Doug Ross, by way of The Classic Liberal…

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Article behind image.

Too late now, guys. You’ll have to file it away for next year.

Hat tip to Dyspepsia Generation.

I’ve already picked on Mr. Klein, but today he or one of his editors chose that title and it’s just too perfect. It illustrates what is wrong with the post-modern liberal movement, or half of what’s wrong with it. It is all about winning. The other half of what’s wrong, is that these are the people who want to erase fissures between us in — everything. Class, wealth, prestige, national borders, “partisan bickering,” race, sex, sexual preference, creed, snips, snails and puppy dog’s tails. We’re all just on spaceship earth together…

…it’s complete bullshit. Their primal urge is to win. They want an elite club, and if nobody is excluded from it then nobody can be in it. They are dedicated to keeping us divided, and then making sure their side wins. And then, to make sure something emerges from the victory, something locked in, so that we’re stuck with it forever and ever, without regard to how unpopular it becomes. And then they want to win at the next thing.

Like I keep explaining to my twelve-year-old son: Find the right scenario, and liberals will behave precisely in the manner and profile they attribute to conservatives.

Passing legislation, it turns out, is a long and ugly process. God, is it ugly. The compromises, both with powerful special interests and decisive senators. The trimming of ambitions and the budget gimmicks and the worship of Congressional Budget Office scores. By the end, you’re passing a compromise of a deal of a negotiation of a concession.

Bad a system as it might be, it’s the only one we’ve got, at least for now. This is what victory looks like…

Only system we’ve got for now? Oh my…is there something about this plan that has not yet been revealed to us? That running for re-election every two or six years is just an intolerable inconvenience isn’t it?

“Victory”? Ah…what a sweet word. As a certain Vice Presidential nominee observed, how nice it would be to see a liberal use that word with regard to America’s enemies.

Hey, that’s beautiful Ezra. Your side won. The Constitution lost…

Ignore, for the moment, the ludicrous claim that giving 30 million Americans health insurance actually lowers the cost of health care. What happened to freedom, to the opposition to an intrusive federal government?

Ask a liberal what he most dislikes about the “right”? “I resent the attempt to tell me how to live my life,” he’ll say. He’ll mention abortion and say that the decision belongs to a woman and her doctor. He’ll mention same-sex marriage and say that government should not prevent two people of the same sex from marrying, especially if one objects based upon religious grounds. He’ll argue that a Supreme Court “stacked” with right-wingers threatens his liberty.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia gives liberals hot flashes. He is religious. He calls the Constitution a “contract,” not a “living, breathing” document on which one can discover or project nonexistent rights. He is a “strict constructionist,” or an “originalist,” who believes that the literal words in the Constitution have meaning. He thinks his job is to figure out what the original Framers meant, not what he would like them to have meant.

Ask a liberal how Scalia and those who share his “conservative” philosophy think the Supreme Court should decide issues like abortion, same-sex marriage and doctor-assisted suicide? He’ll say, “Scalia would impose his religiously based worldview on society — anti-same-sex marriage and anti-abortion — because the federal government should always preserve life.”

No, Scalia would not. In fact, Scalia has publicly said these issues are none of the Court’s business. He’s said that however he feels personally about these contentious matters, the Constitution gives the Court neither the authority nor the expertise to decide them — and such matters are ideally left to the states.

This brings us to ObamaCare.

What words in the U.S. Constitution allow the federal government to compel every American to purchase health insurance? Where does the Constitution allow the federal government to take money from some Americans and give it to others so that they may purchase health insurance?
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A liberal once asked me: “What should society do about the poor? Is your attitude ‘just (expletive) them’?” I said: “Allow me to rephrase your question. Because of someone’s plight, is he entitled to money from you?” “No,” he said, “but it’s the right thing to do.” Yes, a moral, compassionate society cares for those who cannot care for themselves. This is, however, an entirely different matter from using the power of government to take from someone who has, to give to someone who doesn’t. The Constitution does not provide that authority. Nor has it been amended to do so.

What about the poor? Through economic freedom and competition, we make goods and services cheaper, better and more accessible. Health care is less affordable because of well-intentioned rules and regulations. When government officials go beyond passing laws to protect us against force or fraud, they raise costs and hurt the poor.

Finally, what of charity? Americans are the most generous people on earth. The religious and those who believe in limited government are the most generous of all. By design, the federal government plays a limited role. The rest is up to us. Our country was founded in opposition to tyranny by government.

Today we submit to it.

INGSOC. Freedom is slavery.

Related: Amorian.org: “The Supreme Court does not have the authority to ‘widen’ Congress’ powers.”

Also: Point of Law: Why the Reid Bill is Unconstitutional.

Dan Rather didn’t want to talk about Chandra Levy. Charles Gibson wanted to leave the ACORN bust to “the cables.” David Weigel refuses to discuss Sarah Palin’s Facebook updates. But he isn’t above putting out a thesis explaining why exactly it is that he’ll never discuss it.

The problem is that Palin has put the political press in a submissive position, one in which the only information it prints about her comes from prepared statements or from Q&As with friendly interviewers. This isn’t something most politicians get away with, or would be allowed to get away with. But Palin has leveraged her celebrity — her ability to get ratings, the ardor of her fans and the bitterness of her critics — to win a truly unique relationship with the press. She is allowed to shape the public debate without actually engaging in it.

As I said in my reply (#70), it’s kind of a new thing for a Palin criticism to actually make some sense. I gave him credit for that.

But his argument fails for two reasons. First of all, once again, the standard imposed on Palin is an arbitrary one. Supposedly, she isn’t participating in a discourse honestly until she surrenders all control to those who labor exuberantly toward making her look foolish, even if they have to lie to do it. Book burnings, rape kit scandals, Bristol is Trig’s real mother, she calls dinosaurs “Satan’s lizards” — need I go on?

But who else is fulfilling the Weigel standard? Al Gore won’t. President Obama won’t. Hillary Clinton won’t…and those are just the three big offenders. Kerry, Edwards, Frank, Pelosi, Dean — they get a question that isn’t to their liking and we get the Nixon boilerplate of “I’m not gonna dignify that with a response.” I’m not defending this practice. I think we just might have a political system more to our liking, and better for our health, if the people shaping our policy had what it takes to respond to unfriendly questions. Or at least were willing to rise to the challenge. That would be good. But it isn’t happening — perhaps nowadays you can’t survive doing this, no matter how smart you think you are — and Palin didn’t create that situation.

I don’t mean by this that the Weigel standard is unfair. I mean to say that it is rather silly.

And this brings me to the second problem: Who exactly is this woman who is updating her Facebook page? She isn’t the Governor of Alaska. She doesn’t have an actual career as an author, per se. She isn’t the architect of some shady health care scheme that’s about to wreck our economy — she’s criticizing one, sure, just the same way Weigel has some criticisms for her.

Really, Facebook seems like exactly the perfect and proper forum. She’s an experienced and knowledgeable private citizen, who’s selling books to pay legal bills and then she’s going to go home. For a little while or maybe for a long while, who knows. But it seems like a good fit.

The people who are really doing things — refer back to Problem #1 — might consider opening Facebook pages as well, for all the trouble they’re taking to answer less accommodating questions. I mean, really what do we get out of them? “The time for talking is over,” “For too long we have (blank),” “Mistakes we have made,” “Let me be clear,” “Um, Er, Uh” and then the event is closed. If the dictionary says our President isn’t using the word “tax” in the right way — the dictionary! — we just get another snide lecturing that we aren’t supposed to be looking things up there.

It seems every time a Palin critic thinks he has something to say, it all comes down to a rather glaring lack of sense of perspective on his part. Let’s see if I can sum up this feeble mindset in a single sentence:

Silly you, private citizens don’t get to put up statements and then just leave ’em hanging there, avoiding any challenge or criticism; that’s something our leaders get to do while they’re wrecking our economy.

Update: The Weigel Moratorium has been relaxed struck down. More silliness…this time it’s hair-splitting. The point has sailed right over the columnist’s head that state-run health care plans are inimical to any cherishing of the value of the gift of human life. They always have been, they always will be, and it’s just nonsense to keep debating it. Costs have to be controlled. There’s only one way to control them.

I wonder if this is a rather chilling omen about what will really happen? “There’s no such thing as death panels” pundit takes center stage, grabs the mike, and at high noon says “I’m not going to do X.” By 12:30 he’s doing X.

Takes a special kind of person not to be worried about that, Mr. Weigel. How concerned do you think we should be?

Uh oh, looks like someone’s name is getting crossed off a list. Ezra Klein isn’t going to back up PrezBO. And if you’ve been reading Ezra, you know this means there’s been a shift. To call Mr. Klein a lapdog is a slight toward ordinary lapdogs.

Oy. I’ll defend the argument that the health-care bill that looks likely to pass is structurally similar to the health-care proposal released by the Obama campaign. But it’s impossible to defend Obama’s statement that “I didn’t campaign on the public option.” For one thing, it was in his campaign plan, which is to say, he campaigned on it. The proposal (pdf) assured voters that Obama’s plan will “establish a new public insurance program available to Americans who neither qualify for Medicaid or SCHIP nor have access to insurance through their employers.”

The White House argues that they didn’t emphasize it in public speeches, and according to Salon’s Alex Koppelmann, that’s true. But speaking as someone who did a lot of reporting on their health-care plan, they emphasized it privately quite a bit. It was, in fact, their answer to a lot of the other flaws in their proposal. So whether Obama used it in his speeches, his campaign purposefully pushed it to, at the least, some reporters, which is to say they worked to ensure that people knew about the public option’s important role in their health-care thinking.

Sen. Jim DeMint gets to the stuff that should make your eyes pop straight outta your head, at or about 6:08.

Nobody seems to be entirely sure whether this is constitutional. I don’t have a clear answer either. But it certainly does effectively defeat the purpose of having an elected legislature, and it’s certainly in direct conflict with the spirit of Article I.

With a grateful hat tip to Cassy.

Ed Morrissey has more to say:

As I recall, Congress is not allowed to pass rules that bind future Congresses. In the House, the rules have to be offered and approved at the beginning of each session. The Senate has standing rules, but they are not in the form of law that requires further legislation to alter — legislation that would be, under this bill, out of order even to introduce…
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Clearly the founders did not intend…that the first Congress could set the rules in perpetuity, and indeed as DeMint points out, rule changes have been made consistently without resorting to legislation to accomplish them because of the orders of a prior Congress. Put another way, the elected representatives of today should not have greater authority than those who will follow them. Any attempt to pass this into legislation aggrandizes the power of this Congress at the expense of those that follow.

Gary Bauer, writing in the Weekly Standard:

It has been more than a month since U.S. Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan allegedly murdered 14 people and wounded 30 others at Fort Hood military base in Texas. And while we were led to believe that the rampage by Hasan, who is Muslim, would provoke a strong and violent reaction against Arab and Muslim Americans, a backlash has been conspicuous only by its absence.

In fact, in the immediate aftermath of each of the dozen attacks by Muslim Americans since 9-11, the conversation has been dominated by predictions of inevitable violence toward Muslims by bigoted Americans unable to control their rage. And each time a backlash has been virtually nonexistent. Our journalistic and political elites have become terrorism’s unwitting domestic enablers, perceiving religion-based violence where there is none, while ignoring it where it is widespread and intensifying.
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[T]he data show that America’s more than two million Muslims have little to fear from their fellow citizens. According to crime statistics compiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the number of hate crimes against Muslim Americans increased in the immediate aftermath of 9-11. But it declined precipitously after that, and has remained low ever since.

Of 6,832 religion-based hate crimes reported between 2002 and 2006, 4,627, or 68 percent, were committed not against Muslims but against Jews, while 744, or 11 percent, were committed against Muslims. In 2007 there were 1,477 reported offenses motivated by religious bias. Again, 68 percent were committed against Jews, and only 9 percent against Muslims. Reported hate crimes against Catholics and Protestants accounted for 8.4 percent.
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A Rand Corporation report states that of the more than two dozen homegrown terror plots uncovered in the U.S. since 9-11, ten surfaced in 2009. That puts “the level of activity in 2009 much higher than that of previous years,” Rand senior adviser Brian Jenkins told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in November.

The misplaced fear of igniting an anti-Muslim backlash is a consequence of the pervasive and stifling political correctness that surrounds Islam in the West. It prevents many of our journalistic and political elites from naming our enemy and compels them to accommodate radical Islam most readily in the very places it can cause the most damage–in our prisons, public schools, and military.

American Muslim radicalization is happening in a very tolerant America. The United States contains more than 1,200 mosques, and since 9-11 it has elected its first two Muslims congressmen as well as a president who inexplicably believes our country is as much Muslim as it is Christian, and who habitually refers to Islam as a “great religion.”

So some hate-nozzles who’ve dedicated their time and resources toward snarking at Sarah Palin, were recognized at her last book signing and escorted from the event. Andrew Sullivan linked to one of them, and if you’re wondering why Sully can’t stand to have comments at his site you should check out the 280+ under the post of the ejected blogger.

I strongly recommend to any & all who like to advertise their intellectual superiority by criticizing Palin, to check out those 280 so you can see who your bedfellows are. I think my favorite might have been this…

Such a shitty little baby she is pulling a power trip only because she still has some support in this crappy little town.
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Just for the record, I believe that Trig is Willows and that Track is a Menard. I gave this woman the benefit of the doubt for so long but her recent activity has set in stone my belief that she and her family TRULY are nothing but trash and that the most ludicrous tales attached to them are most likely the truth.

Behind that, would be this one…

Hey S’error, you are a phony pit bull. Your teeth are fake. You wear wigs. You have rent a child. Who’s your baby daddy ? How uneducated are your children ? Why does Track hate you ? Why does your house look just like the sports center ? How come your husband does not work ?
I read your book. How come you are always a victim ?
How is life going to be now that you tour is over and no one is paying attention to you ?
Nice facelift ! HA !!

Here’s what I find amusing, and a little bit unsettling…since the book tour started, the newcomers clambering on board the “Yes on Sarah” bandwagon consistently cite as a reason for their support, that the former Governor “seems to piss off the right people.” The No-on-Palin people then proceed to prove the truth of this over and over again.

They think very highly of their own intellectual acumen. It is very important to them that they are acknowledged for being oh so smart. Now dig into those comments; click on some profiles. You’ll see a whole bunch of them are “Anonymous.” Others, if you click on their profiles, you’ll see they started Blogger accounts without blogs, apparently just for the purpose of commenting. Like where they really want to be, is Twitter. Can’t put up anything too complicated, just want to toss out a line of snark here & there.

Click, drip some bile, click something else, repeat. We’re supposed to believe Palin is not a threat? Really? Is there a campaign-of-hate like this being stirred up against, let’s say, Romney? Huckabee?

They also have it in common with each other that there’s always some tip-off, some red flag, that a truly intelligent discerning person wouldn’t want them making important decisions about anything. The “LOL”s, the paranoia, the conspiracy theories, the woman who brags about 4 dogs and 6 cats taking up all her time, but then somehow managing to sign her name to a good chunk of the 280 comments.

A cursory skimming job raises the possibility that every single one of them, qualifies for every single one of the 25 things I notice about Palin bashers. I shall not be verifying this on an item-by-item, poster-by-poster basis. Not worth my time. But I do have to wonder how many of those people are really out there.

Sarah Palin just might decide not to run for anything. But a high level of saturation of these types, would have a deteriorating effect on my faith in people in general. And that’s going through a rather strained recovery at the moment, not unlike our nation’s Obama economy.

The time has come for this one…

This guy voted against Barack Obama and he’s really sorry he did it. He’s got a friend who voted for Barack Obama, and he’s really sorry for that. They meet up with Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, and the four of them walk down the sidewalk…repentant McCain voter, repentant Obama voter, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.

They see a ten dollar bill just lying there. Which one of them picks it up?

“…and that’s why we’re here.”

That’s from 1:55-2:02 in the video above. Okay sweet-pea, but as the guy points out you still flew here in a great big ol’ plane.

Hat tip to Rick. The passage I quoted in the title, in my opinion, was a somewhat-adequate defense; they’re alternative-fuel proponents, and as of now you can’t get to Copenhagen from stateside using linseed oil. They’re just a couple more young people trying to do their part by bringing about the next revolution. All of western society is going to smack itself in the forehead and say “Omigaw, I’ve had my head stuck up my ass all this time and it took the courage of (insert your name here) to point it out to me!”

My concern is not the hypocrisy. Although I do like that voucher, and I think it’s a scream. Read the wording, it just gets funnier and funnier as you keep on reading toward the bottom.

My concern is that sentiment, that objective, regarding society smacking itself in the forehead and “realizing” something. How that approaching Omigosh-moment is so casually defined by our younger people, and has been for generations now, as the meaning behind the word “work.”

Everyone who’s ever stepped onto a campus wants to be our next Joan of Arc.

Like I said in my comment,

These youngsters want to “make us realize” this-or-that…it doesn’t matter what the epiphany is, so long as we “all” have one, and they’re the ones who gave it to us…because they are BORED. They don’t want to fill in the blank after someone else has designed the checkboxes, they want to design the checkboxes, because filling in the blank is for losers. That’s what they have been taught, and I think our society will eventually survive it, but not easily. And we shouldn’t be struggling with this theft of our society’s youth. We shouldn’t be tolerating it.

As I said further on, I know this personality type very well. The tragedy is that these people, while their judgment is unsound, their intellect is not lacking. Overall, they’re reasonably intelligent. In fact that’s usually how the problem got started: When they were about five-to-eight years old, someone told them so.

The folks from days-gone-by did things better than us, though. I’m not referring to their smaller carbon footprint; I’m referring to apprenticeships. You couldn’t become a blacksmith until you did your time as a blacksmith’s apprentice. Ditto for the bricklayer, the barber, the tanner, the shopkeeper, the cooper, the roofer, the miller. You had to form your ideas about how things should work — by spending your certain required number of years just toiling away at them the way they did work, and keeping your high-minded ideas to yourself. It was thought, back then, that if your revolutionary ideas really had merit, you’d still be hanging onto them after the end of this apprenticeship. That idea took hold well before the Renaissance and it was in full bloom afterward, so it can’t be all bad. Why did we scratch it? Whose dumb idea was that?

We’ve gotten rid of this; not through a conscious decision, and so nobody has had to qualify exactly how this decision made sense, or if it ever did. But I think it’s reasonable to say that experiment has failed, and before we talk about “agreements” from Copenhagen, we should first make it a mission to bring back apprenticeships. That is the big crisis that confronts the globe now.

People who haven’t done any real work…by which I mean, not simply spending calories…but putting in effort to produce an outcome defined at the outset by someone more senior; figuring out independently that this-thing or that-thing cannot keep drifting in its current direction if the outcome is to be achieved; and so this must be changed, that must be changed, and it’s all up to you to realize these things and act on them…people who have never been through a stewardship process like that, have these ambitions about “correcting” the rest of us. It is arrogant, counterproductive, wrong, and I cannot find the words to express the magnitude toward which this wastes our human potential.

I think PrezBO put it perfectly — just direct those words toward a different crowd, I say. Quit telling me I’m holding the mop wrong. Grab a mop.

Cassy keeps up with what’s going on at Feministing so you don’t have to!

And Morgan sides with the man-bashing feminists…to a point. (Comment #8.)

I think that I shall never see, anything quite as tragic or pathetic as a post-modern feminist muttering something to the effect of “look how far we still have to go.” Why do we let these people decide anything about their own lives, let alone how anybody else’s life should work? They put four decades of their most passionate effort into something, and when the results are not to their liking they loudly announce that there’s a necessity to do a whole lot more of what was already done…that produced the results they don’t like.

These people shouldn’t be making rules for the rest of us. They shouldn’t own pets, they shouldn’t dress themselves, they shouldn’t pick out wallpaper for their own living spaces, they shouldn’t even be in charge of their own bank accounts.

Daphne found someone who can write almost as well as she can. It’s that lawyer-lover Mahons fellow, with whom I entered into that little dust-up; I was treating him like a jerk, because frankly, he was behaving like one. Well, perhaps I should give him another eval…or not…regardless, this is superb.

Morning has broken. So has my head. As I lay in bed dawn’s soft sunlight burns me like the noon day sun on Dracula at the beach. My mouth feels like an army of pygmies with muddy feet has marched across my mouth for a month.

The tidial headache ebbs and flows between splitting migraine and traumatic brain injury. Events of the night before flash on and off in my battered memory – the vividly inappropriate joke, the tragic karaoke choice and the unnecessary nineteenth drink. Whose idea was shots for the house? Did someone really bring a camera? Why am I wearing one shoe in bed?

Sitting up in bed seems a task fraught with danger. Standing up an impossible fantasy. Yet I manage both. Briefly. A walk fall and crawl to the bathroom (the hop skip and jump of the drinker’s olympics) results in the application of cool tile to the face. I lay on the floor of the bathroom, my feet under the sink and my head next to the bathroom scale and weigh my options. A new low. Before some dectectives comes to chalk around my body, I struggle upright by grabbing the sink and pulling myself up with both shaking hands. A horrible glance at the poor soul in the mirror. Not a moment of great self-respect.

I sidestep to the toilet like a deranged crab and begin pissing away the poison into the bowl. Since I need my hands to hold onto the walls, accuracy at times must be sacrificed for basic relief. When the Mrs. discovers the effects of uncertain targeting later in the day, hilarity will not ensue. With so much alcohol in my system when I finish my dick burps. Not a pleasant experience, I assure you.

Mother of God. Whose idea was cigars? The effects of smoking join forces with the effects of drinking as my liver and lungs compete to see which system can fail first. I don’t need the hair of the dog, I need the hair of the Yak. This day will clearly be spent in agony and penance.

Now I recall why I hate holiday office parties.

Before we thought my son was a girl, we thought he was twins. When we thought he was twins, there was an office party. During and following the office party, this was my experience…partly because, I like to think, we thought he was twins. The ensuing unpleasantness left such a deep mark it has not been repeated since. He’s twelve now.