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Incurious

Tuesday, June 10th, 2008

This is a look in the rear view mirror. Regarding the post previous, I tripped across a good editorial from 2006 by Jay Ambrose, which notes the lack of curiosity among those who tell us these interesting stories about President Bush’s…drum roll, please…lack of curiosity.

I’ve lost track of the linky navigation but it’s probably something you could re-enact without half trying. I think it when Anchoress, to The Captain, back to the Anchoress again, then out to Mr. Ambrose. Anyway, it’s wonderfully written, supported by facts where it needs to be, and makes a devastating point or two, smacking down on things that have been smacked before but not nearly enough.

The truth is that many of the critics who keep telling us that Bush is incurious are themselves incurious, loath to put their favorite asininities at risk through the exercise of open-minded, honest inquiry. Jonathan Chait of The New Republic argued prior to the list’s release that Bush was too dumb to be president, citing among other things the president’s supposed “disdain for book learnin’.” Had Chait been more inquiring himself _ is he too dumb to write for The New Republic? _ he might have learned that Bush has a thing for books. It was easier to rest his case on some meaningless impressions, sloppy analysis and one-sided evidence.

Once the story was out, Maureen Dowd of The New York Times reacted specifically to the news that Bush had read Albert Camus’ “The Stranger” _ and did so in typical dowdy fashion, shabbily getting in a line wondering if Mad magazine was “tucked inside the … classic of angst,” and telling us how absurd it was that the president would be reading the philosopher of the absurd. Not really. Camus _ who respected the moral possibilities of religious belief though not a believer _ was forever struggling with how you find meaning in the world. In an era in which so many are engaged in such a struggle, it makes sense for a serious president to ponder this novel.

Two years later, the pattern continues…hating Bush is a religion that brooks no heresy or apostasy.

Posted in Bush Derangement Syndrome | No Comments »

The Phony “Bush Lied” Line

Monday, June 9th, 2008

Anchoress…

What a long, strange trip it’s been, and here, some years later, we finally get someone in the press to tell it straight: Bush did not lie.

That someone is Fred Hiatt of the Washington Post, who writes…

Search the Internet for “Bush Lied” products, and you will find sites that offer more than a thousand designs. The basic “Bush Lied, People Died” bumper sticker is only the beginning.

Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, set out to provide the official foundation for what has become not only a thriving business but, more important, an article of faith among millions of Americans. And in releasing a committee report Thursday, he claimed to have accomplished his mission, though he did not use the L-word.

“In making the case for war, the administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when it was unsubstantiated, contradicted or even nonexistent,” he said.

But dive into Rockefeller’s report, in search of where exactly President Bush lied about what his intelligence agencies were telling him about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, and you may be surprised by what you find.

On Iraq’s nuclear weapons program? The president’s statements “were generally substantiated by intelligence community estimates.”

On biological weapons, production capability and those infamous mobile laboratories? The president’s statements “were substantiated by intelligence information.”

On chemical weapons, then? “Substantiated by intelligence information.”
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In the report’s final section, the committee takes issue with Bush’s statements about Saddam Hussein’s intentions and what the future might have held. But was that really a question of misrepresenting intelligence, or was it a question of judgment that politicians are expected to make?

I’ll get to that in a second. But first let’s zoom in on what inspired Anchoress to say “Pinch me, I’m dreaming. Say it with me.”

But the phony “Bush lied” story line distracts from the biggest prewar failure: the fact that so much of the intelligence upon which Bush and Rockefeller and everyone else relied turned out to be tragically, catastrophically wrong.

Yes, how far we’ve come. If you could go back to 1991, nobody there would believe you when you told them we had a new President, who took down Saddam Hussein and got a litany of crap for doing it, weapons-o-mass-destruction or no. And, if you could go back to 2004 and tell ’em our mainstream press used the phrase “phony ‘Bush lied’ story line,” that wouldn’t be believed either.

Hell. That much wouldn’t have been believed last year. It’s kind of a bombshell now.

Fred Hiatt continues:

And it trivializes a double dilemma that President Bill Clinton faced before Bush and that President Obama or McCain may well face after: when to act on a threat in the inevitable absence of perfect intelligence and how to mobilize popular support for such action, if deemed essential for national security, in a democracy that will always, and rightly, be reluctant.

See, this is what I think people are missing. We haven’t put too much thought into why, really, it comes so easily to people to accept that “Bush lied.” There are the defects in integrity and character that wedge them into absurd anti-war dogma, in extreme situations wherein perhaps, as Phil says, “sometimes war IS the answer.” People can go through things, and some of these things make it look like a good idea to oppose war, unconditionally, all the time, and forever. One of those things is — war. Veterans can go through combat, and come away thinking war is so awful, that there must be a better way — always. Understandable, I suppose. But that’s feeling, not thinking. Engaging in it at such a critical decision-juncture is, simply, a mistake. Other people want to look good…and have secrets and other inner demons that persuade them toward the idea that they won’t look that way, until they do something grandiose, costless and perpetual. Like engage in silly war protests. Maybe it’s to convince those around them that they’re good people when they themselves know otherwise…form your own opinion about that.

Other folks engage in the twenty-seventh item among the things I know about people, minus what I was told when a child:

27. People who make a conscious decision not to offer help or defense to someone who needs it, don’t want anyone else to help or defend that person either.

Apart from all that, of course, the timeless cliche is still true: War protests are great places to meet chicks.

These are all reasons why people become stridently anti-war; it isn’t all about being pacifist and cuddly and sweet. But there are less personal reasons. Reasons that have to do with money and not character defects.

The United States is a superpower. Those other countries out there, be they belligerent or no, have their own economies; and all economies thrive in certainty and wither in uncertainty. Our weapons are under lock and key, but our political resolve to use them is not. We can be de-fanged, easily, with our arsenal remaining completely intact.

So Hiatt has hit on the agenda behind the “Phony ‘Bush lied’ line” in which we’ve been buried for these last five or six years, without trying to, perhaps without realizing it. What is a sign-off item of concern to him, has been the primary sense of purpose to others from the very beginning. It is to escalate the political cost paid by future Presidents, now and forevermore, for even thinking about engaging in military aggression. Even for the most entirely valid, sustainable, defensive and non-preemptive reasons.

Being the “big guys,” we are not to do it. We are not to even think about it.

Is the artificial aggravation of such political exigencies…treason? Well, I wonder what the Founding Fathers would have to say about it. Reading over the founding documents, including the Federalist papers (starting with 2 through 5, but there are others), Washington’s Farewell Address, and the Constitution itself, you can’t help but pick up on the concerns they had about anything — anything — discouraging the executive from showing well-placed hostility at the right time and place, so long as it served the national defense. Apparently, they were big fans of Phil.

Those who mold, shape, and direct the anti-war movement draw on anti-war passions; that does not mean they are guided by those passions. They are guided by strategy. They have reasons for gelding America into such a grotesque national and international political status that she never fights, no matter what.

Until all contemplations of war by our legislature, and our executive, look like this…

In this chapter with Iraq, the objective has been to scandalize the preemptive strike.

If that’s been successful, the new doctrine in place is that we can’t raise a hand against the other guy, until we’ve courteously allowed him to get his licks in. I’m sure that looks noble to some, but that doesn’t mean that it is. And it certainly doesn’t serve our nation’s interests.

In fact, it gets us most of the way there, to the “don’t fight ever, no matter what” doctrine. About eighty or ninety percent, give-or-take.

Well, we know now, it wasn’t based on truth, and for the most part wasn’t even based on an attempt to be honest. I wonder if it’s succeeded. Time will tell.

Posted in Bush Derangement Syndrome, Deranged Leftists, Iraq and WoT Stuff, Justification for Invasion | 2 Comments »

Getting It Good and Hard

Sunday, June 8th, 2008

George F. Will opines some more, this time about gas prices. And the villain he finds, is a rather interesting one. He’s mediocre some of the time, good much more of the time, and excellent occasionally. This one’s excellent.

“Democracy,” said H.L. Mencken, “is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.” The common people of New York want [Charles] Schumer to be their senator, so they should pipe down about gasoline prices, which are a predictable consequence of their political choice.
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Also disqualified from complaining are all voters who sent to Washington senators and representatives who have voted to keep ANWR’s oil in the ground, and who voted to put 85 percent of America’s offshore territory off-limits to drilling. The U.S. Minerals Management Service says that restricted area contains perhaps 86 billion barrels of oil and 420 trillion cubic feet of natural gas — 10 times the oil and 20 times the natural gas Americans use in a year.

Drilling is under way 60 miles off Florida. The drilling is being done by China, in cooperation with Cuba, which is drilling closer to South Florida than U.S. companies are.

ANWR is larger than the combined areas of five states (Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Delaware) and drilling along its coastal plain would be confined to a space one-sixth the size of Washington’s Dulles Airport. Offshore? Hurricanes Katrina and Rita destroyed or damaged hundreds of drilling rigs without causing a large spill. There has not been a significant spill from an offshore U.S. well since 1969. Of the more than 7 billion barrels of oil pumped offshore in the past 25 years, 0.001 percent — that is one-thousandth of 1 percent — has been spilled. Louisiana has more than 3,200 rigs offshore — and a thriving commercial fishing industry.
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America says to foreign producers: We prefer not to pump our oil, so please pump more of yours, thereby lowering its value, for our benefit. Let it not be said that America has no energy policy.

On an only slightly related topic, birds are building nests on the side of my apartment building. They’re up to somewhere around six nests, going bollywonkers over all the humans that are “invading” these nests…simply by opening doors and walking out of them. I bring this up because there are federal and state laws saying we can’t do anything about it. What we can do is sit around with our thumbs up our butts waiting for them to build a few more nests.

That, and George Will’s comments, inspire me to utter my doleful refrain one more time: When does anyone in any position of authority, ever tell the environmental activist to stick it? Can someone name three examples? I can’t think of one.

It would appear a given environment-related situation can disintegrate into ever-descending depths of dysfunctional mess, and it still won’t happen. I’m glad our standard of living is so sky-high we can afford to be held captive by this. That just tells me a fruit is most ripe right before it starts to rot.

Thanks to the environmentalists, I think we’re just about there.

H/T to Boortz for the Will find.

Posted in Oil & Gas, Overlawyered, Poisoning Capitalism, Poisoning Western Civilization, Tree Huggers | No Comments »

Can’t, Can’t, Can’t, Can’t, Can’t, CAN CAN CAN, Can’t, Can’t, Can’t

Friday, June 6th, 2008

Just had a brain fart on Cassy’s blog and you know, it’s a little bit of a threadjack — kinda. The Obamessiah got all tripped up with his opining, in that cute opining way he has…about whether we’re spinning our wheels in Iraq or not.

My threadjacking comes from my habit of taking a thirty-thousand foot view of this stuff. After all…Iraq isn’t the only thing our democrats say is impossible. I’ve noticed they have a lot of scorn and condescension toward anyone who dares to dream of a day when we’ll have so many violent criminals locked up, that the crime rate drops. They don’t like to hear that. Drilling for oil, over here, and finding some so we don’t have to import so much. Slowing down the sexual hunger of your teenager, especially your teenage daughter — I’m not even talking about keeping her a virgin, just putting a little bit of a damper on things. That’s another thing that brings the bile-snot flowing.

Can’t, can’t, can’t.

There’s a flip-side to that coin. Our liberals think we can do a lot of other things; they insist on it. Negotiating with our enemies is a popular favorite. Tearing down jails. Ain’t that a kicker? To the liberal mind, crime will never, ever, ever drop if we fill up the jails…but if we empty them out, it just might go away. Curing AIDS. Ending poverty. Bringing the carbon content of our atmosphere down to………………some level? Do I even need to argue how silly that one is. The planet is dying, but we can save it by slapping a solar panel on our roof and charging our cell phones with some kind of pedal-power Gilligan-bicycle device.

The liberal mind seems to be stubbornly opposed to the idea that anything can be 30%, 40% or 60% possible. No, it’s all or none. Everything’s either absolutely worth doing, and don’t you dare even suggest it’s beyond our ability or you’re some kind of heretic — or else, anybody who so much as makes a noise or two about trying it, is a damned fool. These are the people who brag about being able to comprehend “shades of gray” in things. When they contemplate what’s possible and what isn’t, gray suddenly disappears. It’s all black-and-white.

So here’s one theory. Among others rattling around in my head…

I’m inclined to believe, against my temptations toward the opposite, that I don’t need to argue how silly it is. I think it’s known. To everyone. I think liberals have just as decent a command of the evidence, and how it brings some objectives into the realm of the possible and easy, and pushes other objectives into the perimeter of mounting difficulty — as anybody else.

I think the agenda they have, is rooted in a personality defect. I say this because the agenda manages to achieve consolidation and coherence, without conspiracy. The communication isn’t needed for the coordination, because it’s a natural syndication among the similarly-handicapped. A conspiracy amongst them, to behave this way, would be needed like you need a conspiracy among hip replacement patients to limp. It’s a natural tendency that arises when something else is missing.

The thing that is missing, is true, productive, determination…stamina…grit. These people are suffering from a phobia against declaring things possible that are actually possible — but challenging. If they can switch these things around, that which is possible & that which is not, they get some sense of security. That means things are declared possible, that are not, and things are declared not-possible, that are. This way, they never have to try.

They say something can’t be done — and it can. If they can prevail, they’ll stop anyone else from trying it, and they don’t have to admit they might have been wrong. But there are some complications; maybe they won’t prevail. If they don’t prevail, and someone goes ahead and does it…that’s a little trickier. But they can just say it was a coincidence. We saw it with the end of the Cold War. Reagan didn’t do it, the Soviet Union just starved naturally, it would’ve happened anyway. Heard that one?

See how easy it is?

Conversely, if something is as realistic as a five-legged unicorn, and they declare it CAN be done, there’s safety in that too. They get their kudos for apparently showing such an impressive resolve. Since they don’t really deserve it, they place a premium value on that. But also, they don’t get nailed on the deception. How could they be? You can’t prove a negative…we’ll just be trapped in an infinite loop. Women — come a long way, but they’re not there yet. How many decades has that been going on? Ethnic minority groups of all kinds — same thing. These are things that can’t really be measured, although you can certainly make a convincing act out of pretending to measure them. And so…the President is a democrat, we’re getting closer, the President is a Republican, we’re getting further away. Who’s to dispute that? It’s so handy.

I think, as I look at all these things democrats tell me ABSOLUTELY can’t be done and these other things that absolutely can be done — the ultimate liberal nightmare, is measurable progress. An ongoing project, transparent, visible to all, at which everyone can look and say “Yup, no doubt about it, that sucker’s 43.6 percent of the way done.” Because the pattern seems to be unbroken, to me: When an objective ends up in the “CAN” column on the liberal-democrat ledger, it’s progress is subject to interpretation, and therefore to spin. Even gun-grabbing. Now that we’ve outlawed guns in City X, how many guns are there? Zero. Whoops, this guy just walked into a building and shot thirty people with a H&K 9mm. Number of guns is still zero. Progress…with things liberals tell us can be done…cannot be measured, or is extraordinarily difficult to measure.

We can measure how much carbon is in the atmosphere, given enough resources. But that’s a special case. You’ll notice, there has been very little discussion of how far down it should be brought.

Drilling stateside…that is always in the “Can’t” column. I dare you to find an exception. There’s the caribou, there’s adorable seal pups, some turd-sucking shrimp has to procreate in the vernal pools, we’re not giving the Indians their due because of some territory boundary dispute…and don’t forget the piddly limits to what lies beneath. There’s always that — it’s a constant. Ten or twenty barrels we’ll pull out, and then it’ll be bone-dry. I know it. I are a democrat senator, and I can feel it in my bones.

Defeating Republicans and conservatives — that is always in the “Can” column.

Defeating terrorists — “Can’t.” That’s a constant too.

Getting rid of discrimination: “Can.” That one actually strikes me as fairly normal. Until I remember, discrimination is pretty much whatever a liberal wants it to be. And they’re honor bound to declare on the side of caution. Ninety-nine sane liberals say “this example doesn’t seem to be discrimination” and then one paranoid raving lunatic liberal says “I think it is” — you’ll end up with a hundred liberals that say, yup-siree, that was discrimination right there.

So when it comes to controlling the private thoughts and property of other people — it’s “Can.”

When it comes to upholding law and order — it’s “Can’t.”

Maybe I’m over-thinking this. Maybe they’re just bossy. They do seem to have a strong tendency to meet behind closed doors, figure out what they want everyone else to do, and then tell us whether it’s a “can” or a “can’t.” Maybe that’s why it’s all-or-nothing.

This year, they’re doing a lot of talking about “hope.” I think, deep down, they don’t really have any. Oh, they’ve got hope they’ll win the White House and they’ll keep the Senate. They’ve got lots of hope when they hope things will be done their way. But I think that’s all they have.

It’s a funny thing about real hope. People who don’t have any, don’t want anyone else to have any either.

Posted in Deranged Leftists, Poisoning Capitalism | No Comments »

How to Make a Citizen’s Arrest of a War Criminal

Thursday, June 5th, 2008

Who’s a bigger bunch of dumbasses…these folks at DU…

Form a team. We need teams in California, Texas, New York, and Washington, D.C., among other places. Your mission is to locate a war criminal from the list above in a public place, detain them, handcuff them, phone the police, read the criminal their rights and the charges against them, ask them if they have anything to say in response, videotape the arrest and post it online. Your team should include one or more people who can produce an excellent video and be extremely fast in editing and posting it online. Your team should include people capable of physically detaining your war criminal. Your team should ideally include a lawyer. And, of course, people who can read the charges and question the suspect. Everyone on your team should be able to keep a secret while you’re planning your arrest.

…or the famous couple depicted in this film clip linked by commenter Heather, at Rachel Lucas’ blog…

Think they’re serious?

Gawd…I hope so.

Update 6/6/08: I desperately want to know how those teams are coming along; but I can only send e-mail to “davidswanson” by registering with DU, and registration with DU is supposed to meet the following terms:

Members are expected to be generally supportive of progressive ideals, and to support Democratic candidates for political office.

I’m going to go ahead and respect that. I do not meet this criteria.

Some of the nobodies who don’t come by to not read The Blog That Nobody Reads, might in fact meet it. Some of you might even be registered. I kinda doubt it…the nobodies tend to be the tolerant, thoughtful type…but who knows.

Someone please drop him a line. It’s clear they want to keep the details in the vest pocket to preserve that…heh…all-important element of surprise. We just want to know how the teams are doing. So that we Bush apologists can be properly cowed and intimidated.

Someone? Pretty please?

Update: Oh. Duh. I see it. david@davidswanson.org of convictbushcheney.org. Step 6, it says it nice and clear.

The request stands; I got a feeling a request from a DU member would hold more water.

We’ll have to keep abreast of this one…

Posted in Bush Derangement Syndrome | 2 Comments »

Justice of Peace Sued Over Paddlin’s

Thursday, June 5th, 2008

Spankings work through embarrassment and humiliation.

Waitaminnit, waitaminnit, I think a lot of us who should know better, still don’t get that. So I’ll say it again. Spankings work through embarrassment and humiliation.

Oh wait, I think there are still some folks who don’t get that, so I’ll…oh…well, after awhile, there’s really nothing more you can do. Is there? I mean some folks really, really, don’t get it.

A Los Fresnos family is going to court to try to prevent a Cameron County justice of the peace from ordering spankings in his courtroom.

The lawsuit filed Wednesday alleges that Justice of the Peace Gustavo “Gus” Garza told a 14-year-old girl’s stepfather that she would be found guilty of a criminal offense and fined $500 for truancy unless the stepfather spanked her in the courtroom.

The lawsuit filed by Mary Vasquez and her husband, Daniel Zurita, described the paddle provided by Garza as large and heavy and fashioned from a thick piece of lumber.

“The word ‘club’ could be fairly used as a substitute for the word ‘paddle’ here as it appears to be something which may have been cut from a (two-by-four) piece of lumber,” attorney Mark Sossi wrote in the family’s petition. “The paddles provided by the judge are of such heft and weight that an individual striking an animal with one might be reasonably reported for cruelty to an animal.”

In a story for Thursday’s editions of The Brownsville Herald, Garza declined to comment on whether he has people spanked in his courtroom. He also said he had not seen the lawsuit.

The lawsuit asks a state district court to stop the spankings and remove Garza from office.

The family alleges in the lawsuit that Garza told Zurita to strike his stepdaughter repeatedly on the buttocks in open court.

Zurita said he didn’t feel as if he had a choice but to follow the order. When he was through, the judge told him he had not struck the girl hard enough, Zurita said in an affidavit.

Vasquez said she had seen the judge order other public spankings.

“It is unconscionable that a Texas judge would order a parent, much less a step parent, be required to strike a child with such a thing in a Texas courtroom,” the family’s attorney wrote in a footnote on the petition. “It is equally unconscionable that an argument could be made that such an order would fall within the lawful authority of any Texas judge.”

Hey here’s an idea: Don’t skip school. Then you won’t be spanked.

Aw, you see the cultural split here? I’m thinking in terms of cause and effect: IF you skip school, THEN you might get spanked. IF we spank kids who skip school, THEN maybe they’ll stop.

Other people think purely in terms of European style “I think this is deplorable and can I get an amen here?” No cause and effect at all. Oh, except with regard to the Justice of the Peace who’s trying to uphold law and order — IF we sue him THEN we can get him thrown outta office. So I guess they believe in cause and effect too.

But not with regard to bringing reform to the people who need it.

Some would say I should withhold my opinion until I have a chance to get to know the JP a little bit better. Maybe he really is off his rocker. I acknowledge that is a possibility. But going by that logic — why am I supposed to agree that this is “unconscionable” when I haven’t had a chance to meet this girl? Maybe she’s a brat. I know two things about her: 1) She’s a truant; and 2) a Justice of the Peace thought it fitting that she be given a smack-down in his courtroom, for being a truant.

Sounds like a brat to me.

Like I said recently: Where is the shame? We have something very similar to it nowadays, and we’re drowning in what’s similar to it: A fear of being sued over having offended someone else’s sense of decency. That is a similar, close-cousin synthetic blend. But it’s not identical, and it turns out to be a poor substitute — especially when we’re up to our armpits in that fear-of-getting-sued stuff, and completely bone-dry fresh-outta good old fashioned shame.

Shame, as in: Oh my dear f*cking God, I’m in court because this bratty stepchild of mine keeps cutting school, everyone thinks I don’t have what it takes to discipline her and it looks like they’re right.

If I were given dictator-for-a-day powers, and only had a limited amount of time to fix a very few things, that would rank very high on my list. We don’t put too much energy anymore into standing up for what we know is right. We’re too concerned with what we think the other fellow thinks is right. We’re over-Kerryized. We see shades of gray where right & wrong are concerned — that is a good thing when there really are shades of gray involved. But real life very rarely plies us with the gray stuff — most of these dilemmas are simple, are indeed black-and-white.

And our post-modern sense of moral relativism seems, to me, to be serving us very poorly in those far-more-common situations. This isn’t that complicated. Kid’s a brat. Needs a whack. Dish it out, hope for the best, and move on.

(Insert sound of my imaginary tobacco wad hitting the spittoon here.)

Posted in Deranged Leftists, Overlawyered, Poisoning Justice | 1 Comment »

This Is Good LI

Sunday, June 1st, 2008

Yup, pretty much. That’s just about it.

Nobody ever says “No” to an environmentalist nut-bag.

Someday, we really do need to do something about that.

Posted in Tree Huggers | 2 Comments »

Open Letter From Obama Supporters to Islamist Whack-Jobs

Sunday, June 1st, 2008

As written by Gerard:

9/11 JumpersTO: ISLAM
FROM: AMERICANS UNITED FOR OBAMA
RE: KILLING US SOME MORE

DEAR ISLAM,

You may have asked yourselves if, with the rise of Barack Hussein Obama, we American supporters of the candidate of the millennium are impatient with you. Yes, it’s true. You are not fulfilling our desires which we believe we have made clear with our worship of Obama. Let’s be clear about one thing, as supporters of Obama we thirst for death.

We would like you, at your earliest opportunity, to expunge our guilt – especially that of the whitest and therefore most guilty among us – by slaughtering us wholesale.

Just as you hate us for what we are so we hate ourselves for who we are. We have so much while you, the petulant children of a whacked-out god, oppressed by your own ratty cultures and fascist governments and unable to contribute anything to civilization for over 500 years, have so little except your “trauma.” Because of this we feel it is only fair that you get to kill more of us at will.

As Obama-Americans we have a problem with our self-esteem in this country, and that problem is that you are not killing enough of us quickly enough. Especially if we support Obama. You don’t think we’re working for him for our health, or even our health-plan, do you?

Pretty much. There’s much more. Go read the whole thing.

Twenty-first century American liberalism in a nutshell: That which builds or preserves must, at all costs, be destroyed; that which destroys must, at all costs, be preserved.

Posted in Deranged Leftists, The Muslim Question | 1 Comment »

D’JEver Notice? V

Sunday, June 1st, 2008

Anger I've SeenFrom time to time I hear about “angry white males.” It occurs to me that simply requesting some evidence to substantiate this theoretical phenomenon, observed first-hand, is to deal it a devastating blow, especially since probably ninety percent or more of the times I’ve heard this phrase have been since the 1994 elections.

Other than my father and my brother and my son getting mad at me for various reasons…why…thinking back on it, I’d have to say the last angry white male I’ve ever seen was Archie Bunker. Oh, and my fifth grade teacher Mr. Vanderpool got really upset with something one of the other kids did.

These are interesting musings on which to think in 2008. This year is five-twelfths of the way over. And I’ve seen so very much anger — so very, very much anger. The term “angry white male” seems to me to be misplaced right now. I thought it was misplaced in ’94. But it seems even more misplaced now.

What holds my fascination even more than the various directions from which it comes, is where it is sent. Anger I have seen this year is a very pragmatic type of anger. Most of it, one way or another, is connected with the primary victim selection process going on within the democrat party. Who’s the whiniest victim among us? Who should run everything? That the weakest, whelpiest sniveling whine-job should make all the critical decisions, is something on which they’re all agreed…they disagree vehemently on who that is going to be. Black guy. Woman. Black guy. Woman. Back and forth it goes…

Where is all that anger directed? It is pointed at whoever, it seems, is about to win the chief-whiny-democrat sweepstakes, to the annoyance of those showing off the anger. This year, it’s just the same old story over and over again.

And from that, I daresay I’ve seen enough anger over the last five months, to put a big dent in all the anger I’ve seen in all my days previous to that.

Angry white males? Maybe it’s time for a lot of other folks to ask, in unison with me: Where, exactly?

Posted in Deranged Leftists, Elections, Obamamania, TIK 52 | 1 Comment »

No Evidence of WMDs…Here

Sunday, June 1st, 2008

From Powerline comes a nugget that is worded so tightly and efficiently that I see no way to “tease” it, so I’ll just quote it in full…

One of the several reasons why the mainstream media have consistently underestimated the significance of the Trinity/Wright/Pfleger story is that, to a considerable degree, conventional reporters and editors tend to agree with Rev. Wright’s critique of America. When Wright said, “God damn America,” reporters thought he’d gone a little too far but didn’t necessarily disagree with the underlying sentiment.

A good illustration of this was the New York Times’s article on black liberation theology in which the paper endorsed as true Wright’s claim that the United States has used biological warfare against other nations. (This was cited to explain that the idea of the federal government inventing the AIDS virus in order to exterminate African-Americans was not so far-fetched.)

What on earth could the Times reporter have had in mind? Maybe the old canard about smallpox and the Indians; I can’t think of any other candidates. In any event, this morning’s Times corrects the error:

An article on May 4 about black liberation theology and the debate surrounding the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr, Senator Barack Obama’s former minister, erroneously confirmed a statement by Mr. Wright that the United States has used biological weapons against other countries. There is no evidence that the United States ever did so.

Note, though, that the paper is keeping its options open. Who knows, maybe the evidence will turn up someday.

This usually-unacknowledged sympathy with Rev. Wright’s anti-Americanism is, I think, part of the reason why the mainstream press misreported the Wright controversy from the beginning.

I remember the last time I had occasion to think about this. It was…a day and a half ago, Thursday evening, cleaning out my son’s end-of-school homework folder. I found an essay about the Santa Ines Mission. I remember helping him with the photographs & illustrations involved in this, but this was the first time I saw the core thesis. I sent it along to his mother, and didn’t copy it, but I remember about forty percent of the way through it makes brief mention of the fact that the Indians burned down the Mission in 1824. It had been rebuilt since then but did not resume it’s missionary functions after that.

The punch in the gut was the very last sentence, something about how “the white settlers were mean to them [the Indians].” I thought for the briefest moment of jotting in something smarmy at the bottom, like, “So the moral of the story is you shouldn’t burn down peoples’ buildings or they might be mean to you?” I thought a little while longer about having a chat with the boy about it. I decided both actions promised inadequate return; my son’s already been counseled against absorbing politically correct nonsense, and the truth of it is — hey, yeah, the white settlers were pretty mean to the Indians.

But I’m not going to pretend to deny what’s going on here. You’re supposed to attach little “down with whitey” trailers on the ends of your essays — if you do that, you’re much more likely to get an A+. That’s the way it worked in my day. We used the word “education” to describe what was taking place there. To borrow a phrase from Inigo Montoya, I do not think that word means what they think it means.

But the sin committed here, is not so much with regard to truth, as with regard to relevance. The subject is the Santa Ines Mission. What’s that got to do with white guys being mean to the Indians? Not an awful lot…on the other hand, Powerline’s example from the NYT has to do with truth. It made the white guys look like a bunch of Dirty Rotten Creepy Jerks (DRCJs), and we’re the New York Times so hey, we like that a lot. Let’s run with it.

After all, we’re the “Paper Of Record.”

Update: This passage from the original New York Times article, also, hit me sort of like a pillowcase full of dead batteries:

“Most black church members want to see their ministers involved in defending the race and improving civil rights,” [Bishop Harry] Jackson said. “The anger and bitterness that bleeds through in Reverend Wright’s comments are something that many blacks can sympathize with, even if they don’t want to hear it in the pulpit.” [emphasis mine]

May I suggest a stronger identification of what exactly it is we’re trying to do as we tinker with something called “race relations.” We’ve been making it a social project for a very long time now, kind of a heavy-handed one at that. Do we want the races to come closer together, or grow further apart?

Because if we don’t want them to grow further apart, it hardly seems productive to me for anyone to be spewing a lot of bile from the pulpit, just because there are some blacks somewhere who “sympathize with” the “anger and bitterness.”

That strikes me as a case of, with friends like these, who needs enemies.

And this white straight middle-aged guy, if nobody else, is pretty sick and tired of seeing Reverend Wright defended this way. In what universe do these apologists live, in which you can spout such acrimonious and unsubstantiated hateful rhetoric, and it’s somehow copacetic if it brings legions of bigots to their feet with cheers of rah rah rah…because they can “sympathize with” it?

This doesn’t impress me as productive — not even potentially. Let’s try the Spock approach for a little while — putting a stop to the emotionalism, and use logic instead. Emotion has been our hydraulic fluid of choice in normalizing race relations, for over forty years. That’s a long time. I keep hearing “we still have a long way to go” so it’s effectiveness as said hydraulic fluid ought, by now, be called into question. One cannot help but wonder, if we channeled logic in this endeavor instead of emotion, how far forty years would have brought us.

The New York Times would certainly not have been just caught with it’s tail in a crack. Because they would have been more vigorously motivated to do their jobs — print up facts, and things those facts support, rather than whatever feels good at the moment.

And, of course, if we went that route Barack Obama would not be a good candidate for any office this year.

Posted in Blogs vs. MSM, Deranged Leftists, Poisoning Western Civilization | No Comments »

On Talking About Talk

Saturday, May 31st, 2008

Ann Coulter impresses me in a lot of ways as being a possible clone of Keith Olbermann, just marching off in a different direction. There are some differences, though. I think she criticizes people who need more criticism. Other people think Keith Olbermann is criticizing people who need more criticism…although I should add, I’ve seen Keith Olbermann criticize very few people, and the people he does criticize, if criticism toward them is going to fix something I would imagine we would have seen those beneficial effects some time ago. Coulter thinks up some new stuff here and there. Olby seems to be on kind of a merry-go-round…disgrace…sir…impeach…cowardly…lied…thousands dead…weapons of mass destruction…civil liberties.

If you’re a good little moonbat liberal, you have to constantly champion Olbermann. You can’t call anything he says into question. And furthermore, you’ll get kicked out of the moonbat liberal club — as in, your membership card is torn into pieces in front of your tear-filled eyes — for daring to imply Ann Coulter is right. About anything. Anything. Or, for daring to imply anyone else might be right about anything, who in turn would dare to imply Ann Coulter is right about anything. Or for saying anything nice about them. Or for giving them aid or comfort. Hmmm. Boy, it’d be nice if we could get that kind of resolved aimed elsewhere.

The irreconcilable dichotomy is that you will, similarly, be kicked out of the moonbat liberal club if you dare to prove Ann Coulter is wrong about certain things…like…

Liberals view talk as an end in itself. They never think through how these talks will proceed, which is why Chamberlain ended up giving away Czechoslovakia. He didn’t leave for Munich planning to do that. It is simply the inevitable result of talking with madmen without a clear and obtainable goal. Without a stick, there’s only a carrot.

I’ve been waiting a long time for Coulter to be proven wrong on this point. I hear a lot of talk about talk. We need to talk to our enemies…that’s what’s missing in this administration…sit down and talk…blah, blah, blah.

I’ve always thought it odd and strange that people who talk about talk, who so clearly love to talk, never seem to talk about what takes place within the talk. Here, Coulter supplies the beginnings of an explanation for why that might be. Where there are no sticks, there are only carrots.

Nobody wants to talk about sticks, and nobody wants to talk about carrots. Talking about talk, on the other hand, is cheap and easy.

Update: You know, now that I’m thinking on it and trying to recall what it is I have and have not seen…it seems eminently reasonable, to me, to ask “Senator, would your administration talk to President Ahmadinejad using sticks, or carrots?”

I wonder what Obama’s answer to that would be. Probably something containing the words “hope,” and “change.” And it would make someone in the crowd faint, no doubt.

Posted in Deranged Leftists, Talking With Tyrants | No Comments »

Stuff White People Like #101: Being Offended

Thursday, May 29th, 2008

Comedy gold, and I’ve come to expect nothing less. Naturally, I’ve highlighted the especially good parts:

To be offended is usually a rather unpleasant experience, one that can expose a person to intolerance, cultural misunderstandings, and even evoke the scars of the past. This is such an unpleasant experience that many people develop a thick skin and try to only be offended in the most egregious and awful situations. In many circumstances, they can allow smaller offenses to slip by as fighting them is a waste of time and energy. But white people, blessed with both time and energy, are not these kind of people. In fact there are few things white people love more than being offended.

Naturally, white people do not get offended by statements directed at white people. In fact, they don’t even have a problem making offensive statements about other white people (ask a white person about “flyover states”). As a rule, white people strongly prefer to get offended on behalf of other people.

What comes next…even better still. Read the whole thing.

Posted in Deranged Leftists, GroupThink Nonsense, Racial Tension, TIK 52 | 7 Comments »

Ostrich Doctrine

Wednesday, May 28th, 2008

salvage‘s ignorance is luminescent. If naivete is a candle, this dude is a flare. He could light up your campsite for your 2 a.m. potty trip during a new moon, like it’s lunchtime.

How? What exactly is Iran going to do? Having a reactor doesn’t = bomb, having a bomb doesn’t = delivery system having a delivery system doesn’t = first strike capability. Considering Israel has a nuclear arsenal that could kill everyone in the ME I don’t think Iran is much of a threat. Even if they could launch their one or two nukes they’d be brought down before they came near Tel Aviv and Iran would be a smooth glass bowl.

Iran is as much a threat as Iraq was, that is not at all.

I love this mix of hubris and cowardliness that is the American wingnut; USA is the most powerful nation in the world BUH! BUH! THAT THIRD WORLD NATION WITH A FRACTION OF OUR MILITARY IS SSSAAACCRRRYY!!

Fear and hate, you just wallow in that crap endlessly.

There ya have it. Recognition of a possible threat == fear and hate.

And bad guys, there’s millions of people crawling all over our continent just like this guy. Say out loud “it’s a for a reactor not a bomb” and they believe it. They are the proponents of the Ostrich Doctrine. The Hakuna Matata foreign policy that has preceded our greatest successes in international relations. Yes…I remember reading that in history. Neville Chamberlain proclaimed “peace in our time,” and within six years we had it. Yeah. Right.

If he was a democrat, I’d say he has this attitude for the reason our democrats have this attitude. Which is, when you recognize a threat, you have to act on it, and when you act on it everyone who votes here is reminded that there are people in the world who want to do us harm…which there are…and when people think of that, they tend to vote for defense. democrats are opposed to defense — you look at their policies on all the issues, across the board, and the one consistency is that the only things worth defending from anything anywhere are things that have to do with democrat foreign and domestic policies. Things like abortion clinics. “Detainees” at Guantanamo. Things that attack other things.

That’s how I’d explain his ignorance if he was a democrat.

But salvage lives in another country, one that is dependent on the United States’ readiness, willingness and ability to defend things — to occasionally ignore what the democrats want us to do — for the defense of salvage‘s own country.

So I would have to chalk this up to plain old self-centeredness. When you say something is, or is not, a threat — you have to have a target in mind. Yeah, well, I think insofar as what salvage has in mind I’m going to have to agree with him a thousand percent. salvage is thinking about salvage. Not a threat? Yeah, if I’m a Mad Mullah and I’m in charge of governing Iran and I’ve got my thumb on a nuclear button that those stupid Yankees in the Evil West know nothing about…and I’m looking for a target…Canada’s going to be pretty far down on my list.

Whatever. Does he really expect people to think “Aw…I’m so glad salvage pointed this out — they may get a nuke, but they don’t have the delivery system! So we have nothing to worry about!” Well, I think he does. That’s the way he thinks. Nothing goes kaboom unless it’s spent the previous few minutes whistling through the air, like Luthor’s rockets in that first Superman movie. Ever.

Remember. This is not a lone wolf. He’s in lots of good company.

Lots.

Posted in Deranged Leftists, Vision for Victory | 2 Comments »

D’JEver Notice? III

Wednesday, May 21st, 2008

I just noticed this about Hillary Clinton. She’s got this talking point which is used most frequently by her, but not exclusively by her. It’s still kind of a general hardcore leftist ultra-radical democrat talking point:

Some have said your votes didn’t matter, that this campaign was over, that allowing everyone to vote and every vote to count would somehow be a mistake. But that didn’t stop you. You’ve never given up on me because you know I’ll never give up on you.
:
And yes, we are in this race because we believe America is worth fighting for. This continues to be a tough fight. And I have fought it the only way I know how — with determination, by never giving up and never giving in. [emphasis mine]

Wouldn’t it be nice to have that kind of determination from some of our ultra-radical hardcore leftist democrats on the subject of the War on Terror? The Peter Quincy Taggart stuff…Never give up…Never surrender?

It isn’t that democrats are opposed to determination, resilience, persistence, stamina and resolve. They’re just so deliberate and focused about where to put it. Good here — bad there.

They run for office, and it’s — I’m a stubborn bulldog, man I’m just a freak of nature, I’ll never ever quit. Then they get in, and it all changes — hurry up and give up, or we just might win this thing.

They aren’t hiding any of this, so I’ll have to reserve the resulting question for their supporters. How does this make sense to you? They seem to be saying — join me, and together we will never, ever, ever give up no matter how discouraging things get, so that I CAN GET INTO THAT OFFICE — and get us to quit.

I’m watching Barack Obama embrace this contradiction on MSNBC, in the moment in which I write this. He’s bragging about the people who tried to talk him into waiting another four years, just giving up…how he looked them in the eye, pressed on…and once he gets in he’ll bring a stop to “this war that I believe never should’ve been authorized” — what’s his argument against it? That it’s been painful and expensive.

Things that help the country, by default, just plain aren’t worth doing. Things that help hardcore liberal career politicians, on the other hand, always are. It’s like they embrace Churchill’s timeless quotation about fighting ’em here and there and never surrendering — only with regard to election campaigns. But about absolutely nothing else.

It is amazing how determined they are about promoting, defending, and codifying the policy of — not being determined. Quitting. They are amazingly determined quitters. It’s really something.

They’re either the most persistent and determined quitters that ever walked Creation, or they’re the most easily discouraged and easily distracted pit-bulls. I dunno which it is, but it looks like they have some issues they need to go off somewhere and resolve about what their message is, before they worry about who’s going to articulate it. Maybe they got started on that, and gave up, because it was too hard.

Update: Thinking on it some more, I notice Republicans are indeed the exact opposite. They promote the policy of fighting the War on Terror, over there so we don’t have to fight it over here. Never leave Iraq until the job is done. Make sure the region will never become a breeding ground for the terrorism that we are absolutely, positively, committed to defeating ONCE AND FOR ALL.

And then when it comes to running for office, all that gritty resolve suddenly turns to crap. Ah…our polls are down. Must be because we’re not moderate enough. Only sensible thing to do is to reach across the aisle and show we’re open to global warming…death taxes…amnesty for illegals…progressive income taxes…hiking the minimum wage…and on and on and on, until there’s no point to being anything but a liberal democrat anymore.

One party is infinitely dedicated and ardently determined to winning elections but winning nothing else, the other party has the same attitude about winning other things but not elections.

Posted in Deranged Leftists | No Comments »

I’m An Atheist And I’ll Pray For Him

Tuesday, May 20th, 2008

Says a DailyKOS contributor about the Lion of the Senate Liberals. Liberal democrats are like that about religion; it’s like jeans vs. slacks, except no need to step into a dressing room to change. More like a light switch. Oop — look at me, for the next five minutes I’m RE-LI-GIOUS…

File this one in the “Am I the only one who notices” file: A goodly chunk of these beneficial wishes for Sen. Kennedy, are made in direct connection to considerations of political consequence — as in, omigosh I hope he gets better so that the nation can benefit from these wonderful hard-left liberal policies he promotes. This is of interest to me, because I’m one of the bloggers who caught a measurable amount of flak and back-talk…from conservatives, no less…for expressing my wishes that Sen. Kennedy recover as much of his health as is possible without going back in to serve anymore.

Since, unlike the DailyKOS folks, I’m not that wild about his policies.

Now that Sen. Kennedy has been confirmed to be afflicted with the very frailty that killed my mother, I’m not backing down from any of it. I want him to drive this thing from his body. I want the chemotherapy to work. I want him to pass with flying colors…and then to go away.

But I have to ask: Why is it that it’s within the bounds of good taste, to wish such an influential legislator fully recovers so that public policy can be decided in a way to your liking. And at the same time, why does it fall below the bounds of good taste to wish an unhealthy old man should retire to a life of dormancy, which is where he belongs — to prevent bad radical liberal policies from being ratified?

Some would say the left-wingers are wishing good health on someone, while I’m wishing sickness. I would argue that is not the case at all. Sen. Kennedy is unhealthy already. I would further argue, they wish to exploit said unhealthy man. For an “ordinary” senator to be nominated and then approved to replace the legendary Lion, would be in keeping with a constitutional republic in which we vote on our representatives as equals.

Another flaw in this argument is revealed when one wonders, with an open mind, what would happen if such a malady were visited upon…Mitch McConnell. Or any other conservative Republican. Actually we needn’t wonder about that too hard. How about an influential Republican strategist from the past, like Lee Atwater?

Somehow, it’s culturally obligatory to remember Atwater in simple, absolute terms. Atwater, we are told, made race an issue in our elections without looking like he was making race an issue. We’re told this by Bob Herbert of the New York Times, who has built an entire career out of telling half-truths about a single speech Ronald Reagan made in Mississippi in 1980.

Meanwhile, it is a settled matter that Kennedy let a woman drown in his car in Chappaquiddick in 1969. Somehow, Kennedy gets to be a complex book, out of which the Chappaquiddick affair is but a single page. See how this works? Liberal democrats want to do all their thinking by feeling…and it amounts to being a cultural request, of which the rest of us dutifully approve. Yes, mister democrat, I must not sound like I’m wishing Kennedy’s brain tumor on him as divine judgment — I can’t come within a hundred miles of that. But you can say exactly the same thing about Lee Atwater and the Willie Horton ad and that’s alright.

This isn’t about feeling bad for Ted Kennedy and his family. Of course I do…how can I not. I’ve seen the heartache a family must endure when one of their own has a tumor growing in the cranium. The feeling of helplessness is profound. It is an occasion of overwhelming sadness. For the benefit of those who’ve not lived through it — words entirely fail. I hope you never learn first-hand.

It’s about the choice or lack thereof. How come we have this obligation to “feel” this way about Sen. Kennedy? And not Atwater? Or Mary Jo Kopechne, the woman who died of Kennedy’s negligence?

How come it’s okay to wish these health sagas turn out in such a way that our government remains hard-left liberal…but not so that our government can become less so?

In fact, how come the things we “wish” become anybody else’s business at all?

To my mind, the one thing that is offensive in the extreme about this, is the necessity certain persons among us feel to reassure, and re-reassure, and re-re-reassure, again and again — all others within listening and reading distance that I Am A Good Person. It’s a liberal democrat trait, but one which a lot of conservatives are emulating. And this impresses me as a far more odious tell-tale than making “tasteless” comments about Senator Kennedy. It betrays an injured and incomplete soul.

Why do you have to reassure us all, so repeatedly, and so constantly, that you’re so “good”?

It’s a real problem indicative of a real character defect. I’m convinced. All who are not convinced similarly, feel free to peruse that DailyKOS thread linked above, and get back to me. These folks have a real problem. It’s like the guy who can’t stop scrubbing his hands, and maybe that’s an apt analogy in more ways than just one.

This is the part where the people who celebrated the death of Reagan, Thurmond, and Heston wag their finger and prove that their [sic] a bunch of hypocriticaljackasses. — Fark commenter Mrbogey (2008-05-20 01:47:24 PM EDT)

Posted in Deranged Leftists | 1 Comment »

The Common Thread: It Would’ve Succeeded Anyway

Monday, May 19th, 2008

Me quoting me, on the tenth of March:

As this sense of community becomes more militant, people begin to get the idea that they are “giving back” simply by becoming an additional voice in micro-revolutions that are already several voices strong. A great example of this is one of the favorite recurring platitudes from the utterly anti-individualist social-butterfly Obama fan: “I want to be part of this.” And so across the landscape there arises a feeling that each individual has contributed, by “helping” to make something happen that would have happened anyway. This poisons the idea that an individual can make a difference, while offering a toxic disguise that what is taking place is precisely the opposite — we start to make what are thought of as “differences” by adding our support to things that would’ve hummed along just fine without us.

Me quoting me, on the ninth of May:

Have you ever noticed that when left-wingers “want to be a part of this,” the “this” under discussion is seldom-to-never something that actually needs their support in order to succeed? They don’t seem to want to actually change the outcome of anything when they “want to be a part of” something. You can grow old waiting for liberals “want[ing] to be a part of” something that needs a tie-breaker vote; I don’t recall hearing of any liberals “want[ing] to be a part of” a Gore victory in 2000 or a Kerry victory in ‘04.

Me quoting me, today, commenting on Sister Toldjah’s blog which includes an amazing picture of the weekend Obama rally…seventy thousand heartbeats, give or take, “want[ing] to be a part of” something that really doesn’t need that much help, and maybe that’s exactly why they “want to be a part of” it.

And if I dare say so myself, my final uppercut is worthy of emphasis here:

Just had a “GOP commercial we really need” moment.

I don’t know if you can wrap up the following in thirty seconds, but it would really drive the point home assuming people would pay the level of attention to it that I would.

Think of Jay Leno’s “jaywalking” format. The reporter shoves a microphone in the faces of random people and asks them, what things did you decide to do because a lot of other people were already doing them?

And he gets back answers like go to a rock concert, go to an Obama rally, take part in an anti-war demonstration, go to an Obama rally, smoke some dope, go to an Obama rally, jump off a bridge, go to an Obama rally…

Next question: How happy are you with those things you decided to do…and the answers are…kinda sorta, not very, I guess it would’ve gone all right without me, I was young & dumb, what can I say…seemed like a great idea at the time.

I dunno. Maybe there’s no effective way to get that message across. Things we do just because everyone else is already doing them, aren’t going to culminate in a demonstrably positive effect on anything. And maybe that’s the whole point. Having a notable and beneficial effect on something, an effect that wouldn’t take place if you were missing, can be a frightening thing to an immature mind.

They want to be a part of something, without having an effect on that thing by including themselves in it.

What an exquisitely frustrating thing this internal contradiction must be. It must be like drinking endlessly from an elixir that is supposed to slake an agonizing thirst, and feels like it is, and ultimately is not. “I want to be a part…I want to make a difference…ooh, no, no I don’t, I want to be a part of something without making a difference one way or the other. I want to go through the motions of contributing to collective inertia, while in fact individually remaining completely devoid of mass.”

Poor, frustrated, delusional, demented souls.

Posted in Deranged Leftists, Poisoning Individuality and Reason | 3 Comments »

Tables Beware

Sunday, May 18th, 2008

Victor Davis Hanson, on what you’re not allowed to say about Barack Obama:

3. Rev. Wright is like “an old uncle” and his church “not particularly controversial.” Those who insist otherwise are using “snippets” and “loops” out of context for cheap political advantage. But should the Rev. repeat his serial lunacies at the National Press Club on national television, and insult the sympathetic liberal DC press corps, then he is suddenly expendable and inexplicably not the same pastor that Barack Obama knew for 20 years — and so now to be freely derided as a “spoiler.”

4. It is assumed that Barack Obama’s exotic middle name Hussein can provide authentic multicultural fides and hope of projecting a new, more globally sympathetic American image abroad, but to voice ‘Hussein’ aloud is assumed to be nefarious.
:
6. John McCain can be written off as “losing his bearings” and wanting U.S. troops in Iraq for “100 years.” But to repeat the fact that a Hamas advisor has praised Obama, or that one of his own foreign policy advisors has met with officials of that terrorist organization, is “divisive,” “a distraction,” and the “old politics as usual.” McCain’s fuzzy references to Shiite/Sunni terrorist cooperation are signs of his senility. Obama’s repeated confusion over how many states there are in the Union (48? or is it 58?) is proof of exhaustion and lack of sleep.

Quite a list. And there’s more.

Rich Lowry, on the same subject — the bossiness that seems to be inherent to Sen. Obama and his followers, specifically with regard to the word “distract”:

IF Barack Obama gets his way, the Oxford English Dictionary will update its definition of “distraction” by the end of the campaign: “Diversion of the mind, attention, etc., from any object or course that tends to advance the political interests of Barack Obama.”

After his blowout win in North Carolina last week, Obama turned to framing the rules of the general election ahead, warning in his victory speech of “efforts to distract us.” The chief distracter happens to be the man standing between Obama and the White House, John McCain, who will “use the very same playbook that his side has used time after time in election after election.”

Pat Buchanan, on the same subject yet again — and he cuts straight to the quick of the matter:

Here are the words that sent [Geraldine Ferraro] to the scaffold.

“If Obama was a white man he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up with the concept.”
:
The attack on Ferraro comes out of a conscious strategy of the Obama campaign — to seek immunity from attack by smearing any and all attackers as having racist motives. When Bill Clinton dismissed Obama’s claim to have been consistently antiwar as a “fairy tale,” and twinned Obama’s victory in South Carolina with Jesse Jackson’s, his statements were described as tinged with racism.

Early this week, Harvard Professor Orlando Patterson’s sensitive nostrils sniffed out racism in Hillary’s Red Phone ad, as there were no blacks in it. Patterson said it reminded him of D.W. Griffith’s pro-KKK “Birth of a Nation,” a 1915 film.

What Barack’s allies seem to be demanding is immunity, a special exemption from political attack, because he is African-American. And those who go after him are to be brought up on charges of racism, as has Bill Clinton, Ed Rendell and now Geraldine Ferraro.

But we aren’t done yet. You really must run, not walk, to the nearest acquaintance of yours with a Rush 24/7 membership and get hold of the podcast from Friday, May 16, first hour, time index 31:09.7 (without commercials) and forward from there by a minute or two.

There, you’ll find an impressively complete list of things…about which we cannot talk…concerning Senator Barack Obama. As Rush Limbaugh points out, it all started with his ears. Barack was sensitive to comments made about his ears. And now…it’s up to…well, you just have to listen. It’s a lot more stuff than you might think.

Like Buchanan pointed out, it seems what they really seek is immunity. From, I guess, “distractions.”

Mark Steyn has another observation to make:

President Bush was in Israel the other day and gave a speech to the Knesset…Sen. Obama was not mentioned in the text. No Democrat was mentioned, save for President Truman, in the context of his recognition of the new state of Israel when it was a mere 11 minutes old.

The Lady Doth Protest Too MuchNonetheless, Barack Obama decided that the president’s speech was really about him, and he didn’t care for it…And, taking their cue from the soon-to-be nominee’s weirdly petty narcissism, Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry, Joe Biden and Co. piled on to deplore Bush’s outrageous, unacceptable, unpresidential, outrageously unacceptable and unacceptably unpresidential behavior.

Honestly. What a bunch of self-absorbed ninnies. Here’s what the president said:

“Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is – the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”

It says something for Democrat touchiness that the minute a guy makes a generalized observation about folks who appease terrorists and dictators the Dems assume: Hey, they’re talking about me. Actually, he wasn’t – or, to be more precise, he wasn’t talking only about you.

New York Sun’s editorial on that…

The speed with which Democrats recognized themselves in that particular paragraph is telling. The president later said he wasn’t talking about them, but they insisted he was. “It is sad that President Bush would use a speech to the Knesset on the 60th anniversary of Israel’s independence to launch a false political attack,” Senator Obama said. “George Bush knows that I have never supported engagement with terrorists, and the president’s extraordinary politicization of foreign policy and the politics of fear do nothing to secure the American people or our stalwart ally Israel.”

In fact Senator Obama has promised to meet with the leaders of Iran, who are terrorists, and with the leader of North Korea, which is on the State Department’s terrorist list and which provided nuclear assistance to the terror-sponsoring state of Syria. If Mr. Obama doesn’t think the leaders of Iran are terrorists, he’s really not ready to answer that 3 a.m. phone call in the White House. To his credit Mr. Obama has said he won’t meet with Hamas, but his promise to meet with Hamas’s masters in Tehran undermines that position, as both Senator McCain and Senator Clinton have pointed out.

Or as The Anchoress put it…

[President Bush has] never deviated from his message – the press just hasn’t been letting you hear it. Now that it got out, today, unfiltered, it sure has infuriated the left and the press. What is very interesting to me is how quickly the headlines and stories have moved away from Bush and any full-text, contextual display of the speech to making it all about Obama. Yes…it really is all about the O!

Completely escaping the attention of both the Dems and the press is the fact that Bush mentioned appeasement and they all jumped up and said, “hey, Obama resembles that remark.” Badly, badly played, Dems. McCain, are you watching?

She continues the next day, with a money quote…

If I were a journalist, I’d be embarrassed. I’d also worry a little about backing a candidate with such a crystalline jaw that even when a jab is not directly meant for him, he still hits the mat. Obama’s tendency to carry and play the worlds tiniest violin – boohoo everybody is so mean to me and I’m so good – is getting old real fast. Did he not realize how much he sounds like whining Hillary?

So to recap, democrats instructed us, or rather journalists instructed us…does it really matter which one it is, at this point. Anyway, they instructed us to be really outraged at President Bush’s remarks which did not call out Barack Obama by name, or even indicate him, or target him, or focus on him — instead, the remarks were focused on the failed policy of appeasement.

“Obama resembles that remark” is exactly right. We were supposed to become outraged, unhinged and offended on behalf of the Obamessiah. Who made a point of also being outraged, unhinged and offended should anyone claim that he’s an appeaser. Well, which is it? Is he not an appeaser, and we should be outraged, unhinged and offended should anyone imply that he is? Or he is one, and we should be outraged, unhinged and offended on his behalf should anyone challenge the Obamaniacal wisdom of appeasing?

The timeless adage from law schools around the country, helps to explain exactly how our liberals managed to bite themselves square in the ass last week:

If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither on your side, pound the table.

The trouble with pounding tables, is that it disclaims structure. You are forsaking the law, and in so doing you are rejecting the implied contract of quid pro quo by which we live among each other. You are forsaking facts, and in so doing rejecting truth, the study of it, and principled thinking that is derived from it.

I remember getting my first taste of the wonders of collective bargaining, the very symbol and germinating seed of twentieth-century liberalism, in my childhood in Bellingham. The “workers” at a small thrift store were on strike, and my parents told us we “weren’t supposed to” shop there.

Does that mean it’s against the law?

Absolutely not, you just aren’t supposed to cross a picket line. Well, why? Because the workers are on strike. Why are they on strike? Because they don’t think their wages, or salary, or something, are enough. Huh. Well, what are their wages and salaries? That’s none of our concern, it’s a private dispute between labor and management. In all likelihood, due to ongoing negotiations, neither party would be authorized to tell us that if they wanted to.

Therein is the logical folly of liberalism. And of pounding on tables. If it’s none of our concern, how are we supposed to conclude that there’s something sacred about this picket line we shouldn’t be crossing?

Sen. Obama represents liberalism in what, I hope, is it’s twilight: After truth, logic and common sense have been utterly and permanently forsaken. With their roots in this Faustian exchange known as “collective bargaining,” liberals are supposed to decide on behalf of everybody else what is odious and offensive, versus what is to be enshrined and adored, without handing out any facts anybody could use to decide such proclamations on their own.

It’s been awhile by now since any liberals have actually pounded facts or the law. Oh yes, every now and then you get to see them go through the motions of doing it…this many zillion scientists signed our report on global warming or the theory of evolution being taught in schools…or abortion is the law of the land. But it’s all a sham. They’d have you believe once the Supreme Court decides something, by golly, you have no right to form your opinion, or even to speak freely against it. Heh. Bring up something called Bush v. Gore 2000 and see if they really believe that.

Nope, it’s all table pounding. Tables beware!

They’ve passed the critical horizon of the black hole of table pounding. That’s really all they can do anymore, is express their horror, angst and righteous indignation at…whatever the latest damn thing is. And they end up tearing apart whatever structural skeleton there was, upon which their argument was supposed to have been built in the first place. They end up contradicting themselves, sooner more likely than later. They have no navigational gear in the sea of ideas. They threw it all overboard.

They pound tables, and that is all they do now.

Posted in Deranged Leftists | No Comments »

Ted Kennedy’s Stroke-Like Symptoms

Saturday, May 17th, 2008

Uh oh. Time for a potential sympathy vote. This is a bad, bad thing…in the same way the California Supreme Court decision was a good thing, in that it reminded conservatives that democracy itself was being banished from our democratic republic for good. Thereby potentially inflating the conservative side of the vote as, on that side of the spectrum, rerun episodes of Everybody Loves Raymond might have sunk a few notches on the priority list.

This could have a similar effect on the other side. Liberals aren’t wild for issues to begin with…thinking about issues makes liberals look bad. They’re much wilder about personalities and human interest stories.

So I wish Massachusetts’ Senior Senator a speedy return to good health. And if that’s not possible, a debilitation just barely serious enough to put him out of the upper chamber for good. But an otherwise healthy, and long, life.

Outliving by a good stretch, any memory the everyday voter would have of his name. To watch his legacy vanish before his bloated baggy eyes.

And to think about what he did.

Update: Ace’s blog is not to be populated with distasteful comments about the Senator.

You know what? If you need to vent, go ahead and do it here. It’s not that I have any passionate hatred for Senator Ted…it’s more like I am tired, just to bits & pieces, of the double standard. And, in my world, deliberating cause and effect is always within the boundaries of good taste. Sen. Kennedy has been the cause of some very bad effects.

I don’t want to wish death on anybody, but his vision for the country is just-plain-bad for the country. If his career is reaching a closure, we’re all better off. Let the commemorations be quiet and brief.

Update 5/18/08: Looking good, but not out of the woods just yet. Healthy enough to turn on the TV and watch a Red Sox game. Condition not life-threatening, but serious.

The worst-case scenario, in my mind, would be for his condition to be sufficiently grave to merit the appointment of a successor, but for the wounded lion to limp onward out of respect to his “contributions,” “lifetime achievement” and “legacy.” That, in sum, would be handing Washington to the cloakroom-smokeroom types.

My sentiments are somewhere between those of commenter #25…

I disagree with him on almost every issue, but wish him a full recovery. Then I can disagree with him again. That is truly the greatest gift this country gives to the world.

…and 44…

Y’all are far too kind. Policy is one thing, but personal culpability for a young woman’s death another. As they said on another blog, may God have mercy on him. That’s all.

The one thing about Ted that everyone seems to forget, is that he could easily have gone home to catch a nap while a woman drowned in his car, and then gone on to fill out another forty years in our nation’s legislature just passing laws. That isn’t what Ted Kennedy did. He has been passing not only laws, but judgment on whether the rest of us are decent people or not.

Update 5/19/08: I don’t want to start another post about this man. I don’t have that much respect for him and I don’t think he is (or should be) that consequential. If he was just another Guy Smiley gift-of-gab no-talent guy like Bill Clinton, substituting silky bromides and platitudes in place of real achievement, I’d think more highly of him. But Clinton had some real talent. Kennedy was just born into his…whatever ya call it…”position.”

Anyway, had to link this. It’s a reasonable and powerful argument about why the Kopechne matter should have a much stronger bearing on things than most people think. Me, I don’t put quite so much emphasis on that single tragic event. It’s important, but mostly as a metaphor for how Ted Kennedy treats people before and after Mary Jo’s passing.

He just doesn’t think we’re worth very much. This is, in my mind, a reflection of what anti-war activism really is. It’s a ceiling to be placed on the level of effort energized for the purpose of defending us from harm. Somewhere beyond a couple of descents into five feet of water, when your clothes are already soaking wet anyway — but falling short of an actual cry for help, when you’re feelin’ all smashed & sleepy.

Posted in Deranged Leftists, Incumbent Scandals | 12 Comments »

Appeasing

Saturday, May 17th, 2008

It’s interesting how real life conjures up the same themes as the news, coincidentally, at any given time. I just got off the e-mail console, where I had to get a little bit philosophical with extended family over travel & trip plans. I saw us going into that thing…you know…with reliable people and unreliable people. I guess there are arrangements to be made insofar as kids from broken homes, stuff has to be coordinated and everybody has to be part of the coordination. Have you been noticing what I’ve been noticing about this? We dutifully take down what the unreliable people have in mind for things…as best we can, since they’re, y’know, unreliable…and then we refine it into instructions about what the reliable people should be doing. Usually, the reliable people do what they’re told, since they’re so reliable and all, and then they find out it all goes to hell because the unreliable people changed their minds, and so now it falls to the reliable people to revise things as expediently as can be managed, and keep watching for the next time the unreliable people change course.

The unreliable people don’t get bothered with any of this. Not a request for another visitation window, even several months down the road. What would be the point? And not a chastisement for changing plans at the last minute inconveniencing everybody else. What would be the point of that? And so all the burden, the inconvenience, falls to those who’ve earned the reputation of treating others with decent standards of respect and consideration.

The kids grow up to be buttholes. The grown-ups end up wondering why. They should be asking, why not? How could you expect the kids to grow up any other way? They see that when you live life for yourself, you get everything you want and nobody bugs you. When you do some planning and show considerations to others your life becomes one big headache; when you don’t, it becomes one big party. I’d have to worry about the kid who didn’t learn a lesson or two from that.

And now, fresh off my arguing about that…we see…via Sound Politics, via Little Green Footballs, via Ace of Spade HQ, via Cassy…some of these butthole kids have grown up and started writing editorials in the Seattle Times. Said editorials making about as much sense as you’d expect. Like fer example — how about the notion that Hitler’s demands weren’t entirely unreasonable? Bruce Ramsey is here to tell you exactly that.

Democrats are rebuking President Bush for saying in his speech to the Knesset, here, that to “negotiate with terrorists and radicals” is “appeasement.” The Democrats took it as a slap at Barack Obama. What bothers me is the continual reference to Hitler and his National Socialists, particularly the British and French accommodation at the Munich Conference of 1938.

The narrative we’re given about Munich is entirely in hindsight. We know what kind of man Hitler was, and that he started World War II in Europe. But in 1938 people knew a lot less. What Hitler was demanding at Munich was not unreasonable as a national claim (though he was making it in a last-minute, unreasonable way.) Germany’s claim was that the areas of Europe that spoke German and thought of themselves as German be under German authority. In September 1938 the principal remaining area was the Sudetenland. [emphasis mine]

Editorialist Ramsey’s column here rises to the level of absurdity in which — if you launch into it determined to deal it some argumentative damage, you can do some, but if you take a friendly posture to it and take it seriously you can do even more damage to it.

I mean, let’s try to extrapolate his argument. It’s a response to President Bush’s point that, you know, our history books already tell us about a time when we tried to negotiate with scumbags. Ramsey tries to turn us the other way by walking through the factual background in a little bit greater detail…Hitler wanted them to do X…they went ahead and did it…the rest is history. Okay, so as far as the backdrop of fact, Ramsey agrees with President Bush. The effect the appeasement of Hitler had on ensuing events, it seems if he disagrees with President Bush there, he doesn’t come out and say it. One would think he would so comment. So we can presume that he further agrees about the cause and effect.

In the end, the Bush-Ramsey point of disagreement, is what we are all to think about this, and/or how we are to behave next time we are presented with an opportunity to appease a tyrant. Ramsey says we should boil up the tea, butter the crumpets, and let the talks begin. Well, why? He just admitted President Bush summarized the events of seventy years ago accurately — his only reservation is that such a summation bothers him.

He provides a defense of the appeasers of the 1930’s that, essentially, their actions were understandable in the wake of what came before. What he seems incapable of comprehending, is that future scholars would not be able to afford such a spirited defense of our generation, should we elect to take the Obama route. They would quite naturally ask “your folks knew all about Hitler, and if you forgot, your President reminded you — what in the hell were you thinking?”

There’s one other thing going on here, and it really has me curious. Ramsey, far from being alone in saying this, intones “In order to get anywhere, each side has to listen to the other.” This is a hot, controversial issue, with each side intent on convincing the other how correct they are. Why, then, do these mint-tea-and-crumpet talkers never seem to furnish me with any details that would inspire me to see the correctness of their point of view? What’s going on in these “talks”? All I see is a bunch of compromises from the reasonable people, while the unreasonable people just do whatever they want. If the unreasonable people do make compromises, they just violate them later. Just like the extended-family visit-trip plans.

Another thing I see is that when these “talks” result in an agreement, somewhere down the road it turns into a big ol’ crap-fest. Yes, the mint-tea-and-crumpet talkers have their moment in the sun. They get to prance off planes with signed papers in hand that they can brandish before the cameras, and say like little kids, “Lookee What I Did!” just like Neville Chamberlin himself.

But without exception, it seems the longer a “talk” takes to turn into a crap-fest, the bigger the crap-fest it becomes. Ramsey’s point, the only one he’s managed to convincingly make, is a valid one: It’s an easy mistake to make, if it’s your first time making it. But that’s no justification for going back, Jack, and doin’ it again, decades later.

If I thought it was a good idea to make John McCain the next President, I’d say let’s go ahead and give the democrats that issue. Let’s make this election all about appeasement. Make it a mint tea and crumpets election year. You think we need to do more talking to the butt-wipes, vote for democrats, if you’ve learned your lesson then vote Republican. I’ll bet most voters have paid enough attention to agree with me. I’ll bet most of them have shared my experiences planning vacations & trips with extended family, to understand the principle that is at work here. McCain would bollux up the message, for sure, making it a “conservative” doctrine to go ahead and drink the tea — otherwise, though, we’d have a rout just like in 1994. I think most people are smart enough to get this. There’s people you do your negotiating and compromising with, and there’s other people who aren’t up to it. And people who aren’t up to it, always put up the appearance that they are. It’s what they figure they should do, in order to get what they want.

Posted in Fifth Column, TIK 52 | No Comments »

The Three Points

Monday, May 12th, 2008

From I Love Jet Noise…

During WWII, the Japanese were searching for a way to demoralize the American forces that they faced. The Japanese psychological warfare experts came up with a message that they thought would work well. They gave the script to their famous broadcaster “Tokyo Rose” and everyday she would broadcast this same message packaged in various ways hoping to have an impact on American GI morale. What was the message? It had three main points:

1. Your President is lying to you.

2. This war is wrong and illegal.

3. You cannot win the war.

Sound familiar? Maybe it’s because the U.S. mainstream media and the Democrat Party has picked up the same message and is broadcasting it to our troops. The only difference is that they claim to support our troops before they demoralize them.

Yes, it does sound familiar.

Posted in Bush Derangement Syndrome, Deranged Leftists, Fifth Column, Iraq and WoT Stuff, Justification for Invasion, Vision for Victory | No Comments »

What Has The Left Done to Reduce Gas Prices?

Saturday, May 10th, 2008

Isn’t it about time we started asking that question? So far, I have…

1. Don’t let us build nuclear power plants;
2. Don’t let us drill for oil stateside;
3. Tax our gas purchases, ostensibly for research of “alternative fuels”;
4. Make it more expensive to sell oil and gas, so those companies pass on the costs to US.

Anything I missed?

Well, Phil has been doing some slant-drilling in cartoon land, and he seems to have hit a mother-lode of sorts.

Posted in Deranged Leftists, Eat The Rich, Poisoning Capitalism | No Comments »

Spells to be Cast on Marines

Friday, May 9th, 2008

H/T: FARK.

Code Pink members unfurled a pink banner reading “Troops Home Now” Friday and waved signs as they began the protest, which they have promised would include incantations and pointy hats for a “witches, crones and sirens” day.

“Women are coming to cast spells and do rituals and to impart wisdom to figure out how we’re going to end war,” Zanne Sam Joi of Bay Area Code Pink told FOXNews.com.

Okay…

Posted in Deranged Leftists | 1 Comment »

Their Presumptive Nominee

Friday, May 9th, 2008

FrankJ gives a rundown of Obama’s strengths and weaknesses:

CONS

* Little experience.
* No accomplishments.
* Poor judgment.
* A history of hanging out with anti-American scumbags.
* Lies when politically convenient.
* Wherever he isn’t exceptionally bad, he’s just a typical politician.
* Liberal.

PROS

* He’s black, so his election will be historic.

This is part of something much bigger than Barack Obama. Have you ever noticed that when left-wingers “want to be a part of this,” the “this” under discussion is seldom-to-never something that actually needs their support in order to succeed? They don’t seem to want to actually change the outcome of anything when they “want to be a part of” something. You can grow old waiting for liberals “want[ing] to be a part of” something that needs a tie-breaker vote; I don’t recall hearing of any liberals “want[ing] to be a part of” a Gore victory in 2000 or a Kerry victory in ’04.

Maybe it’s their inherent hostility to the individual. It seems they wait for the letters to be carved into the tablet of history, and after that’s been done, they want to have their hands on the chisel so they can claim to be “part of” it.

Another thing I notice is they have a propensity to support unbelievably mediocre candidates for high office, with negative claims to greatness. In other words, candidates who only can claim to not be something else. Carter wasn’t Nixon, and Kerry wasn’t Bush. When the democrat candidate for President is a Senator, it’s a Senator who can plow through a lot of years without doing much of anything. When the democrat candidate for President is a Governor of a state, there’s a curious dearth of conversation or news about how that state is doing.

Conservatives are excited about their candidates when their candidates demonstrate the ability to represent true and effective conservatism. Liberals are excited about their candidates when their candidates demonstrate the ability to lie convincingly. Gosh…it just seems that when you’re looking for entirely mediocre candidates, it should be a simple matter to find one or two with some remarkable, positive competencies — as a garnish on the dish, if nothing else — and, furthermore, free or nearly-free of “baggage.”

How come, across whole generations, they never quite seem to be able to get that done?

Posted in Deranged Leftists, Elections, Obamamania | 3 Comments »

Unhappy Liberals

Thursday, May 8th, 2008

UnhappyFound this article via Boortz that says conservatives are much happier in life than liberals, and tries to find an explanation for this differential.

Regardless of marital status, income or church attendance, right-wing individuals reported greater life satisfaction and well-being than left-wingers, the new study found.

Conservatives also scored highest on measures of rationalization, which gauge a person’s tendency to justify, or explain away, inequalities.
:
If your beliefs don’t justify gaps in status, you could be left frustrated and disheartened, according to the researchers, Jaime Napier and John Jost of New York University. They conducted both a U.S.-centric survey and a more internationally focused one to arrive at the findings.

“Our research suggests that inequality takes a greater psychological toll on liberals than on conservatives,” the researchers write in the June issue of the journal Psychological Science, “apparently because liberals lack ideological rationalizations that would help them frame inequality in a positive light.”

Yeah, pretty much. Except the term “rationalization” seems to me to have been pre-selected as a pejorative one, and this could have a skewing effect even on an educated mind in discerning how all this stuff works.

To my way of thinking, the liberals are doomed to be gloomy, or at the very least perpetually confused. Their world view is full of contradictions.

Let’s start with the perception that there is socioeconomic inequality and that we have to do something about it. By now, it should be no secret to anyone that liberals tend to be secular. Their ranks have been swelled with atheists — not the agnostic kind, passively deprived of faith, humbly awaiting evidence of the Almighty to help make up his own mind about things. But the forceful, pugnacious kind. The kind who says “It is a simple matter of logic that there is no God, for I have decided there isn’t one.” And who further “proves” that anyone who doesn’t agree with him is an idiot.

There is, of course, a residual “Old Guard” of liberals who believe in a Higher Power, or at least go through the motions of so believing. But to them, this is a decidedly private thing. It’s not a truism of the cosmos, because they are adamant that someone else’s perception that the one true deity is Allah, or Gaea, or Ganesh, or chaos — these are all equally valid. And lest anyone start to think otherwise, let us get one thing straight here: A private article of belief is a decidedly inferior one. Their more public articles of belief are clearly meant to reign supreme. Single-payer healthcare is the way to go…we’re too civilized to “torture” our detainees…a woman has a right to choose…and if you think otherwise, you are an indecent person. If I’m a liberal and I believe in God, other people who believe in other gods, or no god at all, are all okay. Private article of belief. But I think we need to emit less carbon, and on that point if you disagree you are a sub-human Bush-loving knuckle-dragging red-state so-and-so…the more denigrating adjectives I can toss in, the better liberal I become. In fact, one can’t help but wonder if I’m going to be demoted or defrocked or spanked at the next liberal meeting if I fail to put in certain adjectives.

“Next order of business: The wooden paddle is for Liberal Bob. Liberal Bob, you were seen arguing with a Bush-toady in your cubicle at work on Thursday afternoon, and although you called him a thug and a fascist and a Nazi and a Freeper and wingnut, a you neglected to call him a chickenhawk. Now step up here, and grab your ankles.”

Their man-made codes and taboos and proscriptions are universal and brook no deviance…sealed shut with not a single loophole. That does not apply in any way to the “religious” dogma embraced by “religious” liberals. The Pope says abortion is wrong — how many pro-choice Catholics do we have, just under the Capitol dome, rolling their eyes, clearing their throats, shuffling nervously and staring at the ground? So it’s pretty well decided by now in liberal-land. Religion doesn’t exist, for the most part. And where it does, it doesn’t really count.

Now, just tuck that away for a minute and consider this:

The dirty little secret about liberals, is that each one of the ones capable of deep, philosophical thinking, is engaged in a highly secretive process of contemplating the costs of their policies. The inconveniences. The “drawbacks,” if you will. This stops, abruptly, at the great cloakroom doors that are locked shut behind them. They treat their ideological peers, in effect, with exactly the same courtesies and senses of discretion, that their fellow Americans have consistently been asking of them — said fellow Americans being consistently denied this. Liberalism loves to air America’s dirty laundry to the rest of the world, but it will not air dirty liberal laundry to the rest of America.

Think about all the liberal policies that have a downside, and how the liberals address that downside. They always address it with dismissal. They don’t even debate it. Abortion results in dead babies…you aren’t allowed to think of them as “babies.” Gun control deprives law-abiding citizens of their constitutional right…that right simply doesn’t exist. Waterboarding isn’t torture…yes it is. We need to know what these captured terrorists know…you aren’t allowed to call them “terrorists,” they’re “detainees.”

Global warming isn’t the end of the world…yes it is, we have scientists, and don’t you dare question them because you’re not a scientist. Okay, well these scientists over here disagree…well they don’t count because they’re “dirty.”

See the pattern? Liberals won’t debate the downsides of the policies they have in mind for us. They always dismiss. They always lecture us that we should be looking at the matter under review, only from one side — the side most beneficial to what they want to put in place. All other perspectives don’t count. The liberal will be drummed out of the liberal-club if he brings up those other perspectives, and also, by extension, if he allows you to even think on them for awhile.

The trouble is, that liberals don’t follow their own instructions here. They do think about the downside…in the privacy of their own craniums. A lot of liberals are poor — and a lot of liberal policies are most injurious to our poor. If you live in a rural area with distant neighbors and a lengthy response time from emergency services, that might not even be available…not being able to have a gun, hurts. If you make minimum wage and your employer’s profit margins are slender, and you’ve got a lot of colleagues who also make minimum wage…when your employer is suddenly forced to pay all of you another buck fifty an hour, just the ones he wants to keep on-board before he sends the rest home…that hurts. When your child is in a failing school district and you can’t apply for a voucher to move him somewhere else…that hurts.

So liberals have to sacrifice things for their own failed policies. And they aren’t allowed to talk to anyone about that, except for other liberals. Who will tell them, to coin a phrase, to “move on.”

Now, think about the implications of all this. There is no God; and if there is one, He doesn’t really count for anything. But even though God doesn’t really count for anything, we still have all these pain-in-the-ass rules that cost us a lot, and hurt us a-plenty. And like any rule from God, we aren’t allowed to deviate from those rules, to think about breaking them, to speak out against them. Worst of all, though, these rules did not come from God. They came from nameless, faceless, anonymous fellow liberals…who are not held accountable for their effects. Nor do they feel those effects, since these nameless faceless liberal mortal leaders are all richer than snot.

So sum it up. There is no God. There are rich people and poor people, and we liberals are here to close up that “wealth gap” — by being the very worst offenders, because when the richest among us make up new rules that hurt the poorest among us, it’s our place to tolerate it. Clearly, we believe in authority when it suits us to do so. But what authority is offended when rich people are richer than poor people? Not God, since He doesn’t exist and doesn’t count. And not the actual mortals we obey, the rich liberals. You don’t see them writing extra checks to the Treasury after tax season because they weren’t taxed enough. So the biggest problem in life that’s supposed to shame everybody, really doesn’t even offend anyone, but we have to pretend that it does, so we can fix it, since it’s our fault if it stays broken, but nothing we do will have any effect on it, and if we do manage to fix it we can’t take credit for it, but of course we’re never gonna fix it. And in the meantime, we should be really angry about it.

Hell yeah. I’d be unhappy too. There’d be something terribly wrong with any liberal who was not unhappy. I mean, worse than just being plain-ol’ liberal. Liberalness is both causative of, and symptomatic of, a most exquisite unhappiness.

Posted in Deranged Leftists | 3 Comments »

You People Need to Let Go of This

Sunday, May 4th, 2008

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.

Posted in Elections, Lying Liars, Obamamania, Poisoning Individuality and Reason | 1 Comment »

J.R. Dunn on Jimmy Carter

Saturday, May 3rd, 2008

In American Thinker. This is a story that really needs to be told.

Carter was indirectly responsible for putting the mullahs in power in Iran (kicking off the violent confrontation between Jihadism and the West in the process). He was directly responsible for handing Nicaragua to the Sandinistas (Carter refused to sign off on a plan to replace the dictator Somoza with a government of moderates) and Zimbabwe to Robert Mugabe. (Abel Muzorewa, the centrist opposition figure first elected president, was pushed aside with Carter’s acquiescence and a new election arranged that Mugabe was guaranteed to win.)

JimmahCarter’s weakness for goons has had horrendous historical consequences. Khomeini’s takeover of Iran led to a major war in which millions died, the birth of two terror organizations dedicated to the annihilation of Israel, the deaths of thousands of others across the world — including hundreds of Americans — and the encouragement of the Jihadi terror movement. The Sandinista takeover resulted in chaos across Central America for over a decade and the slaughter of thousands of Nicaraguans, including a large number of Miskito Indians in a process indistinguishable from genocide. Zimbabwe, once one of the richest states in Africa, is today an economic basket case suffering chronic famine and one the lowest life expectancies in the world. The end game is being played out now, with a distinct possibility of a climax to rival in horror and blood those of Rwanda and Cambodia.

Carter learned nothing from this, nothing even from his own unprecedented humiliation by the mullahs he helped put into power, who waited until the exact hour of Ronald Reagan’s inauguration to release the American hostages they had held for the better part of Carter’s last two years in office. To this day, he continues embracing killers, repeating the process endlessly as if, eventually, it’ll come out the way he pictures it in his heart of hearts, in some impossible lion-and-lamb reconciliation. But it always ends otherwise, in disgrace for himself and misery for third parties. Yet he cannot see it.

Dunn lists all this in substantiating something I’ve noticed about Carter, what he calls his “proclivity for thugs.” Across a third of a century, Carter has indeed been consistent in this way. What causes this?

This weakness is often found in educated men, who, apparently out of fear that they’ve missed out in experiencing some of life’s rougher aspects, strike up acquaintances with hard-edged figures they encounter.

Makes perfect sense to me. Blame…America…FIRST.

H/T to fellow Webloggin contributor Bookworm. Credit for the (original) image goes to John Cox, of Cox & Forkum fame.

Posted in Deranged Leftists, Poisoning Western Civilization | No Comments »

Super Delegates

Saturday, May 3rd, 2008

Like it says…and you thought Republicans were stealing elections. No, no, no…in democrat-land, elections are only stolen when the “good” people don’t win.

H/T: Cassie.

Posted in Deranged Leftists | 1 Comment »

I Made a New Word XVI

Saturday, May 3rd, 2008

PIDD (n.)

Persistent Interior Denial Disorder: A cognitive deficiency present in what has become a significant number of self-loathing, white, hetero liberal men. The most prominent symptom is a compulsion to wear outdoor clothing indoors, as if in a state of denial of the obvious fact that a comfortable interior is now being occupied.

It invariably turns out to be metaphorical for a veritable bouquet of other cognitive failures as well.

The most prominent victims of this disorder include such left-wing guilty-white-male luminaries as indoor-baseball-hat-wearer Michael Moore…

[Y]ou have to ask yourself, Larry, what’s it like to be black in America? And what kind of rage would you feel? And if you did feel that rage, what kind of things would you say that, at times, would be outrageous, crazy even, because you’ve had to live through this for so long. And I do not believe, as a white guy, that I am in any position to judge a black man who has had to live through that.

…obsessive/compulsive sunglasses-wearer Richard Belzer…

By the way, Richard always wears sunglasses— not to be cool, but because his eyes are very sesnsitive to the light. He doesn’t need sunglasses to be cool! See if your parents have a copy of Billy Joel’s album Turnstiles. There’s Richard on the cover, in the upper right, wearing his shades.

…and, fellow compulsive wraparound-shades-man Bono.

Bono is almost never seen in public without wearing sunglasses. During a Rolling Stone interview he stated:

[I have] very sensitive eyes to light. If somebody takes my photograph, I will see the flash for the rest of the day. My right eye swells up. I’ve a blockage there, so that my eyes go red a lot. So it’s part vanity, it’s part privacy and part sensitivity.

Experts say the rising trend of liberal white heterosexual men wearing outdoor clothing indoors, is recognized as one of the chief causes of global warming. After all, it did become popular at the same time that scientific instruments recorded a distinct increase in the global temperature…and as is the case with carbon dioxide, correlation IS causation. Except when it’s not.

Anyway, experts say there isn’t an awful lot you can do about a case of PIDD. It’s brought on in childhood. There are two things that lead to it:

1. A mindset that symbolism equals substance. This seems to give way to an impression that the sufferer can change his basic character attributes by choosing what kind of clothing he wears…and therefore becoming inseparably fused to one item of outdoor clothing or another. For example, Michael Moore apparently feels he’ll be betraying his loyal-supporter working class men and women, if he takes off his baseball cap, even as a sign of respect while appearing on a nationally-televised program.

2. The notion that the suffering person can unilaterally determine what is “okay” and what is not. Michael Moore feels certain designated victim groups, such as black people who live in America, suffer from backgrounds conducive to legitimate rage. He says he’s in no position to judge, but this is the opposite of the truth. In the history of non-judgmental people, he may very well be the most judgmental. He is in a position to judge, for example, that if you’re a member of a non-legitimate victim group, you have no rage and can’t have rage. Women are more legitimate victims than men. However, they are less legitimate than blacks. So there’s a hierarchy of sorts here. But the one-dimensional spectrum isn’t the point, the point is that Michael Moore decides this unilaterally, just as he decides unilaterally that it’s okay to wear a hat indoors. This is exactly the problem suffered by Belzer and Bono when they wear their sunglasses.

It is vitally important that we take steps to fight PIDD and fight it now, since the cognitive shortcomings that interfere with the perception that a person is indoors are linked to the cognitive failures that cause victims to apparently ignore the consequences of failed public policies. The evidence to support this connection is, quite simply, overwhelming, and the science is settled on it.

Posted in Deranged Leftists | 2 Comments »

Barracks

Saturday, May 3rd, 2008

Duffy notices our anti-war leftists have adopted a habit of couching their war protest behind some supposed “concern for the safety and well being of our troops.” And so it is with some bemused and frustrated curiosity on his part, and mine as well, that he links to the following clip:

Reactions from the Olbycrowd? Time will tell. If it was a betting pool I’d be putting my money on the square that says “RIGHT, and this is just further evidence of the corruption of BushHalliCheneyBurtonBlackWater blah blah blah…”

Just because I’ve seen that pattern hold up so well. Nobody who has anything whatsoever to do with these operations can ever actually be helped as long as the current President has the eighteenth letter after his name. Nothing can be done…ever…about anything…except a lot of complaining, and that name “Bush” always has to be stuck in there somewhere. That’s all they’ve done. About anything.

But I have an open mind. Let’s see what they do.

I just find it really amazing. If you’re out here, by which I mean you’re a civilian…good heavens. Lifestyle, lifestyle, lifestyle. Even if we dispense all the stuff for which people pay out of pocket and look only at the things to which they are “entitled.” Labels with big bold letters about MSG in their food, more labels about this-and-that may have been chopped up with machines that might’ve touched peanut products. Braille on the touch-keys of the drive-through ATM. Wheelchair ramps freakin’ everywhere. DO NOT USE THIS HAIRDRYER UNDER RUNNING WATER.

And then, on the other side of that green line, these guys are crapping on toilet seats that are half gone, and sharing their living quarters with big patches of mold. Hello?

Posted in Bush Derangement Syndrome, Noble Warriors | 1 Comment »

Being an Ass

Wednesday, April 30th, 2008

Rick served up Zossima’s own hindquarters to him on a silver platter (see comments). Well done.

You have to have been around Rick’s place for awhile and seen Zossima in action to understand how this ball got slammed over the net. Apparently, in the world occupied by some among us, being an ass is something of a noble virtue — provided you cling to an appropriate ideology.

It brings to mind a certain David Horowitz quote Phil dug up last week.

Talking about Leftists in general – a culture he himself was once immersed and saturated in – David Horowitz used this description:

It’s a kind of religion … they get intoxicated with their own virtue … so I was always preaching. I never listened.

Intoxicated with their own virtue – the very thing they claim to hate about the religious right.

The thing of it is, though, President Bush wasn’t an ass the same way Zossima and others on the left so rigorously pursue their asshattery. He didn’t make up some conspiracy theory on the spot about the Jews blowing up the World Trade Center with C4, or about the U.S. Government manufacturing the AIDS virus to keep black people in line. He saw an airhead reporter was building a nonsensical cock-and-bull argument that he was contradicting himself, by a deceptive use of ten-second sound bites, and he steamrolled right over her to get his message out the way he intended.

He went over her head and talked directly with the American people.

But the point is, once you’re intoxicated with your own virtue the way our leftists are — and I doubt any one among them even remembers what, exactly, is so noble about their fight — it’s quite natural to claim an exclusive license to being an ass. And to start exercising it.

Posted in Deranged Leftists | 2 Comments »

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