Monday. Trying to understand liberalism, he paraphrased…

One of your commenters (Nightfly? Cylarz? Philmon?) came up with the best definition I’ve heard: Liberalism is the lifelong attempt to make high school come out right.

The only word lefties use more than shouldbeforcedto is “deserve.”

You didn’t build that, so you don’t deserve to keep the money you make from it.

You were born white and middle class and American, i.e. privileged; you certainly didn’t earn this; therefore you don’t deserve to keep the benefits of these inherited advantages while others, less privileged, go without.

And certainly the starting quarterback doesn’t deserve to be dating the head cheerleader.
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And the thought that all of their self-declared good qualities — intelligence, perception, exquisitely honed sensibilities to the sufferings of others — are also accidents of birth or products of society and therefore inherently unfair never even enters their heads, because to fifteen year olds it’s only other people who ever catch breaks; everything they have is theirs by divine right.

I could write volumes about this stuff. But much of it would be self-indulgent and tedious for others to try to read, since it would consist entirely of incomplete thoughts being pondered as I struggle to figure out something I don’t completely understand. Hmm, come to think of it that’s a good description of most of what I’ve scribbled here over the years.

So I’ve been continuing my struggles, in blogger-silence, while others have labored to answer the same question: Why is Barack Obama any more popular right now, than, say, a painful hemorrhoid? And I think there are three answers for this — three essential components to His bedrock support:

One, those who have calculated (and perhaps experienced) the notion that they will personally benefit from His governance — greed;
Two, those who habitually side with whatever interest in any conflict they perceive to merit “underdog” status — guilt;
Three, those who understand His administration has having a deleterious effect on the country and certain instituions within it — wrath;

One has many parts to it, since a voter doesn’t have to benefit in terms of actual dollars-income in order to perceive a present or prospective benefit overall. Job security will make a nice coin of the realm, sufficient for conjuring up a sturdy motivation. There are public-sector employees, for example the public school teachers and the unions that build their fortresses of power atop the jobs those teachers hold. There are those who make our various social safety nets into hammocks that don’t want the gravy train to end.

Two also has many parts to it, since siding with the underdog has a lot to do with establishing and maintaining a personal sense of identity: “I want my friends and neighbors to think of me as the guy who voted for Obama.” These people, unlike One, are resolutely unconcerned with outcome. They are like Chicago Cubs fans, with the exception that to a Cubs fan, when the Cubs lose a game it is a matter of undeniable fact and the dreamy rationalization that follows is obliged to recognize at least just this much. Obamapologists, as we have seen, are not similarly constrained. Reality itself is like warm putty in their hands. Such is the stately pleasure dome in which one must reside in order to adhere to the narrative in these troubled times.

Three is overlapped heavily with Two. It is almost, but not quite, a perfect subset. Most of the people who “want to be a part of this thing” are angry with, and longing for the destruction of, some designated target and they see Obama as a desirable agent in that destruction. I believe these are the people I notice spewing lots of lofty rhetoric that seems to be associated with building something, that they intend to be associated with building something, creative/constructive efforts, but I notice can’t specifically describe what it is they’re building, and their efforts remain consistently destructive. George W. Bush’s “swagger” makes them angry for some reason. A lot of people are in this camp without realizing it. Sandra Fluke, for example, along with her sympathizers; they are in Group One, but this is secondary to their overlapping membership in Group Three. They’re upset at some “traditional” and “patriarchal” system of values and want to obliterate it.

Now, what to make of this movement in the polls. Three possibilities:

One, the “bounce” is real and Mitt Romney is in some real trouble;
Two, the “bounce” is an illusion created by pollsters who are tinkering with the data to skew the results, to maintain security in their jobs and social statuses;
Three, the “bounce” is a psy-ops campaign against Republican-faithfuls, (mostly) unsupported by (reliable) data, to discourage them into staying home on Election Day.

My sense is that the bounce is more-or-less evenly divided among these three factors. However, Bounce Factor One, which is a genuine groundswell of post-convention support for the incumbent with no trickery involved, consists disproportionately of an engorgement of Obama Bedrock Support Group Two, those who simply want to be on the in-crowd, to sustain and nourish a sense of identity they have built up. They simply do not think things through. They pride themselves on having the right “facts,” but what good are verifiable facts if you don’t know how to use them? And these people do not. I’ve personally had conversations with them that look like this:

OBAMAFAN: (ThinkProgress talking points dealing with cherry-picked data about His Eminence rescuing the economy from “the guys who made this problem in the first place”)…
ME: So do I have this straight? The way the economy is going right now, Obama views that as a success and this is the way things should be.
OBAMAFAN: (Completely incomprehensible and meaningless gibberish)

They’re so fond of “nuance” that they can’t grasp Aristotle’s Law of the Excluded Middle. They come upon a situation in which gray area is nonexistent and is not possible; they cannot recognize it for what it is. And so their argument distills down into nonsense. It becomes “Now that we know what Obama is capable of doing, we must re-elect Him so that He can do something entirely different.”

Those are my thoughts about Obama’s bump in the polls; time will tell if they are correct. Proceeding now to the embassy attack. My goodness, what a delightful potpourri of crazy little thoughts this has stirred up for us, and this illustrates the true damage wrought by liberalism. Why are our most passionate thoughts taking off in a hundred different directions in our nation, here? Why now? Why with this particular incident? This should not be happening; the thinking should be solidified, unidirectional and unifying, crystal-clear. Four good Americans, innocents, diplomats, dragged from the embassy and killed on the anniversary of the most devastating and deadly attack on our nation’s soil. It’s clear that September eleven has been designated “Remind Americans how much they suck day.” Rattling sabers just to keep up some rep of badass-ish-ness, or to get it back again, is a disasteful business. But it becomes a legitimate national security objective when “Remind Americans they suck day” must necessarily involve death and destruction. We draw a line or else we don’t. The terrible truth is that someone has to die either way.

Well I suppose I shouldn’t say that. But we do have a bad habit in the post-World War II United States. We weigh the nationalist, militaristic approach according to death, weighing the deaths that result from the military aggression only but somehow the deaths that result from pacifism don’t register on the scale. We passively allow the pacifist dogma to emerge victorious in this false, one-sided cost-benefit analysis. The bad guys keep getting their way, and every time they do they become more and more emboldened.

This is a very simple argument to make and to understand. Our country continues to pay a terrible price for not hearing it and yet we fail to learn the lesson.

The problem, I think, is not with the composition of the argument, nor with its presentation, but rather with the contrast in argumentative styles. The militarist mindset says “Let us consider the long-term consequences of each approach, and when you ponder that awhile you will see our way is more desirable, for it diminishes the bullying by making the bullying unprofitable.” The pacificst mindset, on the other hand, makes a big show of hand-wringing over the death and destruction associated with the militarist policies; but its argument, boiled down its essentials, becomes one of “You militarist guys might as well convert over to our side, for we shall never, ever consider coming over toward yours.” It becomes exactly what it seeks to oppose: The bullying.

This circles back ’round to Severian’s point about what liberalism is. The definition he’s cited is clear, concise, bumper-sticker-sized, fundamental: A lifelong (and tragic) attempt to make high school come out right. And yet, it doesn’t quite cover all the necessities if it doesn’t make some mention of the argumentative style which has somehow come to be associated with the liberalism we know and observe today. I notice, everywhere I look where the liberals are engaged and trying to win an argument, they’re trying to win it through some clever maneuvering that is disconnected from the presentation of evidence and fact, and building logical observations and calculations on those facts.

Here, I have a great example in mind. There is the immediate question of what to do about this movie, the movie upon which these attacks are being blamed. What is to be done about that? The administration asked Google to take the movie down from YouTube and, from my most recent reading of it, Google has refused to do so but it will block viewings in selected countries. I think what we’re dealing here is a difference in mindsets: There is some trouble in the town, and it’s all going to be made more better if we obstruct the access to some piece of information.

About a month or two ago we managed to slip out and watch Dark Knight Rises, third and apparently final installment in the franchise. One of the things that made me pleasantly surprised with this is, they had this major plotline going on dealing with a decision made at the end of the second installment, said decision had to do with handling a certain bit of information the Obama way. The “wise village elders will conceal the inflammatory information from the unwashed masses” way. This has always bugged me. I thought “Dark Knight” was a good movie, an excellent movie, worthy of owning — yes, we bought it, it’s on the shelf — but I didn’t like that message. And yes, I do see this conclusion to the previous installment as a blemish, and the third installment’s treatment of it as a sort of redemption. In fact, with this addition of the third chapter, it reads like a sturdy fable, better than most of the others, worthy of Aesop. I’m looking at it as: If your statement makes sense, then present it. Argue it. It, along with all the information that pertains to it, warts-and-all. Conceal nothing and misrepresent nothing. For, when you engage in such obfuscation and lying-by-omission, the argument you’re really presenting is “My statement makes sense, if and only if you view it the way I view it, and the way I view it is necessarily incomplete because a complete picture would reveal that my statement doesn’t make sense.”

And who wants to present that kind of argument?

Well, I can answer that: Our modern liberals do. On the Sandra Fluke matter, on the “Warren Buffett rule,” on the raping and murdering of our ambassador in Libya, on ObamaCare, on the you-didn’t-build-that, the case against the Black Panters being dismissed, voter ID, “climate change” or whatever they want to call it today, Wisconsin and the public sector unions, welfare work rules, social security, Medicare, and over-regulating the businesses of those “millionaires and billionaires with their corporate jets” to let ’em know how much they suck and how upset we are with them…on all these issues, the liberal approach is the same, and it reminds me of the sales and marketing folks who were, unwisely, placed in close proximity to me as a software developer so I could see how they work. I’ve never forgotten it, ever. The enduring meme is best expressed as “Right or wrong, we are going to win this argument, because X. Right or wrong.” And then X has something to do with something being given excessive weight in this little melee, which everyone understands deserves no weight at all, but hey reality is reality right? And so it’s an eight hundred pound gorilla that decides everything…right or wrong. Barack Obama is a brilliant speaker and seems like such a nice guy. Seniors rely on Social Security and they vote. Black people, and women who use abortion as a contraceptive method, are angry. Bill Clinton is perceived by these angry women as (somehow) a sexy guy.

So. Liberalism we see today, is a tragic lifelong attempt to make high school come out right — coupled up with, a cynical and delusive way of presenting arguments, involving the deliberate obstruction and obfuscation of information that is crucial to properly deciding issues, in a “Dark Knight” sort of way involving some elite crowd of wise, pure, foresightful village elders who make these brilliant decisions about what details are to be kept from the hoi polloi. It says “I’m going to win this argument, whether I’m right or wrong” about the small stuff, first…like, was our current economic crisis triggered by the banks who hold mortgages, or by regulations passed upon those banks by politicians like Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barney Frank? The liberals say those bizarre regulations are to be held blameless for the catastrophe, which is to be laid at the feet of “those greedy corporations”…right or wrong, they win the argument. And then that trickles on up to the big stuff, which is: Is America done with capitalism? Because those big companies were “the guys who made the problem in the first place,” should they then be regulated to death just for the sake of regulating-to-death…by the politicians who, when one studies the matter, one sees really were “the guys who made the problem in the first place”?

The real problem is: On issue after issue after issue, common sense goes off in one direction, and then our effective public policies go in the precise opposite direction. The result is, of course, liberals winning, and then public policies becoming enacted that don’t do what they’re supposed to do. Achieving something that is, arguably, the exact opposite of what they were supposed to do.

Can’t blame our country for falling for it during one year, or another year, or for maybe a presidential election cycle — or two. Eight years. Thirty or forty years, on the other hand, seems like carelessness. Or negligence. Or maybe treason and sabotage.

The Hello Kitty of Blogging is very surprising to me sometimes, in terms of what posts & pictures get repeatedly “liked” and “shared.”

Seems an awful lot of people managed to identify with this one:

And, you know, that is certainly an encouraging sign.

Had an epiphany while I was out driving & bike-riding around the seashore yesterday. My epiphany was…I’ve been hearing for the last four years about how this speech or that speech — from a certain person who is our President right now — is so wonderful that it is going to be studied in law schools for generations or whatever. This would imply, to someone who thinks about it lazily as I have been doing, that the text will be excerpted and then that will be put in a book somewhere. Is this not, after all, what “study a speech” has meant historically?

But no. You can’t “study” these speeches that way. True, if you could, you could then pick the speeches apart, identify sections, themes, tropes, passive/active voice statements, targets of praise/criticism being called out…and that would be healthy. But no. These are purely video speeches. You watch the speeches or you don’t absorb anything about ’em at all, and you might as well not know about them.

“Wonderful speech” doesn’t even mean wonderful-speech anymore. It is a reference to the audience’s reaction.

For example, would a transcript of Jennifer Granholm’s speech (hat tip to Rick) capture the “wonderfulness”? I think not…

Frequent readers & lurkers of these parts know that about a month ago, we had a gadfly challenging us to come up with a definition for “left wing” and pronouncing as inadequate any response that failed to live up to encyclopedic standards. We ended up in an endless cyclonic “this exchange ain’t over until it’s over the way I say” badminton match, disagreeing over whether left-wing-ism, being so thoroughly grounded in deceit as it is, can be defined in such a way. And whether a series of “Jeff Foxworthy” type of you-might-be-one-if tests would be an acceptable alternative…or could be taken seriously…or if that’s about as good as it gets.

Granholm’s speech offers me another epiphany: Left-wing-ism, in this day and age, could be defined as a resentment. Let’s give it a try: Left-wing politics appeal to a target audience within a selected economic class, blaming everyday-life pains and sufferings and exigencies on the next-higher economic class. That works pretty well, in that it carries the bonus advantage that it was just as true during the storming of the Bastille as it is today. If it works any better today than it did back then, it is because all the other attributes of leftism have been in a relative recession. This core-attribute of it, regardless of whatever prominence it had or had not achieved at any given time relative to the other attributes, has been a constant. If it has not been eminent every single year, it might as well have been.

It does require some tweaking in isolated cases. Homosexuals, I’ve read, are statistically better educated on average, and therefore higher earners. I don’t know how you go about verifying that, but it seems provable that the left-wing appeal there, and in other situations, is non-economic. So let us broaden it: Left-wing politics feed on, and are driven by, feelings of resentment festering within one class toward another. The definition of left-wing politics would be a pursuit of action, vis a vis public policy, based on those resentments. We’ve seen this in Sandra Fluke, and other such “gifted speakers,” as they have molded and shaped ShouldBeForcedTo into a single, almost monosyllabic, word. My goodness, how easily they say “should be forced to.” It’s like they muttered it as the doctor whacked their little butts right after they were born…when mom’s contraceptives weren’t available, or didn’t work.

Right-wing politics would, therefore, be defined as a rebuke of “um, let’s not” when the time comes to propose the change in public policy.

Questions outstanding: Is it possible to look at your own political movement as “unifying,” or deny that it is divisive in nature, when about the only way it can be functionally defined is as a desire for action based on resentments? When it is inherently divisive? When the only workable way to identify your opposition is in terms of “um, let’s not” in response to the changes proposed based on these resentments?

And, am I the only one who’s sick of these “wonderful” speeches that are wonderful only in video form? I’m sure there are others who agree with my ideological leanings who are similarly fed up with it; it would make me feel a lot better if I could perceive some similar fatigue up & down the spectrum. How about the libs? I can truthfully say that if I caught up with a speech in Granholm format, delivered by a politician who thought my way about things, I wouldn’t be any happier with it.

Perhaps not.

Here we come to a second candidate for definition of left-wing-ism…or rather, definition of the weaknesses in thinking and in character that lead to sympathy for, and eventual recruitment into, left-wing visions and schemes. It seems to be a consistency that the greatness of people, speeches, ideas and things, are entirely validated by something external to those people, speeches, ideas and things. And that is something I find truly fascinating — it’s like we’re having an ideological disagreement about the classic timeless riddle, “If a tree falls down in the forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” Granholm, or Clinton, or Obama, tells the crowd what the crowd is ready to hear and the crowd goes wild, that makes the “speech” a great speech even though, if you were to transcribe what was said, the result wouldn’t be all-that. The right-winger, on the other hand, looks at something accomplished that doesn’t exactly set the world on fire, thinks on it a little bit, and comes away with “imagine what it takes to be able to…” A perfect example of this is a soldier sent stateside because he lost his limb, or his face, in a roadside bomb, and the first thing he wants to do after his prosthetic is fitted is go back. Or, if he doesn’t make it stateside, his parents moving his wife and baby son in and helping to raise the child. To a lefty, as the video aptly demonstrates, it is the approving roar of the crowd that makes these things great, in fact it is the approval that is the greatness. They may appreciate the stuffing out of an abandoned single-mother raising her child alone, or even better, going back to school to get a better education. But the truth is that they like these stories because they associate them with crowd-approval and inter-class resentment. The proof? Try to get a lefty feminist excited about a single dad, in exactly the same situation doing exactly the same thing.

To a right-winger, the greatness lives in the deed itself, as well as in the internal gifts that made it possible. The capability and the will, as well as the ultimate effect, the greatness lives in all three, regardless of whether someone steps forward to express their approval of it. And regardless of the class membership of the person who does the deed.

Anyway, about the speeches. I’m at the Popeye Stage with the Clinton/Obama era of dazzling super-mega-awesome speeches. I’ve had all I can stands, and I can’t stands no more.

Michelle Obama lectured us about love, Bill Clinton spoke to us about honor, Cherokee Liz talk to us about truth or something, I guess, and then President Obama said something about making everything equal for everybody. It’s too bad Ted Kennedy couldn’t give lessons on how to drive a car over a bridge, but glad to see they have designated experts on everything.

And then the jobs report for August came out, it stunk on ice and the democrats made it clear they think this is what success looks like.

Well…that is certainly impressive. Please do tell me more about these wonderful speeches and how engaging they were.

I have a theory: When democrats start to make noise about womens’ “reproductive choices” — when that wasn’t what people were already talking about — it means they are in trouble. I think this is their argument of last resort. I mean you have to admit, if there’s some imminent crisis with women teetering on the brink of gestational slavery, 45 years or whatever is a very long time to be doing this teetering. But for a cheep gimmick to be stored in a closet somewhere and then hauled out in time for elections, it’s just about average.

I have another theory: When democrats start talking this up because one of their own is in trouble, I believe a statistical sampling of history will reveal it is the men who are in trouble when this happens. Re-elect him, because he will keep abortion legal and shower you with free contraceptives and that’s all a girl really wants, right? So abortion-talk is drummed up when male democrat politicians are in trouble. I have two female democrat politicians as my senators, they are both considered rather safe now that they’ve been in for twenty years. But this was not always the case, and I cannot recall them flocking to the safe harbor of “I’ll keep abortion legal” the way the men do.

It really all just comes down to this: Barack Obama has entirely used up His term, and at the very end of it He is still blaming Bush.

How racist would you have been if, exactly four years ago, you ran around saying “I’ll bet if Barack Obama gets to be President, at the end of four years He’ll still be blaming George Bush?” Such a remark would not have been allowed…well…pretty much anywhere, right? And yet, here we are. Quite remarkable.

1. Human activity, and human activity in America in particular, is having a deleterious effect upon the environment.
2. The activity of the United States government, with all its planes and cars and meetings and shipping and photocopying and so forth, is human activity.
3. Therefore, for the good of the environment, the Tea Party types are completely correct and we need to reduce the size of government.

Where’ve I gone wrong? Ask a lib who’s still speaking to you…and then stand back, wait for the ++pop++…

By way of Instapundit.

The pundits think it was just wonderful, which just goes to show why I don’t listen to pundits.

Charles Krauthammer was not so impressed. Everybody was watching the same speech, so it is clear there are different criteria being applied.

Might I suggest — we inspect those criteria. We have “engaging,” we have length (48 minutes I’m told), “detailed rebuttals,” we have predictions of what is ultimately going to happen when Paul Ryan debates Joe Biden, and how much the whole thing is going to have an impact on the elections in two months. Things that were mentioned and things that were not.

I think there’s something not being acknowledged about this. I’ll not criticize the length, directly, for I am a garrulous blogger and I would have little ground upon which to stand. And I’m not terribly sensitive to this part of it. What interests me is why. Why does the speech go on and on and on…the answer is, of course, that Clinton loves giving speeches. He is a very charismatic and exciting speaker, because giving the speech is something he likes to do and it shows.

Now, to the thing everybody knows but few are willing to admit: We can safely exclude, as a possibility, any idea that such speakers have worthwhile things to say. We see this in President Obama Himself. Speakers who love giving speeches, have a tendency to fail to come to the point. Why would they?

Can we even view Bill Clinton’s remarks in that kind of a lighting, from that sort of a perspective. You know, I don’t think we can. His “point” was that we should vote for Barack Obama, which he stated several times…and he based this on what? “[I]f you want a country of shared opportunities and shared responsibility, a we’re-all-in-this-together society…” It doesn’t make sense because it isn’t what we’ve been seeing for the last three and a half years.

But also, if that is the point, then there’s no reason for the speech to take 48 minutes. Again, I do not criticize the length, I question the why. Just as I don’t question the length of the Lord of the Rings movies, I question the why. The ratio is off. Not that much story to be told.

And the answer is: To Bill Clinton, a speech is not a chore. It’s like a foot rub, or a massage, or a — oh, I’ll just let that go. He doesn’t want it to end. No, I’m not buying Krauthammer’s idea that it was some kind of revenge against President Obama. Or at least, I just don’t care about that. Obama is not the injured party here, it’s the audience that is injured, and the country.

I’ve had much to say to criticize our modern culture. One of the things I don’t believe I’ve mentioned is, we aren’t bored by the right things. We select badly when we figure out what bores us. It’s not particularly easy, or difficult, to get us bored, we’re just bored by the wrong things. A more mature society would find Bill Clinton the most boring speaker ever, because such a society would be listening to his speeches with the questions in mind that everyone understands are the right questions: What is the point he’s trying to make, and does he manage to provide quality support for it? And it would come away with, well, we-don’t-know and not-really, plus it took us the better part of an hour to take it all in and we’re kinda pissed about that.

But things the way they are, Clinton is graded on how much fun it is to listen to him, when you happen to agree with what he wanted to persuade you to do. How does it feel to listen to the former President give the speech. There it is again: feel, feel, feel, nothing else matters.

A speaker just wasting time, searching for a high, chasing the dragon, droning on to an audience that is doing the same.

Quite sickening.

President Obama’s big mistake up to this point, which I hope He continues to repeat right up until His ass gets kicked outta there, has been to spend all of His resources and His energy marketing Himself to the very, very hardcore Medicators who voted for Him in ’08. Those would be the people who feel, feel, feel their way around every challenge in life and never think, think, think their way through a problem. They don’t give a rat’s rear end about anything in the world other than how they feel at the moment, so cause-and-effect never actually enters the picture. They like to pretend that it does, now & then, and that they’re recognizing it and working with it — because it makes them feel good. But they don’t really do it.

Why this is hurting Him: He’s already got these people locked up. By marketing Himself to them, He isn’t actually changing the situation in any way other than to burn off resources…

…but…it makes Him feel good, so…that’s the rule. If it feels good, do it, and whatever troubles you have should somehow work themselves out.

Now, if Obama came by and read The Blog That Nobody Reads, or one of His campaign staff who is capable of making some decisions comes on by, they could take note of the following. Consider what Obama could do if He wanted to market Himself to people who, to date, would not be so inclined to support Him.

He could do what His predecessor did, and make a pledge not to play golf anymore. That would be a real, to coin a phrase, “change.” Might as well face it, throughout the last three-and-a-half years He’s been looking kind of like an un-manager. He makes a speech blaming Republicans, goes and plays golf, shows up at a democrat fund-raiser, plays some more golf, makes a speech taking credit for something, plays some more golf, produces commercials, plays golf, says “plug the damn hole!,” plays golf, holds a beer summit, plays golf…

…if I didn’t know better, I’d think He just plays golf all the time, waiting for something good to happen so He can hog all the credit for it, or something bad to happen so He can blame “the folks who got us into this mess in the first place”…then goes back to playing golf. He has been an exceptionally passive President. He can actually brag about exactly nothing save for the killing of bin Laden, which is a card He has overplayed so much that any more is going to cause Him serious damage. So: No bragging rights for the country on His watch, the criticism of “He actually hates the country” has started to stick, millions of people out of work and…He’s playing a lotta golf. To keep playing sends an unmistakable message that things are not likely to change.

And, He could at least look like there’s some project in the works, somewhere, that can be managed as a project with tasks and subtasks and objectives and due dates and percentages-done. Just put out a false impression of it — how hard would that be?? It wouldn’t take any effort at all. It would involve a lot of deceptive speech-making, which seems to be right up His alley. Just show up in a city at some time and say “So-and-so has the ball here, our hope is that X will be achieved” and then show up somewhere else two or three weeks later and say “As we hoped, X got done, now we can do Y which could not have been done without X.” Make it look like you’re doing something. That would go a long way toward making it look like smartness is being applied, plans being devised, carried out…there’s another unpleasant truth to be realized here, this shtick of “I am a healing balm and I make the oceans recede” has been played out. That card, like the “I killed bin Laden” card, has been overplayed to the point of becoming toxic, and will cause damage if it is played out any further.

Those are two things He could do to market Himself to new audiences. If they were done, they might all by themselves swing the results of the election to His favor.

They would involve very, very little effort.

Not only will He not do them, but His people won’t even consider them. They are, absolutely, non-starters in every single way. I’d never post them on the Internet if I thought otherwise.

This says a lot about Him and the way He manages things.

Barack & crew know how to do what they know how to do. They’re not interested in expanding the horizons, the world they know is already plenty big enough for them.

From the few glimpses I caught last night, and reading I’ve done this morning, I’ve picked up the impression that they’re going full-bore with the tried-and-true “don’t be a meanie cow” approach. Which works like: Hey, it would really hurt Barack Obama’s feelings to replace Him with someone else so don’t do it. But I call this “tried and true” because it’s been tried a lot of times and it always fails. Aw c’mon, Bob Dole is a Great American, he’s waited so long and darn it, it’s his turn. John McCain is a Great American, it’s his turn gosh darn it, and it’s now or never.

The track record of failure here is most impressive. I’m glad they’ve gone this route.

If you really want to win: It isn’t about the candidate needing the office, it’s about the office needing the candidate. This is one of the few things Americans do right with their elections. It makes a lot of sense. What kind of a loser can’t face the day unless he’s been elevated to the highest office in the land? That’s your guy, really?

So Michelle’s speech, in summary: My parents sacrificed everything for my education, and I do mean everything. And if I’m married to some loser who can only win four years as POTUS, it will all have been for nothing. Is that what I was supposed to have gotten out of that?

If you take her remarks seriously, what they tell you is that we’ve got to do whatever it takes to get Mitt Romney elected. Because, that way, Michelle will go back to the salt mines and she’ll use her ample talents to secure some other high-paying gig in the Chicago Machine or some other high bastion of egalitarian fairness, thereby making the most of the education for which her parents sacrificed so much. Which beats the stuffing out of the situation as it is now, with her wasting these abundant opportunities by way of her frequent shopping excursions in Barcelona or wherever. I mean, it’s no contest. Show some proper and decent respect to the sacrifices Michelle’s parents made, vote Romney in 2012.

The other thing that made an impression on me was when they started panning the crowd to show the audience reactions. Lots of smiles, lots of nods, lots of tears. A couple weeks ago we had a liberal gadfly buzzing around these parts making much about the “definition” of left-wing, seemingly unable to comprehend the simple concept of defining such human-experience situations by their peripheries. There is no other way to define left wing in this day & age, it’s a hot mess of irreconcilable contradictions and it can only be defined by the wall that surrounds it; it is a very, very high wall indeed. The road to being inducted into the fold, and converted out of it again, is long and hard because this wall is impenetrable and insurmountable. Consider the core message: People are good and people are deserving, all equally so. Therefore, we’ve got to get those dirty rotten bastards and make them pay, pay, pay. That is the bi-fold message that drives everything else, it is confused, self-contradictory and unworkable. That we’re all in this together but there’s this “us-we” and a “they-we,” and let’s-get-even-with-’em.

This all showed up — somehow — in those weird smiles. Liberals should not try to smile on camera. It’s creepy. How much anger can you manage to work into a smile? It reminds me of the Terminator Chronicles when they started belaboring the point that Terminator robots can’t really smile; like that. They have such joyless, pained, resentful smiles.

I saw a lot of good reasons last night to drum Barack Obama out of office, but perhaps the very most convincing one out of all of them was this: The people who surround Him, are all invested ears-deep in this culture of “If you do not fully support the solution we’ve developed, you must be in favor of allowing the identified problem to continue, for we recognize no middle ground between those two extremes.” There are those who will say this is insensitive of me, and perhaps they’re right, but it’s true nevertheless: In this country, that attitude is a bigger problem than any health insurance mess. In fact I would say that problem has a parental relationship to the health insurance problem. It got to be the way it is now, because of that. “Us magical and special uniquely-wise elite people, who have no names, have figured out this year’s answer to the problem in some smoke-filled room somewhere, now are you going to support it or not?” That’s what has created the health care access problem we see today, and that’s a fact.

Why anybody wants more of it, is beyond me. As I said, the walls surrounding this mystery play-doh-land are very tall and it’s as hard for me to see into it, as it must be for those within to see the light and find their way out. Both efforts are many years in the making with progress so slow that it seems, at times, to be at a complete standstill.

But I know the country’s best days are still ahead of her.

I also know, that particular “do it our way or not at all” attitude has to be buried good and deep, or at the very least toppled from power, before it happens.

Margot’s bitching about girls in movies being outnumbered and sexualized. Again.

You know, there’s something interesting going on here. Feminism has been effectively split in half, for quite some time now, going all the way back to the beginning…of the current wave, anyway, in the 1960’s. Consider the two mindsets at work:

Mindset 1:

Stimulus: Girl being sexualized. Woman strutting around in skimpy clothes or something.

Response: Right on. Her father wouldn’t like it and her husband might not like it, but who cares. And if it fills any mens’ heads with lascivious thoughts, then that is their problem.

Mindset 2:

Stimulus: The same.

Response: She’s wrong and she should stop. She is setting the movement back <n> years. Why, this could fill mens’ heads with lascivious thoughts, and you know, they cannot be responsible for their actions.

Now, what’s interesting here is that you can’t split Mindset 1 and Mindset 2 along an axis of paleo- and neo-; both combine cultural sentiments both old and new. Since one says a person in a certain role is absolutely right and the other one says that same person is absolutely wrong, they are fundamentally incompatible with each other. And yet they are both feminism.

In fact, if anything it is Mindset 1 that came first. The miniskirts and the go-go boots and the big hair and the hot pants; sometime during the 1970’s things flipped around to, hey, men appreciate these fashion statements and the liberated woman should never do anything a man might appreciate. And ever since then, the hemlines have been going up and down like a yo-yo, all in the name of feminism.

Irony is, Mindset 2 these days seems dominant; any accentuation of the gender divide is ipso facto contrary to the feminist movement, which seems intent on making our society essentially gender-less. But Mindset 2 also bears a close resemblance to Sharia law.

Can a movement really be all about womens’ “liberation” when it would be perfectly cool with sticking them all in burkhas?

Dunno. But, to the subject at hand, which is women in movies and comic books acting like men…this is all rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, it seems to me. If it doesn’t sell tickets and issues, then it isn’t going to stick around — period. And no, no comic books are going to go flying off the shelves because the woman is doing manly things and manly stunts, with manly biceps and manly quads.

But it cuts both ways, too. Suppose the movie or the comic book has a time bomb that can only be dismantled by someone who knows something about computers. Very popular plot device. Well, it turns out you can be sexy & athletic, or you can be computer-literate — pick only one of those two — unless you’re a chick. Chicks can do both. It’s called a geek girl and yes, it can sell movie tickets like nobody’s business. Dudes can’t do this. So yes, the gender roles are different, they always will be, but you see it does balance out.

This was just a quirky little outburst over at the Hello Kitty of Blogging, but it drew an unexpected number of likes so I thought I’d just block-copy it.

Modern liberalism: Some 20 or 30 percent of us who never matured much past middle school, claiming to represent 99 percent, trying to win an election by a tenth of a percent so that some 4 percent of us can tell everybody else how to live, and where to put 100 percent of our money.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: It’s weird and spooky how people who are so excited about building a world that will work for “everyone,” know so much about who they want to exclude from all the decision-making.

Jini Index or Jini Coefficient — explained below…

The conventional Gini coefficient would surely make a short list of subjects I’d arrange into a sixth- or seventh-grade syllabus if I were ever availed the opportunity. For those unfamiliar, it is a fraction between 0 and 1 that indicates the distribution of wealth within a society, nation, region within that nation or some other enclave. If it’s higher, wealth distribution is unequal and if it’s lower then the distribution is more equal. If it’s 1, then there’s one lucky stiff who has all the loot and everybody else’s ass is broke. If it’s zero, then of course everyone has the same amount of stuff.

There is evidence that a lower Gini coefficient will lead to a more prosperous economy, but you have to do a lot of accounting and logical tricks to get there. You have to look at a lot of anecdotal evidence that has been cherry-picked to “prove” the desired conclusion and ignore whatever is contrary, and you need to re-define “prosperous” as something like “stable” or more like, to use a sailing terminology, “becalmed.” A lot of noted and prestigious economists insist that a lower Gini coefficient is a good thing. This actually supports little, save for that the noted and prestigious economists are perhaps a good deal more noted and prestigious than they should be.

The “evil twin” of this would be the Jini number, a measurement of my own creation. It, too, is a fractional measurement between 0 and 1, which I define thusly…

• If the control of the wealth, not the wealth itself, is shifted away from the producers who have generated that wealth and more toward the people who have never built a goddamn thing, then this has the effect of increasing the number, toward 1;
• Within the ranks of these pain-in-the-ass busybody bureaucrats who haven’t built anything — once they have seized this control, inequality of the control-versus-bureaucrat distribution would tend to increase this number further, whereas a sensible checks-and-balances system would reduce it;
• If the Jini is 1.0, the tax rate must be one hundred percent and the entire country is in the back pocket of one single a tyrant who can unilaterally dictate who owns what, who owes what, who loses what and who keeps what; the conventional Gini, likewise, would be 1.0, although you’ll never persuade a good honest lefty to admit it…
• If the Jini is 0.0 then the tax rate must be zero, and the conventional Gini would be…well…nobody knows and nobody cares.

To recap: The Gini tracks inequality within possession of wealth, as the possession of that wealth pools up into an accumulation among elites. The Jini tracks control of the wealth, as that control slips away from those who have produced it. My suggestion is that this metric is far more important and far more worthy of the trouble involved in tracking it…and arguing about it.

It seems the democrats are trying to figure out how to hold a convention — how to get their message out to the voters. How to let us know what they’re really all about. I submit this task might be easier if we all agree on the meaning of a Jini index, or pick whatever other name you’d like…then they could let us know that they’re all about boosting it. And consistently. They could drop this whole thing about “We’re all about equality, but you have to keep in mind some people are more equal than others.” It’s been an effective way to confuse people, but it doesn’t do them very much good if they start to confuse themselves as they deliver it. They aren’t really about equality at all, not even a little tiny bit. They’re against wealthy people keeping the wealth they’ve created. Everything in producer-land has to be equal-equal-equal…as in…they can’t keep it. Inequality is not something quite so much forbidden, as it is a luxury to be enjoyed on the other side of the fence, where people have created nothing, preserved nothing, save for giant bureaucracies that legitimize and institutionalize theft. Meddling muggles whose hands have never touched anything more harsh, dangerous, exacting, demanding or slimy than a file folder, a bottle of water or a glass of scotch. They can have inequality. Because we proles need to know who is the grandest of them all. Like ants in a hill need to know who the Queen is.

Yes, the anthill is the perfect model. The Jini is 1.0 in an anthill.

The Jini explains all. Keep applying for those jobs, losers, we need more tax revenue to pay for Michelle’s vacations…

Update: Was thinking more about this, wondering if it’s a flaw that it measures two things, those two things being the movement of wealth into non-productive activities, and the distribution of authority over the non-productive bureaucrats. I’m sure that’s a sin in the academic world of statistical analysis, but in practice it’s probably alright…imagine a situation where all of the money is moved into non-productivity, the tax rate is 100% for everybody, but all 30 million or whatever unproductive bureaucrats hold a precisely equal share of power on a per-bureaucrat basis. We would have to plot this as a meaningful point since it is defining the high extreme of one spectrum and the lower extreme of the other…four fifths (0.800), five-sixths (0.833) or six-sevenths (0.857).

This would be necessary before we could spreadsheet it out, and the whole concept could come under criticism because this mid-point selection would be mostly arbitrary.

But in practice, this is an extraordinarily unlikely scenario. Hoarders are hoarders just as whores are whores. Who in the world would enact such a draconian taxation system, moving the loot into the ranks of the unproductive, every nickel of it, just to share the authority with a bazillion others in deciding where it should go? I’m sure a lot of people would make some noise to the effect that their passion is for exactly that. But I don’t think it’s really going to happen. It would amount to the perfect sharing exercise following the perfect un-sharing exercise. Human psychology can’t bend that far. You’re either playing by “toddler rules” or you’re not.

Thing I Know #112. Strong leadership is a dialog: That which is led, states the problem, the leader provides the solution. It’s a weak brand of leadership that addresses a problem by directing people to ignore the problem.

“That’s not the question. The question is…”

Nothing further to be said. TIK #112 covers it all, stem to stern, every inch.

As has been observed in these parts, and elsewhere, the Modern Left has a quirky fascination with serendipity. An improbable and anomalous wrinkle of fate, a prevaricating readjustment of a classic dictionary definition, a box of ballots found in Al Franken’s station wagon, a treacherous Republican Senator switching sides…Bill Clinton engaged in this sex act and not that sex act…and presto. The matter is decided in their favor, for lack of a nail a shoe was lost, for lack of a shoe a horse was lost. That seems to be their most cherished and prized outcome.

“Nuthin’ but net” would be alright, but they are much more fond of the ball hitting the metal rim, bouncing a few times, sitting there for a second or two…and then rolling down inside at the buzzer. And then the magic of “democracy” does the rest, fifty-point-one becomes a hundred. Motion carried. Since the Florida election debacle twelve years ago, I have gradually come to realize they aren’t quite so much painted into a corner of lusting after such accidental and hair-splitting victories; they prefer them. I’m not sure why. They’re hooked on drama, or they inwardly sense that the more they advance their agenda at any time, the more slender will be the victory and so they make that association. It’s probably a combination of the two.

I see this morning the Internet is absolutely aflame with this “are we better off than we were four years ago” question. The democrats insist, of course, yes we are but they need to re-define “better off” and “job” and “economy” and “improving” and and and…anyone who doesn’t see it their way is a liar!

That’s from Gateway Pundit, along with many other places.

For those who wish to walk through the details, David Harsanyi at Human Events obliges. Bottom line, we are seeing craven shameless lying in either Paul Ryan or Stephanie Cutter, one or the other…and Paul Ryan isn’t lying.

The way I see the “better off” question: Yes, Obama’s people have probably run around and found eight hundred thousand of something they could call “jobs” (and I suspect the massive energy they’ve sunk into this, is somehow counted in that number). I have questions about this, but let’s just go ahead and grant it. Even if that’s a net reading, it doesn’t manifest the ascension of an improving economy if it doesn’t manifest consumer desire. And that’s what they’ve been selling: Tax more, borrow more, put it all in a big pot and then our wise wonderful leaders will force the largess to go here…presto! That teacher/construction worker has a job!

Churchill…man in a bucket…lifting by handle. You’ve heard that quote. it applies.

But hey, we know what’s what, now don’t we? We have fact checkers.

Nevertheless, when you have to re-define “better off than four years ago” just to answer the question, you’re probably not doing it right. In the end, all comes down to, do we want to see the last four years’ worth of “improvement” and “recovery,” over the next four? That is the question, and this hyper-nuanced “depends on the meaning of ‘is,’ ball landed on our side of the net, fifty-one becomes a hundred” logic isn’t going to work there. Recovery is recovery. Pain is pain.