Our liberals and our newspaper editors, but I repeat myself, have thrown themselves with great gusto into a mission to get the gun control debate back into the headlines, with no small amount of bullying force applied to the popular will. Once again, they’re going to tell the rest of us what to think. They’ve tried this before, and failed. Columbine happened, they tried again, they failed. This time they’ll try harder still.

New York Times, April 17:

Our hearts and the hearts of all Americans go out to the victims and their families. Sympathy was not enough at the time of Columbine, and eight years later it is not enough. What is needed, urgently, is stronger controls over the lethal weapons that cause such wasteful carnage and such unbearable loss.

Cherry-picked reader responses to the editorial, April 18:

How many mass shootings, how much loss, how much grief will it take before our legislators are finally willing to stand up to the National Rifle Association and pass meaningful gun control legislation?
:
How many more people will have to die before our leaders will have the sense and the guts to take on the National Rifle Association and honor the wishes of a majority of Americans who want gun control?
:
When will America join the civilized world and realize the absolute stupidity of its gun laws? Your leaders are not brave enough to stand up to the gun lobby; therefore, shootings like Monday’s will continue to occur.

Sniff…sniff…smells like…coordinated phony “grassroots” talking points being circulated. How does the old maxim go? “When the facts are on your side, pounds the facts; when the law is on your side pound the law. When neither is on your side, pound the table.”

Tables beware!

Our democrats have been alternating between beating their chests that “The People Have Spoken,” and huddling together to try to figure out what The People said. They’ve spent all year not knowing what to do — and now they think they’ve been handed an event on a silver platter and they can leverage it to get more gun control. There are several reasons for wanting to do this, and not a single one of them have to do with making anyone safer. Hint: The scene of Monday’s tragedy already had gun control. There was an attempt last year to fix that, and it failed. That bill could’ve saved some of the thirty-plus victims who are now dead. The New York Times editors and all others who greet that notion with some skepticism, are invited to ponder: In which activity do you think yourself more likely to score thirty points? Laser-tag, or whack-a-mole? In an environment with strict gun control, the carrier of semi-automatic pistols and multiple magazines is engaged in the latter. You might say he’s implementing the ultimate “point-and-click” user interface. It’s a miracle he didn’t take down even more.

Well, if the gun-grabbers don’t want to protect anyone, what do they want to do? Once you can get the United States to become a progressive Euro-pansy nation, you’ve shown you can get the same thing done anywhere else. It’s a political message. The United States is the king of the mountain. The One To Beat. Besides, our democrat Congress is badly in need of political messages to send. We have our first female House Speaker…and democrats and smarter-folks all the nation over are asking — so what? What’s she done? Getting a gun-grabbing bill on the President’s desk would go miles toward answering that.

It’s certainly a daunting task. Like any other liberal idea, gun control doesn’t look good and there aren’t many ways to make it look good. We should all keep in mind what a stiff challenge these gun-grabbing liberals have taken on for themselves.

How do you make a liberal idea look sensible? It turns out there are really only three ways.

Obfuscation. This is the offering that all solutions to the given problem, save the most liberal one, are products of overly simplistic ways of thinking. It exploits an interesting facet of human psychology. If you offer anything else intellectual in nature, people would look to you to provide substantive support to what you offered — but when you offer this, you can claim yourself exempt from such an expectation. The expectation itself, you can argue, is a manifestation that your point hasn’t been fairly considered. Regarding the problem at hand, anytime someone comes back to it and produces a conclusion you don’t like, you can simply accuse them of thinking in overly-simplistic terms.

You would think, then, this tactic would be available only to the geniuses among us. Isn’t it necessary to not only think in those complex terms, but produce a real solution to the problem at hand and then defend it against attack? Au contrair, whoever said such a thing. This is just “Emperor’s New Clothes” stuff in its purest form. Look at the September 11 attacks and the immediate aftermath…”what is it we could have done, to make people around the world want to do such an awful thing to us?”

Is it really simplistic thinking to say “men killed thousands of innocents in a horrible way, they are dead but belong to an organization, that organization needs to be squished like a bug”? Is that really simplistic? Perhaps, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that it is overly-simplistic. Speaking for myself, over five years later I’m still waiting to hear what these complicatedly-thinking geniuses have to say about what to do. I know what we’ve done that they don’t like…I know who they don’t like…that’s about all. Therein lies the benefits to obfuscation, you never really have to say what’s going on or what you’d do about it. You just criticize others.

That’s probably why Sen. John Kerry used it so much during the election of ’04 with such phony words as “nuance,” going from one end of the season to the other without ever saying specifically what he’d do about things — and address why, in a medium receptive to intrusive questions from oppositional forces, the things he would do were likely to achieve success.

Misrepresentation. Simply misstate what the problem is, or what the proposed solutions are. It is exceptionally potent, especially when the misrepresentation is supported by phonetics. Gun control falls into this category since it is frequently summarized as legislation “to get rid of all these guns lying around.” As I noted above, Monday’s rampage took place in a gun-control environment. It stands as a splendid example of what gun control does, and does not, do. It does not “get rid of all the guns.” It ensures that everyone who owns or uses guns, by process-of-elimination, is a law-breaker.

Minimum wage is another example of the phonetics lending support to the effort to misrepresent. The phrase “raise the minimum wage” carries a concise, and strong, suggestion that something is being increased. Who but the most heartless bastard can resist doing that? But in fact, an increase to the minimum wage increases nothing except a statutory parameter. Minimum wage laws, both in design and in effect, simply define a subclass of transactions and make all qualifying transactions illegal. Increasing the minimum wage simply changes the way this definition is done, by declaring more transactions illegal. Will those jobs be changed so they can become legal again, in other words, have their compensation increased? Perhaps. Sometimes. It’s not up to the Congress or to the state legislatures to decide that though.

Some insist there are studies that say the unemployment rate goes down when the minimum wage goes up. (Invariably, my own ability to call this into question is attacked since I don’t have an accounting degree and I’m not any kind of labor analyst.) And yet I can’t help noticing. If I am to accept this, I must accept the following as well:

You can have lots and lots of representations of something. You can define a subset within that thing, and declare the subset illegal. And as a result of you declaring that subset illegal, where the subset was not illegal before (or the subset was narrower before)…you now have more of the thing. Maybe it’s my lack of education talking, but it seems to me if you can collect data to support that, there’s something wrong with the way you’ve collected the data. That, or the rules don’t have quite as much of an effect on what’s being done, as you have presumed.

Carping. It’s not hard to gather an example of this. Just get in an argument with a liberal and use the names “Bush,” “Rove” or “Cheney” in any context you wish save for a negative one. Leave some sneering undone, let the other party respond…presto.

Liberals, you see, are to snarking and carping about Bush/Cheney/Rove, as straight men are to staring at a beautiful woman’s ample bosom. They behave as if they don’t take the opportunity, and someone catches them, they’ll get in trouble.

But once the carp-fest has started logic is invariably abandoned. Our liberals all know this. It’s their way of taking a “breather.” Except when you take a buddy to the gym, who isn’t quite as in-shape as you are, when his breather’s done he’ll get back into the game again. The carping liberal, I’ve noticed over time, is done for good. And that’s always struck me as a bit funny, because you don’t have to wait long before our liberals tell us their ideas would make a lot of sense if “given a fair hearing.”

And then they’re almost always the first to storm out of the room with a bunch of name-calling and snarking about Bush/Fox-News/Halliburton etc.

Just speaking for myself, I’ve filed all of the liberal arguments into those three buckets. I’m going to be accutely interested in the first argument I hear or read that demands a fourth file-folder to be fetched and labeled.

We’re talking about the lives of innocent people here. If liberals have something to say in support of gun control that doesn’t fall into Obfuscation, Misrepresentation or Carping, let’s hear it.

This blog, which nobody actually reads anyway, spends a lot of ink belaboring the obvious. It is often accused of doing this by the folks who aren’t supposed to be reading it, and I find this to be entirely accurate. But oftentimes in life it’s the most obvious observations that are given the least amount of ink…or breath…and, oftentimes, as a direct result we tend to fail to react to these “obvious” things we know to be true, that nobody jots down or says out loud.

Half a year ago I indulged in an exercise in belaboring the obvious. The occasion that inspired the belaboring was the release of a long, long, oh so long list of reasons to hate George W. Bush — who wasn’t running for re-election, but still. Hating’s fun, right?

There is an obvious problem with the hating. As a recruiting tool, it’s expensive, clumsy, and clearly toxic. It’s also deleterious to the primary mission of recruiting, which is to unite and mobilize disparate parties who have passion for a common mission. Oftentimes, it turns out the mission is not so common.

Here’s a great example. Even though nobody ever reads this blog, if anyone ever did happen to stumble into it they’d know I have no great affection for this thing Al Sharpton did to Don Imus. It would be fair to say I hate this thing Al Sharpton did. What if I were willing to say I hate Al Sharpton himself? What if…just as a hypothetical…I were to put out a recruiting drive and tell everyone on the Internet — in summary — if you hate Al Sharpton as much as I do, I want to talk to you.

That would be stupid. I’d end up with a “ragtag fugitive fleet,” the homily goes, of…skinheads, klansmen, Don Imus fans, Tennessee Lady Volunteers maybe, some folks who are just generally good at hating, etc. Maybe even some “ho’s.” Maybe a few folks like me who are genuinely concerned about free speech, and can logically see Sharpton’s little maneuver here was directly opposed to that principle in every possible way. I expect the bigots and the trash would badly outnumber us, and before anyone goes asking, no I’m not referring to the Lady Volunteers or the Imus Fans or the ho’s. I’m talking about the bigots. You ask to be united with all others who hate as you do, equally-and-moreso in a likewise direction…and it will happen. Be careful what you wish for. Garbage in, garbage out.

That’s the problem with hate.

Then there’s the problem with a list-of-102. What do you need from a list of 102, that you can’t get from a list of twenty? I pointed out that Item #1 on the list accused George Bush of aiding and abetting our enemies, the very people on whom he declared war soon after the September 11 attacks. Mmmkay, it’s a little asinine to presume people are motionless and that their allegiances remain static over time. Kind of indicates someone watches TV way too much. But okay, let’s go with that; George Bush gave millions of dollars to the Taliban four months before the attacks, therefore he was indirectly responsible for attacking his own country.

Let us say I am completely sold on that, both in the “facts” upon which it rests, and the conclusion it wants me to draw. Fine, whatever, I hate George Bush because he pumped money into the September 11 attacks. Sold. We got us a traitor in the White House. Under what circumstances, then, am I to even consider Number Eleven…

Of Bush’s proposed $2 trillion tax cut 43% goes to the wealthiest 1% of Americans.

Eh?

We got bin-Laden-Lite running the country, and you want to further agitate my rage with your trifling disputes about taxation policy? That’s a little like taking down Al Capone for tax evasion, isn’t it?

Well, yeah it is, and that’s the point. When you take down Al Capone for tax evasion, the end justifies the means. Whatever principle is involved in it, at some point is chucked out the window. And this says something about the bedmates you make for yourself when you meet other Bush-haters through some meandering endless 102-item list of “reasons to hate.” Sure, you all want George Bush out, but there the similarities must end because there is no genuine debate after you all agree you hate him. Why, who knows. At the very next Bush-haters meeting bin Laden might be standing there right next to you…whoops, I did it again, questioning their patriotism. Better change the subject before I get into trouble.

Anyway, the point stands. It’s a fairly obvious point. I’m just some knucklehead who writes for a blog nobody reads; I’m certainly not, let us say for example, the retired Chief Executive Officer of Chrysler.

Well, Lee Iacocca has flipped his lid, either lately or some time ago. Maybe he’s got a raging case of insomnia brought on by nasal congestion just like me. Except what he’s got, makes him much, much, much crankier.

I. Had Enough?

Am I the only guy in this country who’s fed up with what’s happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. We’ve got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we’ve got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can’t even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, “Stay the course.”

Stay the course? You’ve got to be kidding. This is America, not the damned Titanic. I’ll give you a sound bite: Throw the bums out!

You might think I’m getting senile, that I’ve gone off my rocker, and maybe I have. But someone has to speak up. I hardly recognize this country anymore. The President of the United States is given a free pass to ignore the Constitution, tap our phones, and lead us to war on a pack of lies. Congress responds to record deficits by passing a huge tax cut for the wealthy (thanks, but I don’t need it). The most famous business leaders are not the innovators but the guys in handcuffs. While we’re fiddling in Iraq, the Middle East is burning and nobody seems to know what to do. And the press is waving pom-poms instead of asking hard questions. That’s not the promise of America my parents and yours traveled across the ocean for. I’ve had enough. How about you?

There ya go. The mass-murder-and-overtime-parking indictment of pure hate. Osama-bin-Laden-Lite led us “into war on a pack of lies,” and in case you’re wondering if Iacocca has lost all perspective of what a serious charge that is to make, he goes on to bitch and moan about being allowed to keep some more of the money he made.

Did I miss something here, Mister Iacocca? You want to lecture us about what leadership is, and in order to do that you’re proceeding from the premise that you know what it is, and Congress does not. Hey, as far as that’s concerned I’m on board with you…you have made a lot of money, Congress does have a predilection for pissing it away. But you think simply acknowledging this superior wisdom of yours, through a tax policy that allows you to keep more of your money to spend or invest as you wish, is evil on par with sending the country into war on a pack of lies.

What a glorious Gordian Knot of contradiction.

While you’re busy untangling that for my benefit, sir, let’s inspect some more of your — what did you call them? — “senile” remarks.

The Test of a Leader

I’ve never been Commander in Chief, but I’ve been a CEO. I understand a few things about leadership at the top. I’ve figured out nine points—not ten (I don’t want people accusing me of thinking I’m Moses). I call them the “Nine Cs of Leadership.” They’re not fancy or complicated. Just clear, obvious qualities that every true leader should have…So, here’s my C list:

A leader has to show CURIOSITY. He has to listen to people outside of the “Yes, sir” crowd in his inner circle. He has to read voraciously, because the world is a big, complicated place. George W. Bush brags about never reading a newspaper. “I just scan the headlines,” he says. Am I hearing this right? He’s the President of the United States and he never reads a newspaper?…A leader must have COURAGE. I’m talking about balls…George Bush comes from a blue-blooded Connecticut family, but he likes to talk like a cowboy. You know, My gun is bigger than your gun. Courage in the twenty-first century doesn’t mean posturing and bravado. Courage is a commitment to sit down at the negotiating table and talk.

Well. I’ll leave it to the folks from Connecticut to figure out if Iacocca is accusing them of being geldings. I’m just wondering what he’s been reading voraciously. This big, complicated world has given us a lot of examples of big, complicated problems which our courageous leaders have been talking out at negotiating tables. And when I do my voracious reading, lately it seems the only tangible results being implemented from these negotiating tables, are the ones that have to do with the U.S. and our allies getting screwed over one more time.

Did Iacocca do any voracious reading about the shell game Saddam Hussein was doing while the United Nations passed seventeen resolutions against him? Am I reading this right? That courage would have led to an eighteenth resolution, and if I do some more voracious reading I’ll eventually be able to see the logic in that?

Well maybe he’s talking about something other than Iraq. Has he done his voracious reading about North Korea? Just speaking for myself, the most compelling argument against going into Iraq, and I’ll certainly keep it in mind when rear-view-mirror disputes become something worth my time — is this: We may need the troops currently committed to Iraq, if & when the negotiations with Kim-Jong break down. This fellow presents an interesting challenge to your nine C’s, Mister I: If we were to follow your Nine, we’d be committed to showing our “balls” by jibber-jabbering with him endlessly. And your indictment against Mr. B breaks down a little because he’s been doing exactly that. Perhaps to a fault. The fact of the matter is, “Team America: World Police” seems to have captured the essence of Kim Jong-Il’s character more accurately than any of these newspapers we’re reading so voraciously. Kim-Jong seems to be running a little light on some of those C’s.

You say we show balls when we sit down at negotiating tables. One of your C’s is Common Sense.

You can’t be a leader if you don’t have COMMON SENSE. I call this Charlie Beacham’s rule. When I was a young guy just starting out in the car business, one of my first jobs was as Ford’s zone manager in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. My boss was a guy named Charlie Beacham, who was the East Coast regional manager. Charlie was a big Southerner, with a warm drawl, a huge smile, and a core of steel. Charlie used to tell me, “Remember, Lee, the only thing you’ve got going for you as a human being is your ability to reason and your common sense. If you don’t know a dip of horseshit from a dip of vanilla ice cream, you’ll never make it.”

I’m sure you know who Jimmy Carter is, he’s the guy who thoroughly exacerbated the gas crisis and gave us an inflation crisis on top of it. He, too, missed a few of your C’s, and his incompetence is almost certainly responsible for a good chunk of this Iacocca fortune you want taxed away.

But he’d love the bit about negotiating with our enemies.

President Carter consistently failed us by continuing negotiations, when [C]ommon Sense would declare the point of diminishing returns to have been reached awhile back. He’s had the biggest impact by far with regard to our current situation with North Korea, and none of his influence has been any good. He’s running around demonstrating his lack of [C]haracter and [C]uriosity by spewing bile just like yours. He wants us to negotiate some more.

With people who don’t seem to be interested in negotiating with anyone. At all. So I guess he doesn’t know horseshit from ice cream.

But like George Bush, Carter has made it to the highest office in the land. The current President, who has aroused all this crankiness out of you, according to your own logic has done just a swell job of proving Charlie Beacham wrong. In my book, you can add Carter to that mix as well. Perhaps Beacham’s words had a lot of merit, but no longer do.

Come to think of it, you’ve managed to deal the Beacham maxim a rather devastating assault here. Had any ice cream lately?