House of Eratosthenes

So I’m seeing this emerging meme coming out from multiple different sources — it’s wasteful and pointless to generate a list — that the reason President Obama’s performance in the debate last week sucked so much, was that Mitt Romney lied about so much stuff, and when honest people like His Holiness Our First Godly President come up against lies it’s just like Superman stumbling across Kryptonite or something. Just completely discombobulates ’em, they don’t know what to make of it. The result is the disaster we saw last Wednesday which, really, we should’ve expected it all along. Darn that Romney, he’s such a liar.

*sigh*

Borrowing a page from Family Guy, without the comedic flair, for just a second…This reminds me of a few years ago when Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull came out. Indy fans like me were relieved to see there was no problem at all with Harrison Ford’s apparent strength, agility and vitality with all his…uh…experience. He looks, if a bit weary, then also weatherbeaten, rugged, alert, driven, persistent, strong and (somewhat) fast. Overall, it works. But there were three big problems:

One, nuking the fridge.

Two, emerging from the tomb to find a bunch of bad guys relieving him of his prize.

Three, gawking at the ultimate find when a bunch of bad guys follow him into the chamber, again training their guns on him and holding him captive.

Others have already complained about the first of those three, which has no connection to this anyway. So let us concentrate on the last two. Which do.

Let’s see…lifetime-experienced rough-and-tumble world-wide adventurer Indiana Jones was fooled this way twice in the first movie, perhaps arguably one time in the second one (the “Lao Che Airlines” thing), twice in the third. And it happens twice in the fourth. Three times, if you count being abducted and thrown in the trunk of the sedan at the beginning. Lara Croft, on the other hand, seems to have been snookered this way one time at the Tomb of Qualopec, and then afterward learned her lesson…right? I think she did. Indiana Jones, on the other hand, is some kind of a dumbass. It makes me truly worried about the fifth Indy movie. Okay, in we go into the tomb…hey Indy, got an idea, most of the people who are along here are afraid to go in anyway. We’ve got some nice big-caliber guns, think maybe we should station someone outside as lookouts? Nah.

Yes, that’s taking it a bit too seriously. This is a fictitious character. The job is to gratify audiences, and for most among us, this doesn’t ruin anything.

The President of the United States, on the other hand, is not a fictional character. He’s real and, furthermore, not-gettin’-fooled is actually in the job description. But it’s worth pointing out, I think, that the excuse he’s using here is exactly the same as what the democrats were using a decade ago, after that imbecile George W. Bush fooled them into passing the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) in Iraq, a.k.a. The Iraq Resolution. It is exactly the same. Then, they were confronted by simple, durable and irrefutable logic: Hey waitaminnit, “somewhere in Texas a village is missing an idiot” as you people like to say…the idiot apparently fooled you…what t’heck happened here? What does that make you? And the response came back, well, er, uh, it’s like this, George Bush lied to us. We got fooled because we believed what he was saying, we’re such good people and all.

John Kerry lost the election. It was a squeaker, and there were a lot of factors in play. It is plausible to think back that, what determined the final outcome here, was that the sales pitch simply wasn’t workable: We are sophisticated and good, put us in charge of everything, we’ll make sure everything goes alright until someone tells us something that isn’t true at which time it will all come undone because we aren’t capable of dealing with that.

This just exposes the weakness of liberalism: It doesn’t pursue success, it pursues excuses for failure. It places no more value on either one of those two things, than the other. It’s a political ideology dedicated to the-dog-ate-my-homework.

Indiana Jones has a great excuse for defeat, nowadays: Those darn bad guys, they’ve got guns & junk. This is the guy who singlehandedly defeated an entire convoy. The cream of the crop of Hitler’s mighty military machine. On horseback.

Obama is supposed to be ushering us in to a new age, in which the oceans finally recede and the planet begins to heal.

But tell Him one little fib, and the one loose thread on his sweater has been pulled and the whole thing comes undone.

Funny thing, though, is this. Some of this damage would have been deflected, successfully I think, if the President simply came clean: I lost the debate because I underestimated My opponent. Just a tiny bit of humility…not this proxy stuff, where He apologizes on our behalf to foreign dictators, or commands us to turn off our thermostats so Europe will say okay. Just a smidgen of the good, old-fashioned, money-where-your-mouth-is, first-party stuff. I made a mistake. I was caught with My pants down and I will do My best to make sure it never happens again.

But…not gonna happen. It’s like milking a fish. Or, a refrigerator protecting you from a nuclear blast. Necessary parts just aren’t there.

I dunno why they keep using this excuse. I hope they keep doing it.

I’m really not pleased with a future in which the resourceful and capable Indiana Jones I knew as a teenager, is a relic of distant history, but Barack freakin’ Obama is still going strong, being applauded and cheered on and congratulated for being the Food Stamp President. Are we that ticked off at the very concept of strength, practical intellect, human capability, wherewithal? Are we that enamored of thumb-sucking and making excuses? If so, things are going to have to get a whole lot worse before they get any better.

I think this is the real reason most liberals want to shut down dissent — it reveals too many of these little contradictions.

I used to think it was because of the authoritarian personality, or Cloward-Piven, or because their vision requires the supression of contrary evidence to be plausible. I don’t doubt that this is still true for their court intellectuals. But for your average liberal — your sweet Aunt Ruth and your dotty Uncle Billy — it’s because they can’t bear to think of themselves as anything but nice.

If Obama won the debate, it’s because liberalism is morally superior. If Obama lost on “facts,” it’s because Romney lied, and liberals — who only want to believe the best of everyone, because they’re such nice folks — just aren’t prepared to handle that level of malicious deceit face-to-face. If every word Romney spoke were proven true beyond a shadow of a doubt, the standard liberal line would be that he’s a heartless robotic technocrat who would happily kick orphans into the gutter to starve if it changed the bottom line on the spreadsheet. If you could somehow prove that wasn’t true, the line would be…. something, anything, so long as Aunt Ruth and Uncle Billy can continue reflexively thinking of themselves as “Minnesota Nice.”*

It’s so much easier if we just declare whole categories of though verboten. In the guise of political correctness, of course, because it’s not suppressing dissent, it’s just being nice. And don’t we all want to be nice? Well, maybe you don’t want to be nice, Mr. Meanie Conservative, but such a morally superior being as myself…..
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* a phrase popularized, I believe, by Garrison Keillor, who — suprise surprise — is reportedly a vicious nasty sumbitch in person.
- Severian | 10/10/2012 @ 07:27
It occurs to me that in order to be fooled by someone who is lying to you, you have to trust him first. At least a little. There isn’t a liberal alive – Barack Obama hisself included – who would have said, the day before the debate, “I trust Mitt Romney.” Which just tells me there is no explanation (beyond stupidity, carelessness, or ego) for being taken by his “lies.” And indeed makes the whole gargantuan defeat that much more pathetic, instead of any more excusable.
- Andy | 10/10/2012 @ 11:26
Good points.
- mkfreeberg | 10/10/2012 @ 11:36

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Fooled AgainTuesday, October 9th, 2012

Fooled Again
Tuesday, October 9th, 2012