This morning’s Best Sentence I’ve Seen Lately award goes to the Only Republican in San Francisco, who’s managed to trip across a rather interesting Zogby poll and shares his thoughts. Keep reading ALL the way to the bottom, to the tidbit inside the parentheses.

…being the local political minority that I am, I found this to be credible:

When asked which political party most Americans believe to be responsible for many of the gravest problems facing the world:

o War: 62% blamed Republicans vs. 14% Democrats
o Global Warming: 56% blamed Republicans vs. 10% Democrats
o Prejudice: 52% blamed Republicans vs. 22% for Democrats
o Poverty: 49% held Republicans accountable; 29% Democrats
o Corruption: 47% blamed Republicans vs. 31% Democrats
o Crime: On this issue, respondents reversed the trend, with 42% blaming Democrats vs. 23% Republicans

Now, I would have voted with these majorities. I do think that people blame “Republicans” for just about anything. When I hear this kind of talk (which is pretty much every day ’round here), the first thing I think is that the person talking has trouble forming their own opinions. (I also think “swap ‘Republican’ with ‘Jew’ to see how progressive your ideas really are”.) [emphasis mine]

It’s a brilliant point. I have absolutely nothing to add to it, not a single word…which is a little out of character for me.

How many people do YOU know who might learn a thing or two about themselves from reading it?

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. Get a load of #4.

4. ‘Democrats do not understand the full nature and scope of the terrorist war against us.’Giuliani blames what he calls Bill Clinton’s “decade of denial” for the mess we’re in, and uses it to tarnish the rest of Clinton’s party. “Don’t react, kind of let things go, kind of act the way Clinton did in the ’90s” is his favorite way of characterizing the Democratic response to the threat of terrorism. “We were attacked at Khobar Towers, Kenya, Tanzania, 17 of our sailors were killed on the USS Cole, and the United States government, under then-president Clinton, did not respond,” Giuliani told the rabidly anti-Clinton audience at Pat Robertson’s Regent University. “It was a big mistake to not recognize that the 1993 bombing was a terrorist act and an act of war,” he added. “Bin Laden declared war on us. We didn’t hear it. I thought it was pretty clear at the time, but a lot of people didn’t see it, couldn’t see it.”

This is naked revisionism—and not just because of his own well established, head-in-the-sand indifference to the 1993 bombing. It’s as unambiguously partisan as his claim that on 9/11, he looked to the sky, saw the first fighter jets flying over the city well after the attack, and thanked God that George W. Bush was president. Bob Kerrey, the former Democratic senator who sat on the 9/11 Commission, put it fairly: “Prior to 9/11, no elected official did enough to reduce the threat of Al Qaeda. Neither political party covered itself in glory.”

Read it top to bottom. Eight paragraphs of red herrings…the summary of which could be stated as “Giuliani said something that Bob Kerrey doesn’t like, we believe Bob Kerrey and we think you should too.” Lookee: They caught Rudy in a lie!

Well, nice try is all I can say. There’s an election year coming up, for which the campaigning has started early. Can anyone paying attention say Democrats understand the danger? They’ve been delivering stump speech after stump speech after stump speech, imploring anyone listening to worry about something besides terrorism. It’s become an official party platform, or an all-but-official one. To say they don’t understand the gravity of the threat, is a little like saying water is wet.

I have a prediction: After George W. Bush, the most “polarizing” President of the United States in recent memory, goes home and someone else takes his place, this country is still going to be deeply divided. In fact, you’ll still see his name tossed around rather frequently, as people argue about who’s doing the crappiest job rolling back his “disastrous” policies and who’s secretly in league with the oil cartels that already received such unfairly favorable treatment from you-know-who.

I don’t think George Bush has anything to do with the division. He was President for eight months before the September 11 attacks, and squeaker-election-victory aside, all the criticism I heard heaped on him during those eight months was fairly mundane. You’d hear it about any Republican candidate for high office in this era. Oh, he won’t fund stem cell research. Him and his oil buddies. Sunday school church boy. Oppressing women and gays, blah blah blah blah blah.

We’re divided because we’ve been living in an ivory tower, quibbling about trivial crap like whether to go Betamax or VHS, and the dark-age world came knocking on our ivory doors with its medieval death & destruction and we don’t know what to do. Half of us understand that when you jettison yourself into a future Jean-Luc Picard utopian universe wherein everyone just gets along, there’ll be other folks who aren’t along for the ride and will kill and kill until they themselves are killed. We get it. The other half doesn’t get it. The other half thinks more Picard-style monologues must be the answer; eventually the Romulans, or whoever, will see the error of their ways. That is the cause of the conflict. And before 9/11/01, there was little reason to engage in it, compared with what came afterward.

President Bush is simply a figurehead in that conflict.

And as Exhibit A, I would offer the harmonious, unifying shindig among Illinois democrats, in their attempt to solidify behind the most peaceful, Picard-like candidate that can be found for the upcoming elections anywhere:

Warring factions of Illinois’ Democratic Party turned unity day Wednesday at the Illinois State Fair into a display of name-calling, booing and apologizing for a feud that almost shut down state government.

Organizers tried to focus on their common goal of electing Sen. Barack Obama president, but the diversion couldn’t paper over deep cracks within the party, fissures caused by the caustic 10-week budget stalemate between Democratic leaders.

“It’s embarrassing — it’s not the way people envision their leaders acting,” Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias said. “I think the public is getting sick and tired of this.”

In an oblique reference to the House speaker, the governor slammed “some even in our own party who cynically sit in the shadows and are working to prevent us from getting health care for all the people of our state.”

And the speaker fired back at the governor, saying his latest budget move violates the state Constitution.

State Comptroller Dan Hynes and Attorney General Lisa Madigan, who have waged public feuds with the governor, skipped the State Fair, where they would have had to share the stage with Blagojevich.

Crowds at the Democratic pep rally appeared smaller than at past Governor’s Days. But it was unclear whether the infighting or the humid 97-degree weather was the cause.

I think that treasurer guy is a hundred percent wrong. People, and democrats in particular, want their leaders to act exactly like this. The back-and-forth sniping is undignified, sure, but people love it when their guy, who shares their values, launches an attack fit for the schoolyard on someone else who doesn’t share their values quite so well. They eat it up and they can’t get enough of it. “There, take THAT!”

In fact, it’s rather ironic isn’t it? If you hate war and want to end war, the democrats are here to represent you. And yet they hardly look like a band of merry ambassadors who are equipped and prepared to end any fighting overnight, do they?

They talk about issues that have no “bad guy,” like natural disasters or diseases, and they have to insert one. There seem to be a lot of folks who think this is what an anti-fighting political party looks like. I wonder if they know something I don’t, because it doesn’t look that way to me.

Every now and then during a good-natured debate with a leftist, I will be virtually commanded to believe something uncritically because it appeared in the New York Times. DO…YOU…DARE…TO…QUESTION…SOMETHING that appeared in America’s most prestigious newspaper?

I’ve not tried beating them about the head with the cudgel that is the Jayson Blair scandal. Not sure why. I just figure that’s bait for some kind of trap, like they’re waiting for me to do it. Wonder what would happen.

Well…we all know the New York Times is about as objective and unbiased as Barbra Streisand, maybe plus a few proofreaders that she’s missing from her own payroll. We know this. But every now and then, it’s good to see some evidence so it can be better understood what’s over there in Manhattan. And look at what Mr. Johnson found.

Yeah yeah yeah, there’s no evidence this edit was done by Mr. Sulzburger himself…probably some low-ranking guy in the mail room or something whose opinions are not necessarily those of the newspaper’s.

But what’s more plausible. Someone at the New York Times was defacing the Wikipedia page on his lunch hour, in a coat closet somewhere, in complete secrecy, like Clark Kent changing into his Superman clothes, and oh we must make absolutely sure nobody ever finds out about it…since we all know hating George Bush is a frowned-upon practice at the New York Times. ++chortle++ Or, could it have been just one more specimen of the juvenile “Hey look at me, I hate Bush even more than you do, please like me!!!” self-ingratiation ritual we see on left-wing blogs all the time? Is it too out of the realm of the probable to suppose such a culture might exist within the hallowed walls of our nation’s most revered and highly-regarded newspaper?

Tell ya what. For the uninitiated, just skim through the material in the front section for a few days in a row. Then get back to me on that.

Yeah, people like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh are slanted in the other direction. The thing is, they package themselves that way. In 2007 America, while our conservatives present themselves as conservative, our leftists present themselves as centrists, and we let ’em get away with it and call it “mainstream news.”

Update: We find out about this website, courtesy of TOTALFARK subscriber KnucklePopper. Very informative and useful. Thanks, KP!

Mike Adams writes to his university Board of Trustees with a proposal for erecting a proper memorial to Che Guevara. All these little darlings running around with their “Che” tee shirts, he figures, would be well-served with an education about Che’s famous quotations, thoughts, deeds, alliances, etc.

I also want to make sure that a special room documents Che’s commitment to gay rights. It is important for people to know that when Madonna dresses up in a Che Guevara outfit she is supporting a man who helped criminalize gay sex and supported the incarceration of young men who exhibited mannerisms merely perceived to be gay.

Another room could be used to place some of his actual correspondence in glass cases. That way, people could learn that Guevara signed some of his early correspondence “Stalin II.”

Another room could display pictures of Che fighting in actual revolutionary warfare. This room would be nearly empty because there is little evidence that he ever fought in anything that could be characterized as a real battle. This is due to the fact that most of the people killed by Che were men and boys he shot at close range while they were bound and gagged.

I got a question that kind of touches on this. We’ve got some young men and women who don’t wear Che tee shirts, but instead, wear sand-cammies and serve in Afghanistan and Iraq. I am not one of them, and have not been one of them. But I’ve had some good things to say about them.

Some other folks their age — some among them wearing the Che tee shirts now & then — have a nasty name they like to call people like me because of this. “Chickenhawk.” Over the years, I’ve noticed it’s not necessary for me to support the war to be called a chickenhawk. Simply saying kind things about the people serving…will do nicely. I find that interesting. I admire their service, I have not served. Slam dunk, I’m a chickenhawk.

My question is this: We have quite a few young people who run around wearing these shirts, and doing other things to subtly promote communism. Or lesser strains of the anti-capitalist contagion, such as initiatives to increase the minimum wage, and tax increases on the wealthy. Shouldn’t we have a similar slur with which to tag them — if they have not worked?

Buck found yet another one, and it’s a doozy. Hope you’re sitting down. This fellow who used to earn his paycheck by viewing the entire world through the myopic liberal lens at the BBC, is tattling. And he’s dangerous because he’s reformed. How reformed?

Just casually ruminating about the way he sees the world nowadays, he has — quite by accident — managed to echo my Thing I Know #34, Thing I Know #40 and Thing I Know #53.

That our species has evolved a genetic predisposition to form tribal groups is generally accepted as an evolutionary fact. This grouping – of not more than about five or six hundred – supplies us with our identity, status system, territorial instinct, behavioural discipline and moral code. It survived the transition from hunting to agriculture: the hunting tribe became the farming village. It even survived the early days of the industrial revolution, in pit and mill villages: the back-to-back city slums were the tribal encampments of industrial Britain.

But the evolution of cities, of commuter and dormitory suburbs, has deprived millions of people of tribal living. There is a saying that it takes a village to raise a child, but fewer and fewer of us are now brought up in villages, even urban villages. The enormous popularity of television soap operas is because they provide detribalised viewers with vicarious membership of a fictional, surrogate tribe. Many people find strong substitute tribes at their places of work – they are not the birth-to-death, 24 hours a day tribes we evolved from, but they provide many of the same social needs.

And he’s got a lot to say about what makes a conservative conservative, and a liberal liberal. It gives one cause to think about things, rather deeply.

…the starting point is the realisation that there have always been two principal ways of misunderstanding a society: by looking down on it from above, and by looking up at it from below. In other words, by identifying with institutions or by identifying with individuals.

To look down on society from above, from the point of view of the ruling groups, the institutions, is to see the dangers of the organism splitting apart, the individual components shooting off in different directions, until everything dissolves into anarchy. Those who see society in this way are preoccupied with the need for order, discipline, control, authority and organisation.

To look up at society from below, from the point of view of the lowest group, the governed, is to see the dangers of the organism growing ever more rigid and oppressive until it fossilises into a monolithic tyranny. Those who see society in this way are preoccupied with the need for liberty, equality, self-expression, representation, freedom of speech and action and worship, and the rights of the individual. The reason for the popularity of these misunderstandings is that both views are correct, as far as they go, and both sets of dangers are real but there is no “right” point of view. The most you can ever say is that sometimes society is in danger from too much authority and uniformity and sometimes from too much freedom and variety.

Now this part of it you have to take with a grain of salt, because labels like “conservative” and “liberal” mean different things in the United States than they do over in the UK. But you can tell from my previous post, if from nowhere else, that something has happened to get things rather twisted around. Conservatives defend institutions and liberals defend individuals — there is a kernel of truth in that, still.

But if you are out shopping for some acidic invective to be heaped upon the individual, what better way to get it all done in one shot, than to let the average modern liberal ramble on for a few minutes.

Conservatives don’t seem to be all that enamored of institutions, either. They defend private industry. And they defend it the way I do: I’m getting older, my dreams of starting a business out of a garage and becoming the next Bill Gates, are melting like snowballs on a hot stove…but I still have ’em, and I want to keep the rights I will need to make the dream worthwhile. And if I push up daisies before that day comes to pass, at least I want to keep those rights I failed to use, so that the next generation can perhaps make use of them.

I think that’s what conservatism is — still. I want my God-given rights so I can do…whatever. Become filthy stinking rich if that’s all I want to do. But I want individuals to be respected. Given their rights and their responsibilities. Responsibilities to not hurt each other and not steal from each other…not responsibilities to pay into some leviathan socialist health care system or welfare system so a bunch of other people can go through life as non-individuals, just sitting on a beat-up couch watching re-runs of Survivor. My adoration of “institutions” ends there…I still nurture dreams of becoming one. As an individual.

So this guy has much to learn, still. But he still talks some good sense, and makes weighty observations…an afternoon spent thinking about them, would be an afternoon well spent.

Fifty years ago, people did things together much more. The older politicians we interviewed in the early Tonight days were happier (and much more effective) in public meetings than in television studios. In those days people went to evening meetings. They formed collective opinions. In many places party allegiance was collective and hereditary rather than a matter of individual choice based on a logical comparison of policies.

It is astonishing how many of the technological inventions of the past century have had the effect of separating us off from the group. The car takes us out of public transport, central heating lets each member of a family do their own thing in their own room, watching their own television, listening to their own music, surfing the net on their own PC or talking to a friend on their own mobile. The fridge, the microwave and the takeaway mean that everyone can have their own meal in their own time. Our knowledge of public events and political arguments come direct from the media rather than from a face-to-face group. We still have some local, territorial group memberships, but their importance is now much diminished and their influence weakened.

The whole article has a certain structure to it, which I’m somewhat betraying by extracting from it in a sloppy, scrambled-eggs kind of style. So don’t go by my teasing, read the whole thing top-to-bottom.

Writing for Salon, Glenn Greenwald — and it really is him, not one of his sock puppets — has finally answered the question of what the passionate, foamy-mouthed Bush-bashing libs are going to do after President Bush goes home in 2009. It’s no surprise, really. They’re going to do what they’ve always done, which is to cook up their own version of reality (link requires registration).

The great fraud being perpetrated in our political discourse is the concerted attempt by movement conservatives, now that the Bush presidency lay irreversibly in ruins, to repudiate George Bush by claiming that he is not, and never has been, a “real conservative.” This con game is being perpetrated by the very same conservatives who — when his presidency looked to be an epic success — glorified George W. Bush, ensured both of his election victories, depicted him as the heroic Second Coming of Ronald Reagan, and celebrated him as the embodiment of True Conservatism.

This fraud is as transparent as it is dishonest, yet there are signs that the media is nonetheless beginning to adopt this theme that there is some sort of epic and long-standing “Bush-conservative schism.” But very little effort is required to see what a fraud that storyline is.

One of the few propositions on which Bush supporters and critics agree is that George Bush does not change and has not changed at all over the last six years. He is exactly the same.

Now, this is true. Mr. Greenwald is putting into practice, with a level of skill that can be accumulated only through experience, Thing I Know #121:

One verifiable fact can sell a whole package of unlikely speculation. One appealing opinion can sell a whole package of outright falsehood.

And the one verifiable fact is the famous consistency of George W. Bush.

But the logic is weak, because Greenwald needs to live in a universe where the events surrounding George Bush are as motionless and unchanging as the President himself is known to be. For example, in such a universe we would have to have been talking about illegal immigration in 2003 just as much as we are now.

And, well — we weren’t. We were all talking about Saddam Hussein. President Bush was all about taking that asshole down, and our liberals were busy lecturing us that we should leave things as they were, come what may, because that’s what Germany and France wanted us to do.

And the fact of the matter is, if the Bush administration is in any mode of self-destruction right now, it’s there thanks to an abandonment of conservative principles, not because of any unholy alliance with them. This can be validated rather quickly, if Greenwald simply takes a minute or two to actually talk to some of the conservatives he claims to be analyzing here.

I’m not surprised to see he didn’t. On Planet Greenwald, nothing bad happens except things caused by Republicans being fraudulent about things. Irritable bowel syndrome? You’ve got a case of the trots because Karl Rove must have wanted you to.

Do you know any conservatives who are ready to abandon George Bush because of…let’s say, to pick something people on both sides would agree really is conservative…the 2003 tax cuts? I don’t. How about…to pick something on the opposite side of the spectrum…amnesty for illegal immigrants? I venture to say if you were to conduct some kind of poll among conservatives, this issue would dominate all the others. Bush lost my support because he’s letting in all those illegals. And then in second place, there would be — spending money. Are these unlikely predictions? I have trouble seeing such a poll turning out any other way.

What would Mr. Greenwald call these things? If President Bush were to be succeeded by someone who would lock down the border, enforce the law, and veto some spending provisions from Congress as he’s been unwilling to do — what would you call that new President? Conservative? I’m sure Greenwald would agree those would not be liberal things.

Ultimately, his essay fails because it’s built around a stark falsehood: That conservatism has no definition, it’s just a bunch of powerful people and interests who are fair-weather friends with whatever is winning at any given time. At the same time, he contradicts himself by insisting that conservatism does have a definition, and it’s been enshrined in a presidential administration that everyone is now forced to agree is a failure.

I wish, for Greenwald’s sake, someone compelled him to think on this a few more times before it saw print. He’s either not paying attention, or he’s chosen to confine his intended audience to other folks who haven’t been paying attention. Conservatism is a process in which we figure out how much liberty, and how much money, the government needs to do it’s governing. We give it that much and nothing more. Liberalism is a process in which the Government figures out how much liberty and money we need to do our living; and if we show ourselves to be what certain nameless, faceless individuals want us to be, maybe we’ll be allowed to have it.

President Bush was friendly to the first of those two mindsets when he passed the 2003 tax cuts. He got a lot of ridicule at the time for the advance refunds that were mailed out, but nowadays it’s a little hard to assault this cornerstone of his legacy. Once again, the principles of the Laffer Curve have been proven. I’m sure we’ll forget all about them later.

[The tax cuts have] succeeded even beyond Art Laffer’s dreams, if that’s possible. In the nine quarters preceding that cut on dividend and capital gains rates and in marginal income-tax rates, economic growth averaged an annual 1.1%. In the 12 quarters–three full years–since the tax cut passed, growth has averaged a remarkable 4%. Monetary policy has also fueled this expansion, but the tax cuts were perfectly targeted to improve the incentives to take risks among businesses shell-shocked by the dot-com collapse, 9/11 and Sarbanes-Oxley.

Now, when did President Bush show his fidelity to the notion that powerful, anonymous individuals should decide how the rest of us should live, with our liberty and our own property riding on our ability and willingness to conform? Well, his current friendliness to amnesty is probably a better example of that than anything else he’s done. And then there’s his making nice-nice with the global warming sham, which is an exercise in anti-capitalist elites telling the commoners how to live if ever there was one.

These things are not helping his popularity. The people aren’t going for it.

Greenwald might have been more truthful if he’d written an essay to the effect of, “I guess the people who’d been supporting the President have been much more capable of independent thinking than I thought.” Instead, he wants to pretend conservatism exists only in the sense that it can be measured through presidential approval ratings now — but it wasn’t nearly tangible enough to be measured by the same metric right after the September 11 attacks, or two decades ago when Reagan carried two landslide victories.

Well. It’s been often wondered where all this Bush-bashing energy was going to be directed after President Bush went home. Like I said…now we know. It will be bled off, into more viciousness and more spite aimed at any candidate showing the slightest reluctance to kill babies, confiscate guns, slander soldiers, increase taxes, and outlaw all jobs that do not comport with some narrow beltway elitist view of a “minimum wage.”

We learn via Cox and Forkum, via our friends at The Saloon that former President Jimmy Carter has broken rank with his fellow high-profile hardcore left-winger America-bashers and tyrant-appeasers…in that the pressure in this bubbling stewpot his poorly-advised ramblings have landed him in, have forced him to walk the flaky-man walk and start backpedaling.

Former President Jimmy Carter backed off Monday from harshly critical comments he made of President Bush over the weekend after the White House offered a biting rebuke to the former president by calling him “increasingly irrelevant.”

“My remarks were maybe careless or misinterpreted but I wasn’t comparing the overall administration and certainly not talking about anyone personally,” Carter said in an interview Monday when asked to explain.

The comments “were interpreted as comparing this whole administration to all other administrations when what I was actually doing was responding to a question about foreign policy between [President Richard] Nixon and this administration, and I think that this administration’s foreign policy compared to Nixon’s was much worse. … I wasn’t comparing this administration with other administrations throughout history but just with President Nixon’s,” he told NBC’s “The Today Show.”

Carter, whose administration was plagued by sky-high inflation and a 444-day American hostage crisis in Iran, was filling in a quote Saturday in which he said, “I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history.”

You know, we’ve got much more important things to talk about than which administration was the worst in…well, I dunno what. It’s pretty clear that when Carter says “the worst in history” he doesn’t want his words to be interpreted that way. I mean, y’know, just because that’s exactly what he’s saying. And anyway, if that’s what we’re trying to settle — as James Taranto pointed out yesterday, this would reflect more poorly on the man from Plains, than perhaps he’s expecting — what with the Kamikaze Bunny administration finishing in 34th place compared to the current administration’s 19th.

But let’s just leave that alone. Nobody seems to be terribly concerned about it. Instead, if I were to name one single issue that has aroused the most passion all across the fruited plane, from sea to shining sea, it would have to be — to what extent, exactly, does each noted personality hate President Bush, who is going home no matter what happens in 2009?

That’s the number one issue. Don’t ask me to explain why. But it is.

And isn’t it odd that nobody wants to settle it. Monday Wednesday and Friday, our left-wingers are out there having their little contest about who hates George W. Bush the most. Tuesday Thursday and weekends, after others have taken note of what they’ve said, they’re clarifying themselves, placing careful limits on this hatred as it is to be perceived by the public…more often than not, getting righteously indignant about so-and-so questioning their patriotism. You know, the “don’t put words in my mouth” thing.

Give Carter some credit here. He’s not coming out swinging, grandstanding, showing off with phony outrage which has come to be a customary part of the act. Maybe that page fell out of his copy of the playbook.

But it’s mighty interesting. There’s a right way and a wrong way to read what he said…if you took his words literally, you were doing it wrong. The correct interpretation, that Bush is better than some of the other 42 administrations, but worse than Nixon — doesn’t seem to have had anything to do with what Carter said the first time.

I’m just taking it as a given that the context bears little relevance here. I mean, in my lifetime I’ve heard Nixon called a lot of things. But “history” is not one of those things.

Speaking of history…as a figure of it, Carter teaches us something very important, and it has nothing to do with Republicans or Democrats. Carter is a representation of the hero who will rise out of the ashes, when a large institution is rocked by scandal. In his own way, he is a genuinely good man, I think…or he wants to be one. In the White House, he was also the very picture of a man who was wrong for the job. You hear about how that office ages people. Poor Carter, between 1977 and 1981, managed to etch more lines in his face than anyone who served in that capacity in my lifetime, or anyone about whom I’ve managed to read. Ever have a boss who just wasn’t right for the job? They aren’t very happy day-to-day, are they?

So every generation or so we seem to get a reminder that when a just-past scandal figures prominently in the reasons for choosing someone, that someone is going to have an inglorious tenure in whatever responsibility it is with which they’re about to be entrusted. We’re seeing it now, with our “Mark Foley Congress.” Trouble is, it takes thirty years or so for this to happen.

And you might have noticed yesterday if you happened to see my ruminations about that FARK thread — the question under consideration was whether you’d swap President Bush for President Carter, on September 11, 2001. A lot of FARKers had some grandiose and bumptious answers in the affirmative. If you managed to click their profiles and read-up, you’d see a lot of them were in their lower thirties, or below. Hey, that makes you five-and-under when Carter was actually serving.

So the folks who would have Carter serving again, are the ones who are too young to know how bad he was.

That’s the problem. To apply the lesson, you have to be middle-aged or thereabouts, because it takes thirty years to see incompetence elevated by scandal again. And the thirty-and-under crowd, is the loudest crowd.

I’m not going to go the next step and condescend to them with a paragraph about “they talk when they should listen.” Perhaps that’s true, but it’s clear I’m not the one to do the lecturing. But I will say this; people with opinions, who want their opinions to be worth something, ought to be able to figure out for themselves when to shut up and listen. If we’re talking about some guy who was President when I was still crapping my pants…and in my case, I guess that would be Lynden Johnson, who was controversial in his own way…why, it just seems silly to try to shout down other folks who were actually paying attention to what was going on in the world, when the subject under discussion was actually in office. Look at the thread again. I kept my silence, here and there you’ll see some other folks with good sense, try to draw attention to what a spectacular failure Carter really was. Those folks, by & large, are over forty. They could read news when Carter was President. They know he was a bad seed. This does nothing to phase the young people who want to intone, ignorantly, how much better-off we would be with another Carter era.

Not good.

Or at least, do some reading and gather some facts about what life was like back then, with a failed President. All these problems…no solution in sight. Foreign policy. Hostages. Interest rates. Gas prices. Energy crisis. All of it bad, and getting worse, with light at the end of the tunnel.

Bad leadership, or bad luck? Well, embarrassingly, we got our answer in 1981. Hostages released, energy crisis over, inflation solved. Think it was all coincidence?

Turns out — and we tend to forget this, it’s a hard thing to remember — there are worse things than scandal. Incompetence is worse. Maybe if the thirty-and-under crowd did a little more reading and a little less talking-over-people, then as a whole, we’d remember lessons like this a little bit better. And millions would be the better-off for it.

But of course Carter himself isn’t under thirty. And if we’re trying to improve our lot in life, he’s the first one I’d like to see stick a cork in it. Seems like all the more of a good idea, if he just has to backpedal later on anyway.

…or grown substantially, anyway, in the last few minutes. How did I do it? By reading through this thread (TOTALFARK subscription required, you can get one here).

So who submitted the link?

Hmmm…someone who lurks on FARK…someone who likes to pop simple, easy-to-understand questions, to find out just how off-the-left-end people are. Someone who reads Neal Boortz every day. Someone who doesn’t think too highly of Jimmy Carter. Hmmmm…

I think I can understand why this submitter would want to quiz the FARK population this way. The average FARKer is a potent illustration of tomorrow’s leaders, and personally I find that to be a very sad thing. Mr. Average FARKer is bright, creative, energetic, resourceful whenever a Photoshop contest rolls ’round. Looks to me like nose-per-nose, three out of four of him is currently attending a major university, FARKing every day on the campus computer system. Two out of three of him is an angry left-winger. Near as I can figure, every single one of those left-wingers are Michael Moore fans, and believe every tidbit they’ve seen out of every single Moore movie. They all fancy themselves to be critical thinkers.

They post repeatedly. So even though the left-wing tilt on FARK is about two out of three or seven out of ten…on a post-for-post basis, it’s more like nine out of ten.

Oh, and he was born in 1980, or later. But you knew that, didn’t you. From looking over the comments, a lot of them seem to think Jimmy Carter was an okay President, and would be a good one today. You pretty much have to have been born after 1980 to think that.

For those who lack the TOTALFARK service, you can view the Boortz link here. This is the one that inspired the link that was submitted. Er, I mean, that’s what I’m guessing.

The subject just now was ugly liberal women and good-lookin’ conservative women. Which just naturally inspires a glance at Karol’s page, where we find a link to this:

Dean: Bar Media and Candidates Will Talk

The head of the Democratic Party said Wednesday that the best way to get presidential candidates to talk frankly about issues is to lock out the media.

During the Mortgage Bankers Association conference, a banker expressed frustration with candidates who only talk in sound bites and wondered how that could be changed. Howard Dean, once a presidential candidate, offered a simple solution.

“I suggest you have candidates in to meetings like this and bar the press,” Dean said.

The Democratic National Committee chairman criticized media coverage, arguing that networks such as CBS used to put content first and didn’t mind losing money for the prestige of delivering a quality news report. Dean said the days of Walter Cronkite are gone and the corporatization of the media has led to a desire to boost profits.

“The media has been reduced to info-tainment,” Dean said. “Info-tainment sells, the problem is they reach the lowest common denominator instead of forcing a little education down our throats, which we are probably in need of from time to time.”

Now I imagine there is nothing ominous about this, if you’ve had your head stuck up your ass so far you can nibble on your own uvula. Those of us who’ve been paying attention, understand questions beginning with “How does it make you feel” are reserved for our donks, while questions along the lines of “How much does a gallon of milk cost?” are reserved for politicians who are not donks. It’s been that way for a very long time. Nobody even pretends to be able to explain why anymore. It’s just something we’ve slowly come to accept, and that’s the way it is.

So Howard.

How friendly does the media have to be to you, before you’ll let them back in again?