Archive for the ‘Bush Derangement Syndrome’ Category

“Bush Does This A Lot”

Saturday, January 27th, 2007

Oh he does, does he? And by “this” what we mean is, leaving the “ic” off of Democratic

Bush misses ‘-ic’ but hits a nerve

WASHINGTON – The president, in his State of the Union address Tuesday night, left out a tiny little suffix that means a whole lot to some people. He did it so subtly you could have missed it. Just a little “-ic.”

Bush started the speech on a bipartisan note, honoring the first Madam Speaker, Democrat Nancy Pelosi, and calling on the country to come together.

Then, “I congratulate the Democrat majority,” he said, dropping the last two letters of “Democratic.”

Bush does this a lot, and while it’s hard to say whether the omission was intentional in this instance, it is a semantic tactic that has been part of Republican warfare for decades. It’s a little thing, a means of needling the opposition by purposefully mispronouncing its name, and of suggesting that the party on the left is not truly small-“d” democratic. [emphasis mine]

Okay now President Bush has been in the oval Office for six years now and maybe my memory is a little rusty. But I seem to recall it being widely accepted as a little bit of a smear, a sign of disrespect intentional or otherwise, if the President of United States was consistently referenced using his surname alone. And I seem to recall that rule held for members of Congress as well. “Guess what Feinstein is up to this time?” would be snide. “Murtha is running his mouth off” would be smarmy. Agree or disagree, you were supposed to be paying due respect to the office if not to the occupant. Congressman. Chair/Chairman. Senator. President.

Our liberals wanted it to work a different way after December of 2000, because they didn’t think George Bush should have won the presidency. As usual, to get them to stop complaining we went ahead and did it the way they wanted, and he’s been “Bush” ever since.

So this tempest-in-a-teapot about “ic” — what is that? Are they saying they want to go back to the old way now?

On Baby Videos

Friday, January 26th, 2007

Did Timothy Noah ever have anything against the baby video industry, before he could connect President Bush to it?

Another Thing I Don’t Get

Friday, January 19th, 2007

Maybe I should add this to the list. President Bush…I’m just finishing up six years of being told, and I mean non-stop, one of the many complaints against him is that not only does he make bad decisions, but he lacks the humility to acknowledge that he made a bad decision.

Hey, I’ve had bosses like that. I can see it.

And now the talking point is switched around, because he has changed course. Any flattering comments in this story? Anything about oh, joy, we’ve had this glaring problem in the Oval Office and now things are starting to improve? Anything about how we should count our blessings because, hey, he’s repentant, but learning?

Ha ha, ho ho. You should live so long.

The Bush administration said yesterday that it has agreed to disband a controversial warrantless surveillance program run by the National Security Agency, replacing it with a new effort that will be overseen by the secret court that governs clandestine spying in the United States.

The change — revealed by Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales in a letter to the leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee — marks an abrupt reversal by the administration, which for more than a year has aggressively defended the legality of the NSA surveillance program and disputed court authority to oversee it. [emphasis mine]

He sucks as a President, because he never changes his mind. He sucks as a President, because he abruptly reverses things.

Which is it? On what planet could it possibly be both?

The Jaywalking Professor

Saturday, January 13th, 2007

Neal Boortz is being tough on this guy, a visitor to our shores with a tale of police brutality he’d like to tell. I don’t exactly agree with Neal’s reasoning. I simply don’t know enough about it to sign on to what he’s going. Boortz is a radio guy, and evidently he went on air and made some comments in the professor’s favor, to later retract them and apologize after reading the professor’s take on things (link requires registration when it gets in some funky mood that the web page programmer himself probably doesn’t understand). What was the infraction committed within the professor’s remarks?

He’s blaming the questionable behavior of the Atlanta Police on…aw, well who the hell do ya think?

I found that in Atlanta the civilization of the jail and the courts contrasted with the savagery of the police and the streets. This is a typical American contrast. The executive arm of government tends to be dumb, insensitive, violent and dangerous. The judiciary is the citizen’s vital guarantee of peace and liberty. I became a sort of exemplar in miniature of a classic American dilemma: the “balance of the Constitution,” as Americans call it, between executive power and judicial oversight.

I have long known, as any reasonable person must, that the courts are the citizen’s only protection against a rogue executive and rationally uncontrolled security forces. Though my own misadventure was trivial – and in perspective laughable – it resembles what is happening to the world in the era of George W. Bush. The planet is policed by a violent, arbitary, stupid and dangerous force. Within the USA, the courts struggle to maintain individual rights under the bludgeons of the “war on terror,” defending Guantanamo victims and striving to curb the excesses of the system. We need global institutions of justice, and judges of Judge Jackson’s level of humanity and wisdom, to help protect the world.

I dunno, man. It’s clear from reading the comments in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that there’s some vast untapped repository of information about this, that is outside of my reach. But a lot of the people in the Professor’s camp on this one, have a disturbing tendency to confuse “having a degree” with “being right.” Um, excuse me. At issue is whether or not America is retaining its original ideals, and chief among these ideals is the idea that you get your fair day in court here — even if the dispute in which you are engaged, concerns another party with a much higher social status. We don’t think you’re in the wrong here, just because you’re a pauper and your plaintiff is a Lord. We don’t fine you a sixpence if you’re the son of an Earl, and a half-crown or a jail sentence, for doing the same thing if you’re not so well connected.

Things just don’t fly that way here. That is what America is all about.

And here these chuckleheads are, deciding the professor must be in the right, simply because he is one.

And as Boortz points out, quite correctly, not a very good one at that. He thinks rough police handling in Atlanta has something to do with our President. I don’t know why he thinks this because he feels very little need to establish why this connection exists. But it’s gotta be messed up, whatever it is.

I’m just not willing to decide the handling against him was within-bounds, just because he’s got some screwy ideas.

But having said that, this makes more sense:

I think that we all know that a simple “I’m sorry, officer, I’ll be more careful the next time” would have been more than sufficient. Clearly it escalated beyond that. Is it possible that the good professor used some of his “George Bush is Stupid, America is violent, dangerous and arbitrary” nonsense on the cop?

Why, that would reqiure a heck of an attitude problem. Looks to me like the prof has exactly that.

The B.U.F.

Thursday, January 11th, 2007

Nobody ever reads this blog, so the mantra goes. But of course that leaves unexplained things like last weekend, when once again our traffic graph on Sitemeter went all spikey. We’ve been spiked much higher before. Sunday’s “surge” of traffic netted 350-or-so hits and over 600 page views, an achievement that was approximately duplicated the following day. It became clear rather quickly that Pajamas Media was responsible for the sudden boost, and they extended a hat tip to fellow blogger Rick at Brutally Honest for finding us.

How much of a lift did we get? Since our use of Sitemeter nine months ago, this blog’s record is somewhere around 2,000 page views in a day. I would regard that as somewhat low, even if it were a daily average rather than a “record.” It’s called “The Blog That Nobody Reads” for a reason. Now, while falling far short of even that modest statistic, this recent limelight event was notably satisfying. Everyone talks about wanting to gather expressions of diverse and unique points-of-view. Well, whether that got done before is something that could be debated; but this time, that’s exactly what happened.

Bush HatingThe post that generated all the hubbub was this one, and the subject is the widespread visceral hatred toward President George W. Bush. I will bottom-line it real quick: I treated this Bush-hating emotion, now entering a seventh year — just for a change of pace — as exactly that. An emotion. I called a stop to the unfounded practice of treating it as a logical conclusion of reasoned anti-Bush arguments, just because certain people want everyone look at it that way. As Rick said, I “play[ed] shrink.”

It comes down to this: Someone had to play shrink. Six long years, society’s subwoofer has been drumming out this dull roar of Bush is bad, Bush is evil, Bush is stupid, I hate Bush, blah blah blah. Six years, as the rocket of Bush hatred punches into the stratosphere, The Left insists we all presume it is carried aloft on a fiery plume of logic and reason. Throughout all six years, evidence that logic and reason have something to do with it — is completely lacking. That’s three election cycles the President’s enemies lost. Barely. With statistical insignificance. Elections they could have turned around simply by explaining what they would have done differently…and somehow, chose not to so explain. That certainly isn’t logical. The time had simply come to ponder, gee whiz, maybe jealousy has something to do with it. Perhaps, just perhaps, there’s nothing logical about Bush hatred at all.

And wow. You’d think I had blown something up, demolished something precious and strategically valuable.

I guess that’s exactly what I did. You see, I learned something. There is a breathless urgency involved in proliferating the “Bush hatred is completely logical” canard. There must be. What am I supposed to think? I’m out here, writing for a blog that nobody even reads! Simply wondering, golly, maybe when people hate Bush, it’s a result of something besides Socratean, cool, clear-headed rational deliberation about his policies and where they should lead. I’m noticing that as a causative factor, jealousy explains a lot; some of what it explains, is left unexplained by the whole “cool-headed cogitation” thing we’ve been sold. And then I jot down what’s been left unexplained, that my theory explains. And for me simply jotting this stuff down, in a blog nobody reads anyway, there are people who’d love to KICK MY ASS!! At least that’s how some of them put it. Grrrr!!

I’ve always been suspicious of this kind of thing, perhaps to a fault. The Breathless Urgency Factor — B.U.F. for short. Ideas that seem otherwise reasonable, but Ooh! Ooh! Ooh! They just HAVE to get sold. Someone desperately wants to get those ideas out there. That has always struck me as fishy. Even if you have a financial interest in an idea, if it’s true, doesn’t it tend to get out there on its own?

And then there’s the whole Occam’s Razor thing. People who hate George Bush, don’t have any problems about advertising their emotions. But they are desperate to convince everyone the emotions started as something other than emotions. Well, what’s the shorter and more-certain path; emotions starting out as reasonable thought, and leaping over that critical barrier at some point? Or emotions just starting out as emotions and staying that way?

The emotions have been emotional for a very long time now. Our current President is the first one to spend his entire presidency with the Internet, as we know it, recording and saving everything it can, notwithstanding natural attrition. Let’s see what we have in the archives, shall we?

Ann Coulter, writing in November of 2001, just weeks after the attacks:

WE’VE finally given liberals a war against fundamentalism, and they don’t want to fight it. They would, except it would put them on the same side as the United States.
:
Not exactly smashing stereotypes of liberals as mincing pantywaists, the left’s entire contribution to the war effort thus far has been to whine.
:
Frank “No, No, Nanette!” Rich recently emitted an interminable screech on the op-ed page of The New York Times denouncing the Bush administration for not solving the anthrax cases already: “The most highly trumpeted breakthrough in the hunt for anthrax terrorists – Tom Ridge’s announcement that ‘the site where the letters were mailed’ had been found in New Jersey – proved a dead end.”

As Irish playwright Brendan Behan said: “Critics are like eunuchs in a harem: They know how it’s done, they’ve seen it done every day, but they’re unable to do it themselves.”

That’s five years ago. Since then, the Bush-hating culture has gobbled up a little bit more of the voting public; a tiny bit more, just enough to cross a crucial finish line. With all the speed, and enthusiasm, and jubilation after the the oh-so-critical gobbling, as my skinny kid chowing down the previously-agreed-upon number of bites of beef steak to get his dessert. They’ve won over barely enough hearts & minds to take over Congress. To win any more hearts & minds, is as interesting to them as a second helping of steak is to my son. They’ve won what they need to win; the rest of us who remain unconverted, are just “stupid.”

But other than the Democrats retaking the dome, has anything changed since 2001? Ann Coulter, the specific Frank Rich citation notwithstanding, could have written all that at any ol’ time. It’s spooky, really.

Byron York, writing in National Review in late summer of 2003:

If you haven’t heard the news, you’re not on the cutting edge of Bush-hating. Anyone with Internet access and a little curiosity can discover an extensive network of websites like Bushbodycount.com, which accuses the president and his family of involvement in “mysterious” deaths; Fearbush.com and Takebackthemedia.com, which traffic in images of Bush in Nazi regalia; and Presidentmoron.com and Toostupidtobepresident.com, which portray the president as a drooling idiot. Taken together, the sites, and dozens of others like them, represent the far Left’s online equivalent of the infamous Clinton Chronicles and Clinton Body Count videos and websites of the 1990s, which accused Bill Clinton of all sorts of murders and criminal deeds.

Back then, the Clinton compilations troubled liberal observers and spurred a series of disapproving articles — not to mention armchair psychoanalyses — about Clinton-hating. Today, there appears to be less concern. But perhaps the political world should take more notice. Yes, some of the Bush-hating sites are obscure, but others are not, and given the upcoming presidential race and the intense passions it will likely generate, it seems reasonable to predict that they will all become better known. And it seems just as likely that some of the material they publish will inexorably seep into the wider political discussion. Bush-hating, already intense in some circles, could well become a growth industry in the coming year.

Howard Kurtz, writing in the Washington Post a short time after that:

The words tumble out, the hands gesture urgently, as Jonathan Chait explains why he hates George W. Bush.

It’s Bush’s radical policies, says the 31-year-old New Republic writer, and his unfair tax cuts, and his cowboy phoniness, and his favors for corporate cronies, and his heist in Florida, and his dishonesty about his silver-spoon upbringing, and, oh yes, the way he walks and talks.

For some of his friends, Chait says at a corner table in a downtown Starbucks, “just seeing his face or hearing his voice causes a physical reaction — they have to get away from the TV. My sister-in-law describes Bush’s existence as an oppressive force, a constant weight on her shoulder, just knowing that George Bush is president.”

Again, this could have been written anytime. November of 2000. Last night. Any minute in between.

The words tumble out, the hands gesture urgently. But it’s rational thinking and not raw emotion, they tell me. Why am I to think such a thing?

They are indignant about me considering anything to the contrary; even more indignant about me writing it down where others can see it. “Man…I hope this guy’s not my next door neighbor!!! …CAUSE I WOULD KICK HIS ASS!!! WITH MY PACIFIST…HANDS!!! What an asshole…” Yeesh. Much to my relief, this fellow corrected himself once someone pointed out that hands usually don’t have much to do with kicking peoples’ asses. The issue is my uncertainty about Bush-hatred being grounded in clear-headed thinking. A threat to kick my ass with pacifist hands, needless to say, did very little to address the concern.

Zossima DisapprovesAnd then there is Zossima. Liberal gadfly, seldom correct but never in doubt, always present on Brutally Honest. He’s like a flea, nibbling away on the blood and dander of Rick’s blog, determined to get the first bite, last bite, all bites, and to make sure everyone knows he’s biting…recently he’s jumped over here. Boing! Well, we’re happy to have him. Life gets boring quick if everyone agrees with you all the time. And I think Zossima has grown from the experience. He’s well known for being a little bit too certain about what meets his approval and what does not meet his approval, and it has not been unusual for him to seek all justification in some of his arguments, solely through that — the fact that he personally disapproves of something. He doesn’t like the graphic I made up for his benefit, and I can see why. He protests that it no longer applies. I agree.

The tactic he’s taken here, is slightly more-evolved. He disapproves of the “theory” I’ve been entertaining, and insists that I need to go look up what a theory is. If you read through his comments, you’ll see in his world, theories have to prove things. In fact, I need to prove things. Everything. I need to prove things that are, for all intents and purposes, settled. At one point, the whole notion that President Bush is hated to an extent meaningful in American history, is brought into question, with benefit-of-doubt withheld until proof is forthcoming. At another point, if memory serves, the notion that Bush is hated at all is brought into similar question. Again, nobody is allowed to presume this is the case, until scientific proof has been produced.

Now that is a strict standard.

It doesn’t apply to the things Zossima wants to think, though. Saddam Hussein being harmless, President Bush lying to get into Iraq…you can go ahead and jump to conclusions there. So you could say, whether or not Zossima approves of something, is still meaningful, but now we have a more elegantly crafted architecture to our thinking, that is based upon that. And it works through a standard of “proof” that shifts back-and-forth, according to — yeah, you got it — whether or not Zoss likes it.

But back to the theory about emotions driving Bush-hatred, more than reason and logic. It would appear I raised peoples’ cackles not so much by simply describing just that…but by reading something sexual into it. Something Freudian. Masculinity, you see, has a profound and ancient meaning. It has to do with being strong, of course, and it also has to do with supplying protection. Disciplined protection. And, in some cases, being a “bad boy.” In the final analysis, it has to do with following some rules and rejecting others. Essentially, it’s got to do with being ready, willing, and able to use strength to defend weaker people — or to simply get them out of a jam.

I compared Bush hatred to the intense feeling a rejected husband would have after his wife has found someone more virile. It seems this is what really, really, set people off. Perhaps I timed my comments poorly; the Democrats have just launched a campaign to instruct people to believe that they’re manly. It’s got lots of B.U.F. to it, the Breathless Urgency Factor, but as far as I’m concerned you can decide whatever you want about it. I just can’t help noticing they have a need to do this. I just defined masculinity as being ready, willing, and able to use force to defend weaker people; the Democrats have made a consistent platform out of carefully avoiding any of those three. Give money and benefits to, yeah. Coddle, placate and patronize, yeah. Insult the intelligence and resourcefulness of, sure. Defend — no way. Our liberals must indoctrinate people on the perception that they are manly, because they haven’t been behaving that way.

Regarding House of Eratosthenes’ latest day in the sun. The statistics were pretty modest this time, but I’m very happy it took place. The piece was linked here and here and here and here and here and here, and it even got Dugg. I got to meet people who don’t agree with me about things. That is when we grow. And it keeps coming back to me how “well-put” that other post was…even people who disagree with it, here and there have commented on this. I really don’t understand this. I’ve never understood it. I don’t get how people decide what posts are worth citing and linking and broadcasting, and others are not. And I’d have to be a little tougher on myself, in assessing whether that piece was well-written, because there are parts where I respectfully disagree. But I’m a wiser man for reading what people had to say, especially the ones who disagree.

Does that mean the theory has suffered and lost some of my confidence? Heh…I don’t like to write things to deliberately piss people off, and I know this will. I’m afraid the gap has been closed up, somewhat, between the current level of certainty and the Zossima’s high threshhold of proof. In my world, theories don’t prove things, and so we’ll never get there. But is Bush-hatred rooted in Freudian jealousy?

Freudian jealousy seems to be exactly what was paraded before me this week. Draw whatever conclusions you will.

And Would You Like Fries With That?

Wednesday, January 10th, 2007

Our New SenateSen. Durbin would like the KOS kids to tell him what they want for the direction of the whole friggin’ country. Well, it’s nice to see our leaders listen to the people who elected them. I’m sure the KOSsacks are going to keep all kinds of diverse cross-sections of this long, broad country in mind as they figure out where we’re all going from here.

And throughout the election, I was worried the Democrats knew exactly what they wanted to do once they got in, and were just afraid to say. Apparently, I was afraid of the wrong thing all along.

Oh yeah, the answers? Nothing to be surprised about. “Redeploy” from Iraq, don’t give any grants to faith-based stuff because Gawd Is Badd, M’kay…healthcare for everyone, and global warming global warming global warming. And impeach, and do something about global warming.

They needn’t have bothered with that first one.

Illegal immigration? Don’t hold your breath. Actually, if you scan the thread from top to bottom, you’ll see an emerging “vacuum platform” — a growing list of things Sen. Durbin should get our government to stop worrying about. Ostrich stuff. Just stop saying anything about these problems and they’ll go away. The KOSsacks say so. I think I saw the illegal immigration issue in there. Hey. Good to know.

I wonder what would happen a year ago if a high-ranking Republican official went on record and said “If the Democrats win, you’ll see Sen. Dick Durbin ask the DailyKOS people for instructions on where to take your country.” Can you just imagine the cat-calls after that. It would have made Kerry’s botched joke look like a mid-speech hiccup by comparison.

And yet…here we are. Did you know you were voting on this?

Why The Hatred

Sunday, January 7th, 2007

Not Going To Hell After AllPresident Bush is hated. I think it’s fair to say President Bush is the most hated persona to occupy that high office, probably since the office has been there. The time has come to ask why this is. In nearly four years following the invasion of Iraq, and six years after he took office, none of the explanations make any sense whatsoever. I have been repeatedly preached and scolded and counseled and upbraided and reproached, that I must do certain things and vote certain ways because this emotion exists. I think deep down, everyone agrees it’s unwise to do things because of emotions even when emotions are understood easily. The more I learn of this emotion, the more convinced I am that I don’t understand it, and I don’t think anyone else does either…even the people who advertise that they have it. A lot of people stand to gain an awful lot if they can get people like me to understand what’s going on here. And after all those years, no explanation has been forthcoming, satisfactory or otherwise.

Oh yeah, why I’m supposed to join the ranks of those who hate him — people tell me that. They have a catalog of reasons. They add to it whenever they think of something, and they seem to think there’s something wrong with reciting just a piece of it. The whole list must be rattled off. And replication must be instantaneous; if one Bush-hater thinks of something new, all the other haters must add it to their own catalogs. So I hear these items fairly often. But the thing I want, continues to be left out. It’s like an itch I can’t scratch. Why George W. Bush is a walking superlative in the history of hated-people…such a rich history that is…no one’s given any justification for this.

I’m going to try to do it here.

He got 3,000 American troops killed, they tell me. The notion that these deaths are really his fault, is subject to reasonable debate. The notion that, if he has some blame for these casualties, he’s going to have to share it with others — is something that can only be subject to unreasonable debate. A lot of people could have done a lot of different things, and those dead troops would be smiling and eating and laughing and joking and burping and farting like you and me. But allowing for all this anyway — we’ve had other Presidents who got many more troops killed. Many, many more troops. This is according to the same logic. They weren’t nearly as hated. So that’s not it.

He “waged an illegal and unjust war.” That’s a matter of opinion…but allowing for that, again, going by the same logic, we’ve had other Presidents wage illegal and unjust wars. In the minds of some, anyway. They weren’t so hated.

He’s pro-life. We’ve had other Presidents who were pro-life.

He’s from Texas. We’ve had other Presidents from Texas.

He is thought by some to have shirked his military duty. We’ve had other Presidents thought, by some, to have shirked their military duty.

He swaggers. We’ve had other Presidents who have swaggered. One of them was in a wheelchair.

He spies on people, in the process, alienating them from the rights to which they are guaranteed by the Constitution. That’s what I’m told. Is anybody going to advance the assertion that this is unprecedented? When President Bush is said to “wipe his ass with the Constitution,” this is a figure of speech…invariably, it is pronounced without a citation from the U.S. Constitution in mind that is being violated. Other Presidents BLATANTLY violated specific amendments and/or articles/sections. Unapologetically, and without precedent. That includes the wheelchair-guy by the way. They weren’t so hated.

The economy is lackluster. In America, the economy has been quite a few measurable notches below lackluster, and we’ve had sitting Presidents who were decidedly at fault for some terrible economies. We’ve had Presidents who actually wrecked the economy with their bad policies — economies that would certainly have done better if something different were done. We’ve had Presidents who were still in office when the chickens came home to roost and there was broad agreement about the link between the poor policies and the sputtering economies. President Bush is hated more than those Presidents were…so…we continue looking for the underlying reason. It’s clear we have not yet found it.

A lot of people say he’s a dimwit. That seems, at first blush, to be the answer; I rarely hear anyone confess their hatred of President Bush, without throwing in the apparently-essential scolding that he’s anti-intellectual and stupid. But there are problems with this. Throughout recorded history, if the human equation has shown one consistent sentiment toward simpletons wielding real power, that sentiment would be tolerance. Tolerance to a fault, actually. We can adapt to dimwit bosses, and as a species we have done so many times before America came along. Based on the information I’ve reviewed, if President Bush has managed to arouse bumptious demands for his removal from office based on his addle-mindedness, with all other motivations for the acrimony being decidedly subordinate, he’s made history. Human history. It’s really hard to make that kind of history. I don’t think that’s it.

He’s inarticulate. So was Lincoln, according to some contemporaries. Benjamin Harrison was characterized as speaking in an annoying, high-pitched squeaky voice. Grant was shy. Coolidge didn’t say much.

None of these Presidents were quite so hated.

I think, what it is, is he took a bad guy down. We’ve had Presidents do that before, too…but President Bush did it in the modern age, when good & evil are supposed to be matters open to individual interpretation. In an age where evil is supposed to be a subjective viewpoint…he targeted someone. He’s an unwelcome paradigm shift, and the shift is in an direction that makes a lot of people uncomfortable. Once you go down the road of insisting there is no such thing as “absolute” evil, you can stay there as long as you choose to…until someone else comes along, defines evil as being really evil, and does something about it. This makes the nihilist/anarchist crowd look bad.

It hurts their P.R. You stand there “helplessly” watching a house burn, you look okay. Someone else grabs a hose while you sit there on your ass watching…now, you’re embarrassed. If the other guy didn’t happen along, the house would have burned to the ground. But you’d look good. Nothing else really counts, right?

It’s like the guy watching a woman being mugged and raped, making a calculated, brazen decision to allow the attack to commence uninterrupted because it’s “not my concern.” Inaction resulting from purely pacifist interests. He looks all right…until someone else gets involved. And then the pacifist looks bad. And silly. And cowardly. And impotent. And then the pacifist begins to harbor some decidedly un-pacifist feelings, toward the other fellow who made a decision to help out.

Come to think of it, the anger these leftists have toward President Bush, is not at all unlike the anger felt toward a masculine, self-assertive, virile interloper, from a cuckold, whose lonely and bored wife has finally been reminded what a real man can do. It’s not unlike that kind of anger at all.

One exception, though. In our society, we do not value the idea of strong, effective men stealing women from weaker men. We do not raise our sons to sleep with other mens’ wives. We do raise our boys to stand up for what’s right; to get involved, to lend assistance if evil is sure to triumph for lack of that assistance. That is what President Bush did. I’m glad it was done, and history will be glad for it too.

To those who insist on hating him and continuing to build that reasons-for-hate catalog, I say, go ahead. Hate him if you want; hate him all you want. I think it would be good for your own mental well-being to identify, in your own mind, WHY it is you hate him. If you come up with the reason, and are too ashamed to admit to anybody else what it really is, you’re still better off than the guy who hates President Bush but won’t put the effort in to figuring out why.

Spicoli Thinks You Are A Protein Stain

Friday, December 22nd, 2006

You Dick!Pictured at right is Sean Penn uttering the famous line to the My Favorite Martian guy in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.” It is the limit of his existence. Oh, I’m sure he’s had more money in the bank since then and he’s lived in bigger houses since then. But the point is, this is where he banked his capital, and everything he’s done since then is just a withdrawal from that capital. He can go to Iraq for P.R. purposes and he can play tragic parents in Mystic River and he can do any one of a number of things, but the reason he became what he is, is because of his successful portayal of a buffoon. That is his claim to fame. Even the most slavish, slobbering Sean Penn fan is going to stop short of suggesting he knows something special about Iraq, just because he’s been there. And that was supposed to be the purpose of being there. We were supposed to be surrounded by fawning Sean Penn fans, indignantly demanding of us “Have YOU been to Iraq, like Sean Penn has?” And it’s not happening. It’s not happening because, if we want to get a picture of what things are really like in Iraq, we can ask some of the soldiers coming back from there who had the job of being there. Pro-Bush soldiers, anti-Bush soldiers, pro-war, anti-war…they’re all out there. Some of them will share the opinions they have. And all of them have insight that is worth more than Mr. Penn’s.

Which poses a problem for Sean Penn. And his solution to it, is to show his anger and righteous indignation. Thanks to TheSaloon.net, we see he does this by uttering the following…while accepting an award. Hey, classy.

Let’s put his administration under oath. And then if the crimes of treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanours are proven, do as Article 2, Section 4 of the United States Constitution provides, and remove the president, vice president, and civil officers of the United States from office….If the Justice Department then sees fit to bunk them up with Jeff Skilling, so be it. So look, if we attempt to impeach for lying about a b*** j**, yet accept these almost certain abuses without challenge, we become a c** stain on the flag we wave.

You know what’s really amazing about this? It proves beyond any doubt, that Sean Penn lacks the intellectual depth necessary to relate to a mindset embracing a slightly different system of beliefs.

Assuming he’s sincere, what is it he seeks to do here? I would hazard a guess that he’s trying to address people who think President Clinton did something worse than anything President Bush did, and seek to change their minds. Okay. Hey that’s no big stretch for me…so let’s say he’s trying to change my mind. So here I am thinking President Clinton did something bad and deserved to be impeached — which I do. Sean Penn’s going to try to change my mind with his brilliant logic about semen stains. Okee dokee.

Finger WagglingWhy do I think President Clinton did something wrong? Because it’s conduct unbecoming. Sex in the Oval Office, and then lying about it. It diminishes the office he held. His actions turned the Presidency, and all the trust vested in that office, into a puerile thing. You go into a high school classroom and say the name “Clinton!” — and you get a lot of giggling. So there’s a dignity issue. And then there’s a separate issue involving trust; trust based on truth. The nature of what we call “truth” is changed forever. Presidents, for the rest of my natural existence, can waggle their fingers as much as they want — Presidents! — and the expectation that they are telling the truth, and stand to lose something important if it subsequently turns out they are not, is history. Before Clinton, we knew our officials could lie, but we expected that once they got caught lying they would go away for good. Not so anymore. There’s something damaging about that.

So I think President Clinton changed our nation’s culture with regard to what’s true and what’s not true, what’s mature and what is prurient. What was unacceptable before he came to power, became fair game afterward. He lowered the bar, in ways we can’t really afford to have it lowered.

Spicoli is going to change my mind, by grappling with my prejudices with seminal-discharge analogies, while accepting the Christopher Reeve First Amendment Award — betraying everyone who entrusted him with the microphone for those few seconds.

You know, he ultimately does very little to make me reconsider my initial leanings. In fact, if he himself doesn’t provide them with reinforcement…I dunno what does.

It’s called manners…you dick.

On Sandy Pants

Friday, December 22nd, 2006

Okay, here we go again. Sandy Berger, who was President Clinton’s National Security Adviser, lifted confidential documents from the National Archives by sticking them in his underwear and socks. Some of these he destroyed. We will probably never know what these were. At one time he was offering some half-assed defense that he did the whole thing by mistake, like, he was unaware there were papers being jammed in his boxers. Well, that clearly doesn’t fly, so the best guess is he was throwing out a bunch of bullshit to get people to stop asking questions.

He got a tap on the wrist. A hundred hours community service and a $50,000 fine. YOU…most assuredly, would have gotten far worse for doing the same thing.

Now let’s just say someone is reading this who actually has an attention span. Loves Bush hates Clinton…loves Clinton hates Bush…neo-con…neo-Nazi…neo-communist…greenie…whatever. But can actually stay tuned in to a train of thought and come to a conclusion about it with some measure of objectivity. And this person is mulling over the new information that came out, about Sandy Berger and the construction trailer (H/T: Boortz). Yeah, Sandy Berger used a construction trailer to hide the document(s), checking to make sure nobody was watching him stick it under there — coming back for it later. Kinda takes the wind out of the sails of that “oops I did it again” argument doesn’t it? Okay…what to make of this. Looks like Sandy was hiding something. Oh yeah, can’t prove it, but nothing else explains things. No reason whatsoever to suppose otherwise.

How do you reconcile this with the fairy tale we were just told, about the Republican culture of corruption and how the Democrats are going to come riding in to make everything right? The best information we can get, is that Democrats make everything right by not getting caught. And when they’re caught, this media, that ol’ “lapdog of the Bush Administration” media, will do their part to make the problem go away as fast as possible.

You doubt me? Try this…just try it. Let’s say it was Condi who did the same thing. How many times a day would we be hearing about this? She’s going in, shoving documents in her suit jacket and down her skirt — doesn’t check the documents out, just smuggles ’em out. And then shreds some. Hides others in construction trailers. Years down the line, we have no clue what she destroyed, and no way to find out.

Would that just kind of quietly go away? Really?

Whiskey…Tango…Foxtrot… X

Sunday, December 17th, 2006

Head Up AssWhat do commentators at The Daily Kos do for a living? I mean, these aren’t people making real decisions, are they? Are they? Like, who gets promoted, who has to make photocopies until he quits, how much Nutra-Sweet to pump into a big vat of cola syrup, whether this-or-that pipeline of sewage has already been treated or not.

Not sure what the scientific term is for what we’re seeing here. It’s not idiocy, quite so much as a frighteningly deficient cognitive ability, maybe brewed in with a narcissistic need for attention and perhaps a dash of psychological projection. Thanks to Trip at Webloggin, we come to learn that the results sometimes are…well, take a look.

While some people are rightly concerned for Senator Tim Johnson’s health there are many on the left who are more concerned with maintaining that slim majority – so much so that they have veered down the predictable path of conspiracies behind the “sudden illness”.

well, ok, I will say it – (4+ / 1-)

my, how convenient for the repubs, just like wellstone’s plane crash.

you know what I am hinting at here…

I never take these sorts of things at mere face value; the stakes are just too high.

bush and cheney are criminals; just like desperate cornered mafiosi, bush and cheney will do anything to protect themselves, and I do mean anything.

yeah, I think that wellstone was murdered.

The one entry I cited is just the tip of the donkey’s tail. Go have a look at the rest. I’ll wait.

Now admittedly, I don’t know for a fact that these people somehow got dressed in the morning and started walking around outside. Maybe not. But I know from experience, that DailyKOS does not clean up grammar/punctuation/spelling, so these writers are able to put together sentences that make some sense…even if the ideas hanging from those sentences, do not.

How do you do that, or anything else, while you’re looking at life this way?

Happy Birthday Kirk Douglas

Monday, December 11th, 2006

When I was a young-adult type of guy, it was…what? About twenty years ago. So fifteen years ago I was a medium-youngish adult type of guy, and twenty-five years ago I was a teenager-type kid. About that time, I knew my share of ninety-year-olds. There was a consensus among them that while things in “the world” might look a little bit on the dark side, no challenge in insurmountable, and if we keep our heads about us “it will all work out.”

Ninety years is long enough to learn a thing or two. I found that reassuring.

I dunno if Kirk Douglas agrees with all my opinions about how to solve things, but he’s certainly achieved the easy part which is to agree with me about what’s busted. And as far as this 90-year-old is concerned, the “will all work out” stuff is history.

This is the first time, I daresay, that I’ve seen an old guy announce in a public forum — you’d better pull your heads out of your asses and fix some stuff, or this ship’s going down. I’ve never seen that before. Well…not from a sane, literate old person. I’m almost halfway to the 90-year-mark myself, so since the words of Spartacus represent a paradigm shift, they carry weight with me.

Let’s face it: THE WORLD IS IN A MESS and you are inheriting it. Generation Y, you are on the cusp. You are the group facing many problems: abject poverty, global warming, genocide, AIDS, and suicide bombers to name a few. These problems exist, and the world is silent. We have done very little to solve these problems. Now, we leave it to you. You have to fix it because the situation is intolerable.

No, I don’t agree about the global warming and AIDS; one is a proven scam, and the other has received so much money that it is plagued more by black markets, and scandal, than by indifference. But the numero-uno among his concens, it seems, is that we have a tendency to identify problems and then not do anything about them. Or…to invoke solutions to the stated problem, that have very little to do with mitigating it or solving it.

Mr. Douglas, this forty-year-old is on-board with that concern, if none other. One hundred percent.

Look at it this way. President Bush identified terrorism as a problem. In response to this, he did a bunch of things: Pass the PATRIOT Act, re-invoke the legal definition of Enemy Combatant, invade Afghanistan, invade Iraq. Not a week goes by, wherein as an interconnected people, we are invited to re-examine whether his solutions are suitably connected with the identified problem. And in using the verb “re-examine” I’m being exceedingly generous. Most of this stuff isn’t examination or scrutiny at all, it’s just liberal propaganda masquerading as legitimate criticism. And most of it has to do with that last one, Iraq.

The “average” American conducts this “scrutiny” by announcing the tired old cliche (and falsehood), “No W.M.D.s have been found in Iraq!” Or…”Saddam Hussein was not a threat to America!” And puffing out his chest, strutting around, peacock-like, before receding back into the world of Starbuck’s, Netflix, iPods and PS3 consoles. Like an ostrich. We’ve become a curious peacock-ostrich hybrid. Postriches. Ostcocks. Whatever. Point is, by-and-large this is our method for solving problems. Our “leaders” have been reduced in stature to the point where we don’t expect leadership out of them. We want lightning-rods, and nothing else.

AIDS is still a problem. Hey, you know what? We’ve been fighting AIDS longer than we’ve had a Global War on Terror. Do our solutions have something to do with the identified problem? Like the liberation of Iraq versus the terrorism problem? Perhaps there are some issues there; it isn’t politically correct to call them out, or to try to. After twenty-three years, with millions of lives on the line, why do we have this taboo? Why so many words and so much heat spent, instead, to invoke a bunch of foolish nonsense from a Michael Moore movie? Nonsensical slander about our efforts to rid the world of terrorism, which we’ve only just begun?

Poverty is an even better example. Sam Kinison, trying to be funny, might have had a good point — what are all these people doing, in place where you can’t grow food? It’s certainly related to family planning. And yet, we only connect with each other to solve the crisis, when we’re presented with a plan to prune the leafy part off the weed…adopt this kid or that kid, not a peep about solving the overpopulation problem. Or when there’s an ulterior motive involved. Bono gets some P.R. out of it. Why is that? Why can’t Bono quietly work at this thing? There are a lot of Hollywood celebrities donating their money and time to help good causes, quietly. Why have we become so accustomed to seeing this guy’s face when he talks about poverty? And where are the damned condoms?

I’m venturing into territory where my knowledge falls short of all-encompassing. Forgive me. I’m trying to figure out why a ninety-year-old is gloom-and-doom now, and in years past, this was not the case. I find it alarming. It could just be Mr. Douglas’ personality; I don’t find this likely. I don’t know the man personally, but there are some movie stars who have a “rep” for seeing the darker side of everything, and he is not among them. And I must say, if I was ninety instead of forty, my comments would be very much the same. Throughout those four decades — and, I expect, in the five ahead, assuming I’m lucky enough to have them — my most wonderful plans are doomed to failure when I don’t take a step back and say, “okay…this solves the problem I identified, HOW?” It’s a simple question. Asking it, sincerely, is tougher than it might seem at first. And if you can manage to pull that off, I’ve learned you get surprised more often than you might expect.

But if I ask that question, with a genuine desire to make sure I’m sticking to my knitting, success is almost always mine. And we haven’t been doing that. Since 2001, what we do, for the most part, is find reasons to blame things on George W. Bush. I don’t want to put words in Mr. Douglas’ mouth, but it seems he has some criticism for us, and it appears to be heading somewhere in that direction. We can disagree about the smaller details, but if I’ve gleaned the overall spirit of his message correctly, I can certainly see where he’s coming from.

Flesh! Oh, No! IV

Saturday, June 3rd, 2006

As this blog has observed repeatedly — there’s something kind of strange about people nowadays. Two subjects they just can’t handle in any way, which you can tell by the steady stream of crap that comes out of their mouths when the subjects come up, are these: Terrorist attacks and young ladies in skimpy clothes. Someone who’s just gotten done flinging spittle around the room, pontificating about how a freakin’ hurricane is President Bush’s fault, will act like a terrorist attack is…nobody’s fault. Or, maybe that’s Bush’s fault, too. Or it’s just something that happens from time to time, not a big deal, you’re more likely to be struck by lightning, so don’t worry about it. And certainly, nobody actually went out of their way to get the terrorist attack done. It just happened. Boom, oopsie, move on.

Regarding the young ladies who aren’t wearing a lot of clothes, I strongly suspect that the ones over age eighteen who look decent, aren’t really bothering anyone — it appears we’re stuck in some kind of mode where everybody is pretending to be offended on behalf of everybody else. That certainly does seem to be the case here, in which the male kitchen workers at an all-female Oxford College dorm, are supposed to be “upset” that the student body is showing a little too much, ya know, student body. At beakfast. The male kitchen workers. Article makes mention of the unsettled reaction of the poor blokes, and it’s more than a little strange that the article mentions no blokes, at all, by name or by quote, whatsoever.

Students of St Hilda’s college at Oxford University have been ordered to dress properly for breakfast. Some were arriving for their morning cup of tea wearing the naughtiest of nightgowns. Or pyjamas that left little to the imagination. They claimed that with no men in the all-female halls of residence, there was no need for decorum.

But the kitchen staff – particularly the handful of men among them – hardly knew where to look.

Revealing nightwear best left to the boudoir has now been banned.

The order to cover up has not gone down well with students, however, who claim breakfasting in their nightclothes is one of the privileges of studying at an all-girls college. Arielle Goodley, a 20-year-old English literature and psychology student, received a written warning for wearing a lacy nightie and skimpy dressing gown after the ban was imposed.
:
“They are claiming that it makes the young male serving staff uncomfortable, but we know that’s not true. Whenever we’ve asked the men themselves, they say it doesn’t bother them at all. In reality it’s the older women working there who seem to be making a fuss.”

This is abuse of authority plain and simple. There is no ambiguity going on at all — the Dean, Dr. Amanda Cooper-Sarkar, is order, and the hottie, Arielle Goodley, is chaos. Order, and chaos. Yet the thinking individual must tie his brain up into knots in order to take the ravings of “order” at face-value. The men are upset? The men don’t “know where to look?” What kind of men are these?

Arielle, who is chaos, on the other hand makes perfect sense. A bunch of bitter middle-aged old biddies are passing out new rules and blaming their rigidity and insecurity on the men. Who hasn’t seen that before? I normally side against college kids who want to start mini-revolutions the first time they bump up against rules they don’t want to follow…and I’m inclined to continue that informal policy here. But as far as what’s going on, Ms. Goodley’s comments are perfectly rational, and achieve perfect comportation with my own experiences about such things. As far as what’s going on, I have no reason not to believe each and every word that comes out of her mouth.

Especially that part about asking the guys if it’s okay, and being told hell yes!

Now sometimes, it’s only logical to create new rules in certain situations demanding greater coverage and modesty. This may be one of those times. But when that comes to pass, why, oh why, can’t people just put together one or two sentences that are honest & make sense, and use them? Why do they have to spin so much crap?

And what is up with these cranky women with degrees and hyphenated last names? It seems they are disproportionately represented in these teapot-tempests. Jealousy? You’d think the hyphenated female authorities would at least put some effort into making it look like something else.