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...
Every “good” (sleazy) salesman is taught to tell and not ask. Treat the customer like a child. Too many promising sales fall through because the salesman had the courtesy to seek the customer’s blessing before doing something; if you issue instructions to the customer, rather than requests, you can get things sold that otherwise never would have been.
We’ve seen over the years that this is the way our current President works. He talks a lot about “national dialogue” when it’s a schtik that will get Him out of some kind of trouble, and He’s very fond of playing Himself up as some kind of conduit through which the concerns of the common man can be sent into the beltway so that they, at long last, have an effect on big, important things. But have you ever considered what things would look like if this were really true? Have you ever stopped to consider what it would look like if Obama started a national dialogue every time He wanted something done? As opposed to informing us lowly peons of what He has decided is the right answer? What if Obama was a question-mark — as He ritually presents himself — instead of an exclamation-point?
Would you like your new president to have a special logo? How about an “Office of the President-Elect,” should we have one of those?
Should we implement the DREAM Act?
Do you think, when we spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody?
Would you like your president to bow to foreign dictators?
Trillion dollar budget deficits aren’t something we really care about…right?
How about a half-billion dollar loan to Solyndra, is that a go?
Do you think we should tax capital gains at the same rate as W2-status paychecks, so that Warren Buffett’s secretary never pays a higher rate than he does?
I think it’s time to get rid of manned space flights. What say you?
Should we front-load the taxes on ObamaCare to make it harder to figure out whether the plan pays for itself?
Do you think business owners built the businesses that…uh…y’know, they built?
Do you think we should return the bust of Winston Churchill to the United Kingdom?
Do you think marriage is a union between a man and a woman?
Should Catholic hospitals and charities be forced to provide abortifacients and contraceptives in their health plans, in contravention to their religious principles?
Did the Cambridge Police act stupidly?
Would you like a re-designed American flag?
And my personal favorite: Is the private sector doing fine?
Now with some of these, if you look in some places, you’ll find quite a few of your fellow citizens who will answer “Not only yeah, but hell yeah!” They’re out there. But…not nearly enough to push such a question over the top, were it to be asked in any kind of a respectable nationwide poll.
And here we come to what Barack Obama really is. He is a device. He is a mechanism, to put ideas through that are so bad, that they cannot be “put through” in this way without the benefit of such a magical device. The device He uses is His race. Hillary would have used her sex. John Kerry and Al Gore would have used their ultra-sophisticated ultra-highbrow nuance, their vaunted intellectual ability to “think in shades of gray” as the saying goes. Meaning you’re just a big ol’ slope-foreheaded dummy if you can’t see the wisdom.
Bill Clinton used his charisma. As in: Who gives a flip about the merits of the argument, when this guy walks into a room he lights it up and the ladies just love him, so who cares what you have to say.
Post-Dukakis, the democrat party has been consistently looking for this quality as they choose their champions. Some flavor of false cachet. Some cynical device to make sure arguments are won, always, even when they should not be won. That way, the ideas can mutate and migrate into ever-deepening depths of nuttiness, to such an extent that they make no sense whatsoever, and still have a shot at getting through and hopefully sticking.
Barack Obama is really nothing more than a machine, designed and selected for the purpose of selling ideas that are so bad that a less capable and less sophisticated machine would not be able to get them sold. Merely re-posing these ideas in question form, vividly shows how unsaleable, and how bad, these ideas really are.
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To be fair to Obama and the Democrats (and wow does it feel weird to type that, knowing they would never do me the same courtesy)….
Part of the problem is our fetishization of the office of the presidency. The “imperial presidency” or whatever you want to call it. Under the original system, the real meat-and-potatoes of politics were supposed to be worked out in the races at the local level — voting for your congressman was supposed to be far more important than voting for president, because it was your congressman who would really get in there and represent the unique needs, desires, and views of your section. The president was supposed to be a kind of National Backstop, like when the catcher runs down to first base on a routine ground ball, just in case there’s an overthrow.
These days, though, the President is supposed to be his party’s standard-bearer, and that standard is so broad that you end up with this weird everything-yet-nothing approach to campaigning — Romney is being far too squishy, we say, except when he’s being far too hardline. He’s got to appeal to “moderates,” who are basically just liberals with some faint, mostly theoretical glimmer of common sense, while at the same time pitching red meat to “the base,” half of whom are evangelicals who are (or at least tend to be) breathtakingly statist where their social views are concerned, and the other half of whom fall on the Paul Ryan fiscal responsibility side….
The Cult of Personality is actually an efficient way out of this jumble. You can try your best to square the circles, speak calmly and rationally and logically, cut deals and compromise and hope everyone involved is an adult who realizes that “everybody gets everything they want, consequences be damned” is the way teenagers think…. or you can just make the quarterback the prom king and the student council president and the valedictorian, because he’s such a cool dude and omigod is he looking over here right now?! The people get what they want — freedom from the responsibility of thinking for themselves — and the wire-pullers get the only thing they ever want, which is the ability to keep pulling wires and lining their pockets for another four years without the muddle and mess of “representative government.”
I think Hamilton and Jay wrote about 400 eloquent pages on this…..
- Severian | 09/25/2012 @ 09:38