Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
This one is inspired by a comment made by Duffy in regard to a post I put up expounding on George Will’s thoughts re: The Chosen One. Duffy, in turn, may have been inspired by my observations about the cyclical nature of these presidential candidate superstars.
Duffy observes,
Obama’s game is the retread of every Democrat playbook for the last 30 years. Appeal To Emotion. Change change change was all we heard from Stephanapolous and Carville. Same tune, new dancer. Hell even Cliton’s hagiographic film was called “The Man From Hope”. (Yes they were talking about Geography but the double meaning was evident.) Lofty rhetoric is great but I don’t know if it’s enough to get him to the goal line. The shine is wearing off and people are asking, “yeah, ok, hope and change but what does that mean?”
Having asked that for awhile, and having been accumulating little morsels of information useless in isolated solitude but beginning to make some sense cumulatively when one observes them together…I think maybe I’m ready to field that one.
The hope is that Barack Obama will win. But it is not proportionate to popularity. If it was, Ronald Reagan with his 49-state sweep would earn, at least, a grudgingly superior magnitude of acceptance compared to Bill Clinton, who didn’t even win 50% of the popular vote in ’92. Reagan was more conservative than Clinton, but Reagan was much more popular than Clinton. Reagan, the argument could be made, was more charismatic than Clinton, and probably moreso than Obama as well. Nevertheless, Clinton, until Obama came along, was the walking definition of what was/is being sought. Reagan was not.
The reason why this is so, is not entirely related to political ideology. Ideology is a filtering device, of course — Reagan is a Republican, so the slobbering Obama fans are not permitted to think fondly of Reagan in any context. But here is your riddle wrapped in the enigma: Where is the liberal democrat Obama fan, wandering around, wistfully opining “why, oh why, can’t we find someone who shares my beliefs who is capable of a 49-state sweep, like Reagan was?”
Maybe they say this behind closed doors, but demure when the time comes to express the wish out in the open, lest a chink appear in that liberal democrat armor.
Well, I don’t think so. I’ve been watching these people, and I notice they don’t seem to be able to count to fifty-two. By which I mean — any electoral contest that comes up, winning that magical 51% of the vote is just as good for them as winning 99%. Like shoving a heavy Cadillac off a cliff. Just get that center of gravity over the precipice, that’s all that matters.
And that scares the hell out of me. It tells me that when they express all their hatred for people who don’t think the way they do, they have equal measures of hatred for an ideologically-opposed fairly moderate 49% as they would for an ideologically-opposed fringe-kook 1%. It’s a festering, but dull, dismissive type of pustulating hatred they have for the 49%. But it erupts into a rancid, venomous fountain of spite once the 49% reaches 50%.
To put it another way: These people, their catchphrases notwithstanding, have little or no concern about how many people disagree with their values, or what this might say about their culture’s evolving viewpoint — so long as they can still win elections. They look across the aisle to do their sneering. To roll their eyeballs. To elbow each other in the ribs, jerk their thumb in this direction, and say to one another, “get a load of that guy.” Quantity, so long as the car makes it over the cliff, is well outside of their concern.
Conservatives are different. A poll comes out that says 80% of a community is opposed to same-sex marriage, for instance, and this says something better than if the poll said only 55% was so opposed. If the poll said it was 95% percent, that would be even better.
When the issue comes to capital punishment it’s pretty easy to see why conservatives feel this way. If 40% of us are opposed to capital punishment, that means there’s a real chance someone will eventually be released from prison and kill a young woman or a small child who didn’t have to die. So naturally, if only 20% of us are so opposed, that’s a happier situation. Of course there will always be at least 5% and we realize this; we wish we could get it down to zero. Because some people are simply inclined to kill, live for no other purpose, and anyone who has any effect on how the justice system works ought to understand this.
But our liberals don’t care. They can’t count to fifty-two. They want that 51% and that’s all they care about.
It’s two different ways of looking at cause-and-effect. Some of us go around saying “I’ll bet” about the stuff that really matters. I’ll bet it would be a good idea to take the car in for an oil change early. I’ll bet we’re going to get little tiny flies in the kitchen if I leave that pineapple rind out. I’ll bet I’m going to find my kid has homework due tomorrow that he isn’t getting done, if I ask him. In other words, when we make predictions about the future, what we’re doing is engaging in On Your Left Nut thinking.
These people who are the subject of Duffy’s concern, are different.
They only say “I’ll bet” about one thing: The ability of a candidate to get to that magic 51%. Witness all this unbridled exuberance over Bill Clinton sixteen years ago, and Barack Obama now, over something called “charisma.” But not too much charisma, because ninety-nine percent is no better than fifty-one. Just to win.
Didja ever notice this about some people? You see it a lot with ballot initiatives; and therefore you probably see more of it where I live than anyplace else, because California is drunk silly on referendums. Nobody reads ’em all here.
People gather the day after the election and recall how they voted. And some of these people say something like “I voted yes on that one…but it went down 61 to 39.” And they look down at their toes. But they can’t tell you what the referendum was going to do. One gets the distinct impression if they could go back and do it over, they’d vote no. In other words, the object of the exercise of voting, was not to put a policy in place that would have beneficial results for the community, or even for a class of persons living in it. It was simply to win. Just like playing the lottery. Make the call, will this one go through or will it not; then, proceed on to the next choice and do it again.
They do exactly with predicting the outcome of a democratic process, what the rest of us do with other things that really matter — things that are left up to our own individual choices. They learn their lessons, maybe avoid any publicity they can about how the subject immediately under consideration works. Then they resolve to do better next time. They undergo the same paradigm shift that you do, after making an incorrect guess about whether there is a nest of black widows under your kids’ playground equipment. But they only think that way here. And, maybe with the above-mentioned lottery. And spectator sports events, of course. Other than those three things, they just can’t see any point to saying “I’ll bet” and using their noggin to figure out what’s going on. About anything.
We get frustrated with them, because we’re arguing about what happens if guns are banned; what would happen if Saddam Hussein was left alone; what will happen to the unemployment rate if the minimum wage is raised. We might as well be arguing with a brick wall. These people don’t think in terms of cause and effect, except for things watched by many of their peers, with fairly immediate results. Elections, lotteries, and sporting events. That’s all.
And so all this enthusiasm for Obama being the “real deal,” has to do with what I defined that phrase to actually mean:
REAL DEAL: Flattering slang attached to an individual who possesses a unique ability to sell products unneeded.
Obama still has some mob-support, but it has nothing to do with cause-and-effect, sound policies, beneficial results, inflating your tires to bring down gas prices. Nothing to do with any of that.
It has to do with getting to that 51%. Making people ineffectual, who ought to be ineffectual, because they don’t believe what “we” believe. What do we believe, though? Not a whole lot. Whatever Obama tells us to…today. Go check his website.
After all.
He’s the “real deal.”
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Excactly. Most of these people are in it for the validation, which is easier to get if you take the progressive standpoint.
See? I rest my case.
- philmon | 08/08/2008 @ 15:3751% seems to be a magic number, until it’s time to undo the damage, then suddenly only 41% is what counts.
- CaptDMO | 08/09/2008 @ 12:20[…] or that person thinks. As representatives of the Medicator mindset, our modern political left works tirelessly to align a bare majority of the electorate to their side of an issue, and once that…. As they count percentages, they can’t count to fifty-two. So that’s strange; they care […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 10/30/2011 @ 10:16