Victor Davis Hanson identifies ten reasons why we miss him:

Various polls report that George W. Bush in some states is now better liked than President Obama. Even some liberal pundits call for Bush, the now long-missed moderate, to draw on his recognized tolerance and weigh in on the Ground Zero mosque or the Arizona anti-immigration legislation. Apparently the erstwhile divider is now the healer that the healer Obama is not.

I’m identifying particularly strongly with Item #3:

It is a uniquely American trait to shun whining and petulance. Rugged individualism and can-do optimism used to be ingrained in our national character, and even in our 11th hour have not wholly disappeared. So the public is tiring of Obama’s Pavlovian blaming of Bush. After 20 months, it is time for the president to get a life and quit the “heads you lose/tails I win” attitude about presidential responsibility. If he now takes credit for calm in Iraq without crediting the surge, then Obama can surely take blame for the anemic recovery — brought on by his own bullying of business that has frightened free enterprise into stasis. Note that Bush, unlike Clinton, has not engaged in emeritus tit-for-tat recrimination, and has kept largely quiet in dignified repose. Obama serially goes after Hannity, Limbaugh, and Beck by name; Bush let the slander of a Michael Moore or Keith Olbermann go unanswered.

Thing I Know #375. In any position of executive responsibility, if you make the mistake of mentioning your predecessor too often, people will start to wish he was still there.

Due to technicalities:

“We are definitely pleased that the scam that was being perpetrated has been stopped,” said John Pirich, an attorney for tea party groups around the state. “We also hope that the investigation into this activity proceeds as expeditiously as possible.”

Although the court in its 5-2 decision found the Board of State Canvassers “failed to carry out its duty” to The Tea Party by giving a deadlocked ruling last month, the majority opinion stated the justices were “not persuaded” the group should appear on the ballot.

Michael Hodge, an attorney for The Tea Party who had argued before the Board of Canvassers that the group had enough signatures to appear on the ballot, could not be reached for comment. The Court of Appeals had ruled Monday the Tea Party group could not appear on the ballot because of problems with its petitions including that the word “The” was not in 24-point boldface type as dictated by law.

The Tea Party nominated 23 candidates for offices ranging from secretary of state and attorney general to state House and Senate seats, Congressional seats, Oakland County commissioner, state Board of Education and the University of Michigan Board of Regents.

The ruling comes a day after The Detroit News reported links between Democrats and The Tea Party group with 23 candidates that included the former stepmother of the former leader of the Oakland County Democratic Party being recruited to run as well as another candidate who had placed last in a 2008 Democratic primary.

The scandal over The Tea Party group forced the resignation of Mike McGuinness, the former Oakland County Democratic chairman, and the firing of Jason Bauer, an organizer for the county Democrats who has been accused of notarizing many of the nominations.

My goodness, such creativity being deployed to…uh…to………

My goodness, such a widespread enthusiasm for keeping taxes high, and making it as expensive as possible to run that government, and to earn a living and pay for things.

What drives such people? They want to win — we all like to win at things. But when winning can only happen through deceit, trickery and subterfuge, it seems no alarm bells go off in their addled little brains.

They must be getting a cut, or under the impression they’re getting a cut.

The ninety-sixth award for the Best Sentence I’ve Heard Or Read Lately (BSIHORL) goes out to minuteman, comment-author at Canadian blogger Kate’s Small Dead Animals page.

Not just a single sentence. More like a thought.

Commenting on the Discovery Channel Hostage Crisis, minuteman sez…

This is another example of leftards not making sense. You can argue nuance if you want, but basically if you don’t believe in God, you must believe that we are an animal like any other. All animals expand to the carrying capacity of their environment and then die off, usually as a result of destroying their environment. If there is no God we are no different. It appears to me that the leftards basically believe that as guardians of the earth we have dominion over the beasts of the land, the birds of the air and the fish of the sea, which is basically a God centered view of the world. So which is it Leftards?

Okay he loses three points for his repeated use of that horrible word, #3 on my list of awful words.

And it’s a point we’ve made here before a few times. It’s still brilliant. A secular view of the universe must logically regard all living things within that universe to occupy an equivalent “moral” footing, and morality itself to be something of a tangential issue. We would, necessarily, be involved in a colossal marketplace in a continual exchange of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen across phylum, class and species boundaries. Which puts us all on a level playing field of sorts.

It then becomes a logical abomination to assert that one organism, breathing, devouring, defecating, propagating, et al, is just being an adorable thing straight out of a Disney movie, and the other organism engaged in all the same activities is some kind of blight upon, or threat to, all the rest of it.

I’m not much for fiction, but you could persuade me to plunk down some serious coin on a hardcover about — whatever — just by adding a sticker to the front of the jacket, so I can see it from a good distance away in the bookstore: “Contains a character based on White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs.”

Okay, maybe you’d have to drop a hint as to what happens to the character. But oh yeah, I’d snatch that puppy up.

Or duck outta there and order it on Amazon.

Does he take some kind of vitamin every morning to be this obnoxious? Is this the kind of persona the Obama administration wants to send in to these all-important sit-downs with our “enemies” that will magically heal everything?

Smitty has shoved our opposite words project into second gear, and is now at the forefront of the effort to catalog all the creative ways our left-wingers have found to say the exact opposite of what they really mean.

Or not…he may not be aware we’d thrown the project into overdrive elsewhere. Personally, I have selected numbers 9 and 10 as the scariest ones:

9. When a hyperliberal starts to talk about the freedoms we take for granted you’d better be careful, because he’s about to start pushing a bunch of laws that will deprive you of freedom.
10. When a hyperliberal starts to talk about putting together a society “that works for the benefit of everybody,” the society he starts describing always has rules that are designed to bring harm to certain groups of people.

And now we see the word “patriotism” has something to do with hating your countrymen.

Liberals sure do like opposites. Maybe they carry an enthused fondness for things that have two sides…having done most of their thinking on a virtual Mobius strip.

Whenever they start talking about a “fair” society that works for everybody, I cannot help but wonder where they’re going to put me after they get rid of me.

Dennis tells it like it is.

I’m lovin’ what he said about people in Europe (about 2:14). Lots of nice, decent, smart people over there…but at the same time, there is such a thing as a national process of thought, and what is happening to theirs is not good. We need to catch onto this because we are in a process of importing it.

Hat tip to the Kini Aloha Guy.

There’s some durable, strong, old-fashioned logic for ya.

Got it from this list of ten liberal hypocrites at David Horowitz’ blog, hat tip to Linkiest.

FrankJ nails it shut. An inability to listen is absolute “suicide in a democracy,” and this is the liberals’ biggest problem today.

If I had to name one thing that was liberals biggest problem election-wise, it’s their inability to listen. That wasn’t a big a problem when they were out of power and the opposition, but it’s destroying them now. Liberals like to think the right is crazy and angry, but the right actually does understand the liberals viewpoint. And rejects it. The left, though, doesn’t understand the right; they’re too busy screaming “bigot” and “racist” to even understand what the right is objecting to. While in power, they’ve ignored everyone’s concerns — even deriding those concerns they don’t even understand — and that’s just suicide in a democracy. Now the American people are done listening to the left; I’d say at least 60% of American stop paying attention to the left as soon as they make accusations of racism and bigotry — and that number is only rising. Just look at all the big issues lately: The more the left shouts, the more people turn against them. It’s not so much the Tea Party is so popular as it’s baiting liberals into being even more unpleasant and unlikeable.

That’s the nice thing about the system we have; no matter how much some people scream or cry, they don’t get to ignore election results.

Shiggz, in comment #12, points out the classic psychological projection:

Al Franken the literal things all the left accused Bush of being in 2000.
Joe Biden all the literal things the left accused Quayle of being.
Sotomoyar all the literal things the left accused Harriet Meyers of being.
Al Sharpton all the literal things and worse the left accused Clarence Thomas of being.
Hillary all the literal things the left accused Condoleeza of being.

I could go on but I feel like that gets the point.

Hat tip to Linkiest.

Hat tip to American Power.

Daily Caller:

A writer for a St. Louis alternative newsweekly tells The Daily Caller he does not regret speculating in a story that the suspect of an attempted arson of a Democratic congressman’s campaign office was a Tea Party activist.

It turns out that the suspect in this week’s firebombing of Democratic Rep. Russ Carnahan’s campaign office in St. Louis was actually a liberal blogger and former paid campaign worker for Carnahan’s campaign.

“As to the legions of Tea Party adherents who are calling for my head: No, I have no regrets. I was having fun — at their expense,” River Front Times reporter Chad Garrison said in an email.
:
Outrage with Garrison comes from this paragraph in an article he penned about the incident. “Given what we know of him — 50, white, angry — he certainly fits the demographics of a Tea Party member.”

Garrison said his report was a “joke” and was not meant literally. He pointed to another section of the same story where he wrote: “On second thought, maybe he’s not a Tea Party member. Firebombing your opponent’s office seems a little too, um, sane for that group.”

Dana Loesch, a talk show host and leader of the St. Louis Tea Party, said Garrison’s report was “completely typical of that author.”

“We’ve asked for him to apologize for his remarks but he mistakenly confuses quasi-gonzo journalism with hackneyed writing,” she said.

On Thursday, Garrison said, “you’d have to be quite the literalist to believe I was actually accusing anyone of a crime. Then again, it’s becoming ever clearer that these are people who can’t take a joke and who have no emotion other than blind outrage and indignation.”

Yeah, when I want to see someone who has “no emotion other than blind outrage and indignation” I watch Keith Olbermann’s show.

Which means I don’t, but that’s another story.

You’ve heard of this anti-Muslim anger that has been whipped up into a deadly frenzy by all the opponents of the Victory Mosque? And then it turns out the taxicab driver that was stabbed, was opposed to the mosque and was stabbed by a lefty who was in favor of it.

The obvious lesson to be learned is that you shouldn’t rely on a sole-source for your information, if that source is driven by a clear agenda. Truth, as one would expect, becomes an early casualty.

But there is another lesson here, one much more subtle, and it has to do with this absurd “you-can’t-take-a-joke” defense.

People who think like kids should be kept out of positions of responsibility, credibility and power. One of the reasons we have a mental child sworn in as our President right now, for example, is that His opponent’s running mate famously said “I can see Alaska from my house!” Except she didn’t say that. It was a joke, get it?

And a decision got made based on that joke. There were no Saturday Night Live writers rushing the stage, desperately explaining to us “No, wait! Don’t make a decision based on my joke! It didn’t really happen, it was a joke!” No, the alteration of events that took place — assuming they were altered from what would naturally have happened — happened to be to their liking. And they’ll never say so in a million years, but that’s what really made it hilarious.

This is what Chad Garrison did. If his readers start to seriously think tea party members and sympathizers are more likely to commit arson, that fits in to what Garrison wants to have happen and that’s what makes the joke funny. Put another way, this is a practical joke, and it is upon the people who might make the mistake of trusting Garrison to tell them what’s going on.

Now we’ve got people elected to the highest offices of the government who nurture an ingrained hostility toward the free market; unemployment is steadfastly anchored to 9.5 percent, when in the decade previous with all of the “policies that got us into this mess in the first place” it found a natural resting place around 5.6. This translates to millions of people without work who don’t need to be out of work.

What a thigh slapper.

So when you have a grown-up decision you need to make, and it calls for some grown-up thinking, you can think like a grown-up but if you get your information from someone who thinks like a little kid you might as well be thinking like a little kid, and you’re going to make your grown-up decision poorly. That’s the lesson. All of the children need to leave the room. Yes, it doesn’t sound inclusive, and it isn’t, but this is the spirit that has been missing.

Instead, we have manufactured misunderstandings dressed up as “jokes.” If you fall for them, it’s your fault. If you think there’s something wrong with that, silly goose you, then it’s even more your fault. Grow some thicker skin, will ya?

Something tells me Mr. Garrison will manage to do some growing up if he meets a white, male, 50-ish, non-angry, calm, stoic, tea-party guy. Maybe that will expand his world view sufficiently to teach him what he needs to learn. Or maybe he’ll learn a bit more if he meets a black tea-party guy, 50-ish, calmly and stoically, in a non-angry way, bringing the gavel down on Garrison’s civil trial for libel.

No, the libel laws don’t work like that, but hey a guy can dream. Or no, wait! I’m only joking! Yeah, that’s the ticket!

Jerk.

I see Mark and I are bachelors at the same time. Kinda makes me wonder if our women are getting together somewhere. Shopping maybe?

Anyway, he found the instructions he needed. I think this might help my situation as well, but I’m not sure. I’ll have to watch it a few more times to figure that out one way or the other.

Hat tip to blogger pal Daphne.

(Naughty language warning in effect.)

Via HopeNChange Cartoons, via Gerard, we find out this morning some loudmouthed individual who, although virtually anonymous, seems to be partially responsible for such a wise decision as getting our current President elected — had this to say about the Ground Zero Mosque controversy.

There is a debate to be had about the sensitivity of building this center so close to Ground Zero. But we can not let fear and rage tear down the towers of our core American values.

Wow, that’s both sensitive and clever!

Not and not.

So into what towers are seven out of ten Americans crashing our fuel-filled passenger jet planes? The elites in their ivory towers — Weehee! I can do it too! — have offered only one thing, which doesn’t fit the oh so sensitive metaphor of some plurality of “towers,” presumably, two. If the mosque is not built, or if it is built somewhere else, religious freedom is in awesome shape. It’s doing just fine. About as well as any other day on which the Department of Motor Vehicles insists you must remove your burqa for your driver’s license picture.

Since their argument logically fails, let’s inspect the situation one more time and try to figure out what’s at stake. To fit it to the events at hand, the first core value that comes to mind can be best qualified thusly: Fuck off and die, I’m allowed to do it so I’m gonna.

And the twin tower that goes with it is: And after I’ve done it, I’m gonna call it an act of fellowship, so fuck you again.

Speaking just for myself, I think it is the second tower of core values that I’d like to melt in the inferno of my passenger jet plane bomb. On the first one, I can begin to see the logic; when you have “freedom” but you only get to do what people like, that isn’t really freedom.

But there is a cost to be endured in practicing freedoms that offend others. Principally, there is — and I’m somewhat aghast at the sheer density of anyone who honestly cannot see this — the friendship of those offended. “Fuck off” means forever; you don’t get to go buddy-buddy up to them afterward.

And you certainly don’t get to build any kind of “fellowship center” on a foundation of fuck-you-buddy-I-have-the-right-to-build-right-here.

This much should be obvious. What’s getting in the way, I think, for those struggling with the delusion that a mosque at Ground Zero would be emblematic of “core American values” is the idea that anyone who is part of a DVG, a Designated Victim Group, cannot ever be told no. (It has to be something like that; otherwise, they’d be protecting our core values by defending Dr. Laura Schlessinger, and I don’t see any of ’em bothering to miss reruns of West Wing to do that much.)

This is where they’re constantly being tripped up. You toss a few hypothetical situations at them, ask their opinion about each, and they’re exposed in short order. Equal treatment under the law is not the issue. Exercise and expression of religion is not the issue. “Fellowship,” mutual understanding, mutual respect, these are not the issue. They’ll turn on all of these things if someone in a DVG is about to be told no.

And freedom? Liberty? It most certainly is not about those. The pro-Ground-Zero-mosque people don’t even understand the concept, it seems to me. Follow the argument: Freedom of religious worship is a core value of our society, and so we must allow the mosque to be built at Ground Zero and then we all have to like it. Yes, that is part of the mandate, have you not heard? Here and there you’ll hear one of them say “you don’t have to like it, but…” and that’s the furthest thing from the truth. We have to rid the world of discrimination, and “discrimination” is what they say it is. You have to like the mosque. If you don’t like it, they have a problem with that…even if you keep it to yourself. They’ll not be happy until you’re told what to think, and you do what you’re told.

That isn’t what America is supposed to be about, because that isn’t what freedom is.

Andrea Mitchell comes right out and says it: It’s about sensitivity, but only sensitivity toward persons in certain groups — that is the “core value” that is really being defended. And the best way to show this sensitivity is to make it a special, focused sensitivity…the kind of sensitivity you show, simultaneous with telling members of other groups to go piss up a rope.

It is about special considerations, special favors, special treatments. Not freedom, religious or any other.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: When a hyperliberal starts a speech gushing over how precious some of our freedoms are, you better look out because you’re about to lose some.

Image shamelessly swiped from American Digest.

Filmmaker James Cameron is too busy to shoot it out with the boneheads.

Last March James Cameron sounded defiant.

The Avatar director was determined to expose journalists, such as myself, who thought it was important to ask questions about climate change orthodoxy and the radical “solutions” being proposed.

Cameron said was itching to debate the issue and show skeptical journalists and scientists that they were wrong.

“I want to call those deniers out into the street at high noon and shoot it out with those boneheads,” he said in an interview.

Well, a few weeks ago Mr. Cameron seemed to honor his word.

His representatives contacted myself and two other well known skeptics, Marc Morano of the Climate Depot website and Andrew Breitbart, the new media entrepreneur.

Mr. Cameron was attending the AREDAY environmental conference in Aspen Colorado 19-22 August. He wanted the conference to end with a debate on climate change. Cameron would be flanked with two scientists. It would be 90 minutes long. It would be streamed live on the internet.

They hoped the debate would attract a lot of media coverage.

“We are delighted to have Fox News, Newsmax, The Washington Times and anyone else you’d like. The more the better,” one of James Cameron’s organizers said in an email.

It looked like James Cameron really was a man of his word who would get to take on the skeptics he felt were so endangering humanity.

Everyone on our side agreed with their conditions. The debate was even listed on the AREDAY agenda.

But then as the debate approached James Cameron’s side started changing the rules.

They wanted to change their team. We agreed.

They wanted to change the format to less of a debate—to “a roundtable”. We agreed.

Then they wanted to ban our cameras from the debate. We could have access to their footage. We agreed.

Bizarrely, for a brief while, the worlds most successful film maker suggested that no cameras should be allowed-that sound only should be recorded. We agreed

Then finally James Cameron, who so publicly announced that he “wanted to call those deniers out into the street at high noon and shoot it out,” decided to ban the media from the shoot out.

He even wanted to ban the public. The debate/roundtable would only be open to those who attended the conference.

No media would be allowed and there would be no streaming on the internet. No one would be allowed to record it in any way.

We all agreed to that.

And then, yesterday, just one day before the debate, his representatives sent an email that Mr. “shoot it out ” Cameron no longer wanted to take part. The debate was cancelled.

James Cameron’s behavior raises some very important questions.

Does he genuinely believe in man made climate change? If he believes it is a danger to humanity surely he should be debating the issue every chance he gets ?

Or is it just a pose?

The man who called for an open and public debate at “high noon” suddenly doesn’t want his policies open to serious scrutiny.

I was looking forward to debating with the film maker. I was looking forward to finding out where we agreed and disagreed and finding a way forward that would help the poorest people in the developing and developed world.

But that is not going to happen because somewhere along the way James Cameron, a great film maker, has moved from King of the World to being King of the Hypocrites.

More here.

Cameron challenged Andrew Breitbart, Climate Depot’s Marc Morano and filmmaker Ann McElhinney of ‘Not Evil Just Wrong.’ The debate was already in the program for the Aspen American Renewable Energy Day (AREDAY) summit. The website program described the agreed to debate as “AREDAY Climate Change Debate: Reality or Fiction?”

After setting up the public global warming debate, Cameron and his negotiator then changed formats multiple times and initially said it would be open to the media and then said he would only participate if it was private with no recording devices. The skeptics agreed to all the changes. According to AREDAY organizers, activist Joseph Romm of Climate Progress urged Cameron not to go ahead with the debate as well.

I’m sure we’ll be told this doesn’t prove or disprove a single thing. And indeed it doesn’t…except for one thing:

There is a lot of empty political posturing on the Chicken Little side of this so-called “debate.”

The last, and perhaps most important, of my 42 definitions of a strong society is that nobody ever talks about the world ending, for any reason. Chatter about Armageddon is about as old as recorded human history itself, and it’s unhealthy. It is both a symptom and a cause. It shows people don’t feel sufficiently important just living out their lives, doing what they do. In order to matter, they need to exist at the terminus of something.

And once they start to think in these terms, they start to invest their identities in it. It’s like a twisted form of immortality. Oh, look at me…yeah, my headstone will have a date on it after the dash, but it won’t be any earlier than anybody else’s.

And then they start to skimp on their everyday efforts. Avatar is a good example of what I’m talking about, actually. Awesome exterior shots, yet another major revolution in CGI, the scenery, the colors, the creatures, the camera angles…just an amazing achievement in film-making…every single frame out of the entire roll, just chosen at random, once viewed in all its glory completely takes your breath away…

The story stunk on ice. Very few people have anything good to say about that part of it.

James Cameron wants to be in charge of building the last really profitable movie the human race ever sees. That’s what I think, because while the man definitely has a lot of talent at what he does, nobody is putting his works alongside the works of DeMille, Hitchcock or Spielberg.

Even Cameron wouldn’t be up for a comparison like that.

Oh well, maybe he would, but he’d cancel at the last possible second. Har! Hey, I couldn’t resist that one. Can ya blame me?

Existing in the middle of something can be a terrifying thought. That is what global warming is all about; some among us just aren’t up for it. You’re born, you live, you die, there were people born before you were born and there will be people living on after you’re gone.

I do not pretend to understand this. To put out as many feature films as Cameron has, that have generated, what, ten digits of income worldwide? That’s what single-digit billions is, right, ten? He has accomplished something very impressive and should feel proud. Just as, being our nation’s Vice President for two terms, along with the other things Al Gore has done…these are things that should make someone feel complete, to say the very least.

Well these men and others like them are not feeling complete. It doesn’t make sense, but that’s the way a psychosis works. They’re suffering from feelings of inadequacy that can never be mollified. Not unless they’re still in their seats watching the closing credits, when it all goes dark. They weren’t born early enough to see the beginning, but they’re gonna watch the ending — that’s the dream.

I’ve got a feeling that if James Cameron can ever resign himself to the terrifying reality that he’s living in the middle of something, and is going to be a figment of history someday, maybe after that reckoning he’ll put out a movie I actually want to add to my collection. And then put in my DVD player and watch. A few times. This, to date, is something he has not yet done. And maybe it’s self-centered for me to think this, but I believe this is the current inadequacy upon which his energies would be more properly focused.

Richard Baehr, writing in American Thinker, takes the latest Paul Krugman effort to the woodshed.

Krugman is a Princeton economics professor who won a Nobel Prize in Economics. So the alternative explanation for Krugman’s column today — that he is just stupid, and very bad with numbers would seem to be far less likely than that he lies in order to deliberately mislead Times readers and the general public.
:
He admits in his column today that extending the Bush tax cuts that President Obama wants to continue for another ten years is expensive. Those tax cuts are for individuals earning less than $200,000 a year, or families earning less than $250,000. In his article, Krugman does not provide any numbers for the cost of extending the tax cuts for those earning less than the target amounts. Those tax cuts are by far the biggest share of the cost of extending the Bush 2001 tax cuts. Despite that, Krugman lets loose this whopper with relation to the cost of extending the 2001 tax cuts to the highest earners:

“And where would this $680 billion go? Nearly all of it would go to the richest 1 percent of Americans, people with incomes of more than $500,000 a year. But that’s the least of it: the policy center’s estimates say that the majority of the tax cuts would go to the richest one-tenth of 1 percent. Take a group of 1,000 randomly selected Americans, and pick the one with the highest income; he’s going to get the majority of that group’s tax break.”

Quite simply, if you take a group of 1,000 randomly selected Americans, and pick the one with the highest income, he is not likely to get a majority of the tax benefit of that group. Far from it.

I don’t need much convincing. Speaking of a tax cut as something that “costs” money is Item #7 on my list of things that gave you away as an imbecile; Krugman’s columns typically start from that premise, and then work forward into bristling thickets of nonsense, because he’s a Keynesian. “Tax cut” isn’t even an honest expression of the way Keynesians think about the issue; “allowance increase” would be a more accurate term. The money, all of it, belongs to the state and we’re voting on how much generosity the state should show in allowing us to keep a little bit of it for awhile.

I do not know why we seriously try to perceive economic matters in this way when reality has so thoroughly schooled us it is the wrong way to go. I do not know why, when Paul Krugman jots down his codswallop, a link to it is yanked up to the top of the Memorandum scroll where it seems to slam up against a big bell with a loud “Ping!”

I do not know why he still has a New York Times column. But I suppose I should be glad that he does; it’s a useful window into how the professionals at the Old Gray Lady see the world. Money is wonderful stuff…except, it has this tendency to coagulate around rich people, who don’t really deserve to have any more of it than the next guy. Except for us, and our friends. For the time being.

I recall back in the eighties there was a lot of negotiating between the White House and the democrat-controlled Congress about taxes and the social programs funded. The democrats could have this increase…if Reagan could have this tax cut. George W. Bush ended this by letting his own Congress go ahead and have pretty much every spending increase they wanted, sidestepping the debate to save up on his “political capitol.” I can see why Bush would have wanted to do this, since Reagan didn’t realize any enduring political victory from all the back-and-forth — but it was cute watching democrat congressmen show all this hyperventilating angst about the “DYAFASIT”…only half of the time. As in, oh, now we’re talking about federal largess that might actually land in my district, so suddenly the deficit doesn’t matter.

Addorable. Like I saw one right-wing blogger jot down about some other left-wing idiosyncrasy, “I could just pinch your cheeks. Really, really, REALLY hard.”

Krugman needs a vise around his head, like that guy in Casino.

And this country’s economy is going to get much better, once money has been placed under the control of the people who make it and put real wealth behind it. The question is whether that is even possible anymore.

I can’t quite agree with all the people saying “best fan film ever,” but all in all it’s good enough for an embed. Acting is a little on the substandard side, except for the lady. The story is a mash-up between Robocop 3, Phantom Menace and Zorro.

But no conference rooms or handrails. I like that.

Bird: I’m out in the middle of nowhere! I am ruler and master of all I survey! I am completely awesome!

Me: Complete agreement without reservation on Points #2 and #3, my fine feathered friend. I glug my grog in your honor, one bachelor to another.

Allowing your Point #1 to stand without further comment.

Yes, there is a lesson here kiddies. When you think you’ve acquired a superior grasp on reality — even when you have proof — those whom, you can see, have been easily deluded, still retain an entitlement to their dignity.

I like to think this is one of the key differences between liberals and conservatives. Reality is important, don’t get me wrong — you cannot figure out what to do in a given situation, with any greater competence than you’d realize from a purely random-chance selection, without understanding it.

But it isn’t everything. The correct perception of it doesn’t even gauge intelligence accurately. Some living things forsake it, and they have their reasons.

But here and there, now and then, they still command a certain dignity. Yes, there are people like that. You’re best off looking for ways to show your respect, dismissing with a snotty derision only when all other methods have utterly failed.

On Saturday morning, I had set the alarm for 2:20am. But the Chinese food from Friday was not setting right with me, so I rose at 1:58 and shut off the alarm.

I sidestepped the ritual of preparing her the homemade morning coffee, since she would rely on Starbuck’s and so would I. I submerged myself in a hot bath, and at 2:50 I changed into my bicycling gear, kissed her good-bye and drove the car to the corner gas station to fill it.

She was mostly ready to go when I came back, at 3:15. She’d started NCIS, one of her Cutie Quincy shows, an hour before we’d have to leave for the airport so she’d know when her time was up. I stretched out so I could store up some energy, and in a few minutes the credits rolled.

She only needed her carry-on. I took it to the car for her. I dropped her off curb-side, at United terminal, 4:23. We kissed good-bye. Twice. She was pre-reserved, so there was no point to finding a spot in the parking lot.

As planned, I drove back to our homefires. I gave my bod a once-over with some Coppertone SPF 8, then inflated my mountain bike’s tires and got moving.

I thought it prudent to park for the better part of an hour at Starbuck’s…by this time, I was out of bed for over three hours without a caffeine fix, and that just wasn’t right. Besides of which it was still pitch black. Who knows what in the hell is out there. Coyotes? Snakes? A real man is capable of tangling with the Wild West — that’ what I was doing out here in the first place — but part of that capability is the resolve to engage only those exigencies that absolutely must be engaged. I grabbed myself a cup o’ Joe, tended to some of my secret projects on the HP mini, then re-saddled as the streaks of gray out in the East turned to rosy red.

Click the pic to embiggen these first four pictures from my week and a half of virtual bachelorhood. We engaged in some more chit-chat at 10:30 during her layover in Chicago…during which time, I was still toiling over my weekend errands on two wheels.

I’m forty-four now. I can wipe my own ass, pick out my own clothes, cook a fine meal. I’m about to toss a big ol’ side of salmon on the grill as I write this. And it’s nice to go conquering the wilderness whenever I feel like it, without worrying about a traveling companion who hasn’t built up her endurance.

But I’ll be happy when she comes back. Quoting myself in an off-line to blogsister Daphne:

We [men] like to be capable; trouble is, we’re inherently efficient. Starting at age twelve we look for ways to cut corners, drinking straight out of the carton and all that. Efficiency is very often at odds with being a good man. Once we’re alone, we’re reminded of this constantly, and we don’t like it because that’s a reminder that we’re inherently incomplete. Perhaps women are just as incomplete without us, but your side seems to have this enviable ability to remain blissfully ignorant of this.

A good test of a relationship is, are you happier with her than you are without her.

I can find some measure of happiness without her. But I’ll be much happier with her back by my side. I miss her. It’s a good feeling to genuinely miss someone, after so many years — decades, really — achieving an ideal state of happiness alone.

The world is filled with women who can command an unreasonable level of attention from a man; that is how the human genome is wired, after all. But what kind of woman can transform a man in such a way?

The phone rang, and it was her. The clock said 6:58. She’d waited for the house to go to bed, at nearly ten o’clock over there, so we could finally talk without interruptions. About little tiny bullshit things, the way lovers do. She’s finishing up Season 2 Episode 2. Of what, I asked? Ah, it’s that one…yet another show about wisecracking twenty-something hotties carving up stoic dead people. She’s kept the household drowning in this stuff. Crossing Jordan, NCIS, Bones, CSI, et al. She never reaches an exhaustion point with the “Cuter Quincy” genre. Myself, I’m a bachelor just rattling around in a too-large apartment like a BB in a boxcar, in his underwear, gnawing on butter sticks washed down with St. Pauli girl. I’m taking advantage of the stretch to finish off seasons 6 and 7 of Dukes of Hazzard.

But since I kind of like her, I imagine I’ll be missing the NCIS nonsense before she’s back. Except for that jackass David Caruso with his stupid sunglasses — bastard. So glad she’s not into him. If I never see that one again, it’ll be too soon.

Anyway, left to myself I see my own tastes are certainly no more intellectually stimulating. Once them Dukes are cuffed & stuffed, as time permits I’ll finish off the complete run of Knight Rider, Incredible Hulk and The Fall Guy. As my thirteen-year-old son has inquired about these episodes, I have frequently deadpanned that all prime-time television was required to do certain things in the early ’80’s, but of course it is only half a joke. These staple items were de rigueur. Somewhere along the run of however many seasons were granted by the producer-gods, each show had to have…

1. An episode involving the rescue of a gorgeous Olympic athlete from a Soviet state
2. A skateboarding episode
3. A trucking episode with lots of CB radio chatter
4. An episode with some adorable sentient robots, provided such a device was not part of the regular cast
5. An alternative-fuels episode, usually involving a contest
6. Lots of government-agency conspiracy episodes
7. At least one amnesia episode
8. A mind-control episode
9. A telekenesis episode
10. A hypnosis episode
11. An episode with extraterrestrials
12. An episode involving a seance
13. A “Milagro-Beanfield” episode involving a poor community of hard-working decent people being screwed by a rich guy
14. An episode about the hopes and dreams of an aspiring country western singer
15. An episode about earthquakes
16. An episode about race cars

There may be some exceptions. To confirm, you’d have to string these along the top of a table, list the shows down the side, and start filling in boxes…but there is some anal-retentive list-making obsession that is beyond even me. Even now. I think I’d just as soon learn quilt-making, at least then I’d emerge from it knowing how to do something I didn’t know before. I’ll leave that magical spreadsheet to someone else chomping at the bit to prove me wrong.

But I don’t think I am; I think everybody hit everything, before McDonald’s introduced the McNugget.

Anyway, I’m not too wild about teevee, and I’m not about to delude myself into thinking I’ll put in the requisite number of hours to polish all this stuff off. And you can completely forget about anything coming out lately. I heard on the car radio some kind of back-and-forth about a show called “Jersey Shore.” Lots of people are claiming not to watch it, and it turns out to be like a supermarket tabloid…ultimately, everyone ‘fesses up to taking a peek.

Now, I’m really on the outs here because I really have no idea what they’re talking about. And in terms of raw curiosity, my get-up-and-go has gotten up and left; I don’t know, I don’t want to know. It sounds like more “reality-teevee” bullshit.

But I’m looking forward to picking her up at the airport on the 31st. It’s going to be a long ten days for me. I’m thinking of sending a limo when the time comes.

It’s been an interesting couple of weeks, hasn’t it? His Holy Eminence had to backpedal on His endorsement of the Ground Zero Mosque, and immediately afterward a poll comes out that says 18% of us think He’s a Muslim. Dr. Laura walked away from her show in the wake of the “racist rant” scandal. We’ve got more flap about the GZ Mosque itself. And for some reason, that “sexist video” made by the Republicans is getting some more news…the one that points out how hot the conservative women are and how ugly the liberal women are. “She’s a Lady” and “Who Let the Dogs Out.”

From this, the usual is to happen: Our liberals are to show us the very worst human nature has to offer; they are to display the spirit that held American citizens captive behind barbed wire fences in 1942. And then, inexplicably, the rest of us are to assume a defensive posture — in a social phenomenon nobody has been able to explain to me in any lucid way since all the way back to grade school, we are to apologize to them.

Let us look hard at what has happened. I think when you inspect the details, and human nature, you see that in spite of all the unpleasantness, you find this is a string of events that we should hope to see repeated.

What the recent events have done, is force a separation between the agenda-driven liberals and the “Aunt Sally” liberals. The leaders and the followers. The bigoted leftists who want to make a pariah caste out of anyone who doesn’t agree with them about everything, and the sweet people you happen to know, the family matriarchs who bake you pies and creamy mashed potatoes whenever you pop in to visit, who happen to have voted for Obama and would do it again.

Deep down, I think everyone recognizes the problem. It is mostly one of semantics. You say “liberal,” and most of us think of Aunt Sally. You say “progressive” and we think of Aunt Sally. Aunt Sally was a “feminist” back in the day, so when you say that word we think of her then, too. And when you start to describe all the ways liberals are breaking things…and let’s face it, it’s really, really hard to ignore it while they’re in the middle of breaking them, isn’t it?…it sounds like you’re pointing out something bad about Aunt Sally who made us all those homemade pies and biscuits during the holidays. Poor Aunt Sally! You couldn’t possibly want to do to her what…uh…er…ah…

— what the people Aunt Sally voted into office two years ago, are trying to do to you?

I propose a change in nomenclature. Liberals who want to turn “free and reasonable exchanges of opinions” over the dinner table into fire-and-brimstone sermons, scolding the opposition over their “bigotry,” are not liberals the way Aunt Sally is a liberal. If it’s some asshole you met on the innerwebs, or some Glorious Being elected to be our President, or even worse yet some spokesman for the Glorious Being…these obnoxious personas are different from Aunt Sally, who wouldn’t be engaging in anything of the kind. Aunt Sally doesn’t understand the issues, nor does she pretend to. The worst she’s going to do, is become a Cheesecake Nazi…imploring you that, if you’ve been accused of being a hateful bigot and unworthy of burning the same oxygen as real people, just let the accusation stand so we can move on to something else. There’s cheesecake!

Aunt Sally should be left alone. Her political ideas, detestable and empty as they may be, are spawned from her desire to be a decent person — which, also, has given birth to a sincere effort to be one, and this has paid off over the years. When we lump Aunt Sally in with the Internet assholes, and the McGovern-voting granduncle who’s accusing us of racism just because we notice Obama is a bad President, we feel bad about it and we should feel bad about it. We all know someone at work who is part of Obama’s forty percent approval rating, and we cannot honestly accuse such people of being stupid, easily fooled, lazy, or in on some worldwide conspiracy to banish individual thinking & hard work to oblivion. Some of these Obama-fans are smart as a whip and work their asses off. Give them their due.

But the stronger, agenda-driven variety is a big a problem. Their coverage is broad and their substance is acrid. They’re in the White House, they’re in the colleges, in the public schools, network teevee, cable teevee, all over the forementioned innertubes. Let us start by defining them. I propose the term “Hyperliberals”; your pie-baking leftward-leaning Auntie is not one, because I’ll wager she doesn’t have or do too many of these things:

– Very quick to judge people who might have a different viewpoint, imagining all kinds of undesirable personality attributes in ideological opponents, indulging in easy convenient fantasy with regard to imaginary thoughts and sometimes quotes;
– Frequently caught bestowing “rights” and privileges upon members of Designated Victim Groups (DVGs) while simultaneously denying precisely the same allowances to others;
– Dripping with hostility toward the religious (minus Muslims) — persistence in a belief that all of the world’s problems are caused by religion, and a refusal to acknowledge any of the situations in history that have been improved by the actions of the faithful;
– Exclusion — an enduring behavioral pattern of proposing solutions to problems that are entirely concerned with identifying some loathed class, and isolating it, making it ineffectual;
– Calling others selfish for merely maintaining possession, or wishing to maintain possession, of the property they have rightfully earned;
– Hostility against marriage and parenthood, an apparent desire to degrade the human family arrangement into something more bovine;
– An unexplained and unexplainable passion for tax increases, for their own sake;
– Antisemitism;
– A cognitivie dissonance that begins with their stated purpose of building an egalitarian society filled with self-sufficient, capable individuals, and ends with an unrelenting enmity toward persons and institutions that really try to make this happen: Boy Scouts, parochial schools, stay-at-home Moms, tea party activists and the like.

I say these are two weeks we should want to see repeated, because the Hyperliberal…this toxic, poisonous elite within the liberal community — the anti-social among the socialists — have been separated from the Aunt Sally people. We haven’t heard much at all from Aunt Sally this week. But we have heard much, and seen much evidence of, the Hyperliberal. The liberal vampires…

I’ve been calling those on the left “vampires” because when you hold a mirror up to them, they don’t begin to see themselves. I’ve been trying to gently explain that they’re not arguing the issues, only demonizing their opponents, and they just can’t/won’t see it. I couldn’t possibly be talking about them this way. They are the virtuous ones.

I think this is due to either narcissism (which would be unsurprising given the self-esteem movement of the last several decades) or extreme cognitive dissonance. Either way it supports the idea that liberalism (which is really leftism now) is a mental disorder. My evangelical friend says it is a spiritual disorder, which may get more to the point of the “vampire” label.

This is a psychological problem. It is an insecurity. It is, I think, a desire to feel important, tragically infused with an inability to realize this importance in absolute terms. The patient can only feel significant when someone else has been made far less so.

Your hard-working, intelligent liberal co-worker does not have this problem. He hands in his work on time, goes home, gets a kiss from his wife and he goes about his business happily — feeling important. Rooting for the liberal side, for him, is just like rooting for one sports team or the other. Your Aunt Sally doesn’t have this problem either. She makes a nice dinner and a dessert to go with it, everyone wolfs it down and she feels important.

People like our current President need to constantly shun others, to constantly scold. It is much like obesity, in that there’s some nerve going haywire, an “I’m hungry” nerve. The body is nourished but the impulse to eat persists. It’s exactly like that, except it’s a need to lecture. So out comes some poorly-thought-out diatribe about “folks” bitterly clinging to God and guns.

It has become easy to see, these two weeks, why it is so important to drive these people from power, or at least offer their motion a stiff resistance. Our freedoms are never in greater jeopardy than when these liberal vampires start talking about how important our freedoms are. Have you ever noticed that? We have a First Amendment that says Congress shall make no law establishing a religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. This, somehow, means you cannot pray in a public school. The old joke is that as long as there are pop quizzes, there will be prayer in school…but there is a serious side to this. A nation got started so that people could worship freely — our hardcore leftists wax lyrically about how important that is, then they stop us from doing that very thing!

It’s very much like a husband telling his wife how much he loves her right after his latest frenzy of beating her senseless. Except husbands who do this don’t often claim it’s someone else who did the beating.

This “I love you even as I’m attacking you” relationship our liberal-vampires have is not quite so much against our freedoms; it is against reality itself. This is another reason why it is important to all of us that they be put out of power, why things will continue to get worse as long as they have it. Their plans seem to all have it in common that they are “intended” to achieve the exact opposite of what common sense says they would do. Remember the underpants-gnome episode of South Park, about the gnomes that stole the little boy’s underpants to make a profit? The gnome explained it thusly:

Step 1. Steal underpants
Step 2. ?
Step 3. Profit

Remember the economic stimulus? Step 1, spend a dazzling amount of money on brand new programs, the need for which had not been previously perceived or discussed…Step 2 ??? Step 3, budget surpluses galore.

Step 1, find as many ways as you possibly can to make it more expensive to hire people, and keep them on your payroll after you’ve hired them…Step 2, ????? Step 3, unemployment rate tumbles to the ground.

Step 1, build the Ground Zero Mosque which is a heap-big poke in the eye to New Yorkers, especially those related to the ones who perished in the 9/11 attacks…Step 2, ??????? Step 3, Islamo-Western relations improved mightily.

Step 1, tax the businesses and the rich people to such an extent that it’s painful to be either one, Step 2, ????????? Step 3, they’re grateful to you or they damn well oughta be.

Step 1, sue Arizona for trying to keep illegal aliens out of their state, Step 2, ????????? Step 3, illegal immigration crisis is solved.

Step 1, right after a white talk radio hostess complains that black comics can use the “N” word and people in her position cannot use it, fire her (thereby proving her point beyond any reasonable dispute or doubt), Step 2, ?????????? Step 3, sit back and watch race relations improve overnight.

Step 1, tell a Gold Star mother her son deserved to die, Step 2, ?????????? Step 3, take a bow because the discussion of of our various national problems and issues is bound to become more civil, how in the world could it not?

Step 1, bail out banks for making bad loans, Step 2, ?????????? Step 3, watch the new era of sound financial discipline unfold.

Step 1, constantly criticize this notion of “American exceptionalism,” bow to every single foreign dignitary you possibly can, say not a single positive thing about your own country other than what you can change it into… Step 2, ?????????? Step 3, Americans feel much better about themselves and the country in which they live.

I could add to this list all day long. Liberal plans do exactly the opposite of what they are supposed to do. That is, they do exactly the opposite of what the liberals tell us the plans are supposed to do.

No, I don’t think the Aunt-Sally-liberals are part of this. They work hard, they’re decent people, they’re smart. They just don’t pay attention after they’ve been given their instructions.

I’m talking about the balance of the liberal community that remains. They aren’t trying to do what they are representing themselves as trying to do. Or they have inextricably intertwined their brittle egos to solutions that, had they thought about them in a quality way for just a few seconds, they’d realize are the wrong solutions.

Or, they’re pig-fucking stupid. We’re talking about a lot of people here, so maybe it’s a combination of all three.

No, I don’t have a lot of respect for them. And I’m not feeling so much as a twitch of guilt about it either. These people are trying to hurt me. They’re trying to hurt you too.

Cross-posted at Washington Rebel and at Right Wing News.

Twenty-two levels. Interestingly, it’s mostly females up to level 5; the “gentlemen” dominate from there on out. Got it from FARK.

In my world, you can’t graduate from sixth grade without watching something like this all the way through. And maybe writing a report.

Hat tip to blogger friend Phil.

Taranto speaks truth:

If the intent of the Ground Zero mosque is “to bring Muslims and non-Muslims together,” it is already a failure on its own terms. But the [New York] Times betrays its own lack of interest in conciliation by urging the president to “push back hard.”

By using the metaphor of physical assault, the Times makes clear that it views the placement of the proposed mosque as an assault on the sensibilities of what Times columnist Ross Douthat calls “the second America” — and that it is eager to see those sensibilities assaulted.

This is a constant with leftist movements. They all hold themselves out to be unifying, and they are. But they’re only designed to unify some subset of us. They’re meant to create a new elite.

Someone’s always supposed to be left out. Someone’s always supposed to be told they don’t count. To be alienated.

Conservatives shoot for a hundred, liberals shoot for fifty-one. Conservatives say, hey…if we want the economy to take off, shouldn’t government get out of the way? If we want more people to be hired, shouldn’t we make it less expensive to get them hired? And they find it disconcerting that anybody could possibly disagree. They’re not mobilized into action because someone disagrees; just profoundly disappointed.

Liberals just want to reach that fifty-first percentage. They don’t give a rip about the fifty-second. The loyal dissent, once it’s been eroded down to forty-nine, can hang around. In fact, it’s essential. Someone has to be made ineffectual. Someone has to be told they can go fuck a rusty jackhammer.

Without that vital ingredient, the feeling just isn’t complete.

They aren’t here to bring us all together or to make progress. That is not part of the agenda.

Speaking of bare asses being paraded around in public (see previous post): Here’s an example of an ass I’d just as soon see covered up, or not at all. The one on the right.

As blogger friend Gerard says: “Excuse me, but isn’t the person on the right supposed to be in charge of the Federal Government’s ‘No Child’s Fat Behind’ program?”

There is something going on with the office of the First Lady and it’s something related to our two major political parties. The one so aptly represented by Michelle Obama’s husband, it would seem, is pushing toward a fixture eerily reminiscent of the British royal family…or Marie Antoinette herself.

Office of the First Lady…hmmm….

The First Lady has a Chief of Staff. When did that happen? She has two dozen people working for her.

I’m seeing a lot of apologia for this, and there’s nothing apologetic about any of it because it all seems to take the form of “B-b-ut LAURA BUSH!” Nobody’s ready to explain what the 24 people actually do, in the service of someone who does not legislate, does not execute, does not adjudicate, does not nominate, doesn’t even decide anything.

Here’s how I see it: You need a scheduling assistant and an expert on etiquette. In Michelle Obama’s case there could be someone like Michael Caine’s character from Miss Congeniality giving badly-needed tips on “gliding.”

More and more, the democrat party seems to be the one that thinks it’s kind of neat when the ol’ man sneaks around behind the First Lady’s back. “Hooray, Bill Clinton got away with it!” and all that. How come these are the same people who think she should be like the Queen of Hearts, holding her own Royal Court? How come there are 21 names between their vision of the services the First Lady requires, and mine? What exactly are these people supposed to be doing all day? Distracting her?

I see shenanigans taking place with this office. Yes, I’m quite serious…and it’s more than a little bit embarrassing to be pointing it out, since that office isn’t supposed to be an office and it isn’t supposed to be doing much of anything. It’s an exercise in awkwardness to be demanding the extra attention, or answers to questions…which is probably why the shenanigans are taking place there.

Seriously. This country was started so we could get away from royalty. Maybe it’s time we got away from it. Two hundred thirty-four years? Yeah, I’d say that’s long enough. Let’s get rid of royalty.

Americans have already taken a long, hard look at the Wonder of Wasilla. A loud, angry, desperate stream of incendiary rhetoric has emerged that she lacks the requisite brainpower…but “desperate” is the key word there, and the stream of rhetoric is not a consensus, no matter how hard it tries to look like one. The consensus that has emerged is that America would like to keep looking.

But as long as the current leadership offers us all of the pain of having an idiot in charge of things, with none of the benefits — nobody is being eliminated from anything.

Newt Gingrich has seen this, and is considering a run in 2012. A lively discussion ensues over at Daphne’s place, where the hostess is less than enthralled.

I’ve already offered my opinion there.

In a way, it’s useful and helpful when the public clamors to wild-ass nonsensical opinions and declares them to be “moderate”…in this example, the idea that the planet is some kind of danger, and if humanity will only take a proactive stance and bring its fume emissions into check, maybe it can be saved. That is helpful, because the phony thinkers reveal themselves, like poisonous reptiles, arachnids and lizards, slithering out from under the dark spaces under big rocks. They make their big show of reaching across the aisle to the opposition, to showcase their extraordinary harmlessness.

Offering themselves as perfect leaders for a constituency that wants to be governed by Wesley Mouch.

It was not within their method of thinking to know that Wesley Mouch was the zero at the meeting point of forces unleashed in destruction against one another.

Well, we don’t need a Wesley Mouch and we don’t want a Wesley Mouch. What we need and want, is someone who will stand up to the bullshit that is threatening to consume us and annihilate us. On purpose.

As far as I’m concerned, any Gingrich candidacy died right there. In an instant. Like a fly under a swatter.

Why do the Brits think America’s President is headed for a crash and a burn?

1. The Obama presidency is out of touch with the American people
2. Most Americans don’t have confidence in the president’s leadership
3. Obama fails to inspire
4. The United States is drowning in debt
5. Obama’s Big Government message is falling flat
6. Obama’s support for socialised health care is a huge political mistake
7. Obama’s handling of the Gulf oil spill has been weak-kneed and indecisive
8. US foreign policy is an embarrassing mess under the Obama administration
9. President Obama is muddled and confused on national security
10. Obama doesn’t believe in American greatness

Economist:

Why, asks a Democrat leading a training session for fellow activists, doesn’t “Yes we can” work as a slogan any more? “Because we haven’t,” a jaded participant responds.

The democrat party is going to try to save the midterms by…get this…ramping up on the “it’s all Bush’s fault” rhetoric. Karl Rove explains why it won’t work:

Democrats can’t sell themselves as “the results party,” as Democratic National Chairman Tim Kaine proclaimed in April. Nor do they have an attractive or popular policy agenda moving forward. Mr. Obama’s fixation with blaming his predecessor has badly weakened him. Constantly engaging in the blame game makes the president look enfeebled and whiny rather than sturdy and confident. One of any president’s most important possessions is his reputation for strong leadership.

Democrats are likely to lurch from one approach to another. Candidates on the ropes often do. At this stage, though, it doesn’t much matter what they decide on. The narrative for this election is firmly in place.

When the lessons you learn from politics on the national stage, match up with the lessons you learn from politics in high school or in the office — you are being exposed to fundamental truths about human nature and it’s a good time to power up the long term memory. What we are learning now, is the same thing we’ve learned before. Reality has been beating us upside the head with it whether we’ve chosen to pay attention, or not:

When you sacrifice all that you have, all that you know is right, and all that you can do just to be popular…in the long run, you are left without even that. You lose everything.

1. He knows trigonometry.
2. He can drive a stick shift.
3. He NEVER uses the word “basically.”
4. He can type without looking at the keyboard.
5. He eats meat. He drinks beer. He goes to Hooter’s.
6. On the weekends, he does *something* that makes him sweat.
7. He can bend a beer bottle cap into a metal taco, with one hand.
8. He’s not in touch with his “feminine side” and does not wish to be.
9. He can shoot. A real gun. Something with a caliber that begins with “3” or higher.
10. He can tie knots. Lots and lots of knots. Something besides the bow-line and the square.
11. With his wife/girlfriend/kids in the room, he uses the word “chicks.” No apologies offered.
12. He very rarely apologizes for anything; if he does, it’s about something he’ll never do again.
13. He knows how to cook. Something that involves mixing a sauce together and heating something up.
14. A woman who builds a household with this man, knows the household is different because it’s him.
15. His voice never ascends above Middle C, unless it does that naturally; which of course it does not.
16. When he meets people, he stands up, looks them in the eye, shakes their hand, and gives them his name.
17. He will take a bullet for the ones he loves. He knows who they are, and if the time comes, he’ll be there.
18. He also knows the ones he does not love so much, and he’ll sacrifice for them too. He will take the blows that were intended for the one who did him wrong.
19. But he’s no patsy. People who owe him favors, know they owe him favors. If they forget, he’ll remind them.
20. He fixes things. He did not go to a class to learn how. He figured out how it worked and then he fixed it.
21. He does not come home to be informed that there is a dog in the house now. He maintains control of the house.
22. He does not drive his kids to school. His kids know how to do things, including how to get themselves to school.
23. He is well read. He has read Atlas Shrugged from cover to cover. He can tell you the parts of it he agrees with, which is most of it.
24. He knows how to spell things. He knows how to use punctuation. He knows his homophones and homonyms. He has mastered the complexity of “it’s”.
25. He thinks the happy ending to “Stepford Wives” is a tragic ending, and that all the eerie parts of it are actually happy. He isn’t afraid to say so.
26. When women, children and liberals are present, he changes the language he uses and the jokes he tells. He does NOT…NOT…NOT change his opinions to suit the new crowd.
27. He keeps his opinion when everyone else agrees with it. He keeps it when just about everybody is disagreeing with it. He only abandons it when the evidence tells him he should.
28. He is naturally enthused about changing the state of objects from a great distance. Shooting things with a gun; flying a model airplane by remote control; pissing on a leaf floating in a stream from a bridge up above it.
29. He possesses the ability to pave his own road, as well as to observe social protocols. He can survive if society is completely dismantled, but he can follow orders too. He is Patrick Swayze’s character in Steel Dawn.
30. He can, and does, figure out for himself that more work is necessary. A reward he’s been anticipating may be delayed, or given up entirely, because of what he realizes must be done. And he does it without a word of complaint.