Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich says Sarah Palin will be one of 20 or 30 significant players in the Republican party going forward, but she won’t be a leading contender and she won’t be the de facto leader.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) is batting down the hype that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin heads into 2012 as the frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination.
Palin energized the Republican base after GOP presidential nominee Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) tapped her as his running mate and she has tried to preserve her high public profile since Election Day.
But Gingrich, an architect of the Republican revolution of 1994, took Palin down a notch, asserting that she would not become the party’s leader, as some have predicted.
“I think that she is going to be a significant player,” said Gingrich during an interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation”. “But she’s going to be one of 20 or 30 significant players. She’s not going to be the de facto leader.”
:
Palin dominated media coverage at the Republican Governors Association meeting in Miami last week. She grabbed the spotlight at a Thursday press conference, answering reporters’ questions while a dozen other GOP governors stood awkwardly behind her on stage.
Crowds of reporters and cameras chased Palin in Miami while ignoring more experienced colleagues from other states.
But Gingrich on Sunday sought to divert some media attention away from Palin and to other governors such as Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) and Utah Gov. John Huntsman (R).
“She’s going to be a much bigger story in the short run,” said Gingrich, explaining Palin’s higher media profile compared to other GOP governors. “But, I think, as she goes back to being governor and as she works in Alaska, you’re going to see a group of governors emerge, not just Sarah Palin.”
Gingrich said Huntsman and Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels (R) may emerge as political leaders on the economy while Jindal could claim the mantel on healthcare reform.
“I would say, for example, to Republicans who are about to face this question of how do you get the economy growing again, bring in Gov. Daniels and bring in Gov. Huntsman….”
“If you want to understand healthcare, you can do a lot worse than to bring in Bobby Jindal who may well know more about health policy than any other elected official in America and is doing an extraordinary job in Louisiana.”
I…I…I’m so confused. Did you just say you represented the Republican party?
Because, y’know, I think if I needed some direction from my luminous leaders on who’s supposed to catch my fancy and who is not, I would’ve joined the party run by those other guys. They thrive on that stuff, you know. “You like Shiraz better than White Zin, today’s favorite color is purple.” Since when do you get to decide what we are going to be telling you? I guess in some hidden lab somewhere deep in Mount G.O.P, some scientist is looking at a “Ignore The Base” meter and has put out a report over the weekend saying the November quota has not yet been met.
Here’s what it’s about, Newt. Not so much about growing the economy…but how. Not so much about healthcare…but quit going through life yelling for your mommy. Have Huntsman or Daniels or Jindal become known for something like “Drill Baby Drill”? Would they?
Here’s what it’s about — it’s about refusing to apologize for your existence…discouraging others from apologizing for existing…and then…refusing to apologize for those previous two.
Sarah Palin has earned our trust here.
You used to do the same, friend. Then what happened?
Maybe you’re the guy people were talking about when they clamored for this “change.” You’ve been in the beltway for awhile, and something in there seems to have gotten to you.
The Dagney with the misspelled name speaks for me on this one…and God only knows how many others.
I actually heard Cal Thomas, a reliable conservative voice, say on Fox News tonight say he thought Sarah Palin needed to reinvent herself? CAL, WE LOVE SARAH AS SHE IS!!!!!!!!!! WHAT IN HEAVEN’S NAME WOULD MAKE YOU THINK SHE NEEDS TO BE ANYONE ELSE?
Imagine the following in your very best slow, loud, Samuel L. Jackson, Pulp Fiction voice…
Nobody needs to reinvent a Goddamned thing.
It’s the people voting. One ticket had lawyers on it, the other ticket had none. The electorate was in the mood to vote for lawyers. Focus-group tested buzzwords, a bunch of nonsense that “Everybody” knows…that’s what the ballots were made of this year.
We’ve gotten sick and tired of lawyers and canned catchphrases before. We will be tired of ’em again. And when we are, “Smug ‘n Plugs” won’t have a single other thing to sell anybody. The hunger for real solutions, with substance, that actually work, will set in.
It’s a hunger that always arrives quickly. Quickly and painfully. The desire to see good guys treated like bad guys, and bad guys treated like good, dissipates the minute the bad guys start running around doing their damage. In other words, we’re all a bunch of Paul Kerseys…we believe in fluff and hope and change and things that sound good, “root cause of crime is poverty,” second chances, rehabilitation, right up until our wives and daughters are violated and murdered. Then we’re ready for some reality and some justice.
Let the electorate try their childish experiment. They won’t be enamored of it for long, I promise you. May the lesson arrive quickly, may the tuition be affordable, may the damage be slight.
Drill baby drill.
Update: You know, at first it strikes me as a fair argument that I ought to be doing some research into whether Mr. Thomas said what’s attributed to him, before I work up my passions. Ordinarily, I’d agree.
But not here. I’ve heard this tired trope many times before, that Ms. Palin “needs to change,” and at this point I don’t give a rat’s rear end whether Cal Thomas said it or not, nevermind in what context. I don’t care. The talking point is out there, and it’s a load of hogwash.
The electorate will be learning soon enough what a dreadful mistake they made. Sarah Palin doesn’t need to change a thing. Not in what she does, not in what she is, not in what she says. She’s smart, and she’s right.
And so this inspires some more (semi-stolen from DC Comics) artwork. As if we haven’t indulged in that enough already. I’ve always liked George Perez’ work…and the Supergirl/Wonder Woman ratio has been tilted a bit too strongly toward the Amazon Princess lately so the time’s come to even it out.
The more potential maladies that are subjected to preventive medicine in one generation, the greater the number of preventive measures will be proposed in the next. And they always, always, always involve money.
It’s the one sales pitch, to which we fail to show any constructive skepticism whatsoever.
An annual physical exam and twice-yearly dental checkup are supposed to protect your health. Now there’s a move for married Americans to do the same to protect the health of their unions.
So far, 171 couples in the Worcester, Mass., area are getting a Marriage Checkup, part of a clinical trial funded by the National Institutes of Health.
With questionnaires and two in-person sessions, the free program provides personalized feedback to keep relationships on track and circumvent trouble, says psychologist James Cordova, who runs the project at Clark University, where he’s an associate professor.
“This is a health issue,” he told a session of the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies on Saturday. Some 3,000 are attending the three-day meeting, which ends Sunday.
“Your marital health doesn’t catch your attention until it really starts to hurt,” he says. “By that point, sometimes irreversible damage has been done.”
Doctor Freeberg here, who has spent, uh (grabs calculator) slightly less than four percent of his visit on this big blue marble in a state of wedlock, and is not in such a state now…nevertheless…has the perfect prescription for coupling-up and staying coupled-up. And periodic check-ups, wonderful as they may sound, don’t have an awful lot to do with it.
It’s so easy. So simple. So perfectly in harmony with exactly what we do, when we don’t want to die from cancer.
And it seems nobody ever thinks of it. Until it’s too late.
Stay Away From Selfish Bitches.
If she recounts conversations back to you, and the conversations are all “and then I said…and then I said…and then I said…” — run like hell.
If she ever uses the word “oppressive” except when quoting someone else, run like hell.
If she treats the waitress like a lower form of human being, run like hell.
If she keeps up her house or apartment, and the clothes stored in it, the way a guy does the same, you run like hell.
If she turns up her nose when you donate to groups that help veterans, run like hell.
If she presses too hard for the subject to be changed when you talk about whether you want a Glock or a Sig Sauer, or debate the virtues of 5.56 NATO versus 7.65 Browning…run like hell.
And, of course, it goes without saying, if she refuses to “let” you do something — like, for example, go to Hooters — run like hell. In fact, run like hell if she doesn’t drag you there. With a big smile on her face.
Because women who don’t like to have fun, are walking wastes of energy and time. They are black holes for your life force. Life is not a dress rehearsal, boys. So you put some attention into who you’re choosing. Once you get a good one, you hang on to her and let her know how happy you are that the two of you met. Find ways. All the other good things will follow.
The marriage checkup is not therapy but an information service, Cordova told the nonprofit membership group of psychologists, psychiatrists and social workers.
“We’re able to help them identify exactly what it is they’re doing that is keeping them healthy and make sure that whatever their areas of concern are aren’t potentially problematic in the long run,” he says.
Cordova says an estimated 12 million couples — about 20% of all marriages — experience some significant level of distress. And he says about 5% of couples who marry are already distressed. Marriages deteriorate in stages, and he says a marital checkup can catch small issues before they grow big.
Marriages do not deteriotate in stages. I know it looks like that the first year or two after things “didn’t work out”…it always does. With some more time, one sees the problem really was that all those years ago, at the time the twosome became one, both halves were somewhat ignorant about what exactly it was they wanted out of life. Separation became an inevitability once, tragically united, they began to figure it out.
The thing is, though, once the intelligent divorcee realizes this, the divorce itself is a somewhat distant memory.
By then, his or her friends are done inquiring about the possible cause of the divorce. They’re too busy asking other more recent divorcee friends, still laboring under the delusion of this “grew apart in stages” fallacy, why they think they got divorced. So this epiphany is a relatively quiet one, and the urban myth of “stages” endures.
Poppycock.
Just don’t marry bitches. Marry (or couple up with) sweethearts, and treat ’em like that’s what they are. Spend your time around someone who wants you to be happy, and you will be.
Humans. Boy, we are really good at making simple things complicated. Y’know?
Man, I am so jazzed about what happened with the previous post. I broke a cardinal rule there, you know.
I am a blogger with an software engineering background. I’ve found blogging is the opposite of engineering. Lemme explain how…
Let us say you have invented a software networking tool. It is a peer-to-peer networking tool that works kind of like those old programs that connected to bulletin boards. It is a Layer 5 tool you’ve invented, which means it is a session-layer tool. You remember that — Please Do Not Throw Sausage Pizza Away, 5th word begins with S, S stands for Session. Now let us say you have a customer that is running into problems with your tool, and whether you know it or not, the customer is having these problems because of the networking software on his desktop computer.
He has a serious bug in his datagram layer software, which is Layer 2.
You address this by changing your software. You are addressing a layer-2 problem with layer-5 fixes. What happens.
We-ell…
You burn a lot of midnight oil. You have very little to show for it. Your software modules take on thousands of lines of nonsense code that doesn’t really do anything. Your test cases turn to manure. You revert a lot of changes, and of those, you revert a lot of them right back again.
See where I’m going with this? In engineering, you address bugs at the layer in which they occur. Because addressing them somewhere else is always possible. But it’s a one-step-forward, three-steps-back proposition.
I’ve come to view blogging as the opposite.
People vote for Barack Obama, which is a problem. The problem is due to something else far more deeply-rooted…our continuing apathy toward truth, toward cause-and-effect thinking, toward reckoning with consequences as our parents and grandparents told us we should learn to do. But if you speak to that, you might very well lose your audience. So instead, maybe it’s better for bloggers to think like bloggers, and not as software engineers. Maybe bloggers should address symptoms instead of causes.
That’s been my rule. But I broke it.
This dipstick of a news anchor said, without a piece of evidence to back it up (so far as I know), that pro-Proposition-8 people were just as hateful and visceral as anti-Proposition-8 people. I could have acted as a good blogger and just addressed that.
But I went deeper. I broke form, and acted as a software engineer, analyzing the root cause.
I explored bullshit narratives; how popular they’ve become; what role they played in electing our Messiah of a President-Elect.
I was certain this would lose my audience. But this is The Blog That Nobody Reads. The nobodies who don’t stop by to not read The Blog That Nobody Reads when they don’t have the time, reacted favorably to it and it sparked a fascinating discussion, both online and off. And then more than a few of my friends around the web picked it up. Apparently, this has really hit a nerve.
Good. I hope the folks who’ve taken the time to comment on what this means to them, represent millions. And I think that they do.
So I made a new word, again. It’s a little bit more than one word…
Overly-Convenient Narrative (OCN), or Bullshit Narrative, Socially Expedient Narrative, Howdy Narrative:
A construct of words, sentences, expressions and focus-group-tested phrases to describe a sequence of events with only a casual relation to the truth. Recall that Bullshit has an interesting non-correlational relationship with truth: “One cannot bullshit unless one absolves onesself of any concern at all about personal costs involved in disregarding truth — costs absorbed by other parties, are quite alright.” Liars are not bullshitters because liars have to concern themselves with what’s true, and assert something that differs from it.
A bullshit narrative tends to be more believable than regular bullshit, because whereas regular bullshit meanders randomly toward and away-from what’s true, the OCN narrative is formed around a kernel of truth. It is overly-convenient because it is assembled according to what is likely to be proliferated the most rapidly among diverse audiences, and to survive the longest. People use it to introduce themselves to each other, and ingratiate themselves with others who have bought into the same bullshit narrative, thus striking up a chord of instant (if not somewhat phony) friendship.
I went on to compile a list. A list that I could, if I dare say so, add to all day long if I so chose:
Some notable overly-convenient, bullshit narratives:
1. Sarah Palin is a dumbass.
2. So is George W. Bush.
3. So is J. Danforth Quayle.
4. We’ve poisoned the environment, causing global warming, and now we’re all gonna die.
5. The rich don’t pay taxes because they can hire accountants who know all the tricks of the trade.
6. Joe McCarthy ruined the lives of hundreds of people over made up, trumped-up charges.
7. Religious people are bigoted and intolerant.
8. (DEBUNKED) America is such a racist country it will never elect a black President.
9. No one is truly free unless… (fill in the blank)
10. Saddam Hussein was not dangerous because he had no weapons.
11. Clinton kept us safe. The 9/11 attacks occurred on George Bush’s watch.
12. Whenever a Republican is President, the public debt explodes.
13. You can’t raise a family on minimum wage the way it is now.
14. Nobody has any business owning assault weapons.
15. Barack Obama… (fill in the blank)
16. Republicans are opposed to civil rights.
17. We shouldn’t care what the Founding Fathers thought of things, because those guys owned slaves.
18. America is all about separation of church and state.
19. Our strength lies in our diversity.
20. Republicans and democrats have the same goals in mind, just different ideas about how to get them done.
Thinking takes work.
A lot of people don’t want to do it.
They want to do a lot of talking anyway. So they recycle tropes. Tropes they “know” are true, because they’ve heard ’em so many times before.
I’ve been thinking a lot about narratives lately. By that I mean, descriptions of events that are pieced together toward the objective of surviving, and traveling far and wide, rather than for the purpose of promoting good decisions.
There is a reason I’ve been thinking about them, and on this reason I’d rather remain somewhat slithery and vague for the time being. My old “friend” from work, the one who likes to talk about politics a lot but has shown a consistent tendency to descend into conflict with people — and it’s always someone else’s fault. Yeah, he’s an Obamaton.
I’d rather talk less about him, and more about who, and what, he represents. This should be do-able because this type of person is commonplace. They don’t want to be negative people, I don’t think. Conflict follows them around because they lack the tools to deal with the conversations they want to have. They want to talk about their truisms, their narratives…global warming will kill us all, Obama is a smarty-pants and will fix everything, George W. Bush is a war criminal and a dummy. Conflict will follow them around because if they persist in having these conversations with people who see things the same way, they’re going to get bored. It isn’t that they want to argue. It’s that they want ideas to be exchanged. If you think George W. Bush is stupid, and I think Bush is stupid, ideas won’t be exchanged because there’s no reason to explore anything.
So they gravitate outward.
And they bump into people like me…who don’t want to do a lot of arguing either. But we live in a different world, one in which each conclusion possesses an attribute of likelihood. In our world, if we are to conclude something is so, then the requirements change for the underlying justification based on whether we’re concluding the thing is probably so, versus whether we’re concluding the thing might be so. And if you’re arguing that the thing must be so, then the rules change yet again. You say this guy, whom I’ve never met and am never going to meet, who is President of the United States when I’m not, and has fooled me along with everyone else with his phony election…is a big dummy? Are you saying that’s probably true or are you saying that’s possibly true? And what of Obama rescuing us? Solving all our problems? To the satisfaction of whom?
People who argue by narrative don’t think this way. “Obama is the Real Deal,” to them, is an idea that has come to maturity just as much as any other…because it is ready to travel. To endure, to propagate. It need not prove anything, and it need not rest on evidence of anything.
Someday, I must find a way to deal with these people. Ignoring them doesn’t work. Agreeing with everything they say, doesn’t work. Changing the subject doesn’t work.
I’ve told the story before, of this popular narrative that emerged a year and a half ago that this was a racist country that would never elect a black man as President…I ended up in trouble when it was discovered I was leaving this narrative in my “holding area,” waiting for solid evidence of it, refusing to give it the benefit of the doubt. I was inexperienced in matters dealing with our racial-relations problems, was the new narrative — and there is some truth in that. But whatever. In the end, it turned out I was correct not giving the benefit-of-doubt to that other narrative. It wasn’t true, and it probably hasn’t been true for a very long time.
But it has been a very popular thing to say.
That’s the trouble with thinking by narrative. You can certainly say, they are already being subjected to a meritocracy in the theater of ideas, for they would not proliferate if there was not some truth to them. That’s the weakness: Some truth.
This battle for survival is not sufficiently taxing, for the emerging victors to show a pattern of verity. To survive and spread, the narrative doesn’t have to be provably true, demonstrably true, probably true…not even conceivably true. The appearance of truth will be quite sufficient. It’s all based on the other fellow, that stranger over there — how ready is he going to be to hear it. That’s the lodestar.
Quite a lead-in for this film clip Rick found at the “Jack Lewis” site. And this film clip is quite a morsel of ugliness, some three minutes’ worth, to get to the end, in which the dimwit anchor says something that twisted Rick off pretty good, and rightly so in my opinion:
Those last three words: “On both sides.”
You tool. You stupid tool. Yes, I mean that as the insult. I find it fitting in your case.
Maybe there was something earlier in this newscast substantiating that there was an equal measure of hate and nastiness on the “Yes On Prop 8” side. Maybe. I don’t give a rip. This is arguing by narrative. This is what I’m talking about. It’s “Who ya gonna believe, me or your lyin’ eyes” stuff.
It has become such a convenient narrative that religious folks are bigoted and intolerant. Too many people don’t care if it’s true or not. They’re meeting people by spewing this tired trope, making friends, and that’s all that matters to them.
But I end up in conflict with them, the same way I ended up in conflict when I voiced my doubts that racism was still capable of swaying a presidential election. I doubt it. I doubt religious people are inherently nasty, I doubt they are statistically nasty, I doubt they’re even motivated in that direction more than the average bear.
Spare me your anecdotes. I’m sure you have one or two. But it speaks volumes that when the time comes to support the argument, the most popular anecdote is something called “The Crusades,” and the second most popular is something called “The Inquisition.”
I’m not supposed to think anything of Obama’s America-hating asshole friends, because some of the stuff that went down occurred “When He Was Eight” — well here’s a news flash. During the crusades, Barack Obama wasn’t eight yet — so why in the hell does anyone bother to talk about ’em?
And so this chestnut that religious people are intolerant, is being stored, by me, in that holding area. I’m still waiting to be convinced of it. That, right there, is enough to get some people spittin’ mad. It gets them mad because they’ve got this little sound bite they can trot out, and use to make new friends, nevermind if there’s truth to it or not…and when they meet someone who isn’t buying, to them it’s like they’ve met someone determined to be their enemy. I’m sure it might feel that way when you’ve become accustomed to something else.
But that just goes to show, they’re the ones generating the conflict. They make friends by twisting truth around, rather than regarding the truth as it exists. And the truth as it exists, in my experience at least, is that the religious people I’ve met have been very nice. I haven’t personally seen too many of ’em shun anyone over their sexual preferences…I’ve heard quite a lot about that kind of thing, mostly with the kind of vague outlining used to relay urban legends, friend-of-a-friend stuff, like the lady with black widows making a nest in her beehive hairdo. The religious people I’ve met possess not a monopoly, but something very close to it, in helping strangers who are less well-off and expecting no payment of any kind in return.
So mister airhead anchorman, kindly take your “On Both Sides” narrative — for that is all that it is — and stick it up your rear end where it belongs, until you have something more substantial upon which to hang it.
I am tired, exceedlingly, to the point of digust, of watching people attacked and ridiculed for their creed, within the borders of a nation that was founded expressly to provide shelter from exactly that. And supposedly, more often than not, in the name of tolerance. Cut me a megaton crystal-cadillac break.
There are four things about people I’ve never been able to figure out. Maybe they’re all related to each other.
1. We Kill God Whenever We Get What We Want
When the very essentials of life require a struggle, and such struggles entail uncertainty, we believe in God. It’s quite unavoidable, you know. It’s said there are no atheists in foxholes; there is some truth in this, but it may be closer to the truth to say there are no atheists on a farm. When every foodstuff and every staple requires effort and every effort involves working waiting and wondering, there has to be prayer. When you pray, you have to send your prayers somewhere.
And then when things are better, and we go too long a time without working waiting and wondering, even for our luxury items…after awhile, God dies. Or disappears. Carrots and cabbages can be had for a ritual, which will be over in fifteen minutes with a quick drive to the corner market and a swipe of the debit card. Cigarettes, too. And candy-coffee. Purified water, tampons, chewing gum, electronic gadgets whose names begin with a lowercase “i” and tote around our personal music collections. Look how smart we are, we don’t have to wonder where we’ll be getting anything. We’re way too smart for God. We think we’ve killed Him, we think this is the result of cool reasoning and logic, but all that’s changed is that the necessity for prayer has momentarily disappeared. And so anybody who still believes in Him, must be a big dummy. Just because we can get sweet coffee drinks with long unpronouncable names whenever we want to.
2. We Really Hate Having Our Asses Saved
There’s something going on here that has to do with our own ignorance. We have such a breathtaking and heartfelt gratitude for those who save us from a calamity we know is coming, that we’ve had time to dread. For the savior who spares us from some looming disaster of which we’ve been ignorant the entire time, right up until the danger has passed, we have nothing but spite and scorn. Someone kills a nest of black widows under the equipment your kids play on — if you’ve known about the black widows for a month or two, and haven’t been sure what to do about ’em, you’re all, thankyewthankyewthankyew. If you’re just finding out about ’em, it’s more like, What the hell are you doing in my yard, man? Get outta here. The guy who tells you your tire is flat, just as you’re getting in your car; the guy who calls you on the phone with your wallet in his hand, when you thought it was safely in your pocket. For a single instant there is a flash of inexplicable anger for such well-intentioned strangers — for no good reason. It’s as if, if we refuse to accept the danger, maybe that’ll re-write history so the danger was never there.
Even then…how do you explain the nastiness? Someone saves you from something. Maybe you want to believe in the something, maybe you don’t. If you don’t want to believe in it, and you think you’re right and this fellow who “saved” you is wrong, why do you hate him so? No, don’t give me your pablum about “illegal and unjust war,” etc. George W. Bush is hated by millions upon millions of the people who live in the country he leads; only a tiny fraction among them know anybody serving in the military, let alone anyone who was a casualty. And if they cared about the “Iraqi civilians” one bit they’d have been popping champagne corks over the end of Saddam Hussein’s regime, because when you really care about someone, that’s what you do when they no longer have to live under an oppressive dictator.
It’s the action itself. We have a whole lot of spite for action that takes place early on, in the middle of our debating. When the debating extends past the point where it’s obvious what’s the right thing to do and what’s the wrong thing to do, we get white-hot-pissed at the guy who does what is clearly the right thing while we’re still arguing.
3. We Value Association as an Adequate Substitute for a Workable Plan
It’s true, you know. Once we come together on something, or when we’re even simply invited to come together…no plan is needed. We don’t even need to agree on what the goal is, which is something I’ve always thought of as particularly absurd. How many times does this happen in your daily life. How many times are you told “together…we can do this,” and nobody takes the time or trouble to say a few words about what exactly the “this” is.
It’s quite a simple and durable piece of logic, that if there is a benefit to be realized from laboring on something together, we need some synchronicity here. But the people who are the most enthused about coming together seem to fight any effort to define that. It’s just “this.” We’re all going to work on “this” together.
4. We’re Always Causing the End of the World
This is the one thing on which we’ve been completely consistent, it seems, throughout all of our various civilizations right back to the dawn of recorded history and probably before even that. The end of the world is imminent, and it’s all our fault.
Time was when God was going to get mad at us and figure out His whole experiment was a wash…because of our screw-ups. That was part of the magic, you know — our own culpability, our own sin. Nobody ever trembled at the thought that God might’ve built the human race as a tool, back when He was unaware there was some other resource at His command which would do the same thing, and then one day say to Himself “oh silly Me, this whole thing was unnecessary.” No apprehension that Armageddon would be brought about by some factor completely outside our control. No, the fantasy was always that we caused it. And of course it wouldn’t do to say we’d mess up something that would cause the end of ourselves as individuals, or of our families, or our countries. Nope, never any local damage. That would’ve spoiled the fun. It was always lights-out for the entire human race, with our own fingers on the switch.
Nothing’s changed. Now that God is dead, we have Global Warming. It’ll make the entire planet uninhabitable, and once again…drum roll, please…it’s all our fault.
The millenia tick on by, we believe in God then we don’t, our asses get saved by people we hate…and this stays consistent. We just can’t get away from it.
…they never mean it, and don’t you forget it. That’s the truth, boys & girls. When they say they want a discussion, what they want is an echo chamber, nothing more and nothing less. I’ve not yet seen it fail.
The blogosphere is chock full of weary but optimistic comments from those who share my views, but have more class. The leitmotif is to roll up our sleeves, swallow hard, and find ways to work together.
Sorry. When the party in power has the idea to tax the businesses and people who are responsible for providing jobs to everybody else…and it’s already well established what happens when we do that…I don’t think being a good American has too much to do with bucking-up, sucking-up, and falling in line. I don’t think it has to do with protests or strikes or revolutions or riots, either.
Sure, respect High Holiness as the legitimately elected President of the United States and Commander in Chief. A deeply flawed Commander in Chief. Corrupt, mistaken…one or the other, perhaps both. Talk reasonably about the issue to whoever will listen.
But the policy doesn’t work, and that’s just a fact. It’s provable. It’s been tried. Many times. We know it’s counterproductive…what we don’t know, is the extent of the consequences of giving it one more go.
Obama himself is smart enough to know spreading the wealth does not work. If he isn’t that smart, certainly, more than a few of the people working for him are. Somehow they’ve got loopholes built in so this doesn’t hurt them.
We are not in this together.
And Obamatons do not want a free and open exchange of ideas.
We are not laboring toward the same goals with different methods in mind for getting it done.
No, this is a cold civil war. A war in which the enemy has won the latest battle, and that means if we play by the rules we give them the respect the deserve as the victors of the latest battle. Nothing more, nothing less.
And never ever forget — that is far greater civility than they ever showed when they were out of power. It is far greater respect than anything demonstrated at the Wellstone Memorial.
Some tax policies don’t work. It’s just a fact.
Some strategies of “diplomacy” are tantamount to surrender. It’s just a fact.
Some dialogues are nothing more than a monologue. It’s just a fact.
And calling out a small girl in your class because her daddy’s in Iraq and you want to ridicule what he’s trying to do, is being a classless turd. That’s just a fact too.
H/T: Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler who, true to form, has lots of well-chosen dirty words about the occasion. And a snail-mail address by which you can reach the superintendent’s office of this schoolteacher’s district, to let ’em know what a swell job you think she’s doing.
Quoting myself, as I engage in debate about this regular sixteen-year event in which the youngest guy wins the election on behalf of a new generation without offering any good ideas.
Why, I wonder, is this a post-World-War-II thing. Young people have always wanted to go out and make their mark; change the world. This notion is fairly young — that this world-changing should be done by voting, with a large mob of people who are of like mind and similar age, to elect the candidate closest to your young generation, without demanding he define what “change” he’s bringing. A hundred years ago, the whippersnapper with stars in his eyes would talk about what HE is going to do. “And then I’m going to marry that girl! Over there! I just know it!”
Okay, some of that I’m conjuring up from movies, which is always a mistake.
But the point stands. There’s been an insidious attack upon the individual sometime during the 20th century. For all the bluster raining down upon us throughout the generations, it seems, looking back, that is the single most significant political transformation within our shores during that hundred years; the individual doesn’t matter very much. Achievement is something you do after you “come together,” and what exactly it is you do, together with the ultimate effect of it, are just meaningless trivialities.
ABC News is reporting that Obama will inherit a bad economy. That’s some rich spin right there; The Messiah In Chief will milk that one for…well, forever. If we repealed term limits and he was in there for ninety years he’d still be playing that one up: I didn’t screw up anything, it’s the “failed policies of George W. Bush.”
You know what ABC is trying to tell you? Obama won the election, and then the Dow tanked the next day.
That’s highly unusual, you know. It’s sufficiently unusual that it really says something about The Chosen One, and it isn’t good. The market is an emotional construct — but not completely so.
For those who’d care to activate the left side of the brain as we proceed to inspect this…it doesn’t require much inspection at all. There’s not much to inspect, because we don’t know a great deal about what The One will do after His Holy Hand comes off the Bible.
We know things are supposed to be better for everyone because He is going to spread the wealth around. As I’ve pointed out before — we’re not that young of a nation. We’ve spread the wealth around before. Always, a generation or two have to pass on by before we think it’s a good idea worth trying again. If it worked out okay, we’d just start doin’ it and stick with it. That didn’t happen.
We also know he’s going to tax the snot out of any company involved with producing oil, so that we pay less for gasoline. Now, remember: We’re thinking with the left brain here. Cause and effect. Facts and conclusions. Reason. You make it more expensive for a company to do business, and the price of the product that company produces, comes down? Come again?
And we know universal healthcare is coming. A lot of other countries have universal healthcare. American patients who need medical care, are not going there to get it. The people who live there, come here.
He’ll end the war no matter what. Wars are ended through negotiation and coordination involving both sides. The point of decision is part of those negotiations. You don’t walk into them with your own commitment already in hand, written up, ready to be tossed on the table. When one side decides to end the war without any concessions from the other, they have a name for that: Surrender.
Other than those…well, if we’re tuning out passions and just sticking to logic and reason, the bottom of the barrel’s been scraped hasn’t it? We’re down to how young and handsome and charismatic he is, and “there’s just something about him!” and tingling feelings in the leg and (planted) schoolgirls fainting when he speaks at those rallies of his…and hope…and change.
And I guess, in 2024, we’ll be doin’ it again. By which time Obama will look like a silly old buffoon, like Bill Clinton, and all the “young” people who voted for him. Well there is some satisfaction in that.
But this isn’t a timeless trend, this heartbeat of stupid. It has an origin, and if you go back in time before that origin, it isn’t here yet. Therefore, it must have a terminus somewhere. How is that brought about, that’s the question. This is still a wonderful, mighty nation that can survive an onslaught of underqualified, lackluster leaders, even in the White House. But it doesn’t deserve to be condemned to an endless, pulsating supply of ’em.
I was doing three seemingly unrelated things that got me to thinkin’. The first was to re-read Gerard Van der Leun’s excellent piece about the American Castrati…
If you focus on it, you realize that you hear this voice every day if you bounce around a bit in our larger cities buying this or ordering that, and in general running into young people in the “service” sector — be it coffee shop, video store, department store, boutique, bookstore, or office cube farm. It’s a kind of voice that was seldom heard anywhere but now seems to be everywhere.
It is the voice of the neuter .
I mean that in the grammatical sense:
“a. Neither masculine nor feminine in gender.
“b. Neither active nor passive; intransitive,”
and in the biological sense:
“a. Biology Having undeveloped or imperfectly developed sexual organs: the neuter caste in social insects.
“b. Botany Having no pistils or stamens; asexual.
“c. Zoology Sexually undeveloped.”
You hear this soft, inflected tone everywhere that young people below, roughly, 35 congregate. As flat as the bottles of spring water they carry and affectless as algae, it tends to always trend towards a slight rising question at the end of even simple declarative sentences. It has no timbre to it and no edge of assertion in it.
The second was listening to my own voice upon stumbling across an old video, in which I teach my son to ride a bike without training wheels. I’m not talking like a Castrati, thank God. My declarative sentences are indeed declarative. It’s the pitch. Slightly diffferent from what I use talking to grown-ups. Or even him, and his friends, in different settings. Somehow, when little kids are scared out of their wits, we’re indoctrinated to try to defuse the situation by altering the pitch. Just a fraction of an octave. Why do we do that? It doesn’t calm me down when a woman is addressing me and the pitch of her voice goes up.
The third thing I did was just wander around Folsom. It’s a kid-friendly place. The patchwork-quilt of folsom is polka-dotted with parks of varying size, and being a parent myself I get to watch lots of parents interact with their children.
This last part is a little disturbing.
Fathers…and mothers…modulate their voices way, way upward. Several octaves in the case of the gentlemen. It does not sound like me telling my kid to keep his feet on the pedals. It does not lack a declarative tone at the end, like the Castrati described by Van der Leun. They declare things. They just declare them in this weird, other-worldly, somniferous voice. Kind of like Marvin the Martian. Except Marvin the Martian sounds like an opera baritone compared to this.
Kailey…hunny? We have…to stop…it’s time…to go…eat din…ner……okay?
And way freakin’ up there. It’s not just strange. It’s creepy.
In quieter moments, usually before the sun peeks up over the foothills, like right now — I worry more about this than I do about Barack Obama winning the election tomorrow. That’s one of tomorrow’s leaders swinging away in the playground. Boy or girl, when does s/he ever get to see some masculinity in some form or another? When is s/he allowed to see it implemented to solve a problem? How can that happen, with the Daddy talking like that?
Does the little curtain-critter put the XBOX controller down long enough to wander out into the garage and see Papa Bear repairing the lawnmower engine? Or…simply replacing an inner tube in a bicycle? Are they walked through the exercise, or is it just — give your broken whatever to the small-d dad, like a toddler giving a used tissue to momma to crumple up and put in her pocket. Pick it back up from him, later, fixed.
Does he teach the children about maintaining gear properly? Not losing things? How to watch for those tell-tale signs you didn’t spend enough money on something? Anticipating the need to have certain safety-related items working…well…the very first time they’re needed…with no fiddlin’.
Do they use the “Batman” analogy, like my son and I have been? You know — when Batman’s falling off the building, it’s way too late to ponder whether he brought with him the “good” bat-a-rang or settled for that crummy bat-a-rang he can’t really count on.
In what pitch do they tell their children about gear, supplies, tools and skills? Is it that creepy faux-female voice I see on the playgrounds so often? This…is my…workbench…I wash my…hands before…I go in…Mommy’s kitchen…
I suppose it’s none of my business. Or at least it seems not to be — until I start to think waitaminnit. This is all the kids I’m seeing around here. An entire generation. Now, look at the kids voting for the first time tomorrow. When were they on the playgrounds; Bill Clinton was already President. We really haven’t got that long to wait, and then we’ll have some decisions made by an entire generation of kids who have been raised to think of testosterone not even as something despicable or deadly, but something even worse than that: Something alien. Strange. Undesirable. Something to be kept distant.
An enemy at the gate.
Maybe that’s already happened. Maybe that’s why Obama’s ahead in the polls right now. Four years ago, John Kerry had better military credentials than George W. Bush, and that was supposed to mean a lot. Now, the delta between McCain’s experience fighting for the country, and Obama’s…it isn’t even necessary to find a counterpoint to this one. The discourse doesn’t even head off in that direction. Masculinity is an enemy at the gate. As a voting society, it seems we comprehend its useful purpose, about as well as a thawed-out caveman might comprehend the useful purpose of a calculator.
With one exception. The caveman might grasp that the calculator is assembled to get something done that otherwise could not have been done. To our prevailing sentiment, it would appear masculinity lacks that much meaning for us. There are signs — on the playgrounds, and in a lot of other places too — that our culture has come to view it as a hindrance. Something that is, quite simply, in the way.
And we got here without investing too much quality thought in the issue. What a shame.
All told, 59 percent of voters surveyed said Ms. Palin was not prepared for the job, up nine percentage points since the beginning of the month. Nearly a third of voters polled said the vice-presidential selection would be a major factor influencing their vote for president, and those voters broadly favor Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee. [emphasis mine]
Since the beginning of the month.
What events, pray tell, occurred since the beginning of the month to make people convinced of such a thing…people who were left unconvinced as of the thirtieth of September? The Katy Couric interview? Nope, sorry. Occurred before that. The “Bush Doctrine” thing, in which it turned out Palin was correct and it was the reporter who needed an education about it? Nope. That was even earlier.
It’s the time span declared, that creates the glaring logical problem with this. It’s a fair statement to make that throughout October, nothing substantial transpired to convince anyone of Palin’s unfitness or incompetence provided they weren’t so convinced before. Nothing substantial…and only one thing that was insubstantial. The spending of millions of dollars to get the word out.
That old meme about “all Republicans who pose a threat to democrats must be stupid if they were born after Pearl Harbor (and must be evil if they were born before).”
I guess that old warhorse still has a few years of life left in ‘er. That’ll always be the case, you know, as long as people are more malleable in their thinking than they believe themselves to be. And they are. Everyone wants to be placed on the pedestal reserved for independent thinkers…so few really merit that.
Meanwhile, here are a few words jotted down by Elaine Lafferty, who used to run Ms. Magazine. Yeah, that notorious right-wing libertarian rag Ms. Lafferty’s as loyal-democrat as they come, and she actually sat with and talked to that clueless dolt Sarah P. In close quarters. In October, and before.
It’s difficult not to froth when one reads, as I did again and again this week, doubts about Sarah Palin’s “intelligence,” coming especially from women such as PBS’s Bonnie Erbe, who, as near as I recall, has not herself heretofore been burdened with the Susan Sontag of Journalism moniker. As Fred Barnes—God help me, I’m agreeing with Fred Barnes—suggests in the Weekly Standard, these high toned and authoritative dismissals come from people who have never met or spoken with Sarah Palin. Those who know her, love her or hate her, offer no such criticism. They know what I know, and I learned it from spending just a little time traveling on the cramped campaign plane this week: Sarah Palin is very smart.
I’m a Democrat, but I’ve worked as a consultant with the McCain campaign since shortly after Palin’s nomination. Last week, there was the thought that as a former editor-in-chief of Ms. magazine as well as a feminist activist in my pre-journalism days, I might be helpful in contributing to a speech that Palin had long wanted to give on women’s rights.
Now by “smart,” I don’t refer to a person who is wily or calculating or nimble in the way of certain talented athletes who we admire but suspect don’t really have serious brains in their skulls. I mean, instead, a mind that is thoughtful, curious, with a discernable pattern of associative thinking and insight. Palin asks questions, and probes linkages and logic that bring to mind a quirky law professor I once had. Palin is more than a “quick study”; I’d heard rumors around the campaign of her photographic memory and, frankly, I watched it in action. She sees. She processes. She questions, and only then, she acts. What is often called her “confidence” is actually a rarity in national politics: I saw a woman who knows exactly who she is.
That’s probably why the millions of dollars were spent to get the word out that she don’t know nuthin’. Nothing scares a politician, or for that matter anyone in any position of power, like an everyman with a brain in his head who actually uses it. As Ayn Rand said, thinking men can’t really be ruled.
And this is the real concern about the nine-point swing. Palin certainly has had her stumbles and hiccups, one could even call them gaffes…but since they all occurred before this huge jump in her incompetence rating, what we have here is a jump of nine solid points, every single one of ’em delivered by propaganda, since the evidence did nothing to support this in the timeframe specified. Every single point, and every single fraction of a point — that’s all people parroting what they were told to think, there.
Should this concern us? I’d ordinarily say no, because people have always wanted to put on a big show of thinking for themselves, and they’ve always been dissappointing in this. It’s one of those things that go all the way back to the snake giving Eve that apple…or the first man’s ape-tail shriveling up into nothingness, if that’s your point of view. Humans have always wanted to be regarded by other humans as deep, solitary, independent thinkers. They’ve never wanted to do much to earn that.
Here’s what concerns me. You can’t just spend millions of dollars repeating over and over again that a certain smart person is stupid, and then enjoy a nine percent increase in the number of people who believe it to be true. People have to have some reason to clamber on board the bandwagon. Sarah Palin hasn’t been giving people reason to believe that it’s true. As far as I know, free cigarettes and hooch haven’t been passed out to people willing to sign on to the idea that Palin’s a moron…and so it comes down, by process of elimination, to a technique the democrat power-brokers and party bosses are known for using, and using very well.
The “I’m not too sure about you” technique. The “maybe-you-can-count-on-me” technique.
The weapon wielded here, is your own uncertainty. Tell a man you think he’s scum and nothing he does will ever change your mind, and you can’t get him to do anything.
Tell a man you think he’s wonderful and nothing anybody else does will change your mind, and you get the same result.
But you tell him you used to like him, now you’ve heard some ugly stuff, or accuse him of some skulduggery here or there…put on a good act that you’re thoroughly convinced that he did what he did, even though you just pulled it out of your ass…but are undecided about whether the fellow deserves the consequences that would surely rain down upon his head if word got out…maybe demonstrate the capability to convince others of this imaginary transgression, nevermind whether there are any facts that would back it up.
He’ll move mountains for you.
And he’ll believe everything you tell him.
It always has the potential to work, and it does work nearly always. That’s because we’re all flawed. If you’ve made mistakes in the past and haven’t come to terms with them, a complete stranger can accuse you of something else entirely unrelated, something of which you couldn’t possibly be guilty. If the facts don’t back him up but he still strikes a chord…he’s got at least a shot at owning your very soul. We seem to have it wired into our brains to think “well, I didn’t steal any office supplies like he thinks I did, but I returned a library book a week late a few years ago and he doesn’t know about that, so I guess it all evens out.”
The only exception to that rule, is the true Howard Roarks of the world; recall what Ayn Rand said about thinking men being ruled. People who believe in what they do everyday, who are strong enough to sustain their own definition of what’s worthwhile, and know that they themselves are it. In other words, that stuff we used to call “self-respect.” That isn’t being a perfect being, devoid of sin. That simply means making up your own mind about things. This technique of “friend yesterday enemy today maybe-friend tomorrow” doesn’t work on them.
Apparently, it does work effectively in the here-and-now. Hence my concern. It would seem this isn’t Howard Roark’s finest year. Individual self-respect seems to have gone on a holiday.
I wonder if we’ll ever see it again. It would be nice if we did…but if that doesn’t happen before Tuesday, I don’t suppose it very much matters. Enjoy your two years of socialism, and for being forced to live under it, you can thank the people around you who are utterly lacking in self-respect. Whatever the personal reason they have for missing it, in every country in which socialism has prospered, they are always the ones who brought it on in. The kind of person who yanks her daughter out of school to go see the Replacement-God-Man in action. Yay, the unicorn-fart man will pay my mortgage for me…
In a fascinating contribution of hers called The Palin Rorshach Test, Jennifer Rubin notes that Sarah Palin, the Alaska Governor currently running for the White House with some old guy, is far less interesting than the discourse and debate she has inspired. Rubin’s column explores the real differences between Palin supporters and Palin skeptics…then it delves into the skeptic side of that schism, and takes a look at what truly motivates those who so recoil from Caribou Barbie.
Sure, there’s a strong suspicion that many in the anti-Palin camp are posturing to ingratiate themselves with the Washington cocktail set. (One defender of Palin recently said to me of Palin opponents: “They want to be above the respectability bar, not below it.”) But I will accept for sake of argument that most advocates on both sides are sincere. And I’ll ignore for a moment that a number of Palin skeptics may have another candidate already in mind for 2012. So what’s the real difference between the sides?
I think it breaks down into “Players” and “Kibitzers.”
The Players are those who engage in politics not simply as an intellectual exercise but as a sport — a combat sport. They appreciate the need to sell and engage voters. They like the rough and tumble of campaigns. They understand the point of it all is to “win, baby, win.” And because they see politics as a group activity they are attuned to the audience — the voters. They watch the crowd, not because the crowd is “right,” but because without the crowd (voters), this is all an academic exercise. It is not hard to see why talk show hosts fall into this category. They, after all, make their living engaging the public and understand precisely what it takes to hold their interest.
That is not to say that the Players don’t care about ideas or the message. To the contrary, because they see the message of conservatism as a valuable and potentially winning vision they are extremely attuned to finding the right messenger. If you trust the message to the wrong candidate you get 1996, or worse.
On the other side are the Kibitzers, those who don’t hold office or run campaigns or much bother with real voters. They write books, tell us what is wrong with conservatism, and scold the poor slobs who run campaigns. They lack any visceral sense of actual conservative voters. Their bent is decidedly academic and their approach to politics is sterile. If you can simply come up with the ideal blueprint, go on Charlie Rose’s show, and write a column for the New York Times or Washington Post, the light will go on, the conservative movement will be saved, and they will earn the applause of their peers.
Now, some of the Kibitzers, truth be told, don’t care much about ideas: it is sentiment and word pictures that catch their attention. They’d rather toss around elegant phrases unmoored to any reasoned argument — slip the surly bonds of analysis, as it were — than mix it up in the hurly-burly of real electoral politics. [bold emphasis mine]
Yup, that’s Yin and Yang. The Yin allow their social skills to atrophy until a very seasoned age, so they can concentrate on making things work. The Yang allow their functional skills to atrophy indefinitely, so they can concentrate on socializing. This thing we call “The Right” in our country is predominantly Yin while The Left is predominantly Yang, but each side of the left-right divide is a composite of unlike parts.
In other words, there is a sprinkling of Yin in the left. Liberals do get things built. Al Gore’s a great example of this.
And there’s a sprinkling of Yang on the right. This is the phenomenon Rubin is noticing. Most conservatives are concerned with substance, and just a few are concerned with style. These are the folks who’d prefer to “toss around elegant phrases unmoored to any reasoned argument.” And they do not like Sarah Palin, not even a little bit. They liked John McCain way back when, in the olden days, when the New York Times liked him. Palin offends them, and not just a little.
It’s the stuff she does. She’s a “get it done” gal. When she fires someone, there’s a reason why — she wants ’em gone. She doesn’t want to just go through the motions of firing them. And if you get in her way, she’ll fire your ass too.
The Yang are not so burdened by what causes what, and what’s a consequence of what. That isn’t their world. Being superior communicators, want to replicate themselves in others. These are the people who stop you from doing something “the wrong way,” but can’t tell you what awful consequences will be conjured up should you continue to do things that way. They are schooled in procedure, and not in cause-and-effect. Internal to any given culture, most of the social problems develop from Yin and Yang having contact with each other too quickly, too intimately, and without adequate…buffering. For better or for worse, this apparatus we call the “conservative wing” falls under “any given culture.” Hence the divide that has come to Ms. Rubin’s attention.
But the whole country is divided this way right now. It is reaching a tragic zenith.
Since no one but the Yin can make something work that previously did not, it’s up to them to build up a society. And no one but the Yang has any desire to replicate their own behavior in others, therefore, it’s natural that once things are comfortable and functional, the Yang take things over. With no challenges left to a mature and evolving society, eventually, they succeed at this…and then such a society becomes all about commisserating with one another, all about empathy. At such an event horizon of societal maturity, that society will forsake the values that were necessary to getting it built. Unfortunately, what’s needed to build something is identical to what’s needed to maintain it, so this high level of societal maturity will always turn out to be cancerous. The Yang, therefore, will always have it in their destiny to ride such a maturity back downward again, into the ground, as they seek to obliterate or convert anyone who isn’t like them.
The United States is at a very high level on this bell curve of societal maturity. Out here on the west coast, I can say that this spot of earth on which my fanny is sitting right now, when it was trod upon by (European) people for the very first time just a couple centuries ago, the paramount concern was starvation; after that, rattlesnakes. Here we are, just one or two clock-ticks later. Five generations, perhaps six or seven. And we’re worried that Starbucks might have put the wrong flavor of syrup in our lattes. It’s more common for schoolchildren to be held back a grade over concerns about their “social skills” than about their academic achievement.
Everywhere you look, someone’s calling someone else stupid.
Gallup found in January 2000 that while 66 percent of the public could name the host of “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” only 6 percent knew the name of the speaker of the House. Last year, a Polling Company survey found that 58 percent of Americans could not name a single federal Cabinet department.
The ignorant can be found in the highest reaches of academe. Of more than 3,100 Ivy League students polled for a University of Pennsylvania study in 1993, 11 percent couldn’t identify the author of the Declaration of Independence, half didn’t know the names of their US senators, and 75 percent were unaware that the classic description of democracy — “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” — is from the Gettysburg Address.
These tidbits are nothing new. Or old. They’ve been going on for awhile, and they’ve always been remarkable given this long-running crescendo of our political-argument din. It seems every single year we make just a little bit more noise about things compared to the year before. Can we really be that ignorant of the essentials of the subjects that so thoroughly capture and hold our passions?
Can you really have that much heat with so little light?
It would seem the answer is yes. But only in a society that has ripened to the point where the cells that make it up, are scrumptious…juicy…heaving and undulating…ripe to the point of rot. Ready for an unstoppable malignant spread. Near the apex, ready for a complete Yang-takover, and the subsequent ride downward into chaos, like in the closing chapters of Atlas Shrugged, like in the fall of Rome, like in the sinking of Atlantis.
Like a lawn dart, straight into the ground.
The natural consequence of forgetting, from sea to shining sea, what it takes to get a useful thing built and what it takes to keep it working.
Are we there. Are we approaching the apex, or past it.
The Yin and Yang series is about how there are two ways to think out every problem, and thinking people are divided into two camps whether they realize it or not because each individual selects one of those two ways of thinking and sticks to it for life. The ninth installment explores how this takes place inside the cranium.
I’ve written much about this, but to explore it at a high level it comes down to this: You can think like a Yin by traversing the first three pillars of persuasion in sequence — fact; opinion; thing to do. Or, you can think like a Yang, by anticipating what a group consensus will find to be reprehensible, and doing the opposite. The first of those two techniques works well when you are in solitude and don’t have to reckon with the opinions of others. The second works only in a group environment, which explains why some of us get lonely faster than others — they’re deprived not only of happiness when others aren’t around, but also of the fuel for what they have adopted as the convention for rational thinking.
Where do Republicans and democrats enter into this? Republicans recruit primarily from the Yin; democrats draw their support primarily from the Yang.
And this is why their talking points are different. The two issues I think illustrate this best, are 1) waterboarding, and 2) hate crime legislation.
To the left, waterboarding is simply awful. Don’t do it. What we don’t discuss too much is that on the right, a lot of people think it’s awful too. Except the right wing is home to the truly nuanced thinkers here. They’re the ones asking all these pain-in-the-ass questions. The first three pillars in sequence; cause-and-effect. IF THEN. So, IF we waterboard, THEN someone somewhere will think we’re bad. Who is that, exactly? Who thinks that? IF we stop waterboarding, THEN someone will think we’re better people than we’d otherwise be? What happens then? And when they ask those questions and await answers, they’re left sucking air. There are no answers. It’s just empty rhetoric. So they don’t take the argument seriously, because the argument isn’t there to be taken seriously.
Hate crimes, likewise, are simply awful. But hate crime legislation is only attractive to you if you neglect cause and effect. IF we enhance penalties based on motive, THEN the government has a compelling reason to examine motive that it didn’t have before. IF it examines motive, THEN it must necessarily examine thought…a personal attribute previously thought to be private and sacrosanct. This is a problem. The Yang are not properly equipped to care about any of this. There is only the group consensus, which is sort of a replacement-deity, to be considered. The crime is awful, therefore, any punishment of the crime must be good. Four legs good two legs bad.
In announcing that things are deplorable, the right does not communicate the messages very well. The left excels at this. Every little criticism against Barack Obama, now, is raaaaaaaacist whether it is legitimate or not. Simply repeating his own words, without comment, can be racist now. Meanwhile, Sarah Palin is hung in effigy in front of some guy’s house and you have to count on the fringe kook right wing blogs, like this one, to see it treated as anything more remarkable than a routine news oddity tidbit, like a giant spider snacking on a bird.
It isn’t that the right wing sucks at broadcasting the “That’s Deplorable!!!” sound bite. The problem is with models of thought. That just isn’t how the right wing thinks about things. It’s better equipped to deal with real life, in a world filled with spiders eating birds, killer whales biting seals in half, lionesses stripping planks of bloody flesh off of captured antelopes while they’re still alive, and islamic militant fundamentalist jackholes shooting schoolgirls while they run out of burning buildings.
You cope in a world such as this, by reacting, logically, to such instances of barbarism. To find something to be repugant to your personal value system and then just go around announcing it loudly, to hopefully win recruits…really doesn’t accomplish very much. Especially when you’re doing it to bolster an argument that you shouldn’t be doing anything about anything — that’s when it becomes glaringly unhelpful.
Think of this as an extension of D’JEver Notice? I, in which I made the point that each one of the industries that have “let us down,” if you take the time to inspect how that industry works and how it has morphed in recent history, you find it fails to stand as an example of the weaknesses of capitalism because it no longer adheres to any capitalist model. You have education, healthcare, the world oil market, and — since I wrote that above installment, which has turned out to be prescient — we’ve had this huge ol’ dealy-do with the subprime lending mess.
Capitalism didn’t create those problems. It didn’t leave us; we left it. We started messing around with some cross-breeding against the marxist way of life and that is when the real problems started.
Now there’s an election upon us in which we get to figure out an answer to the central question: Are we ready to give up on capitalism? Are we ready to put the socialists in charge of our government, unopposed, when they aren’t even ready to admit they’re socialists? And it occurs to me:
Capitalism is “failing” because we have seen it fall short of a standard that is so inherently silly, we cannot even say what it is, out loud, and still preserve a healthy, decent sense of shame. That standard is this:
To motivate all those involved in a financial transaction, to act in the interests of other parties similarly involved, to the detriment of their own.
And here, I’m specifically calling out those “Wall Street traders” who sold those Structured Investment Vehicles (SIVs) to suckers, along with the banks that made those bad loans in the first place that later on were packaged into these SIVs. That’s your failure of capitalism, there; people failed to look out for one another because we had this “Wild, Wild West” thing going on in the lending industry. Capitalism unfettered and running amok.
To make this look like the Wild West, you’d have to have a very special Wild West. Basically, you’d have to have the Marshal acting as a Government Sponsored Enterprise (GSE), sitting on a huge sack of gold bullion. Sort of insuring the town saloon — if Frank Miller shows up on the noon train and starts smashing up the town saloon, the Marshal would have his bag of gold ready. Except he wouldn’t offer a settlement to the saloon owner to replace his big ol’ bar mirror he bought in St. Louis. No, he’d be giving the gold bullion to Frank Miller for smashing up the saloon.
See, the government’s standing behind these bad loans…that’s the genesis of the problem. Now, the bank has to make bad loans. It would be irresponsible of the bank not to. Look at all that free money from the government just waiting to be snatched up out there. That isn’t capitalism.
But anyway. The point is, socialism…which is running for President in six days, and true to form, is afraid to call itself socialism…also has a thoroughly miserable job of living up to this impossible standard. Motivating people to engage in transactions, looking out for everyone else. It doesn’t succeed at this any better than capitalism does. The difference is, a) unlike capitalism, socialism is internally structured to count on meeting this impossible goal; and b) unlike capitalism, when socialism fails to meet this impossible goal, we have a lot of people running around who don’t remember. Seems the folks who suffer from the shortest memories have the loudest voices about this.
In my opinion, Barry O needs to get his talking points in order. Right now, the issue that confronts him is that the people who don’t want to see him win, are making the point Barack Obama wants us to become a socialist country and socialism doesn’t work! And the Obama/Biden campaign has responded with two rejoinders that really should put us in our place:
No he isn’t…
…and…Yes it does.
I know he’s all hopey-changey and makes the leg tingle, etc. But shouldn’t voters at least press him to pick one of those two mutually exclusive responses? No I’m not, and Yes it does. He’s supposed to be so clean and articulate and he likes to use the cliche “Let’s be clear” a lot. Fine. So be clear.
Is an Obama presidency all about giving up on capitalism, or not?
“Al Franken was taking on the vast right-wing conspiracy before other people even admitted it existed,” she told a crowd of 2,000 supporters on the University of Minnesota campus, urging them to give her rival, Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama, a filibuster-proof margin in the Senate. “Al Franken, with your help, can be our 60th vote.” [emphasis mine]
While I remain a staunch anti-filibuster advocate (When I Start Running This Place, Item #30), it’s an interesting canary in a coal mine in this situation; with 41 Republicans in the Senate the filibuster would be the last hurdle for bad ideas, or at least, extreme ideas.
Think about it: With the results in from an election in which Obama became our President in a rout, and democrats solidified their holds on both houses of the legislature — what kind of acts would still need that pesky filibuster to be removed, or rendered ineffective, in order to pass?
Here’s something else to ponder. Since the question posed above is simply belaboring the obvious (my respected pro-filibuster opponents use that argument on me, fairly often), it’s well-established that we already have quite a few people who are concerned with it. Hillary’s no dummy with that fine political art & science of figuring out what’s bothering people. She could have come up with a laundry list of good ideas, that might perish in the legislative chamber of a nation gripped in left-wing fever if there are 41 Republican votes in the Senate to bottle things up. Somehow, it was worthwhile to leave this undone. And I notice that’s the case pretty consistently.
The democrat party loves to talk about victory over Republicans.
It loves to talk about tactics and measures put in place to make sure they’re unopposed. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if they were so enthused, with the prospect of defeating terrorists?
They so seldom talk about the fine details of what exactly it is they want to do. They hate Joe The Plumber so much. All Joe The Plumber did was initiate a dialog about this, at such a level that such a dialog became truly useful to people. If democrats thought they had a platform that would become more popular to us as we learned more about it, right about now Joe The Plumber would be getting a phone call about a Cabinet position, or an Ambassadorship.
That’s not what’s happening to Joe right now.
Their euphemisms disturb me. A lot.
So many of their most effective euphemisms involve placing discussion of generalities, where discussion of specifics would be in everybody’s better interests. Barack Obama has been babbling constantly for the last two years about “the failed policies of the Bush administration.” He could have been talking about an immediate withdrawal from Iraq. He could have been talking about making sure each year’s budget is in the black — no new spending. After all, we “know” that’s what he really means, right? But he doesn’t say those things very often; instead, he talks about “the failed policies” with that name always following afterward.
No politician worth his salt will choose a strategy that involves risk and cost, over another one that does not.
I’m hearing the word “common sense” bubbling to the surface of the political-speech stewpot as well. In a sane political cycle, a singular use of this term would inspire stigma, and repeated uses of it would result in career suicide. But it seems Sen. Obama’s margin over his opponent widens by a point every time he uses that phrase, so it’s working out very well for him.
Implications of “common sense”:
You and I are not only united, but our unification is a piece of distant history. We are united in our goals as well as in our methods for reaching them. What I’d do in a situation, is identical to what you’d do in the same situation…or, at least, our reactions would be substantially similar. We need not make early commitments about what exactly is to be done — we can leave the real decision making until later, because you and I have this fraternal notion of trust in each other.
Is that the situation with the political climate of our country today?
More to the point, what has Obama, or Hillary, or the democrat party in general — done to foster a climate like that?
Therein lies the patently absurd dishonesty to which we’ve unfortunately become accustomed, and begun to accept. The democrat party is making a good show of including “everyone” in what they’re going to be doing. But Hillary’s effort here is typical of her party’s efforts. They want a complete election cycle in which they are so powerful, that nobody else’s opinion matters. They’ve done such a splendid job of gathering campaign funds, now, that they have a golden opportunity to explain the details of why they need that, to the rest of us.
And they won’t do that. They won’t do it, because it would hurt them. They act — in many, many ways — like people ready to assume a substantially different behavior, after a point of commitment has passed. The point of commitment means everything to them. If they had a real fraternal camaraderie with the rest of the nation, something in which the phrase “common sense” would be meaningful, the point of commitment wouldn’t have such an impact.
They act — more than a little — like the blushing bride waiting for the rings to be exchanged so she can gain back the weight, stop wearing make-up, spend truckloads of money down at the mall, start shagging the best man, and never cook another meal again.
“Mr. Rearden, the law which you are denouncing is based on the highest principle — the principle of the public good.”
“Who is the public? What does it hold as its good? There was a time when men believed that ‘the good’ was a concept to be defined by a code of moral values and that no man had the right to seek his good at the violation of the rights of another. If it is now believed that my fellow men may sacrifice me in any manner they please for the sake of whatever they deem to be for their own good, if they believe that they may seize my property simply because they need it — well, so does any burglar. There is only one difference: the burglar does not ask me to sanction his act.” [emphasis mine]
— Atlas Shrugged, p. 442 (35th anniv. reprint ed., Signet)
So Rick links to a story about Henry Rearden, oh I mean Joe The Plumber, and how JTP is fearing for the future of our country. Good fear to have; I share it. And, by the by, he complements it with the cartoon you see to the right.
Zossima, the local liberal gadfly, indulges in his long-supported habit of saying…his stuff…I think the least I can do is whatever I can to ensure his words achieve greater visibility. It is the very least I can do.
…I’ll go along with any plan you guys propose as long as you have a real solution for dealing with the deficit. Kinda funny thing you might want to take your head out of your kiester to notice: $11 trillion in US federal gov’t debt is largely due to the tax and economic policies of Reagan and two Bushes. Clinton balanced the budget and brought prosperity. I’m just sayin’…
Okay. So the subject under discussion is liberals with their little “Robin Hood” schtick and how much that fowls things up. Zossima wants to talk about the deficit. Okay…we’re going to tax the snot out of people who actually make the jobs in our country, who make business actually happen — because that’s the only way we can “deal…with the deficit.”
So if spreading the wealth around will bring down this public debt you want to discuss (as opposed to the subject at hand), how come nobody’s been able to make it work that way?
You’re so smart and you make things so simple. This should be an easy question for you.
Zossima comes back, and boy, he really puts me in my place. The answer was so obvious, I don’t know how it ever got past me. I feel like Luke Wilson in Idiocracy, you know, when he got in the wrong line at the prison…just the biggest dumbass…
Huh, lessee, the simple mind asks for a simple answer. Well, under Clinton, taxes were increased. And under Clinton, we had economic prosperity and a balanced budget. Under Reagan, Bush the elder, and Bush the doofus, taxes were decreased, deficits soared, and we are now on the brink of economic ruin.
Bzzzt! WRONG! Sorry, try again. When Clinton came to office, the public debt held by our government was somewhere around 4.1 to 4.2 trillion. When he left it was up around 5.7 trillion.
So back to my question. When did it work?
If you check out that link, you’ll see Rick found the hard data derived from what I had referenced before getting into it…you’ll also see where I call out this difference between public debt, which is a balance sheet item, and this budget deficit thing which is a year-to-year statistic, commonly confused with public debt to make democrats look good.
But try this. Go look up the statistics for the public debt of our government. How it’s carried from one year to the next; how it goes up, how it goes down. You’ll see it’s spun out of control, regularly, since the founding of the nation.
When does it spin out of control?
When a Republican is in the White House?
When a democrat is in the White House?
When the Republicans run Congress?
When democrats run Congress? When the democrat party comes up with bold, new, innovative social programs?
No, no, no, no and no.
It’s WAR, stupid.
Wars are expensive. Cold wars and hot wars. And lately, when a Republican becomes President, the public debt spins out of control if & when there is a war on. Not quite so much when there’s a democrat President.
Is that because democrats know how to deal with finances and debt? Hah. Tell me another. Nobody, who’s paid the slightest bit of attention, can possibly take it seriously that democrats have anything to do with fiscal restraint. They don’t. It’s the wars. Republicans go ahead and deal with what’s going on, in the here-and-now; democrats put things off until some other time that might turn out to be more convenient (when a Republican can take the fall for things). So yes. Our public debt explodes when a Republican is in office, so that smaller wars can be fought at that time, when they need to be fought — rather than be allowed to putrify and become gigantic wars for someone else to deal with.
Which would, then, explode our nation’s debt anyway.
Like it or not, that’s the history of our nation. Back to the very beginning.
But back to the subject immediately under discussion —
Economics is all about cause and effect. I get that these wonderful liberal Presidents like Carter, Clinton and Obama are cause, and a “balanced budget” is the effect…lots of leftist twits have told me so…nobody’s been able to draw a line logically connecting the two together. They can’t. You don’t jump-start an economy by making it more expensive to buy goods and services.
You don’t create jobs by making it more expensive to provide those jobs.
You don’t bring down the price of a company’s products by making it more expensive for that company to bring products to market.
This stuff isn’t debated often, because there simply isn’t a debate to have about it. It’s math. Simple, third-grade math.
It CAN be, you know. Case in point…another female slut bellyaches away about being called a slut, right after calling herself one…
The idea that sexual women are worthless derives, pretty clearly, from a time when women were property; yes, ye olden days. Days when your father could trade your virginity for a goat. In that time, if you had the gall to bone someone before marriage, you damaged Dad’s goods, and might therefore cause him to get a low-quality goat, or no goat at all. It wasn’t really a moral question so much as a question of ownership; your body belonged to Dad or Husband, not to you, so using it for your own pleasure was equivalent to borrowing someone’s car and bringing it back with a broken headlight and a big dent in the hood.
*sigh* Here we go again…ye olde facts of life…
Women, whether they choose to be insightful about this stuff or not, are in a position to be spoiled rotten here. If & when they have a child, it’s their’s. There is no question. Therefore, some of the more ignorant ones are a little slow to catch on to the pitfalls of too much “experience.”
Let’s sum it up this way. If you were a guy, ladies — IF you were a guy — how much money would you have to be paid, to father a child you had good reason to believe was not yours? And so, yes…what was jotted down above about fathers and daughters and goats, while a crude summary, remains a fairly accurate summary of how things worked. Ignorant truth. Back in ye olden days, a man trying to marry off his sexually seasoned daughter was placed into a compromising position. That’s the way an economy works. Econ one-oh-one. Sorry, feminists, that’s just the way it is.
And it works that way now, too. If a lady says a gentleman is good enough for her, for marriage, for a movie, for a cup of tea, for a roll in the hay…that’s a pretty big compliment, even if she’s been granting the same privilege to other suitors. But it’s a much, much bigger compliment if she’s been showing some discretion. If she discriminates in favor of the fella. Yeah, discrimination. It’s usually a good thing if you’re on the pleasant end of it, especially if you’re wanting to get some attention from a lady who already has a good bit of yours. And so when one of the Sex in the City girls motions for that night’s stud to come on up, well…it’s not going to cause too much of a thrill for him, compared to the same gesture from another lady who asks more questions first.
In other words, if a lady accommodates casually, she is appreciated casually as well. She’s no longer capable of extending to her various beaus a true compliment. So this strain of feminism longs wistfully for a time and place and plane of existence, in which sluts are valued as much as, more more than, the girls who are more chaste.
Not gonna happen. Sorry.
Wow, we sure have a lot of people stumbling around, dreaming of perfect fantasy societies that never have been, and can never be.
Yasser Abdel Said murdered his own daughters for dating boys who weren’t Muslims. And that silly FBI put out a notice on him, that was so insensitive that it actually called out the facts. Gasp.
Since this murdering bastard butchered his daughters here in the USA, and we’d really, really, like to get him up close and personal with the Mexas execution chamber, Yasser hit the big time, when the FBI posted some ‘Wanted’ info on this steaming load. That’s when this sorry saga strayed into the Girlieman spotlight.
Initially, following the lead of the murdered teenage girls’ great aunt, the initial FBI ‘wanted’ blurb was thrillingly real:
“The 17- and 18-year-old girls were dating American boys, which was contrary to their father’s rules of not dating non-Muslim boys,” The FBI “wanted” poster read early last week. “Reportedly, the girls were murdered due to an ‘Honor Killing.’” (Fox News)
In record time, ‘some Muslims’ whined about the use of ‘honor killing’. These homegrown Jihadikazes are worried that rank and file American individuals will get the ‘wrong’ idea since ‘honor killing’ ‘attaches a religious motive’ to this crime. These murderer coddling traitors to everything we hold dear worry that “honor killing” might make a rational adult discriminate against Mecca Maniacs. If by ‘discriminate’ they mean someone, like me, wants to see this man, who killed his daughters to preserve the family honor, burn in the hell he deserves, then I am guilty as charged.
Going gutless and furtive, the FBI beat a hasty retreat, by rewriting the wanted blurb to make it okey dokey for traitorous, American hating, Sharia loving, scumbags like CAIR. That’s when a craven, Jihadikaze coddling, coward named Mark White, media coordinator in the bureau’s Dallas office, left a lasting stench in our nostrils.
‘…[He whined to Fox] that the FBI changed the wording “because the statement was not meant to indicate that the FBI was ‘labeling’ anything.
“The person who wrote it up did not see the misunderstanding that [the original wording] would create,” White said.
White added that the FBI should not be in the business of calling cases anything that is not described in law.
“It’s our job to find the fugitive. It’s not our job to label this case anything other than what it is, what it is from a criminal perspective,” he said, noting that there was no legal definition of an “honor killing” and that such a motive had not yet been proven in court. That will come out in the trial, and the jury can decide that.” (Fox News)
When challenged about the FBI’s double standard – they, routinely, use the equally ‘discriminatory’ term ‘hate crime’ – this stinking stain on humanity’s butt spewed more weasel words. Blah, blah, blah.
The irony here — a lot of Americans don’t understand very much about Islam, even after all these years. The debate that swirls under the surface, is whether the religion is inherently violent, or whether it’s been hijacked by violent fringe-group radicals.
Politically-correct backpedaling like this, has at least the potential to make the entire religion look more dangerous than it really is. It creates an appearance that in order to make the religion look harmless, you have to suppress facts. Make sure things stay un-discussed. This isn’t a matter of correcting a mistaken record — it’s a matter of whittling down the scope of what can be mentioned.
What people indulge in that for the purpose of making large numbers of other people to think good things about something…or to prevent them from thinking bad things…it lends, at the very least, an appearance that shenanigans are goin’ down. Someone’s selling a pig in a poke. It accomplishes the exact opposite of what’s intended.
Daniel J. Summers liked Rick’s cartoon, so he swiped it shamelessly, and gave us the credit for it. That’s the nature of blogging, of course; we did the same, offering credit to Rick but not to Cadillac Tight, or Exhibit A Press.
He throws in a great link, by one of our favorite columnists, Neal Boortz. It’s a letter to the undecided voter. If it wasn’t destined to fail in what it is trying to do, I’d call it the most important letter anyone’s written this year…maybe this decade. At this point, however, my optimism is somewhere between flickering and snuffed. Buy gold.
Then he lays the smackdown. Nothing outside of what I’d noticed, about a week ago — indeed, what he’s doing is giving me credit for talking about it, of which I don’t know I’m deserving because at the time I wasn’t the only one talking about it. It was being played up as some kind of phony-baloney Joe The Plumber scandal.
Joe the Plumber does not make 250,000 dollars a year. He doesn’t even make close to that.
He just wants to.
This does not detract from my admiration for the real Joe the Plumber. It doesn’t change my desire for people to pull the “I Am Spartacus” thing with Joe.
Quite to the contrary, I think that’s thirty tons of awesome.
After a week of cooling-down and thinking about other things, I’ve noticed a new wrinkle about this Joe The Plumber thing that was unnoticed before. Or, more likely, noticed but un-commented-upon. I find it worthy of comment.
Invited to address the Joe The Plumber thing during the third Presidential debate, Sen. Obama said…
Now, the conversation I had with Joe the plumber, what I essentially said to him was, “Five years ago, when you were in a position to buy your business, you needed a tax cut then.”
And what I want to do is to make sure that the plumber, the nurse, the firefighter, the teacher, the young entrepreneur who doesn’t yet have money, I want to give them a tax break now.
Poor Barack was trying to make a point back then, that I’m just starting to notice now…he was tripped up by the facts, since back on October 15 a lot of people failed to make this crucial distinction between pulling in a quarter million a year, and wanting to do that someday. Therefore, his comment seems quite silly, and it’s not my intention to make it that way.
But there’s a fascinating point to be made here with regard to time. It’s an important point. It has to do with how some of us see ourselves…it has to do with that graphic of the kitty looking at itself in the mirror and seeing a lion, that I used when I wrote about Joe The Plumber (link above).
A few years ago, when a certain family member was going through a tough time he’d brought down on himself by seeing little besides perfection in himself and little besides flaws in others, I remember being drawn into a semi-heated argument. I do have faults here and there…sometimes, when I say stupid things, I’m slow to recognize it — this was not one of those times. This time I said something exceptionally wise and failed to recognize it. I’m like Obama that way. I fail to see my own wisdom and brilliance here & there. I’m working on it…
…anyway, what I offered was some kind of counseling against comparing onesself to others. It’s inappropriate, first of all; it’s a fool’s ambition to live out one’s life with a goal of being better than some-other-guy. Last I checked, they don’t carve anything about that on tombstones. Find a tombstone that says “He did better than Frank over there” with an arrow under it…you let me know. But there’s another point to be made: We betray our narcissistic intentions, some of us, by comparing our gonna-dooz with others’ hav-dunz. Gonna-dooz, and have-dunz. Those are two different things.
Obama, here, committed a sin in the world of socialist propaganda. He discussed the subject of time.
I think Joe The Plumber is “thirty tons of awesome” because he understands the difference between gonna-dooz and have-dunz, and in forming his values, he forms them around the gonna-dooz. That takes courage. That takes balls.
Barack Obama understands the difference too. (On October 15, like many of us, he mistakenly thought making 250,000 was a have-dunz of Joe’s…when it’s not.) He wanted to discuss Joe’s have-dunz. And his point was that most of us — and what he meant, in spirit, was all of us — are lacking the gumpshun we would need, to make plans around our gonna-dooz. We aren’t that great. We aren’t that strong. We need a tax policy that’s formed around our limitations, because our limitations define our identities.
Two men. One of them is thought to be the very incarnation of “The Change We Deserve.” Isn’t there a profound irony there, that the more majestic, godlike figure who presents himself as ready to lead a nation of hundreds of millions, is the one facing backward? And the guy playing catch with his son in front of a house that costs less than Barack Obama’s necktie, is the one with the leadership and courage that is needed to look forward? Thus endeth the lesson — on this one point, I trust, I have defined exactly what’s cockeyed about the situation.
Barack Obama is Ozymandias. It’s just a fact. He may win the election…or not; it may take two weeks for him to wither away into clay feet on a pedestal, or it may take four years, or eight. But he’ll get there. There is absolutely no question about it. He is Ozymandias, because while he is very impressive in the moment, history will treat him unkindly because he does not have the courage to truly look into the future. He commits a twin crime, two, possibly intermingled and inseparable, crimes of thought: He confuses mediocrity with excellence, and he confuses gonna-dooz with have-dunz.
Let’s borrow one of Cassy Fiano‘s ideas. I find, in general, if you plagiarize the brilliant ones…crime does pay. We need a payout.
I am Joe the Plumber. His story is my story.
I don’t have my quarter-mill-a-year quite yet, Sen. Obama; but I will someday, and if you’ve got a problem with my pal Joe you’ve got a problem with me.
Yeah. Like that.
Do you understand how tender and soft Obama’s armor is in this one spot? He doesn’t have any armor there at all. It is a gaping, yawning chasm in the hull of his battleship. Every single response he’s offered on this issue, in the debates as well as on the campaign trail, has had something to do with taking this 95% who’d get a tax cut…and pretending as if that’s 100%. Every single response has been a variation of that theme.
Tell you what — you prove to me that 95 and 100 is the same, I’ll agree the math is on Obama’s side, and if you can’t, then we have to agree it isn’t.
He’s raising taxes on the people who create jobs, and he does not want to talk about it. The situation is no more complicated than that. What’s complicated, is getting that message out to the people who haven’t been paying attention.
The kollege kids at FARK are trying to come up with ways to make this more innocent than the hijinks and shenanigans of the Congressman’s predecessor, Mark Foley.
For the uninitiated, Mahoney is a democrat. Foley was a Republican. Mahoney won Foley’s seat after, and as a direct consequence of, Foley’s problems. In fact, Foley’s problems are consequential to the entire nation because they were central to the impetus for throwing the Republican bums out of Congress and entrusting our legislative branch to the democrat party.
Mahoney’s scandal is a heterosexual one. Foley’s scandal was homosexual. And yes, you’ll be surprised how many FARK kollege kids are bringing that up. Maybe.
Mahoney’s scandal seems to involve some hush money. Foley’s did not. It involved underage pages.
The FARK kollege kids needed to check the party affiliation of these two “gentlemen,” and then engage in a little bit of collaboration with each other, to figure out what their opinions would and should be. And they’ll *never* admit it. That’s where it gets fun to watch.
Our challenge to come up with an exhaustive list of reasons not to support Sarah Palin, seems to have drawn the notice of a mixed-ideology crowd over here. A couple of the most vociferous among the angry-left over there would appear to think they’ve met and surpassed the challenge…something to do with Palin being a bumpkin.
And I got chided a few times for not backing up my assertions with facts. And, by the way, I’m stoooooopid…and Palin’s a bumpkin (and the Rothschilds own her).
Just thought I’d help ’em get the word out. This kind of clear-headed thinking needs all the publicity it can get, in these unenlightened times, ya know.
Ever notice that whirlpool of weirdness that envelopes you whenever you hear everyday left-wing people describing the smartness of left-wing politicians? You’re not imagining it.
Picking up where she stopped last time we noticed her, Dr. Melissa Clouthier continues her thoughts about common sense, and what she calls “intellectualism,” which I delight in calling other things. Usually “arrogance,” but more like “foppishness,” “pretentious snobbery,” “boobishness,” “sparkle & glitter,” “all package no contents,” “showmanship,” “gift-o-gab,” and “prissiness.”
When I was in Chiropractic College, I stumbled across a wide spectrum of individuals:
There were the knobby heads who could memorize facts cold, did well on tests and had an amazing ability to integrate the knowledge into clinical experience.
Then there were the knobby heads who could memorize facts, did well on tests, had trouble with integrating the knowledge and were good intellectually but had a terrible time relating the knowledge to an actual hurting person.
Most people were above average intelligence, did pretty good on tests, could integrate their knowledge and were terrific clinicians.
Some people in this above average range could not relate to patients, either, but didn’t have the intellectual fortitude to do pure research. These people can make up for it with excellent business experience or they tend to suffer in practice.
:
The same goes for politics. There are people, Chief Justice Roberts comes to mind, who has a monster intellect and the incredible ability to translate the complex into language the common person can understand and grasp. That does not necessarily mean I will always agree with his opinions, by the way, just that I respect the mind and thought process that got him there.
Sarah Palin strikes me as bright, but not genius smart. What she also has is an ability to put the knowledge in context and grasp the effects of the policy. She has a gift for practical reasoning.
Some on the left seem to think we need an intellectual giant as president and that will guarantee smart policy. That is a non-sequit[u]r of dismaying proportions–as anyone who spent time around the smarty-pants set knows.
Within these paragraphs, Clouthier speaks for me, including the description of Gov. Palin. Palin’s not a genius and doesn’t need to be. She’s mastered, or at least progressed very highly within, the art & science of figuring out effects from causes — just like any experienced outdoorsman. If I do this, then that will happen…if I do not do this other thing, then that will happen. She is not a savant and doesn’t even rate highly among “smart” elites. I do think she’s smarter than most ordinary people, way smarter than average. Bill Clinton is probably smarter than she is…in his own way. He’s got talents for which you could search and search and search, and never find a specimen more remarkable in that regard than Bill; whereas Palin is merely above-average. They’re both to be respected — neither one’s a dummy — but Sarah is closer to the center of the bell curve.
In a responsible position, it’s no contest. You want Sarah Palin there. Most folks have met a Bill Clinton type, who can talk your ear off about how good things are goin’ while the real job goes undone. You want that guy putting out the fire consuming your home? Seriously? I don’t think so.
Leftists, lately, don’t distinguish among these different types and magnitudes of smarts. Quoting myself, in response to Melissa’s latest thoughts:
I see a lot of things happening when democrats tell us one among their own is “smart”:
First of all, the process by which they decree Bill Clinton or John Kerry or Al Gore or Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton to be “smart,” is a depressing exercise in anti-intellectualism itself. All the sins you can make against brain-smarts, are in that process. They think something because someone else told ‘em to think that; they’re bullying YOU around, trying to make you think this third-party (neither one of you have met) is smart, just because they’re bullying you; they’re confusing gift-o-gab with across-the-board smarts; the list goes on and on. These are all anti-intellectual things to do, and they’re doing them, toward the goal of defining who’s smart and who isn’t.
Second, of course, is that it’s confirmation bias writ large. The message unspoken is that democrats are just plain smart. Find a guy who thinks John Kerry is smart…wh[at] democrat does that guy think is average intellect or below? The answer, invariably, is nobody. It’s not about smarts. It’s about democrats. It’s just propaganda, a lot of folks know it, but nobody ever says it.
Third: The definition is sloppy. You quickly gather the impression, and you’re right, that the conversation/bullying-session isn’t really about *smarts*. These famous democrats aren’t presented as people functionally smart, above-average, IQ somewhere in the 125-135 range…if you’re working late and the deadline is tomorrow, would you want them working on it with you, or some big dummy. It’s not that kind of smarts. These are luminous beings. Barack Obama has wrinkles on his brain you don’t have. You should be squealing in delight to be breathing [the] same oxygen as them.
If you pay attention to politics for any length of time, you understand this to be a political gimmick, nothing more — that’s even if you agree with what’s being attempted here, even if you’re a leftist. It only works because most people don’t pay that much attention. Most people hear this discourse about smartness, they think the ideas are all about smartness and nothing else. They couldn’t be more wrong.
Next time we’re tempted into our latest fling with quasi-socialism, maybe we should consider the Ann Landers approach: “Are you better off with him or without him?”
We were married on March 4, 1932. Since then, we’ve had trial separation after trial separation after trial separation…whenever we’re at our most depressed, he calls us in the middle of the night from a pay phone by the bus depot. And we get suckered back into it one more time. After all, nobody’s saying we should be neck-deep in old-fashioned socialism…a little bit ought to be okay, right?
In the end, Congress approved the package—seeing as how the alternative was rising unemployment, a plunging stock market, and corporations unable to borrow to cover their short-term obligations. Now, with the bailout proceeding according to plan, Americans are confronted with…rising unemployment, a plunging stock market, and corporations unable to borrow to cover their short-term obligations.
That is not how things were supposed to go. On Sept. 25, The Washington Post endorsed the administration’s effort, warning that the nation faced a replay of 1929.
“This catastrophe can be avoided,” said the editorial, “and it will be if government promptly and effectively addresses the immediate cause of financial distress—the toxic build-up in unmarketable mortgage-backed securities on bank balance sheets.” (My emphasis.) The Treasury plan, it said, fit the bill.
But the effort to restore confidence and stabilize markets turned out to be, pardon the expression, a bust. After the bailout was signed into law on Friday, Oct. 3, investors had all weekend to contemplate its tonic properties but found none.
On Monday, the stock market looked like it had been pushed out of an airplane. The Federal Reserve was so alarmed by the credit situation that it decided to take the radical step of lending directly to businesses.
By then the rescue package was a fading memory. Instead of being safely contained, the turmoil intensified and spread far beyond Wall Street—to financial markets in Europe, Asia, and South America. Said a Tuesday news story in The New York Times, “Three days after the plan was approved, it looks like a pebble tossed into a churning sea.”
“Mistake” seems to be perhaps too charitable of a word. After all, we already had a teetering, towering stack of experiences that should’ve enabled us to know better.
Gov. Sarah Palin parachuted into a phone interview on the Laura Ingraham show in the last minutes of the program today at about ten minutes to Noon eastern. She urged citizens (and by extension, the media) to demand answers from Barack Obama and Joe Biden about Bill Ayers, ACORN, and Obama’s record of voting against protections for infants born alive after an unsuccessful abortion.
“I don’t see the other ticket being asked to be truthful and give details,” she said. She added that Obama’s positions are “so far left,” but they’re being “packaged up to look pretty and mainstream, and they are not.”
:
On Ayers, Palin said Obama hasn’t told the “total truth” about his long-time association with an “unrepentant domestic terrorist.” On ACORN, she said they are pushing voter fraud. “Doesn’t anybody have a conscience any more?” She urged, America to “wake up and ask thse questions.”
Based on some experience watching some talking points blossom and others die on the vine, it seems to me our problem is with these “soft referendums” that pass unanimously without being put to a vote. Like for example: What’s mean? We’ve somehow decided what’s mean and what isn’t, to the complete advantage of liberal democrats, without any meaningful dissents, and without actually casting ballots.
Sen. McCain points at Sen. Obama during a townhall debate and uses the words “that one.” That’s mean. Obama’s official campaign makes fun of Sen. McCain because his wartime injuries leave him unable to use a computer keyboard…that isn’t mean.
What’s bipartisanship? That’s another one. John McCain has made a big show out of being able to work with Barack Obama and other liberal democrats. I haven’t heard of Sen. Obama making any similar and opposite declarations about his readiness, willingness, or ability to work with Republicans. All I’ve seen him do is blame Bush for any little fly in the ointment…often changing the subject, to the point of offense, to do so.
And yet among those who think the answer to our problems is to “rise above partisanship and do what’s best for the country” — the overwhelming consensus is to flock to The Chosen One, whom any honest analysis would declare has very, very little to do with rising above partisanship. How does this dovetail with their decree that partisanship caused our problems and bipartisanship will end them? What’s that got to do with an Obama administration? Again: It’s a soft referendum. It was put to “The People,” supposedly, but decided, unanimously, without voting.
People like to run around babbling a bunch of stuff and nonsense about what independent thinkers they are. It just ain’t so.
A single report by KFYI radio of Phoenix, Arizona highlights a shocking claim made by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). HUD says that five million illegal aliens hold illegal mortgages. This is just one more example of the lax lending laws put into place by Democrats like Barney Frank that have contributed to this economic crisis. One would think this would be big news. But, so far we have only this one report to cover it.
There have been earlier stories of home flipping schemes that made liberal use of illegal aliens as straw buyers and the FBI has followed numerous cases to prosecution and conviction. But the Old Media have not done much with this story.
KFYI reports that these fraudulent straw purchases of mortgages by illegal aliens has affected every state in the union.
One illegal alien was arrested this year in Tucson after allegedly using a stolen social security number to buy two homes and rack up over $780,000 in bad debt.
Some five million fraudulent home mortgages are in the hands of illegal aliens, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
It’s not known how many of those have contributed to the subprime housing mortgage meltdown, but it has affected every state, including Arizona.
The problem began years ago when banks were forced to give mortgages without confirming social security numbers or borrower identification. As a result, illegal immigrants were able to obtain home mortgages which they could not afford.
Lax immigration laws have also helped make this crime easy to perpetrate.
In 1965 a Democrat Controlled Congress under President Lyndon Johnson passed the concept of “chain” immigration into law. A later commission named the Hesburgh Commission convened during Ronald Reagan’s first term, found that this concept statistically allowed each single immigrant to bring into this country 84 of his family members. Of course, all these people have to live somewhere making such fraudulent mortgages quite attractive.
But go on. Vote for the fellow with the most charismatic personality for your hopey changey goodness, and blame any hitches in the giddy-up on “eight years of Bush Cheney.”
John Stossel snags the forty-third award for the Best Sentence I’ve Heard Or Read Lately (BSIHORL):
Everybody talked about the “freeze” in the credit markets, but why, I wonder, were the cable news programs that repeated the credit-freeze mantra pausing for commercials from companies trying to lend me money?
He goes on…
Ditech and LendingTree still hawk mortgages at under 6 percent. Some credit freeze.
Economist Robert Higgs of the Independent Institute looked at the credit numbers kept by the Federal Reserve. He writes: “Although certain financial institutions are undeniably in deep trouble — difficulties of their own making … — credit markets in general have not ceased to operate. Moreover, lenders are extending credit in historically great amounts“.
Maybe this is why CNN business reporter Ali Velshi broke ranks when reporting on “dried up” credit and said, “When I say ‘dried up,’ I don’t mean there’s no money. But you’d better have good collateral and good credit.”
What’s wrong with that?
You really should go read the whole thing. It’ll change your perspective…especially if you think the 1929 crash was some harbinger of doom regarding what’s about to happen to us next.
It’s the technology. Not what it used to be. Seventy-nine years is a long, long time.
So writes Chatterbox, whom you may know as Timothy Noah, of Slate Magazine (H/T: Boortz). He’s referring to a little list he cooked up of things you can say, now, if you are a left-wing kook. His point is that with McCain’s defeat now an inevitability, these items might soon be embraced by the mainstream; you won’t have to be safely insulated from major political campaigns to say them out loud.
It still isn’t wise for Obama to say them, but maybe the New Complacency will loosen other tongues within the political mainstream. Even if it doesn’t, it’s fun to think about what those utterances might be. What follows is a list, compiled with help from my fellow Slate staffers. The views expressed don’t necessarily reflect those of the contributors—one of whom is a conservative Republican—or even me. But they sure are a refreshing change from what we’ve been hearing since 1981. With a little luck, they may soon be orthodoxies.
I think Karl Marx had some valuable insights into capitalist economies!
I think abortion should be safe and legal. Rare is fine, too, but the way to achieve that is contraception, baby!
I think Mormons are kooks!
The Second Amendment does too allow government to ban handguns!
Let’s standardize the federal age of consent at 16!
Promiscuity between consenting adults is good exercise!
Wheeeee! Isn’t this fun?
Health care is a service, not a business!
Pot is no more dangerous than vodka. Legalize it!
I don’t support the troops. I support some troops, depending on whether or not they’ve committed war crimes!
No more wars without United Nations or at least NATO support!
Saving the boulder darter was worth a few thousand jobs!
If Eastern Europeans think NATO will go to war to defend them against Russia, they’re out of their minds!
Ditto if Taiwan thinks the United States will go to war to defend it against China!
Let’s teach evolution in Sunday school!
The military-industrial complex is a greater menace than most foreign nations!
If Israel isn’t out of the occupied territories in six months, we’ll cut off all aid.
I think Chatterbox deserves a profound thank you from the electorate for revealing what we are really debating here with this election. Karl Marx had valuable insight into capitalist economies, huh? Government should dictate that evolution is taught in Sunday school? I thought the left-wingers were all about separation of church and state?
Now this all sounds quite out-there and absurd…but you know, he’s right. Among Obama supporters, none of these ideas are out of their localized “mainstream,” so can it really be said such tidbits won’t find greater acceptance in the new Age of Obama, or perhaps codified into public policy.
Some, among his supporters, think they’re good ideas. If I understand his context right, it looks like I have written proof.
Can we please re-schedule and re-do that ridiculous “townhall” debate? Call me nuts if you want, but I think the public has a right to know what exactly we’ve been arguing about.
2. We Really Hate Having Our Asses Saved
I think it breaks down into “Players” and “Kibitzers.”
