Via Retrocrush…

If you’re like me, you spent countless hours as a child clipping out the crotches of your favorite superheroes and pasting them on the wall in hilarious mosaic patterns.

Eh…no…no, not quite…

Anyway, for all you inclined to identify DC and Marvel crotches, the contest awaits.

Someone had this great, great definition of “bias” and I can’t for the life of me remember if I discussed it before. Maybe I did. Nine times or more. Well, I don’t wish to become tedious but I need to define what bias is, even though just about everyone already knows, and I may be repeating myself. But the points which appear below, depend on this.

Bias is best represented by how we treat our bathroom scales — it’s a process of gathering data and cognitions already gathered, solely for the reason that you don’t like what you learned from the first go-round, such that any plan you put in place as a result of this data-gathering ends up tainted. I think I weigh 200 pounds; 185 would be a lot better, but 200 is what I weigh. I strip down to my birthday suit and I weigh in at 203. That can’t be right. So I weigh myself again. And again. And again. And again…certainly, we don’t need to get graphic about the various things I’ll try. But I might make this into quite a complicated daily weigh-in, right? I mean, who hasn’t been there before? And, of course, somewhere along the line I’m going to announce that I need a new scale because this one’s busted.

A week later, the busted scale says I weigh 199. Into the shower I jump, and I get on with my day. The weigh-in is over. Scale works great.

In sum, when I’m over, I need to weigh myself ten times or so. When I’m under, one weighing will do.

That’s bias.

Now, I’m given cause to think about this definition because loud-mouth pundits, both conservative and liberal, are offering these opinions about what is beginning to become an issue and what is no longer an issue. Thursday/Friday before an election, impresses me as an especially treacherous time to be trying to infer what the electorate is thinking. I suppose if you’re like me, you’re going to study up on some of the arcane propositions in the hours ahead, during the slow hours of Saturday morning with your “honeydew” jar emptied from the gently insistent summertime items filling said jar in the months just past. I could see how the “undecided” voter would be an important demographic. And yet, beyond that, I don’t see how we know too much about that undecided voter. Such a mystery cannot be illuminated by any light source conceived by God or man — save for the false light of bias.

In other words, no, conservative pundit, I don’t think Mark Foley is “yesterday’s news.” No, liberal pundit, I don’t think Kerry is “off the front page.” I don’t think you can say those things — and speak from any meaningful repository of knowledge. I think such proclamations are declaration of bias, nothing more. They are examples of wishful thinking. They cannot be anything more than that.

To speak from some sphere of knowledge, I — like them — can only whittle down the subject of my statement to a sphere of commentary that retains meaning, and to do that I have to miniaturize it to marble-size and talk about just myself. That’s all I can do; all anyone can do. And to me, the Kerry episode, by itself, doesn’t change a whole lot about the things I know. It’s how people react to it that I find inspiring and educational.

Like an ocean liner doing a hairpin-turn, barrel roll and loop-the-loop in rapid succession, the left-wing has come up with some last-minute election season talking points to deflect this. They are to be commended for this agility, but the product is lackluster and betrays the haphazard, panicky construction. The product is flimsy. Here’s the essence of it.

Senator Kerry didn’t say it —

Ugh…I’ll pause here to note that if I were in that room with Democratic credentials and a desire to see the Democratic party succeed on Tuesday, I would have pulled the emergency cord. I mean, we’re one sentence into this mini-platform, and right out of the chute the facts are on one side and Democrats are on the other. Like they can’t help themselves. At step one, they’re investing everything on the premise you can’t, or won’t, get ahold of a clip and simply play it back. That’s their keystone premise…here in the Age Of YouTube.

Continuing…

Senator Kerry didn’t say it. But if he did, everybody knows he’s right. Everybody thinks what he said…which, really, he didn’t say. Senator Kerry doesn’t believe what you think he said, which he didn’t actually say, because he’s very well educated and he’s one of those troops, so it’s patently silly to think for a minute Kerry would say this thing, that he didn’t really say, which everybody knows to be true anyway. Kerry is right about this thing he didn’t really say. Everyone agrees. And he doesn’t.

Now, as I noted yesterday, Senator Kerry did say it and from watching the entire 15-minute speech it’s clear he meant exactly what he said. True, a snarky snippet about President Bush’s educational credentials would have fit in better with his “Fozzie Bear” Vaudeville routine, and if you artificially stick in a couple of words this would make his punchline fit in better. But there’s no evidence that this would be an accurate rendering of what he meant, in letter or in spirit — certainly not in spirit. Senator Kerry doesn’t act anything like a speaker who meant to say something substantially different. There’s no “Omigosh I flubbed up that line” expression, no backtracking, nothing of the like. He meant to deliver a punchline, he delivered it, and the crowd ate it up.

As far as his stated sentiment being accurate, or rather, the bias of pundits lending credibility to it…this thing he said that he didn’t really mean to say, supposedly…suddenly examples abound.

Seattle P.I. editorial page:

Was Kerry making fun of the president, or warning students against the pitfalls awaiting the undereducated in general?

It doesn’t matter. Kerry was right either way.

Kerry wasn’t saying — regardless of the Republican spin — that our troops are stupid.

Kerry’s intended point was obvious. President Bush didn’t do his homework before he ordered the invasion. He didn’t study the intricacies of Mideast religion, culture, politics and tribalism. He wasn’t smart about it and we are stuck in Iraq.

Although there are plenty of well-educated people in our armed forces — Kerry was one of them — military service has long been an opportunity employer for those with less education and fewer skills than they need to work in the private sector. Indeed, the military sells itself as a place to garner skills and to help pay for higher education.

And wars, including this one, are often fought by those less privileged — albeit no less smart — than the sons and daughters of those who lead us into them.

Rosa Brooks, writing for the LA Times:

If those grunts were half as smart as members of Congress, they’d be on Capitol Hill getting sucked up to by lobbyists instead of sucking up dust in Baghdad’s bloody alleys — right?

Most of our current political leaders didn’t waste any time serving in the military. Like Vice President Dick Cheney, they had “other priorities.” As recently as 1994, 44% of members of Congress were veterans. Today, it’s only 26%. And despite the mandatory “I adore our heroic troops” rhetoric, most on Capitol Hill aren’t steering their own children toward military service. Only about 1% of U.S. representatives and senators have a son or daughter in uniform.

For many in Congress, serving in the military is a fine thing to do — for all those poor schmoes who don’t have any better options, that is.
:
But recent studies of military demographics suggest that today’s military is neither uneducated nor poor. Statistically, the enlisted ranks of the military are drawn mainly from neighborhoods that are slightly more affluent than the norm. The very poor are actually underrepresented in the military, relative to the number of very poor people in the population.

That’s mainly because the military won’t accept the lowest academic achievers. The Army limits recruits without high school degrees to 3 1/2 % of the pool, for instance, while the Marines won’t accept recruits without high school degrees. Poverty correlates strongly with high school dropout rates, so these rules significantly limit the access of the very poor to military service.

At the same time, they ensure that enlisted members of the military are more likely than members of the general population to have high school degrees. The same pattern holds for commissioned officers. In 2004, for instance, only 4.2% of officers lacked college degrees, and a whopping 37% held an advanced degree of some sort, compared to only 10% of adults nationwide.

The myth that the military is mainly the province of the poor and the uneducated is grossly misleading, and it’s also dangerous. It obscures the far more worrisome gaps that have recently emerged between the military and civilian society.

Demographically, the military is profoundly different from civilian society. It’s drawn disproportionately from households in rural areas, for one thing. For another, the South and Southwest are substantially overrepresented within the military, while the Northeast is dramatically underrepresented.

Compared to civilians, members of the military are significantly more religious, and they’re also far more likely to be Republicans. A 2005 Military Times poll found that 56% of military personnel described themselves as Republicans, and only 13% described themselves as Democrats. Nationwide, most polls suggest that people who define themselves as Democrats outnumber those defining themselves as Republicans.

And though the average member of the military is neither poor nor uneducated, social and economic elites are dramatically underrepresented in the military.

I believe there are many others out in liberal-land who would love to speak up, but are afraid they’d reveal sentiments that the LA Times and Seattle P.I. were all too ambitious about revealing. The military, like everyone else on the receiving end of liberal benevolence, impresses them as the sludgy, thick bottom layer of a pot of stew that hasn’t been stirred. Underprivileged, unskilled, immobile — can’t succeed without their help.

But here’s the most prominent lesson I’ve learned from the Kerry episode: According to our liberals, I’m not supposed to learn lessons. That would be thinking for myself, and they don’t want me to do that, or for anybody else to do that. I call that thought-control; as Jane Hamsher at Firedoglake demonstrates, our liberals call that P.R.

I can see we’re going to have to set up some sort of “Democratic PR school” soon. There seem to be a few remedial lessons they are lacking, as the John Kerry incident demonstrates.

First of all — I don’t care if John Kerry was eating live babies on TV, one week out from an election you do not repeat GOP talking points. Ever. It makes you look like a big pussy who can’t stand up to the Republicans, even when they’re playing from an exceptionally weak hand on an issue you own. For all those anxious to be seen as the tough defenders of national security, huddling in a crouch position while they pummel you about the head and saying “yes, yes, we deserve this” is just not the best option.

Secondly — did I mention that the Democrats own the issue of Iraq? Even the WSJ acknowledges it is the #1 issue influencing people’s votes this election.

Here we are learning about this simmering resentment and inherent condescending attitude focused with laser-like precision on our military volunteers, an entirely legitimate thing to notice just before an election…and if Hamsher represents our liberals well, no reason whatsoever to think she doesn’t — we’re not supposed to be noticing this. Liberals, you see, “own the issue of Iraq.” Think about Iraq, you end up hating Bush and loving the big ol’ soldier-slandering mushbucket of liberal goodness. If things somehow go the other way, someone needs a “P.R. lesson,” facts be damned. Them’s the rules.

And although it’s fair to say, I think, millions of voters are ready to pull the lever for Democrats because they want “moderation” and “unity” and more “exchange of ideas in the Beltway” — I’m just spitballing here, but I think that’s a fair consensus — Hamsher, and liberals who agree with her, say that’s out of the question. At least before the election, that’s out of the question. You don’t repeat Republican talking points because it makes you look like a big pussy.

Another interesting thing here: Kerry made this into a hugely damaging issue by doing exactly what Hamsher, and other extreme left-wing take-no-prisoners bloggers, want. Had he gone the other direction and said “I meant to make a joke at President Bush’s expense, not yours, and I might have dropped a word or two because of my excitement and I’m sorry if the meaning was changed and/or I made anyone feel bad” — like that — the Kerry thing would have been off the front page. But he lashed out and accused the White House of trying to change the subject…as if transcripts weren’t available…as if video clips were not available. In short, he lied.

He called into question every single shred of supposedly-legitimate liberal rage, we’ve ever seen, since Fahrenheit 9/11. He made us reconsider all of it…or at least, created an intellectual necessity for us to do that. He revealed the classic liberal temper-tantrum flung toward 1600 Pennsylvania as, not something based on thought, but rather a meaningless cliche. By doing exactly what Hamsher said she wanted. He revealed the liberal plan to deal with all issues — across the board — as nothing more than blaming things on some guy who’s going back to Crawford in early 2009, and whose culpability in such matters won’t have a damn thing to do with anything. In sum, he increased the necessity for liberals to come up with a real plan, at just such a time as they can’t do it, and won’t do it.

In the end, the point that Senator Kerry isn’t running for anything this year, only makes his comment more damaging. What it does, is encase this whole silly “did-he-mean-it” line of arguing further into the cement of irrelevance. Liberals see our soldiers as the sludge of society, the same way they see all the beneficiaries of their liberalness. They must rescue our soldiers from Iraq, the same way they must defend the right-to-vote for our ethnic minorities, or the right-to-be-hired of said minorities. None of whom, according to our liberals, are capable of helping themselves…because the whole sorry lot of them lack the education, resourcefulness or intelligence to do so.

It’s one of the few things that remain consistent about our liberals. You can receive their help, or their respect. Never, ever, both at the same time.

Update: Got a thought I can’t just let go. This particular posting has a carefully defined scope, and my thought falls well within it, is well worth noting, and has not been so noted.

I generally disapprove of what we call “psychologizing” which, in my artificially narrow definition of the word, means to postulate on what a person is going to be thinking based on what that person is already thinking. I see this as an exercise in deriving information that is mostly useless, based on other things that are not and cannot be proven. I indulge in this practice here only to make note of a political/social phenomenon that has become so chafed and festered and swollen that ignoring it has become impossible.

I’m referring to the reflexive impulse on the part of our liberals to blame things on George W. Bush.

Senator Kerry’s “botched joke” or whatever you choose to call it, has offered this beast the very most awkward specimen of pottage, one quite incompatible with said beast’s digestive tract. Senator Kerry insulted the troops stationed in Iraq, both in letter and in spirit. We may debate what his intentions were, but one thing is beyond reasonable dispute: President Bush had absolutely nothing to do with it. Neither did any Republican, anywhere. A loyal, high-profile Democrat said a dumb thing, and that’s as complicated as the situation gets.

Do our liberals say to themselves, “hopefully this will go away quickly and the next thing to come up, is something we can blame on George Bush”? No, they don’t. Whatever stinks like dog feces, must be gingerly placed on the porch of Pennsylvania & 16th, and whoever passes on the opportunity risks excoriation and ostracism from the Democratic party apparatchiks. Here is a situation where an exception to the rule would be quite reasonable; you could even go so far as to say, victory for the Democrats on Tuesday, depends utterly on such an exception being made. The party’s continuing survival, even, may depend on this exception being granted.

And yet, no such exception is forthcoming. No circuit breaker. No breakway fender.

I can’t help but notice all kinds of popular liberal leitmotifs into which such an exception would gracefully morph. The first thing that comes to mind is the “George Bush can’t admit his mistakes” thing, as in: “Kerry’s botched joke is all Sen. Kerry’s doing and none of President Bush’s, but at least with a whole week of (not-so-gentle) probing and prodding, Kerry admitted his mistake, where as President Bush has yet to admit his.” Something like that. Perhaps, somewhere, a liberal blogger is saying that very thing — without laying any blame for the joke-botching at the feet of George Bush, whatsoever. Perhaps.

I haven’t seen that anywhere. What I have seen, is lots of “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain” commands that I’m not supposed to think about what John Kerry said; if that command is not obeyed, the ugliness starts immediately, and all of it has to do with our current President. I’ve seen lots of accusations that President Bush…yawn…”lied” during his own remarks about the Senator’s implosion. I’ve seen the case made, repeatedly, that when all’s said and done our mainstream press is indeed biased — toward the right! As in, those dastardly newspapers are actually mentioning that the Democrats’ 2004 champion for the presidency thinks our troops are a bunch of dummies, or at least says so. Invariably, such an observation concludes that the Bush White House has the press in it’s pocket and that they’re too “timid” to “speak truth to power.”

I’ve seen a lot of conservative bloggers and pundits make the comment, sarcastically, that Sen. Kerry’s misstep was further evidence of President Bush’s sinister plan to control the thought waves of our population — perhaps that the evil Karl Rove somehow fooled the Massachusetts Senator into saying what he said.

And I get the distinct impression that the liberals are inhaling, ready to agree with this, and halfway through the first syllable biting their tongues and thinking…eh…that’s one step forward and three steps back. Maybe if we take that to the drawing board and polish it up, we can come up with something…

…and this is what I can no longer ignore. To the Democrats, a highly-irrelevant talking point that mentions the evil deeds of George W. Bush, is distinctly preferred over a relevant talking-point that does not. Their mental adrenaline, such as it is, is directed in bridging the gap between what has caused grief to us over the last day or so…and ol’ what’s-his-name. What has aroused our angst, lately, that is not his fault? It seems they’re on a mission to prove there is no such thing.

As a Republican, I find it sadly amusing. As an American, I find it to be just sad — to say nothing of a significant security threat. I expect Democrats will be running our legislature next year. Our 110^th Congress, like few Congresses that have ever sat before it since Reconstruction, will be confronted by a huge array of challenges that can only be addressed by looking forward. And they have nothing to say about anything if they can’t talk about HIM! To somehow curtail them from mentioning that particular guy, is to deprive them, completely, of any ideas they can vocalize, anywhere. About anything.

Seldom has that been demonstrated with greater clarity, than in the last five days. President Bush is disconnected from HalpUsJonCarry-Gate, so completely, that we might as well be talking about any one of a number of other things…related to American politics, or not. Why, if I were to ask you what kind of pretzels are your favorite — even that has more to do with President Bush, than the dreaded incident from this week. What would happen if the Starbuck’s barrista asked Howard Dean, or Dianne Feinstein, or Senator Kerry or one of our other modern liberals, “May I prepare a beverage while you’re waiting in line? And please don’t mention George Bush in your answer.” Really, what would happen next? Would the line suddenly come to an abrupt stop? Would that outlet shut down for the rest of the day, while the line just snakes out the door, as the liberal tries, tries, and tries again to come up with a Bush-free answer?

Honest to God, in this day and age I think that’s exactly what would happen.

Update: If I had my way, everybody who goes to vote on Tuesday would read this and then…as a follow-up…go back and look at that 15-minute video clip I linked, with the complete Kerry speech. The one that was filmed & edited before anybody involved anticipated that this would become some kind of a big deal. Read…

You must forgive me, for there just is not a lot of room in my life for even good jokes–and there is absolutely no room for “botched jokes”–when the subject of the joke is my son who was killed in Iraq. I know exactly what came out of Sen. John Kerry’s mouth, and in those words there is no interpretation required. His attempt to convince us–and, I believe, to convince himself that that there was really a botched joke buried deep within his insult is in fact a reaffirmation of his ever-present condescending nature. He actually believes that we are stupid enough to agree with him and start laughing simply because he said it was a joke. Mr. Kerry said exactly what he meant and meant exactly what he said. In those words Mr. Kerry did in fact wash completely away the facade of his support of our magnificent troops and revealed for all to see his true colors.
:
John Kerry stands alone, to be judged by his words. He has given us the rare opportunity to look into the soul of a politician, and he has shown himself wanting, especially in view of the fact that he asked us to allow him the honor and privilege of leading our gallant military at a time of war. It is rare in life to be able to know the consequences of both sides of a decision. Mr. Kerry has clearly demonstrated what manner of president he would have been. Fortunately the American electorate denied him that high honor.

The writer is Ronald Griffin, father of Army Spc. Kyle Griffin who was killed in a truck accident in Iraq in May of 2003. Pondering the situation with Specialist Griffin, one immediately is struck by two important things missing from Sen. Kerry’s thoughtless words: Fairness and truth. Now, go back to the video clip. Look at the audience reaction right after “stuck in Iraq.”

I have been told there are gasps mixed in with the laughter and the cheering. That’s possible, and it would be difficult to assess how much of each ingredient is mixed in. I realize that’s simply the way audio information is, especially when it’s been electronically translated.

Even with all that, this whole episode says something terribly unflattering not only about Sen. Kerry, who isn’t running for anything — but about the faction that supports him, which definitely is. Whether they realize it or not, they are skullfuckingly vicious bastards and no civilized society would think of putting them in charge of so much as a vegetable cart.

Sickening.

I think that’s what we should call it. An irrational conviction, suffered mostly by people who passionately hate President Bush, that their personal opinions about things are somehow absolute in nature. That their way is the only way. That their personal preferences and subjective tastes, for reasons unexplained, are in some way measurable.

At the MTV Europe Music Awards, Kanye won some award instead of some other award, and this really cheesed him off.

Rap star Kanye West was named Best Hip Hop artist but still came off as a sore loser at the MTV Europe Music Awards.

Kanye apparently was so disappointed at not winning for Best Video that he crashed the stage Thursday in Copenhagen when the award was being presented to Justice and Simian for “We Are Your Friends.”

In a tirade riddled with expletives, Kanye said he should have won the prize for his video “Touch The Sky,” because it “cost a million dollars, Pamela Anderson was in it. I was jumping across canyons.”

“If I don’t win, the awards show loses credibility,” Kanye said.

The rapper grabbed the Best Hip Hop award earlier in the night in a star-studded event hosted by Justin Timberlake in the Danish capital.

Gee, I didn’t know credibility was something measurable like…uh…heat density, kinetic energy or mass. If that’s the case, what happens to your credibility when you crash the award ceremony of the guy who kicked your ass at something?

Via Hot Air, the complete 15-minute speech by John “Fozzie Bear” Kerry, stumping for Phil Angelides, during which he made his notorious remark at the expense of…President Bush? Troops in Iraq? It’s a matter of disagreement.

My thoughts, having viewed the whole thing:

Via Ace of Spades HQ, South Park’s take on evolution.

Content warning, it contains references to monkeys having sex with squirrels and fish, I think the “F” word that rhymes with “truck” is in there. Can’t remember too clearly, I was laughing too hard.

Via News Blog Central I come to find out about this Yahoo News story with some interesting phraseology, and I’ll let the NBC proprietor, CEO, chief, cook and bottle-washer James Bostwick explain this further.

I love the tone of this article. When Republicans make their case, they’re “attacking” Democrats. When the Dems bid, it’s called “countering.” The verbage throughout the article is very enlightening. Here’s a few highlights of clever word association by author Espo.

Republicans: attack, criticizing, battle…waged, protect seats, Bush’s script, mocked, reeling, ridiculed, accusation.

Democrats: undeterred, countered, change, winning, usher in a new era of divided government, poised to win, decade of struggle, projected confidence, competitive, gained the endorsement.

You can see that the author paints a bleak outlook for Republicans almost characterizing them as cornered animals, lashing out at the establishment. Meanwhile, Democrats are valiantly fighting the fight, and striving towards victory. Shameless.

Follow the link, and you get this parting-shot at the end where several Democratic “countering” ad is analyzed…

Lacking the presidential megaphone, Democrats broadcast their message in television commercials in key districts around the country.

“Rick O’Donnell. He’s George Bush’s candidate for Congress. O’Donnell wanted to send 75,000 more troops to Iraq,” says an ad in a suburban Denver race that Democrats are particularly optimistic about winning.

“Despite a war gone wrong and no plan for victory politicians like Rob Simmons keep voting to stay the course again and again, following George Bush’s failed leadership no matter what the cost,” is the accusation against Rep. Rob Simmons of Connecticut.

Rep. Dave Reichert “just sides with Bush on Iraq,” says the announcer in the ad against the Washington state congressman. “Iraq is just a disaster. Iraq is a complete disaster. It’s heartbreaking.”

Yet another ad shows Rep. Heather Wilson, R-N.M., saying, “We need to stay the course,” followed by an announcer’s voice saying, “No, we don’t.”

I discussed this whole Iraq thing briefly last night. It’s not complicated at all, in fact, it’s even simpler than most people make it out to be.

Republicans: If we leave Iraq now, it will be a complete disaster. So let’s not do that yet.

Democrats: If we leave Iraq now, it will be a complete disaster. So…what in the hell are we waiting for?

Let’s just go ahead and call this right now. If Democrats capture one chamber of Congress, or the other…certainly, if they capture both…Iraq AND terrorism will simply be “tuned out.” Welfare, minimum wage, medicare, global warming, roll back the tax cuts, rich not paying their fair share. It will be the 1980’s all over again, all domestic issues, all the time. You will go through all of 2007 not hearing anything about terrorists, except maybe from some Republicans forcibly retired from Congress.

I’m calling it: The transformation will start during the holidays. Thanksgiving. You’ll read about poor people and homeless people having shitty Thanksgivings. Thanksgiving will become a major, major event. Microphones shoved into the faces of voluneer workers doling out the turkey and gravy in homeless shelters, so they can discuss what dire circumstances these people are in, and how many of them are going to develop medical problems because it’s going to be so cold this winter.

The drumbeat will continue for two solid years, in preparation for the 2008 presidential elections. All poor people, all the time. Not a peep about dirty little depraved animal-men who want to kill large numbers of us to make political statements. Derelicts, old people, single parents, programs, benefits, premiums, interest, mortgages, taxes.

Just get terrorism the hell OFF the front page. It’s really hard to sell new social programs when the filthy commoners are thinking about terrorists.

If Democrats win, a year from today the September 11 attacks will be as distant from our contemporary mindset as the War of 1812. The terrorists will not have gone away, by any means. We’ll just be directed from our elites to think about other things.

“Bumptious” is a word that means to be self-assertive, saliently so. If you stand up for yourself, you might be bumptious, but that by itself doesn’t do the trick. Bumptious means loud; it means to be offensive, usually, with some measure beyond what’s necessary. It means your strategy is self-preservation, and perhaps there is some nobility in that, but your tactics are unnecessarily shrill. Bumptious is a word I have to work hard to keep from overusing, for if I were to start using it, I can see myself easily wearing it out — it’s such a great word. It’s an addictive word. Besides, it’s a relevant word; we live in some very bumptious times.

I know a lot of registered Democrats. Some are reasonable, some are not, but all of them have a lot of loyalty to the “home team” above & beyond what they can logically explain. And all of them are bumptious about these loyalties they cannot explain; only on certain days, however. Monday, Wednesday and Friday they might be wisely counseling me that they’re above the fray and see no advantage to highlighting their disagreements with me, opting instead to “agree to disagree.” But such agreements go sailing out the window on Sundays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. They’re selective about their contrition and shyness. They choose, judiciously, when to be quiet and when to be loud. It all depends on what’s going on.

I notice that all the Democrats I know, are this way. The extreme ones, the moderate ones. It’s time for some in-your-face table-pounding…when it’s time for it…otherwise, now is not the time. And they always want to be the ones choosing what time it is.

Now, this Kerry thing is most peculiar. People who sympathize with John Kerry now say he was joking; those are the ones who want to talk about it. The rest of them are willing to forfeit the whole issue. Tee hee! Did I say that? No, nobody’s forfeiting anything…the ones who don’t want to talk about Kerry’s “botched joke,” are indignantly instructing the rest of us to think Kerry forgot to stick in a couple of words that would have completely changed the meaning of what he said, and we should do it for him or else we’re “misinterpreting” what he said. I think Howard Dean, Chairman of the Democratic party, summed it up best.

Howard Dean, in comments to reporters in his home state, said Sen. John Kerry had committed “a blooper,” but the reaction had given Democrats an opportunity to highlight what they describe as the Republicans’ weaknesses on the Iraq war.

“Kerry made a blooper. Bloopers happen,” Dean said at the state party’s campaign headquarters.

“I think we want to focus on the president’s intemperate rhetoric in saying to vote for a Democrat is a vote to help the terrorists win,” Dean said. “That’s clearly untrue and that’s exactly the reason why President Bush is a failed president.”

Nobody with a brain who’s been following this, Republican, Democrat, or anywhere in between, is pretending to believe Dean’s going to be consistent on this. He won’t; Democrats in general won’t; that’s my whole point. Bloopers happen? Does that mean bloopers don’t count, ever — or bloopers don’t count today? Like, next time President Bush makes one, the time-honored blooper will go right back to being an indicator of leadership material or lack thereof?

This selective bumptiousness is okay, I suppose, except for one thing. And it scares the ever-lovin’ crap out of me.

Republicans tell me if we are going to leave Iraq “before the job is done,” disaster will surely follow. They may be right, they may be wrong. But I’m much more concerned about whether this is a middle-of-the-road ponderance of likely future events, or a right-wing talking point. It doesn’t seem, to me, to be a right-wing talking point. Democrats and liberals could take issue with this any day they want to. They’re judiciously bumptious, you see. They could decide to argue with this and say “no, no, we can leave Iraq, and there won’t be a price to be paid by ANYONE for this.” They could say that.

They choose not to. Their sagacious bumptiousness tells them to let this one pass. And in my eyes, by their silence, they’re agreeing with this. Let me guess: That evil President George Bush has got us in a no-win quagmire situation, and we need to get out, but if we do so it will all go to shit. Something like that, right?

Okay. So both sides agree we can’t just pull out of Iraq without disaster following.

Democrats have a platform of doing exactly that thing. Sure, the euphemism is “redeploy.” But their plan is to leave.

So Republicans have an ominous prediction of disaster if a certain thing is done; Democrats share in that recognition of the bad things that will happen if we do that thing. They agree. They only disagree about whether it’s good to discuss it or not. But as to what will happen if we do that thing, they agree.

Well, Democrats want to do that thing — leave — and Republicans don’t.

I mean, do I have that right? That’s the platform, isn’t it…if we pull out of Iraq, the place will become a shitstorm — so let’s do it? Is this election really more complicated than that? Really? A party that wants to do what will lead to a disaster, versus another party that doesn’t? If so, what am I leaving out?

I’m sorry, I’m sorry. That’s a silly question about such a trivial matter. Er…oh wait a minute, no it isn’t.

Is anyone keeping track of all these generalities, and while we’re at it, all the unsubstantiated characterizations? Republicans are morons, the Christian Right runs everything, Republicans are drowning in scandal, white men are angry, troops in Iraq are a bunch of dimwits…Cheney is unscrupulous and Bush is a putz.

I remember a generation ago that a “liberal” was someone who was fighting a Good Fight against generalizations. It started out with an intellectual combat waged against half-assed unthinking statements like “black people are lazy” — the liberal would be there to say, hey, there’s lazy & hard-working white people, there’s lazy & hard-working black people, you shouldn’t be stereotyping. The liberal was right. No matter what your personal experience was, somewhere a black guy was working his ass off…somewhere else, a white guy was being lazier than any black guy you’d ever seen. Individuals are individuals, classes are classes, the two are different.

Liberals got so militant about this, that even sensible generalizations based on empirical observations, or cause-and-effect, were off-limits. “Obese people seem to buy food in large quantities,” would have gotten you a censure from our liberals…even as they indignantly noted our egghead scientists might be saying that very thing, and not enough people were paying attention to the egghead scientists. You might say our liberals, outwardly dedicated to everyone being equal, simultaneously crusaded for generalizations to be enjoyed only by our academic elites. Wage-slaves were not to indulge in this. So there’s some irony — your caste determined your license to think in certain ways. Elites could generalize, commoners could not.

Then things got even funnier and more ironic. Telling people what to think, is always easier than telling people how to think, and the liberal movement took the path of least resistance. Liberals made it known were were not allowed to have such thoughts in our heads. They effectively said, we will discipline you if you’re caught thinking Chinese people run laundromats, or Mexicans drive big old cars with messed-up suspension systems, or that women are shrill gold-diggers…and you know what? We don’t give a damn anymore if it’s stereotyping, or an honest observation of an individual. Sure enough, within a decade a man could be divorced, with his ex-wife taking everything all his material possessions because she never had a job in her life and didn’t want one…and he could state, factually, “I just got divorced and my ex-wife took all my material possessions, because she’s never had a job in her life and she doesn’t want one” — and a liberal would be right there, waggling the liberal finger in his face, tut-tutting him into obedient silence.

So there’s some more irony. Generalizations no longer had anything to do with it.

And now, as Obi-Wan Kenobi might say, our liberals have become exactly what they swore to oppose. It’s all about telling the masses what to think about this class of person or that class of person. In fact, if the stereotypes aren’t disseminated far and wide, and too many of us keep in mind that individuals are individuals and classes are classes, our liberals just aren’t happy. To simply make an observation that some Euro-centric white men (who aren’t Democrats) might have honest motives and might work hard — just some — is to create a state of war, in which the liberal must have the last word.

Senator Kerry says his line about the troops was a “botched joke” that was aimed at the White House, not at the troops. “The White House’s attempt to distort my true statement is a remarkable testament to their abject failure in making America safe…It’s a stunning statement about their willingness to reduce anything in America to raw politics.” You know, if I predicted this little exchange a year ago, it would have been clumsy political satire. Kerry says…aw hell, let’s just try to go beyond factual history and venture into outlandish, unprecedented theory — difficult as that is. Kerry says the troops in Iraq are disease-infested, raping, ignorant brutes who set dogs on fire for fun. President Bush says “that’s not fair and you owe the troops an apology” and Kerry replies…”The White House’s attempt to distort my true statement is a remarkable blah blah blah…reduce anything in America to raw politics.”

That’s a pretty poor excuse for satire, but it’s the best I can manage and that’s my point. Satire is supposed to go above and beyond the plane of reality — and that has become prohibitively difficult in the Senator’s case. He has arrived at his zenith. He can say anything…about anyone…in any context he chooses…and once called on it, he’ll accuse the accuser. He has pushed it to such outlandish extremes that you can’t even poke fun at it anymore.

So let’s take a look at what he said, although by doing so, we’re clearly excusing ourselves from Kerry’s intended audience since he doesn’t want anyone examining anything. Kerry says the White House is attempting to distort his true statement which was a “botched joke” directed at President Bush and his “failed policies.” Okay. What he said…was…

You know, education, if you make the most of it, if you study hard and do your homework, and make an effort to be smart, uh, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq. [emphasis mine]

My point is…and I’m sure others have made the same point somewhere by now, perhaps more concisely…there’s no distortion present and none required. If you don’t make an effort to be smart, you get stuck in Iraq. So those guys “stuck in Iraq” did not make the effort to be smart.

It’s what he said.

It wasn’t taken out of context. Go on, do a Google for anything you care to Google — not hard now! — and sift through the avalanche of news about Kerry’s “botched joke” here. Try to find a way he was unfairly taken out of context. Just try it.

As the Boston Herald pointed out, not only is Kerry guilty of the kind of generalization our liberals used to fight with every fiber of their being…his implications are not even factually sustainable. It’s simplemindedness and bigotry…presented to us in as pure and as acrid a form as we’ve ever seen such things.

You know, I’m just sure the pressure of campaigning the last week before the election is incredible. But it’s part of the job, and for Sen. Kerry to get in trouble over this, is just plain fair. He spoke from the heart. Central to the real platform of the Democratic party, is an axiom that our troops serving in Iraq are, not dedicated professionals trying to do a job, but just a bunch of simple-minded dolts. I see a lot of Democrats and other left-wingers getting all huffy-puffy when someone makes that observation about what they think, but I don’t see a lot of them directly contesting it. Getting huffy-puffy is where the argument starts, and where it ends.

Not News

Oh yeah…I’m good with this (link requires registration). Hopefully it’s the first raindrop of a flood, long overdue.

At 2 TV Stations in Maine, What Al Gore’s Movie Says Isn’t News
By JOSEPH B. TREASTER

How important is global warming in Maine? Not important enough for local television.

Michael Palmer, the general manager of television stations WVII and WFVX, ABC and Fox affiliates in Bangor, has told his joint staff of nine men and women that when “Bar Harbor is underwater, then we can do global warming stories.”

“Until then,” he added. “No more.”

Mr. Palmer laid out his policy in an e-mail message sent out during the summer. A copy was sent to The New York Times. Mr. Palmer did not respond to a phone message left with an employee of the stations nor to an e-mail message. But a former staff member confirmed the e-mail message that went out during the summer after the stations broadcast a live report from a movie theater in Maine where Al Gore’s movie on global warming, “An Inconvenient Truth,” was opening.

Mr. Palmer began his e-mail message: “I was wondering where we should send the bill for the live shot Friday at the theater for the Al Gore commercial we aired.”

Mr. Palmer said he wanted no more stories broadcast on global warming because: “a) we do local news, b) the issue evolved from hard science into hard politics and c) despite what you may have heard from the mainstream media, this science is far from conclusive.” Mr. Palmer said in his e-mail message to his operations manager and two women who served as a news anchor and a reporter that he placed “global warming stories in the same category as ‘the killer African bee scare’ from the 1970s or, more recently, the Y2K scare when everyone’s computer was going to self-destruct.”

H/T: Boortz.

Article goes on to cite Dr. James Hansen as a neutral, authoritative source. Good for Dr. Hansen. And therein lies the trouble with things like neutrality, objectivity, centrism: Someone has to define these things. A lot of people are walking around, bragging about how well-informed they are because they read NYT. Not only will they stop short of saying they let the Old Gray Lady tell them what they’re supposed to think, they’ll vigorously argue against that very concept — and yet — the Paper of Record sticks a microphone into the face of James Hansen, not bothering to collect any other dissenting scientific opinion or counterpoint, and hey it’s all good.

Whiskey…Tango…Foxtrot… VII

Like they say. “They’re at it again.” In January I had recorded some thoughts about the exchange between Bill O’Reilly and David Letterman…in which I think both sides would agree, the following sums things up accurately. O’Reilly shared some coherent thoughts after accumulating a serviceable knowledge about the given subject, and Letterman responded by freely admitting his ignorance, and being a smartass. Five months later, I had opined grandiloquently about what heap-big trouble we had made for ourselves, now that we had a discourse going in which half of us were irreversibly convinced Letterman had somehow won this thing. I mean, I was just stunned. Like I said, I come from Earth…a place where keeping the argument going, after ‘fessing up “I’m not smart enough to debate this with you point by point” is unthinkable. Keeping it going is unthinkable — calling victory on it is even moreso. Silly me. That’s the way things are on Earth. My home. Guess I should be more tolerant of people who come from other places.

Well. Everything that was old is new again. O’Reilly asked Letterman, point-blank, if Letterman wants the United States to win the war in Iraq. Simple question — Letterman can’t answer it — and woontcha know it, the weird purple-blooded aliens out on Planet “You Win An Argument By Talking Around The Issue,” otherwise known as Planet-Blue-State, think — once again — Letterman handed O’Reilly his own ass.

Well, very impressive. But if it’s not clarified what, exactly, the goal is — what does it even matter if Letterman “won” by whatever definitions his deranged fans may choose to put in place? Who CARES? Do you want the United States to win, Dave, or don’t you?

My thoughtfulness demands an answer before pursuing your argument any further.

Bumper Sticker

Being “pithy” is a real challenge for me. At an age when most kids were learning how to give off the right “vibe” with each other, I was reading the encyclopedia to pass the time. When it came time to get a job, when other kids were learning the fine points of customer service at the fast food restaurant or the shoe store, I was a software developer.

As a result of that, I may have some strengths figuring out what must be communicated, but I’m handicapped in figuring out what could be left out. I look at such things the way a software developer looks at them: If something’s in need of definition, and it goes undefined, that is a “bug” waiting to happen.

So I get a lot of criticism for the length of what I have to say. Most of it’s deserved. In fact, the high compliments that go with it about “good writing” or “great writing” or whatever…I’m mostly convinced that’s undeserved. A writer is supposed to know something about his audience’s mindset. And in the final analysis, I really haven’t got a God damned clue. I’m always the last to know.

So I can’t write pithy stuff. And if, somehow, we escape a Democratic Congress next year, a fate which we richly deserve…and Republicans can hang on to control of Congress, which they do not deserve…whoever makes that happen, will have written some pithy stuff. Which I can’t do.

Not often.

But I did think of something.

The situation is summed up nicely, I think, by the border issue. The Republicans in Congress have approved building a third of the fence we should have had all along. Just a third. Seven hundred miles. They have authorized it…the funds are not there to pay for it. In short, they’re paying “lip service” to the fence, and to border control in general. They say they’re dedicated to it, they pass stuff that kind of goes in that direction, but they will not actually get it done.

Democrats are dedicated to “immigration reform.” They won’t even say what that is, let alone actually do some stuff consistent with whatever they’d say it is. But they’re completely united on one thing: Republicans are screwing it up, and we need to put them in charge.

And thus it is with every issue on down the line. Republicans are dedicated to an idea, and their performance in moving toward that idea is a) good b) lackluster c) poor d) disasterous e) bass-ackward. Democrats are dedicated to…some cool catchphrase that will get people a) energized b) pissed-off c) energized and pissed-off. On all issues, the catchphrase is supposed to communicate an idea, but which idea it communicates varies from noggin to noggin among the people who are getting energized and pissed-off. Nobody knows what a Democratic Congress would do about immigration, or the War on Terror, or even the finer details of any of the issues Democrats like: Universal healthcare, minimum wage, rolling back tax cuts, abortion on demand.

Democrats and the mainstream media — but I repeat myself — command us to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Don’t worry about what they’d do. The status quo is so bad, we need to communicate our anger…by putting them in charge.

Well, in charge of what? What they want to lead, is so massive, so important, that this whole argument makes sense only to those who tune out of the whole process. They’re talking to the folks who are so “overwhelmed” driving to soccer practice, picking up six-dollar foo-foo drinks at Starbuck’s, and bellyaching about not having enough cash for gas. They’ll just clear out that half-hour on Tuesday morning to vote how angry they are about gas prices, and couldn’t give a shit about politics.

But those are the people who decide things. People out of the reach of windbags like me, who don’t know how to express pithy ideas. And because of that, the country is about to be run by people whose agenda is…who knows what. The best information to be gathered, is that the plan for fighting the War on Terror, is going to be for our leaders to command us proles, to stop thinking about it. And almost certainly, that will be done by means of bright shiny objects. Increases in minimum wage, bold new plans for healthcare…each of them calculated to address a social issue, never quite solving it for good. It’ll be more about the noise, less about actually addressing anything. Just like the good ol’ days.

Two words for Starbuck’s-slurping, soccer-momming, gas-price-bitching myrmidons: “Congressional Material.” With a question mark afterward, and placed over this picture.

That’s what it’s all about. Most people would agree, an election isn’t about registering your angst about things. It’s about selecting leaders who are going to make important decisions about things. Most people would agree with that…even Democrats agree with it, when they try to make the election all about Mark Foley. It’s just, the folks who are going to put Democrats in Congress, aren’t following through on it. They’ll say they are voting for someone to bring about “change.” But if you ask them what the change is going to be, only 10 out of 100 will have an answer for you — and those ten answers will be all different.

Congressional Material. That’s what this election is all about. Make the candidates spell out what they plan to do, and we can have an election about who’s congressional material and who isn’t. For the challengers to say “I’m all pissed off and you should be too!” and let them get away with that…that’s not leading to an election about congressional material. That is what’s called a bitch pitch.

And it’s not the candidate’s job to prevent that. It’s the electorate’s job.

Memo For File XXXI

Quoth our 32nd President, our “A Little Dab (o’Socialism)’ll Do Ya” President, the guy who locked up all the Japanese-American citizens — lemme repeat that, citizens — in camps simply because of the blood in their veins. The guy who prepared America for the modern world by, of all things, transforming it into a collectivist utopia; God only knows how good things could have been if it was a supply-sider carrying us across that critical bridge. We learn of this via some starry-eyed left-wing douchenozzle, via the much more venerable Fetching Jen.

President Roosevelt argues that his hybrid-socialist revolution is simply a continuation of the American Revolution; it’s the natural next-step. In fact, I think the douchenozzle hit the nail on the head here: “Our Founding Fathers had either not anticipated that need when they wrote our Constitution, or else they had felt that our fledgling country was not yet ready for that concept. But as FDR pointed out in his speech, many things had changed since then.”

And so it was to win freedom from the tyranny of political autocracy that the American Revolution was fought. That victory gave the business of governing into the hands of the average man, who won the right with his neighbors to make and order his own destiny through his own Government. Political tyranny was wiped out at Philadelphia on July 4, 1776.

Since that struggle, however, man’s inventive genius released new forces in our land which reordered the lives of our people. The age of machinery, of railroads; of steam and electricity; the telegraph and the radio; mass production, mass distribution-all of these combined to bring forward a new civilization and with it a new problem for those who sought to remain free.

For out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital-all undreamed of by the fathers-the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service.

There was no place among this royalty for our many thousands of small business men and merchants who sought to make a worthy use of the American system of initiative and profit. They were no more free than the worker or the farmer. Even honest and progressive-minded men of wealth, aware of their obligation to their generation, could never know just where they fitted into this dynastic scheme of things.

It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property. And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man.

The hours men and women worked, the wages they received, the conditions of their labor-these had passed beyond the control of the people, and were imposed by this new industrial dictatorship. The savings of the average family, the capital of the small business man, the investments set aside for old age-other people’s money-these were tools which the new economic royalty used to dig itself in.

Those who tilled the soil no longer reaped the rewards which were their right. The small measure of their gains was decreed by men in distant cities. [emphasis mine]

Now if you’re sharp, you can already see the circuitous route that is being set up. Till the soil for small measure of gains decreed by men in distant cities; have a revolution to declare your independence; exploit your opportunity to the fullest by starting a business and employing several of your peers; make a profit and incur capital gains. Then…after the natural next-step revolution, the socialist upheaval — once again, see the measure of your gains decreed by men in distant cities.

Roosevelt says the circle has to do with the industrial revolution. We’ve exchanged one tyrant for another — the magnate. It’s ironic that what he’s set up here, is a situation where the government becomes the new tyrant…”small measure of their gains was decreed by men in distant cities.” How is the minimum wage determined? How is the marginal income tax rate determined? How is the capital gains tax rate determined? Who decides if we have a death tax or not?

Cyclical. Roosevelt agrees with me on this…we simply disagree as to how it’s cyclical — who the modern George III and House of Commons really is.

Quoth Eric Blair, a.k.a. George Orwell, writing as “Emmanuel Goldstein” in Nineteen Eighty-Four…about which we learn via me.

Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle, and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they have borne countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their attitude towards one another, have varied from age to age: but the essential structure of society has never altered. Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibnum, however far it is pushed one way or the other.
:
The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable. The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim…is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal.
:
Thus throughout history a struggle which is the same in its main outlines recurs over and over again. For long periods the High seem to be securely in power, but sooner or later there always comes a moment when they lose either their belief in themselves or their capacity to govern efficiently, or both. They are then overthrown by the Middle, who enlist the Low on their side by pretending to them that they are fighting for liberty and justice. As soon as they have reached their objective, the Middle thrust the Low back into their old position of servitude, and themselves become the High.
:
Presently a new Middle group splits off from one of the other groups, or from both of them, and the struggle begins over again. Of the three groups, only the Low are never even temporarily successful in achieving their aims. [emphasis mine]

I see a connection.

We’re All Such Independent Thinkers IV

From One Good Move: Katie Couric interviews Michael J. Fox.

Double-irony. Michael J. Fox says he couldn’t give a damn about pity and just thinks he’s got a right to air his opinion like anybody else. “Just have a discussion about it, and see what happens.” Great idea. And yet the whole point of the interview is that if somebody is suffering, you’ve got to let them have the last word or else you are a COCK.

Actually, that’s Limbaugh’s position too. We aren’t really having a free and open discussion, we’re just pretending to do that. The new rule is that Mr. Fox has to have the last word, end of story. Make it happen, you are a Cool Person^TM. Keep it from happening, by voicing a contrary opinion, you’re a cock.

The other irony is that while the argument “these cells aren’t going to become a person anyway” is logically valid, and thus a good point, whether it is the end of the issue or not is a matter of personal belief. Well, now. It’s just awfully tough for me to comprehend the idea that as taxpayers, we have a right to stop a huge marble cross or Star of David or Crescent or statue of Buddha from being erected in our state’s Supreme Courts, simply because it contradicts our personal beliefs…but taxpayers have nothing to say about it when government is doing something they see as tantamount to murder. I’m not talking about something that can be proven to be murder, or something that can be proven not to be murder. Just something that’s up to one’s personal belief. I don’t see how this rule pertains to the cross-in-the-capitol situation, and not the embryonic stem cell situation.

The only other thing I’d have to say, and this is probably a bigger concern to me than those other two, is: If we’re going to “have a discussion about it and see what happens” let’s have a discussion about things that are true. There’s no such thing as a “embryonic stem cell research ban.” Oh, and to the best knowledge I have about the situation, Limbaugh hasn’t prevented anyone from speaking out with viewpoints contrary to his. Ever.

Update 10/28/06: As is usually the case, what I find interesting about this is not so much what has happened, and not even what is being said about it, but how these things are being said.

There’s something about the extreme left wing. They have so much to say about how things are and what should be done about those things. And it seems some among them can’t ever tell you any of it, without instructing you on what to think. Ever. How you should come to think the thing they want you to think, seems to be beyond their capacity. It seems the concept of “skepticism” is something completely foreign to them, and they’re completely, utterly, unprepared for it.

Rush Limbaugh may not be this country’s most disgusting human being, but he surely ranks among the top 10.

You’re undoubtedly familiar with his latest outrageousness – claiming that Michael J. Fox was really faking those Parkinson’s disease palsied shakes when he cut campaign ads for candidates who, like Wisconsin’s Jim Doyle, favor embryonic stem cell research.

Fox, who came down with Parkinson’s about 15 years ago and was forced to essentially retire from his acting career, thus became the latest victim of the well-honed Republican attack machine made famous by the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth during the 2004 presidential election.

Limbaugh, with his audience of like-minded flame-throwers, is a key player in the well-organized cabal that uses innuendo and, more times than not, outright lies to savage anyone who dares to disagree with the right-wingers who long ago took the Republican Party hostage.

In a response to charges by conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh, Michael J. Fox defended his appearance in recent political campaign ads, saying he was neither acting nor off his medication for Parkinson’s disease.

You have to hand it to them – they’re very clever.

Although few of them ever served in the military themselves, they’ve been able to turn war heroes into cowards. Just ask Democrat Max Cleland or even Republican John McCain – one lost his legs and an arm because of an enemy grenade, the other was a prisoner of war for more than five years – who were targeted by a well-organized campaign that started with Karl Rove in the White House and was spread by Limbaugh and his right-wing imitators on talk radio.

And, of course, there was John Kerry, a decorated and wounded Vietnam War veteran, who was made out to be a wimp by a propaganda machine whose favorite candidate hadn’t even shown up for National Guard drills.

This year they’ve characterized an Illinois congressional candidate, Tammy Duckworth, an Army pilot who lost both legs in Iraq, as a “cut and runner.”

So Michael J. Fox is only the latest to be the target of the cruel attacks that have nothing to do with the issues, but everything to do with planting seeds of doubt and fueling the whispering campaigns.

Limbaugh, of course, always tries to leave himself a way out.

“If this was not an act,” he said of the Fox ad, “then I apologize.” All of which is nothing more than a joke, of course, since to raise the issue at all accomplishes the mission.

The pity of it all is that all too many Americans fall for these tactics of character assassination. It will never end until the people stand up and say “enough.” [emphasis mine]

I have to chuckle at that implied litmus test involving service in the military. I don’t remember things being that way at all in 1996…the year a Republican “decorated and wounded veteran” ran for President against an incumbent Democrat with lackluster military service credentials.

These people don’t communicate ideas. They tell people what to think and when to think it. They figuratively pop open the cranial cavity of the “listener,” stick the idea in, and sew things shut again, bypassing any critical inspection whatsoever. It’s not just their preference. They simply can’t do it any other way.

Beccy Cole

Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler and Brutally Honest, and probably a whole lot of others, have provided me with a valuable education about that country music stuff in which you plebes like to immerse yourselves up to your necks.

Beccy Cole. An Aussie who just might inspire me to give the genre another listen.

What kinds of people have been tearing her “posters off the wall” anyway? Well, we know the answer to that of course. Anti-war people…who shy away, Kerry-like, from the question of whether the job needs to be done, and then go on to “respect the troops” by repeating anecdotes and urban legends about rapes, naked people, flushing the Koran, over and over again — only rarely can be found to say anything else about the soldiers closest to the danger.

Well now. Since anti-war people have shown so much reluctance to arguing about whether the job needs to be done — they go right up to the “Saddam Hussein was not dangerous” thing, but not one step further — let’s use an analogy to take the emotionalism out of it. Let’s think of a job we all agree needs to be done. Um…changing a flat. Yes, that’s it. Changing a flat.

It’s a JOB, okay? The driver, or car-owner, or a gentleman, is going to take on the job upon which the other three passengers depend. It’s the left-rear tire on a busy freeway, so there’s some personal danger involved with this. Pitch-black, raining like a sonofabitch.

What would we all think of the sullen, cantankerous passenger in the back seat who is opposed to tire-changing…but whenever confronted with this realization, denies that he is opposed to tire-changing?

How seriously would we take him if he insisted — insisted! — that he’s a big fan of the guy changing the tire, but whenever the guy outside drops the lug wrench, pisses and moans about the sound it makes when it strikes the pavement?

Demanding that everyone inside the nice comfy, cushy car, get a big ol’ noisy debate going about the proper way to tighten the lug nuts, and whether the guy outside, whom he supports so much, is doing it right?

Whether the guy is changing the right tire.

Oh and he won’t let you express any opinion that changing the tire is the right thing to do — if you’re in the warm, comfy, cushy car with him. No, you should be out there if you think it’s such a swell idea, while the loudmouth “holds court” inside with his ideas left unchallenged by anyone still inside with him.

The decision has been made that the tire needs changing. The changing is underway. As of December 2003, the flat tire has been removed.

The tire-changing critic won’t EVER shut the fuck up.

How seriously would we take that guy?

How about the notion that those of us who support the tire-changing, are in the wrong place, being inside the car? Would that be a good argument? Because it seems to me, not only would it be unnecessarily dangerous to all concerned having more people outside than the job demands…not only that…but if anybody’s out-of-place sitting in the car, it’d be the tiresome complainer in the back seat who wants to talk about all the stuff the tire-changing-guy is doing that doesn’t meet his approval.

In fact, next time we go anywhere, it seems obvious the one guy who insists we should just keep on truckin’, nobody ever performing any repairs of any kind on the car, under any circumstances whatsoever, no matter what’s going on…I dunno. Seems really, really obvious that if he’s still coming with us next time, he’s riding in the trunk with duct tape over his mouth. Maybe after the tire’s changed we can get that arrangement going on the way home.

Anyway, I’m rambling. I do that when my horizons have been expanded.

Passing Up Tips

Via Boortz (you need to scroll down to “NOT SERIOUS ABOUT THE MEXICAN INVASION”, since as of right now his permalinks aren’t working for this). We get to find out how incredibly serious the feds are about illegal immigration.

A national backlash against illegal immigration has many police chiefs squirming behind their badges. They’re the faces of law enforcement in a country that doesn’t always enforce immigration laws. But Roswell Police Chief Edwin Williams has found an unlikely ally to help him feel true to his duty: the fax machine.

At least once a day his jailers fax the names of inmates suspected of being in the country illegally to immigration agents in Atlanta. It’s a practice Williams started a decade � and roughly 10,000 names � ago, long before illegal immigration grew into a front-burner issue.

Today, Roswell stands alone in the area covered by Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) regional office in Atlanta. No other jurisdiction in the Carolinas or Georgia sends such a list, said Kenneth Smith, the office’s special agent-in-charge.

The north Fulton city of 100,000 has faxed the booking sheets of 1,396 detainees to ICE in the past nine months alone, according to police department records. Immigration agents have picked up three of them, Williams said, or one out of every 465.

Don’t forget to check out the chart at the bottom of the article.

Okee dokee, I’m sure during an interview to explain this impressive lack of diligence, the feds are going to say something to the effect that this is the wrong approach, they’d follow up much better if Chief Williams followed the proper channels. Whatever. I’d just like to ask a hypothetical question about this.

What if the electorate took this much, much more seriously than whoever is on the receiving end of these faxes?

How would the electorate be behaving now, right before a midterm election? Suppose this issue was in the top-two or top-three on the minds of nearly all voters. What kind of a climate would we have…

…well. We’d have a decidedly anti-incumbent mood. We’d have a fever mildly expressing a bias toward the minority party, and suggesting that there will be a bloodletting in twelve days. But something that, at the same time, presents some resistence to being translated to a party preference. We’d have something just nodding toward the marginal possibility that Republicans might keep both houses…but if they do, boy howdee, they’d better watch their P’s and Q’s. Just a throw-the-bastards-out kind of thing. An “If you keep your seat it’s only because we decided the other guys are worse” kind of thing.

Both parties would be worried about their respective bases staying home. Democrats would be campaigning on “we are not the other guys,” they’d slam us all with eleventh-hour sex scandals and work overtime on agitating and mobilizing the grown-up hippies. Oh and of course, they’d vigorously oppose any attempt to verify ID at the polling place. Republicans would be campaigning on “don’t forget what the issues are,” and they’d tip-toe around the observation that they’ve been negligent in standing for things, promising to do better. They’d find new and creative ways of making this pledge without going on record agreeing that things are screwed up.

Rare, of course, would be the mainstream news story that would actually talk about this.

Right? Isn’t that what we’d have?

Well. What exactly would you say is going on right now?

Best Republican Commercials

Right Wing News has a top-ten list, for the 2006 season, with honorable mentions.

My favorite is this one by Larry Elder.

He…Needs To See This…

Once again, Michael Savage made me wish I had a longer commute home.

He was opening his phone lines to a question based on two premises: 1) Republicans are far, far better than Democrats when it comes to national defense; and 2) in his personal opinion, this by itself is not an adequate reason for him to get out and vote for them. Maybe he figures it’s an adequate reason to pick Republicans over Donks, but it’s not good enough to get him off his ass over to the polling booth, to actually punch the ballot. So he was asking his listeners for a few more reasons.

I live 1.75 miles from work (of COURSE I have measured it). If I were to ring in to his switchboard the very second I turned my ignition key, I’d still be waiting to talk to him by the time I was home, cold bottle of St. Pauli Girl in hand. So…he’ll have to find a way to keep on pluggin’, without my input.

Well, he needs to see this latest ad by David Zucker.

You see, it’s not about the actual amount of money that is taxed, or that is spent. If that is the case, we need to put Democrats in charge because the Republican Congress has spent more money per year than has ever spent before. And then, we need to plan on replacing the Democratic Congress with a new Republican one in 2008 or 2010, since that Congress will surely have broken all records as well…seems like a pretty futile exercise, right?

No, it’s not about the actual dollar amounts. It’s about the relationship between the government, and the governed.

To the Democrats, the taking of the money is every bit as important as the giving of that same money. It’s not so much about gifting those stolen assets to the poor, downtrodden — um, actually, to those who live their private lives in ways upon which the bureaucracy smiles, whether those lifestyles are productive or not. No, it’s not really about that. It’s about the infliction of pain upon those groups that do not merit the approval of the bureaucracy. Smokers. Working stiffs that make more than 100k a year. Investors. Small business owners.

Republicans are all drunk on the elixir of “Buy More Votes With Public Funds.” That is true. In this sense, they are no better than Democrats. But at least, the act of taxing is a real necessity. It is a necessary evil. A means to an end.

Democrats…have become intoxicated on a wholly different elixir. And they’ve remained in their drunken stupor for a generation, or more. They’re all about…if we tax the right people, the act of taxation, has a certain nobility to it. We should work on taxing them even more.

Saving money for the taxpayer? Screw that! We’re Democrats. We’re all about targeting the correct people for taxation. We tax people who are evil…people who are evil because the “majority” has voted them that way. The more we can tax them, the better. If we can tax them into nonexistence, that’s better still.

Of course that raises the question…from whence do we get our tax revenues?

We are Democrats. We believe in big people telling little people what to think. So you are commanded, Wizard-Of-Oz style, not to worry about that.

Whiskey…Tango…Foxtrot… VI

Via Best of the Web: Why do we tolerate candidates like this. Even if you agree with them, and even if you think the other guy is so terrible. Why does anyone tolerate them?

You punch the hole next to these guys’ names, and you are part of the problem. It’s a carbuncle on the ass cheek of American politics, and it reflects poorly on us all.

Inquirer: Let me ask you to shift gears to the anti-terrorism initiatives. Last night in the debate, I think you said that you’d support warrantless wiretapping. How does that square with your suspicion about this White House? Why would you be willing to let them do that without judicial oversight? And on the Military Commissions Act, would that have been something you would have supported? In general, your outlook on anti terrorism initiatives.

Casey: Yeah, I think going backwards the, with regard to the detainees and interrogation, look, we’ve had people like John McCain, and you could give other examples as well, but people who have looked at this for a long time who have been very serious about making sure that we are very tough in our interrogation, that we get as much information as possible from those we detain and interrogate and also John McCain, showing the kind of independence that Rick Santorum never seems to show, took on the administration and I think they, based upon their experience, I think they got it right and I think I would have support that.

Secondly, on the question of wiretaps, my position all along has been we’ve got to do everything possible and give every tool that government agencies need, intelligence, law enforcement, give them the tools they need to fight this war on terror. And I think we, in terms of wiretapping, whether its terrorists, known terrorists, or suspected terrorists, we’ve gotta give this government all the tools it can. And I think what we’ve seen in the past is the system that has been set up when its operated according to the law, and when the administration goes and puts a wiretap in place and then comes back later and gets a warrant after the fact, the system that has been set up is a pretty solid system, but they often don’t comply with it. You can support having a lot of tough wiretapping, but also support the kind of tough oversight of the administration, which I think has been lacking. And I think we can have the two in balance at right.

Inquirer: Well, it might have been misreported this morning, but it certainly seemed to me as if you were endorsing the NSA program which is warrantless wiretapping without court oversight.

Casey: Well, I think, look, my position all along has been you’ve got to have the ability to wiretap known or suspected terrorists, and I am going to make sure that everything I do in this area is focused on anti-terrorism and making sure that we are being as tough as possible to ferret out any kind of plot or and kind of terrorist activity.

Inquirer: Bob, it’s real simple, and it seems to me you are dancing around it. Either you believe that the President or his designees need to go to the FISA court and provide some probable cause for the wiretapping, or you don’t. They say they don’t. They say they can do it on their own say so and there’s no oversight of whether the person they’re wiretapping is actually credibly a terrorist suspect or not. That’s the issue. Do they have to go through the FISA court or not? Nobody’s debating that we need to wiretap suspected terrorists.

Casey: You know very well that Senator Specter has worked very hard on this to try to get this right and I think with bipartisan cooperation, working with people like Senator Specter, as I know I can, that we can get this right. I don’t, I don’t, I don’t see what the…

Inquirer: It’s a real simple question. Do they need to go through the FISA Court as the FISA law has said since 1973 or don’t they? They say they don’t. We say they do. What do you say?

Casey: I think it’s worked well.

Inquirer: What has worked well?

Casey: I think it’s worked well when you use that system and you use it in the context of making sure that we are doing everything possible to, to…

Inquirer: So, are you saying that the president has been breaking the law since 2002, or whenever the NSA program started?

Casey: I’m saying that people like Senator Specter have a lot of questions about whether or not the law was broken. I don’t think anyone has made a determination about that. I think that’s pretty clear.

May I address the Bob Casey, Jr. loyalists for just a few seconds.

This asshole wants to make life-and-death decisions about protecting your family from terrorists who would cook their own weiners on a big hot plate just to blow your kids into so many bite-sized McNuggets.

And if you went out to buy some crummy five thousand dollar car on a Friday night, and the greaseball used-car salesman was only a quarter as evasive as the Senate hopeful is being in this interview, you’d walk the hell out of there and not look back. On the principle of the thing. To protect a crummy, stupid little five thousand dollar investment.

Versus — your…childrens’…LIVES.

Oh yeah, I know that makes me some kind of Republican scare-monger. Yeah, I get that. Well guess what. “Global Warming” is not a proven threat just yet…terrorists blowing themselves up to take out a few thousand of us, randomly-selected, IS a proven threat. Remember?

This Is Good XXVII

Via Boortz: Very Funny Ads.

Professor: Faculty SHOULD Be Liberal

Just something to remember next time someone forcefully denies the liberal bias in the academia. And it should lead to a question: Does the denier agree with the position of this person who says this is the way things should be? And if so, are these positions to be taken seriously? That the liberal bias ought to be existing, and the educational institution is derelict in it’s duty to bring it about?

Professor: Faculty SHOULD be liberal

Donald Lazere, a University of Iowa visiting professor, will present a lecture and discussion entitled “Two Cheers for Political Correctness: Why Higher Education SHOULD Have a Liberal Bias” from 5 to 7 p.m. Friday, Oct. 27, in Room S401 in the Pappajohn Business Building.

Lazere’s presentation, sponsored by the UI Project on Rhetoric of Inquiry (POROI), will be free and open to the public.

Lazere will make the case that daily life in America is so saturated with conservative conventions that the resulting biases are not even perceived as such but simply assumed to be the norm of neutrality.

“It is a legitimate role for professors in liberal education to make students aware of liberal or leftist viewpoints that challenge the biases in these conservative conventions. The frequent unfortunate result, however, is that many students — as well as conservatives in the larger society, in media, and in government — are inclined only to stigmatize the challenging views as biased, not the conventions they challenge,” said Lazere.

Mmmkay. Well, look. Colleges and universities are already getting a bad rap from the business community, for failing to prepare graduates with the selection of skills needed to present resumes, pass through interviews, etc. etc. “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach” goes the maxim. I wouldn’t want to see this situation deteriorate any further. And yet, the guy does have a point. If the students graduate without a sampling of diverse points of view, the educational institution could be said by some to have failed in its mission.

So how about a disclaimer for all the liberal points of view that are presented behind the ivy walls, for diversity’s sake and for diversity’s sake alone. “Your instructor has worked hard to offer you a smorgasbord of conservative ideas that work in the real world; now, for diversity’s sake alone, we are going to give you an offering of liberal ideas that DON’T.” Just put that little preamble on the beginning, and then let the left-wing love-fest commence in that context. I’d be down with that.

Come to think of it, so should Prof. Lazere.

Oh and this other silly back-and-forth discussion on whether there’s a liberal bias in our universities, or not. That can stop now. Right?

On Embryonic Stem Cell Research

It’s thrust into the news once again, as Rush Limbaugh is in hot water — somebody’s definition of “hot water,” somebody, somewhere — over his “insensitive” comments about Parkinson’s Disease sufferer Michael J. Fox.

His body visibly wracked by tremors, actor Michael J. Fox appears in a political ad that was the subject of widespread discussion on Monday after conservative radio commentator Rush Limbaugh claimed Fox was “either off his medication or acting.”

A victim of Parkinson’s disease, Fox speaks out in the ad for Missouri Democratic Senate candidate Claire McCaskill, who supports embryonic stem cell research.

“I think this is exploitative in a way that’s unbecoming of either Claire McCaskill or Michael J. Fox,” Limbaugh said on his syndicated show.

On his Web site Tuesday, Limbaugh appeared to back away from his accusation.

“All I’m saying is I’ve never seen him the way he appears in this commercial for Claire McCaskill,” says Limbaugh. “So I will bigly, hugely admit that I was wrong, and I will apologize to Michael J. Fox, if I am wrong in characterizing his behavior on this commercial as an act, especially since people are telling me they have seen him this way on other interviews and in other television appearances.”

In response to this CBS news story, I did something really funny and strange and weird. Hey, this is the House of Eratosthenes…it’s named after a guy who ran around peeking in water wells, eventually figuring out the earth is round, and how round the earth is, in an age where conventional wisdom said the earth was flat. House of Eratosthenes. Not “House of Some Guy Who Believes Everything He’s Told.”

So I did my funny thing. I clicked the button on my trackball. I clicked open Rush Limbaugh’s website to see what he had to say for himself. Yeah that’s right…I went to the place CBS said they got their information, and gave it a gander. Silly me.

Michael J. Fox Is Not Infallible;
He’s Just the Latest Victim Used by the Democrat
October 24, 2006

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: One of the big issues in the Missouri Senate race — as you know, we touched on it yesterday — is the Michael J. Fox commercial which is entirely misleading and which is in itself an attack ad, and it is filled with disinformation about embryonic stem cell research and how Jim Talent wants to criminalize it. Embryonic stem cell research — and, by the way, Fox is doing similar commercials in Maryland now for Ben Cardin against Michael Steele. But embryonic stem cell research is currently legal and completely unrestricted in both Maryland and Missouri and in the vast majority of other states. It’s largely personal and institutional ethics that keep scientists from cloning research.

The debate we’re having is almost always about governmental funding or radical measures like the one currently on the ballot in Missouri, which is Amendment 2, which would write a right to cloning into the state constitution of Missouri, and it’s one of these cleverly worded things that makes you: if you vote yes, you’re voting no, and vice-versa. So we’ll talk more about the Michael Fox situation because, as I knew yesterday, the Drive-By Media, including things like Inside Edition, are all panting (panting) to make something out of this that isn’t. We will address that, but Michael J. Fox entered the political arena long ago. He became a US citizen in 2000.

He’s from Canada. He was active in the Kerry campaign in 2004 and he’s entered the political arena again with this series of commercials for Ben Cardin in Maryland and Claire McCaskill in Missouri. One of the tactics the Democrats have — and they’ve used this consistently. They bring forth people who they think are victims for the purposes of exploiting them, and when you bring forth — for example, if you’re talking about embryonic stem cell research, and you want to convey the notion that the Republicans are opposed to it, and in effect they’re for people having Parkinson’s Disease. Make no mistake that’s what the intent is.

None of that, so far as I can tell, directly contradicts what’s been presented to me in the CBS piece.

But it makes some great points worth noting.

Not that any of it changes my position on stem cell research. I have no religious objections to it whatsoever, nor do I have any personal beef with using up taxpayer dollars on the research. But at the same time, I fully appreciate there are other taxpayers, who do.

Nobody, with any scientific credentials, or with a name and reputation worth defending, is willing to put their nuts on the block and say “Michael J. Fox needs stem cell research to cure his condition.” Nobody is willing to say Michael J. Fox is doomed forevermore, to anything, without that kind of research. Nobody’s willing to say Michael J. Fox enjoys some kind of hope for his future condition, that is dependent on this kind of research.

So the way I figure it, people like Michael J. Fox need this kind of research, just about as much as your average Catholic needs a statue of the Virgin Mary erected on the steps of City Hall. Right? Oh sure, if the research does work out, it would mean a whole lot more to him than that…but nobody’s willing to say that’s the way things will go, or even that there’s a decent chance that’s the way things might go. Scientifically, this research is nothing more than a political prop.

And a statue of the Virgin Mary on the steps of City Hall, while it would be pleasing to the Catholic voter, it would be deeply offensive to the Jewish, Muslim or Atheist voter. (Do Atheists get a capital “A”? Do they want one? I dunno.) Except…I’m really not quite so sure Jews and Muslims hold it as a sacred belief, that they’d be committing some kind of mortal sin by tolerating the statue.

The Judeo-Christian voter who values prenatal human life for religious reasons, is being asked to look the other way while babies are being ground up. Oh yeah, reality is a little more scientific and refined than that crude metaphor. But not meaningfully so.

And that’s how I see it. Use a sick person like Michael J. Fox to stump for Democrats who support embryonic stem cell research…or use Christopher Reeve…or anybody else. It’s no different from saying “So-and-so is a Catholic, and he’d really like to see a big marble cross in the rotunda of the Supreme Court.” It’s no different. Not unless someone wants to insinuate Michael J. Fox actually needs the research to take place. And nobody’s willing to come out and say that. They only imply it.

The Don’t Show Me State

I am a registered Republican and I am what I am told amounts to a “conservative” blogger.

I take the security threats — the hypothetical security threats — with regard to the Diebold machinery, seriously. If someone wants to propose a plan to fix this threat, or legislation to ban the machines until the threat is addressed, I will support them. In fact, insisting on a paper trail is not good enough for me. I would support a reasonable plan to address this…even before anybody brings me concrete evidence of such a compromise having ever taken place.

This is a left-wing hot-button issue. I’m crossing over the aisle by lending my support to said issue. If I’m supposed to be running my blog to promote Republican-friendly causes, in this particular installment I’m doing a pretty shitty job of it.

So I am calling on all left-wingers and Democrats who might trip across this blog. Which, of course, as has been repeatedly noted, nobody actually reads anyway. Will you support me in insisting on measures to authenticate voters at the polls, and to ensure their eligibility to vote in our elections?

People in the good state of Missouri need photo identification to cash a check, board a plane or apply for food stamps. But the state Supreme Court has ruled that a photo ID requirement to vote is too great a burden on the elderly and the poor. Go figure.

Public polls consistently show that an overwhelming majority of Americans–regardless of age, race, ethnicity or socioeconomic status–favor voter ID laws. And nearly half of the nation’s states have passed them. Yet a string of recent court decisions has blocked their implementation in some places, thus siding with Democrats and liberal special interest groups who would rather turn a blind eye to voter fraud.

A Georgia judge ruled a voter ID law unconstitutional in September. Earlier this month, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals blocked enforcement of a similar law in Arizona, only to be unanimously reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday. (While the Supremes didn’t decide on the merits, their willingness to let the ID requirement be enforced in next month’s election suggests some encouraging deference to state officials who want to protect the integrity of the ballot.) Also this month, a Seventh Circuit appeals panel heard arguments in a case concerning Indiana’s voter ID requirements. And the Michigan Supreme Court will consider a voter ID challenge in November.

Not holding my breath…

Um, Hey, That’s Illegal

This tactic we see with regard to Julia Wilson, the foolish girl who threatened President Bush on her MySpace page, is nothing new. She committed a federal crime by threatening the President. That’s not my interpretation of things, that’s just things the way they are. And as far as any relevant question you’d care to pose about the whole stupid affair, that just about settles it. Up is that way; down is that way; Julia Wilson committed a crime.

Now, can you commit a crime and still be a victim? Absolutely. And in what we consider to be the “modern” era, you can advertise your victimhood to the point where a substantial number of people will forget all about the crime you committed. And if you can create enough noise about it, you’ll rock the boat so much that the crime you committed, doesn’t even matter anymore. Only a few of us are in power, you see. All the rest of us, our opinions don’t matter in the final analysis. And people who are in power — for reasons that are mostly unexplained to me, still — are beholden to those among the rest of us who are easily distracted, if the powerful are not easily distracted themselves. In other words, we live in a time where any decision made that really counts for something, is easily swayed toward forgiveness of that which ought not be forgiven. Not forgiveness, really. Forgetfulness is more like it. This bizarre kind of authoritarian Attention Deficit Disorder. Criminal-as-victim: “Hey look! A bright shiny object!” And quicker than you can say “whiplash,” suddenly no crime was committed at all…save for the treatment of the person who committed the crime.

Now if you’re the person who committed the crime — why not give it a try? Why not play a round of bright-shiny-object-roulette? Or three rounds, or more. You have nothing to lose!

But as this intrepid blogger reminds us…Julia Wilson committed a crime.

The girl was quoted as saying that the Secret Service agents were rather harsh in their questioning and were “unnecessarily mean.” Okay, and threatening their boss and our President isn�t mean? I wonder how the girl would feel if her life was threatened. Would that not be mean?

The Secret Service take threats against their President very seriously. No fourteen year old girl � nor anybody in the U.S. for that matter � is going to get in their way of protecting the President. The Secret Service probably wanted to find out if the girl was involved in any terrorist groups, had like-minded friends, and possibly if she contacted others to aid in an assassination attempt. Age doesn�t really matter when a threat is made.

If a person is old enough to make a credible threat against the President, then that person is old enough to take the intense verbal questioning that the Secret Service has.

The blogger’s masthead makes the statement that he writes logically. Well, we try for that objective here too…as to whether we succeed, we’d rather leave that up to the readership to decide for themselves. But if it is to be decided by me about this fellow’s writing, if I am to confine my verdict just to this post alone…I’ll give him a passing grade. Actually, I’m favorably impressed.

He’s twenty-five. I’d like to monitor him and see what he puts out when he’s twenty-six. Good work.

Ms. Wilson, herself…well, there’s still some time to straighten out. I can’t give her advice without getting in back of a long, long line anyway, and I’m not sure just one or two well-thought-out tidbits would do the trick. I’d start with, next time, let the facts about the issues sink in first, and then let the passion follow. And choose the hills upon which to die (not a threat). And know what a public forum is and what a private sanctuary is. And be slow to accept compliments your elders give you, just because they lean in the same direction ideologically. And, and, and…yeesh. Well, the poor girl’s just a mess. But a young mess. There’s time.

Memo For File XXX

I never get tired of watching Fargo, and I’m not entirely sure why. It could be the oddball Scandinavian slang and dialect, it could be that it’s only an hour and a half, it could be that it’s one of those “Nobody’s what you’d call ‘NORMAL'” type movies.

Or, it could be that even when you place it alongside a comprehensive listing of the “Hero’s Journey” events, it does a very nice job of following them all. The Campbell H.J. works on a subconscious level, so it could be that. Surely, much of the credit has to go to the script. It’s one of the cleanest film noir scripts ever written. Or greenlit, anyway.

Don’t Repeat 1974

Via News Blog Central: Don’t Repeat Mistake of 1974.

In early 1973, the Dow approached new highs in a booming economy. In the 1972 election, the new left was rejected in almost every state. The Paris Peace Treaty was concluded with North Vietnam memorializing its pledge not to interfere militarily in the affairs of South Vietnam. The nation was prosperous and at peace.

Within a short time, the mainstream media were able to dismember and destroy the Nixon Administration, using as their sword the Watergate affair. In the congressional elections of 1974, Republican candidates were pounded, losing 48 House seats and five Senate seats.

Until the 1990s, the so-called �Watergate Babies� (i.e. left-wing Democrats) ruled Congress. As its first act after the 1974 election, the new Congress cut off all aid to South Vietnam. Within a short period of time, this led to Communist conquest of all of Indochina, the massacre of at least 4 million of our friends in the killing fields of Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, and the displacement of millions of “boat people.”

What was it I was just saying about truth, and it’s well-established right-wing bias?

Democrats Are Dangerous

Via Webloggin: Just Why Democrats Are ‘Dangerous’ When It Comes To America’s Defense.

Here�s the Democrats� national defense record for the last 40 years:

A. Democrat President Johnson misjudges the Gulf of Tonkin incident, pursues the Vietnam War until a liberal CBS TV announcer thinks we�re losing and says we should quit. So we quit and lose. The victorious communists then kill 2 million innocent civilians.

B. Democrat President Jimmy Carter during the Cold War withdraws U.S. support for our longtime military ally, the Shah of Iran. Carter doesn�t like his human rights treatment of Soviet spies in prison. The shah is overthrown, and Ayatollah Khomeini returns, seizes power and creates an Islamic nation. Opponents are killed, the idea of suicide bombers is introduced to the PLO, and Iran�s oil wealth is used to spawn and support Hezbollah, a terrorist militia that killed 241 Marines in a Beirut bombing and that lately attacked Israel. Iranian radicals storm our embassy, taking 52 American hostages for 444 days. Carter fails in an amateurish attempt to rescue them. Eight military personnel and eight aircraft are lost in a desert foul-up.

Democrat Carter, self-assured and well-meaning but dangerously naive, was responsible for bringing into power an Iranian Islamic regime that�s now creating nuclear weapons to wipe out Israel and blackmail the U.S. and Europe. Iran has further provided weapons and support to Shiite militia and death squads in Iraq and could provide nukes to al-Qaida, with which it has a working relationship.

After the Soviets meet the inexperienced Carter, they invade Afghanistan. Then the communists capture Ethiopia, South Yemen, Angola, Cambodia, Mozambique, Grenada and Nicaragua. The Afghanistan invasion attracts young Osama bin Laden, who raises money and recruits other Muslims to fight the anti-Soviet jihad. After the Soviets leave, this band becomes al-Qaida.

The mini-history goes on for awhile from there…and there’s a lot leading up to it.

I remember Stephen Colbert drawing a lot of approving yuks out of left-wing hippy land when he made a comment to the effect that “the truth has a lot of liberal bias to it” or something like that. Heh. Step back and look at the BIG picture. The truth does seem to have a bias, but not in that direction.

Religious Scientist Taints Science With His Faith

That’s a more accurate headline than anything else you’ll read about this guy, anywhere.

Yes, atheism is a religion. And as a religion, when it comes to scientists who “practice” it, it gets away with a lot more crap than any other religion could.

Does Bush check the Rapture Index daily, as Reagan did his stars? We don’t know, but would anyone be surprised?

That right there is some brilliant “scientific” reasoning, Dr. Dawkins.

From the early 1960’s with “My Favorite Martian” into the next decade, and with a brief resurrection in “Mork and Mindy,” we used to have this interest in the shipwrecked space alien. The mini-genre limped along by exploring facets of our lives “earthlings” took for granted, but that a developed intellect from another environment would find stange for a number of reasons.

Liberals, nowadays, have me convinced that perhaps bringing the mini-genre back would be a worthy exercise. We do far too many strange things, that are normal to us only because we’ve become acclimated to them over time. They wouldn’t…couldn’t…make any sense whatsoever to someone visiting from beyond who was not so acclimated.

And here, I’m referring to the arguing conservatives and liberals do over what’s a good social idea, versus what is not. Liberals say whatever a conservative thinks is good, sucks ass, and whatever the conservative doesn’t want to do, is great; and vice-versa. This is all part-and-parcel of a two-party system. Thanks to The Otto Show, we get a great example of this kind of whining over here, where a lefty guy struggles to make sense out of his own beliefs.

If not for the liberals in the world, we would still be living in caves. Neo-Cons have no imagination. Because of this they fear change of any kind. The only thing that ever remains the same is that things change. A Neo-Cons, will never willingly explore new avenues. They discover nothing except by chance, and never take chances unless forced by unavoidable circumstances. Liberals ask questions, and find new and better ways. They embrace change and innovation. They believe in the saying “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, again.” But Know to try a different way each time to avoid the same mistakes that kept them from succeeding, this way, they learn from their mistakes. Neo-Cons are afraid of the future because the don’t learn from the past.

Huh. I wonder what kind of past that guy’s been looking at. My recollection is, “learn[ing] from their mistakes” means to make sure liberals never run things.

Perhaps I, and that liberal guy, are showing how a personal bias works. I remember some things, he remembers different things.

The dispassionate-but-intelligent-and-interested space alien would be down with all this, I think.

But here’s where he’d have the problem.

Certain ideas, such as freezing the minimum wage and the cutting capital gains taxes, would illuminate the effects of not only those policies, but their opposites as well. They would also illuminate the effect of personal decisions, good and bad, on personal destinies. In other words, if the free market has a greater role in determining our standard of living, it becomes much easier to see what works and what doesn’t. If our standard of living is determined by something other than the free market, the contrast is injured and this distinction becomes much more difficult for everyone.

And without exception, I notice, liberal policies tend toward this difficulty. In fact, that seems to be the definition of a liberal idea. Pumping more money into a failing public school district and requiring parents to continue sending their children there, doesn’t have very much to do with punishing productivity by rolling back tax cuts. Taxing people after they’ve died, doesn’t have very much to do with making it illegal to hire people for less than some arbitrary “minimum wage.”

There is no common thread running through those ideas — except one. It is the erasure of the contrast between good ideas and bad ones. The confusion. Liberal policies confuse. They make it harder to figure out what works and what doesn’t work.

And so I think the dispassionate-but-reasonable space alien would want to know this:

How come you earthlings spend so much energy arguing about what ideas are good for everybody and what ideas are bad for everbody — and yet, only half of you support policies that would prove what’s good, and the other half of you seem to be resolutely opposed to ever finding out for sure?

You earthlings seem to agree on what would highlight the differences and erase the uncertainty forever. You also appear to be weary of arguing. Why not just spend, let’s say, a decade or so, putting aside the arguments and just doing these things that highlight the differences? Then you’d know.

Come to think of it, I’m not even a space alien. And this has had me befuddled for quite awhile.

The More Things Change…

From George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four:

Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle, and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they have borne countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their attitude towards one another, have varied from age to age: but the essential structure of society has never altered. Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibnum, however far it is pushed one way or the other.
:
The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable. The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim…is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal.

High == Republicans in Congress

Middle == Democrats in Congress

Low == Liberals who want to vote for Democrats

Am I right, or am I right?

Thus throughout history a struggle which is the same in its main outlines recurs over and over again. For long periods the High seem to be securely in power, but sooner or later there always comes a moment when they lose either their belief in themselves or their capacity to govern efficiently, or both. They are then overthrown by the Middle, who enlist the Low on their side by pretending to them that they are fighting for liberty and justice. As soon as they have reached their objective, the Middle thrust the Low back into their old position of servitude, and themselves become the High.

Aw gee, no way could that possibly happen after the glorious midterm revolution of 2006 right?

I mean gee whiz, we’ve only been promised Social Security is going to be “shorn up” for, like, I dunno, two generations now.

Presently a new Middle group splits off from one of the other groups, or from both of them, and the struggle begins over again. Of the three groups, only the Low are never even temporarily successful in achieving their aims. It would be an exaggeration to say that throughout history there has been no progress of a material kind. Even today, in a period of decline, the average human being is physically better off than he was a few centuries ago. But no advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimetre nearer. From the point of view of the Low, no historic change has ever meant much more than a change in the name of their masters.

This Is Good XXVII

Via The Absurd Report, via Webloggin’.