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Democrats Getting High on Limbaugh

Wednesday, October 10th, 2007

This article by Jack Kelly from this weekend comes close to earning a Best Sentence I’ve Heard Or Read Lately (BSIHORL) award. But it’s three sentences…

One would think Democrats would find enough to criticize in the things Rush Limbaugh actually says, since he rarely has kind things to say about them. But Mr. Limbaugh was being attacked Monday for something he didn’t say. And the timing of the attack makes it clear the Democrats knew perfectly well that what they were saying about Rush wasn’t true.

…and, if it actually got a BSIHORL award, you wouldn’t be quite so inclined to read the whole thing. Which you really should go and do. Now.

What…you’re still here??

Posted in Deranged Leftists | 4 Comments »

This Is Good XLIV

Friday, October 5th, 2007

Good satire is hard to find, being such a careful balance between things that are actually happening, and the absurd. If, by it’s very existence, it cannot whip the canvas off a “Big Reveal” that something is becoming silly, that ought not be, then the satire runs the risk of becoming silly itself. It is a demanding work of art, the soufflé of political humor.

This is what I call good satire.

Rush McFatso Limbaugh, for those of you who haven’t already been told what to think of him, is a right-wing, hate-mongering hater who uses The People’s Airwaves to spew his vile hate-speech into the primitive, insect brains of the dittohead masses. Anyone who listens to his hateful tirades risks becoming one of his mindless neo-con herd. Thank Goddess we have Democrat leaders like Harry Reid to listen to Limbaugh’s show for us and whittle his entire 3-hour program down to two words.
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…it’s especially infuriating that Limbaugh should attack soldiers who openly criticize Bush’s illegal and immoral war, as those are the only kinds of troops who deserve and have the respect of progressives everywhere. So much so that we won’t humiliate them by checking their credentials before we wheel them out to denounce the U.S.’s imperialist acts of aggression.

I do not have what it takes to write satire; I’m more inclined toward the monotonous, bloated, puffy essay. But one of the points upon which this piece relies, is an arcane, abstract matter that’s been bugging me like a pebble in my shoe for a long time now, that I haven’t seen pointed out by anyone, anywhere. Maybe I spilled a few words about it in the recent past, and can’t find my own ramblings. It’s possible. Let me expound.

It has to do with this thing about “those are the only kinds of troops who deserve and have the respect of progressives everywhere.” This is where the piece is nudged away from the plane of reality, since a progressive is not supposed to be heard qualifying classes of people who receive the respect or alms or comfort or assistance of other progressives…as much as they’d like to, and as accurately as this would reflect their actions and true intent. No, you won’t hear the liberal donks say such a thing, because in the domain of gutteral sounds the correct word is “all.” All, and things related to all. Everybody. Everyone, universal, every.

Of course, I’m not speaking of respect for our troops…not just that. “We support higher educational opportunities for all.” “Everybody deserves a living wage.”

What makes me queasy, is these face-to-face debates I’ve had over the last handful of years, here & there. And the “respect for troops” thing is just the most unsettling example of a phenomenon that transcends many different issues. It takes a certain level of diplomatic skill to keep these conversations light, because our donks have apprently been given instructions that they should look for opportunities to accuse the opposition of questioning their patriotism, and having detecting such an opportunity, should lash out with as much childish emotion as can be managed. You see them doing this in those letters to the editor they’ve been instructed to write, and in their left-wing blogs that exist pretty much for the purpose of repetitively recycling instructions on what is to be adored and what is to be deplored. Questioning My Patriotism! Grrrr!

And always, in the Iraq situation, one which both sides acknowledge is generally sucky, and on which both sides acknowledge a solution is elusive, and which just about everyone acknowledges to be complicated…the subject is directed, without me or anyone else bringing it up, to how the liberal feels about the troops. I’ve come to see it as a “Doth Protest Too Much” kind of a thing. And like any other issue, the word “all” is stuck in there. The donk supports the troops. All the troops.

I ask…what about the troops who want to listen to Rush Limbaugh?

What about the troops who not only support other troops like you do, but the mission as well, as you don’t?

What about the troops who re-up when they don’t have to?

What about the troops who voted for George W. Bush? Twice?

Those — too? That “all”?

I never get back the emphatic “Yes!” that you might expect. Maybe if I participated in such exchanges more often, I’d have seen it by now, but I’m a little timid. If I’m to come to blows with someone and start losing some friends, I’d much rather the issue be something genuine and real. To become a pariah because I’ve fallen into the role of “bad guy” in some script that has been circulated by Dr. Howard Dean, a charming and intelligent charlatan I’ve never personally met, just isn’t my cuppa.

But by far the most typical reaction is a “homina homina” thing followed by a hasty change in subject. That freaks me out, a little.

And as I pointed out above, it has ramifications with many other issues. “Everybody deserves a living wage” has been exposed, many times, as a crock. Liberal donks don’t believe this, even if they say they do. What if, for example, an evil, crooked CEO of the Ken Lay variety lost all his income and assets, and couldn’t get a job that paid a living wage. Forced to sell pencils in the street, like it’s 1929 all over again. Would that represent a sub-standard situation which decent people would feel some moral compulsion to jump into & fix? Because, of course, however you define a “living wage” this guy probably wouldn’t be cranking it out.

No. Of course not. It’s silly to think so even for a second. Well then…what about a CEO who wasn’t as wicked as Ken Lay? What if the same thing happened to an only-halfway crooked CEO. Or a CEO who wasn’t crooked at all? What if it was just some guy who had it good for awhile, and now, was taken down a few pegs to the point where he couldn’t even earn that “living wage”?

This is exactly the kind of dream our donks have before they get that twisted grin on their silly donk faces and that sick twinkle in their donkey eyeballs. I believe they call it “finding out what it’s like.” Is it an ethically compromised situation in which they feel compelled to run interference…get that guy the “living wage” he “deserves,” just as “everyone” does?

Again — anybody who’s been paying attention, understands that is just ridiculous. In short, they don’t mean “all.”

I’ve come to learn, slowly, that donks never seem to mean “all.” It’s the one word they can be counted-upon to start throwing around, when what they really mean is the exact opposite. There is always a filtering process in place when they use the word “all.”

Free speech is another great example. It’s pretty easy to produce or happen-upon a donk who claims it to be breathtakingly important, that “all viewpoints be heard” and that “freedom of speech” should be a right “enjoyed by all.” If they meant that for real, they would make a priority out of seeing to it the neo-Nazi skinheads could reach as big an audience as could be managed, so we could hear all about the “n-word” people don’t know their place, and the Jews made up the story about the holocaust right before they took over all the businesses. So I’m a little relieved that the donks don’t mean what they say. But if you took their words at face value, you’d have to infer this is exactly what they mean.

The donk has freedom of speech…the donk’s enjoyment of freedom of speech, is measured in his ability to reach an audience, voluntary if possible; captive, just as good. We “all” have a “right” to “freedom of speech”; therefore, the Nazi skinhead deserves a captive audience too. That would be robust, durable, simple logic. What spoils it is not that the brakes are slammed on before the Nazi is given a podium and a bullhorn, but it’s intrinsic insincerity. “All” doesn’t mean “all”; it never does.

It’s the solidarity. The living-in-tribes. The “my team is right about everything, the other team is never right about anything” stuff. It keeps getting in the way. In the last few years, I’ve developed this confusion about whether to laugh or cry when I come across this: The donks have this unwritten code, this “gang” doctrine. They are very much like sports fans who support a team, don’t know why they support the team, and adore each other all the more because nobody can offer a reason why the team should be supported. This puts them on a higher plane with each other. I guess if a well-justified reason for this team-adoration would or could be produced, this would introduce the possibility that perhaps the love is conditional.

And so no reason is produced. I don’t understand if this is a necessary ingredient to their group identity, but it certainly enhances the experience. I expect this lack-of-justification must be some kind of dessert to the feast. Or at least a garnish. The little boy who loses the ball game, by receiving the same ice cream sundae awarded to the other little boy who won it, at least knows that his Mom will always love him no matter what.

But Job Number One is the solidarity. Love the tribe with or without conditions, above all other things you must love it. Thou shalt not be caught saying or doing anything that might hurt the tribe. Nor shalt thou be caught saying or doing anything that might help the other one.

And this is why, I’m gathering, “all” never means “all” — as often as the gutteral sounds are trotted out and run through the lazy disconnected voice box. Every, everyone, each of us, all.

Hey, politics is inextricably intertwined with insincerity. But I would hope when a political ideology forms the habit of using a phrase, month in month out, year in and year out…and it can be counted on each time to indicate something logically opposite from what it’s supposed to mean…the rest of us would apply some pressure toward that phrase’s retirement. Otherwise, we’re all just chumps. It’s like a philanderer’s wife being told he’ll be home in time for dinner, and continuing to have that yummy pot roast and mashed potatoes ready at 5:30, fresh out of the oven, each and every single night even though it’s always wasted. There comes a point, to be frank about it, where the poor miserable woman ceases to be victimized and starts to be just plain stupid.

Posted in Deranged Leftists, Iraq and WoT Stuff, Vision for Victory | 1 Comment »

Easy

Sunday, September 30th, 2007

Via New York Daily News, via Trying To Grok, via Wizbang, via Rick, we learn of a truthy article about Barack Obama — or more precisely, about his campaign. It’s fascinating because it mentions what everybody knows, and nobody else says out loud. And in case you missed it, spells it out for you in the parting shot at the end.

Singles will check out eligible candidates at Obama rally
By Jo Piazza
Thursday, September 27th 2007, 3:18 PM

Looking for a date for Friday night? Want someone to read thepoliticker.com with and talk to about Eliot Spitzer’s fiscal policy late into the night?

Like-minded city singles are looking to tonight’s Barack Obama rally as more than just a politically charged soiree: It’ll be a raging pickup scene.
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Even the invite for the event reads like a singles bash:

“Hope hits the Big Apple! Join us at Jay-Z’s 4-0/40 Club on Thursday as we ride the winds of change from the hottest rally in New York. Move to the music, socialize with friends, and let your voice be heard as we celebrate with audacity.”
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One ardent Obama supporter (who declined to give his name because he works in politics) says he’ll attend both the rally and the after-party, and he doesn’t expect to be going home alone.

He’s confident for a reason.

“Let’s face it: Leftie girls are easy,” he says.

Ah…now, let’s be fair. It’s not so much about the donk girls being easy — although, it would be dishonest or foolish to dismiss that supposition out-of-hand. But as any experienced straight fella knows, and you don’t repeat this often in a co-ed environment: Methods work. Females of all political persuasions hate this, but truth doesn’t often deplore what the ladies deplore, much as they’d like it to. Methods work, guys who use methods are far “luckier” than guys who do not, and that nonsense about “eyes met from across the room, and we just clicked in a magic moment,” etc., has just about as much basis in reality as your average unicorn. When a lady says this, what she’s saying is that her paramour managed to think circles around her, to “fool” her if you will. Usually, with little or no actual deceipt, since when it works that well it means the damsel gave her tacit endorsement.

Simply put, the single fella has to have an angle.

Angles are arranged into families, just as species are arranged into phyla.

And the upshot is — this has been true since ancient times — there is no aphrodesiac more powerful than the “you and me against the world” thing. It ties in with just about everything on a maiden’s mind when she’s looking for a suitor. She’s programmed by the forces of evolution, or by God, or both, to make the world work the way she wants to work, through her uterus. She gets a vote, just one vote, on how the next generation is to molded and shaped, based on how she will splice her genes.

And so the appeal of a prospective suitor is equivalent to the appeal of the opportunity he brings. No opportunity is more appealing than the fleeting one, so the message is simple: We belong together, because you and I “get” a simple concept the rest of the world is too stupid to figure out. I’m the Adam to your Eve.

What is particularly embarrassing about this particular snippet to Obama The Walks-On-Water candidate, is that this superficial, utterly non-politics-related forum is going to work better with his events than with those aligned with any other candidate. Personally, I’ve done exactly this with the political movements on the other side of the aisle, many times. With mixed success.

It’s a little more complicated with rallies and candidates on the “right” side. The reasons why, are things I don’t wish to inspect closely here; they should be self-evident. If you don’t really care about re-shaping the world as much as you pretend to, and you just want something easy, the left side is the path of least resistance.

Don't Forget to Pre-Soak, Honey And you’re certainly not going to head down to a Hillary rally. I mean who knows, things might actually work out over a long term. What guy wants to spend half a century washing dishes by hand? Edwards is out, too. He’s a rich tort lawyer who has produced nothing, pretending to do battle on behalf of hard-working poor people, against rich people just like him. You have to be pretty stupid to fall for something like that, and when a woman is that stupid, she gets boring pretty quick. Hillary out, Edwards out. That leaves Obama.

As an added bonus, I would have to imagine the ladies there have been pre-selected for you. “You and I get it, nobody else does, let’s start changing what we both want changed without discussing what we’re going to change it to” — that’s Obama’s campaign theme right there. Anybody smart enough to see that one coming, isn’t going to be at an Obama bash.

It would have to be like some magical fishing trip, in which the fish jump into your boat. And somehow gut and clean themselves.

But if we can take a moment to inspect Obama’s political prospects and veer away from the dating scene for just a few paragraphs: This is why a lot of people don’t take him seriously. America, as a country, has a rich history and there is a core theme running throughout that history. In our culture, we do things the easy way for as long as we can…until it can be ascertained the easy way is going to be less rewarding than the hard way. And then, to our credit, we do things the hard way.

It is the shining jewel to the American crown. It is our schtick, you might say. We love our Starbuck’s foo-foo drinks and our big comfy air-conditioned cars and our water and dry-cleaning delivery services — but when you can get something over the long term by doing something tough, that you can’t get by doing it easy, we’re the first to see it and we are the most consistent in acting on it.

The countries all over the rest of the world cluck their tongues and call us stupid and talk about how much they resent us, and we just keep plugging away. What they don’t understand about us, after all, they’re never going to learn.

These single fellas showing up at the Obama rallies who just want to get their wickers wet, it seems to me, are emblematic of the Obama campaign as a whole. They want to do things the easy way, and are therefore “ardent supporters” of a campaign that is all about doing things the easy way. Ooh, we got a candidate who is the “real deal” and is articulate and well-spoken. Let’s get him elected and then figure out what he’s actually going to do.

So Obama, as a political phenomenon as well as a social one — means this: The destination is arbitrary, the ease of the journey is what truly matters.

This is as un-American as un-American can possibly be. It is antithetical to everything in our legacy that is significant and good. But I don’t say that to pass judgment on it, I’m just pointing out something about the very nature of the Obama campaign that dooms it’s chances and limits it’s life-expectancy. The plant is seriously mismatched from the surrounding soil. Obama has a commanding presence and can deliver empty platitudes just as well as anybody else, and is running for exactly the right office — in the wrong country. He’s a short-circuit, a traversing of the path-of-least-resistance, campaigning within a society that isn’t terribly wild about such things.

To recap: Yeah, we do like “easy,” as much as, maybe even more than, any other country on the globe. But we like to get things even more — be they easy or hard. We want to be assured we’re going to get everything the easy way, that we’d get if we did things the hard way. All Americans insist on this. Even our liberals insist on it. They just can’t see as far down the road as normal people can. The moment will come when Obama has to make those assurances, and that’s when his candidacy will end.

But in the meantime, I hope those horny guys get lucky. That’s about all they’re getting.

Posted in Deranged Leftists, Glad I Learned About This | 2 Comments »

Phony Soldiers

Saturday, September 29th, 2007

Well well well. The donks are trying to make some hay out of Rush Limbaugh’s Phony Soldiers remark. There’s an effort in the House of Representatives to get a resolution going condemning him for his remarks.

Obviously, this is all about equal-time, what with that stupid General Betray Us ad backfiring so impressively. You dare to make “Move On From Some Selected Things And Not Other Things Dot Org” regretful or embarrassed about their ad…which seemed like such a great idea to them at the time…why, they’ve got to be able to do the same thing to Limbaugh, right? They’re entitled to a “freebie,” right?

All in the name of equal time?

Well…let’s take a look at this. Rush Limbaugh is failing to appreciate the service of all the soldiers, is that it? The soldiers he calls “phony soldiers,” are soldiers who disagree with his personal opinions.

I guess the closest parallel I can find to this, is the liberal donk who claims to “support the troops but not their mission.” I specifically brought this issue up with one of them one time. He was trying to start a dialog…snicker…yeah, in that way donks start dialogs. You know. To finish them. He wanted to start a dialog on whether it was possible to support the troops while opposing the mission upon which those troops were sent. Obviously, to bully and intimidate and cudgel anyone within earshot toward believing in the affirmative.

Along came the sound bite — I support the troops, I just oppose what they’ve been sent to do.

I thought it appropriate to pose a simple inquiry. I really wanted to know. Do you support all of the troops? And he was like…well, what do you mean by that? I said, I mean, even the troops who don’t agree with you about the mission. Some of these troops about which I keep hearing — the ones who “re-up” when they don’t have to. The ones who believe so strongly in what they’re doing, that they volunteer. Maybe…the ones who voted for President Bush twice. Do you support those troops? Or when you say “the troops,” do you mean only the ones you happen to like?

He changed the subject.

A year later, here we are…being instructed to hold Rush Limbaugh in some kind of contempt for failing to support all the troops, even the ones who disagree with him.

Rush has often been heard to say he doesn’t need equal time, he is equal time. If that’s true anywhere, seems to me it’s especially true here. From what I’ve been able to figure out, our liberal donks have been selectively picking and choosing which troops to support, since the very first one among them stepped forward and said “I support the troops.”

And I’ve noticed this is true across the board. Anytime a donk says “I support free health care…affordable college tuition…a transparent government…clean air and water…for all” you get back such an interesting deer-in-headlights look when you pose the simple follow-up: “Even folks who vote Republican?”

It brings a smile to my face watching them scramble. But kind of a sad one. With liberals, everything depends on definitions. Even miniscule tidbits with supposedly ironclad non-negotiable meanings…like “all” and “everybody.” And “is.”

Posted in Deranged Leftists, Iraq and WoT Stuff | 2 Comments »

Unhappy Marriage

Friday, September 28th, 2007

David Limbaugh makes a lot of good points.

The [crazy leftist donk] base, typified by groups like MoveOn.org, has no choice but to accept the Democratic Party as its vehicle to promote the liberal policy agenda. There is no other viable alternative. In turn, party leaders must cater to the far left because of its indispensable funding and grassroots contributions.

While there are many blind followers in the base, there are also plenty of savvy operators who are fully aware of the massive deception Democratic leaders have perpetrated on the American people concerning Iraq.

They’re too shrewd not to understand that John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, to name a prominent few, have been lying through their teeth in saying they were duped into supporting the Iraq war resolution.

Other than their delusions about Bush having stolen the 2000 election, nothing motivates the base more than the carefully crafted fable that Bush “lied” us into war. You cannot be worthy of the left’s consideration unless you fully embrace this propaganda.

My take on it? He’s being unfair in singling out the donks, since unhappy marriages is what successful politics are all about. Like millions of others, I’m in a pretty “unhealthy marriage” with the Bush administration right now, and I’m sure your average rabid leftist donk is going to lose no time in pointing that out should Limbaugh’s article find it’s way under that donk’s nose.

And the wombat-rabies-bollywonkers crazy donk would be quite correct.

But in his typical lawyerly fashion, and in this context I mean that as a compliment, he dissects the unholy alliance with an admirable diligence and the slicing-and-dicing job ends up neat, thorough, and educational.

The only problem that remains is how to warn the mainstream halfwits that this is what they’re ready to elect next year. A bunch of freakin’ raving loons who show NO signs of executing an actual plan, any better than they did following the 2006 elections. Yes, politics is filled with unhappy marriages. But fer cryin’ out loud, there’s Romeo-and-Juliet unhappy marriages, and then there’s Claus and Sonny von Bulow unhappy marriages.

Posted in Deranged Leftists | No Comments »

Adorable, Until…

Thursday, September 27th, 2007

Thanks to blogger friend Phil for sending me this in an off line e-mail.

Hillary Clinton ‘could cost Democrats dear’
By Toby Harnden in Washington
Last Updated: 2:29am BST 27/09/2007

A leaked Democratic poll has suggested that Hillary Clinton, the frontrunner in the race for the party’s presidential nomination, could lose the 2008 election because of her “very polarised image”.

The survey by the Democratic pollsters Lake Research indicated that both Mrs Clinton and Barack Obama, second in the Democratic race, trailed Rudy Giuliani, the Republican front runner, in 31 swing congressional districts.

The private memo, leaked to The Washington Post, painted what researchers described as a “sobering picture” for Democrats who believe that President George W Bush’s disastrous favourability numbers almost guarantee they will capture the White House next year.

All party preference polls show that Democrats are much more popular than Republicans. But when the names of individual candidates are used, the gap narrows considerably.

“The images of the two early [Democratic] favourites are part of the problem,” the memo said.
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The poll found that Mrs Clinton, in particular, could damage the chances of congressional Democratic candidates on the ballot. The sensitivity of the issue was underlined by the reluctance of Democrats to discuss the survey.

“We’re not commenting on this poll,” said Daniel Gotoff, co-author of the memo accompanying the Lake Research poll. “It was leaked and obviously not by us.”

It really got me to thinking. If I was a donk party chieftain way high up, responsible for writing party platforms and doing the cool “kingmaker” stuff, figuring out who was going to get nominated…how would I handle this, exactly?

It’s a little awkward for them. See they’ve got this name for themselves…they don’t call themselves “donks,” they call themselves something that has to do with the ancient Greek word demos, for “The People.” And if you call them that but leave the “ic” off the end, they get really cranky — right before insisting you call the Boy Scouts a “hate group.” But for the donks to get out of this malaise they’re in, it seems there’s no avenue available to them except to go by that ancient Greek name, and start living up to it.

But see, they can’t do that. The People want a bunch of things the donks aren’t going to tolerate, let alone promote. Let us have guns. Stop reverse-discrimination on the basis of skin color. Build a border around the country that actually means something. Make public school students repeat grades until they pass the requirements academically…in English. Put the United Nations in the business of bringing food and medicine to those who need it — and nothing else — and put them in the position of supervised, not supervisor.

And, bring me the bodies of dead terrorists. The more the better. Preferably, a little singed around the edges with horrified expressions etched onto their dirty dead faces. But quantity over quality; the bigger the carcass pile, the better.

Take your glowbubble wormening and shove it. Drill in the Arctic. Lower my taxes. Get people off welfare. Let me listen to whatever radio station I think deserves my attention, and let those radio stations broadcast what they think will attract and hold my interest. Treat businesses more like they’re real people…which is what they are…and treat unions as if they’re not, since they aren’t.

They can’t do any of this. And so they are left to make noise about scandals that involve Republicans, so that those scandals end up toppling careers, and direct us to “move on” from scandals that involve donks, so that those scandals don’t.

They do other things to make their image all friendly and happy — and, in a grievous assault upon that Greek name by which they would choose to go, everything they do seems to begin and end with a shady smoke-filled back room handshake with the right people. Union bosses endorse the donk candidate in an important election, and then in so doing insist on being called “the police” or “the firemen.” Our print media journalists, also in the right place at the right time during the back room handshake deal, obediently comply. That funny Greek name, come to think on it, makes perfect sense — as long as you don’t interpret “The People” to mean all of the people. What it means is, the “right” people. Union thugs, crooked politicians, heads of states that sponsor terrorism, or in some other way fail to have our interests at heart. People antagonistic, for whatever reason, to capitalism. Gun-grabbing Nazis. The important thing is, all the definitions are laid out with the captains of all those teams…behind closed doors. Those “people.”

The riffraff, the hoi polloi, they’re just kind of a hydraulic fluid agent through which it’s all supposed to be made to happen.

But the donks do have this going for them — they are popular. They are much more popular than Republicans. Until they select a candidate, and then the worm turns. Any candidate.

How can I not be amused by this? They’ve clearly got something going in their favor right now, even if that something is limited to them simply not being Republicans. The ideas they have, the “principles” under which they operate, if you want to call ’em that…loser.

Their candidates…bigger losers. We don’t like them because after all the money’s been spent making them likable, the candidates remain anything but. The worst part of it is that just before the candidates stop being likable, what they do to end their likability, has something to do with explaining what they plan to do after they win.

It must be awfully frustrating. Especially when you have that razor-thin window of opportunity after you’ve sent all these faux-grassroots voices out there with their phony bumper-sticker slogans, about so-and-so being “the real deal,” before so-and-so opens his or her mouth and spoils everything. That must be more frustrating than if you didn’t have that narrow window of political victory at all.

Hillary has a good defense here. Nominate her, and she can win — with good timing. If ballots are punched while people are still thinking about poor, poor Hillary and her husband cheating on her, and by golly it’s high time we had a woman in the White House, and oh she is so strong-willed just like someone on a Lifetime television movie airing on a Sunday night…but before they think about issues, and lying, and “I don’t recall,” and Rose Law Firm, and subpoenaed billing records…as long as the election takes place within that narrow window of time, she can win.

If it happens anywhere outside that narrow window, she’s a dead duck.

But the same is true of anybody else who could be nominated. It all demands careful handling and public relations. Very, very careful, with surgical precision…just like any other bad idea.

The other thing that impresses me about this, is that in spite of Thing I Know #212…

Some of the words that end with “ist” seem to support weighy, urgent ideas, but enjoy very little by way of definition, especially the ones tossed around over the last thirty years. Chauvinist. Racist. Feminist. People who use these words the most often, seem to be frustrated by something. Maybe they’re frustrated because nobody has any way of knowing exactly what it is they’re trying to say.

…there is something decidedly sexist about Hillary’s star appeal, and the primary force behind it. I’m referring to husband Bill’s chronic infidelity. Were it not for that, I wouldn’t be talking about her, and neither would anybody else.

Now, what would we be saying about a male candidate whose wife was screwing every pair of trousers in town because she had all the scruples of an alley cat? It’s not difficult at all to speculate, with remarkable confidence. We’d probably be abuzz with something like…how, if he can’t preside properly over his own household, does he dare to offer himself in equivalent service to his country. How good can a leader of anything be in a leadership position, when his wife sleeps with other guys? Something questioning his manhood, and his lack of willingness to stand up for it.

We certainly wouldn’t be cluck-clucking over how the poor dear fellow is so put-upon, and deserves to be President. I’m sure very few would be saying anything even remotely similar to that. Even fewer would admit to saying something like that.

People who like Hillary, are often heard to ask a question: “Is America ready for a woman to be President?” My counter-question is whether America is ready for a cuckold to be President…a male cuckold. And the fact is, the country is decidedly NOT. She won’t be. The cuckold’s other qualifications impeccable, unquestionable, polished to a mirror-finish, he wouldn’t last as long as a snowflake on a red hot stove.

But Hillary’s failure to keep her spouse happy — let’s face it, if she was a man, that’s exactly what we’d be calling it — isn’t just a stumbling block that has managed to stay out of her way. It helps her. It is a virtual qualification for the office she seeks.

Arguably, her only one.

Why it’s gotten Hillary this far, is something someone should be called-upon to explain. I’d love to hear the composition of it, although I imagine the substance of it wouldn’t hold much surprise. It says something about women, or more precisely, how they are perceived by those who hold themselves up as tireless champions fighting for the interests of women. And what it says, however it is phrased, can’t be good.

Posted in Elections, Lying Liars, Pinheads | 2 Comments »

Not In It For The Attention, Mind You… X

Tuesday, September 25th, 2007

On Saturday morning, I had defined what I see are the two most important issues of next year’s elections, all-but-guaranteed to stay in those top two slots between now and then.

The single most important issue of the presidential elections next year: Who is going to bring me the the biggest pile of dead terrorist carcasses over the next four years?
:
Coming in at a close second, and I do mean a close one, is a big package of interrelated sub-issues all knotted together. They have to do with the people who are actually proud to call themselves “liberals,” not in the classic sense, but in the post-modern sense…Are liberals crazy, or just stupid? Do we really have to let them vote even when they so obviously lack the level of maturity one would be expected to achieve by age eighteen?
:
What exactly is this well-funded advocacy group that I continue to call “Move On From Some Things And Dwell Endlessly On Other Things Dot Org”? For whom do they speak? Now that we all understand they’re a bunch of all-but-certified nutcases, when they tell us their nutcase things are they speaking on behalf of Hillary? Obama? Edwards? Kerry? Kennedy? Anybody else who will be invested with the authority to decide important, life-altering things, should we opt to put the kiddies from the kiddie-table in charge again next year? What about Michael Moore, does he speak for anybody? How cozy is his relationship with the “Inmates Should Run The Asylum” party?

In posing this as an open question to be decided, I speak recklessly, since I speak for others. I gather many who feel the obligation of exercising their civic duties, are all-but-decided that the Republicans have been in charge long enough. But they aren’t getting a warm-fuzzy out of the prospect of putting the donks in the White House. They know there are consequences. They know, for four years at least, we’ll be buried in phony solutions to non-problems, sky-high inflation, race-baiting, feminist-weeping, tyrant-coddling.

For myself, it’s not an open question. It’s an item of concern.

And I’ll tell you what really concerns me about this, what really makes it almost as important — but not quite — as the “who’s gonna deliver the biggest number of dead-terrorist-bodies” issue. It’s the donks themselves. They aren’t ready to accuse me of sliming and slandering them; not some among them, anyway. These donks don’t disagree with me about what they are, or might be. To plagiarize Sally Field for just a second: They’re nuts. They’re really, really nuts.

My first reminder of this was not long at all in coming. Fellow Webloggin contributor Teri O’Brien managed to capture an item from the 9/11 anniversary that had smoothly flown in under my radar, which falls squarely into this second-most-important issue and in fact helps to highlight how important it really is. Veteran actor James Brolin, famous for a long and stellar movie career and for marrying whats-her-name, made just about as big an ass out of himself as could be managed under a tight schedule. Appearing on WPLR radio to promote his new film, The Hunting Party, he managed to get himself a little sidetracked. The film, you’ll notice, has something to do with the CIA not being able to find bad guys. Brolin, perhaps wishing for a peaceful domestic existence, or whatever, went out of his way to find some parallels in real-life — and the radio guys had to remind him what today’s date was.

Brolin thought this was worthy of a sarcastic, genuflecting comment: “Happy 9/11.” Too bad there wasn’t someone around to remind him he was really on the radio, and his words weren’t being confined to a cozy cloister of his crazy left-wing anti-war buddies, an audience to which I’m gathering he’s somewhat better accustomed. You decide:

Now, as I said, half-cocked brain-dead comments like this one, may or may not be representative of the donk party that wishes to be placed in charge of more things next year, and that, to me, is the open question on the second-most-important issue. What is a democrat? Is it someone who’s going to do what the electorate has in mind when it votes for democrats…just shave off the most prominent and offensive protrusions of the Republican platform, maybe save America from becoming a theocracy one more time? Rescue some little old ladies from having to choose between medicine and dog food?

I’m not asking about what registered democrat voters intend to have done when they are punching ballots. That and a buck-fifty will get you a coffee. I want to know what democrat leaders do when they are voted in. Are they all about repealing unwanted extremist conservative policies?

Or are they about a bunch of crazy crap. Like actor Brolin. Do they all live in their little tiny worlds, places where the worst attack ever launched against the United States since Pearl Harbor, and perhaps ever, is nothing more than inspiration for a sarcastic joke and a couple of yuks. In short, I’m wondering the same thing about Brolin that I wonder about Michael Moore. The donk activists, no doubt, will pour out of the woodwork with their “yes but” nonsense, e.g., “yes we all know that was offensive and absurd, but he makes some good points…”

Does Brolin represent the donk politicians who want to be put in charge of things next year?

Well in trying to answer that, I stumbled across this…

…and I would have to say, this is even more of a kick to the figurative solar plexus than the first item. He comes on The View, pretends to do a high-five with token Republican Hasselbeck, who dutifully falls for it…and then turns around and ingratiates himself with the “mainstream” with a not-so-humorous high-level anecdote about his background: All his relatives were Republicans, but he learned to think for himself.

Ouch! That’s gonna leave a mark!

And you don’t even have to ask for examples, either. The very next thing out of his mouth, is a plug for this website. This is what Brolin thinks about when he thinks for himself? Yes, it is…or that’s what Brolin wants me to think…assuming he’s ready and able to think through the messages he intends to convey, which is something I have to doubt for obvious reasons. But he seems pretty enthused about this goofy website. I didn’t see anything to the effect of a disclaimer, or limitation, or “just because I think you should hit that website doesn’t mean I agree with everything on it.” I saw nothing like that.

And the website is about all the usual bullshit. The towers were demolished from within, look at the puffs of smoke, inside job, thermite, pretext for war, blah blah blah.

So James Brolin, I must conclude, is enough of a crazy whackadoodle that he believes in the “Nine One One Was An Inside Job” line. He advertises it, in fact, to show how much he’s learned to think for himself since his grandmother tried to bully him into voting Republican. That’s some good independent thinking there, Jim.

And the donks who want to run for the White House…well, I still don’t know. This “inside job” stuff surfaces fairly often, and it’s comparatively rare that a donk candidate, for any office, will forcefully repudiate any of it. So is it an official — or all-but-official — platform of the donk party that there were no terrorists, and George W. Bush the big stupid idiot cowboy moron managed to wire the World Trade Center with blocks of C4 and then hide all the evidence?

This seems like a laughable supposition. But, again, the Ass Party doesn’t forcefully distance themselves from this, and their failure to distance is substantially just as good as endorsement. It’s the votes. They need them.

And this would have to mean the second most important issue, has a direct bearing on the first. You want to be President, Mr. or Ms. donk. To be President, you sell your soul to Brolin and to whack-jobs like him, who think the skyscrapers were brought down by explosives. Which can only mean…we never had any terrorists to chase. The nineteen men who hijacked those planes must have been undercover agents for the CIA, or something. So on the first-most-important issue — my sense is going to have to be that you’re not going to be exactly gumming up the pipelines with those dead-terrorist bodies, huh? It’d be back to the good ol’ days of “my cruise missile missed him by a couple of hours” every year or two.

To the donks, and by that I mean, the power-players who decide how elections will be run, there is a different Number One issue: We haven’t been hearing anyone talk about Al Gore’s “Social Security lock box” for seven years now. Before all this terrorism stuff, you talk about Social Security, and donks win elections. That’s the way it’s supposed to work. Ooh, your gramma’s not going to get her checks if you put a Republican in charge — donks win elections. Ooh, here we go again, Republicans going to take her house away…every two years, the same stuff.

Terrorism kind of puts a damper on that. It’s tough to get worked up about how much old people with vacation homes can fleece thirty-something apartment rats, when we have very young men and women going into harm’s way and coming back wearing prosthetics. Or, in flag-draped coffins. That’s the big secret. The flag-draped coffin is supposed to be dealing an enormous blow to Republican “credibility,” but really it’s the donks who have something to sell us, that they can’t sell us while we’re still seeing these coffins roll in.

The donks don’t really want us to lose the war, per se. They just want it over. They want us to stop thinking about anything beyond the water’s edge…with the exception of some nifty healthcare system Sweden has that we don’t have. They want us to go back to agonizing about minimum wage, women-minorities-hardest-hit, and glowbubble wormening. And to make that happen, they’ll sell out to the Brolin maniacs who think the September Eleven attacks are just a big joke, and that the skyscrapers were brought down by Watergate burglars.

To Brolin, I owe a profound thanks for helping to prove my point. People who are considering voting for donks next fall, need to think long and hard about what that means. Are the donks teetering on the edge of insanity, or have they fallen headlong into the chasm, like you sir?

American Digest I owe an equally profound, and somewhat more sincere, thanks to somebody else too. Since I put up that original post, my traffic has tripled and after three days is going strong. This is because I was linked by my Number One blogger hero, Gerard Van der Leun, who somehow saw fit to scoop up an assortment of entirely-unrelated Morgan ravings and highlight them for the benefit of his own audience. Every subject imaginable, from cowardly anti-war yokels, to Marilyn Monroe’s shapely torso, to Wikipedia.

Gerard, I can’t thank you enough. We’re not so much into pumping up traffic here…this is The Blog That Nobody Reads, after all. But the prospect of making some new friends is always a promising one, and it’s a high honor indeed to have earned this kind of attention from your direction. In these parts, you’re a legend — the guy who thinks up new ways of saying things that desperately need to be said. In this corner of the ‘sphere, you’re always going to be the guy who thought up the phrase American Castrati.

So this is kind of like Jack meeting Cher. Kind of. Not really. Maybe we should let that one go. Anyway, thanks again, m’friend.

We do have some polite disagreement to make on the whole Bollinger thing, but that’s a story for another day. And I will say it’s a credit to the right-half of the “blogosphere” that you are calling out your teammates. Rather tough to envision The Left doing the same thing, to say the least.

Posted in Celebrity Halfwits, Deranged Leftists, My Blogger Friends | No Comments »

Forget It Ever Happened

Tuesday, September 25th, 2007

Like the psychotic penguin says in this movie, you…didn’t…see…nuthin’.

Because Move On From Some Things, Dwell Endlessly On Other Things Dot Org is going to be wiring over the difference — so forget everything. Scandal over.

Move on, as they say.

Posted in Deranged Leftists, Private Sector Scandals | No Comments »

Enemy of my Enemy

Tuesday, September 25th, 2007

She’s female, she’s gay, she’s a lefty blogger on DailyKOS and so she’s got a huge crush on Guess Who.

I know I’m a Jewish lesbian and he’d probably have me killed. But still, the guy speaks some blunt truths about the Bush Administration that make me swoon…

Okay, I admit it. Part of it is that he just looks cuddly. Possibly cuddly enough to turn me straight. I think he kind of looks like Kermit the Frog. Sort of. With smaller eyes. But that’s not all…

I want to be very clear. There are certainly many things about Ahmadinejad that I abhor — locking up dissidents, executing of gay folks, denying the fact of the Holocaust, potentially adding another dangerous nuclear power to the world and, in general, stifling democracy. Even still, I can’t help but be turned on by his frank rhetoric calling out the horrors of the Bush Administration and, for that matter, generations of US foreign policy preceding.

No, I am absolutely opposed to taking away this delusional woman’s right to say what’s on her mind. But now that we know what’s rattling around in what passes for her brain…seems the rest of us have some obligation or another to protect her from herself. Don’t we? I mean, she’s pretty much admitting to this unhealthy crush on this Kermit character who she admits to knowing, with little doubt, would have her killed if he could. I mean, that’s about as insane as smacking your own forehead with a hammer.

Par for the course, where our good Kossack friends are concerned.

Posted in Bush Derangement Syndrome, Glad I Learned About This | 3 Comments »

The Second Most Important Issue

Saturday, September 22nd, 2007

The single most important issue of the presidential elections next year: Who is going to bring me the the biggest pile of dead terrorist carcasses over the next four years?

Among the sensible people who agree with me on that, many will argue there is no close-second; this is a far-and-away thing. I respectfully admonish them to reconsider, because the second-most-important issue is very important indeed, and it is breathing hotly on the neck of the first.

Coming in at a close second, and I do mean a close one, is a big package of interrelated sub-issues all knotted together. They have to do with the people who are actually proud to call themselves “liberals,” not in the classic sense, but in the post-modern sense. Can we be fooled into thinking they are really champions of our freedoms, when they’re forcing us to think that, and coercing us into silence on any other viewpoint? Are we really so dense that we fail to see, or we can be distracted from seeing, the irony in that simple contradiction? Are liberals crazy, or just stupid? Do we really have to let them vote even when they so obviously lack the level of maturity one would be expected to achieve by age eighteen?

Is it really being “centrist” or “moderate” when you let grown-ups run the government half the time, and a bunch of attention-starved spoiled brats run it the rest of the time? Are we really so desperate to put a woman in the White House that we’ll put one in who is barely even a woman, and is such a toxic candidate that she can’t voice a position on any issue, without inserting a villain into it, should one be missing?

Are we going to let our print-media journalists decide for us which scandals end public-service careers and which ones do not — knowing full well they’re in the business of selling bad news, and have no financial stake in seeing things run sensibly so that bad news is a more the occasional happenstance the rest of us wish it to be?

What exactly is this well-funded advocacy group that I continue to call “Move On From Some Things And Dwell Endlessly On Other Things Dot Org”? For whom do they speak? Now that we all understand they’re a bunch of all-but-certified nutcases, when they tell us their nutcase things are they speaking on behalf of Hillary? Obama? Edwards? Kerry? Kennedy? Anybody else who will be invested with the authority to decide important, life-altering things, should we opt to put the kiddies from the kiddie-table in charge again next year?

What about Michael Moore, does he speak for anybody? How cozy is his relationship with the “Inmates Should Run The Asylum” party?

Bad Ad Ah, if you’re smart, you probably know where this is headed. That ad. That horrible, wonderful, self-disgracing, gloriously-backfiring ad. And more precisely, the vote about the ad.

I have been instructed to believe…by those who endlessly instruct me to believe that they are laboring tirelessly for my right to think whatever I want to think, without so much of a hint of awareness of their irony…that the vote was a waste of time.

With all due respect, kiddies, I think not. The issue that faces us next year, right behind that whole dead-terrorist-bodies thing, is whether the donks benefit from a frayed, fragile, threadbare tethering to reality or whether that tethering has snapped altogether. The donks are pretty emphatic that the real issue is whether or not the current President is a dumbass, which seems to me a peripheral article of history at best. We disagree; should we debate the question, it would be a pretty quick debate but it might get a little messy, gentle as I would try to be. It’s the facts, you see; they are not on their side. Next year, they are running — the “moron” is not. That’s just the way things are. We don’t get to vote on George Bush’s intellect or lack thereof — we are obliged to vote on the sanity of the donks, or lack thereof.

We have a right to know.

We have a duty to know.

And now we know. There is a deep split in the donk party about whether they want to approach the brink of sanity, or go toppling over the edge. The “useless” matter about whether to condemn the ad, or not, is put to a vote. Yea, 72; Nay, 25; Not Voting, 3.

Members of the grown-up party voted unanimously in a grown-up way. You’ll notice, this has been the catalyst of every major disagreement in foreign and domestic issues in modern history, once you cut through the B.S. about whether an election was stolen just because it didn’t turn out the way someone wanted: Should bad behavior get a spanking or not? It all comes down to that. Some of us believe if we’d paddle the rear ends of our own flesh and blood for doing the same thing, there should be consequences for others for doing it. Others think everything comes down to a “civil rights” issue, and civil rights is somehow measured in your ability to get away with things that common sense says demand censure. I see it in illegal immigration, repealing the death penalty, the tasering of whoosee-whatsit, the invasion of you-know-what…it’s in everything about which we choose to argue, or just about.

And you see it in the ad. Everybody either agrees the ad was stupid, or else “feels” that it should be defended but understands this is impossible to do on an intellectual level, so they might as well keep their silence. It’s an indefensible message. The question is whether to point it out. And as usual, the wildest and craziest kiddie-table people have squeezed together some kind of passion on that issue, based on cynical knowledge of the political consequences but on no higher ideal. In short, they understand it was dumb, and they understand why the rest of us think it worthy of comment and inspection. They just don’t want us to do it because it interferes with agendas they have on other things.

Just a girl in short shorts... Into this hot-button issue wades Becky, a.k.a. Just a Girl in Short Shorts Talking About Whatever. Do try to contain yourselves, fellas…the blog title isn’t just about what she is, it also describes what she likes, and she’s not preferentially inclined toward you. But it’s always a visually rewarding experience to give her a hit now and then, since she can be counted on to put up pictures of what she likes. And who doesn’t like that?

She’s a lot like Bacon Eating Atheist Jew. Just a whole lot easier on the eye (no offense intended, Bacon). Strong capital-L Libertarian leanings with a healthy ability to detect crap from miles away…except when it comes to bashing conservatives, and then, from my point of view, she pretty much falls for whatever crap she’s fed. In summary, she’s got great cognitive thinking skills when she agrees with me, and doesn’t when she doesn’t. And when people comment they treat her with kid gloves, even when she’s wrong, because hey — she’s a good looking girl in short shorts. And I freely admit I’m in that crowd too. If it was “Just An Ugly Dude in Shabby Clothes Talking About Stuff” I’d probably haul out all kinds of whoopass I’m keeping bottled up.

But meanwhile, back to the subject at hand. The vote on the stupid ad was a tactical maneuver by Republicans, seeking to highlight the schism in the donk party. Becky has the wisdom and insight to penetrate this, but is sufficiently myopic to settle into the idea that since it’s political, and poised to benefit people who disagree with her on some issues such as gay marriage, there can be nothing good about it.

I personally have no use for MoveOn. They are a left wing socialist cadre of Internet whiners. But, they have become a financial powerhouse in the Democratic Party.

I also think their ad was in poor taste. But no more so than when George Bush made John Mcain’s daughter cry by announcing during the South Carolina primary campaign that she was the bastard daughter of McCain, conceived with some Asian wench. The girl still asks her Mom why the president hates her so much. Of course, Daddy eventually sucked up to Sonny.

But the record is replete with volumes of Republican crap at least as vile as the MoveOn ad.

So the Neo-con Republican Warhawks jumped all over the ad , as is to be expected. It detracts from talking about the war and how to get the fuck out, how stupid the president is and etc. [emphasis mine]

Ah, ugh. Darling…you fail. You fail big. The vote detracted from talking about President Bush being a raging clueless assbag one more time? Congress has some important business before it involving calling him a few more names? What is this, the third grade?

I’m sympathetic to the notion that resolutions are wastes of time, or at least, can be. House condemns this, Senate censures that, United Nations deplores some other damn silly thing…what’s the point? And yet, through the lens of history, I see when resolutions are offered with a maximum saturation of partisan political cynicism, this is when they are at the most useful to the public at large. It should not by now be a secret to anyone that when we vote, most of us are taking a calculated gamble on whoever is going to do the least harm. Genuine “confidence” in our leadership, to the extent it actually ever existed at all, is with us no longer. We vote for candidates who are going to bring the messages and priorities to the forefront we want at that forefront, and those of us who think critically always have reservations about it.

So since all the “smart” people are projecting the donks will win next year, I see this vote as in inspection of a new and shiny car that is all-but-bought, with the papers not quite signed yet. Turns out, it is poorly put-together and falls apart quickly. It’s subject to overheating and burnout. That, and nobody is really too sure how it works. Useful information to have just about now, right?

Compare this to some of the “resolutions” passed by cities, unions and colleges against the War in Iraq. Becky speaks for many. I hope everyone who finds fault with the Senate for taking time to condemn the “Move On From What We Tell You To Move On From Dot Org” ad — or more precisely, to figure out who among those seated for the vote, has the stones to condemn it — will find fault with those other resolutions as well. The Senate vote tells us something we, regardless of our ideological prejudices, desperately need to know. Come to think of it, Move On’s insanity itself has been doing that…probably the only useful thing they’ve managed to do in nine years and Lord knows how many millions of dollars.

Those other three examples, and many others like them, achieve no such thing. How do they stand as specimens of wasted time and energy?

Thanks to the vote, now we know who lacks the readiness, willingness, ability, and/or just plain balls to call out stupid crap, falling well beneath, but pretending to be on par with, the national discourse — when they see it. When means whenever they see it. That means we have twenty-five people voting in our legislative chambers upper house, who, by rights, ought to be sent right back to Kindergarten again so they can learn to play nice, right before snack time and nap time. I like that we know this, that we now have a list. We can debate to some extent what it means, but it’s established beyond any disagreement what the list is. The names are:

Akaka, Bingaman, Boxer, Brown, Byrd,
Clinton, Dodd, Durbin, Feingold, Harkin,
Inouye, Kennedy, Kerry, Lautenberg, Levin,
Menendez, Murray, Reed, Reid, Rockefeller,
Sanders, Schumer, Stabenow, Whitehouse, Wyden.

Remember: When we get a new President, over the last several generations it is nearly always either a Governor, or someone from this legislative body. One fourth of those seated therein, as I type this, are virtual children.

So I’m happy — thrilled, actually — that we got some valuable insight this week, on what is the second-most important issue of next year’s elections. When you vote for a donk…what do you get in return? Harmless resistance against a theocracy, in which nobody with any power has seriously proposed we should live, and in which we have never once even come close to living…or a bunch of slobbering childish fools intoxicated with power, who can’t communicate a thought with even a moderate level of complexity to it, without regurgitating gallon after gallon of instructions about what everyone should be doing and thinking?

Besides who’s going to kill the most terrorists, that is what we really need to know. We on the right wing, on the left, everything in between. We desperately need to figure out the answer to this question, and we have less than fourteen months to do it.

Posted in About Me and My Blog, Deranged Leftists, Elections, Moonbat Conspiracies, My Blogger Friends | 6 Comments »

So You Build Keyboards, Do You

Friday, September 21st, 2007

I’ve been lurking in some of the fool-threads, watching fools from both sides go at it. And it has lately become clear to me that, contrary to my expectations, here in late 2007 the wildly unrealistic and irresponsible “Why Aren’t You There?” argument is still among us.

Back when I provided an answer to it, I had already started to see this repudiated by my most hardcore left-wing friends and I thought it was on the DailyKOS trash heap, or headed there. To the credit of The Left, that is what they do with some of their silliest arguments. They’re like…candy wrappers. Or condoms. Useful for a designated time, for a designated purpose, and once that purpose is fulfilled all you want to do is get rid of it.

Well if the “Why Aren’t You There?” argument is a candy wrapper, it has yet to be crumpled up; the yummy residue of what was inside has yet to be completely dumped out. Bad on them, because this shows the silliest arguments can be imbued with Yoda-like life-expectancies within the otherworldly, surreal existence of The Left. Or, at least, can be. That’s a shame. If the elections next year are about anything, they’re about whether the line tethering The Left to what’s reasonable and real has been badly frayed, or severed altogether.

And since the country needs to have that answered, we should inspect exactly what would be needed for “Why Aren’t You There?” argument to make some sense. Let’s start with the punchline itself, and what’s implied by it. You’re an anti-war lefty; you encounter, stateside, someone who thinks we should be fighting the war when you don’t think we should be. At this point, that could mean a lot of things. Many among us think it was a mistake to go into Iraq, but now that we’re there we shouldn’t leave yet. A dwindling minority of grown-ups among us resemble me, recognizing that our decision was to go in or not go in…and for a number of good reasons, not-going-in was just plain unacceptable. We say this was the right decision — the most ardent supporters, myself included, insist it was overdue — doing it over, we’d do things the same way.

Still others think we should leave Iraq, but it’s appropriate to leave the decision about when, up to the President and to Congress. That isn’t pro-war, but it’s not consistent with the “all anarchy, all the time” passion of the DailyKOS crowd. And so, of course, it goes without saying that the KOS kids hate it.

So the KOSsacks “win” the argument, in their own eyes at least, with four words: Why aren’t you there? Oh my, check my chest cavity, a pound of flesh is missing. For it has now been revealed: I don’t support the troops after all. Why, if I were, I’d be there.

Obviously, this is supposed to impress somebody — somebody who isn’t me. It doesn’t mesh with logic and common sense; not very well, and not at all. If I’m to be smeared as someone who only pretends to support the troops, but doesn’t really, it’s a bit like a wrestling match with the proverbial pig isn’t it? It’s a tad difficult to assert someone supports the troops when he’s running around stateside, grouchily making his peevish rhetorical inquiries into why so-and-so isn’t there, arguing that since so-and-so isn’t there nobody else should be. So I’ve always looked at people who say “why aren’t you there” as saying “I don’t support them, or what they’re doing, and neither should you.” I don’t see how that could mean anything else.

They tell me this is an insinuation I shouldn’t dare make. Well, okay…if I can’t say it out loud, I’ll just have to think it in silence, for I can think nothing else. It just doesn’t seem like a very supportive question to be asking, to me.

But let’s inspect the logic that goes into this. You ask “Why Aren’t You There?” and in response, I go homina-homina-homina…the conclusion to be drawn, is that I’m only pretending there’s a good reason for anybody to be there, by deep down I know there isn’t one because if there was, I’d be there myself.

Okay. So…when people recognize there’s even so much as a peripheral reason for something to be done, they do it themselves.

No exceptions. None.

This is incredible. Consider the ramifications. How many things are there that people do, that I personally don’t do and have not done. I’m not a schoolteacher, I’m not a fireman, I’m not a construction worker. I don’t pick coffee beans or roast them or package them or transport them or sell them; so I can’t drink coffee. Logically, my butt need not fit into the chair in which I’m sitting as I type this, since I don’t build chairs — and I shouldn’t have need to type this, since I don’t build keyboards.

A great rejoinder to this would be “Are you a gynecologist or a cop?” Very few would be able to answer to one of those; by their logic, if they’re gynecologists, we must not need the police, and if they’re police, we must not need gynecologists.

It’s been presumed by some that the typical KOSKid lives in his parents’ basement and doesn’t do anything. I’ve found the crudest and simplest stereotypes are the ones that are lacking in merit, and have settled into a habit of dismissing this one. But the “Why Aren’t You There?” argument tempts me to reconsider it. It seems to me to be an argument acceptable to someone who doesn’t do anything and hasn’t done anything. I’ve met, personally, some folks who have managed to channel vast amounts of energy into coming up with reasons not to do things, enough to convince me this is a modern epidemic — this might be the cause, or perhaps, the ultimate effect.

Maybe the plague of the twenty-first century is not cancer, or AIDs, but sloth. A conviction that, if it is to be admitted that anything is important or worthwhile or beneficial to anyone, some boogeyman might come along and invite the person so admitting, to climb aboard and contribute in some way. I’m gathering that some folks find this horrifying, for the simple reason that a meaningful contribution would be antithetical to the way they’ve lived their lives up until now. It would be an unwelcome paradigm shift.

This is something I already know to be true, about some people. Thing I Know #92. Useful people have a fear of becoming useless that is exceeded in intensity only by the fear useless people have of someday being useful.

So I presume when people say “Why Aren’t You There?,” what they’re saying is they’ve managed to live out their lives without contributing anything whatsoever to anyone whatsoever, and don’t want to change.

That is their right. But it impresses me a lot — and by that, I mean down to the marrow of my bones. We have people serving in Iraq, losing parts of their bodies…coming back stateside, getting patched up, learning how to use their prosthetics, and then asking to go back there again. And then we have other people who have made a sort of religion out of not doing anything that might be helpful to someone, and calling into question whether anyone else should help someone, or even say kind things about those who do.

To put it more elegantly, some among us have a phobia about giving away some of their sweat, while others have no compunctions whatsoever about giving away their blood.

And the bulk of both groups reside in the same narrow age bracket. A five-year window somewhere around the half the age I am now.

I see times of deep, irreconcilable conflict in the years ahead. Something like what we’ve already had for the last forty years or so. But much, much deeper and darker.

As for my answer, it remains unchanged. To oppose YOU. Anyone who asks “Why Aren’t You There?” is, all the bullshit peeled aside, a nihilist. Nihilists are having a fairly good time of it right now; they’re injecting a nihilist marinade into everything we do in public policy lately; and, by nature, don’t support the troops or much of anything else. Someone with principle and brains has to be stateside, to make sure they are opposed.

They are trying to make a lot of decisions for everybody else, after all. Those decisions are not wise. They are not harmless.

They have to be opposed.

Posted in Deranged Leftists, Justification for Invasion, Keyboard builders, Vision for Victory | 1 Comment »

Best Sentence XVII

Thursday, September 20th, 2007

The winner of the “Best Sentence I’ve Heard Lately” award is, once again, Ann Coulter. Hey, what can I say, she tries harder than most other folks. It’s her schtick; she makes it her business to win these things.

And like the girl with the curl, when she is good she is very very good. It’s actually two sentences this time:

The editors of The New York Times have been engaging in a spirited debate with their readers over whether doctors are wildly overpaid or just hugely overpaid. The results of this debate are available on TimeSelect, for just $49.95.

Posted in Blogs vs. MSM, Deranged Leftists, Poisoning Individuality and Reason, Universal Healthcare | 2 Comments »

I Made a New Word VII

Thursday, September 20th, 2007

Manilow MANILOSIS (n.): 1. A disease which causes the afflicted person to cite the disagreeing political viewpoints of others, and react to the disagreement by eschewing any juxtaposition between them and himself, perhaps out of the fear that his arguments will be revealed as insubstantial or logically tenuous if challenged. 2. The irrational prognostication that known political disagreements, will everlastingly remain the only matters of discussion, coupled with an equally irrational sensibility that politically-differing individuals cannot be friends. 3. The delusion that showcasing this disease and the suffering from it, is in fact the manifestation of some kind of ethical or philosophical principle. 4. The insistence that political agendas that would, if enacted, by design have profound effects upon the lives of everyone, must be deliberated and refined only in the presence of some.

There is no known cure. There is thought to be some hope for the afflicted, but the patient has to want to change.

Posted in Deranged Leftists | 1 Comment »

Barry’s Beliefs

Wednesday, September 19th, 2007

I’ve seen this written up in a couple other places but I’ll give the hat tip to Rick. And I think it’s only fair to explore things from Barry Manilow’s perspective to kick it off…

Monday, September 17, 2007
A message from Barry…

Hey guys,

I wanted to let you know that I will no longer be on The View tomorrow as scheduled. I had made a request that I be interviewed by Joy, Barbara or Whoopi, but not Elisabeth Hasselback. Unfortunately, the show was not willing to accommodate this simple request so I bowed out.

It’s really too bad because I’ve always been a big supporter of the show, but I cannot compromise my beliefs. The good news is that I will be on a whole slew of other shows promoting the new album so I hope you can catch me on those.

Love,
Barry

Rick winds up his post by launching a couple of questions aimed pointedly at Barry’s masculinity.

Rick, this strikes me as somewhat unfair. Not so much to Mr. Manilow, but to women, in general. I’ve personally met many fine people lacking in testosterone, penises or testicles who are perfectly qualified to help the legendary performance artist try to recover what he seems to be lacking; ladies of dignity, quality and guts.

Women who can share the same airspace with someone who disagrees with them about something. Maybe…maybe even deal with the point of disagreement, should it actually surface, not run screaming out of the room. In some cases, perhaps, even changing a mind or two, while keeping things positive.

As for the fellas — given the absurd situation that any among them are really as lacking in these qualities as Mr. Manilow seems to be, well, I’d consider it the definition of “gentlemanly” behavior to do what Manilow did. Better that a man admit to his limitations than to make an ass out of himself and everyone else. Of course, I can’t extend that observation to tossing The View producers under the bus on your website. In that sense if none other, I’m with ya.

I think Hasselbeck would do fine on teaching just some of these skills the musician is lacking, if a tutor must be found for Mr. Manilow. Maybe that’s what he doesn’t like about her. She can do some things he can’t. But if that’s so offensive to him, there are a lot of other folks who are up to the job. Obviously, Lesson One would have to be getting rid of the echo chamber. Can’t learn how to discuss anything if you’re constantly surrounded by yes-men.

Wow, you realize the ramifications of what I’ve just said? Manilow could learn what he needs to learn…not only from Hasselbeck…but from O’Donnell. Rosie O’Doughnut, a “lady” who has a raging case of CBTA if nobody else does. But at least she doesn’t have to control the roster of occupants of whatever room she’s in.

What a way to live.

But among the folks who are proud to call themselves “liberal,” or those who are more receptive to other people and ideas we call “liberal”…Mr. Manilow is far more representative a sampling than Ms. O’Donnell. There are far more people like him than her. In a way I guess that’s a good thing, because people like me are among the first to be ostracized by them and there’s only so much I can take of his pretentious crooning or her insipid yammering.

But isn’t it funny? The ideas these people have, tend to maintain this common theme that “everybody” should have a right to something-or-other, and “everybody” should have some kind of associated obligation. Like recording legend Manilow, when a lot of these people talk out these rights and responsibilities “everybody” should have, they really aren’t cool with talking it out — with everybody. Manilow’s word selection is revealing this way. It seems to be an important underlying principle that only some may discuss what, by design, is supposed to affect everyone. Profoundly.

Rick, I like your observation, I just think it needs a little bit of refinement. To say that what Manilow is lacking has something to do with manhood, strikes me as a short-changing of women for the respect some of them — most of them — are justly due. To say he has yet to grow up, likewise, would be insulting the children. Maybe the most accurate reference available would have something to do with evolution. Our songbird, along with millions of liberals, is stuck sometime in the past. Somewhere before the ancient Greeks, who made an art and a science out of talking things out, centuries before the time of Christ.

I hope it doesn’t have to do with his genetic makeup or anything. I’d like to think there’s still a way to get him the help that he needs. But there does seem to be something rather subhuman about it all. Something…insect-like. Hmmm. Maybe that’s the root source of the word I’m trying to invent here. I’ll have to ponder this some other time, I got a nice full day to spend working.

Around people who don’t agree with me about everything.

Posted in Deranged Leftists | 7 Comments »

I Made a New Word VI

Saturday, September 15th, 2007

Betray Us MOVE ON DOT REALITY (n.): (1) An instance or collection of cognitive product, used by left-wing people not to embrace reality as we know it, but rather to ingratiate themselves with each other socially. Such stuff has an occasional collision with truth in the same way a busted clock tells the correct time twice a day.

(2) The otherworldly plane of virtual existence in which one lives when one nurtures a habit of intellectually promoting, and/or fixating on, such stuff.

This is how the “Betray Us” ad backfired this week. That the people we call “progressive” nowadays systematically denounce any and all facts they find to be politically inconvenient, is old news to people like me who lack the dignity to avoid arguing with them on the innernets. To “normal” people who do a much better job of engaging their daily lives and staying away from “all that politics stuff,” it’s still a somewhat shocking revelation. You know…the clock-in, clock-out, go-home, rent-videos, play-video-games crowd.

The people who decide elections.

To them, it’s not so much news that The Left would trash Gen. Petraeus, or that The Left would decide to trash him based on the things he had to say. That, arguably, is what politics is all about. Someone says what you like, the job is to sell everybody on his impeccable credentials. He says something you don’t like, you find some scandals and play them up, never mind that the dirt you dig up pales in comparison to the dirt the other guys could dig up on you. That’s why it’s such a dirty business, and that’s why “mainstream” America wants to have so little to do with it.

Rather, the story is in how quickly The Left decided to do this. General Petraeus isn’t, let’s say, a Jack Abramoff or a Marc Foley or a Larry Craig, someone whose name has been twisting away in an unflattering limelight like an earthworm lacking the stamina and moisture to make it into the grass on a hot summer day, drying out in agony. We haven’t had any months-long inquest in the court of public opinion, about whether Petraeus is inappropriately beholden to the White House’s take on things in the theater under his command. It’s just a tad bit awkward to get such a debate going now just because it’s politically expedient to get such a debate going. “Main Street” can smell those kinds of shenanigans…even on it’s way to the ice cream stand or to the coffee shop.

But the real damage is in the wording. “Betray Us.” It seems SO clever, you know. Petraeus…Betray Us…it rhymes! That means you have to gimme credit for it! This problem arises with the salient question, posed by Main Street USA to the “Move On From Some Things, Dwell Irrationally On Other Things Dot Org” people: What exactly do you mean by “Us”? Do you mean the General means to betray us, as in the country, or by “us” do you mean YOU?

Main Street USA — not anti-left bloggers like me, who lack the dignity to extricate ourselves from the argument on a daily basis, and therefore are numerically insignificant, but the BIG America — saw that the General’s loyalty was being questioned, according to an oath he himself NEVER took. And this shocked them. They saw a bunch of phony political obligations being imposed upon him, and they came to realize they were next. In short, with this silly ad, heartland Americans realized exactly how The Hard Left works nowadays.

The Left pretends to be engaged in reality…they pretend to have a monopoly in this…and none of the things they do, once you list those things and start inspecting them closely, have anything to do with this. Anything at all. Our leftist comedians and pundits want to seize control over what we all think about things, even incredibly important issues like Iraq, so they can take this control and turn it over to someone else. They want to bully and intimidate and coerce us into thinking what they want us to think. They want to blackmail us into helping them. Helping them do…well, nobody’s really sure what. They themselves aren’t really sure.

It’s got something to do with rolling back tax cuts, not fighting any wars, repeating slander about our President and our soldiers, and then bellyaching about how none of the other countries like us.

But as the non-blogger world is slowly finding out, facts have nothing to do with any of this…because on the way to getting it all done, “facts” are reduced to things coming out of the mouths and pens of people considered “loyal,” and loyalty is attached only to people who are observed saying the right “facts.” That’s where this alternative reality comes in. This is where all this nonsensical crap comes in, to consume us if we let it. Where, in all of human history, fire has never once melted steel. Where global warming caused Hurricane Katrina. And the collapse of the bridge in Minnesota was Karl Rove’s fault.

It has nothing to do with what you saw happening, or what you can confirm happened, or what you’d bet some money, happened or might have happened. It’s got to do with what will make you some new friends, if you’re seen mumbling something to the effect you believe it, exhorting others to believe it, or both.

Having waded into the muck some time ago, I’ve known about this for awhile: Thinking through our most critical and crucial problems, to far too many among us — to the loudest among us — is purely a social exercise and has little to do with what’s real, even less to do with solving problems for anybody. Thanks to “Move On From Some Things, Dwell Irrationally On Other Things Dot Org” and their ill-conceived newspaper ad, now the rest of the country is coming around to realizing this too. People who are less aware of what’s going on than I am, because they have more dignity.

This country has some heap-big problems. We can debate some other time whether or not they ALL started with George W. Bush; there are a lot of reasons to question even that. But when we’re deciding who’s going to shoulder the unenviable burden of solving them, we’d better keep the grown-ups in charge, and leave the kiddies at the kiddie table where they belong. I’d like to take this opportunity to publicly thank “Move On From What We Tell You To Move On From Dot Org” for getting that message out. I could never have done it quite as effectively as they managed to, without even trying.

Posted in Deranged Leftists, Lying Liars | 5 Comments »

Let Us Remember…

Tuesday, September 11th, 2007

…you can’t have civilization without justice.

Some folks are sympathetic to the prospect of putting democrats in charge because we haven’t caught Osama bin Laden yet. Other folks are similarly sympathetic, because they don’t believe in justice. Or in fixing anything. Or in any military engagement, for any reason, whatsoever.

On this day, we can honor the memory of the fallen by doing everything we can to stop those two antithetical factions from ever lending strength to each other. They shouldn’t be able to. They believe in opposites. Such an alliance would be able to make no assurances or promises to anyone at all, except through deception.

And let us never elect anyone to an office involving public trust, who campaigns for such office by pretending this awful thing never took place, or by distracting us from remembering it properly. Such citizens are barely worthy of their citizenship, and entirely unworthy of honor. Unworthy of trust. Unworthy of esteem.

Altogether unworthy of attention. From anyone.

Posted in About Me and My Blog, Deranged Leftists, Eulogies, Iraq and WoT Stuff | 1 Comment »

Simply Reprehensible

Tuesday, September 11th, 2007

I will not be covering the specimens of democrat ugliness in the days ahead. There is no point. They’re going to be placing impressive quantities of energy on the objective of out-doing each other, seeing who can say the ugliest things about Gen. Petreaus, knowing full well that the second-place winner carries home no prize.

There are people out there blogging so that they have something to do; there are people out there blogging for a living. This ass-race is going to have to be closely tracked, so let them do it. My only contribution, should I choose to undertake such an effort, will be to find something that once-upon-a-time strikes me as particularly odious, highlight it, and then within a matter of hours see that specimen knocked out of the “Ass Hall of Fame” by something much worse.

I will take one lap around that track, though.

Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez, D-California, hat tip to Hugh Hewitt…video behind the link…

Not to be outdone on the outrage scale by her South Florida colleague, Bob Wexler, Orange County, California’s Sanchez, the very last person in the House of Representatives that you would expect to be invited to a gathering of Mensa, concluded the Joint House hearing with General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker.

Of all the things she could focus on, she asked a question about the facts on the ground versus an ABC News/BBC poll that better supports the Democrats’ view that there is nothing good to be found in Iraq as long as George Bush has anything to do with it.

Note that after she finally gets around to her question, she directs the poll question to Ambassador Crocker, who cites the statistics he knows. Sanchez interrupts and drops the insinuation that General Petraeus is manipulating the numbers in Iraq, essentially lying in his report, he numbers in his report, saying “and General Petraues will know what I mean by that.”

Later in her presentation, dripping with condescension, she slags the entire Iraqi population as saying we are the only good thing happening in their economy.

She is an idiot. And it is pretty well known even in the House of Representatives that she is an idiot. And idiots being able to prosper and rise to the level of being able to ask questions of four-star generals in time of war is one of the things that is truly remarkable about this country. But no one likes a condescending idiot. It may be fair to say that when compared to the 160,000 men and women under General Petraeus’ command, Congresswoman Sanchez may rank in the 2nd percentile in intelligence.

But make no mistake, Sanchez, like Bob Wexler, like MoveOn.org, like the Code Pink protestors, like the Democrats in the Senate who were silent today when they should have been renouncing the New York Times ad today, does not hold the military in anything but contempt.

So that’s your baseline. Just dis-gus-ting…and it’s going to get worse from there.

I’m not the first to say this and I won’t be the last. There are not enough hours in the week for me to fulfill my civic duty by providing all the scrutiny I should be providing, toward these legislative houses. From what I can see, I do not have what it takes to serve there, or to be in one of the chambers for five minutes. That is NOT a compliment.

Every time I see one of these clips, ever since the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, my confidence in government sags. House…Senate…it makes no difference. I wouldn’t be able to adapt to this in any way, and anybody who can, I don’t want them running so much as a hot dog stand. Let alone a country.

The democrats are supposed to represent the people. That is supposed to be their schtick. Demos…Greek…”people.” From what I can see, Congress is in this downward spiral because of opinions being advanced without fact — opinions manufactured to appeal to certain advocacy groups, and not to the people. Opinions woven together, not for the purpose of logically engaging other opinions, but to bully and intimidate and cudgel anyone who might advance a different opinion.

That is not representing The People. That is representing advocacy groups. When the democrats do this, they defeat the only deliverable they can promise to us when they try to win elections. They’re supposed to pull us out of military theaters prematurely and let Al Qaeda take the place over, tax the snot out of us and take away our guns — so that The People can get some representation in government. Yeah. Well try this. Be a “people” and write a letter to your democrat Congresswoman or Senator, telling him or her you really wish that representative’s position on an issue was different, and politely exploring the reasons why.

You get back a form letter.

Whoever disagrees with them about what should be done, doesn’t count. Whoever offers facts confounding theirs, is a liar. Period. End of story. Hellllooooooooo, Republican campaign organizers and ad designers. Your work is being done for you. Next year should be looking like 1994, or else you need to be finding a different line of work. There’s no reason to be losing against these people. None.

Posted in Deranged Leftists, Iraq and WoT Stuff, Lying Liars, TIK 52 | No Comments »

Memo For File XLVI

Monday, September 10th, 2007

A little bit of constructive criticism for my local newspaper, the Sacramento Bee.

On the desk in front of me is the “Forum” section to the Sunday paper, slightly misshapen from what has become a customary “oopsie” or two as the corners are accidently dunked in the hot tub at twilight. Let us review all the opportunities this piece of paper had carry something important, by reviewing the seven days of events upon which this section might have commented.

Someone claiming to be Osama bin Laden appeared on a videotape that was released on or about Monday, dispensing a lot of instructions to Americans that we should convert to Islam, bemoaning global warming, chiding the democrats in Congress for failing to pull America out of Iraq, and basically sounding just like middle-eastern version of Keith Olbermann. Word got around Washington that the long-awaited report from Gen. David Petraeus is going to say more positive things about the “surge” in Iraq than the democrats would like it to say. As a result of that, after months of going on record with a wait-and-see approach about the General’s report, our democrats have decided to pull a hairpin U-turn and start trashing the report before it is released, questioning the General’s value as an impartial observer of the progress in the theater, and sending Harry Reid and Charles Schumer out in front of cameras to make asses out of themselves.

MoveOn.Org, the liberal activist group that for seven years has been dedicated to not moving on from things, has started attacking Congressman Brian Baird, D-Washington, for traveling to Iraq, returning back here, and daring to speak candidly about what he saw over there. So now, not only are Islamic terrorists attacking Americans for being American, but Americans are attacking other Americans for practicing freedom of speech after being elected to Congress, seeing the success of our country’s military engagements with their own eyes, and honestly informing the rest of us about what it is they’ve seen.

There was an absolutely unbelievable story about one of Hillary Clinton’s most prominent fund-raisers missing his bail hearing. Whereabouts unknown!

Oh and one other thing — in making his remarks, Sen. Schumer got busted by some intrepid bloggers after his web site was updated with a phony transcript of his comments on the Senate floor. In the floor speech, he singled out our troops for special criticism, citing “The inability of American soldiers to protect these tribes…” and someone altered this on his web site to “The lack of protection for these tribes.” So we learned our senior Senator from the state of New York wants to bash the men and women who are out there, risking life and limb, and he doesn’t even have the stones to stand behind his own remarks. Certainly, this is valuable information for the citizens of a democratic republic to have.

Fertile ground for my newspaper’s opinion section that coming weekend, wouldn’t you say?

See, to an American who has his priorities in order, I know what is to be concluded from the events above. I am one of those Americans. But numerically, I am insignificant, and so this is why I buy the Sacramento Bee from time to time — especially on Sundays. How do our nation’s most ignorant and easily-led citizens see such things? Can they detect lies, deceipt and charlatanism when such things are paraded right in front of their noses and pointed out to them? Well…now that the pages have dried out again, let’s rustle them open again and see what we have here.

I see the token conservative George F. Will wants us to think about Iraq. But only from a very high level, with commentary about Gen. Petraeus’ educational background, how we got the situation we currently have over there, the mistakes some of our civilian leaders have made. Not too much about recent events and how they might shape things from here on out. Nothing about Schumer’s shenanigans, or the videotape, or the political machinations by our democrat leadership in Congress as the Petraeus report comes due.

Leonard Pitts would like to talk about peoples’ feelings as the sixth anniversary of the September 11 attacks comes up. Always nice to have a human-interest story in The Bee; you can never have to many of those, I guess.

Commentary about healthcare. Together with a cartoon by Rex Babin prominently featuring a man’s bare buttocks. Good…what else? Letters to the Editor about whether or not President Bush should be impeached. Looks like it was “Impeachment Day” at the Letters Desk…there’s one letter about the Hillary fugitive, another one about kids not being able to play rough anymore, all other letters are about an impeachment that isn’t going to happen. Someone managed to detect some irony in Tony Snow’s overall medical condition — but not Michael Moore’s. For the uninitiated, Snow is the outgoing White House Press Secretary, and Michael Moore is a filmmaker who produces left-wing propaganda, calls his works “documentaries,” and wins awards for said documentaries as if they really were documentaries. One would expect Snow to have a right-wing outlook on the United States’ healthcare system, whereas Moore thinks our healthcare should work kind of like Cuba. Tony Snow has ‘fessed up to not having a 401(k) account. He is not yet cancer free. Moore, on the other hand, is a big fat slob who’d rather make movies about how our healthcare should work, than stop making his own healthcare needlessly expensive by being a big fat slob. So anyway…we have a special hatchet-job on Tony Snow for having an empty 401(k) account, branding him some kind of a hypocrite, but not a single peep about Moore.

Ah, and I almost the centerpiece: A hit piece on the front page, chastising homosexuals who dare to support conservative values…or conservatives who dare to be homosexual. It’s called “Hypocrites & Haters” but it should really be called “Who We’ve Decided You Should Hate This Week.” Not deemed complete without a huge splash photo of Sen. Larry Craig resigning in front of a zillion cameras. Not sure which is the bigger crime, being a gay Republican or a Republican who’s gay, but it’s clear someone’s got a big beef with anyone who is both of those. The dirty little secret is, it’s a reprint from an article on the hard-line extreme left-wing web site The Nation. I have never understood this practice. I hope it’s a questionable one: It’s like newspaper editors walked into your living room or home-office, fired up your inkjet printer, printed up something freely available on the Internet, reimbursed you for the ink but then charged you $1.62. If you wanted a printout — you would have made one yourself, right?

I’m also a little lost on this thing where you can’t have a negative thought about homosexuals in general, or even any thought that approaches negativity, until you find out they’re Republicans, at which point you’re somehow obliged to be displeased with them. Had the article taken homosexuals to task for their sympathies to any other political viewpoint, it surely would have been branded as “hate speech.” Since homosexuals are being effectively disallowed from any service or activism in support of conservative values, it seems not only are you allowed to write such stuff without anyone calling it a crime, but you can charge money for the reading of it…to be paid by Bee subscribers who lack Google skills, and can’t track down your hatred and invective on the Internet.

Well, with all these things going on with terrorism I’m glad to be reminded there are gay Republicans and that I’m supposed to hate them, that’s certainly valuable. Personally, I’m still of the opinion that if a politician is gay, but his votes are likely to bring in more dead terrorists, then by all means let ‘im go to work. But keep on burning up ink by the barrel, telling me what kind of prejudices I’m supposed to have a zillion more times. Maybe I’ll come around eventually. Well done.

David Brooks writes about a social contract for healthcare. Weintraub gives us more info about some kind of a health care “deal” coming into focus. I like Weintraub overall, but counting the “butt” cartoon this is four pieces already. Maybe my own good health has spoiled me rotten…it just seems like I should be reading more about terrorists, and what we’re doing to kill them, and less about how politicians and union officials think overly-expensive pills should be covered.

The Supreme Court ruled that the public has a right to access information on salaries of public officials.

A puff piece on Couric. A tasteful farewell to Pavarotti. Ginger Rutland isn’t pleased with the way the city handled Tex Mex and other downtown restaurants. Someone else is unhappy with the way prison guard pay is managed.

I could go on, but I think you get the point. We’re about to have a big showdown over the killing of terrorists, how well we’re doing it, whether Iraq will end up being a place where a lot of them get stamped out like the weeds they are, or to bloom like never before. I could, with very little effort, assemble a logically compelling argument that no other issue really matters by comparison. At least not right now. But whoever has the task of assembling the “Forum” section for the Sacramento Bee, doesn’t seem to see it that way. That person lacks a certain vision. It would be beneficial for that person to be called into a meeting with his or her superiors, for a quick talk, which need not be altogether pleasant.

I would start with this: Henceforth, let’s draw straws to see who gets to write the ONE editorial about health care, sniveling away about how America hasn’t “pinkified” the industry fast enough or hard enough to make us happy. Just one of those — that way we have the defense that the topics covered on the weekend may be marginal in importance and interest, but hey, they’re diverse. No need to sprinkle the healthcare-whining throughout the six-page opinion section, like flakes of pepper on a cod fillet, thereby depriving the paper of even that defense-of-last-resort. But in general…share some opinions that are timely, poignant, thought-provoking and important. There’s an agenda present that is due for a dropping, or an agenda absent that is due for a picking-up. Maybe both of those.

See, I don’t really begrudge my local paper for being hard-left-wing. I don’t even begrudge them for missing the cajones to admit this is what they are. Such misdemeanors are expected of newspapers nowadays. But newspapers should be topical. Or at the very least, they shouldn’t engage such an abundance of effort in making themselves trivial.

Posted in Blogs vs. MSM, Deranged Leftists | 3 Comments »

Fred’s The One

Thursday, September 6th, 2007

Lest there be any doubt that Fred is the one, consider this: Meredith hates him.

View video here.

Meredith riffed off Russert’s “credibility” line to take her next shot.

VIEIRA: Well you know you talk about credibility. I want to read you something that New Hampshire Republican chairman Fergus Cullen said about Thompson. He said that the voters in this state are interested in this guy, but, and here’s the but, “for Thompson to go on Jay Leno the same night and be trading jokes while other candidates are having a substantive discussion on issues is not going to be missed by New Hampshire voters.” So it’s possible the decision could backfire, isn’t it?

Russert observed that the influential Manchester Union-Leader has been saying much the same thing, and that “there’s no doubt about it, Thompson has some work to do.”

Of course we all remember the way “Today” roughed up Hillary the morning after she chose to announce via a fluffy chat-on-the-couch. Or not.

Stick a sock in it, Meredith. I’ll tell you one think that wasn’t missed by this voter: A whole gaggle of supposed “Republicans” tittering away…how did you put it? “Trading jokes?” Yeah, doing that, about the one candidate who wasn’t there because they were so pants-crappingly scared of him AND they knew this was the last time they could disparage him without having to worry about a ricochet beatdown.

WONDERFUL. In 2007, politics is all about “we all agree on who the target is, let’s see who’s best at throwing the pie.” Isn’t that just great? The one habit that, since December of 2000, had the least to do with actually solving any of the problems anyone wants to see solved, and it has propagated to bipartisan status now.

Fred, here’s to ya. Hope you show them they had something to worry about all along. You can probably come up with a much better witty comeback on your own. Mine would be something like “I fail to see what any of this has to do with keeping illegal aliens out of the country or killing more terrorists.”

Posted in Elections, Lying Liars | 2 Comments »

Idiots and Segways

Tuesday, September 4th, 2007

To be fair about it, this has always been Item #18 on the Things That Don’t F@!!*!”!ing Matter list:

President Bush fell off of a “Segway”

Well, there is clumsiness, and then there is irony. Throughout yesterday, my plan was to just leave this latest event unmentioned. But in the end, I had a flash of realization.

I’m just not that big of a person.

It might not have been instant, but the bad karma a former British tabloid editor got calling President Bush “an idiot” for falling off a Segway in 2003 got him four years later as he broke three ribs when he accidentally hit a curb driving a – wait for it – Segway (h/t Say Anything via Glenn Reynolds).

As reported by Access Hollywood on August 21 (emphasis added):

Piers Morgan may be a great judge of “talent,” but clearly, riding a segway is not one of his own.

The “America’s Got Talent” judge broke several ribs this weekend as a result of a Segway accident, and may not be able to appear on tonight’s season finale.

Hysterically, on June 14, 2003, the tabloid Morgan was then editor for, the Daily Mirror, ran a headline “You’d have to be an idiot to fall off, wouldn’t you Mr President,” along with a rather disparaging article with these pictures of Bush’s accident (emphasis added):

THE makers promise it will never fall over…

So even George Bush should be able to use the Segway personal two-wheel transporter without tumbling off.

After all, it’s kept upright by some of the most sophisticated gyroscopes known to man, linked to a series of computers to detect the slightest movement.

But if anyone can make a pig’s ear of riding a sophisticated, self-balancing machine like this, Dubya can.

The President climbed on, stumbled a bit, then crashed off the other side – before it had actually gone anywhere.

And this is the man who used to fly fighter planes.

Cue John Lennon: Instant karma’s gonna get you. Gonna knock you off your feet.

Posted in Bush Derangement Syndrome, Glad I Learned About This | No Comments »

On Thompson

Saturday, September 1st, 2007

FrankJ has probably done as decent a job as anyone, of rounding up the straight-skinny on what exactly is going on with Fred Thompson.

Bottom line: September 6. That’s when it starts.

Why do I like Fred Thompson? Federalism. Gun rights. Border security.

In short, stuff that our Year 2007 High Priests of Truth tell us is hard-line, extreme-right-wing stuff…to which the men who founded this country, agreeing with one another on practically nothing else, would be united in unison in swiveling their noggins toward such an utterance, dropping their jaws, and uttering an incredulous “Huhwha???” Stuff that our loud angry mostly-anonymous voices tell us is reckless, uncompromising, brittle and extremist, but which common sense tells us is the very essence of moderation.

Thompson I rather liked FormerHostage’s comment (#4):

This morning I saw a MFL wearing a T-shirt that said: 01-20-08 Bush’s Last Day.

I was thinking that you should steal this idea and create T-shirts that say: 01-20-08 Thompson’s First Day.

It would be priceless to watch the expression on their faces when they realize that instead of a fellow traveller you’re (cue ominous music) ONE. OF. THEM!(end music).

Yeah…I’m thinking have the Bush comment on the front of the shirt and the Thompson “afterthought” on the back. Of course, the one I’m wearing right now as I type this very sentence, suits me just fine. Ah well, time to start my day with an afternoon cup o’joe at Starbuck’s, with a halo over my head, humming a happy tune…

Not to worry, it IS Folsom. Of course, slime always leaves a residue. Better be careful, some of the hippies might ball up their tiny fists at me.

Posted in Deranged Leftists | 2 Comments »

Creationist Scandals

Saturday, September 1st, 2007

Panda’s Thumb has an interesting theory for which support has been gleaned from the Larry Craig mess: that scandals disproportionately afflict creationists. Into the supporting data sets waltzes Sen. Craig, who in 1989…

…co-sponsored a constitutional amendment, the “Community Life Amendment,” to authorize teaching “the creation of the earth as accepted in Judeo-Christian tradition.”

I think Panda’s Thumb’s theory might have been in better shape if Sen. Craig’s name had been left unmentioned. It’s not too extravagant to suppose the Senator is innocent of the charges. True, he did plead guilty to a lesser charge, and there are other problems with the supposition — who the hell picks up toilet paper on the floor of bathroom stalls, how can you take it so calmly when a cop calls you a liar, and so forth — but it’s a little strange that so much legal hot water can be churned up out of so little evidence. This is bothersome to quite a few folks, some of whom hate Sen. Craig’s guts and think he’s guilty as hell. A prostitution sting can’t work this way. A lot of other things can’t work this way. A cop can’t bust you for fidgeting, making gestures, gesturing in manners anecdotally associated with…ripping off a stereo system out of a jeep. Pressing chewing gum against a bus seat. Jaywalking. Tearing the tag off a mattress.

And then there’s the thing loyal gentlemen Craig-haters club members refuse to discuss: Do you want to take a crap in a stall next to a cop? A cop who can’t leave his own crapper until he busts someone? Are you in control of where your feet are going and how they’re moving? Really?

So to include Sen. Craig, strikes me as a little bit of a grasping-at-straws exercise. If we’re counting scandals, and measuring them on any sort of a scientific basis, the Craig thing hardly emerges as a creme de la creme specimen, does it? No, if the Craig mess is statistically representative of any phenomenon, it is a phenomenon of people talking about things, and officials being forced to resign over those things — but not of those things actually being done.

And in this respect, Panda is quite correct. Just not in the way Panda thinks.

At this point, we have to confess to an ugly truth about religion. It is more than a belief in one or several deities. It always has been much more than that. It is a system which empowers the few to dictate behavior to many, and avoid any intra-societal debate about whether such behavior would be beneficial or not, or whether there might be alternatives. This is the stigma the secularists continue to slap on religion, and they are quite correct about this. Religion is an ancient method of keeping the riff-raff in line. This is what has kept it around for so long, at least throughout the middle ages. It’s undeniable.

Saying so doesn’t make you a godless heathen. You can admit this truism and still have a healthy belief in and respect for God. This confession has to do with the affairs of men, which is an enclave altogether separate from the dominion of God.

The thing is, though, religion works best when people struggle away in substandard lifestyles. Actually, when people have no lifestyles. This is easy to substantiate. Here we are in 2007, we have an unprecedented surge of atheism…oh, look how popular it is! Can’t swing a dead cat around without hitting an atheist, haughtily lecturing at you that the cat evolved from a ladybug, now there is no cat, and you’re such a drooling idiot if you dare to question his wisdom. Atheist book after atheist book after atheist book hits the best-seller list — there are even “A for Atheism” tee shirts. It’s a big business, one that looks more and more, ironically enough, like evangelism.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what’s going on here. People, we see fairly easily once we really start to pay attention to them and how they do things, aren’t so ready, willing and able to soar above the level of an easily-led zombie as they prefer to believe they are. They like someone else telling them what to do. They might not like the idea of it, and sometimes they’re less welcoming of it than other times. But over the long haul, they certainly can’t be counted on to nurse a viscerally-independent rebellious acrimony toward arbitrary and excessive authority.

Over the long haul, they’ll always make a place for it. For the “natural-born leader” who steps in and starts slinging around commandments…benevolent commandments, malicious ones, duplicitous ones, or just-plain poorly-thought-out ones.

And you can take it to the bank that someone will always be willing to step up and do exactly that. Blame God or blame Darwin — somehow, we have been hard-wired to live in tribes. Tribes with hierarchical command structures. Leaders…followers…neither class with a monopoly on survival-related genetic attributes, since after hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, both classes are still here. Goin’ STRONG. No end in sight. Anyone who seeks to assert leading-and-following is learned behavior, only has to hang around groups of people while they do the leading-and-following for awhile. Watch the group put someone in charge. See how much sense it makes. Repeat the experiment a few times…the “learned behavior” theory will be quietly withdrawn in sheepish disgrace. It isn’t learned behavior. It’s genetic coding.

The methodology of communication between these two classes, the “network topology,” if you will, by which the leaders tell the followers what to do — this is the only thing that changes. It changes with technology. In an agricultural society, religion just seems like a natural fit. Try living as a farmer for a year without praying. Try doing it when you have fifteen kids, fifteen kids you need in order to get enough help with the spring planting or the fall harvest. Try it when, at best, you might be able to hope for ten of those fifteen to live long enough to have kids of their own, and only five of the fifteen to live to bury you.

Just try not praying then.

Once you realize that, you realize how cowardly atheism is. There is the factual cowardice of it; it is “right,” because and only because God is an entity whose existence cannot be proven. This means atheism cannot be debunked, and since it cannot be debunked it insists on being awarded the status of “proven,” when all it has achieved is non-debunkery, and a logical assurance of everlasting non-debunkery. No further proof than that. “I must be right, for you cannot say that I am wrong,” is what it tells us.

But there is also the fair-weather cowardice. Atheism pops up to accept accolades and embraces from our society, when it can. Once the starvation and pestilence and Great Depressions and Nazis and under-electrified rural areas and racial oppression have been relegated to the dustbin of history, with the lid of the dustbin riveted and welded in place — up pops atheism! We can afford to be atheists now, although our grandparents could not have. Nevermind that, we can be atheists now, so let’s have at it.

In the end, Panda’s Thumb’s error is to associate the word “scandal” with some kind of honest and even-handed delivery of hard fact. This is why I think so little of Panda’s example, since the Craig Scandal is based on postulation and not fact.

The Thumb has accidentally proven something problematic to the theory it intends to promote; it has stuck a rake handle into it’s own bicycle spokes. Scandals, as we know them today, are not about guilt. They are about control. They are about telling the “little people” what to think and what to do…exactly the task religion was achieving for the powerful, hundreds of years ago.

This is a process that has been repeated countless times in human history, each time a new sovereign has displaced an old one through a revolution. The difference now is that the new emperor, and the former one, are harder to identify. Neither one wore a crown, neither one was an individual, but rather they were & are aggregates of individuals. But now, as in revolutions past, our new ruler has to sweep away the remnants of government wielded by the old one. This is an essential last-phase of any successful revolution — the parliament and the councils and the census-taking establishments of the displaced king, must be broken down, then rooted out, then swept away, and the residue sterilized.

That’s what the new ruler is doing now, and that’s what atheism is all about. Godless people are much easier to control. They don’t think they were put here by a Higher Power for any glorious purpose…of necessity, they must think the whole point to their existence is to eat and poop and inhale and exhale, plus whatever ancillary purpose some employer somewhere might see fit for them to do. An employer which, of further necessity, they must think of as some kind of fool, or a big meanie, or both.

This is why atheists don’t often have too many nice things to say about other people, unless those other people are also atheists. I can pretty much promise you if an atheist happens to trip across this post, he or she will prove this point nicely. Better than even odds the adjective “stupid” will be embedded somewhere in the response, and will compliment yours truly.

Anyway, that’s what scandals are now. Pretty much. They are drummed up artificially, tossed out to us like T-bone steaks to hungry tigers, at times deemed convenient to interested parties. This is not to say everyone afflicted with scandal is innocent. But we might as well admit that scandals are being used as devices, since they doubtlessly are. The scandal is a new Layer 2 network topology — it displaces religion exactly the same way Ethernet displaced Token-Ring. It is a new mechanism to keep the proles and plebes in line, now that the technology is available to sustain a communication medium that relies on rhythm, and there is a pressing need for such a medium that does what the old one did, while eschewing any notion of a deity. Demand…supply.

So I think Panda’s Thumb is right: Scandals disproportionately afflict those failing to demonstrate an inimicable attitude toward religion, failing to embrace secularism. Scandals will continue to be pointed in that direction, toward those targets. The theory is correct, just not for the reasons thought.

Thing I Know #85. As the standard of living improves, people slowly lose their need for a Supreme Being, while their need for a spiritual leader remains.

Thing I Know #175. Atheists are supposed to value their independence, and be determined to live out their lives to appeal to no one, and at the pleasure of no one. But when they’re around other atheists they don’t act like this.

Posted in Gawd Is Bad Mmmkay, Incumbent Scandals, Poisoning Christianity | 2 Comments »

Nonsensical Rules…It Must Mean Bush

Friday, August 31st, 2007

Guess what folks, employees in an agency of the federal government now have to follow some rules, which in certain cases make little-to-no sense at all. Have you ever heard of such a thing?

Scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Goddard Space Flight Center are up in arms over a new requirement by NASA that they submit to detailed FBI scrutiny of their backgrounds in order to obtain clearance to go to work. They are claiming that the agency may be trying to control or silence them about issues like global warming.

The new security clearance requirement, which involves interviews of neighbors and checks into the distant background activities of scientists, many of whom have worked at JPL and Goddard for as long as thirty years, is puzzling because both locations have little or no involvement in secret or national security research. Indeed, by law, NASA’s activities and the research its scientists engage in are required to be publicly available.

“Almost nobody at NASA does classified work,” says Robert Nelson, a veteran scientist at JPL who heads up the photo analysis unit on the Cassini-Huygens space probe project exploring Saturn and its moons. “I think this is really all about NASA director [Michael] Griffin putting a security wrap around us.”

Yup, throughout modern history enormous, leviathan government agencies have imposed rules on the people who work for them, rules that run contrary to common sense, or to the notions of lots of people about the way things ought to work. Through all the decades hearing about such boondoggles, I had no idea President Bush was responsible for all the red tape, or that it was being wielded to put a choke-hold on global warming alarmist research.

Why, now that you point it out to me, it makes perfect sense.

I got my own idea of what this is about. The latest “Everyone Else Is Linking It, I Might As Well Too” story on global warming, of which you and I could have read just about anywhere yesterday (but my hat tip goes to Buck), does sufficient damage to the Chicken Little dogma that you just knew a backlash was inevitable.

In 2004, history professor Naomi Oreskes performed a survey of research papers on climate change. Examining peer-reviewed papers published on the ISI Web of Science database from 1993 to 2003, she found a majority supported the “consensus view,” defined as humans were having at least some effect on global climate change. Oreskes’ work has been repeatedly cited, but as some of its data is now nearly 15 years old, its conclusions are becoming somewhat dated.

Medical researcher Dr. Klaus-Martin Schulte recently updated this research. Using the same database and search terms as Oreskes, he examined all papers published from 2004 to February 2007. The results have been submitted to the journal Energy and Environment, of which DailyTech has obtained a pre-publication copy. The figures are surprising.

Of 528 total papers on climate change, only 38 (7%) gave an explicit endorsement of the consensus. If one considers “implicit” endorsement (accepting the consensus without explicit statement), the figure rises to 45%. However, while only 32 papers (6%) reject the consensus outright, the largest category (48%) are neutral papers, refusing to either accept or reject the hypothesis. This is no “consensus.”

The figures are even more shocking when one remembers the watered-down definition of consensus here. Not only does it not require supporting that man is the “primary” cause of warming, but it doesn’t require any belief or support for “catastrophic” global warming. In fact of all papers published in this period (2004 to February 2007), only a single one makes any reference to climate change leading to catastrophic results.

One out of 528.

That came out on a WEDNESDAY.

This National Agency Check stuff — being breathlessly reported for the benefit of a paranoid-liberal readership that has never heard of NAC before and suspects Bush skullduggery anytime they encounter something they don’t understand — came out on a THURSDAY.

Wednesday…Thursday. Discharge, ricochet. Action, reaction. Push-me, pull-you. Once again, the global warming mindset tries like the dickens to look like “science,” and ends up looking more like a religion. I’m not the first to point it out, and I won’t be the last.

As for Bush Derangement Syndrome, in three decades it will look just like pet rocks and mutton-chop sideburns do today.

Posted in Bush Derangement Syndrome | No Comments »

Bloomberg: Give Poor Cash for Good Behavior

Thursday, August 30th, 2007

Yeah, why didn’t we think of this before?

[New York City Mayor Mike] Bloomberg says that after years of fighting poverty, the government has little to show for its efforts. Now it’s time to try something new. Why not offer incentives to poor people to do things that can benefit them, such as attend school, get a library card or go to the doctor?
:
Bloomberg points to the incentives the government already offers to the rich. For instance, there are subsidies to farmers to stop planting corn or energy companies to drill — or not drill — in certain places.

“You can argue that a lot of the things Congress subsidizes, people should do anyway,” he says in an interview with NPR’s Steve Inskeep. “But the truth … is, when you have a bonus, you tend to work harder and do more.”

Bloomberg, a billionaire, says New York City will try the incentives as an experiment using private money, including some of his own.

It’s a funny thing about the nanny-state. Whenever a “bold” new idea is proposed, like this, both sides of the argument cite precedent. The protagonists point backward, the antagonists, forward.

Those who are supportive say things like, heck, we already do (such-and-such). Notice the nod back to Roosevelt’s Agricultural Adjustment Administration and the paying of farmers not to grow corn, to slaughter cattle, to pour cream into ditches, etc.

And the antagonists pose the rhetorical question: What’s next? I could ask this. Hey, I make some pretty smart decisions. Where’s my handout from Bloomberg’s personal treasure chest?

Aren’t all nanny-state initiatives, the conventional as well as the more adventurous — just like this? To make them look like great ideas you have to say 1) we’re simply following through on earlier precedent, and 2) it STOPS here. Which is essentially arguing against the scientific principle of inertia.

One thing I do find encouraging here is that the program is being sold on the strength of some of the money…just some…coming from Bloomberg’s personal checkbook, at least in the experimental phases. If he could guarantee that the program would stay this way, I could support that. Not that I would predict success, but I would at least hope for it, and I’d support the rights of persons wishing to join him, throwing their own money into the hat. Mistake? Probably. But I’d support the right to make it.

Of course that would be a “foundation,” and government wouldn’t have a single thing to do with it. So for the city government to get involved, something is going to have to go beyond volunteerism. Government is not about selection, it is about force. Opting-in to and opting-out of things, that’s what the private sector is for.

Posted in Ayn Rand Spins, Deranged Leftists, Domestic Issues | No Comments »

Tortured Debate

Monday, August 27th, 2007

Alberto Gonzales has resigned from his post as U.S. Attorney General, as Charles Krauthammer and I thought he should’ve a long time ago.

This makes me think about something:

I was on a thread somewhere and I got into a bit of a dust-up with some rabid left-wingers on the torture thing. I was pointing out something no different from what I had pointed out in other places, before: I’m not completely sold on the idea that this is “wrong,” and I find it deceptive to lump “humiliation” together with the stuff that comes to mind when you use the T-word. Namely, bodily mutilations, fire and steel. I don’t see these as the same thing and I don’t think there are very many people, at all, who see them as the same thing. To pretend these are on the same footing, in any way, is fundamentally dishonest.

And in my assessment of the argument, the “Torture Is Wrong” doctrine depends completely on those two things being the same. Once you acknowledge they’re different, you realize something: This really is all about de-fanging the United States. It’s about making sure we can’t do anything to win the war, besides getting shot at. Just because a lot of “Torture Is Wrong” people aren’t after that, doesn’t mean there’s some other motive behind it. There isn’t. It’s about emboldening one side of this war, by putting the other side — us — on a short leash, and letting them do whatever they want.

Now, this argument doesn’t have much currency. In the dust-up in which I lowered myself to participating, the left-wingers expressed their horror at my different ideas so all the other left-wingers could see them doing it, and that was the end of it…in short, they argued from personal incredulity…

…but my argument doesn’t have currency outside of left-winger-land, either. People, to their credit, are generally very keen on the idea that governments are corrupt and it’s up to the people represented by those governments, to straighten them out and keep them straightened out. This is a noble goal. Of course, the immature mind is selective about this; he is more receptive to this when the party opposed to his, is the one in power. In other words, the dullard falls prey to the “My guy is okay, the other guy is messed up” mindset.

That’s where our left-wingers are coming from right now. The other guy is in power…so now, the government can do bad things. Alert Mode On. Once a “good guy” is in the White House, we can get back to worrying about confiscating guns, images of Moses in courthouses, price-gouging in the kids’ cereal market, not enough blacks on cable TV sitcoms, and are the taxpayers paying enough that Grandma can buy medicine and dog food for her dinner. And naturally, if any of these problems go unsolved — and trust me, all of them will remain essentially unchanged, no matter how much time is spent solving them — it won’t reflect poorly on that “good guy” in charge. He’ll be “trying.” It’ll be like the nineties all over again.

But for those of us who want the United States to win the war, one issue remains. I’m not sure what you can do to get information out of a “detainee,” if 1) Torture is wrong, and 2) Torture includes everything less-than-comfortable. What then? You’d have to just sit around waiting for him to feel talkative, wouldn’t you? I mean, what else is there?

Well, it turns out this was prophetic. Now that a successor will have to be nominated for Gonzo, we’re about to be dragged through the torture debate. The newspapers and the cable television and the alphabet-soup-network commentators have their own ideas — make that “idea” — about the angle on this story. As usual, the bloggers have a more interesting, enlightening, and multi-point perspective on the issue. Simply put, we have a few more questions about it.

I wish to contribute my own questions to the discussion. The question I thought of since the dust-up was:

What if we were to abolish torture, and not tell anybody?

You see, over the years I’ve noticed something about people. When they say “you shouldn’t do X” and the only answer they can provide as to why, is “because X is wrong” — they typically don’t give a rat’s ass whether or not X continues to be done or not. What they really want, is to be seen intoning to someone that X ought not be done because X is wrong. They’re performing. Style over substance. So my question is…what if we were to do exactly what they want, but only on the layer that deals with substance?

What if the world were to continue to believe we were torturing people, and meanwhile, behind the scenes, we didn’t do it? What if someone were to be completely deserving of the credit of making us stop torturing people…but not get any of the credit for stopping us? That would be like going to the golf course alone and getting a hole-in-one with nobody around to see. But if it’s about right-and-wrong, that’d be okay wouldn’t it?

Granted, this would violate the Living With Morgan Rule #1, in which, deploring false accusations, once I’m accused of something I want to be guilty of doing it. But leaving that aside. Suppose the world community is left to conclude we’re waterboarding these guys and subjecting them to the batteries-in-a-pillowcase debriefing sessions. But meanwhile, behind the scenes all we do is wait hand and foot on Ahmed and Muammar like waiters in some five-star restaurant…all day long, and then the next day we do it again. If they want to talk, we listen. If not, we serve up another banana-nut muffin and make sure there’s a good selection between grape jelly and orange marmalade.

Now, would that be okay? I mean, we wouldn’t be doing anything “wrong”; just, a lot of folks would be laboring under the misconception that we are.

I would have to expect, realistically, my plan wouldn’t get a lot of takers. It would, however, have a unifying effect on those who place more importance on reality itself, than the popular perception of that reality. Those on the “right wing” would rightfully conclude I’d be throwing in the towel on the prospect of getting any information out of these guys. They’d say, as a direct result of this, people will die. I don’t have any information that would contradict this; I don’t think anyone else does either. And those on the “left wing” who ought to be celebrating at our government somehow becoming “ethical,” would doubtless find something else that isn’t up to snuff, and start complaining about that.

Of course, for those who are concerned about image, by design the situtation would remain unchanged. I expect they’d go on and on about polls, and disapproval, and international-community this and we are seen that.

I would expect something else, though.

A lot of substance-over-image left-wingers, would hop the turnstyle. They’d start to worry more about image of what’s going on, than about what’s actually going on. I mean, that’s the part of it that would still suck…so they’d simply change what they find important.

At this point, let’s end the mental exercise. It has achieved what it was tossed out to accomplish. The torture debate has nothing to do with what is actually happening; it has to do with the public image of what is happening. It’s all about perceptions. Let me repeat: The debate is ALL about perceptions. It has butkus to do with reality.

When people say “we should not torture because it is wrong,” what they really mean is “we should not torture because it can be presented as being wrong” or “we should not torture because I can get lots of people agitated over the idea that it is wrong.”

Torture really being wrong, has nothing to do with it. That’s why nobody’s going to stick their neck out and sign on to the idea that “if we stop torturing people we will become noble.” Nobody’s saying that, and nobody will say that.

But they’ll sure as hell say the opposite. They’ll say “people despise us because we torture,” even though they’ll never say “people will start liking us if we don’t torture.”

So their argument is lacking in substance, because it isn’t about substance. It isn’t supposed to be. This is why my “solution” wouldn’t be any solution at all. It fixes the substance while leaving the image unchanged…in what is essentially a public-relations issue.

But the P.R. guys don’t have a solution either. Before we started arguing all over the world about torture, we were arguing all over the world about the invasion of Iraq. How many people do you know who have negative feelings toward the United States over this torture issue, who didn’t have negative feelings against the United States about going into Iraq before we started arguing about the torture issue? I mean, count everybody — people you know, public figures, celebrities…can you think of anyone? I can’t think of a single person.

It’s not exactly a hot news item when liberals and democrats rally around an issue that is phony. This one has captured the mainstream, what you might call the “heartland.” It’s easy to understand why, because who wants to be strapped to a waterboard? It doesn’t seem very appealing. But when you dissect this issue, it turns out, surprisingly, to be more phony than most others. The substance-angle is nonexistent, and the style-angle is ineffectual and goes nowhere. It’s just a talking point in circulation among America’s enemies — those who fight us overtly, and those who insist they’re “patriotic” but never seem to have a kind word to say about the country.

Of course it is an effective talking-point, and it is around, posing problems for us, because of our actions. But since bringing a stop to those actions — in style, as well as in substance — wouldn’t make anything any better, I’d like our senators to do a good job explaining to us why they’ll be debating it, before they do so debate it. I’d like to see them do an excellent job justifying this. I have strong doubts they’ll even perform an adequate one.

Posted in Incumbent Scandals, Overlawyered, Poisoning Western Civilization, TIK 52, Torture and Civil Liberties and What-Not | 1 Comment »

Whiskey…Tango…Foxtrot… XIV

Saturday, August 25th, 2007

Thing I Know #17. A man may not kill a fly for a cause he believes is right; but he might do terrible things for a cause he believes is righteous.

I guess our democrats are now on the “righteous” side of that fence. Hat tip to Dr. Melissa Clouthier.

Seriously, what in the hell is the matter with these people? What exactly is it they are trying to do, and do they even remember what that purpose once was? It seems to have been pitched out the window by now.

Posted in Deranged Leftists | No Comments »

This Is Good XLII

Friday, August 24th, 2007

Wow, did Hillary Clinton ever get under this guy’s skin:

My opinion? A little dignity wouldn’t be a bad thing to add; nobody’s mind was ever changed by having someone call them a stupid idiot. But the message is a good one once the emotionalism is taken out of it. For example, you could seal this up in a time capsule to let people from the future know what kind of team-oriented politics we have going on right now. And yeah, in that statement I am criticizing Hillary’s fans, not the people who criticize Hillary or her fans. Team politics — they, and she, are what those are all about. My team’s great, the other team sucks, whatever my team wants is good, whatever the other team wants is bad…all I care about is points and touchdowns and the clock and what quarter we’re in, nothing else matters. That’s Team Hillary for ya.

The guy simply has a great point. Hillary criticizes the clemency order for Scooter Libby, and she’s hoping people will forget about what her husband did. She hopes for that — to someone with a working memory of inconvenient things, her comments have significant problems — and why shouldn’t she hope for it? Those people are out there. They’ve been mobilized by left-wing blogs and left-wing columnists and left-wing producers of “documentaries.” They think all you have to know about American politics is that Bush is Emperor Palpatine…and there simply isn’t anything worth knowing beyond that. Joe Wilson is caught in lie after lie after lie, real lies not phony ones — assholes in head scarves are trying to kill us, bake us to death in skyscrapers to make political statements — none of it matters. All for the team.

And she goes out there and manufactures all this anger and parades it in front of people. Anger and showmanship. Kind of like the guy narrating this movie himself, ironically…except with a much greater audience, a much greater conviction of self-entitlement to power, and a much greater prospect of directly impacting the lives of everyday people, whether they want her to or not. And unlike the narrator, missing even a cosmetic pretense for even-handedness in these matters. Just rah rah rah, hurray for our side, and down with the other guy.

In short, exactly what people are supposed to be sick and tired of. On the public wanting cooler heads to prevail in politics, my “news” will have no hesitation to clue me in…but I could grow very old waiting around for them to hang it around the neck of her Hillary-ness.

And what in the world is up with that nasal resonance of hers? It’s like she’s talking through the beak of a goose. A metal goose.

This is what scares me about Hillary: That is her appeal. The negativity. People who like Hillary, do not like Hillary because of her readiness, willingness or ability to improve people’s lives. They like Hillary because they expect her to injure certain targeted individuals and classes of people. They want her to hurt someone.

Her husband, crook that he was, and as bad for the country as he was, at least was seen by some of his fans as a medicinal balm. They supported him because they thought he would deliver a better life to people who desperately needed one. Hillary has only token residue of that kind of appeal, if she has it at all. She’s here to take some kind of dirty-rotten-bastards down a peg, and that is all she is here to do; that’s the kind of candidate she is.

Maybe to be a successful female candidate, that’s what you have to do and that’s what you have to be. Sort of a super-weapon candidate. There may be a kernel of truth to that. If there is, that’s unfair and we should change it. But I strongly doubt it’s an airtight thing. I think if you’re a positive person who is a woman, and you want to run for office and make our country stronger and improve the lives of people who live in it, and stand up for what you believe without being a total theatrical bitch like Hillary — I do think, if you’re sufficiently energetic and resourceful and creative, you’ll find a way to get it done.

And if I’m wrong, if that is absolutely impossible, that what I’ve just discussed is a luxury to be reserved for us dudes because it’s our world everybody’s living in and we’re too privileged to realize it — then until that’s fixed let’s just keep men in the White House. Having our first female President in this half of the century, just isn’t worth it. It’s not worth having someone, of either gender, waking up every morning in that mansion and saying to themselves “who am I going to hurt today?”

After the terrorists are dead, our nation could use some time for healing. From what I can see of Hillary, with her we get neither one of those things. With her in charge we get to continue arguing about matters ranging from all-important to comically trivial, and our enemies get to continue killing us.

Posted in Deranged Leftists, Incumbent Scandals | 2 Comments »

Not In It For The Attention, Mind You… IX

Monday, August 20th, 2007

The Village Voice lied. They told a big fat fib.

I say that with a wink and a nod; I don’t really mean it. The story begins with a guy named Rudy Giuliani, who is running for President of the United States right now. He’s been saying a lot of stuff the Village Voice doesn’t like: He has a competitive level of experience dealing with terrorism; New York City was better prepared for the 9/11 attacks than any other place in the country; putting the command center in World Trade #7 was not my fault; Democrats don’t understand the nature of the terrorist threat; and, every effort was made by Mayor Giuliani and his staff to ensure the safety of rescue workers at ground zero.

Now, the Village Voice has come into some evidence that raises problems with all five of these. And so they chose to — I dunno why, maybe someone made a hasty judgment, didn’t get enough sleep, got in a fight with their wife that morning — anyway, they chose to publish their problematic facts & factoids about these statements under the headline…

Rudy Giuliani’s Five Big Lies About 9/11
On the stump, Rudy can’t help spreading smoke and ashes about his lousy record
by Wayne Barrett
with special research assistance by Alexandra Kahan
August 7th, 2007 9:44 PM

Why are these things lies? Well it turns out, the five things Giuliani said — are opinions. They are subjective. They are communicative of personal sentiments, which are not directly substantiated by concrete facts, nor are they directly refuted by concrete facts. They’re simply doctrines of belief.

And without descending into Socratean dissections of philosophical classifications of things, I thought I’d scribble down a few of my thoughts. I think I did a reasonably articulate job of it — unlike some people — so I’ll just let those words stand as they were written originally.

I had to save this article from The Village Voice because it’s a source of perpetual amusement to me how the liberal mind defines the word “lie.” If they like chocolate chip mint ice cream, and I say plain vanilla is better, that qualifies. At an even six feet, if I make the statement that I am not a tall man, and they can rustle up someone to showcase who’s 5′10″, that qualifies too.

I think just about everyone would agree if I borrow a dollar from you, and promise to pay you back tomorrow with absolutely no intention of doing so, that would be a lie. But they always want to go further.

Further, as in saying: No, you don’t need to engage in intent to deceive, in order to lie. You’re a liar when we say you’re a liar.

Chocolate chip mint ice cream, versus vanilla, is a matter of personal preference. Six feet tall being tall, is a matter of relativity. That is the meaning of subjective: Conditional on the viewpoints of an observer. Not necessarily measurable. Sure you’ve got tape measures that say “Six Feet Zero,” but that’s an absolute measurement, not a relative one. When you define someone as being a “liar” based on six feet being tall or not being tall, the issue under consideration becomes relative. These are elusive matters to a simple mind, especially to a simple mind that has already settled on the mindset desired, and therefore has little practical reason to take more complex things into account.

I could’ve gone further. “That Bob in the cubicle next to mine, is a crook and he should be fired.” That is two subjective statements, each of which may seem to be objective in nature, if and only if you are a raging simpleton. One is an inference; the other one is a proposal for a course of action. Both may be “correct,” but both are almost certain to be opposed to other proposals that may be equally valid. If you think you caught Bob stealing something, maybe what happened was the stockroom had a different inventory of pencils and sticky-notes than what you thought. As to whether he should be fired, well, even if he did lift a pack of erasers and take them home, perhaps the case can be made that he should be kept on anyway. Maybe Bob makes a lot of money for the company.

The point is, when a subjective statement goes masquerading as an objective one, it’s always good to do a little extra investigation. Taking someone’s word for it? Eh…I wouldn’t do that. Odds are, the person telling you what to think, wouldn’t do it either.

Well anyway, I guess VV picked up a significant amount of traffic and referrals from this hatchet job on Giuliani, so on Friday they took an extra lap around the track to accept their kisses and rah-rahs and applause…and then they did something rather bizarre.

Hate Us or Love Us
posted: 6:38 PM, August 17, 2007 by Michael Clancy

“Hate Us or Love Us” is a weekly look at the hate and the love that people show the Voice. Bonnie Ruberg served up a two-week double-shot of the love, and, of course, the hate. Look for it every Friday.

The New Republic and CBS—along with political blogs and bloggers alike—hailed Wayne Barrett’s “Rudy Giuliani’s Five Big Lies About 9/11.” TNR said the story “absolutely devastates Rudy Giuliani’s claims about fighting terrorism.”

Matthew Yglesias and Ross Douthat at The Atlantic wonder what effect the piece will have on liberals vs. conservatives.

Meanwhile, Republican voices grumble something about lies and chocolate chip ice cream. [emphasis mine]

This subtle commandment to the Village Voice readership about what it is they are supposed to fail to comprehend, is almost a divinely-ordered manifestation of the truism of one of the more wretchedly worded Things I Know, namely #14.

The brain is not the only part of you that has a tough time absorbing arguments you don’t like. When you read such things the words seem blurry. When you hear them the syllables run together.

I was thinking someday I should re-word that altogether. Something with an almost Shakespearean lilt to it, about how quickly your attention span shrivels up when you sense something isn’t going to appeal to your prejudices. No matter how the wording is improved later, I think the sentiment is clear. Many among us, make conscious or all-but-conscious decisions to plead intellectual fatigue, when exposed to new ideas we don’t think we’re gonna like — such as, in this case, maybe what Giuliani told weren’t really “lies,” but simply articulations of belief with which some self-important pundit or commentator, somewhere, has a problem.

To the mindset that has already judged Giuliani to be a shameless liar and staked some kind of political capital on it, there is no simple way to word this. You can plunge deep into “Dick and Jane” levels of juvenile sentence constructs…it won’t be simple enough for them. It will be contrary to the prejudices. So the eyes will tear up, and the auditory canals will swell shut.

Suddenly, as if on queue, the Village Voice which did all this digging about Giuliani’s statements, and unearthed all this documentation about where the emergency headquarters in New York City should go, and who said so, and when…suddenly, they have the attention span of a flashbulb. Something about chocolate chip ice cream…indeed. Heh.

Meanwhile, I’m just flabbergasted at the notion that I have a role to play in representing a demographic of grumbling, ice-cream-eating “Republicans.” Memo to Village Voice, Giuliani isn’t even my guy. Really, it doesn’t get any more complicated than what I said:

How the liberal mind defines the word “lie,” is a source of amusement to me. Perpetually. It never ceases to make me chuckle — somewhat sadly, but you have to giggle a little bit if you don’t want to cry. You pick out some interior paint with the wife, you like ivory white and she likes eggshell…does she then get to call you a “liar” whenever you say ivory has a nice look to it? Reasonable minds would have trouble signing on to that. From where I’m sitting, it seems Giuliani’s “lies” fall into the same category. He thinks democrats fail to comprehend the terrorist threat; you would like it if people showed resistance to this. Candidates you like, would suffer if the electorate agreed with Rudy on this point, and candidates you dislike, would probably prosper.

Nevertheless, there are reasons for people to come to the same conclusion as Mr. Giuliani. As I commented in my original write-up, the democrats have been working awfully hard to get people all worked up about non-terrorism-related issues. It could be reasonably asserted they’ve placed more energy into this effort, than into any other. In 2007 they’ve become kind of the “Don’t Worry Be Happy” party when it comes to international terrorism.

So can you call this one of Rudy’s big lies? Really? I suppose you could, if you expand the definition of “lie” extravagantly enough, expanding that bulls-eye to “Rosie-O’Donnell’s Ass” dimensions, so that anyone with opinions different from yours is telling “lies.”

But would that be honest? Really?

Well, I’d better stop here. Wouldn’t want to prattle on longer than you can pay attention.

Posted in Deranged Leftists, Poisoning Individuality and Reason | 1 Comment »

Maybe I Should Sign

Monday, August 20th, 2007

Dave Lindorff is putting together a petition to challenge House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and put pressure on her to be kookier than she already is.

Not sure what my thoughts are about this. The country is in some terrible danger from the democrats being kooky; but what really makes it a formidable threat, is the democrats show signs of being able to sell the public on the idea that they aren’t that kooky. Deep down, I think everyone with an IQ of room temperature or above, recognizes FDR’s Party of the People has diminished into just a big, financed, unthinking angry mob, unable to think its way out of a wet paper bag. There is no reason to elect democrats, none whatsoever. Pressed to provide one, all the party can do is spend an entire election cycle smearing and slandering the opposition, so that when the cycle closes they can say “vote for me because I’m not that other guy.” That’s all they got.

And like I said, I think most people get this.

Question is, on a Tuesday in November, how many can be made to forget. It really is the number one threat facing the nation right now. Another term for Jimmy Carter, or someone more-or-less just like him in the White House…after that I think you could stick a fork in us. As a country, we’d be just about done. So the argument could be made, maybe everybody should sign.

The thing holding me back, is such a plan would rely — completely — on the prospects for exhausting the capabilities of the democrats to be able to sell silly things and make those silly things look reasonable. I’m not quite so sure there’s a ceiling on that, let alone that such a ceiling could be reached. Their “big tent” is so awkwardly big…especially on the subject of God, on which they welcome with open arms Protestant fundamentalists, as well as the secular-types who hate the fundamentalists so much…the elasticity of the fabric seems to defy all known limits recognized by science as we know it.

But when they lose, historically they lose because people say to themselves “that’s it, I just can’t take any more kookiness.” That, and their failure to step back from the big-tent nonsense for just a day or two, and commit to an actual plan to address the issues they just keep identifying over and over again. “Yes, our candidate has a plan, just go to his web site and find out” was the refrain in ’04 from Kerry’s people…and Kucinich’s people…and Dean’s people…and Clark’s people. That, coupled with their kookiness, is how they lose.

Maybe we already have that in ’08 without this petition getting any more signatures. Maybe not.

I’ll have to think on it some more. It’s really about making democrat craziness more transparent to everyday people…getting the word out that the donkey is rabid. Everything depends on it.

Posted in Deranged Leftists | 1 Comment »

First…And Better

Saturday, August 18th, 2007

FrankJ’s “peace plan” should be required reading in all grade-school classes, from third on up to about tenth. And of course beyond that, for the benefit of folks who still somehow don’t get it…which, sadly, many do not. Go read it now.

His premise is that it is an intrinsic quality of the human condition that a target must be acquired, and attacked. In my personal experience, those who are most vehement in denying this, actually do the best job of enshrining and sustaining this passion and then psychologically projecting it onto others. He goes on to point out a second intrinsic compulsion, which kicks in when the target is being selected, to put the cross-hairs on the “weenie.” Which, in the status quo of world politics…is the United States. Yes, we’re a “superpower.” Yes, we still have the greatest military might and our standard of living is the highest. But we are the world’s weenie because we are engaged in the most intense effort to avoid conflict. A bunch of loudmouths around the planet, most of them nameless, faceless, anonymous and unaccountable, have saddled us with the responsibility to engage in this conflict-avoidance — which means, they have proposed that if we are found to be locked in conflict with any other entity, the fault is to be automatically assumed to be ours.

And we have accepted this burden.

This is somewhat parallel to, and perhaps identical to, the Picard vs. Tazmanian Devil Doctrine we observed here…much later, and not nearly as articulately. Wherever conflict occurs between two parties, one of whom is more “civilised” than the other, the more cerebral party is dependent on diplomatic resolution whereas the savage is not. If the conflict degenerates into a physical contest, it’s not necessarily the mightier party that prevails, but the one more willing to use force. Which means that, while the diplomatic alternatives are explored, the more powerful of the two contestants is going to be the one least interested in participating — this is true of all employment/contracting situations, marriage engagements, anything cooperative — and again, this will be the savage.

So the philosopher/poet guy, you see, is going to be screwed every time.

FrankJ accurately points out that on the schoolyard playground, it is the “nerd” that is put in the cross hairs. It isn’t because of his physically diminutive stature, or his lack of fashion sense, or his social awkwardness…although these all do help contribute somewhat. The primary motive is the target’s reluctance to engage in conflict.

The little nerdling endures the torment, waits for one of his tormentors to let his guard down, and delivers a swift chop to the solar plexus — the bullying stops. The nerdling does not grow six inches taller overnight, or sprout new muscles. But the bullying stops then & there. Trust me on this. I was that nerdling in fourth grade, and then (new school) in the seventh grade. Lay down one wallop…just one…and the bullying stops.

I should also add that school administrators, like any other authority figure, have a way of laying down cross hairs just like any bully. They’ll pick on those they’ve pre-judged to be most interested in avoiding conflict. And so the nerdling will end up in the principle’s office, receiving a stern lecture for that one whallop, that the pudgy former-tormentors never received throughout the course of perhaps hundreds of noogies, lings, wet-willies, indian burns, pink bellies, etc. etc. etc. Part of this is because the nerdling is far less experienced than the bullies at figuring out when the teacher isn’t looking. But that’s a tiny part of it. Most of it is that people in authority tend to be cowards. They wield that authority over the entity most likely to yield.

Just as a sailboat has right-of-way over a power boat, the likely victor in a conflict is the unthinking one. FrankJ pointed it out years before I did, and he did it better.

Update: I was given cause to think back on these pre-dawn ravings of mine a few minutes ago when the cashier of a major national retail chain noticed my tee shirt…one of the more clever anti-Clinton designs you can purchase here. She didn’t take exception to it, actually sympathized with it so I would assume she’s no fan of the Clintons. But she launched into an anti-dirty-rotten-scoundrels rant of sorts, about how “it never seems to get any better no matter who we put in” and so forth. Well, I had to agree with that one, and maybe that was my mistake. She started going on about how the one we got now is the “worst ever.” And then looked back at me with a mixture of snickering and pleading, waiting for me to agree to that too.

I giggled a little as I signed off on the sale, and muttered an audible “…so they tell me.” Incredulously, she wailed at me “well, look around! Can’t you tell?”

Yeah…I’m a passionate believer in recognizing when something is busted. Some of my friends who are perpetual optimists, end up in conflict with me in this area. They know something isn’t right, I know it isn’t right, I complain about it, they lecture me that I shouldn’t be occupying my energy with it unless I have a solution. This is where I can start to see their logic; you see, I have ugly bedfellows in the pessimism department. I want to bitch and moan so I’ll stay motivated to spot a solution, if & when one manages to float within arm’s reach. Some other people like to bitch and moan just to bitch and moan.

And you have to join that crowd, and you must have already lost all of the perspective they are in danger of losing, to live in 2007 America and snark and snipe away about how tough we have it especially in contrast to the generations who came before. Sorry, I don’t care who’s in the White House, I can’t join in on that.

Go on, try to do some bitching. What’ve you got? The price of gas just went down and you’re afraid it might go up again…the environmentalists have just discovered bottled water is bad for the environment…there may be a square mile on this great continent with fewer than eight Starbuck’s coffee shops in it…and the global warming ManBearPig. The number of persons uninsured for their health care is in eight digits, a figure that can be obtained only by counting all the young adults who don’t have health insurance because they’d rather be spending the cash on other things.

Now, perhaps I could’ve inspired a welcome paradigm shift in my newfound gloomy friend, but there is the matter of the Golden Rule to consider. See, when I’m in line waiting to buy something, and the person ahead of me wants to be a Chatty Cathy with the cashier, it pisses me off. It’s wrong, and see above — when I notice things are wrong I complain about them. I bitch and moan and squeal…and you see, I’d have to stop doing that if I were to make the lady in line behind me wait longer. You can’t complain about other people doing things if you yourself are going to be doing that same thing.

So, I simply smiled and said “well…I dunno about that.”

The cashier beamed, handed me my receipt, and wished me a nice day. Later I’m sure she’ll brag to her friends about how she got a knuckle-dragging red-state Republican to be sheepish by speaking truth to power. I suppose she’d be right about that. I did what it took to keep the line moving. Someone had to.

But it occurs to me. Above, I’m discussing some of the personal dynamics that go on when one side of a negotiation process is saddled with all of the burden to avoid conflict. That’s exactly what happened in my dialog with the cashier, when you think about it. I could have reminded her that things aren’t so bad, challenged her world view, and the process by which she places blame on the President for whatever grievances she thinks she might have. These are positive thoughts. But there’s no way to express them positively. There simply isn’t any way to reply, substantially, while keeping things pleasant.

WEP40 So I think an important battle has been lost here. You can say some incredibly vicious things about President Bush now, and about Republicans in general, and still be widely perceived as a pleasant person saying pleasant things. To inject some logic into such a dialog, is something you can’t do without being perceived as some kind of a nasty little butt hole. Maybe I’m reading too much into it. The retail establishment I visited, after all, is unionized…which is going to have a big effect on things. You go on one of those six-times-a-day smoking breaks, you get tired of making idle chit-chat about the weather, the next subject is politics. And so reality takes a back seat, as you manufacture lots of make-believe codswallop so you can do some bitching.

And the level of comfort people feel, that everyone around them is going to have exactly the same take on things as they do, is pretty alarming. And as I keep saying on this blog that nobody actually reads anyway — President Bush’s aptitudes, his depth of character, his moral leanings…is well on the way to being irrelevant, and is all irrelevant already insofar as we need to decide how to vote next year. None of it matters.

Which means any & all bellyaching about President Bush — is political sloganeering for the benefit of paid political strategists. Nothing more, nothing less.

But there is something else going on. This woman was much older than I was. I doubt she was 260 years old — which is about the age you’d have to be to say “this is the worst President ever” and know what you’re talking about. But six-times-a-day union-mandated smoking breaks aside, I’m sure she was old enough to understand we’ve had at least one President that was worse.

Memo to FrankJ: I have two of your tee shirt designs already. If we can work something out with John Cox who did the drawing, I’ll just throw in the design to the right. I will gladly renounce any material claim I might otherwise have. Call it yours, do whatever you want. But speaking for myself, I would love to have a tee shirt that looks like this. I doubt like hell I’m the only one.

Posted in Deranged Leftists | No Comments »

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