Andrew W. Smith, writing in ChronicleHerald.ca:

The people need a Fourth Estate, not yet another adulator of Barack Obama, yet another smearer of Sarah Palin, yet another patrician editor to keep out anything disagreeable to progressive sensibilities, yet another laptop-and-latte journalism-schooler to spit on everything pre-dating 1968. And they wonder why the news business has come on hard times.

What’s he talkin’ about?

He’s got a dozen factual bullet points about the most politically powerful man alive today, the most politically powerful man the world has ever known.

Twelve things, each of which, smart-money says you’re learning for the very first time. It’s likely each of the twelve is news to you — that six or more come as a surprise, is a virtual certainty.

Unless, that is, you’ve been hanging out in those crazy wild-eyed right wing blogs you’re not supposed to be reading. That really is the main issue. Because there are quite a few walking around among us who, being told about those twelve things, to protect their fragile egos will insist these have little or no bearing upon the decision they made about who should run our government half a year ago. And that pronouncement may very well be correct — it may very well be justifiable.

But these twelve things would be far better known, in a culture that prides itself so much on being independent and well-informed…as ours does.

Theodore Dalrymple (tweeted by Gerard):

It is curious how, when it comes to rape, the liberal press, and presumably liberals themselves, suddenly appreciate the value of punishment. They do not say of rape that we must understand the causes of rape before we punish it; that we must understand how men develop into rapists before we lock them away, preferably for a long time; that prison does not work. It is as if, when speaking of rape, it suddenly becomes time to put away childish things, and to talk the only kind of language that rapists understand.

They quiver with outrage when they learn that the clear-up rate for rape cases is only 6.5 per cent, though this in fact is very similar to the clear-up rate of all crimes. They are appalled at cases where rapists are left free to commit more of their crimes because of police and Crown Prosecution Service incompetence, which is itself the natural result of the policy of successive governments. But it is important for their self-respect as liberals that their outrage should not be
generalised, that they should not let it spill over into consideration of other categories of crime, where the same bureaucratic levity and frivolity is likewise demonstrated. For, as every decent person knows, there are far too many prisoners in this country already, and prison does not work. [emphasis mine]

JohnJ:

It’s a shame that so many Americans reject the idea that knowledge is necessary for making decisions.

The Wikipedia article on False Consensus Effect:

The false consensus effect is the tendency for people to project their way of thinking onto other people. In other words, they assume that everyone else thinks the same way they do. This supposed correlation is unsubstantiated by statistical data, leading to the perception of a consensus that does not exist. This logical fallacy involves a group or individual assuming that their own opinions, beliefs and predilections are more prevalent amongst the general public than they really are.

This bias is commonly present in a group setting where one thinks the collective opinion of their own group matches that of the larger population. Since the members of a group reach a consensus and rarely encounter those who dispute it, they tend to believe that everybody thinks the same way. [emphasis mine]

Me:

Thing I Know #129. Leaders; votes; clergy; academics; pundits; prevailing sentiment; political expediency. Wherever these decide what is & isn’t true, an empire will surely fall.
Thing I Know #230. We’d call them “rationalists” if they thought things through rationally; that’s why they’re called “socialists.”
Thing I Know #300. People talk a lot about “coming together” to do vague, undefined things, when they want to present those things to outsiders as creative efforts, but what they’re really trying to do, is destroy something, or destroy the people who would be building something.

What is & isn’t true.

What is & isn’t right.

JohnJ’s nailed it here, folks. People are in solitude, flying blind. Then they get together, dish out some bromides to impress each other and all of a sudden they “know” things. Without having gathered any concrete information about anything, other than what other folks in earshot & line-of-sight happen to think.

Almost as if someone yelled “Abracadabra!” — a convicted murderer who butchered a fifteen-year-old girl in a field somewhere, has a “right” to his life, and an unborn baby who has never had a chance to breathe air, and therefore to do anything of the sort, doesn’t have the same right.

A terrorist helps to plan a devastating strike with some other terrorists, and before the plan can be put into effect, we catch just that one but not the others. Waiting around passively for him to spill the details of the plan, and then allowing hundreds of innocent people to die in a horrible death when that doesn’t happen…that’s a morally superior decision. Doing whatever it takes to make him talk, so that those people can end up alive, and the terrorist can also end up alive and in custody where he belongs — that is supposed to be an ethical stain.

We’re long past the point where we should be asking:

What have groups of people, sacrificing their individual sensibilities for the more refined wisdom prevailing over that group setting — ever done to advance civilization? What decisions have groups of people ever made to preserve those who would create and preserve, or to destroy those who would destroy?

Seriously.

I see the military get together to do things. That doesn’t count; that involves a rigid command hierarchy. That kind of thinking is vertical, nothing horizontal about it.

I see the United Nations issue their strongly worded letters.

I see Congress get together and vote away trillions of dollars on what, here, I shall politely term “nonsense,” although I clearly have a different noun in mind.

These are all the fulfillment of the prophecy of Thing I Know #300. They are presented as creative efforts, and they look like creative efforts. But what they’re really trying to do, is destroy something, or destroy the people who would be building something. Every little thing we’re using here — just me, let’s say — the text editor into which I type these words, the protocol by which my laptop communicates with the wireless router, the beer I’m sipping from the bottle, and the bottle that envelopes it. They were all given to us by individuals. If they were made available to us by groups, then all the group ever did was vote the money in to produce what an individual somewhere figured out could be produced. Individuals create, groups destroy. Life teaches us this over and over and over again. It wears away on us with this lesson, like water upon the rock.

And yet the rock that is our ignorance, endures. We do not listen. We think groups create things…realize things…show moral consciousness that each individual in the group somehow cannot show. Where do we get this? Is it just a bad habit we carry forward from kindergarten?

We get together with others of like mind, repeat a few platitudes that mean nothing, and suddenly we think we “know” things. We don’t know anything in that setting, except how to deflect blame. The group settles on a plan doomed to fail, and when it fails, nobody is at fault because nobody’s name was attached to it. It was simply “decided” that this was the best plan. The inevitable consequence is that another bad plan will rise, Phoenix-like, from the ashes of the previous bad plan, and then the group will get behind that just like they got behind the previous plan.

But the group also thinks convicted killers are innocent and deserving of life, and babies are guilty and deserving of death. So what individual man of sane mind, would expect any results but the most dismal, from such an environment?

And yet, in 2009, that is how we decide everything that really matters. Nothing is fit to be translated into action, unless & until a committee has blessed it. The committee that takes responsibility for none of its mistakes, and is oh-so-certain we should keep our fuel in the “pristine” ground and burn food instead.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News.

What do you do when your son wants to drop out of college and become a basketball star?

When your best friend wants to take her estranged husband back after he walked out on her and moved in with his girlfriend…for the fourth time in three years?

When your daughter wants to become an emancipated minor and travel the country with her no-good excessively-pierced-and-tatoo’d motorcycle thug boyfriend?

In a perfect universe, you’d look for ways to refine your message. Look in the mirror to figure out why, thus far, you have not quite managed to get your common-sense through whatever impenetrable barrier is blockading it. But — and this is sad — this is not a perfect universe. Eve did eat of the apple, people are flawed, and although they live on the plane of reality all the time, they’re only open to that plane’s teachings a portion of the time.

Which means it’s quite often that they have to learn from their own mistakes. Time, often, is the teacher of last resort. The best recourse for those of us who can see the plain folly of what’s being done, is to wait, ask that most pointed of questions…”so how’s that workin’ out for ya?”…wait some more…ask again.

Now, lately I’m hearing an awful lot about how the Republicans are facing some kind of crisis about refining their message.

Three months into the new Congress, Republicans are struggling to reinvent themselves on the fly as they adjust to life without a president of their own party or a majority in the House and Senate.

Opposition to President Barack Obama’s policies is relatively easy to achieve. But developing alternatives that can appeal outside the party’s conservative core seems more difficult.

On taxes and other issues, polling suggests Republicans are facing a far different electorate from the one that trusted them with control of Congress for more than a decade and twice elected George W. Bush president.

You have got to be kidding me. I’d sure like to see the questions in that “polling.” Not really; truth be told, there are few matters on which I’ve been able to drum up less curiosity, than about what those polling-questions are. I’m pretty sure I know.

And I’d write them differently. I’d write them…to reflect the choices that really confront Americans. Start with “Is government the solution, or is government the problem?” There. Now how’s that poll looking?

That’s how you refine your message. Stop it with the push-polling…for the other side. Build your polls, instead, around how much Americans do or don’t know about how these problems came to be. Do they understand how it is all these burr-in-the-sweater issues came up in their parents’ and grandparents’ time, and generations later we’re still — laughably — voting in each election cycle on how to fix each one Once And For All?

And if your polls capture ignorance, your message is to educate. If they instead capture knowledge, mixed with apathy, your strategy is to wait. It’s that simple.

But it seems the Republicans who make the decisions, are taking the bait.

“Rhetorically, Republicans are having a very hard time finding something that raises the consciousness of the average voter,” said Saul Anuzis, a former chairman of the Michigan Republican Party who recently lost a bid to became national party chairman.

Workaday labels like “big spender” and “liberal” have lost their punch, and last fall, Senator John McCain of Arizona and Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska gained little traction during the presidential campaign by linking Mr. Obama’s agenda to socialism.

So Mr. Anuzis has turned to provocation with a purpose. He calls the president’s domestic agenda “economic fascism.”

Yeah good luck on that.

“Your boyfriend’s a scumbag and he won’t be able to provide for you.”

“Screw you, dad, we’re going to live on our love!”

“Alright then, your boyfriend’s a…a…um, an asshole! There, see the light now?”

That dog ain’t gonna hunt.

People are in the mood for some socialism now. If there was some urgency involved in Republicans refining their vocabulary, using just the right words to prevent some dreadful mistakes from being made, purely out of love for the country…that kind of urgency was defeated when these enormous gobs of money got spent. That was the horse running out of the barn, right there. Everything that can still be prevented, now, is just frosting on the cake.

Some of it still does have some urgency to it. There is a new global warming tax looming. Again, if this is the scumbucket boyfriend with whom the daughter wants to elope, there comes a time you’ll have to admit you can’t stop it.

But there are advantages to being in the opposition. The biggest one which all these stories are missing, is this: You don’t have to come up with the perfect answer. Defeat can be a marvelous coagulant. That’s what these “Republicans trying in vain to hone their message” stories are there to prevent. They are anti-coagulants. The people pushing them understand, implicitly, that if the forces that oppose democrats can be prevented from coming together in their hour of defeat, then they can be prevented from coming together anytime.

That is what needs to be fought. For example: What’s the Republican answer to gay marriage, make it a states’-right thing, or pass an anti-gay-marriage amendment? Answer: WHO CARES? Nobody’s looking to “do” gay marriage the Republican way. That isn’t happening anytime soon, whatever it is. And there sure as hell isn’t any same-sex-marriage ban being ratified into the Constitution this year or next. The question is just silly. The only reason to be asking it now, is to push a political agenda and keep the Republicans, and other anti-democrats, splintered apart.

In sum — a party that has been so solidly thrust into the position of the minority…as the democrat party regularly was, just a few years ago…doesn’t have to answer any questions. Such a party gets to ask them, instead. As the democrats did, when they were there.

And the future of the country depends on it. Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. What’s a more relevant question to be asking right now: “Should we have a same-sex-marriage ban written into the Constitution?” — or — “Is it possible, or even likely, for a nation to spend itself into prosperity?”

Which one of those questions is more pertinent to the challenges facing us in the year ahead? That debate is settled before it’s begun.

Here’s another one: “Should we have a law against teaching evolution in the public schools?” — or — “Is it proper to put taxes in place for the purpose of controlling people, rather than to raise revenue?”

See how that works? The party-out-of-power, for the good of the country, gets to ask the questions. We really don’t have much to gain from asking quasi-rhetorical questions, leading questions, push-poll questions, for the purpose of making the party-out-of-power look like they belong there. That matter has already been decided. A questioning session about all the things we’re definitely not going to be doing, is just a silly waste of time…and that is at best.

Republicans, libertarians, John Birch Society folks, Objectivists, et al — instead, need to ask the questions about the things we will likely be doing. That’s far more beneficial and a more effective use of time. Are we going to go into debt in order to improve our country’s financial situation? And how does that work, exactly?

Are we going to tax people into the right behavior? What exactly would people have been doing with that money being taxed away, if it weren’t taxed away? When I keep hearing that taxes were cut “for 95% of all households,” is that a literal 95% that is nineteen-out-of-twenty…or is that a figurative 95%…as in “everyone, or something close to everyone, something that might-as-well-be everyone.” (As I’ve said before, and said often, the figure “ninety-five percent” is commonly used to describe both of these, and it’s rather stunning that nobody’s nailed the administration down on this simple but valid point up until now.)

Do we really have a climate change crisis? Is carbon dioxide the cause of it? Actually, you know that particular question has been asked enough…the question we really need to be asking is, instead…can we stop an oncoming climate change crisis by yanking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere? Who says so? How far do we need to get that down, in parts-per-million? What does that cost? What happens if we do? What happens if we don’t? Those are the questions that really matter.

See, it comes down to this.

We’ve been conditioned to think everyone who’s asking a question, especially if they’ve been elected into a majority position and then start asking the questions, is thinking like a grown-up. In politics, the opposite is very often true. In April of 2009, there is no reason — none whatsoever — for any grown-ups to be asking what the Republicans would do, if they were in charge of things, to make the country into a Christian theocracy.

There’s no reason to be asking that at all, and to even ponder it is to be thinking like an immature child.

Questions are for the powerful. Just like it was asked of Republicans, years ago, “Is waterboarding torture?”

President Obama, when you were talking about the “failed policies of the Bush administration,” did you have in mind one of the most popular examples of such policies…the repeated failure to veto new spending plans from Congress? Is your $3.6 trillion budget supposed to be a departure from that?

Like that. What is so hard about that?

Let the legislation go forward…but push for sunset provisions. Sit back and wait. Point out the errors that could’ve been prevented. Every now and then, say “How’s that workin’ out for ya?” And most important of all…ask questions. That is the dissenting party’s job. The party-in-power, has the job of answering them. Not asking them.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News.