A rather abundant number of years ago, I became aware of a whole subculture of humanity that I suspect exists within all societies that get things done. I shall call it, until such time as a better phrasing comes along, the “All Those Not Volunteering Take One Step Back” culture. A task arises, executive in nature, one that cannot be achieved by a committee or even by a trio or duo; it demands a singular pair of hands and an investment of effort and energy that may or may not be significant. And out come the excuses: I don’t know how, that’s not my field, I’m not authorized, I’m dyslexic, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The disability varies — the outcome remains the same. No action forthcoming from this quadrant; look elsewhere. One cannot help but wonder how they would respond to a real crisis. The house must burn all the way to the ground, because no hose is available and your wrists are too feeble to carry a bucket even half-full?

There is some military humor to the effect that this is a long-standing tradition in certain branches of our armed forces. I reckon there must be some truth in it, but it certainly cannot be completely so. How in the world could my nation ever have become a superpower, with the troops responsible for the killing-of-people and breaking-of-things all waiting around for the next fella to deal out the mayhem? That would be like having no military at all, and countries with no military at all, do not become countries like the United States. And from even just a cursory reading of our history, to say nothing of our present headlines, I know better than that.

I’m not so sure of our future, though. Hours ago I mused on what I suppose I can call — again, until a better phrasing presents itself — the Matthews Mindset, after Chris Matthews. Mr. Matthews seems to think it’s vitriolic to recognize so much as the possibility of a difference between what President Obama wants, and what’s good for the country. Just a fistful of hours before becoming aware of Matthews’ childish tantrum, coincidentally, I had opined about a nominally different, but strongly related, issue. And that would be the one that involes the fans of Barack Obama who gauge our society’s health by the yardstick of nationwide, unanimous fidelity to His vision, without bothering themselves to learn anything about what His vision might be:

Just realized something about these folks. You’d think, as much attention as I’m forced to pay to them, and as much attention as I continue to pay to them when I’m no longer forced to, there would eventually be a point of complete saturation. But it would seem if I am indeed bright enough to reach that point, it’s taking me awhile to get there.

They don’t give a rat’s ass what policies are implemented. The One could invade Iran tomorrow at noon, and Planet Obamafan would be erupting into a standing ovation.

They don’t care about what consequences, good or bad, result from the policies. Dow is tumbling, as Buck points out — is it alright with them if the rest of us notice it? NO! We should look the other way.

So they don’t care about the goals, they don’t care about the methods implemented to reach the goals…it logically follows, any one point between those two ends, likewise, they don’t care about it.

They care about who’s running things. Obama won, they say, and He won by something decisive. Therefore, let’s all get behind Him…the important thing is to be unified.

If it was a valid claim that The One was victorious to some extent that equates to virtual unanimity, it would be a silly, useless and redundant exercise to dish out instructions to show some sense of unity that is already there. But the real point here, is, these people do not want the economy fixed. They just want everyone to be on the same page — that is how they do their thinking, through a process of sanitization. They’re exercising a gut-instinct…seek out whoever might be from a rival village, and “fix” the situation until there are no rival villages. How they really intend to do that fixing, perhaps if they thought that through a little bit more, made some commitments to what they are & are not willing to do, they’d be a little bit less frightening.

This is the danger involved in the “All Those Not Volunteering Take One Step Back” culture. In engaging some of the Obamatons in what they laughingly call a “spirited debate,” I have come to be surprised, and almost shocked, at how little they know about what exactly is being done by The Chosen One for whom they’ll go to such great lengths to provide a passionate defense. There seems to be a link between this dogged determination to hide whatever individual ability might be tapped by a community, and in being so tapped, might demand some inconveniently-timed effort; and, this parallel dogged determination to force all others in proximity, to agree to the wisdom and beneficiality involved in policies of which the advocate isn’t even aware, even at a generalized, abstract level. To put it another way: The folks who can’t be relied-upon to do anything to help out, and seem so adamant at perpetually insisting they cannot be so relied-upon, have it in mind that all others around them should say things and do things exactly the same way.

To put it more concisely still: Those who insist on giving up all the time, suddenly are determined to win, when the contest becomes one of convincing others to give up.

It kind of overlaps with Everything I Know About People, Minus What I Was Told When I Was A Child, Items 4, 11, 14, 15, 21, 24 and 25.

People who don’t work hard, don’t want anyone else to work hard either.
People who don’t exercise their right to free speech, don’t want anyone else speaking freely either.
People who don’t make a material success of themselves and their efforts, don’t want anyone else to prosper either.
People who have been duped by something and have come to realize it, want everyone else to be duped in the same way.
People who won’t take the initiative to see what needs doing and do it, don’t want anyone else to take the initiative either.
People who imagine themselves as part of a group, with no individual identity, don’t want anyone else to have an individual identity either.
People who can’t solve problems because they don’t think rationally, work pretty hard to avoid acknowledging that someone else solved a problem.

These traits defy theories of both Intelligent Design, and Evolution, alike. If we acquired them during Creation, surely they must have come from the snake and the apple. But if we acquired them through evolution, it must have been a ripple. It certainly isn’t a case of survival-of-the-fittest!

And yet, we do have these ugly traits. Or some folks do. We’ve all seen ’em. This job comes up, that job comes up, that other job over there comes up…and…oh, I’m too stupid. I don’t know how. I have a phobia. I’m too weak. Don’t count on me. I need special instruction.

Every single time the teacher needs the erasers cleaned, they avoid eye contact. Perhaps that is where it germinates; perhaps it is this notion that any & all work an individual must do, that all others don’t have to do, is some sort of punishment.

At any rate, it just flabbergasts me that we can have so many people walking around cheering President Obama along like some demigod, while He tosses around a few words here and there about “personal responsibility” — aren’t they listening? And then they treat any disagreement with His policies almost as some sort of crime. While showing, at times, a spellbinding level of ignorance about what exactly those policies are.

Perhaps, for them, it is a chance to feel involved with something, like you’re making an individual contribution to something and, through this individual action or these individual actions, are altering the outcome. Perhaps, for them, this is a precious feeling. Precious because, as the years roll on by, it comes up so infrequently.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News.

David Frum’s feelings are hurt:

…I’ve received a great deal of e-mail. Most of these e-mails say some version of the same thing: if you don’t agree with Rush [Limbaugh], quit calling yourself a conservative and get out of the Republican Party. There’s the perfect culmination of the outlook Rush Limbaugh has taught his fans and followers: we want to transform the party of Lincoln, Eisenhower and Reagan into a party of unanimous dittoheads—and we don’t care how much the party has to shrink to do it. That’s not the language of politics. It’s the language of a cult.

Yeah, I think I know why they’re saying that to you, and it doesn’t have a whole lot to do with cults. It has to do with some of the outlandish things you’re saying:

Rush Limbaugh is a seriously unpopular figure among the voters that conservatives and Republicans need to reach. Forty-one percent of independents have an unfavorable opinion of him, according to the new NEWSWEEK Poll. Limbaugh is especially off-putting to women: his audience is 72 percent male, according to Pew Research. Limbaugh himself acknowledges his unpopularity among women. On his Feb. 24 broadcast, he said with a chuckle: “Thirty-one-point gender gaps don’t come along all that often … Given this massive gender gap in my personal approval numbers … it seems reasonable for me to convene a summit.”

Limbaugh was kidding about the summit. But his quip acknowledged something that eludes many of those who would make him the arbiter of Republican authenticity: from a political point of view, Limbaugh is kryptonite, weakening the GOP nationally. No Republican official will say that; Limbaugh demands absolute deference from the conservative world, and he generally gets it. When offended, he can extract apologies from Republican members of Congress, even the chairman of the Republican National Committee.

So people like Frum don’t get any of that sweet, sweet deference that is so regularly plied upon the unpopular Limbaugh. How unfair.

Frum goes on…

Look at America’s public-policy problems, look at voting trends, and it’s inescapably obvious that the Republican Party needs to evolve. We need to put free-market health-care reform, not tax cuts, at the core of our economic message. It’s health-care costs that are crushing middle-class incomes. Between 2000 and 2006, the amount that employers paid for labor rose substantially. Employees got none of that money; all of it was absorbed by rising health-care costs. Meanwhile, the income-tax cuts offered by Republicans interest fewer and fewer people: before the recession, two thirds of American workers paid more in payroll taxes than in income taxes.

We need to modulate our social conservatism (not jettison—modulate). The GOP will remain a predominantly conservative party and a predominantly pro-life party. But especially on gay-rights issues, the under-30 generation has arrived at a new consensus. Our party seems to be running to govern a country that no longer exists. The rule that both our presidential and vice presidential candidates must always be pro-life has become counterproductive: McCain’s only hope of winning the presidency in 2008 was to carry Pennsylvania, and yet Pennsylvania’s most successful Republican vote winner, former governor Tom Ridge, was barred from the ticket because he’s pro-choice.

Frum is undecided about whether he wants to bellyache about people not being liked because they make too much sense, or about people not making enough sense because they’re too busy trying to be liked. To him, it seems, likability trumps reason and logic if, and only if, you’re talking about the right people doing the liking or not-liking: Non-conservatives.

Mr. Frum, I think that might be why you’re getting the mail. Your core message is that conservative principles don’t count.

Here’s an idea. Why don’t you publish a brand-new article called “I Told You So,” pointing back to this one, to be put into print once we have a chance to see which policies work? Zowee! Is that a paradigm shift or what? That would involve educating oneself on reality, rather than fixating on personalities and popularity contests like some smitten fifteen-year-old girl.

Do you realize how many times, just in the twentieth century, conservatives lost the affections of the electorate in a big, big way? Lessee…I think we should go ahead and count William Jennings Bryan, although he never did actually triumph…we should give it to Wilson even though he got a decisive benefit from the vote-splitting in 1912…Roosevelt in 1932…Camelot…Watergate…Iran-Contra…The Man From Hope.

It seems escape velocity from Planet Conservative is never quite reached. Something keeps pulling us back in. What would you think that is? Is it that conservatives are so seductive, so smooth and silky, such good speakers, so freakin’ fun? Or could it be the Diebold machines?

Heh. It is to laugh.

Nope, it’s reality. To see what I’m talking about, just catch a plane ticket to any big city run by a solid majority of democrats. Walk around in the seedier sections of that town for awhile. Buy some coffee. Buy some groceries. Buy some gas. Bend the rules a little, fire off a pellet gun in your backyard, throw some batteries in the garbage and tell people about it. Get a job without belonging to a union.

Live there long enough to be on both sides of the law. Get mugged. Have your car keyed.

You vote for a solution that sounds good, but isn’t…you vote for another one, and another one…you watch all these things get implemented and then turn to crap. You watch your government go into debt, and then step into the money-lending market as the 800-pound gorilla on the consuming side of that counter…inflation skyrockets. Crime skyrockets too. Women violated, kids abducted, old people mugged — people get tired of this after awhile.

Limbaugh is unpolished and unappealing because he can afford to be. After living in a crime-infested, over-inflationed, crude-oil-deprived fantasy land for awhile, people don’t care what other people look like. They start to care more about ideas and reality.

So conservatives don’t need to change a damn thing.

They just need to identify, and reject, people like you. Good for them.

Dr. Melissa has yet another delicious rant up about the moderates and all the damage they dealt to this fine nation four months ago. Not that we needed it, she already had us thinking long and hard about what it means to be, what in this day and age, we call a “moderate.”

I had already put together a little list. It’s in David-Letterman format — the reason why I did this, probably won’t become clear until you get all the way through it.

TOP TEN THINGS YOU NEED TO DO TO BE, WHAT IN THIS DAY AND AGE, WE CALL A “MODERATE”:

10. Consistently reject anything extreme, for that is the essence of moderation. It is, isn’t it?
9. Keep current with what other people think is extreme, for if you are adhering only to your own notions of what’s moderate, you aren’t a true moderate.
8. Only extremists will dismiss an idea because of a bleak outcome. So be an idea packrat. Use the failed ideas, as if they worked. Use them over and over again. In fact, the only idea you should ever reject, is the idea that sometimes an idea has earned rejection.
7. Hear from all sides before deciding anything. That includes gathering opinions from the ignorant.
6. That also includes gathering opinions from the insane. Treat these opinions as if they came from sane people.
5. That even includes gathering opinions from sworn enemies, or anyone with interests contrary to yours. Treat these opinions as if they came from friends. Also, gather opinions from agenda-driven zealots who don’t agree with you about the virtues of moderation.
4. Give equal weight and merit, deserved or not, to everything you hear. Moderation-versus-extremism must be your *only* litmus test for ideas, and those who profer them.
3. Don’t concern yourself with facts. Moderation demands only a working knowledge of what others are thinking. Facts occasionally persuade people to reject some things, and there’s nothing moderate about that.
2. There is a “blue line” among moderates. An attack upon a moderate — or someone simply calling himself one — is an attack on YOU. Fight!

AND THE NUMBER ONE THING YOU NEED TO DO TO BE WHAT, IN THIS DAY AND AGE, WE CALL A “MODERATE”…

1. Be an extremist. As ardent, as dedicated, as pugnacious, as hot-blooded, impetuous, slobbering and foolish as there has ever been. In all of human history.

Now, think on this long and hard — vis a vis some of the “moderates” you know. It’s true, isn’t it? Moderates do not reject…anything. Ever. Even when they voted against McCain/Palin, they didn’t even reject that. It was more of a…mmm, well, there’s a certain amount of coolness involved in the Hockey Mom and the old guy…there’s a certain surplus amount of coolness involved in those two lawyers over there, so I’ll vote for the lawyers.

Moderates cannot, will not, won’t ever, never did, reject something. They are incapable of forming the words, on the tongue or in the noggin — “That there is a dumbass idea that’s been given a lot of chances, we’re all done gambling things on it fer good.” They can’t do this. They’re like really old men living in houses with all manner of worthless crap in the attic and basement. Can’t pitch anything out.

That would be far too extreme.

And so they end up being extremists without knowing it. They end up re-defining their goal in life to be nothing but a big fat zero; then, tragedy of tragedies, they fail at even that.

A little bit less of the “Once they come together, Americans can do anything!” tonight…from both sides…

…a little bit more of “Once Americans are left to solve problems as individuals, using their own best judgment, they can do anything!” …or… “Once Americans are restored the freedom and liberty God intended for them to have, they can do anything!”

— that would have been like a long, tall, cool drink of water after weeks of wandering in the desert.

I guess this just isn’t the right time for that kind of message. Oh well. Just a little bit of waiting, I’m sure being able to do things will come back in style. A little bit of waiting and a little bit more suffering. No point wondering about any of it. It’ll happen. The longer we stay enamored of “coming together” as opposed to actually doing constructive things…the more suffering we’re going to do…we’ll do just as much of it as we have to, to learn. Not one speck less. Guaranteed.

Update: Yeah, if you’re bright you already got this figured out. I’m trashing Jindal some more; that was his central point, the die-hard liberal-lefty tagline “Together We Can Do This!!” Thought he’d take a page out of their playbook, get the Manhattan boob-tube blue-blooders to like him for a few minutes. Poor dumb bastard.

They’re trashing him. On Fox.

We already held a vote on whether we like imitation-democrats with the letter “R” after their names, Bobby. The guy who tried that got creamed. It’s gonna stay that way for awhile.

You make the Republican party the party of individualism, can-do, real-freedom, kick-bad-guys’-asses, individuality-and-reason…the Party of Eratosthenes…the Party of Aristotle…it’ll be like Lincoln to Hoover without Wilson in-between. With much better results.

I promise. Really. It’s woven into our fabric. This country is just a whole lot of individualist bedrock with just some flimsy phony flibbertigibbet socialist topsoil.

Be the leader this country craves, and it’ll beat a path to your door. Yeah maybe people won’t admit their mistakes. But they’ll fix ’em once given an opportunity.

If it wasn’t in our genetic makeup, we’d have a Prime Minister by now, we’d be running on the metric system, our “football” players would be kicking a round white ball around in their short pants, nobody would have guns including the cops, and we’d probably even be driving on the wrong goddamned side of the road.

And don’t even ask what would be going on in Iraq right now. Yeah. I said it, I went there.

This is America, a .44 magnum revolver in a pellet-gun world. People are all cluck-clucking that we went and brandished the sidearm…there was a robbery in progress, it was more than called-for…but contrary to the blue-blood talking points, nothing’s been discharged — and meanwhile, we’re getting shaken down. We just got driven to our bank machine, to yank the last $300 out of our checking account, at knifepoint…when our credit cards are already maxed. That happened. Tonight. In fact, it’s worse than that, we’re expected to thank the guy who just robbed us. No, more than that, join a cult that worships Him as if He were some kind of God.

The sleeping giant will awaken. At some point, it has to. My prayers, and my bets, are on-or-before 2012. Let it be.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News.

The observation made by Dr. Melissa has me thinking more about that oldest of societal artifacts, the taboo. Taboos are fascinating because they have maximum effect on all of us, while involving an absolute minimum of cognitive thought.

I thought I’d start some lists:

Ten Societal Taboos I Can Get Behind:
1. Men don’t hit women.
2. Men hold out seats for women, open doors for women, hold umbrellas over womens’ heads.
3. A preposition is not something you end a sentence with.
4. You don’t say anything bad about someone’s race, because it’s intellectually lazy, and there’s nothing they could do about it if they wanted to.
5. Say “please” and “thank you.”
6. Don’t use George Carlin’s Seven Dirty Words in a blog post…or at least, the headline of a blog post.
7. Take your hat off when you’re indoors.
8. Don’t do anything, or say anything, to old people you wouldn’t want said to you when you’re an old person.
9. Drive with your high beams turned off, when you see a car approaching.
10. Put your goddamn apostrophes in the right place. Don’t use them in front of the “S” letter when it’s used for plurals.

Ten Societal Taboos I Cannot Get Behind:
1. Keep your kids away from anything that might be dangerous.
2. You can’t say anything bad about single moms, and that includes pointing out the disadvantages kids have in single-parent households.
3. Men shouldn’t go to Hooters because it’s a “strip bar.”
4. Reporters are better than bloggers.
5. You have no standing to expect to make a living, if you don’t 1) join a union, 2) go to a college, 3) have a house/wife/kids.
6. Men shouldn’t even want to do things women wouldn’t want to do…let alone actually do them.
7. Don’t say anything bad about someone’s religion…unless they’re Christians then it’s quite alright. After all, they’re not cutting anyone’s head off.
8. Don’t own a gun, fire a gun, look at a gun, tell your kids about guns.
9. Don’t hunt.
10. Don’t talk like a real, full-grown man in front of little kids. Use a phony voice that starts out an octave above middle-C, and goes up from there.

Ten Societal Taboos I Would Like To See:
1. Wear your goddamn ball cap on your head front-wards, and make sure your pants cover up your ass crack.
2. Don’t speculate on someone being a clueless idiot if you haven’t personally met ’em. Let’s call this the “Sarah Palin rule.”
3. Wives, I don’t wanna hear about it when you gave your man a bunch of guff about nothing. If he asked nicely for you to bring him a beer, bring him one.
4. Jocks don’t pick on nerds. You’ll have to kiss their asses later on when you work for them. You really might as well start now.
5. Drive the same speed when there isn’t a cop, as when there is one. Keep it reasonable and you don’t need to care about whether he’s watching.
6. Girls and women who wanna date the “bad boy,” are stupid and nobody respects them. That’s the situation anyway. Might as well say so.
7. Don’t get your news from The Daily Show. You’re telling people this isn’t true. So make it not-true. Get your news somewhere else.
8. Expounding upon #7: Don’t watch the teevee, read a book instead.
9. Taking your kids to see a “Doofus Dad” movie is tantamount to child abuse.
10. Making a “Doofus Dad” movie is sexist. Because it is.

Maybe I should make some kind of blogger game out of this. As in, “Come up with your own and tag five others.”

But thinking on that again, if I heard of a new taboo against inventing games like those, I wouldn’t be entirely opposed to it. So tell you what, if you like my idea and you want to make such a game out of it, tag away.

With Obama administration officials and feminists running around, half-cocked, saying exactly the opposite of what they mean, the time has come to review my list of opposite words.

 • Everyone;
 • Science;
 • Diversity;
 • Tolerance;
 • Skeptic(ism).

This is going to have to be lengthened, today as well as in the four years ahead.

It’s missing “frank,” “dialogue,” “freedom” and “choice.”

People who want frankness don’t want frankness, people who want freedom aren’t willing to shoulder the associated burdens, people who want dialogues want anything but a dialogue, and people who want “choice” are enchanted with the prospect of controlling what others do.

One more thing, and I’m not sure if it qualifies as a true “opposite”: I’ve long been noticing that people who say if we “all come together we can get this done,” seem to be dedicated to that coming-together and not too much else; they can dole out vast volumes of words across great expanses of time, without ever applying true specificity to what the “this” is.

My goodness, it would seem that big, bad ol’ stinky economy has us down in the dumps. I’m seeing a common theme in what makes a good article.

It seems to have something to do with “Why Wasn’t I Good Enough”? Or, to be more precise about it, “Why Wasn’t I Ordinary Enough?” If you see the page pictured and click on the first link I circled, you’ll be taken here and you can read all about how & why a grown-up little-boy might be naturally selected for extinction in the Darwinist second-date sweepstakes. Too much attitude, ranted about old girlfriends, oggled other women. Not a single word about the big killer: You didn’t show enough of your personality, and she doesn’t understand why you’d be a better pick than any one of a bunch of other guys she could second-date any time she wants.

I look at “dating advice” like this, as something pretty simple. If it is indeed accepted as “advice,” it creates more of what is in abundance already. And in this case, that something is fear. Fear of being remarkable. Men aren’t supposed to anything as individuals. It’s quite sexy for them to go through the motions — the “rebel” thing — just don’t really do anything in life that way. Make individuality a fashion statement, and nothing more.

You’ll see the link at the bottom is pretty much the same thing (however, if you click on that one, you’ll find the subheadline is more accurate than the headline). Now this is truly worthy of note and comment: My regular page full of useless, puffy trash-tabloid headlines from MSN, and three out of nine of them — a third! — are directly concerned with addressing the fears people have of being put on the outs.

This is not a good thing. People who are too concerned about doing the right things to keep from being rejected, tend to worry overly much about “staying inside the lines” — don’t do anything, at at least nobody can accuse you of doing anything weird. It doesn’t come quite so easily to us to worry about performing. Sure, we’ll go through the motions of it. “Do what you’re supposed to do,” just like back in the third or fourth grade. What goes unmentioned is that sometimes “supposed-to-do” has to do with sitting still, remaining humdrum, so as not to threaten anybody else.

It happens a lot in the world of dating as well as in the world of work. Some truly available young women go on first-dates with several guys at once; now, who do you think is going to get the second date? The free-lance photographer, or the oh-so-polite guy who does…y’know, I can’t quite remember what he does for a living?

The point is — if you do something noteworthy on an individual level, the whole “not selected for extinction” thing tends to work itself out, y’know? But because that tends to raise the bar a little bit on everyone else, our tendency is to see that as a destructive thing, and therefore to discourage it. Just do the same things everyone else is doing, and “the economy” will eventually get better.

That isn’t going to cut it. An economy is a vast network of individuals doing remarkable things. For it to hum along, someone’s gotta go first. Build something. Buy something. Perform some services someone can’t get anywhere else.

It all starts with someone who doesn’t give a good Goddamn what “everyone” thinks. That’s how America got here in the first place y’know.

So if the whore’s too stupid to agree to a second date, go meet up with someone who isn’t.

Thing I Know #125. They tell me rules are needed for civilization, but I notice civilization is needed for the rules. Civilization arises from where a wild frontier was tamed. On the taming of a wild frontier by a rulebook, history stands mute.

I was scanning over fellow Right Wing News contributor Dr. Melissa Clouthier‘s thoughts about the way Sarah Palin was treated in the election last year. I thought it would be good to jot down some theories I’ve had rattling around in my head, which I can’t prove but can’t disprove either. Some of them cannot remain in this uncertain state with the passage of time, so this should be a handy list to keep on hand in the years ahead.

Had womens’ suffrage never been enacted, Sarah Palin would be the President right now.

Yeah, that one can’t ever be proven or disproven. And, obviously, what I mean to say is “if somehow the chicks could run but couldn’t vote.” And then there’s the matter of that old guy she was running with, whose name escapes me.

People who dislike Sarah Palin, by and large, hate her. Most of them are women. The men who do this, write like women and they probably throw baseballs that way too.

Those men would not be able to take on the average Palin-voting man in a fist fight. I doubt like hell they could prevail in an election…among just men. Nope, so far, every manly-men I’ve met, likes and respects Sarah Palin — or, at the very least, while voting against her nevertheless acknowledged she was probably qualified for the office she sought.

An indispensible part of this frothy anti-Palin rage that possessed so much weight in determining the election outcome last year, was female jealousy. I never did see the gentlemen contribute much toward the “come hate Palin with us!” movement. Crab-in-a-bucket syndrome. You’re prettier than me, and I’ll be damned if you’re going to live in the White House when I won’t be…said the other women.

If womens’ suffrage revoked the right to vote from men, we’d still make it to 2009 without a single female President.

Getting a female in the House of Representatives or the Senate is relatively easy, because most women would be willing to do it. You stick out when you want to, the rest of the time you fade into the crowd of fellow senators. It takes an unusual woman to fill an executive position — one in which, sometimes, you might wish the ground would swallow you up and cloak you in comforting anonymity, but you simply don’t have that option. Parents and teachers who are responsible for the upbringing of both boys and girls, will readily admit, they inculcate the boys to this uncomfortable position with much more regularity and vigor than the girls. If they don’t admit that, they’re damned liars.

Boys and girls are simply not brought up the same way. To presume men and women are exactly the same, is just stupid. To continue to think so, against the evidence that comes along to assault your theory, is borderline insane. Women tend to recoil from the prospect of sticking out from the crowd. Many women don’t recoil from this, but if they are indeed ready to take on the challenges of true individuality, they’re ready in a way different from the equivalent gentleman because they’ll insist on doing it on their terms. They tend to insist on more control over it than men do.

Ridicule? That’s quite out of the question. This is why, when you see a television commercial about a pain reliever or a cleaning product, even a cleaning product that has to do with cars, when one half of the married couple is using “Brand X” and in need of correction, it’s the man. Men can take ridicule.

People say a lot about what it’s like to be President of the United States; most of the folks who comment about this, like me, have never been President. So allow me to join their ranks with a contribution no one’s quite made yet, at least, not very often: When you’re the United States President, someone, somewhere, is going to make a fool out of you. Often. And you’ll know it. If you’re not cool with that, it’s not the job you should be seeking.

Women are smart. And they don’t need to be told…most of them should not be seeking this job. So they don’t. We do not have any sinister, wrinkly, old, “Wear Neckties At Midnight” white-guy star chambers with secret handshakes conspiring to keep women out of the White House.

We don’t need ’em for that. It’s the women. Most of them just don’t want to go there.

If Nancy Pelosi didn’t have two years to show us how awful a “First Woman X” could be, Hillary would’ve been nominated.

The “oppressed black male” victim card kicked the “oppressed woman” victim card’s ass twice last year.

And good.

We’re just not all that thrilled with seeing the “First Woman X” anymore. In fact, if the first woman to walk on the moon took her stroll tomorrow at high noon, you wouldn’t know anything about it, and you wouldn’t know anything about it because you wouldn’t want to know anything about it.

“First Women” don’t necessarily have to be good women. They have at least the potential to be downright lousy. No one says that, but just about everyone knows it, and acts on it — and they know it because Speaker Nan has been a terrible House Speaker.

If a major political party nominated a candidate-of-color more rational and soothing than Jesse Jackson, we could’ve had a black President years ago.

Because no bigotry really got defeated in November of 2008. What happened was, in November 2008, we found out that if it is indeed around, it is incapable of dictating the outcome of an election like we had been led to believe.

How long has that been going on? We don’t know, because the only person-of-color to be seriously nominated by a major political party, was a nut. And I’m being generous with my use of the phrase “seriously nominated.”

President Obama needs to find a new gimmick in 2012, or else make some retirement plans.

This one, I think I can bet some money on.

There won’t be any “thing” for people to “be a part of.”

And we will have had four years to see what Obama policies really look like (last year, it was considered rude to even inquire as to what they might be). Seeing the wreckage of forty-eight months of policies enacted, was more than enough to sour us on Jimmy Carter.

If Sarah Palin looked more like Madeleine Albright, she would’ve received much better treatment.

I’ll bet money on that too.

Sarah Palin received a great deal of abuse — because she’s pretty. Underqualified? Cut me a megaton break. Check out some of the ugly liberal democrat women serving under the capitol dome — or better yet, some of the ugly liberal democrat women who weren’t elected to anything at all, and simply wrote some screeching feminist bromide book. Imagine them held to some litmus test, sensible or otherwise, vis a vis “qualifications.”

Average-looking women don’t like pretty women. Not unless the pretty woman keeps her mouth shut, her opinions to herself, and floats around as a bit of human fluff, completely harmless, capable of being a universal peer to…whoever. Good looks, strong opinion, support from fellow females: She can pick just two of those.

Nine out of ten Obama voters who think Sarah Palin is an underqualified embarrassment, can’t list from memory three things Palin really said.

They get so cranky when you point out they get their news from Saturday Night Live, and The Daily Show. No they don’t! No they don’t! They watch Keith Olbermann too!

Nice try, but if you talk to them for a few minutes you realize they really do get their news from The Daily Show.

And so far, every embarrassing “gaffe” they attribute to Palin, actually came out of the mouth of Tina Fey. Occasionally I’ll meet one who understands Palin said something slightly different, and can recite her actual statement, insisting that’s just as embarrassing as the way Fey re-worded it. But that’s the power of comedy for you. What Palin said wasn’t really just as embarrassing, or even, embarrassing at all. If it was, there’d be no need to re-word it. And no currency awarded to Tina Fey, for having done so.

What liberals love about America, is what they love about America after America has been “changed.”

We’ll be such a wonderful country, as soon as we finish dishing out some endless litany of apologies.

You single, available studs out there, I’d like you to start wooing the object of your affection this way. Shower her with platitudes about how wonderful she will be when you’re done changing her.

Bet you won’t win that election. You might even get a restraining order filed against you.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News.

The fifty-fourth Best Sentence I’ve Heard Or Read Lately (BSIHORL) award goes out this morning to Ann Coulter for the uppercut at the end of her latest column, Liberal Victimhood: A Game You Can Play at Home. She makes the case that for half a century or more, liberals have energized their supporters, and even non-supporters, into doing nonsensical things by playing the victim…then closes with this zinger.

…ironically, Obama’s father is from Africa: He never suffered from the ancient policies that, today, give his son Victim Gold. To the contrary, if Obama’s African relatives had anything to do with slavery, it was on the business end.

I’m biased in favor of Ms. Coulter because this was something I’d been noticing of late. But I don’t blame the liberals — they’re just trying to win elections, something politicians are supposed to do.

What I find much more worthy of thought, is the misbehavior of the rest of us. My thoughts, also, are more directed at the third-person-hood of victimology. We don’t need to see any tangible connection between the guy who wants us to do something stupid, and the purported victim, to lose all or most of our cognitive wherewithal.

Who owns this business?

The business owner.

How are the wages of the employees determined?

They negotiate them with the business owner when they are hired.

Who decides whether to build a wheelchair ramp?

The business owner.

Who decides whether breastfeeding is allowed in the restaurant?

The business owner.

What do you do if you don’t like the decision he makes about that?

Eat somewhere else.

And how do we…ZOMFG!! LOOK AT THAT POOR OLD MAN HE STUBBED HIS TOE, OR GOT DISCRIMINATED AGAINST!! OR THERE’S A FLY IN HIS SOUP OR HIS PECKER DOESN’T WORK OR HE CAN’T GET A GREEN CARD!!

Aaaiigggh, we need some laws! And fines! And taxes! Programs! Subsidies! Doing something stupid is better than doing nothing! Aiiigh! Move, move, move!!

There’s a little bit of this absurd exchange in all of us. We understand who-owns-what decision, and we act on that understanding, right up until we find out that someone got a raw deal somewhere. Then we suddenly enter this bizarro world, in which nobody is really responsible for anything as an individual. Everything anybody does, is everybody else’s business; the most competent way to get money spent is to route it through the government. When you wake up first thing in the morning, is it your opinion that the most responsible way to spend money is to get it spent through the government? I’ll bet not. I’ll bet even some of you who are on the DNC’s mailing list, show the proper skepticism, at least until the focus-group propaganda goons go to work on you. How about in the moment in which you retire for the night, hmmm? Think the government can spend money more effectively than you can, nickel-for-nickel? What about in most of the waking moments in between, what’s your opinion then, typically?

So how come your perception of the world around you, shifts so dramatically, in the few seconds in which you’re feeling sorry for someone?

It is, in 2009, the most effective and reliable way to poison individuality and reason. Just find a victim…somewhere. A barrel of reasoning power is undone by a half-pint of good old-fashioned compassion — gone awry, alchemized into a toxic lace. It throws rational thinking off. People falling in love, think more clearly than people feeling sorry for someone.

We do NOT need to be told a believable story about how the spending of this money will help the injured person. We pretend we need this, but we don’t. Go on, review some of these outlandish tales about how things were going to be fixed. Look at the most recent one — stimulate the economy. And where was that money going to go if it wasn’t taxed from us in the first place? We’d have put it in a big composting heap in the backyard?

Ask the “average” guy who’s more qualified…Barack Obama or Sarah Palin. Obama, of course! Then ask ’em why…duh…er…lights go out. The subject is changed, or some droning stream of Tina Fey quotes slowly plops out of their cakeholes. The fact of the matter is that it really is the most naked form of racism you can find nowadays. Obama and Palin are both fine speechmakers — they both stumble, embarrassingly, now and then if you wait long enough for them to do so. They’re just about on par.

But a bubbly, precocious hockey-mom is expected to talk the way Sarah Palin does. Black guys, on the other hand, are supposed to be angry. That’s what this “There’s Something About Him!” really means; the “something about” Obama is that our society has been conditioned to expect a sulking, smoldering heap of a rap-star dude wherever we see a black male, and for those who’ve bought into this, Obama personally offers a rather disorienting departure from the stereotype. Enter the victimology. Someone is portrayed as a victim, and suddenly large numbers of people are persuaded toward silly, nonsensical things.

I don’t know what causes us to do this. The theory I have found most worthy of entertainment, is that there is an unspoken preciousness to the event in which we demonstrate our inner decency to those around us…or are simply given an opportunity to do this. Someone loses something in a house fire, I give ’em a dollar, I’m a righteous dude. Maybe that someone was a millionaire, maybe the thing lost was sentimental and can’t be replaced with all the money in the world. It doesn’t matter. Look how decent I am! And the wonderful thing is, if I keep all my money in my pocket and vote the victim a large bundle of your dollars…I’m still just as wonderful. For the moment.

This is a thirst that is never, ever quenched for very long. The decency has to be proven over, and over, and over again. Real decency would only have to be showcased once, if at all.

I don’t like that theory, but it has endured. The reason I don’t like it is that if it’s true, those among us who are most lacking in inner decency, would be the most enamored of the opportunities to advertise it falsely. So someone who really does see blacks and whites on equal footing, won’t place too much value on an event in which he can manifest that he does so. Obama’s victory would therefore be a sign not so much that bigotry has ended in America, but that it has softened. And, furthermore, if you wish to seek out instances of it, you’re better off looking among those who voted Obama/Biden, than among those who voted for the opposition. They had/have a great deal more to prove.

Geraldine Ferraro — you can tell this by the great hurry in which she was shushed up — was right. I’m reasonably sure a theoretical white guy named “Barack Hussein Obama” with all the personal privileges of the real black one, and a similar bunch of America-hating friends, wouldn’t have gotten terribly far.

By the way, Coulter’s statement narrowly edged out a quote from Margaret Thatcher I found over at fellow Webloggin contributor Joshuapundit’s place:

The problem with Socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.

Today, you need to be reasonably well-read about twentieth-century history, to see the logic and truth of what she said there.

I’m afraid, in the next six to twelve months, this will not be the case.

Someone out there sharing thoughts about a book he read. Interesting point…

I just started reading “Think Better: An Innovator’s Guide to Productive Thinking” by Tim Hurson.

I just started Chapter 3 and have become amazed that I hadn’t thought about the difference between Critical Thinking and Creative Thinking…even though I’ve blogged about the subject in the past (see The Problem(s) with Linear Thinking, Critical Thinking Definitions, and my review of Jack’s Notebook).

In Chapter 3 of this book, the author does a great job explaining that these are completely different thinking processes.  The author provides the following definitions:

 • Creative Thinking – generative, nonjudgmental and expansive. When you are thinking creatively, you are generating lists of new ideas.
 • Critical Thinking – analytical, judgmental and selective. When you are thinking critically, you are making choices.

I hadn’t thought about the differences between these two types of thinking…in fact, I’ve even used them as interchangeable terms for the same thing!

The author argues that using both thinking processes together creates a much more productive thinking process. An interesting analogy that he uses in the book is:

Think of the thinking process as a kayak with 2 paddles. One paddle represents creative thinking while the other represents critical thinking. If you were to only use one paddle (i.e., creative thinking), you’d end up going in circles. To make the kayak move forward, you’ve got to alternate between paddles.

So far this is an interesting book…I plan to review it in more detail later this month.

Great point. But oh my goodness, how I disagree with that kayak analogy! And I’m not just talking about how the author means to use the term blades instead of paddles (most kayaks rely on a single, double-bladed paddle).

More importantly, it’s a far better and more apt analogy to think of tools. Hammers and screwdrivers. One’s right for one situation, another’s right for another. There are jobs you can do where you have to work from sunup to sundown, relying every minute on one tool and not the other — and that’s quite alright. So the fellow who alternates from one tool to the next, and back again, based only on a feeling that that’s what he should be doing…that’s actually the guy doin’ it wrong.

Which one of these thinking-types is in danger of being permanently extinguished in our society? Both of them. I’ve complained, regularly, about “doofus dads” in kids’ movies, whacking themselves in the forehead, five minutes before closing credits, figuring out “Omigawd, I’ve been such an a-hole!” and this leads to the happy ending that otherwise could’ve never been had. It’s blisteringly offensive to me, as a man and as a Dad. It is, without a doubt, an assault on men. But most of all, it’s theft. It is the cloaking of rite-and-ritual as some kind of creativity, creativity that’s worth the expenditure of a little bit o’money. It’s just another re-telling of a story we’ve seen and heard many, many, many, many times before. And it’s propaganda that your precious little babums should start talking smack back at you, and generally start behaving like a disrespectful spoiled rotten brat. Yes, you’re supposed to be dipping into your checking account to pay for this.

And you’re goddamned right — I can make a conversation about that, out of a conversation about anything. It’s like Bill Maher and legalizing pot. But getting back to the subject at hand…

There are other tropes recycled regularly in our movies, products in which we’re supposed to see creativity, where in fact there is none. And the problem is more widespread than movies.

As for critical thinking…well…we still have the problem of global warming in which skepticism is being undefined as a useful word. It’s been re-defined as the exact opposite of what it classically is, flipped over like a pancake. You’re a “good skeptic” if you believe everything you hear, and if you question it you’re “not showing the proper skepticism.” This is a danger to critical thinking in our culture.

What to do about it? We can’t reverse this erosion as any kind of a group; each person has to work against it, as an individual. Otherwise, there goes the paddle.