House of Eratosthenes

It’s a catchy slogan, but it’s a model for what Steele, and the GOP, should not be using. The first time Palin used it, it was a net plus. It got people talking about the power being invested in government — read that as “a bunch of strangers” — over not only end-of-life counseling, but all equally intimate issues involved in the delivery and administration of health care.

Now drop the sound bites.

They don’t work as well in the conservative realm as they do in the liberal realm. They simply don’t. Anyone who’s sat down to a Thanksgiving meal with one token right-wing curmudgeon at one end of the table, and a liberal counterpart at the other (uncles, grandparents, in-laws, whatever) knows what I’m talking about. The liberal loves to drop sound bites and then smirk smugly. The conservative isn’t quite as likely to do this. That’s because the conservative has some genuine concerns over the idea of strangers in the beltway telling him he has to pay more taxes…or not eat fatty foods…or his bonus was too big…or that only Washington spending can “stimulate” this economy…or that people who’ve never owned slaves, should pay billions of dollars in “reparations” to people who’ve never been slaves.

It’s not that the conservative’s brain is bigger (although that is likely the case). It’s that his motives are more honest. “I want to pay more taxes so the government can give it to people who deserve it more than I do” is simply not an honest thing to say. If it was honest, the guy who says it would be paying his tax liability plus a whole lot more…something I’ve personally not seen, been told about, or believe to have taken place very often.

“I trust myself to spend my money more than I trust the government to spend it” — maybe you think that’s impure, or evil. But it’s honest. And so the conservative argues from the heart. He doesn’t need his party boss to tell him what the focus-group-tested phrases are.

And so, by and large, conservatives do not squeal with delight when they hear their so-called-leaders blossom forward with a new slogan. That’s what liberals do. Anything to avoid actually addressing the logic of this or that thing said at that holiday meal by that asshole on the other side of the family tree.

Conservatives do not adore sound bites, they do not think with them. And so conservative leaders should not use them. “Death panel for ObamaCare” does not have the same effect as Obama Himself saying “We should get out of Iraq with the same level of responsibility we did not use getting in” or what-not.

It’s kind of like a guy-driver crying to get out of a speeding ticket. NOT GOING TO WORK FOR YOU. …and that is just the way life is. All things are not equal. Knights and princesses.

Having said that, where do we go from here? I think everything that needs to be said about health care, has been said. No minds are going to be changed, one way or t’other. Some of us are living our lives to embiggen our opportunities, and we see security as something that will never be complete — it has to be compromised, in some increment, just to get life lived. I referred to these earlier as the Architects, because while we’re living life and trying to increase our options we’re building stuff. Or trying to.

Others don’t give two shits about opportunity, and they see every single marginal potential that something might go wrong, as some sort of unfinished task. They try to get everything they want, and occasionally the message sinks in that that’s never gonna happen. Stunned, they blink a couple times, their throats do that bobbing-up-and-down thing, and then they announce equality must be the new name of the game. It’s called tall-poppy syndrome, or TPS: we all gots ta be equally miserable. These are the Medicators. They go through the motions of thinking through their problems just like Architects, but really what they’re doing is feeling their way around the problems which is why they’re constantly self-medicating. When the whale to your Ahab is something that has to do with eliminating risk, and you’ve lost sight of what you’re trying to do by eliminating this risk…you’re probably a medicator.

Those of us who are into living life, rather than sanitizing it, labor day in and day out to stop those other people from ever learning the horrible secret: The human body is a miracle machine that is built to fall apart. Once the utopia-hype-sanitization-equality people catch onto that, their tall-poppy mania will kick in and we’ll all be living in Logan’s Run City of Domes. It is an absolute certainty. They have to remain ignorant of this, or by the next weekend we’ll all have colored blinking crystals embedded in the palms of our hands.

I’m exaggerating? Think back. These people are never done. They are just as obsessive as any other self-medicating druggie. They don’t compromise. If they do, it’s on the size of the baby-step to be taken today. Once we are agreed on that, the ink won’t even be dry on the signatures before they are planning the next baby step. They just take these baby steps to look moderate, but there’s nothing moderate about ’em. There’s always something left to be done, they’re never happy, and the next “progress” is always in the same direction. That isn’t compromising.

One other thought…

There’s something about being a security-over-opportunity person that causes one to buy into the malarkey that we’ll save money providing health care insurance to whatever-the-number-is-today millions of folks who currently do not have it. Also, they tend to buy into the idea that a tax cut costs money. They’re wrong on both counts, of course. But if that is where the lines are drawn, I say let us then do this:

Bundle whatever monstrosity emerges from this perversion of a process, with a huge tax cut across the board for corporations, small businesses and individuals. Scrap the death tax for good while you’re at it.

Those of us who know what we’re talking about, will look at it like: The economy is going to take this deadly beating from the monstrosity, but with this other item to sweeten the pot maybe we’ll survive it.

Those among us who believe every little word told to them by He Who Argues With The Dictionaries, just because His voice sounds a little bit like Walter Cronkite’s and He says “uh” and “um” so thoughtfully — they can console themselves with the double-falsehood that the tax cut will cost hundreds of billions of dollars, but ObamaCare will save so much money that we’ll break even.

If the democrat party really does believe all the nonsense they’re telling people, this could be given some serious consideration at the very least.

Update: Blogger friend Buck dropped this into the comments, and it needs to see light, get around, be seen. Especially by the Medicators mentioned above…and The Blog That Nobody Reads is not the ideal place for that, of course. But still. This deserves a second & third look.

If’n you’re interested: Further on Ryan/The One. And thanks for the shout-out. 😉
- bpenni | 02/28/2010 @ 11:03
Unless we fix the health care system, we won’t be able to create the jobs we need for recovery.

I think I heard this somewhere. Didn’t I?
.
- OregonGuy | 02/28/2010 @ 13:17

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“Scrap It”Sunday, February 28th, 2010

“Scrap It”
Sunday, February 28th, 2010