House of Eratosthenes

Enrollees over at the Hello Kitty of Blogging, who happen to be friends with Don Surber, were given a real treat this morning. Call it a “column prototype” of sorts, it was going to be going into the paper, but Surber decided to commit it to that medium instead:

EVERY politician says something stupid in any campaign. Usually people give them a pass. President Obama recently said that if people feel faint in the heat, they should call a paralegal.

Amusing but no big deal. It sits besides his 57 states comment as something conservatives drag out now and then to mock him.

What scored was his statement in Roanoke, Va.: “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.”

That line marked a turning point in the 2012 election just as John Kerry’s statement that he “actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it” turned the 2004 election around.

Of all the dumb things Kerry may have said that year, that quote because it revealed something about Kerry that a majority of voters had suspected all along: that he is a sneaky opportunistic politician who always has his finger in the wind.

His supporters argued that it was taken out of context in the speech. Perhaps.

But voters put the quote in the context of the character of the man himself — the Vietnam War hero who then turned on his fellow warriors in false testimony to Congress.

In that context, Kerry was untrustworthy. His statement confirmed that.

Liberals have argued that Obama’s words are taken out of context. They argue that he was making a point about no man being an island, even though he said no such thing at all.

Voters, again, are putting the politician’s words in the context of his actions.

Americans gave Obama $787 billion for a stimulus. He spent it on government programs. The unemployment rate went up. Slowly it has come down, but it is still higher than when he started spending the stimulus.

“If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that” confirms for many people — a majority of voters, I believe — that [this] president is a big government blowhard who does not understand business and is to blame for the lack of a recovery from this recession.

Context is not simply reading the whole speech but placing the speaker in context.

If your preacher says, “you didn’t build that,” you agree because you know and I know that God created the universe and we should humble ourselves before the Lord.

But when a smarty pants who just graduated from an Ivy League school says it, you and I know this kid has a lot to learn.

I like those last two paragraphs because they highlight a differential between classic Judeo-Christian teachings, and modern liberalism. Both of which, by the way, seek to tone down the credit claimed by the mortal builder for the glory of his creations, but for very different reasons. The religion says the glory should go somewhere else, the modern libs essentially say the glory itself is a problem, and should just go away.

Of course, like any other contaminant, the glory can’t just “go away,” it has to get sucked up somewhere. That’s why we capitalize the H in pronouns like “His” and “He” when we refer to President Barack Obama: Liberals honor Him exactly the same way the devoted honor their deities. Glory should not go toward ordinary mortals, no matter what, so it should go to Him instead. He’s like a vacuum-cleaner-bag for glory. All the rest of us are essentially just the same, all milling about pointlessly in this lower layer of human strata, in which nobody really built anything; only The Obama is on a different plane.

It is an Architect/Medicator conflict, as I later wrote:

The “you-didn’t-build-ism” is an example of the endless battle between “architect” and “medicator” personality types. The difference between these types is the source of most human conflict. Architects flesh out details and get them defined, not as an end but as a means toward an end; Medicators, in turn, are threatened by this process of definition. That’s what President Obama was doing; it was not His intention to insult the business owners, nor was He really trying to give credit to the “someone else” people who did the real building or whatever. What He was trying to do was erase the distinction.

I’ve disagreed with Rush Limbaugh about this part of it for many years now — NO, these people we call “liberals” do not see government as the source of all good things. They don’t really like government any better than most conservatives…They see it as a great anonymizer, like an IP masking service on the Internet. The function provided by government, the way they see it, is the same as the function of distributing blank bullets among a firing squad so nobody knows who really killed the guy standing in front of them.

They don’t want to believe in God — because, they don’t want to believe in anything good. In their world, stuff just kinda happens.

That’s what you-didn’t-build-ism really is: It’s just simple fear. Fear of acknowledging a detail. “So-and-so built such-and-such” is the loathed, feared detail.

For the record, no, this was not a winning move for the President; it was a dumb stupid thing to say. And I mean that purely in the practical sense. Yes, some people were very enthused about it, but those people were going to vote for Him in November anyway. Contrasted with, there were people who were purely undecided about which way to go, who will never support Him now, certainly not if they care about what’s going on with jobs, and the economy. Because now it’s revealed, this is a guy who not only didn’t start a business, probably doesn’t know anybody who ever did, but wouldn’t.

Like Cylarz said under the other post I put up about this…

This is nothing new. Back in the 90s, Clinton was always talking about “government giving people the tools they need to succeed.” The man was such a skillful liar that I never knew for sure what he really did or didn’t believe, but I wrote back in college, “Like any good liberal, he has it exactly backwards.” It probably never even occurred to him that maybe it was the people who give the government the tools IT needs to succeed – they fund its operations and its powers derive from “the just consent of the governed.”

Yes, there are customers. Yes, there are employees, and roads built by other people, and bridges. But the guy starting the business has to carry all of that. He takes out the loans. He pays the employees, along with the taxes involved in hiring them. Secures the permits, rents the space, pays the taxes that get those roads built and maintained. When customers give him money, he sees to it they receive a greater share of product & service, and if he fails to do that then they stop being customers. Everybody else involved in the building of this business, has to be compensated at a profit for their involvement or they cease to be involved. The people building the businesses have to see to all that, or the business goes un-built.

Just statin’ the obvious, here…although, looks like it isn’t obvious to everyone…

[…] The “Underlying Social Contract” You-Didn’t-Build-ism “Sh*t You Don’t Say at a Job Interview” “A Generation Awakens” Memo […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 07/20/2012 @ 07:43
I saw your comment over at the Hello Kitty of Blogging about an app to defriend people who still plan to vote for Barry. I typically -mostly-ignore politics over on FB because my friends are spread across the political spectrum. However, I’m about to lose my temper at the rampant bullshit disguised as facts being posted. Looks like I won’t have to defriend some people soon, as I suspect some of the more (now) humorless ones will take care of it for me.

I have to admit, I cannot actually bring myself to look at FB right now because I’m fairly certain that “crazed wingnutz and Rush Limbaugh killed those people” would cause me to lose my shit in an epic fashion, something my family and close friends would not appreciate.
- Physics Geek | 07/20/2012 @ 08:11
Yeah, the dishonesty is interesting. It’s scary how many people out there carry themselves around as “non-political” or “politically neutral/moderate” and then show all the usual signs of being in the tank. One of my favorite signs: A conservative or Republican does something wrong, and oh, look at the awful things those people do…and then a democrat does something much worse, something that highlights the moral bankruptcy of that party and that ideology, and they’re all, oh well, you can’t trust any of them regardless of party…
- mkfreeberg | 07/20/2012 @ 08:22
And the big thing that only business owners understand is making payroll. You are responsible to pay people for the work they’ve done. Their ability to pay their bills and put food on the table rests on the ability of the business owner to pay them. The government does not step in to bail the owner out.
- teripittman | 07/20/2012 @ 15:20
Thanks for picking that comment up, Morgan. After I said that, I actually had a feeling you might quote me.
- cylarz | 07/21/2012 @ 00:18

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