John Hawkins fills us in on why and how the Tea Party is ruining America:

1) The Tea Partiers Lost America’s AAA Credit Rating. Sure, the Tea Partiers may have supported the Ryan Plan and Cut, Cap, and Balance, both of which would have preserved America’s AAA credit rating, but what we’ve just experienced is a “Tea Party downgrade.” How does that work? Well, just as Paul Revere caused the British to attack America and Mothers Against Drunk Driving causes people to drive drunk, the Tea Partiers caused America’s credit downgrade with their incessant demands that we cut spending to avert a credit downgrade…or something. It’s a little foggy.

2) The Tea Partiers Are Extremely Radical. Have you heard these radical yahoos going on about what they want to do? They actually want to stick to the Constitution and balance the budget! What kind of crazy talk is that? Need I remind you that the last time we had people talking like that in this country, they clung to their guns and religion, too. Next thing you know, they actually overthrew the government over taxes. Are those really the type of people we want to emulate in this country?

One of my Facebook friends has commented that she will not vote for a Tea Party candidate because their ideas are far too extreme. So I submitted a reply politely asking for the single most extreme Tea Party position on any issue. I’ll let you know what she manages to produce, in the comments below, as soon as she comes up with something.

So I’m arguing with this lefty college professor, and you can tell already I’ve got him completely creamed because he pulled the “Me and my friends are all political science professors” card. No, c’mon, I’m not making it up it really happened. He’s trying to pawn off that debt-downgrade-Tea-Party’s-fault thing…and I’m not buying it. So that makes me dumb. You know how this goes: The lefty produces a premise, or a “whenever,” or an explanation or a theory, with just a glimmer of promising evidence. It is opposed to common sense in some way. But because of this glimmer of promising evidence it’s supposed to completely change your world view, and from this instant forward you’re supposed to drift around pointing back at this guy, I guess, and tell everyone you meet “He just completely changed my worldview!”

See, you’re supposed to think: It could be…therefore…it must be. This is exactly the way people can no longer afford to think, when they’re in the business of building things that actually have to work, which is why it’s popular with professors. In this case, there’s that passage in the S&P report on America’s debt downgrade that seems to say we could’ve saved ourselves from the natural consequence of spending with wild abandon, if only we’d done what democrats want us to do: Stop worrying about debt when the time comes to spend money, and only worry about debt when the time comes to raise taxes.

Classic prog idea: It makes sense if you’re a wizened sage smarty-pants…and are completely lacking in common sense. Because with your feet planted back on the ground where they belong, you have to think: Well now waitaminnit. If I’m married to someone and our credit gets downgraded, and she’s been saying all along “don’t spend the money, don’t spend the money, we shouldn’t be going so far into debt”…after the downgrade happens am I going to be the one to tell her “I told you so”? Dude…that makes no sense at all.

See how easy it is to prove this is a sucky-ass idea. Just correlate it to real life — and, yeah, to really pound the hammer into the wall, for some folks, we use the female to represent the sensible point of view just like in a detergent commercial, a lot of people won’t respond otherwise. And, just like that, it’s crystal-clear. How is it some people can’t see this? Can it be they know something the rest of us don’t? They sure act like it!

And that is when I had my flash of brilliance. Maybe…maybe…that is the warning system right there. As I’ve been writing in these pages, over and over again right back to the very beginning — we live in a time when there is a rich, vast array of services available to us that spare us from the necessity of rational thinking. We are safe and we can part with a few bucks to spare ourselves from labor, if we want that option…and if you live in California and we’re talking about changing your own oil, unless you have an accepted way to dispose of the old oil, you don’t have the option! People tend to forget what this ultimately means: We don’t recoil from sucky-ass ideas because there’s no reason to.

So we have these ninnies running around, not all of them left-wing shills (although most of them are), plying us with their barely “plausible” nonsense. They’re lonely people because this is how they renew their social contacts — their ideas are found to be antithetical to common sense, but there’s something plausible about it, so the idea must be true and since it isn’t the first thing you’d assume, this makes them brilliant and now you’re supposed to accept the anti-common-sense idea plus tell all your friends about this wonderful, brilliant person you found on the Internet who showed you this truth you’d never have otherwise realized and it just completely turns your life around.

My flash-of-brilliance moment was nothing more than a new appreciation for how often we’re running into this. It’s growing, starting to surround us, it’s everywhere we look now. Someone has a new angle to present — but it isn’t really a new angle, it’s just a bunch of barely plausible crap that’s supposed to win them some friends.

Then I had a moment of exuberant scientific curiosity: Formed this way, an idea would not very often be a good one, would it? It would almost have to be a sucky-ass idea in order to prosper when it is formed in this way toward this objective. So, theory: If an idea makes a person feel exclusively bright…if it’s like a special gemstone he can carry in his pocket that gives him special, individual worth…you can pretty much conclude right there and then that the idea sucks ass.

A I searched through my short- and long-term memory trying to figure out if this gels, I found one single exception and I had my moment of sensible humility. Because, to be completely honest about it, I might very well have had my eyes closed with a big smug smile on my face when I told my fiance and my kid “Fine, you guys keep using your pussy Windows operating system but I’m all fed up with it and I don’t need it anymore.” And this, I must say in all humility…has turned out to be an okay idea. So my decision of what OS to use is just fine, but my theory needs just a little bit of refinement.

If it makes you feel above everybody else, but it isn’t Unix, the idea sucks ass. That’s my hypothesis. With that one little waiver in place, it seems to work. People who feel all smug and special because they’re switching to Unix, are sick and tired of Gates & Ballmer’s shenanigans and they just want something to work. People who feel smug and special about something else, on the other hand…driving a hybrid…drinking out of an eco-cup…blaming the people who said “Hey, let’s not go so far into debt” when the credit gets downgraded…placing an order at Starbucks that takes longer to explain to the “barista” than it does to get the drink actually whipped up, with more calories than a Quarter Pounder at McDonalds — and then insist they make it with non-fat milk — these people all have ideas that suck ass.

It isn’t a hard-and-fast logical conclusion to be drawn. If it was, I wouldn’t be able to grant a waiver from it. It’s simply an observation about the times in which we live. Very, very few of us are charged with the task of building something that might seriously injure or kill us, or somebody else, if it doesn’t work right. And so, to accommodate this vacuum of critical thinking we have demonstrated, we are being confronted by a tsunami of endearing, socially-elevating, smug, talk-with-your-eyes-closed ideas.

That suck ass.

Potty-mouth language warning.

Hat tip to my local morning radio guys and blogger friend Buck.

It’s interesting that the Angry Left gets away with this; you could argue they’re not getting away with anything, in the sense that they’re fooling absolutely nobody, just enjoying all the benefits that would be involved in fooling everybody. “Angry protesters”? “Residents of the district”?

Astroturfers. What’s wrong with using that word? It was invented for precisely this very thing. Loser Move-On-Dot-Org hacks.

And teachers, huh? Hope there’s not many of those. I’ve seen a lot of things paraded past my face persuading me toward sticking the kid in a private school…a lot of things…statistics, reports, stories, rumors, you name it. Nothing pushes me toward that line quite as much as the idea that something like this might in fact be a “teacher’s union” protest. It is the most compelling argument toward private or parochial in our modern times, and that is really saying something.

A meme has taken hold; it says that the Tea Party is to blame for the United States’ recent credit downgrade. Perhaps it is more fitting to say the meme has been “launched.” Progressives do that with memes, they launch them, just like NASA used to launch space shuttles before President Obama came along, or shipping lines launch a new vessel on her maiden voyage. Some shuttles and some vessels have long and distinguished careers, and some burn up in the atmosphere or sink on a reef after just a few times out. Well hey, let’s launch the meme and see what happens. Throw the crap at the wall and see if it sticks.

According to the meme, the Tea Party is to blame for the credit downgrade because we didn’t get a big tax increase out of the debt deal. This, somehow, would have saved our AAA rating.

It seems to be coming from this passage in S&P’s report, which for obvious reasons has been quoted frequently:

Compared with previous projections, our revised base case scenario now assumes that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, due to expire by the end of 2012, remain in place. We have changed our assumption on this because the majority of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise revenues, a position we believe Congress reinforced by passing the act…

Gee whiz, there’s a quote straight from the source that will buttress the argument, and everything.

Except I’m doubting like the dickens any thinking individual can coherently spell out the logic. Let’s give it a try by starting out with the basic concepts, on which everyone can agree. We have this thing called an “economy” and an economy can be strong or it can be weak; right now it is anemic. Because the economy is anemic, our government is having difficulty raising the revenues that would offset its spending, some 25 to 30 cents on the dollar of which, on an annual basis, is brand new and wasn’t part of its budget as recently as three years ago.

To say any more about the spending is to depart from that narrow focus on which all points on the political spectrum will find agreement. I’ve already mentioned something on which my left-leaning friends would like everyone to remain silent. So let us really fracture the envelope we have now pushed, and note that we are fracturing it: I think an “economy” is a system or community of multiple parties, exchanging goods or services, each party acting toward the benefit of its own interests. So a “strong economy” is one in which it is easy to channel the disparate interests into economic activity, which is trading; an “anemic economy” is one in which there is difficulty involved in doing this.

Still basic stuff, but we don’t agree on it anymore. Liberals cry foul. They may or may not say that my position is wrong, but you know they must have a different definition in mind when they say the cure for a “weak economy” is to “raise taxes.” Taxes have the effect of making it harder to envision a profit from the trading. Liberals may dispute my definition of what an economy is, but they do not dispute this part of what taxes do to the profit motive — on that point, they find agreement. This is why they like the higher taxes. They say so often. So-and-so is getting by too easy, “not paying his/their fair share.” We need higher taxes so the rich/wealthy can give back to the community.

So they must disagree with me about what an economy is. When they agree with me that the economy is weak and sickly, their fix is to raise taxes which, in their view, would somehow strengthen this “economy” upon which they are actually proposing to place a heavier burden.

Wow, these are the people who want to regulate health care for our old people? What do they do when their grandmothers get weak and sickly? Have her move in…and then put the old battleaxe in charge of moving the furniture around?

There is another point to be made here about liberals and higher taxes. I’m afraid this point may not be relevant for quite some time, but it’s still worthy of comment: Those who are capable of recalling pertinent events after a greater stretch of time — and perhaps this is a dwindling audience — will recall that our liberals think higher taxes are very important when everyone agrees the economy is strong.

We saw it in the 80’s, we saw it in the 90’s, we saw it in the “aughts.” Right? Boom times…the rich are doing okay…they get richer, the poor get poorer. The divide between rich and poor is growing. The economic recovery is leaving too many poor people behind. Blah, blah, blah…so this is an interesting point, that is very often overlooked in our fast-paced, blink-and-you-miss-it world of “The Only News I Care About Is Right Now.” When the economy is doing well, our liberals look at higher taxes as a necessary restraining device — it somehow becomes the government’s business to make sure nobody is doing too well. When the economy is flat-lined, comatose or just put on a sickbed for a spell, our liberals think higher taxes possess some medicinal value. They aren’t a restraining device anymore, they’re an energizing elixir.

So it seems they don’t even have their own definition of what an “economy” really is. They don’t know. That means you’d better not ask them, or the conversation will become uncivil and it will be all your fault. But the liberals know what higher taxes do! They make the economy stronger — or put it in check, or something. Always, always, higher taxes will move us in the right direction where we want to go. Like magic. The answer is always higher taxes.

Meanwhile, on the Tea Party’s culpability in the debt downgrade…well, the S&P passage may look like it stands on its own. But for those who show too much recklessness in interpreting it in ways helpful to their own ideological agendas, the facts are not kind to what they’re trying to put together.

See, when we citizen simpletons waved signs like “You Can’t Spend Your Way Out Of Debt,” and “Stop Stealing From Our Kids,” we thought we were helping. It probably sounds crazy to you, but we figured the best way to avoid a debt crisis was to — gee, it seems so silly now — not to borrow all that money in the first place.
:
President Barack Obama wanted to spend $1 trillion in borrowed money on the stimulus, and we opposed it. Then he wanted to add trillions in new health care entitlements and we opposed it. Then he wanted a “clean bill” on the debt ceiling — authority for another $2.4 trillion in debt with zero in spending cuts — and we opposed that, too.

So obviously the downgrade is all the Tea Party’s fault. Because, um, well, you see . . .

I suppose that’s dry reading. So let’s sign off instead with the Tweet of the Day, via Prof. Jacobson, by way of Gerard:

I think that sums it up nicely.

Isn’t a credit-downgrade what you’re ultimately supposed to be afraid of, when you’re spending way more money than you’re taking in?

Just a useful sentence from Ed Driscoll that I wanted to preserve:

[The Tea Party] has to be the first “Totalitarian” movement in the history of mankind that, if it gets everything it wants…will leave you the hell alone.

A Thomas Jefferson quote by way of Land of the Tea:

I place economy among the first and most important of republican virtues, and public debt as the greatest of dangers to be feared. We must make our choice between frugality and liberty, or excessive spending and servitude. If the debt should be swelled to a formidable size, its entire discharge will be despaired of and we shall be committed to a career of debt corruption, and rottenness. The discharge of the debt, therefore, is vital to the destiny of our government.

And yes, doubters, he really did say it.

Anthony Watts is on the case.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one…

A blonde is typing away on her computer in a coffee shop. Suddenly she lets out a shriek. “My work! My computer screen just went black and now I can’t find my work!”

One of the other patrons suggests, trying to be helpful, “Maybe the battery shut down. Did you have it plugged in?”

Blondie indignantly clucks her tongue and rolls her eyes. “No, you idiot! It’s wireless!”

Brad Hoffman (hat tip to Ed Darrell):

[President Barack] Obama should have let the Bush tax cuts expire last year, which would have dramatically reduced our deficit. [emphasis mine]

Like, you let the tax cuts expire, that would make the tax rate higher. A higher tax rate means the government takes in more money, which is what it needs in order to pay down the deficit! Because when you have a deficit it means you haven’t been taking in enough money, so what we need to do is pay more taxes. You idiot!

What’s so hard to understand about this? And why won’t my stupid wireless laptop work anymore?

Many explanations are possible; perhaps it is the most valid one that actually applies, and whatever it is, it just completely changes everything.

But. Would that even matter?

I’ve been “in computers” for 23 years now, some 19 or 20 of them in some huge leviathan construct — believe me, I know bureaucracy. I can spot it a mile off, I know what it looks like up close, I’m more familiar than I want to be with how it looks from the inside.

The thinking that got Obama elected is thinking I have seen many, many times before. Here I’ll summarize it quickly from memory…and those memories do not draw on Barack Obama.

Management’s management, alright? We don’t need someone who knows the ins and outs of what we’re building or what we’re doing. It’s all just a bunch of widgets, isn’t it? What we need is someone with people skills. Someone who can inspire others to follow where he’s going. Just hire someone for this job who will secure that much — all the other pieces will fall into place.

Two problems: One, you aren’t giving up your search for A (effective management) in favor of a search for B (the pizzazz, ooh, there’s just something about him!) — in hopes that the realization of B will naturally bring about A. That is a tempting rationalization, and there is some allure to it; but that isn’t what’s going on. What’s happening is, you are sacrificing A for B. You get effectiveness when you apply a pressure that demands effectiveness — it must be unremitting and unceasing — there is no substitute for it. Second problem: As our President vividly but perhaps unintentionally demonstrates for us, when the dust all settles you don’t even get B.

Barack Obama has become a nightmarish, freaky bore. I mean, just face the cold hard reality: When He steps up to a podium, do you even have a glimmer of “let’s see what He has to say here”? Anticipate learning something new? Seeing something unexpected?

Can you even rely on being entertained?

We searched our kingdom for a new, wise and able King, and instead ensconced a court jester onto the throne. Now we don’t even have a decent jester. Yeah, yeah, I know…racist of me.

Ah, God bless the Internet and God bless Google. Finally found it.

Happy Friday, everybody.

Well, we’ve reached a negotiation. It’s pissing everyone off, so it’s probably about as good a compromise as could be reached. I’m sure a better compromise might have been…well, better…but it’s an open question as to whether that was possible, and a worse compromise surely would have dealt more damage.

Let’s review at a high level with all the drama left out of it. That’s when we learn the most, you know; reviewing things at a high level, and with low drama. It occurs to me that with all this conflict compressed into a couple of months of “ZOMDFG The Debt Limit Cometh” we may have seen our entire human-species story conveniently mushed into a handy package of relatively miniscule time. The opportunity for learning about ourselves is rare.

We have these capable people, we have local widows and we have town drunks. That is to say, we have people who are capable of meeting their own essential needs and then sparing a bit of effort afterward to help others. We have those who are in need of the assistance through no fault of their own, and then we have others who live in a state of dependency as a chosen lifestyle who think work is for suckers. Now, within the capable people there is another meaningful distinction to be made between those who earn their daily bread creating products and services that can be sold — and then we have those who, although they bristle at having it pointed out, push paper around and produce nothing. That’s a touchy subject, so much so that this last divide cannot even be acknowledged if the peace is to be kept, unless the audience within earshot has been carefully selected.

Now, you put these pieces together into a unified mass, and you can divide that mass again yet another way, this time according to how people think: Those who are receptive to all of the above three distinctions, and those who will acknowledge only the one divide between capable and incapable. Conservatives and liberals, in other words. Conservatives understand there are producers and non-producers; they understand there are local-widows and town-drunks. Liberals only see the difference between what they call “haves and have-nots.” So add this to the long list of reasons that the liberal viewpoint not only doesn’t make sense, but cannot make sense; in a twist of irony which no sane writer of fiction would allow himself, liberals fail to gel with reality because they are not sufficiently “nuanced.” Our side doesn’t know its butt from a hole in the ground, but somehow, we have all the money — except when a survey comes out that says liberals must be more sophisticated because they enjoy higher incomes and have achieved higher levels of education. See, even when they measure things liberals can’t keep it real, because the measurements change to accommodate what’s being currently discussed; what is to be “proven.” They see themselves as champions of the underclass, the David striking a blow against Goliath, but when they seek to assert themselves their tactics become like those of the Goliath. The rest of us need to learn to welcome our new overlords, they’ve taken over the academia, the communications industries, the science institutes, the executive branch, everything that is an establishment. Anyone who isn’t a liberal, even flush after an election victory, needs to bend, yield, give way, make do, learn to compromise, etc. But oh by the way we’re filthy stinker rich people who have all the money.

Now, into this picture of the people, we have to add the picture of our nation’s government’s finances. The revenue situation stinks on ice. We’re taking in something like three dollars for every four we spend on defense, social services, stimulus programs, foreign aid, administration, and interest on the debt. Much of the spending is new; up until just a few years ago, we somehow figured out how to get along without it. By the way, the debt situation, like the revenue situation, is about as bad as it can possibly get. Were the revenue situation to be completely turned around starting tomorrow, there is still much difficulty involved in seeing how we can ever dig ourselves out of this hole.

The point of all this is one I’ve made many times before. Those who obsess over the one people-distinction, the dividing line between the haves and the have-nots, and close their eyes to all the other people-distinctions…have-nots due to circumstance, and have-nots due to personal preference…haves from making friends and pushing paper around, and haves due to money fairly earned by helping others…of necessity must also blind themselves to the deteriorating financial situation. As we round this meaningful corner of truly losing control of the government’s finances, to such an extent that we’ve never lost this much control before — they still need to make their noise about finding creative and innovative new ways to spend money. The real tragedy is that their ideas are not stationary; they’re sliding down a slippery slope. Some among them are thoroughly enmeshed in the progressive worldview, ready to tattoo themselves with it from head to toe. Others are simply headed there, humans only just recently bitten by the zombie, at the nascent “What’s wrong with us all coming together to help each other?” gullible, innocent, almost adorably naive stage.

Now, look what we just saw happening here. Leave aside which side got what it wanted out of the final compromise; ignore that, for in my view it’s a little like figuring out chair positions on the Titanic. Take a look, instead, at the public-relations battle. Liberals pride themselves on their public relations. They took a beating from beginning to end here, and no, it was not a “lost leader” as part of some grand strategy of theirs. They looked like idiots and they didn’t plan to. Even worse, they looked that way to the “no dog in this hunt” types, the moderates, the Main Street people, the freshly-bitten slippery-slope-sliders. Idiots. Harmful, dangerous idiots.

And that is the point I wish to make here. It is a point I’ve made before: Modern-day liberalism is the precise opposite of what it pretends to be, the inverted-color image of what those who embrace it, seek to make of themselves. It is supposed to be about independent and logical thinking, but you can’t get much less logical than “screw the debt picture we have to find more ways to spend money.” It isn’t independent. Once confronted with something that is plain truth, a fact so verifiable and simple that it cannot be denied, liberals will refuse to discuss it if it endangers the agenda. One of my favorites is “Is Peggy Joseph (the ‘Obama gonna put gas in my car and pay my mortgage’ lady) smarter than Walter Williams, Charles Krauthammer and George Will?” They simply won’t address it. It’s mind-boggling to watch this. They’re emotionally invested in that hardcore-case worldview, in which the dumbest person who agrees with them, can boast of greater intellect and capability than the most promising among those who dare to dissent. And so the subject is changed, because it seems if they confess to the obvious someone will leap out of nowhere to grab and tear up their “left-winger in good standing” card.

Seriously, try it sometime.

We found out why Barack Obama got nominated back in 2008. No president in modern times, I daresay, has dealt with any situation with greater incompetence and laziness that what we just saw out of Him. Quick, name one thing Barack Obama did about this besides giving wonderful speeches, just one thing. You can’t. And at this point, should the speeches even count? You and I breathe in oxygen and return it to the environment as carbon dioxide; Obama gives speeches. But if you have a single negative thing to say about Obama then you must be racist. So yes, Obama is where He is because of the color of His skin. Every politician desires some cudgel to be wielded to allow him to have the final word in an argument — Barack Obama just so happens to have one. And absolutely nothing else that would make Him of any practical use to anybody.

I have also written, to excess, about how liberals boast of their grand ambition to make life more “fair” and to make people more “equal.” But that this, too, is polar-opposite/mirror-flipped from what they really want to see happen, and you don’t have to study them too long before this becomes apparent. Social spending, military spending, invading a country, aborting babies, a mosque at ground zero, gun control, labor unions, teacher salaries, evolution versus intelligent design — discuss any one of these things with a liberal for more than thirty seconds, and the discussion will loop around to someone being innately better than somebody else. These people are so wonderful, those people are bitter clingers. What did we just see happen here? Liberals came to an argument without facts and without reason, and ended up calling the other side a bunch of names.

Like I said: A compression of human history. The complete picture of what we are, warts and all.

Call them liberals, progressives, moonbats, lefties, whatever. They are, ultimately, line-erasers. Distinction-losers. They seek to conflate those who need help because of genuinely hard luck, with those who choose to rely on the efforts of others because of genuine laziness. They seek to do this so they can achieve the next tier of compassion, understanding, wisdom and open-mindedness. They achieve the exact opposite. They appear to genuinely believe they are laboring toward a level playing field in which everyone with a heartbeat enjoys equal rights and equal opportunity. Consciously or not, they labor toward the exact opposite of this.

They talk a great deal of “sitting down to talk out our differences” with “understanding” and a willingness and capability manifested on both sides, to perceive subtle “nuances” and achieve a productive “compromise.” Which, then, both sides can recall fondly, remember as an occasion on which something meaningful got done, goals were reached on both sides, understanding was achieved and conflict was avoided. We’ve just seen how they conduct themselves before, during, and after such a sit-down.

They walked into the “sit-down” intent on getting everything they wanted, compromising on nothing, got all pissy with their representatives at the table when the compromise was offered anyway. They got even pissier when the compromise was reached, signed, sealed and delivered. Now they’re scheming of ways to get even. Because they’re so much better than everybody else and deserve more, and everyone else is so terrible and awful.

They’re supposed to be working toward a better world. But a child can see the world that has been built, may be completely screwed, and it isn’t because of conservatives saying “stop spending money” — it’s because of liberals saying “spend all the money you want plus a whole lot more.”

They have giant holes in their lives that can’t ever be filled. Feeling guilty about drowning girls in the back seats of their cars, or whatever…they must do penance, but the penance somehow has something to do with the rest of us being forced to spend money.

Severian. Channeling Freeberg, but in a better position to comment than Freeberg.

Hat tip to Phil.

Wisdom from Yours Truly, on the Hello Kitty of Blogging…which is more appropriate, I believe, as a post of its own. So I’ll plant it here:

I think progressivism holds appeal because it does the opposite of what people say about it: It sorts people into different levels and locks them in place there. This guy here at the top is supposed to decide everything, that guy there has the authority to destroy people because his judgment is completely perfect, all these other people at the bottom should just mill about waiting to be told what to do.

Funny thing is, that’s exactly how the enthused progressives are [naturally] configured. Some of them want to boss strangers around, and others want to line up for their three hots every day and just be told what to do. So the allure i[s] that you’ll be locked into the plateau that is most comfortable to you. It seems there isn’t a progressive anywhere who’s entertained the thought, even momentarily, that maybe the this perfectly-run United Federation of Planets will find the “right” role for him that is different from what he’s envisioned.

We see three tiers, at least. You have the Obama/Hitler/Napoleon/Mao/Stalin guy at the apex of the pyramid…the demigod. The public figure whose face is to be put on posters, and by his very definition cannot make any mistakes since anything he does instantly becomes the definition of moral, just and right. You have the middle manager who carries out the Sun King’s directives. Then you have everybody else.

There are ranks within ranks. Man-God-King has a consort and other immediate family members; they are demigods too. The middle managers are placed on a higher relative level as they are positioned closer to the Man-God-King. As for the proles milling about, sheep-like out at the periphery, it seems they are also ranked within their own caste according to whether they agree ideologically. The “I for one welcome our new overlords” proles are better than the Tea Party proles.

But that is the ziggurat right there, the upside-down funnel. Social structures that accept the left-wing approach, constantly, arrange themselves into this configuration, popularized since ancient Egypt. It’s timeless, I think.

I further perceive that the most enthused progressive aspires toward the middle ring, seeing himself as a middle manager. From arguing with these people, it seems to me they get a perverse thrill out of telling other people what to do…it’s as if, if they were to go out and do their converting and there was no converting to do because everyone already agreed, they’d become exquisitely unhappy. So they’re salivating about the prospect of forcing plans on people, but are not ready to become the person who comes up with the plan because that would involve too much responsibility. They want to receive a plan from someone, and then hammer it into place somewhere else.

I believe their ambitions are formed by absences: They don’t want to come up with the plan, they don’t want to take responsibility for coming up with the plan, and they don’t want to learn to live with something that doesn’t meet with their agreement. They’re simply avoiding challenges, and while they’re at it, avoiding the stigma that would come with avoiding challenges…and so they engage in an illusion, trying to appear to be doing something.

Hence, the appeal of wanting “To Be A Part Of This Thing.”

Winner of the contest at Power Line.

On the debt issue, or debt ceiling issue, or budget issue, or budget deal issue, or the deficit spending issue…whatever ya wanna call it…Terri thinks my position is the conservative one.

She’s right, of course. That’s the problem.

I have this unrealistic viewpoint of budget issues: The way I figure it, companies and people and governments are all forming budgets for essentially the same purpose, and that’s to get all stressed out before the money gets spent instead of after the money gets spent. Of course they & we do this for different reasons…but that doesn’t matter, that’s essentially what budgeting is.

And so my unrealistic viewpoint is, however you define “conservative” with regard to the government’s budget, that’s what conservative should mean with regard to your household budget. What you call “liberal” with regard to the government’s budget, that word should have the same meaning when used to describe your budget too. “Middle of the road” just logically follows those two. In my world, that’s how it works.

I hope I’m out of step with everybody else. Because brother, let me tell you what…what I’m heard being described as “inflexibly right wing” within discussions of the government’s reckless-spending-issue…

Let’s boil it down this way. I get my paycheck and I have a stack of bills I have allocated to that paycheck. The way I see it, it is that paycheck’s job to pay those bills, because the next paycheck is going to have a whole new stack of bills up against it. So it’s like this: If I do a “right wing” job of managing that paycheck, you know what that means? It means I don’t spend a single nickel of it on bullshit, until I’ve paid every single nickel of those bills. And “bullshit” is anything that isn’t a bill, including food. Sorry, sweetie! You have to cook tonight even though I got a paycheck — no pizza delivery — because I haven’t gotten the phone company to answer their damn phone and take my money yet. I keep paying bills and paying bills, until there isn’t anybody left who’s willing to take money from me anymore…I figure up how much of what’s left to allocate for frivolous incidentals, like groceries, and I hold that out. And I put the rest in savings. Hopefully at least half of it will go in savings. That’s a “right wing” way of managing a paycheck as far as I’m concerned.

“Left wing” means I get sloppy and lazy. I go, “oh I’m rich because I haven’t paid my bills yet,” I start computing how much I can blow on miscellaneous crap, and I spend that first. At some point I get around to paying my bills, and I take a gander at my checkbook register to try not to overdraw the account, and hope against hope that one number’s bigger than another.

If I’m really lazy, clumsy and incompetent about it, I figure out aw crap I went over a little bit…then I have to pull a quick hundred bucks or two out of savings, so I can finish paying my bills. That’s a rather left-wing, liberal, overly tolerant way of paying my bills.

Or, maybe I let a bill go so the next paycheck can handle it. It’s still within the thirty days right? That’s left-wing. And I don’t say that to insult left-wingers, that’s just the way it works. That’s the direction we’re talking about — left-wing tolerates slop, right-wing requires strictness.

Anyway. That’s where I put the goalposts. Right wing pays bills and then savings and then indulges bullshit with what’s left over, if anything is left over. Left-wing indulges the bullshit first…might dip into savings a little tiny bit…but not too much. If it does, the savings will be replenished later. That, when I manage my household finances, is “left wing.”

Now. Let’s look at what has happened to our ideological positions with regard to managing the federal government’s budget.

Pffffffffft……..where to begin??? I guess we should start with right wing. What does it take to be an advocate of a “right wing” position on this particular issue? It would be easier to enumerate the positions that would not be right wing. Strident, shrill, uncompromising, and downright rude right wingers…Tea Party people…what makes them this way? Upon what are they insisting?

“Hey folks, would it be too much to ask that we at least track how many freakin’ digits are in the debt we’re racking up?” “Gah!!!! Shrill, strident, take-no-prisoners right-winger!”

Middle of the road means, I guess, go ahead and raise the debt ceiling and keep right on spending. Find creative new innovative ways to spend money. I call that liberal but the prevailing viewpoint says that’s middle of the road…for reasons that entirely escape me.

The government’s spending a trillion dollars more than it’s taking in. Every year. Would “Hey…let’s try not to make it two trillion” — would that be right-wing? Would that be unrealistically, uncompromisingly Tea-Party-ish?

The democrats wanted a stiff tax increase in this deal, to punish — er, I mean, make those “millionaires and billionaires pay their fair share.” I’d say no to that…but I’m a right winger. I suppose anyone who gave the slightest bit of resistance to it was a right-winger. Of course, Congress doesn’t have the authority to demand a certain amount of revenue for the government; all it can do is raise the tax rates, and hope for the best. Just like, at the kitchen table as I go over the household budget and realize I’m not making enough money, I can keep spending what I like and hope I can get a big raise next year. To pin my hopes on that, in managing my budget, is something I’d call left-wing. I’ll bet you’d call that left-wing too, as you manage your own budget.

When did that become a centrist position when we think about the federal government’s budget?

How far does Congress have to go — or any member of Congress, within that august body — to be considered “left wing” during deliberations about the federal government’s budget? Oh, my. Is it even possible? I haven’t even heard any one particular position called left wing. I don’t think anyone with a real voice and with real influence, has even kept track of it — I don’t think they’d know how to answer the question. From all I’ve managed to read and hear over the last few weeks, everything is either “right wing” or “mainstream/centrist.” And all of these positions, with very few exceptions, have to do with spending essentially as much money as has already been spent. Not my idea of moderate at all.

Well. I think my own opinion is as middle-of-the-road as middle-of-the-road can get. I think Congress should manage their budget the way I manage mine. And what would I do if my financial picture looked like the government’s? Hah! The mind boggles.

Raise the debt limit? Are you out of your freakin’ gourd? Try spending limit. No wait…try savings minimum.

I’d make Genghis Kahn look like Abbey Hoffman if they’d left it up to me. At least, by their standards of “right” versus “left”…

Coffee, straight from my own coffee pot in my own kitchen. Ahhhh… ++slurp++

I drove through about two thousand miles, give or take, with a total of about maybe…I dunno…ten, twenty minutes of audio entertainment Friday morning when it got nightmarishly boring. The rest of the time I just did some thinking. One of my deeper thoughts turned to superheroes in general. You see some of them functioning as individuals, like Batman and Spider Man, and others work within a group like the Power Rangers, Fantastic Four and the Justice League.

Some of these characters are transitional. That is to say, they have their adventures as individuals and then you see them as part of a group, and then they have their own stories as individuals again. With a lot of the big names, it’s a very casual transition. Batman, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman and Aquaman are just kind of…in there, and then out there. Doing the hokey-pokey, in, out, in, shake it all about. There are others like The Huntress who are unceremoniously drummed out and then allowed back in, each transition part of a story with high philosophical meaning about the ramifications involved with working in a group. Those ramifications typically involve living up to a higher standard, and that, in turn, typically involves treating the bad guys in a humane way that doesn’t conclude with some desperate need for immediate medical attention.

Sometimes, a story arc will involve a member of a group leaving and then rejoining in time for a climactic battle scene, during which time it will become evident that he realizes much greater success when he is part of the group. This part of it, like a lot of other fiction, I have found to be the exact opposite of real life. Which is odd, because a fictional construct of the most realistic sequence — the hero works on his own, finds a way to change the world for the better, joins a group, finds he isn’t contributing much, goes out on his own and returns to his previous cycle of changing the world for the better — is not to be found in too many places…not within my knowledge, anyway. It’s a big comic book world, I’m sure everything’s been done at least once somewhere.

But if it has, it just doesn’t seem to take.

I wonder why? Sure we all like to have the little kids understand the benefits of working together and sharing their toys and activities with each other. But we want them to earn some money someday, don’t we? Wouldn’t it be useful to warn them about creativity-killing bureaucracies? There is The Huntress, of course; but it always seemed, to me, that the message being delivered had something to do with her being a better person when she was part of the Justice League, nevermind if she enjoyed a higher functional purpose, or if she even looked right in that role.

In fact, let’s go through all the mathematical possibilities. Work by yourself, join a group. Work as part of a group, quit the group and work by yourself. Work in a group, quit the group, have an epiphany and re-join the group. Work by yourself, join the group, decide this is for the birds, quit and work by yourself again. Cross-tabulated with…realize some successes working in the group, encounter persistent failure working by yourself, or realize some successes on your own and find yourself about as useful as a bag without a bottom when you’re in the group. How many different rows and columns are we talking about here? I do not know, and that’s out of scope…if I were to spare the few minutes getting it into a list, it would look very silly anyway and it would only serve to distract.

But your Origami-Unicorn-hey-I’m-a-replicant moment…the moment in which you realize your dreams and memories have been implanted…is this: We expect a certain moral to the parable. If you’re part of the Justice League and you realize a mix of successes and failures there, and quit to go out on your own, we have been conditioned to expect you to fail. You are ultimately supposed to learn that your proper place is within a group. If your efforts as a lone wolf are consistently successful, you’re supposed to conclude that it just doesn’t feel right, isn’t worth it, and you’re supposed to re-join the group — if you encounter failure on your own, you are supposed to come to an understanding that this is because the group is missing, and go re-join them.

Of course, if you don’t do that, and you say “Well, I may be failing as a lone individual right now, but success is just around the corner” then that would be nuts. That would almost be enough, all by itself, to make you a villain.

But if you realize persistent success in your efforts fighting as a lone superhero, and join a group, and then you find you’re chock full of fail in that configuration…then, you are expected to just keep at it, keep trying, eventually you’ll learn how to fit in and All Will Be Right With The World.

Some figures, of course, work well by themselves from the very moment in which they were created. But these are flawed, byronic heroes like the above-mentioned Batman and Spider Man. They are incomplete people, “dark” heroes whom kids can think are cool, if they want to, but the kids shouldn’t actually aspire to be like them.

As I said, this is a medium for little kids so some of this is to be expected. Parents tend to like their little darlings to be taught how to play nice with the other little darlings. But then, that’s what makes this so important. The adults should be paying more attention when their preciouses are ritually taught that engaging in efforts by yourself, is undesirable, doomed to failure, or ought to be dooomed to failure; and that self-worth is something to be found only when one functions as part of a group.

This, I believe, is not a positive development. Frankly, I don’t see the need. Yes there are some kids who’ve developed the kind of personality where they become excellent team players, and are unhappy or unfulfilled attending to their challenges by themselves. Do they require the entire comic book industry to pander to this aptitude profile, in order to feel good about themselves? Is such pandering, at an early age, even necessary? Does this even have to be defined at an early age? There’s nothing wrong with acquiring and realizing your most beneficial strengths as part of a group. Our country’s defense is based on this very thing. But if that’s where your calling is, it seems to me your drill instructor can beat the attitude into you at age seventeen or eighteen, just fine; success is not guaranteed there by any means, but it won’t have a lot to do with what comic books you were reading.

Hey, the feminists get to throw their fits whenever Wonder Woman’s legs aren’t covered up (although, at 70 she has yet to gain traction, momentum or currency — in or out of a group — without bare legs). All kinds and sorts of ethnic minority groups get to complain when they are not duly represented by some lame late-arrival to Super Friends like Apache Chief or Samurai or El Dorado. At least, I hope they complain, because I’d hate to think the writers just came up with these characters on their own…that would be really patronizing.

And don’t forget the physics. Everyone loves to complain about physics. Can Daredevil really do all that stuff just because he’s blind? How exactly does The Flash vibrate his molecules through a wall?

Anyway, everybody complains about everything in comic books — everybody’s got a pet peeve. Seems I should get mine, and that’s it right there. What’s wrong with celebrating the potential of the individual in our comic books, or even the triumph of the individual over the dysfunctional bureaucracy. Isn’t that how they got their start? Superman, the individual, wrecking the car with the group of bank robbers still inside it? Wasn’t that supposed to define the industry right there? What happened?