Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
186k Per Second 4-Block World 84 Rules 9/11 Families A Big Victory Ace of Spades HQ Adam's Blog After Grog Blog Alarming News Alice the Camel Althouse Always Right, Usually Correct America's North Shore Journal American Daily
American Digest American Princess The Anchoress Andrew Ian Dodge Andrew Olmstead Angelican Samizdat Ann's Fuse Box Annoyances and Dislikes Another Rovian Conspiracy Another Think Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler Associated Content The Astute Bloggers Atlantic Blog Atlas Shrugs Atomic Trousers Azamatterofact B Movies Bad Catholicism Bacon Eating Atheist Jew Barking Moonbat Early Warning System The Bastidge The Belmont Club Because I Said So Bernie Quigley Best of the Web Between the Coasts Bidinotto's Blog Big Lizards Bill Hobbs Bill Roggio The Black Republican BlameBush! Blasphemes Blog Curry Blogodidact Blowing Smoke A Blog For All The Blog On A Stick Blogizdat (Just Think About It) Blogmeister USA Blogs For Bush Blogs With A Face Blue Star Chronicles Blue Stickies Bodie Specter Brilliant! Unsympathetic Common Sense Booker Rising Boots and Sabers Boots On Bottom Line Up Front Broken Masterpieces Brothers Judd Brutally Honest Building a Timberframe Home Bush is Hitler Busty Superhero Chick Caerdroia Caffeinated Thoughts California Conservative Cap'n Bob & The Damsel Can I Borrow Your Life Captain's Quarters Carol's Blog! Cassy Fiano Cato Institute CDR Salamander Ceecee Marie Cellar Door Chancy Chatter Chaos Manor Musings Chapomatic Chicago Boyz Chickenhawk Express Chief Wiggles Chika de ManiLA Christianity, Politics, Sports and Me Church and State The Cigar Intelligence Agency Cindermutha Classic Liberal Blog Club Troppo Coalition of the Swilling Code Red Coffey Grinds Cold Fury Colorado Right Common Sense Junction Common Sense Regained with Kyle-Anne Shiver Confederate Yankee Confessions of a Gun Toting Seagull Conservathink Conservative Beach Girl Conservative Blog Therapy Conservative Boot Camp Conservative Outpost Conservative Pup The Conservative Right Conservatives for American Values Conspiracy To Keep You Poor & Stupid Cox and Forkum Cranky Professor Cranky Rants Crazy But Able Crazy Rants of Samantha Burns Create a New Season Crush Liberalism Curmudgeonly & Skeptical D. Challener Roe Da' Guns Random Thoughts Dagney's Rant The Daily Brief The Daily Dish Daily Flute Daily Pundit The Daley Gator Daniel J. Summers Dare2SayIt Darlene Taylor Dave's Not Here David Drake Day By Day Dean's World Decision '08 Debbie Schlussel Dhimmi Watch Dipso Chronicles Dirty Election Dirty Harry's Place Dissecting Leftism The Dissident Frogman Dogwood Pundit Don Singleton Don Surber Don't Go Into The Light Dooce Doug Ross
Down With Absolutes Drink This Dumb Ox News Dummocrats Dustbury Dustin M. Wax Dyspepsia Generation Ed Driscoll The Egoist Eject! Eject! Eject! Euphoric Reality Exile in Portales Everything I Know Is Wrong Exit Zero Expanding Introverse Exposing Feminism Faith and Theology
FARK Fatale Abstraction Feministing Fetching Jen Finding Ponies... Fireflies in the Cloud Fish or Man Flagrant Harbour Flopping Aces Florida Cracker For Your Conservative Pleasure Forgetting Ourselves Fourth Check Raise Fred Thompson News Free Thoughts The Freedom Dogs Gadfly Galley Slaves Gate City Gator in the Desert Gay Patriot The Gallivantings of Daniel Franklin Garbanzo Tunes God, Guts & Sarah Palin Google News GOP Vixen GraniteGrok The Greatest Jeneration Green Mountain Daily Greg and Beth Greg Mankiw Gribbit's Word Guy in Pajamas Hammer of Truth The Happy Feminist Hatless in Hattiesburg The Heat Is On Hell in a Handbasket Hello Iraq Helmet Hair Blog Heritage Foundation Hillary Needs a Vacation Hillbilly White Trash The Hoffman's Hearsay Hog on Ice HolyCoast Homeschooling 9/11 Horsefeathers Huck Upchuck Hugh Hewitt I, Infidel I'll Think of Something Later IMAO Imaginary Liberal In Jennifer's Head Innocents Abroad
Instapundit Intellectual Conservative The Iowa Voice Is This Life? Islamic Danger 4u The Ivory Tower Ivory Tower Adventures J. D. Pendry Jaded Haven James Lileks Jane Lake Makes a Mistake Jarhead's Firing Range The Jawa Report Jellyfish Online Jeremayakovka Jesus and the Culture Wars Jesus' General Jihad Watch Jim Ryan Jon Swift Joseph Grossberg Julie Cork Just Because Your Paranoid... Just One Minute Karen De Coster Keep America at Work KelliPundit Kender's Musings Kiko's House Kini Aloha Guy KURU Lounge La Casa de Towanda Laughter Geneology Leaning Straight Up Left Coast Rebel Let's Think About That Liberal Utopia Liberal Whoppers Liberalism is a Mental Disorder Liberpolly's Journal Libertas Immortalis Life in 3D Linda SOG Little Green Fascists Little Green Footballs Locomotive Breath Ludwig von Mises Institute Lundesigns Rachel Lucas The Machinery of Night The Macho Response Macsmind Maggie's Farm Making Ripples Management Systems Consulting, Inc. Marginalized Action Dinosaur Mark's Programming Ramblings The Marmot's Hole Martini Pundit MB Musings McBangle's Angle Media Research Center The Median Sib Mein Blogovault Melissa Clouthier Men's News Daily Mending Time Michael's Soapbox Michelle Malkin Mike's Eyes Millard Filmore's Bathtub A Million Monkeys Typing Michael Savage Minnesota Democrats Exposed Miss Cellania Missio Dei Missouri Minuteman Modern Tribalist Moonbattery Mother, May I Sleep With Treacher? Move America Forward Moxie Ms. Underestimated My Republican Blog My Vast Right Wing Conspiracy Mythusmage Opines Naked Writing Nation of Cowards National Center Blog Nealz Nuze NeoCon Blonde Neo-Neocon Neptunus Lex Nerd Family Network of Enlightened Women (NeW) News Pundit Nightmare Hall No Sheeples Here NoisyRoom.net Normblog The Nose On Your Face NYC Educator The Oak Tree Obama's Gaffes Obi's Sister Oh, That Liberal Media! Old Hippie One Cosmos One Man's Kingdom One More Cup of Coffee Operation Yellow Elephant OpiniPundit Orion Sector The Other (Robert Stacy) McCain The Outlaw Republican Outside The Beltway Pajamas Media Palm Tree Pundit Papa Knows Part-Time Pundit Pass The Ammo Passionate America Patriotic Mom Pat's Daily Rant Patterico's Pontifications Pencader Days Perfunction Perish the Thought Personal Qwest Peter Porcupine Pettifog Philmon Philosoblog Physics Geek Pigilito Says... Pillage Idiot The Pirate's Cove Pittsburgh Bloggers Point of a Gun Political Byline A Political Glimpse From Ireland Political Party Pooper Possumblog Power Line PrestoPundit Professor Mondo Protein Wisdom Protest Warrior Psssst! Over Here! The Pungeoning Q and O Quiet Moments, Busy Lives Rachel Lucas Radio Paradise Rantburg Real Clear Politics Real Debate Wisconsin Reason Rebecca MacKinnon RedState.Org PAC Red, White and Conservative Reformed Chicks Babbling The Reign of Reason The Religion of Peace Resistance is Futile! Revenge... Reverse Vampyr Rhymes with Cars and Girls Right Angle Right Events Right Mom Right Thinking from the Left Coast Right Truth Right View Wisconsin Right Wing Rocker Right Wing News Rightwingsparkle Robin Goodfellow Rocker and Sage Roger L. Simon Rogue Thinker Roissy in DC Ronalfy Ron's Musings Rossputin Roughstock Journal The Rude Pundit The Rule of Reason Running Roach The Saloon The Salty Tusk Samantha Speaks Samizdata Samson Blinded Say Anything Say No To P.C.B.S. Scillicon and Cigarette Burns Scott's Morning Brew SCOTUSBlog Screw Politically Correct B.S. SCSU Scholars Seablogger See Jane Mom Self-Evident Truths Sensenbrenner Watch Sergeant Lori Seven Inches of Sense Shakesville Shark Blog Sheila Schoonmaker Shot in the Dark The Simplest Thing Simply Left Behind Sister Toldjah Sippican Cottage SISU Six Meat Buffet Skeptical Observer Skirts, Not Pantsuits Small Dead Animals Smallest Minority Solomonia Soy Como Soy Spiced Sass Spleenville Steeljaw Scribe Stephen W. Browne Stilettos In The Sand Still Muttering to Myself SoxBlog Stolen Thunder Strata-Sphere Sugar Free But Still Sweet The Sundries Shack Susan Hill Sweet, Familiar Dissonance Tail Over Tea Kettle Tale Spin Talk Arena Tapscott's Copy Desk Target of Opportunity Tasteful Infidelicacies Tequila and Javalinas Texas Rainmaker Texas Scribbler That's Right Thirty-Nine And Holding This Blog Is Full Of Crap Thought You Should Know Tom Nelson Townhall Toys in the Attic The Truth Tim Blair The TrogloPundit Truth, Justice and the American Way The Truth Laid Bear Two Babes and a Brain Unclaimed Territory Urban Grounds Varifrank Verum Serum Victor Davis Hanson Villanous Company The Virginian Vodkapundit The Volokh Conspiracy Vox Popular Vox Veterana Walls of the City The Warrior Class Washington Rebel Weasel Zippers Webutante Weekly Standard Western Chauvinist A Western Heart Wheels Within Wheels When Angry Democrats Attack! Whiskey's Place Wicking's Weblog Wide Awakes Radio (WAR) Winds of Change.NET Word Around the Net Writing English Woman Honor Thyself "A Work in Progress World According to Carl WorldNet Daily WuzzaDem WyBlog Yorkshire Soul Zero Two Mike SoldierTwo of ’em, by my count: Open up the marketplace, and tort reform. And listening to your constituents like you’re supposed to, by implication, that’s a third good idea.
Why, naturally that’s all just crazy talk.
Hat tip to Noisy Room, by way of blogger friend Rick.
Hawkins explores each one; but my favorites are #2 and #4.
2) Because moderates tend to be much less ideological, less knowledgeable about politics, and less informed than liberals and conservatives, it’s entirely possible that even if our candidate’s views are closer to their views, they won’t be capable of figuring it out (That’s exactly how it worked with McCain and Obama, for example).
:
4) Moderates may not know a lot about politics, but they do at least know that they can’t trust the press. So, how do they decide whom to vote for? I would suggest to you that many of them largely base their decisions on anecdotal evidence.What do I mean by that? Let’s take the current election. What did a moderate voter hear from his liberal friends about Obama? “He’s the greatest hope for America! He’s wonderful! He’ll solve all our problems!” Now, what did that same moderate hear from his conservative friends about McCain? “He’d probably be a lousy President, but he’d still be better than Obama.”
In other words, if conservatives aren’t enthusiastic about their nominee, moderates are going to take cues from that and cast their votes accordingly. That’s one of the reasons why it’s so counter-productive to antagonize conservatives in an effort to draw in moderates.
As I pointed out lately, we suffer from a tragic loss of good judgment when we figure out how to use words like “centrist,” “moderate” and “extremist.” We don’t have a very good picture of what an “extremist conservative” is. Most of us, across all different kinds of ideological regions on the spectrum, think that has something to do with being mean. Lacking compassion. Unpleasant. Stingy. Reactionary. A bit of a dickhole. Exclusionary. You get the picture. A Grade-A1 USDA Prime piece of jackass.
Here’s how I see it:
Human history tells us something important about human nature, and what it tells us is altogether unflattering: The things that are most reliably demonstrated to be bad ideas, are the ones we try the most often. That’s just the way it is.
I mean, overall. Not across the board. Some things work quite well, and we do those things often too. Let’s make murder illegal. When people show they don’t care about breaking the law, let’s lock them up. On those, there really isn’t very much disagreement.
Let’s take money away from people who have it, and give it to those who don’t…
…that’s been tried so many times. It’s supposed to create some kind of wonderful society, one where no one is ever left wanting for anything. It’s had hundreds of years to work out that way. And it hasn’t yet. We’re still waiting on it. And our resolve to keep trying it again and again, has in recent generations become something of an obsession. We’re like the wolf licking at the razor blade, faster and faster as he gets more and more of a taste of blood.
Let’s show compassion to those who kill our wives and children, by letting them out of prison, and when they see our compassion they’ll stop killing. That’s another one.
You know, it really isn’t fair if you just come up with an idea, you get to copyright it and own it, as if you did some “real” work when all you did was think of an idea. Knowledge should belong to the world.
Stop asking her father for permission to marry her. Naive stupid young girls who just want a sexy appealing party-stud, and don’t care about a man’s financial stability, should have the final say in who’s going to knock ’em up.
Businesses lack compassion. Let’s force them to stop business-ing, and when we need the things those businesses make, let’s put the government in the business of doing that business-ing instead. Because anyone knows when it’s compassion you want you should make a bee-line straight to the nearest government bureaucrat who’s thirty seconds late for his lunch break, and there you’ll find all you can handle.
I could add to this list ALL day…don’t tempt me…
So here’s what an “extremist conservative” really is. An extremist conservative looks at all those bad ideas we’ve put into practice many times already, that have never worked out one single time, and does what common sense people do. He says “fuck it.” He dumps it all in an outhouse, then he moves the outhouse building so no one can ever find the dumbass idea he just dumped in, and pours cement in the hole so the dumbass idea can never be used again even if it’s somehow found. If he’s even more extreme than that, he decides to do it even sooner. And if he’s the most extreme conservative you’ll ever know and you’ll ever meet — he uses his intellectual gifts to figure out why this is a dumbass idea that’s never going to work.
What’s a liberal do? He says let’s give it another try.
A moderate liberal says let’s try just a little bit of it.
An extremist liberal says let’s never give up trying no matter what.
And the moderate conservative? Well, the sad, vicious truth of it is these people are just liars. Liars or dupes. History says “the dumbass idea never worked once” and the liberals say “don’t you dare believe that, it’s an ‘urban legend’.” And the moderate conservative says “Alright! You guys know best!”
Meanwhile, the dumbass idea never worked because it’s never gonna work.
And the guys who notice it hasn’t worked and can’t work…we call them “extremist conservatives” so we can give ourselves an excuse to keep trying it.
That’s the truth. Dress it up however you want, but that’s how it is.
I gotta agree with Neal on this one. One of the risks of crossing that fourth milestone on the way to complete insanity, is that it’s possible for your crossing to be highly visible to others. And by “possible” what I really mean is “almost certain.”
Yeah, Republicans can do it too.
If nobody on your team can ever make a mistake, and nobody from the other team can ever do or say anything good, you’re riding for a fall.
Having said that, though, the “What Can You Do To Help Barack Obama” thing remains a fact and it remains a viable and legitimate issue. Elected officials are our servants; we are not theirs.
…that being a reference to the previous post…
…our friend down in New Mexico who frequently takes issue with us about our extremist positions, versus his middle-of-the-road ones. He had an opportunity to expound at length on how he thinks people should spend Labor Day. He had, count ’em, one-two-three perfectly decent opportunities to disagree with us about things.
And he ended up three-for-three. We, with our extremist viewpoints, could have authored every single word he wrote. Especially these:
I will resist the temptation to turn this post into an anti-union screed, and said temptation is strong indeed, Gentle Reader. But let me just say this about that… I’m of the opinion that labor unions are the root of all most evil in our post-industrial society. I’ll grant you labor unions have a glorious history and were responsible for righting numerous wrongs in the early 20th century. But like the buggy whip, their time has passed. What we get from our unions today are things like “card check” —a decidedly UN-American renunciation of free elections in the workplace— and outright political intimidation. I’m not seeing much good in that… and neither are most other Americans, as Ed Morrissey notes in this Hot Air post. But let us not digress further; I’m sure you get my point.
I have redacted much there, because our friend down south places much in the clamshells () and as I’ve said before, I consider parenthetical material to be entirely expendable. But within the clamshells and outside of ’em, there is much linky goodness peppered throughout Buck’s Labor Day post, and it’s all well worth reading. Go read it all, every single word. You’ll be doing yourself a favor.
Nevertheless, this “centrist” thing brings up a concern that weighs somewhat heavily on my mind whenever our so-called “moderate” acquaintance takes issue with our “extremist” ramblings. We are, in recent years, strangely unified on our definitions…extremist…moderate…fringe-kook…centrist. There is very little disagreement lately on what opinion falls into what category. And this unification does not work along lines of common sense. This, in my mind, is a bad thing. It is almost a public mental health issue. Something just shy of a crisis.
I don’t like the way “centrist” is defined lately.
Let us say we do something that common sense, as well as history itself, counsels as being reprehensibly unwise. Passing gas into a campfire — after painting one’s hind end with gasoline. Kidnapping baby bear cubs in line-of-sight of their mothers. Telling Hells’ Angels riders something like “Hey, are you faggots going to move your fucking bikes so I can park here?” Flesh out that list of mine in whatever manner most effectively entertains you…
…it seems to me that lately, what defines a “centrist” is the following: We’ve done this stupid thing, whatever it is, ten times. It’s put us in the emergency ward ten times. Let’s go for an eleventh, just for the hell of it!
The guy who says “Let’s not, and say we did” is characterized as the extremist.
Am I right or am I right? We’re tinkering around with the idea of passing nationalized health care — which hasn’t been written into a unified body of legislation yet, let alone passed through committee. Every time some “conservative firebrand” comes up with a word of caution for us…think of Sarah Palin’s “death panels”…we are cautioned that this is a “falsehood,” that it is “bearing false witness,” that it is an “urban legend.” And that she is an “extremist.” But primarily, that the stuff she’s saying is not true.
Of course it isn’t! The legislation hasn’t been written yet. But if you want to go by the history of other countries that have this kind of health care plan in place, what she said is absolutely one hundred percent true. Death panels, death courts, death quorums, death committees, call ’em what you will. It’s bureaucrats deciding who’s gonna live and who’s gonna die…and “death panel” is just as good a name as any.
My point is not that what Palin said, in the final analysis, is true. Although it is.
My point is that her comments have been characterized as extremist in nature, and those who contradict her have been characterized as moderates. In a sane universe, it would be the other way around. The evidence is overwhelmingly on her side. I say again: overwhelmingly. Start, if it suits your druthers, with all the countries that have instituted nationalized health care plans, similar or identical to the one we are now considering — who are now rejecting those plans, or in some other way regretting them. They have bureaucrats sitting down to decide who does & doesn’t “deserve” coverage…empowered with decision-making over life-and-death…just like Palin said.
Palin one, Obama zip.
And that leads into this other article of “must-not-miss” stuff straight from the archives of that extremist Libertarian crackpot Neal Boortz: Four Problems That Could Sink America. Briefly summarized here:
1. We don’t like to work. Sure, now that jobs are scarce, everybody’s willing to put in a few extra hours to stay ahead of the ax. But look around: We still expect easy money, hope to retire early, and embrace the oversimplistic message of bestsellers like The One Minute Millionaire and The 4-Hour Workweek. Unfortunately, the rest of the world isn’t sending as much money our way as it used to, which makes it harder to do less with more.
:
2. Nobody wants to sacrifice. Why should we? The government is standing by with stimulus money, banker bailouts, homeowner aid, cash for clunkers, expanded healthcare, and maybe more stimulus money. And most Americans will never have to pay an extra dime for any of this. Somehow, $9 trillion worth of government debt will just become somebody else’s problem.3. We’re uninformed.
:
People who lack the sense to question Big Lies always end up in deep trouble. Being well informed takes work, even with the Internet. In a democracy, that’s simply a civic burden. If we’re too foolish or lazy to educate ourselves on healthcare, global warming, financial reform, and other complicated issues, then we’re signing ourselves over to special interests who see nothing wrong with plundering our national–and personal–wealth.
:
4. iCulture. We may be chastened by the recession, but Americans still believe they deserve the best of everything–the best job, the best healthcare, the best education for our kids. And we want it at a discount–or better yet, free–which brings us back to the usual disconnect between what we want and what we’re willing to pay for.
Do you see a common thread amongst those four? I do. I call it the “ant and grasshopper milkshake.”
People who are willing to endure the dilemma of delayed gratification, for a late reward, are intermingled in their personal fortunes and prospects with lazier people who just want to fuck around. The result: The standard of living for hard-working people who choose to educate themselves and then act on that education, is deprecated; the standard of living for jag-offs, conversely, is artificially enhanced.
To stand in opposition to this, is not extreme. To lend your voice in support of it, is not moderate.
Our friend in New Mexico does not suffer from a lack of brains, or balls, or judgment. He simply misunderstands the debate — some of the time. And he doesn’t even misunderstand the debate quite so much; he misunderstands the enemy.
His values on the other hand, are right where they should be. And his idea is an awesome one — I know this to be true, because it’s an idea we’ve had here many a time. People need to pull their heads out of their asses with regard to old-fashioned honest hard work, and listen to what Mike Rowe has to say. For whatever other disagreements he & I may have, we are abso-freakin-lutely on the same page there. I swear, if people gave up watching American Idol, and spend just five minutes out of that time out of every hour that was spent previously, watching Dirty Jobs — a lot of this nation’s problems would disappear overnight.
Hat tip: IMAO.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” — Upton Sinclair
I was watching democrat party advisors and consultants “guest” on the Fox News Channel to peddle their shit, and a very simple thought jumped into my head. At first I thought it was such a simple thought that it couldn’t possibly be worth anything. But then I realized it was impossibly difficult to tell whether it was a simple thought or a complexificated thought. Which one of those it was, I was not sure. But it was one of those two.
And that’s the sign of a good thought.
By which I mean, you may claim this is a thought not worth having…and perhaps you are right. But having been through this cycle a few times, I know beyond any doubt it’s a thought worth jotting down.
Let’s jot it down.
I have a perception, which I could quantify properly if I had a mind to do so, but I have no mind to do so because the benefits would be slight and the effort would be cumbersome. Let us simply presume the thought may be properly quantified but I don’t feel it worth the hassle of proving it. My perception is that we have embarked on some kind of “quickening.” Things, today, compared to the way things were a year ago — are vastly and drastically more changed compared to the way they were changed between one year ago and two years ago. We are in a measurable acceleration curve. Do I really need to provide data to support that? Is there any intelligent soul out there who would honestly contest it? I think not…and so I shall skip that part of the exercise.
No, in observing this quickening, I wish merely to observe, and I think it only necessary to observe, this: Something has fallen away. A facade. A mask. A mask has fallen away. We pretend it is not so. But we seem to be merely going through the motions of carrying out an elaborate deception, that a generation ago was somehow more honest. People pretend to be falling for things that, in times past, really did fool them. And can fool them no longer.
To understand what I mean, it is necessary to divide people into groups. Oh, how we hate to do that! And yet we cannot explain why we so hate it.
Some of us seek to deceive, and others do not. The necessity of separating the one from the other, is self-evident and self-explanatory.
There are those who seek to convince all within earshot and line-of-sight, that the planet will die unless we unplug our phones as soon as they’re done charging.
There are those who seek to convince all within earshot and line-of-sight, that terrorists seek to end their own lives in order to kill a few of us…and yet if we simply change our foreign policy, they’ll start loving us all to pieces.
There are those who seek to convince all within earshot and line-of-sight, that we are not a very good people. But if we simply create a binding structure of public government-owned and government-administrated insurance for our lives and medical needs, that we will become wonderful people.
There are those who seek to convince all within earshot and line-of-sight, that our young children know a great deal more about how to make our society work properly than we do; and that those who have been on the planet far longer than we have, know far less about this than we do.
There are those who seek to convince all within earshot and line-of-sight, that our economy sucks so much because our country is so far in debt; but that we can turn things around by taking on more debt.
There are those who seek to convince all within earshot and line-of-sight, that a woman who is loyal to her man, who makes his life easier, who uses her daylight hours to create a home he will want to approach when the day’s work is done…and brings him cold beverages to drink and hot meat to eat, perhaps dressing herself down to titillate him and make him feel more important…is somehow doing damage to herself, and perhaps to him. And that a miserable, demanding, bitching dried-out old harridan is somehow fulfilling some sacrosanct destiny, for her benefit and for his.
There are those who seek to convince all within earshot and line-of-sight, that Iraq was a much better place with ol’ Saddam in charge.
Here is my complicated but simple thought. And perhaps it will diminish what faith you have left in humanity. Or perhaps it will help to preserve it.
NOBODY is falling for this bullshit. Nobody. No conservatives. No liberals. Nobody in between.
No, in our parents’ generation, our so-called “leaders” told us sweet little lies…some of us immediately figured out what they were doing, but also, that they had a stake in the lie being successfully told. And so they became passive liars. They listened, they smiled, they nodded — not believing a single word of the lie being told. But understanding right off the bat, that it was to their material benefit for the lie to propagate. And so they behaved as if they believed the lie, that they were far too smart to believe.
Some others among us were just-plain-duped. They were the suckers. Their wallets held the fuel that kept the whole Ponzi scheme going…and they did not hang on to that fuel for very long.
Nowadays — we have the quickening. And I do not think things are staying the same. The lies being told are so much more brazen. We can have a “public option” on our national healthcare, with no rationing. Nobody has any reason to oppose His Glorious Wonderfulness’ ideas, other than their own unapologetic racism. Hollywood celebrities are the wisest among us. Unplug that coffee pot, or the planet might die. Keep importing that oil from the states that sponsor terrorist acts against us, or else Fluffy the Polar Bear won’t have any chunks of ice waiting for him as he swims around, and Fluffy just might drown.
I fear we have lost that all-important distinction, as we embark on the 21st century Anno Domini.
I fear we have lost our ability to distinguish between those who profit from the lies, and those who honestly fall for the lies.
I fear we are now telling lies that are so substandard in quality, that nobody is falling for them. Nobody. Anywhere.
I fear we have been suckered into a kind of infinite vortex. I fear we have become pawns in some pyramid scheme. That nobody’s dumb enough to fall for the lies being told, but also, that we are all in a desperate search for the next sucker…the next sucker who simply doesn’t exist anymore.
I fear that we have, for generations now, been divided among those who seek to deceive, those who pretend to be deceived, and those who honestly are deceived.
And that, while nobody was paying attention, the last of those three groups quietly dwindled down to nothing. I fear we are caught in some bizarre little puppet show. One in which all, or most of us, are caught defining our individual existences around the act of selling something nobody is buying.
I fear this is the beginning of the end of a mighty civilization. I, and you, are blessed to be born at just the right time to witness it.
Blessed, and at the same time, cursed.
Cross-posted at Right Wing News.
A purse-dog-house. A house-dog-purse. A purse-sized-dog-house. A dog-sized-purse-house.
Whatever.
Thousands of years from now, archeologists will come together and agree…that great country known as America, began her downfall with those damnable rodent-sized dogs and their damnable stupid accessories. Gladiator games for the Romans, softball-sized canines for us.
One other thing — the English language leaves me ill-equipped to express what a terrible photographer is you-know-who. Can’t she afford a better camera?
More here.
On an offline from loyal and frequent commenter Rob.
Out of all the things said in yesterday morning’s post, this part didn’t go over too well with a couple of our loyal readers…
The “I’m a fiscal conservative but a social moderate” stuff. It’s a phrase tossed around so casually now, so meaninglessly. Check out what that means. Socially, the democrat agenda is to increase the standard of living for those who don’t put much effort into taking responsibility for things, and to decrease the standard of living for those who do. What’s the Republican response to that? If “fiscal conservative social moderate” means agreement with that, then don’t let the doorknob hit ya where the Good Lord split ya.
The question that arises is whether the nugget stirred discontent because of something that needed aligning with the truth, or whether it brought a stinging sensation that is the natural result of an effective disinfectant going to work.
I submit that it is the latter of those two. Had I any doubts about that, they were put to rest a half an hour ago when I heard the lies spewing forth from the lying lips of the early morning teevee news bitch (paraphrase):
For several months now the feds have been putting a lot of money into our banks, and now things are looking better.
I submit, further, that the thing being done to us has a lot to do with Item #3 on the list of ways To Motivate Large Numbers of People to Do a Dumb Thing Without Anyone Associating the Dumb Thing With Your Name Later On:
3. Switch Moderation and Extremism with Each Other
It’s a dirty little secret about people: They lack the ability to recognize an extreme idea when they hear about it. Even more helpful to your cause, they also lack the humility needed to confess, even to themselves, that they are lacking in this ability…
Is it really an extreme idea to call the lying teevee news bitch a lying teevee news bitch? Is it really an example of moderation to question the moderation of those who call themselves moderates? Well, how can we measure extremism versus moderation. We can go by popular decree, which I’ve never liked at all. And yet perhaps it has some legitimacy here — popular decree was how we figured out moderation-versus-extremism in the first place, was it not? And once the public has been forced to live through something, once it’s been educated through pain, the value of popular will slowly escalates. There isn’t too much sophistication demanded of an organism that is expected to recognize “Hey, this really sucks” when it goes through pain. Actually, on the flip side of that, it’s kind of insulting to demand the organism think to itself “Hey, this is really awesome” just because it’s told things are so awesome by lying teevee news bitches.
Or, we can rely on simple mathematical concepts. The feds did pump a lot of money into our banks…but what the feds pumped into our banks…came from us in the first place. That, or it was borrowed. Our simple mathematical concept therefore is —
Money feds pumped into our banks, equals
money taken from us in the first place, plus
money borrowed on our credit
The borrowing has real consequences. First of all, it will be paid back. So your kids thank you. Secondly, as it is paid back, the federal government waddles into the money-lending market on the “borrower” side of the table…something like a seven-foot Kodiak bear waddling into your backyard swimming pool. Actually, that big bear sitting in your kids’ wading pool. We have a device to calibrate how the money-lending market works, in its effort to adjust to supply and demand. That device is the interest rate. You were wondering why, sometimes, we struggle with skyrocketing inflation rate; well, now you know. That’s most of it, the interest rate.
Interestingly, the second method I’ve proposed to measure moderation-versus-extremism, is currently not too far different from the first. Earlier in the year, as I wore my anti-Obama tee shirts around Folsom on the weekends, I’d gather my usual eclectic mixture of smiles & high fives versus dirty sideways glances & sneers. Lately I’ve added a new one to the inventory that removes all subtlety:
The reaction to this is unprecedented: People want to talk to me about it. Not “Hey, whaddya think you’re doing, you some kind of racist trash or what” kind of talk to me. They want to know things. They want an education. You can see it in their eyes, they just got done making a serious decision about something on which they now realize they knew next-to-nothing; they’ve lately become aware of this vast multitude of issues that were involved, and they want to find out about some of them. They suspect they’ve made a terrible mistake, if they don’t realize it outright; and they’d like to at least start the process of comprehending what exactly it was.
They’ve been told that it’s radical gun-and-Bible-hugging agitprop to suggest His Worshipfulness might have Communist leanings. And they’ve made the conscious decision that, you know what, I think I’d like to find out a little bit more before I just sweep all dissent aside like I did last November. They’ve started to figure out there’s a bit more to the story.
In fact, let’s rework that mathematical formula just a little bit more:
Money feds pumped into our banks, plus
money spent on interest servicing debts incurred previously, plus
money spent on all the bullshit administration layers associated with pumping money into our banks, equals
money taken from us in the first place, plus
money borrowed on our credit
Even with these new lines added, this formula still adheres to reality only in a superficial, Fisher-Price-Toy kind of a way. Many more lines would have to be added in order to capture all the things that really do matter; but as the additional lines are tacked on, you’ll see for the most part they aren’t any more flattering to the plan that was just carried out. The point is — the lying teevee news bitch’s summary only included the first line. This goes to show the high level of difficulty involved in capturing just how deceptive it is. This is exactly the kind of “news” that is worse than no news at all. But it’s the kind of news we’re being given, and expected to believe, if we are to evolve as good “moderate” citizens.
In fact, it is worthy of emphasis that I didn’t counsel the Republicans to ostracize or excoriate the “fiscal conservatives and social moderates.” My teachings had to do with inspecting, case-by-case, what exactly this highly overused phrase means. As I noted in my follow-up —
It is a hackneyed phrase that has been overused and abused to the point where it no longer means anything. What do you have to say when FCSM is used as a cover for things that are obviously not true? The “I’m a ‘conservative,’ but I acknowledge global warming” thing for example?
Is it moderate, or extreme, to infer against the data that there’s some planet-wide “mean temperature” that is increasing as we pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and because of this, we anticipate a global catastrophe; one that can somehow be averted if, and only if, we place large sums of money into undisclosed locations any time a transaction takes place that involves the consumption of energy; and then that we labor with the assurances, again against the evidence, that this virtual tax will somehow stop the planet from dying?
Form whatever opinion you wish to form about that one, fiscal-moderates-social-conservatives. I’ve formed mine.
We’re spending the day celebrating the arrival of cooler weather, via a trip to the seashore. If we stay inland, such a celebration is still a couple months off. That’s Sacramento living for ya. School starts in early August, the temperature descends to match that situation…oh…somewhere around Christmas. Yeah. You see why I have trouble adapting to this.
If I don’t make it back, this will be the last post. If I get arrested and can’t make bail, this will be the last post for a few days. If all goes well this will be the last one for at least twelve hours, more likely twenty-four.
Let’s make it about some more free advice to Republicans…
…You see the last line of the Palin/Supergirl logo to the left? “And Don’t Change A Thing“? That’s where you are. Don’t change. Wait. Or rather…purify, then wait. These jack-holes spending money just as fast as any democrat; get rid of ’em. That’s just belaboring the obvious.
The “I’m a fiscal conservative but a social moderate” stuff. It’s a phrase tossed around so casually now, so meaninglessly. Check out what that means. Socially, the democrat agenda is to increase the standard of living for those who don’t put much effort into taking responsibility for things, and to decrease the standard of living for those who do. What’s the Republican response to that? If “fiscal conservative social moderate” means agreement with that, then don’t let the doorknob hit ya where the Good Lord split ya. People who work hard, should enjoy more things than people who do not. The market already works that way, and government should make no effort toward overturning that or overruling that. It isn’t something that needs any correcting. It’s just things the way they’re supposed to work. Ants have it better than grasshoppers.
Repeat after me: Equality of opportunity. Not equality of outcome.
Don’t wait for people to be dissatisfied with democrats. Wait for them to be freaked out. For forty-five years now, if you’re a superstar democrat Presidential candidate…that means you are missing standards. Good, reliable character, and superstar-democrat, have been mutually exclusive things. For these forty-five years, if the democrat party is pinning their hopes and dreams on you that means nobody in their right mind would let you spend a weekend with their kids. Not even five minutes, if you’re alone. And that includes loyal democrat voters. Your opposition isn’t about “values are unimportant”; they’re about “values are toxic, and are to be avoided.” In the final analysis, that won’t play in Peoria. During elections, it plays because it is hidden, and only because it is hidden.
But look who bears the party standard during those elections. The electorate is constantly being lectured to look past things, to forget things. Obama’s asshole preacher friend. Kerry’s “Winter Soldier” speech. Clinton’s affairs. Carter’s apologia on behalf of Palestinian terrorist thugs, and general wimpiness.
The democrat party thinks living under the right set of laws, makes a people into a better class of people. That is really their platform — outlaw the guns, outlaw the capital punishment, outlaw discrimination, create a uniform standard of living regardless of the level of effort, and we become “good.” But every election cycle, they claim to have found a super-duper-good guy for us, good enough to be the best of the best among us after we’ve been made into good people. And when they tell us about him, most of their words amount to lecturing us about what information we should not be absorbing and what questions we should not be asking. Obama’s friends. Obama’s ears. Obama’s middle name. Obama’s death panels. Obama’s childhood. Obama’s college years.
How good are these people, if filtration is so much more important than edification, when it comes time to learn about who & what they are? How good of a person could that possibly be? If he thinks the best shot he’s got at winning an election, is for people to not learn things about him?
So don’t change…other than to kick out your traitors, those who contaminate your message by bearing your emblem while failing to capture the spirit that is supposed to go behind it. Stop spending money, and if you can’t stop spending money, at least stop finding new ways to spend money. Run government more like a business, that at least tries not to go broke. Stop interfering with life’s pain…especially when the pain comes as a direct result of individual stupidity, and is so obviously part of the nature’s educational curriculum. Like John Wayne said, “Life is tough; life’s tougher if you’re stupid.”
What an awful campaign slogan, huh. My message for you is a simple one: Don’t be too sure about that. Hire fewer political consultants that wear nice suits and leather shoes. Hire more of ’em wearing plaid shirts, blue jeans and hiking boots. Even better, hire some political consultants who have to wipe fish guts off their hands before they come talk to you, because they’re just clocking out of their “real” job. You’ll start to see things differently.
One last word: Incorporate a plank into your party platform about philosophy. Leave it unwritten if you think that’s best, but don’t keep it a secret, shout it loud and proud. We’ve had a lot of noise made over the last generation or two, about seeing “the other side” of things. This has resonated very well with people who want to elect leaders who look past the packaging, and into the contents, of whatever comes along. This has not worked out well. The electorate has wisely sought keen insight, and they have been rewarded with a topsy-turvy upside-down way of looking at things, and seeing their opposites.
Now, it is all over the place. Anarchy is order. Lawbreaking is law-abiding. Children have wisdom. Old people are stupid. Women make perfectly fine dads. If you champion womens’ rights, you should have wanted Saddam Hussein to stay exactly where he was. Murderers have a right to life. Babies do not. Abortion is a right guaranteed in the Constitution. Carrying a gun, is not. Barack Obama loves America. Ted Kennedy was the Conscience of the Senate. The best cure for the nation’s economic depression is for the government to put us further in debt. Timothy Geithner is a financial genius who is the only logical nominee for Secretary of the Treasury. Bill Clinton does right by people. Financial solvency comes from making everything artificially more expensive: food, fuel, books, data transfer, home ownership, education, cigarettes. Now we’re looking at everything that requires energy to be marketed…which means everything…
The people are frustrated because it seems every move we make to get out of this hole, gets our country deeper into it. The reason for this is quite simple: Our solutions do not work, and cannot work, because we have been taught for decades to see things as the opposite of what they really are.
This is all a failed experiment. Find me a hundred people who are blind to this in 2009, and I’ll show you seventy-five who’ll be able to see it by 2012. The people have had their taste of new-age complexity, and their appetite is on the wane. They still want the insight of their leaders to be necessarily “nuanced” to match the complexity of everyday life, of the reality those leaders are supposed to accurately perceive. But no more than that. Not past the point of diminishing returns.
The time has come for our nation to see things as they really are.
I much prefer people who have standards and sometimes fail to live up to them over people who never fail to because they have none.
I notice there are quite a few people walking around these days who think they have “standards” because they are in the advanced stages of Goodperson Fever. I lived up to a standard, because I’m drinking out of an eco-cup. I lived up to a standard, because I recycle. I lived up to a standard because I’m protesting the experimentation on animals.
These are not standards; they are events. As “standards” they fail the test, like the hash marks upon a yardstick made out of rubber. They don’t measure things absolutely, they measure them relatively. Relatively, as in “…and that guy, over there, didn’t do the same thing so that makes me better than him.” That’s the real purpose of doing all that stuff; for comparison purposes. In gauging the conduct of a person living in solitude, they gauge nothing.
Those aren’t actual standards.
Just before the elections, I had made an observation about the various failures of capitalism. Actually, it was an observation I had made before:
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.
Yesterday, Charles Krauthammer came up with some constructive criticism for the democrat party regarding what they should do with Obamacare: Junk it, and come up with an “Obamacare 2.0.” It’s not lost on me that as you read through Krauthammer’s piece, it almost comes through as an entirely unintended subtext — which it isn’t — that what’s good for the democrat party is bad for everyone else, and vice-versa. Krauthammer’s closing uppercut makes it clear that a “public option” to ensure that “everyone” receives the care they need, is a fool’s dream regardless of who wants who to win: “Look at Canada. Look at Britain. They got hooked; now they ration. So will we.”
Ezra Klein took exception to this:
So do we. This is not an arguable proposition. It is not a difference of opinion, or a conversation about semantics. We ration. We ration without discussion, remorse or concern. We ration health care the way we ration other goods: We make it too expensive for everyone to afford.
Klein then uses some statistics to create a beautifully symmetrical Rorschach pattern: “38 percent of Britons and 27 percent of Canadians reported waiting four months or more for elective surgery. Among Americans, that number was only 5 percent…24 percent of Americans reported that they did not get medical care because of cost…In Britain and Canada, only about 6 percent of respondents reported that costs had limited their access to care.”
It reminds me of what President Obama said about public sector vs. private sector competition, comparing it to the postal service co-existing with private carriers with his crack about the “Post Office always having problems.” The point is supposed to be universal coverage; uni-coverage that won’t make us sorry we asked for it. Klein, like Obama, seems to have lost track of what he’s trying to argue here. Obama was trying to sell us a public option as the answer to our problems, and to buttress his point, look at the Post Office that’s always having problems! Klein, on the other hand, if I’m reading him right — his message is one of “Sure there are long waits when everybody is covered, but that’s okay because everybody will be covered…okay, they won’t be…but things are just as bad now, so let’s just change the badness without expecting anything to get better, and you see, we’ve just gotta do this.”
Or…something like that.
The commonality between the two, is this dogged determination to defeat each argument from the opposition by any means, usually with some technicality that might look good on paper but logically ends up being entirely meaningless.
The trouble they’re having, is that with a radical change to America’s health care system, there is a REAL possibility that REAL people might get REALLY hurt — and everybody understands this. That motivates people to think differently. You tell people “The reason the economy sucks is that we aren’t taxing the rich enough, what we need to do is tax them completely into oblivion so we don’t have any rich people anymore”…and people buy into that. Why shouldn’t they? You’re admitting you’re hurting someone, but that’s okay because it’s someone they’ll never, ever meet…
So they buy into your fairy tale: We must destroy the economy in order to save it.
When this obvious fissure between your fairy tale, and truth itself, threatens to hurt them, though — this all changes. This is a situation somewhat like trying to figure out if there’s a scorpion’s nest under the backyard structure on which their kids play. It makes people think differently. Better. It renews their bond with the plane of reality, and responsible planning. The cold hard fact of the matter is this: People are much more interested in reality when it directly benefits them. Not the other guy. Them.
And so this dog won’t hunt. Let’s turn everything around, because too many people are denied care. But after we turn everything around, an equal number of people will still be denied care…but that will be much better because…uh…where was I going with this?
As for the substance of Klein’s international comparison, Ronald Bailey takes him to task in Reason:
Like most left-leaning folks, Klein clearly doesn’t know the definition of rationing. Take this one from Britannica:
Government allocation of scarce resources and consumer goods, usually adopted during wars, famines, or other national emergencies.
Klein evidently thinks that market outcomes that he dislikes mean that government should step in and impose outcomes that he does like. All right, let’s admit it; the health insurance market and the rest of health care are royally screwed up as a result of decades of government interventions and mandates. Consequently we don’t actually find the usual benefits of falling prices and improving products and services that we experience in normally operating markets where robust competition and choice reign.
As I explained in an earlier column where I tried to clear up New York Times economic columnist David Leonhardt’s similar confusion over rationing:
…what is rationing? Leonhardt is correct when he writes, “In truth, rationing is an inescapable part of economic life. It is the process of allocating scarce resources.” The crucial question that Leonhardt misses is that “rationing” depends on who is allocating the scarce resources. It’s not rationing if an individual decides to spend his money on a 16-ounce steak—but it is rationing if he can only purchase a USDA prime rib eye when he has a coupon issued from a government agency. In other words, true rationing occurs when individuals are forbidden from spending their money on products or services they want to buy.
Imperfect as private health insurance markets are, if a customer [or his employer] doesn’t like the decisions made by Blue Cross Blue Shield, Kaiser Permanente, or Golden Rule insurance bureaucrats, he can look elsewhere for his health insurance coverage. But if the government health care scheme becomes a monopoly, when the bureaucrats at the new Health Benefits Advisory Committee decide that a treatment should be withheld, that treatment will be withheld. That’s rationing.
I concluded:
“Americans should get the first chance to limit their own health spending,” Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.) observed recently. “Once they learn the true cost of what they are buying, share a larger portion of the cost, and can judge the benefits—if any—of treatment options, then they will choose more wisely than the government.” He’s right. Congress should think about “rationing” health insurance and health care the old-fashioned way—through the market.
But through the usual lack leftwing lack of imagination and a truly touching and naive faith in the efficacy of top/down government “solutions,” Klein ends up advocating for government rationing and for imposing a government monopoly on health care, instead of for more competition and choice.
This all goes back full-circle, to the original point I made about these industries that demonstrate the failures of capitalism by letting us down so badly — but do not really stand, any longer, as models of what we have in mind when we talk about “capitalism.” Health care, like home-equity lending, has been stuck in that whirlpool for a very long time now. In my own way, I know this first-hand from my twelve years plus-something in the health care industry. Even Information Technology geeks, at some point, have to be concerned with the health of the industry that provides the wealth in their paychecks…and from the inside, I could see that industry was not terribly impacted, like a true capitalist mechanism, with the “real” costs of providing quality care.
It was the “general” expense that represented the big headaches, the sorry-no-raises-this-year, the apprehension about the next round of layoffs. The layers of “oversight” and “regulation,” the tort system, the latest political hiccup that got Congress suddenly interested in our industry as a whole. That is what increased the difficulty of operating, and it wasn’t terribly hard to see after awhile.
With that experience behind me, I’m still waiting for someone to coherently explain how a public option would streamline this. So far, all I’m hearing is the Klein argument, that equal numbers of people would be left uncovered, but somehow more artfully. And the Obama argument, that I should look to the Post Office as my harbinger of what’s to come, with all the problems they keep having.
I’m not finding these arguments terribly convincing, I must say. And I don’t think I’m alone.
I’m reading the headlines and I’m watching the news on the teevee, and it’s looking more and more definite: Unless someone’s blowing smoke up my butt, it’s a done deal. The democrats are going to take their pig-in-a-poke of a European-style universal health care plan, toss around a few brainless bromides about the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, and try to put it over the top. They’re hoping X many members of Congress who are up for re-election in 2010, are going to look at their constituents and figure out they couldn’t afford to vote yes before Teddy Swimmer kicked it, and now that he has, maybe they can say “I voted yea to honor his memory” and get away with it. Tug at the heartstrings a little. Think of the children, think of the guy who needs Viagra and can’t afford it, think of Ted.
Think of, think of, think of. Think of everything except whether the idea is a good ‘un or not. As I said this morning…and it is worth repeating…
Every left-wing politician’s argument, it seems, is a distraction away from the “If we do this, that thing will happen” that is central to all responsible planning. Their talking points seem to systematically address all concerns in the universe except that.
And now the nation is supposed to look back on this health care scheme it deplores, and smile upon it, to give a dead narcissist a cheery send-off.
Wonder what Mary Jo thinks of that.
You know why the nation is so unbelievably divided right now? It’s not because Republicans are smart and democrats are stupid. Here is some truth: Our division comes not from a divide over smarts, or even a divide in priorities or a divide in principles. It is, fundamentally, a disagreement in how quickly one should be distracted.
The typical democrat voter is plenty smart enough to understand conservative principles — at least the obvious ones. The ones, like: If you’re a proponent of womens’ rights across the world, you should have supported the invasion of Iraq. Or…if all the guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns. Or…if you say yes to all the illegal aliens, you really don’t know what you’re saying yes to — because being illegal is all about nobody knowing who you really are, or what you’ve done. Or…if you’re really tired of seeing gas prices go up, fer Chrissakes, drill baby drill.
These are not esoteric belief systems. They’re fairly obvious. They’re like “two plus two equals four” — if you use the part of your brain that specializes in basic, concrete cognitive thought.
And that’s what the ideological split really is. Our liberals don’t disagree with us about what two plus two is. They disagree about “overriding” concerns. To the liberal mind, there is always something that changes that particular play, by slapping the ball out of bounds. There’s always some exception clause being invoked. Something that turns everything upside-down; something that makes wet into dry, North into South, red into cyan, makes the moral immoral and the immoral moral, makes children wise and the elders childlike, makes a school district struggling with seventy languages into an optimal model for efficient education, a plutocracy into an egalitarian society, yesterday’s no-account bum into today’s “working family,” global-warming into climate-change, Hillary Clinton into a smart attractive woman, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq into some earthly paradise, John McCain into a divider, Nancy Pelosi into a uniter. Everything is transmogrified into the opposite of what it really is. Because of some kind of right-brain-induced logical hiccup.
They don’t really believe the stuff they say they believe. If they did, they really would be stupid. But most of them aren’t stupid; they’re just distracted, and because they’re distracted they’re jealous of anyone who isn’t.
And now a Senator has dropped dead. It’s just another loophole. Another exception clause. In their world, there’s no way to really show proper respect to the dead, except by turning the rules of the universe upside down. In their world, if I really respect you, and you happen to kick the bucket on the day I’m asked what two plus two is, I have to say three. Or five. If I give the same answer to that basic question that I’d give on any other day, I’m not respecting you. And so when Senator Kennedy drops dead, we have to suddenly pretend a stupid idea is a great one.
But it isn’t. Two and two are still four. And the idea still sucks ass.
Harsh words (relatively) for the recently departed, from Nick Gillespie, Reason Online:
With the death of Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), two points immediately come to mind.
First is the endless, generally uncritical encomia that journalists and other public commenters immediately generate whenever any major figure, especially a controversial one, dies. Here’s a writer for what was effectively Kennedy’s hometown paper, The Boston Globe:
“I think they’re gonna say he is one of the greatest legislators, or most effective legislators—if not the most effective legislator—the Senate has ever seen,” Boston Globe reporter and author Susan Milligan said. “And I don’t think you could find a sitting senator right now, Democrat or Republican, who would disagree with that assessment.”
Milligan’s assessment may well be on-target: When you consider major legislation that Kennedy helped to hustle across the finish line, such as No Child Left Behind and the Americans with Disabilities Act, he was indeed an incredibly effective legislator, typically reaching far beyond the partisan rhetoric for which he was famous to work with hard-core Republicans. Kennedy was, in the turgid term regularly applied to him, the “liberal lion” of the Senate, a principled and unyielding advocate for bigger government, higher taxes, more business regulation, you name it. Yet many of his signature accomplishments—No Child Left Behind and the Americans with Disabilities Act, for instance—were not pushed through along partisan lines. In each instance, he worked with the respective President Bush and a slew of Republicans at the time to ensure passage.
Which brings me to the second point: The legislation for which he will be remembered is precisely the sort of top-down, centralized legislation that needs to be jettisoned in the 21st century. Like Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.V.) and the recently deposed Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), Kennedy was in fact a man out of time, a bridge back to the past rather than a guide to the future. His mind-set was very much of a piece with a best-and-the-brightest, centralized mentality that has never served America well over the long haul.
And it’s had lots and lots of chances.
Enough is enough.
Gerard now has a hardcore case of it.
I’ve been told, so often and so stridently, to feel this and to feel that and to feel for the downtrodden of the world, that I find I no longer feel anything at all. I don’t think I’m alone in not caring. I think caring and compassion, now that it has been institutionalized enough to demand caring and compassion, has finally found its limit…Compassion can never be made compulsory and cash-flow positive at the same time. Whenever and wherever compassion has been made compulsory the people soon find they no longer have care or quartas to spare.
Perhaps what our friend in Seattle is feeling, is the onset of some deplorable disease.
Or perhaps it’s a recovery. A recovery from that wretched infestation known as…dramatic pause…drumroll, please…
It’s our modern plague. If you’ve ever done a good deed, and then just kinda hung around awhile to see if anyone noticed, and if so, how many, and what they thought about it all…you have been infected. And you probably still have it, unless you’ve since gotten in touch with your inner dark, uncaring, cynical bastard.
If I could identify one thing about liberals that is more alarming than all the rest, this would make the top three or four I’m quite sure:
This uneasy relationship they have to the ancient and simple concept of a crime that demands punishment. It is, forgive the pun, a “tortured” relationship. In the vast pantheon of crimes that one man can commit against another, it would seem there are tiers of crime, and the tier has very little to do with the magnitude of damage caused. All but a few transgressions fall into some more modest “Yeah-But” plateau. As in, yeah this guy broke into that other guy’s house…but the other guy should have just let ‘im get away, at least then nobody would get hurt. Or — yeah, this guy mugged and raped a woman, but he’s a product of his upbringing, he is not to blame.
Yeah, that dictator over there may be a threat to us and he may be oppressing his own people…but if we went after him, we’d only be doing it for the oil, and anyway we would almost certainly become exactly what it is we are trying to defeat. Better to leave well enough alone.
And then there is that superior tier, of crimes against the philosophy of liberalism itself.
There is no “Yeah-But” get-outta-jail-free card here.
This falls into that larger file folder of liberals wanting “all” of society to operate under one set of rules, and the elite crust of that society operating under a different set of rules. Crimes against you, and your family, and your friends, should be let go. You need to heal, to grow, to get past it, and the only way you can get past it is to let the miscreant go. Let the original offense go unavenged. Because when you seek revenge, you’re just poisoning yourself.
All that Mahatma-Ghandi shit goes sailing out the window at breakneck speed, when the victim of a crime is liberal philosophy itself. The Ghandi-nonsense is histoire. Misdeeds, all of a sudden, absolutely, positively must be avenged. Letting it go…moving on…out of the question. It’s the principle of the thing, dammit! The world has to be shown that our way is the right way, and it must be shown this by force.
Liberals act very much like conservatives this way. They act like something somewhat above-and-beyond conservatism, this way.
With this inconsistency, liberalism fails to achieve even the minimal standard of what it most energetically strives to be: Be something for which knowledgeable and conscientious people can cast a vote.
Update: I should say something about Ted’s passing I suppose. The “liberal lion of the Senate” provided the younger generation with a striking vision, an invaluable lesson for young and old alike. That lesson being: A lot of people aren’t at peace with themselves, so they try to soothe their consciences by supporting bad public policies. Don’t be like that.
It’s a good lesson.
Didja ever notice, when hardcore left-wing types start describing someone with something that starts with “the conscience of the”…it always seems to be someone that, generally speaking, regardless of the position the rest of us occupy on the ideological spectrum — none of us would want watching our kids?
Guilty people always have an excuse ready; every minute of every day. It is what they do, they’re always getting ready. That’s part of being guilty.
Bill Whittle has those thoughts and more.
I recall something about this in Atlas Shrugged. Henry Rearden is blackmailed into signing over his rights to Rearden Metal, and he makes the point to the state thug doing the blackmailing — if we really were the type of people you were threatening to make us look like, your threat of blackmail would have no effect on us. And the state thug says, of course, yeah I know. Whatever. Ya gonna sign that thing or are ya gonna make me wait all day?
Rather shocking the amoral things that are done by a state, when it engages in the masquerade of supposedly trying to do super-moral things.
Hat tip: Hector Owen.
What is the biggest threat to both our security and our liberty, in the modern age?
It’s liberals defining for us what is sensible and what is nuts. This estranges us from prospects for our continuing survival, as well as from our freedoms. They’ve turned it all around. What makes sense, we treat as something strange; what’s odiously surreal, we now treat as the very pinnacle of logic.
How do they do this?
They follow Item #2 on the list of ways to motivate large numbers of people to do dumb things without anyone associating the dumb thing with your name later on. Which is to identify the thing you want done, and socially stigmatize its opposite. Every single thought, every thought promoted and every thought opposed, is on one side of the other of a new social stigma. This is why it is so popular lately to think unrepentant murderers enjoy an inalienable right to life but also that innocent unborn babies do not.
And what is the very pinnacle of their achievement here?
The notion that Vice President Joe Biden is some kind of senior, wizened, composed, diplomatic, dignified, knowledgeable elder statesman.
That’s a modern event. In the years to come, perhaps it will have to surrender its “Best Lie Ever” trophy to some other popular canard that comes along. But for this year, it is at the tippy-top of the list. No liberal democrat, no matter how loyal, really believes it down to the marrow of his bones; and if any one among them really does, there is a soul that is genuinely lost. This would be a weak and feeble mind that has completely, irreversibly given up on the notion of perceiving things in the world around it by relying on its own abilities and faculties.
It has become one of my favorite litmus tests for figuring out whether or not a liberal who wants to argue about politics, retains the minimal level of competence required for such a thing. Is Joe Biden a venerable, competent elder statesman? Are you buyin’ into that?
We’re reaching back, or rather digging down, into our “stuff for blogging” stack. There’s some great stuff with a thick layer of dust on top, that has not yet made it into the scroll.
This is a wonderful bit of creative writing from Neo-Neocon:
Obama’s race is the gift that keeps on giving. It will continue to do so until we see the unlikely spectacle of hordes of Angry Black Men rising up against him. That’s the only thing that will get those poor Angry White Men off the hook—and maybe not even that.
The fact that the opponents of health care reform speaking up at the town hall meetings are clearly motivated by extremely substantive issues other than racial hatred of Obama is irrelevant to Michael Crowley. In fact, many of them are also at least as furious at Congress and the person of one White Woman Nancy Pelosi, as well as a number of Very White CongressMen.
But repeat after me: they are White. They are Men. They are Angry at Obama. They are Angry White Men.
And don’t let the fact that some of them are women confuse you, either…
It goes on like that, and keeps getting better.
This kind of touches on a provocative nugget I dropped into this morning‘s post, which I might very well be repeating a few more times in the weeks and months ahead. Hell, I might have it embroidered on a cloth and hung on a wall:
It is a prerequisite now, before one steps up to a debate to oppose carbon cap-and-trade bills, to offer the ritual disclaimer “I believe global warming is a serious problem and that it is caused by man.” The data no longer back this up…When liberals step up to a debate to insist that taxes should stay high and be pushed higher…they do not labor under any social necessity to say “I believe the Laffer Curve is real,” the way their opponents have been similarly nagged to say “I believe global warming is real.”
In a sane universe, if you were required to profess any particular opinion just to be taken seriously, that opinion would be a lot closer to “The Laffer Curve is real” than “global warming is real.” But the verbal talisman — the modern Speakeasy passphrase — in our world it has to do with global warming.
Let’s face it. Liberals today have complete control over our prevailing notions about what’s a sensible thing to say and what’s just plain nuts. And rationality and logic haven’t been deciding those things for us. Those things have been decided by this: Liberals make a demand of us, and we grant the demand no matter how asinine and silly it is. So that maybe we aren’t called racists.
What kinds of things have we decided are nuts and stupid and crazy this way? Stuff like…maybe it’s a bad idea to elect a President because He happens to show a lot of personal charisma, when He doesn’t discuss any specifics of what He’s going to do when He gets into office. Or…if the Constitution says we have a right to keep and bear arms, golly gee, maybe we do. Or…if we want to turn the economy around, maybe we should liberate businesses from taxes and regulations, rather than piling on more.
You know. Really wild, radical, crazy hateful stuff. Yeah.
“In the presence of a man who insists humans breathe air, and another who says that humans breathe water, you do not stick your face in the toilet bowl fifty percent of the time.” — Morgan K. Freeberg
A powerful case is being made that President Obama needs to move toward the right in the months ahead; indeed, that His presidency may depend on this.
This is the failure of American politics. Moderation is very often a reinforcing agent and a nourishing agent. Observing this pattern, at times we are seduced into thinking moderation is emblematic of all that is good; we make the mistake of drawing on the metaphor from nature, thinking of the mighty oak that survives the storm not so much by being thick and strong, but rather by bending a little. There are many problems with this: Evil is constantly on the lookout for cheap and easy new ways to appear good, and this ends up being one of them. Also, the mindset tends to lead us toward the polar opposite of what we are seeking. After a time, as we desperately seek someone with something to say, the mindset directs us toward the vacillating leadership of those who have nothing to say.
It is particularly mismatched to situations in which the debate is about which of two cups has the poison. Which, I would argue, is a hypothetical that fits just about all the disagreements we confront today. When the answer that emerges is “drink from both but sip slowly,” the consequences are not helpful to what we’re trying to do.
But it’s refreshing seeing the give-some-of-it-up dictum stuck onto the democrats for once. In my memory, the only time I’ve ever seen them cautioned by their own or by outsiders to moderate the tone, the cautioning has more to do with this: Do every little thing you’ve always wanted to do, and do just as much of it, but proceed slowly so you can get the albatross sold. That’s not moderation, that’s shuffling us toward the brink of the cliff at a relaxed, leisurely pace.
I have a nice road/offroad hybrid bike, and I happen to live at the base of the tallest hill for miles and miles around. To me, slipping in to the granny-gear isn’t even a compromise, it’s simply a fact of life. It means reaching the top in fifteen minutes as opposed to…well…not reaching it at all. And it would be just plain stupid to say “Morgan had to give up some of what he was doing because he was forced to shift into first gear.” There’s a difference between speed and distance.
This article seems to suggest Obama needs to give up on some goals that involve distance.
Good.
Mr. Obama’s bet was that his personal popularity would be enough to push his agenda through. Perhaps that would have been possible before the $787 billion economic stimulus package, the $410 billion omnibus bill that funds the government, the House-approved cap-and-trade bill, and so forth. But these big-ticket spending bills have helped define what the president means by “hope” and “change,” and it is through this prism that the American public now views his health-care proposals.
Public skepticism increased when the Congressional Budget Office issued findings contradicting Mr. Obama’s claims that his health-care reform would lower costs. And the more Americans have learned about the specifics, the more they dislike the plans. The president understands that he loses when he talks about substantive issues, which is why he’s been fudging on the public option. He may not understand that he is closing the gap between his unpopular policies and his personal popularity in the worst way a president can: by reducing his own credibility.
Back in 1994, Mr. Clinton faced pretty much the same problem. Though he too had won the White House promising to be a new kind of Democrat, his first two years had a distinctly liberal tenor: battling over gays in the military, promoting a new energy tax, turning a promised middle-class tax cut into a huge tax hike, and trying to push through universal health care. Though he continues to deny GOP contributions to his success, after his 1994 health-care defeat, Mr. Clinton did what all smart pols do: He appropriated the most appealing parts of his opponents’ agenda.
The result was a new Bill Clinton, embracing everything from deregulation and welfare reform to the Defense of Marriage Act. In his 1996 State of the Union, he even struck a Reaganite chord by announcing that “the era of Big Government is over.” From this newly held center, Mr. Clinton advanced his presidency and pushed, both successfully and unfairly, to demonize Mr. Gingrich. Mostly he got away with it.
The cycle continues: America steps up to buy into more of this poison liberalism, when and only when 1) her head is filled with thoughts irrelevant to what it is she is buying, usually by means of some distracting debate about personalities; 2) when times are truly desperate and she sees absolutely no alternative to it, or 3) it is buried deep within an inseparable package that includes components, either in style or in substance, of liberalism’s opposite. If none of those three apply, in America it’s a no-go.
And yet, by leveraging those three, with a go-slow approach, liberalism’s salesmen just might get the job done. Simply by exchanging that least valuable of all commodities, speed. America herself may eventually be sold the pig-in-a-poke that is information-age socialism.
That’s the challenge. To send America down the sad trail of so many countries that came before her — starting with world superpower, and ending with becoming just another filthy little wealth-confiscating socialist mudpuddle.
The advice for President Obama is good…for Him. I hope He does not take it. It would be bad for the country. What’s good for the country is to recognize the debate for what it is: Should we drink the poison or should we not? Those who say we should not, have been pressured, constantly, for the last year or more, to moderate their tone. It is a prerequisite now, before one steps up to a debate to oppose carbon cap-and-trade bills, to offer the ritual disclaimer “I believe global warming is a serious problem and that it is caused by man.” The data no longer back this up, but the necessity of offering the disclaimer — somehow — remains.
When liberals step up to a debate to insist that taxes should stay high and be pushed higher…they do not labor under any social necessity to say “I believe the Laffer Curve is real,” the way their opponents have been similarly nagged to say “I believe global warming is real.” As we bully and bludgeon our politicians and other advocates to be more moderate, when it comes to recognizing what is & isn’t so, we have become very choosey in selecting which side is being nagged toward the “center” of sipping poison slowly. If this situation is changing now, that is what I call a welcome change. But I’m going to hold off on the celebrations until I see where the change is going.
Because the guy writing the article is a hundred percent right: Clinton was handed a heaping piled-high plate of defeat. Clinton managed to turn it all around, and pretty much get everything else done besides the health care, by selling the poison liberalism with the three distracting agents listed above combined with a go-slow approach. He shifted into granny gears and got the job done. He sold us his bag o’ crap, and in so doing defined a way for all his successors to accomplish more of the same thing.
Had this thing growing in my head for a little while, since last week sometime, not being entirely sure where I was trying to take it. I’ve got a feeling now that I’ve put some definition into it and squeaked out the first ten bullets, it’s going to explode into a hundred or more in short order.
It’s amazing all the things we just presume are true, just because large numbers of other folks are already presuming the same thing. Isn’t it?
1. The merit of a relatively conservative argument is measured in its advocate’s willingness to compromise, which means to reject certain key parts of it; the merit of a relatively progressive argument is measured in its advocate’s willingness to do the opposite.
2. Freeing a man who killed innocent people proves you are “civilized” and “compassionate.” Stopping such a man from killing innocent people just goes to show you’re some kind of a knuckle-dragging rube.
3. If you have an opinion about how your congressman should vote, you should write to him and explain it so he can maybe take the time to write back and tell you whether or not you got it right.
4. If you pass the right law, you can make the people who are bound by it into better people.
5. One sure-fire way to improve an economy is to lower the standard of living of people who invest in businesses, and increase the standard of living of people who don’t.
6. I admire someone with the courage to do what he knows is right regardless of what anyone says, but he’s a drooling idiot if he doesn’t do it exactly the way I think he should.
7. You don’t know what you’re talking about unless, when you’re looking for superior wisdom, you look to the kids who haven’t been around very long.
8. Since it’s the entire world that might fizzle out, we’ve only got one shot at saving it; we’d better confine our efforts to little tiny immeasurable things things like unplugging our coffee pots.
9. The right to vote should extend to everyone, unconditionally. The right to earn a living, speak your mind in a town hall meeting, defend a family — not so much.
10. The key to economic recovery is to authorize our government to take lots and lots of our money away from us, and then possibly give it back to us again.
Pete Du Pont explores, writing in WSJ Opinion:
One has already been signed into law by President Obama: an increase in the tax on tobacco, to $1.01 a pack of cigarettes from 39 cents, and to as much as 40 cents a cigar from a nickel–increases of 159% and 700%, respectively. This is expected to bring in $8 billion a year. Next up is a possible increase in alcohol, beer and wine taxes, raising about another $6 billion annually, and perhaps another $5 billion a year on sugary drinks will be enacted.
Then come a series of substantial tax increases that are on the Washington agenda that, if enacted, will create real problems for our country’s economy.
First, allowing the expiration of the previous Bush administration tax cuts at the end of 2010. These reductions increased government tax receipts by $785 billion (just as the Kennedy and Reagan tax cuts increased tax revenues) and gave us eight million new jobs over a 52-month period. The cuts go away if Congress does nothing, raising tax rates on the top earners will to 39.6% from 35%, and on the next-highest bracket to 36% from 33%. The Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that 55% of these tax increases will come from small-business income.
Next comes Rep. Charles Rangel’s additional tax increases, a part of the House health-care bill. The House Ways and Means chairman calls for a 1% surtax on couples with more than $350,000 in income, 1.5% on incomes more than $500,000, and 5.4% on incomes more than $1 million. The extra tax would kick in at lower levels for unmarried taxpayers. And if promised health-care cost savings don’t materialize, the surtaxes would automatically double.
The seventieth award for Best Sentence I’ve Heard Or Read Lately (BSIHORL) is hereby awarded to Maggie’s Farm:
Let me get this straight…
We’re going to pass a health care plan written by a committee whose head says he doesn’t understand it, passed by a Congress that hasn’t read it but exempts themselves from it, signed by a president that also hasn’t read it (and who smokes) with funding administered by a treasury chief who didn’t pay his taxes, overseen by a surgeon general who is obese, and financed by a country that’s nearly broke.
What possibly could go wrong?
And don’t you dare say a disparaging word against the government’s ability to “compete” with the private sector, or I’ll call you a birther right-wing whack-job who’s probably a racist.
Gerard is taking stock of where the blame and shame should go, with regard to the release of Lockerbie bombing mastermind Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, whose eyes are downcast, hat pulled down over his face, nose tucked into jacket collar, as he boards the plane home — to a hero’s welcome.
Who else should be looking downward, wistfully, at a ground they wish would swallow them up on the spot? Who else toils under the heavy burden of a boulder of guilt and shame on their shoulders? Scottish Justice Minister Kenny MacAskill? The entire Scottish government? Scotland herself? Just the moral imbeciles and reprobates who write overly-obsequious columns defending the decision? Perhaps, as Gerard’s headline says, the entire civilized world?
I vote for the last one.
It’s a topsy-turvy world in which we live. You don’t see these “tributes to our decency” written up about decisions to do things that make it more likely innocent people will live to see another day. No, you don’t; the extension of the right to live, somehow being connected to the personal decency of the authority who decides to make that extension, always seems to be granted to people who would murder others, or who would preserve the lives of those who would murder others.
“Civilized” behavior has come to have something to do with preserving those who destroy, or destroying those who would create or preserve. If you preserve those who create or preserve, or destroy those who would destroy those who would create or preserve, it seems no one’s ready to call you civilized. Those who are ready to call you a barbarian, on the other hand, have to queue up in back of a very long line.
Time to dig out that Bible quote again, you know the one…the one we like…Isaiah 5:20. This time I’ll let you Google it.
Charles Krauthammer exposes an ugly truth about these various efforts we’ve undertaken in the modern age to build our dream Utopian society that works “for the benefit of everyone”: A central pillar to the vision, is now and has always been, one of creating an exclusive club very much like the pigs in George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Unfortunately, he exposes this ugly truth not by realizing it about others and responsibly pointing it out, but by being a part of it.
Let’s see if we can have a reasoned discussion about end-of-life counseling.
We might start by asking Sarah Palin to leave the room. I’ve got nothing against her. She’s a remarkable political talent. But there are no “death panels” in the Democratic health-care bills, and to say that there are is to debase the debate.
Speaking of debasing the debate…if you pop that link open and read it, you’ll see the next several paragraphs after this snide little salvo, Krauthammer goes on to most articulately make Palin’s point.
The good Dr. Melissa goes after the good Dr. Charles with some points he should have been able to realize on his own. The truth is, even when Krauthammer makes Palin’s point apparently without consciously realizing he’s making Palin’s point while telling Palin to shut up, he fails to capture exactly how bad things might get. But the point isn’t lost on Melissa Clouthier any more than it’s lost on Sarah Palin.
Taken on its own, Section 1233 of H.R. 3200 is not a death panel. It’s more a death recommendation.
Dr. Krauthammer forgets though, that this isn’t the only death-related provision of the bill or of this health care legislation generally. The counseling is an indicator of intent. While a doctor is financially incentivized to have a death discussion, the government program will, by nature of sheer numbers, want people to choose, as President Obama says, a “pain pill over surgery.”
Further, the government, and a bureaucratic board of 27 appointees will be deciding care for people. That is, 27 people will be answering questions like: who receives care? Who qualifies? Who doesn’t? In what circumstances? It will be a bureaucratic answer and bureaucrats, who cannot be sued and have no incentive beyond cutting costs and appeasing political special interests. Individual needs will get lost in the collective good. Some people will die because of these choices.
This Utopian society we’ve been trying to build that nobody living or dead has actually seen…I’m just fascinated with it. During the planning and construction, someone is always being excluded from something. Old people should just die, former Governors of Alaska should just shut up, those people shouldn’t be in this town hall because they’re too well dressed.
We’re trying to find a way to get “everyone” covered, no matter what, so nobody’s excluded.
Before we talk about that, we should have Sarah leave the room.
She has the annoying habit of pointing out that this plan might give us an incentive to kill people.
Which, according to Krauthammer’s own words, is exactly right. She’s gotta go.
I would argue that the entire exercise of building this society is, from the foundation on up, riddled with contradictions. It has no clue as to whether it wants to honor the fundamental God-given right of humans to exist and to fight for that right to exist…it doesn’t know. Because its answer to that is both a yes and a no. Both of them rather emphatic. And so it labors under the heavy burden of an inherent contradiction. It ends up fighting itself. That’s why it’s failing.
When Dr. Clouthier cross-posted this at Right Wing News, Commenter CavalierX cut right to the heart of the matter in one deft motion, like a skilled surgeon wielding a sharp scalpel. Every single syllable of his is loaded with wisdom, you know this to be true because every single syllable of it could have been mine.
I generally like Krauthammer, but he’s an ass if he thinks there’s no such thing as a “death panel” just because the words “death panel” don’t appear in the bill that hasn’t been written yet. Someone’s going to have to make decisions on what qualifies people to recieve what treatments, and you can call it a commission, bureau, cabinet, task force or board — they will decide who lives and who dies. “Death panel” is as good a name as any.
It’s rapidly become an “Everyone Else is Blogging It, I Might As Well Too” thing, but I have to do it anyway because it fits into something we’ve been discussing here of late; specifically, is it always a rationally moderate thing to compromise with people? All people? All the time? No matter what their values are?
The Lockerbie bomber has been freed on “compassionate grounds”:
The only man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing returned home Thursday to a cheering crowd after his release from a Scottish prison — an outrage to many relatives of the 270 people who perished when Pan Am Flight 103 exploded.
President Barack Obama said the Scottish decision to free terminally ill Abdel Baset al-Megrahi on compassionate grounds was a mistake and said he should be under house arrest. Obama warned Libya not to give him a hero’s welcome.
Despite the warning, thousands of young men were on hand at a Tripoli airport where al-Megrahi’s plane touched down. Some threw flower petals as he stepped from the plane. He wore a a dark suit and a burgundy tie and appeared visibly tired.
He was accompanied by Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi’s son, Saif al-Islam Gadhafi, who was dressed in a traditional white robe and golden embroidered vest. The son pledged last year to bring al-Megrahi home and raised his hand victoriously to the crowd as he exited the plane. They then sped off in a convoy of white sedans.
International photographers and camera crews — along with most Libyan broadcast media — were barred from filming the arrival at the airport, which decades ago had been part of a U.S. air base.
Al-Megrahi’s release disgusted many victims’ relatives.
“You get that lump in your throat and you feel like you’re going to throw up,” said Norma Maslowski, of Haddonfield, New Jersey, whose 30-year-old daughter, Diane, died in the attack.
“This isn’t about compassionate release. This is part of give-Gadhafi-what-he-wants-so-we-can-have-the-oil,” said Susan Cohen, of Cape May Court House, New Jersey. Her 20-year-old daughter, Theodora, was killed.
I am not questioning the humanity of the Lockerbie bomber.
I am challenging the civil nature of those who freed him. They turned justice on its head for no better reason than to prove what swell folks they are. What they really accomplished was the exact opposite.
They’re worse than creeps. They have revealed a code of “ethics” that besmirches whatever contract comes into contact with it. Forget about governing a jurisdiction; people like this can’t be trusted to know right from wrong any better than a dog can be trusted to pay a mortgage on time.
First proposed in 1966 and named after Columbia University sociologists Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, the “Cloward-Piven Strategy” seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.
Inspired by the August 1965 riots in the black district of Watts in Los Angeles (which erupted after police had used batons to subdue a black man suspected of drunk driving), Cloward and Piven published an article titled “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty” in the May 2, 1966 issue of The Nation. Following its publication, The Nation sold an unprecedented 30,000 reprints. Activists were abuzz over the so-called “crisis strategy” or “Cloward-Piven Strategy,” as it came to be called. Many were eager to put it into effect.
In their 1966 article, Cloward and Piven charged that the ruling classes used welfare to weaken the poor; that by providing a social safety net, the rich doused the fires of rebellion. Poor people can advance only when “the rest of society is afraid of them,” Cloward told The New York Times on September 27, 1970. Rather than placating the poor with government hand-outs, wrote Cloward and Piven, activists should work to sabotage and destroy the welfare system; the collapse of the welfare state would ignite a political and financial crisis that would rock the nation; poor people would rise in revolt; only then would “the rest of society” accept their demands.
The key to sparking this rebellion would be to expose the inadequacy of the welfare state. Cloward-Piven’s early promoters cited radical organizer Saul Alinsky as their inspiration. “Make the enemy live up to their (sic) own book of rules,” Alinsky wrote in his 1972 book Rules for Radicals. When pressed to honor every word of every law and statute, every Judaeo-Christian moral tenet, and every implicit promise of the liberal social contract, human agencies inevitably fall short. The system’s failure to “live up” to its rule book can then be used to discredit it altogether, and to replace the capitalist “rule book” with a socialist one.
:
This was an example of what are commonly called Trojan Horse movements — mass movements whose outward purpose seems to be providing material help to the downtrodden, but whose real objective is to draft poor people into service as revolutionary foot soldiers; to mobilize poor people en masse to overwhelm government agencies with a flood of demands beyond the capacity of those agencies to meet. The flood of demands was calculated to break the budget, jam the bureaucratic gears into gridlock, and bring the system crashing down. Fear, turmoil, violence and economic collapse would accompany such a breakdown — providing perfect conditions for fostering radical change. That was the theory.
:
The Cloward-Piven strategy depended on surprise. Once society recovered from the initial shock, the backlash began. New York’s welfare crisis horrified America, giving rise to a reform movement which culminated in “the end of welfare as we know it” — the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which imposed time limits on federal welfare, along with strict eligibility and work requirements. Both Cloward and Piven attended the White House signing of the bill as guests of President Clinton.
:
Cloward and Piven never again revealed their intentions as candidly as they had in their 1966 article. Even so, their activism in subsequent years continued to rely on the tactic of overloading the system. When the public caught on to their welfare scheme, Cloward and Piven simply moved on, applying pressure to other sectors of the bureaucracy, wherever they detected weakness.
Let’s not negotiate with these people. No matter what. Let’s just renounce this supposedly-noble objective of trying to find a midpoint or “common ground.”
I’ve spent a lifetime having it beaten into my head that only crazy old men in plaid shirts crusted with their own drool babble on about anything that comes close to “communists trying to ruin our way of life and tear down our country.”
But as I learn more about the turmoil that was taking place around the time of my birth, I find the facts point more and more toward this as the proper way to look at things. You don’t need to drink vodka and wear a big fur hat with a red star on the front to be a commie.
And negotiating with one is like negotiating with a rattlesnake. It is the straddling of a divide that stretches from one universe to a wholly incompatible other universe. It is a compromise between order and anarchy, creation and destruction, good and evil. It doesn’t take much at all to deserve a spot at a conference table, but one unalterable standard must be that you have to want a spot at the conference table. And commies don’t want one. They just want to tear things down.
Hat tip to Boortz.
We’ve all heard it, or most of us have heard it…over, and over, and over, and over and over again. This is, I believe, an enormous mistake on the part of those who are trying to impress us with the audio. There is so much taken away with discarding the visual.
For one thing, it’s a whole new level of funny. I laughed my ass off. And the other thing, perhaps closely related to the first thing, is…I’m somewhat inclined to see things Bill’s way here. The older I get, the more of a visceral reaction I have to the unclear instruction. You know how “unclear” is an anagram of “nuclear”? That’s because of me. Good instructions, most folks can follow — that’s why they’re good instructions. Shitty instructions take a special skill, and I don’t gots it. The more life challenges me to produce this talent I don’t gots, that I never once in my life implied to a single soul I gots, the more aggravated I gets. Big time. It’s like a one-legged man being challenged to kick butts. The five hundredth time, you’re ready to stand up on something, break something, and yell “I get it I get it I get it I get it, everyone can do it I can’t! Now stop it already!” I can feel the blood getting hotter as it is piped up into my head through my jugular. Maybe there’s more Irish in me than I thought.
Earlier this week I was in traffic court being led down this line and that line like a head of stupid livestock…and yet, even though I was livestock, I was still being called upon to make decisions. Nobody there understood these decisions. Rampant confusion. The impulse was damn near irresistible to jump up on the nearest table and yell at the top of my lungs, “Mutherfuckers, if it came naturally to us to follow shitty instructions we wouldn’t be here in the first place!”
But ya know, maybe that wouldn’t have gone over so well.
Bill O’Reilly shows wisdom (well…limited…this is the age of the YouTubes) in knowing where he can throw a temper tantrum. But he’s no more sanitized than I in his use of the King’s English, so watch your volume level and share the experience with some mature hardy souls who might appreciate it.
They’re gunnin’ fer the gals:
A nationwide crackdown on drunken driving that starts tomorrow will feature sobriety checkpoints, saturation patrols and a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign.
It also will focus on women, who represent a growing percentage of drunken drivers, U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said yesterday.
“Impaired driving is an issue that cuts across all segments of society and, sadly, the number of arrests of women driving under the influence is on the rise. This is clearly a very disturbing trend,” Mr. LaHood said at a news conference in Washington, D.C.
He cited FBI statistics showing that arrests of women driving under the influence increased by nearly 30 percent from 1998 to 2007. Over the same period, DUI arrests of men decreased by 7.5 percent, although men still were arrested four times as often as women.
An analysis by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration showed that the number of impaired women drivers involved in fatal crashes increased in 10 states last year, including Ohio and West Virginia, despite an overall decline of 9 percent in drunken driver crashes. In Pennsylvania, the number of female drunken drivers in fatal crashes declined from 67 in 2007 to 54 last year.
“Women are driving more like men and, unfortunately, have picked up some of their dangerous habits,” said Barbara Harsha, executive director of the Governors Highway Safety Association, which is participating in the enforcement blitz.
Hmmm. I think this one, I’ll just leave up there…without comment. Quit while ahead.
And we didn’t get here by saying “Oh, we’re willing to compromise and be moderate…that proves we’re reasonable…” We got here by the opposition being unreasonable. And with everyone realizing that on their own.
A certain faithful reader needed to see that. Now then. On with the dancing.