Maybe I should revise my opinion about these shout-fests where the two sides talk over each other. Up until now I’ve regarded it as a non-edifying, even stultifying, forum because it simply isn’t possible for any new information or revelations to come out amid all the flotsam and jetsam.

Apparently, not only might I have been wrong about this, but my perception may have been the exact opposite of the truth.

Was it even a slip-up??

From The Blaze.

I very often hear of our progressives comparing the national economy to a gas engine. Their point, as I understand it, is that all the ingredients can be there for high performance — valves closing as they should, spark, fuel, aspiration and so forth — and the net output might be zero simply because the machinery hasn’t been started. So lack of motion equals lack of motion. Prime the pump. Close the switch. Spin the crankshaft and off we go.

It leads to a mistaken conclusion because the economy is much more like a pair of wild animals. If the species are compatible and the attraction is there, nature will take its course, and if it doesn’t then something’s wrong. Or…if it really is a gas engine, the “starter” theory is mythical. An economy with all the working parts in place & in good order, will take off with no starting necessary. If it isn’t running, that’s your reading on how good the parts are & how well they’re fitting together.

If we are to fit the liberal message and strategy into the gas engine analogy, the plan is to siphon the gas out of the tank while the engine is running, until such time as the engine quits. When it quits, indulge in your “starter” theory, charging the taxpayers somewhere between half a trillion and a full trillion per yank…a service the liberal will have to provide, since everyone else is too stupid.

And don’t anybody even think of putting more gas in the tank because that would be greedy.

The subject is the “new tone,” you know, that “civility” thing.

Mr. President, we all remember your eloquence in Arizona last January, when you declared that irresponsible rhetoric had no place in public discourse. You said,

“At a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized – at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do – it’s important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds.”

So, did you mean that? Because it seems like if you meant that, you would have been mortified to follow Hoffa’s incendiary rhetoric, and you would have found a way — with smart diplomacy — to have corrected him; you’d have been horrified to know your Vice-President was calling his fellow countrymen “barbarians” and you’d have suggested that maybe “Joe was just a little excited, but I’ve talked to him.”

Instead. Silence.

My father always told me that “silence implies consent.”

It is the tragic nature of demagoguery that it can be effectively practiced in a passive style as well as in an active one, in fact it adds an appealing attribute of plausible deniability when it is practiced passively. A “wing man” or a “pit bull” can lunge in for the attack while the leader of the movement stands back and observes. The incriminating association is made only by the few in the minority who practice their talents at noticing what is done, not merely by what is said; some among those who remain will insist that all in attendance must indulge a game of pretend, recognizing a separating partition that isn’t there.

Just a meaningful repudiation, is all the Anchoress requests of her President. And her humble request is left unfulfilled.

Silence is consent.

Hat tip to blogger friend Rick.

Sonic Charmer has found a humdinger to be filed away in the folder marked “For when lefties tell me to just shut up and listen to the economists.”

The key paragraphs:

A couple of hours after talking to an ABC correspondent about the woeful job numbers and what might be done to improve them, I was in the Bloomberg TV studios debating a guy from Heritage. He went on for several minutes about the damage being done by high taxes, excess regulation, business “uncertainty” about future tax hikes and regulatory burdens. I asked Bloomberg’s host whether he was aware that corporate profits relative to national income had just hit a 60-year peak? He had heard rumors to that effect. Was he aware that taxes on corporate earnings were at a 60-year low? The Heritage guy had heard that might be the case.

Then why was uncertainty about taxes and the future burden of the Affordable Care Act holding back business investment and hiring right now? If managers thought taxes or regulatory costs might go up in the future, wouldn’t it make sense to take advantage of today’s low taxes and lower burdens to invest and hire today? According to the “uncertainty” argument, businesses are fearful they might face high taxes and extra health costs in 2016 or 2018. Shouldn’t they expand hiring right now and scale back employment when they actually face higher costs (if they ever do)?

Nevermind the ramshackle structure of the flawed argument, just look at the point that is being made: “Darn that reality, it refuses to comport with my theories, how shall we punish it?” It is a classic example of Thing I Know #400.

Lately I’m noticing a prevalent and widespread sickness in which opinionated people conflate or confuse their preferences with regard to what should happen, with what might make sense. In other words, they cannot understand “surprise” events, or events contrary to their vision. They are often heard to protest that such a contraband event is senseless. They say this when in fact it is perfectly reasonable given the antecedent events related to it — what is senseless, is the failure to anticipate that it would happen.

Particularly applicable to the field of economics, which must be a study in the approximate prediction of human behavior — for, if it cannot be practiced to facilitate that, then it has no purpose whatsoever. So yeah, what are you guys studying, exactly? What are you smoking?

No, I don’t have an economics degree and I’m asking the question anyway. Find a way to deal.

As far as the argument itself, Sonic has already dissected it thereby dirtying his hands. No point to me jumping in & doing the same.

Hat tip to Captain at Small Dead Animals.

Cassy’s pissed, and rightly so.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: The trouble with women is that women are people, and people are flawed. So this isn’t really a woman thing. I notice when people get into a group setting, especially online with that semi-safe semi-anonymity, and say “Is it okay if I…” there are two things that are going on. One, the right answer is no and they damn well know it; two, they’re hoping to make it into a yes. Psychologists have a specific term to describe this: Validation.

In my book, that’s a betrayal of wedding vows already. The husband didn’t marry hundreds and hundreds of future best-friends-forever who have yet to be met and maybe, in some cases, have yet to even be born. He didn’t marry a bunch of semi-anonymous female busybodies on the Internet. Why should his married life be affected, in any way, by the opinions spouting forth from such outsiders? He married a woman…one woman…one mature and capable woman, which means that woman is duty-bound to come up with her own ways of handling things.

This is an equal-opportunity complaint. Lately I’m just completely bowled over by the number of ways some people conjure up, to demonstrate they never were ready for marriage — without coming out & saying it or even admitting it to themselves. It’s not a country club membership or a fun hobby to try out for a little while.

The Atlantic.

I’m only 23 and it’s been barely over a year since I graduated from university. Yet already the work environment and the consequences of the “real world” have warped and degraded me. All I have are feelings of disillusionment and betrayal. If I were a mood ring, the color would translate to somewhere between quite desperation and self-loathing. I work full-time at a temp position that under-utilizes me. I make sure not to finish work to quickly, for fear it doing so will only shorten my employment. Before that I worked in retail. Before long, I may end up back there.

Hat tip to Instapundit.

Hmmmm…interesting.

Compared with other children with absentee dads, kids whose fathers were active parents in early and middle childhood had fewer behaviour problems and higher intellectual abilities as they grew older — even among socio-economically at-risk families.

Hat tip to Gerard.

Jewel adds:

Somewhere, the shrill and dying voices of barren, bitter feminists is rising to some crescent moon, uncomforted by their futile attempts to alter reality, which has so disappointed them. They have found out what the Weather Worshipers have found out: That Nature doesn’t really need them as protectors. Reality always finds a way.

James Hoffa, Jr., warming up the crowd for the President, says “let’s take these sons of bitches out.”

Media Matters is outraged that anybody notices, but Jim Hoft is having none of it.

So the focus of MM’s complaint is a video clip in which Fox seems to have skipped forward to the good part with the sons-of-bitches…leaving out the bit about voting. From reviewing the second clip, it seems this is a valid complaint but it’s also a trivial one. How many times a week have we been admonished to treat the office of the President of the United States with respect — by people who can’t tell the difference between respect and reverence? And then go on to make introductory speeches for the President with language like “take these sons of bitches out,” or defend people who make speeches like that. Respect for the office of President? We need someone to pick & choose when that is due, and when it is not, I guess.

The weasel who comes on to defend Hoffa, says it strikes him as “disingenuous” to complain about Hoffa when you have these Tea Party people “roaring” and “foaming at the mouth.” Nothing provided to back up that story; guess we’re not supposed to ask for it. Okay so the defense is now complete. Everybody does it, and Hoffa didn’t.

Progressives just love to talk about “the video takes his remarks out of context” and they just love talking about what the other guy did. Both tactics divert the argument into thicket patches of details, and it takes time for fair-minded people to sift through the details. How much time do you have every day for watching YouTube clips?

Meanwhile, the whole “context” thing is a complete bunny trail. Go round up a hundred people who think it’s inappropriate for Hoffa to make these remarks. How many, do you think, believe he was actually threatening physical violence?

Most of them, I think, will see it the way I do: It manifests a mindset, an us-versus-them mindset. These are the people who are not supposed to have that mindset. They want to bring the whole world together, supposedly. Overcome differences, world without borders, we’re all in this together, blah blah blah et cetera.

Megyn Kelly notes that everyone on the left seems to be getting a pass for putting this nastier “get the sunsa bitches” sentiment to voice — everyone seems to be getting excused by their colleagues, very few on the progressive side are trying to police their own. I think they’re playing a game of “let’s see where the boundaries are.” Ever have a relative who made it into adulthood without ever having been meaningfully disciplined? Every now and then they’ll make some slight against somebody, and better-than-even-odds they’ll do it without being aware of it, and get called on the carpet for it. The response? Anger. Theatrical, audible anger…and it’s anger because of what happens next. What happens next is a change of subject. Now just a minute, are you accusing Bubbins of something? How dare you. Oh yes, let’s all have a long, drawn-out circular conversation about whether it was fair to expect Bubbins to have known he shouldn’t do that…were his words taken out of context…Officer Krupke, I have a social disease but deep down inside me there is good. Bubbins will get an apology out of the person from whom the conflict emerged — or, he will get a proxy apology, a consensus decision that Bubbins was the victim here. Either way, Bubbins wins.

So give it a try, Bubbins! “HOW DARE YOU PUT WORDS IN MY MOUTH!”

They’re in a game of throw crap at the wall, see if it sticks. Like the dysfunctional and over-indulged brother or cousin…the one who is constantly blowing up in some kind of rage, without appearing genuinely angry about anything, usually right after having stepped in something and getting caught. The one who, typically, is never given any meaningful responsibilities.

But these people are in charge right now.

Update: Neal Boortz thinks what we’re seeing is the rage of a large hungry beast that has lately been starved. He’s got links to data that back this up, and more examples to offer of the predatory rage.

Blergh.

I’m sure that comment was a dig at Rick Perry. But it is useful as a device to get us talking about something not too much discussed; and that, in turn, illustrates rather vividly why Sarah Palin’s fifteenth minute is very far away from being up.

Me, I rather like Rick Perry. If Palin announces she isn’t going to run, Perry would be my pick. All the talk about him being an entrenched power mogul is a little bit overblown & lacking in perspective, in my opinion. He started being Governor of Texas, what, when George W. Bush stepped down to serve as President or something? So, beginning of 2001, ten years ago? Yeah, and? We’ve got people serving in the United States Senate for generations.

But we are overdue for a paradigm shift.

The way I see it, people living in a free society are always going to be predisposed to separate themselves into exactly two important factions; they will unify into one piece only in the presence of a truly grave threat, and then not for any sustained length of time. And if ever they are to fracture into three or more pieces, they’ll place a high priority on healing the smaller cracks and fissures, to overcome those, but also to keep the one yawning chasm in place. So that is the natural juxtaposition of a free people, from what I have seen. One big major split with two large crowds, one on either side of the big split.

Our big split has been rotated. When FDR changed the way we do business in the United States, around that time it became a split of: Management versus labor. The democrats wanted it that way, reasoning that if elections are decided by votes, labor gets more votes so everything is going to be democrat-heavy for a few decades. And that is precisely what happened. After awhile, though, people began to figure out organized labor existed for the purpose of making itself more expensive and we all were paying the price. And so there was a balancing that came about. But the polarization was between labor-sympathetics and management-sympathetics. Or let’s label that last one — people who are capable of looking down the road. People who actually read about what’s going on and put it all together; people who are capable of saying “So we work these generous compensation and vacation packages into the price of things manufactured domestically…we bitch about exports going down, imports going up, ‘jobs being shipped overseas’…and…hello, clue??”

That has been the liberal/conservative divide. At least on domestic issues dealing with regulation of the private sector.

But as far as reality is concerned, there is a different divide being created by a shift in executive power. Our modern loathing of details that make things work, has inclined us to vote in these executives to make decisions based on vague campaign promises, rather than to vote directly on the policies ourselves. Obama is perhaps the very pinnacle of this trend, having campaigned on little more than a bumper sticker slogan of “hope and change.” He was confronted by a tidal wave of criticism over the excessive vagueness of this “plan,” but the tidal wave of criticism was insufficient to stop Him, so we voted in ’08 that bumper sticker slogans were enough. The trend has been building for a very long time, that we don’t want to get into our election season squabbles about policies, we want to get into our election seasons squabbles about…Michelle Obama’s arms, Barack’s dance moves, John McCain can’t send e-mail, Palin doesn’t know the answer to trivial pursuit questions and oh my goodness doesn’t Joe Biden have an impressive wide white straight-toothed smile? Such a nice man.

So we don’t argue too much about “how many jobs are we going to lose to satisfy organized labor’s insatiable demands?” At some point, you’ve shipped all the jobs overseas you can afford to ship overseas, and we’re probably there…next step is the public sector unions getting everything they want, and it seems that particular battle might have been resolved, this time against the unions. So it’s more-or-less settled. In this way, we’ve “grown up” somewhat, probably far too late, and come to realize we’re all in the same boat as far as providing goods and services. Management and labor are seen by the electorate as being more-or-less on the same side. People don’t say so out loud. But M&L are only placed in conflict with each other during some spat about maternity leave or the latest labor demand for better medical benefits or more vacations. Which I think is seen by most nowadays, the way I have always looked at it: as something that is not a public policy issue.

Maybe that’s because in the 21st century labor lacks the ability to get into specifics. They can’t say “Our rights are being oppressed if we don’t get our four weeks vacation, management wants to restrict us to only three!” The average voter would reply with “Uh hey waitaminnit…I only get two where I work.”

The new polarization, I think, is between people who have jobs that actually produce things — or are trying like the dickens to get hold of a job that does that, based on the experience they’ve accumulated to date — and everybody else. The moochers who think work is for suckers, the pencil-neck bureaucrats, the lawyers, the rules & regs people, the politicians, the buyers and sellers of so-called “toxic assets.”

Like Palin said (about 1:40): “We are governed by a permanent political class.” They are completely out of control. Because our major split has been mis-aligned from reality for about, oh, thirty years or more…they have realized a huge benefit from their complete lock on our political and educational institutions, with the other side enjoying no representation at all, or very little. Hence my comments about the polarization being in need of an update.

We have labor and management in the business of building something that other people can actually use, for which customers and clients will willingly pay real money. And then we have labor and management in something that isn’t a business at all. Coming up with new & creative excuses for slapping taxes on things. Regulating, regulating and regulating some more.

We’re running into all kinds of problems when the second of those two groups, makes it their “business” to pretend to know something about how the first of those two groups builds their stuff — when they really don’t know much of anything about anything.

We have a new yawning political chasm between those who run out of money and must take their lumps for having screwed up — on the income, on the expenses, or on the budgeting, one way or another it will be their fault; and, those who run out of money and can simply pass blame on to the taxpayer for not having paid enough. That is our new dividing line.

The labor/management split is out of whack because it’s out of date. The last time it made any sense, the clothes worn by the Monopoly Man were almost still in style.

And so this gels into a perplexing question for those who insist Palin is “doing damage” and her “fifteenth minute is up”: Do you think there might be some validity, any at all, to my observation that we are polarized in a whole new way and that the older labor/management schism no longer reflects reality? And, if you’re willing to concede that, if only partly — who besides Palin is going to carry the interests of the wealth creators…that would be wealth-creation management, as well as wealth-creation labor…to the halls of power where the rules are made? Who else is as likely? Who else is as fit?

Because, you see, this is why there’s this red ink all over the place. The people who build things that actually might command a willingly-paid price, haven’t had a voice in Washington. They haven’t been trudging to the Potomac to make themselves heard. They’ve been too busy; they’ve had work to do. Even now, when they’re participating, it’s only under protest and it’s only with the time they can spare as they try to continue making things that generate real wealth for themselves & others. The rest of the country needs them, more than they need the rest of the country. And so we have been leaving the rule-making to people who don’t know how to build working valuable things, and don’t care to learn how. We have been making rules that destroy wealth, because we have been allowing the rules to be made by those who do not respect the creation of real wealth.

I keep hearing from the Palin-haters “What exactly is Palin’s plan to fix what’s broken?” The question, it seems to me, is what exactly is going to be done by anybody else, to wrest the power out of the grasp of those who consume and destroy, building nothing, and get it into the hands of people who know how to build things? Who else do you Palin-bashers have in mind to get that accomplished?

Update: The complete speech in transcript and video form. Doesn’t settle whether she’s running or not, but it’s enough to change the odds at the betting tables quite a bit.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News and Washington Rebel.

George Lucas is still screwin’ around…picking at his lifetime masterpiece like a little boy picking at the crusty scab on his knee.

Screw it, I say. I have a story too, and I’ve been just itching to make that stupid duck into a pelican. Pelicans are just as surreal and exotic and giggle-inspiring as ducks, and they’ve got more business being around the ocean. Probably make better pets too. So if Lucas gets to stir his own pudding then I can do the same. A pelican it is.

Also, I would argue my story has done a much better job of mirroring real life. Still not clear after all these decades why exactly the rebel alliance got started. Slavery? Some fans are under the impression the rebellion represents the Confederate States of America and Emperor Palpatine represents Lincoln…so that doesn’t work. Clear win for my side. Hope the Pelican is dead…History and Logic are in complete agreement, Rhetoric is — well okay. In my story she runs up a huge mound of debt and hits the road, in reality the bitch is still around and we’ve gotta listen to her prattle on some more next week. But it mostly works. Pretty good for two and a half years, if I dare say so myself.

And Han shot first, George.

From here.

Too good not to snag…

Exactly right. From here.

Every time I see this blithe dismissal of the Tea Party — represented aptly by Waters’ “go to hell” comment — I see yet another reminder of what I think people are starting to figure out everywhere:

Modern liberalism is the triggering of some vast, omnipresent plan to affect the human condition. The plan will be enacted far & wide, your involvement in it will be compulsory not voluntary, and there will be no getting out of it once you’re in it. But very few will be privileged to participate in figuring out what the plan will be. Planned by the elites, imposed upon the masses; those are the vital ingredients.

This was a non-story.

As was this. For the record, I’m willing to grant President Obama the benefit of the doubt that the scheduling of the “jobs” speech was a coincidence. Not quite so much because I think it was, but because I see the whole thing as entirely inconsequential.

You can imagine, therefore, how pathetic I think this was. And let’s not even start thinking about this or this. Stories like those only highlight the futility involved in listening to more of Dear Leader’s blah, blah and blah, and that’ll just piss us all off some more when something good on teevee gets pre-empted for it. Like, for instance, I dunno…A Very Special The Kardashians?

I do have to wonder, once again, what’s going to happen when Barack Obama is out of office. All you people on the left and on the right who are so sure He’ll cruise to re-election no matter how bad the economy is — you do realize, even granting for argument’s sake your prediction will come true, it’s still a when and not an if, right? Someday, Obama is going to be a former President.

Should high-ranking officials in Congress resign in disgrace, then, too, for politely suggesting He should pick a different day for His latest styrofoam-packing-peanut speech? Has this been thought out at all?

It’s just another reminder, I think, the latest of many that: Many among Obama’s supporters are not cheering Him on to advance the hopes & dreams of persons-of-color, or to actually get anything done, but just to win arguments. They live in a world of “everything takes a back seat to O.” In left wing politics, this has always been true of the svengali at the top of the power pyramid — a mistake ceases to be a mistake when He is the one who makes it. These poor wretches, somehow, have personally externalized the experience of “being right” and thus have trivialized it. They support King Barry The First, essentially, for no better reason than they just want to win arguments.

Theirs is the story behind the non-story. President Soetoro’s people failed to think something through, He received a polite request as a result and He, with equal politeness, acquiesced. Perhaps because He has what it takes for Him to show true politeness, or perhaps that’s not the case and He just figured out that there was no win for Him here so He’d better save what face He could. I really don’t give a good goddamn about that. It’s really a challenge for me to think of anything less worthy of a good mulling-over. It’s a complete tangent. They ran into a snag and they worked it out…whatever.

But these people are completely beside themselves and no — I don’t think they’re ready for Barack Obama to not be President anymore. They won’t be ready for it in 2013 or 2017 or ever.

If Barry does win a second term, there is going to be a call for a repeal of term limits. I don’t think He will. But if He does, then mark my words on this and you read it here first.

They will want Barry ensconced for life. Because they want to win arguments. Period.

Shelby Steele:

American exceptionalism is, among other things, the result of a difficult rigor: the use of individual initiative as the engine of development within a society that strives to ensure individual freedom through the rule of law. Over time a society like this will become great. This is how—despite all our flagrant shortcomings and self-betrayals—America evolved into an exceptional nation.
:
Our national exceptionalism both burdens and defames us, yet it remains our fate. We make others anxious, envious, resentful, admiring and sometimes hate-driven. There’s a reason al Qaeda operatives targeted the U.S. on 9/11 and not, say, Buenos Aires. They wanted to enrich their act of evil with the gravitas of American exceptionalism. They wanted to steal our thunder.

So we Americans cannot help but feel some ambivalence toward our singularity in the world—with its draining entanglements abroad, the selfless demands it makes on both our military and our taxpayers, and all the false charges of imperial hubris it incurs. Therefore it is not surprising that America developed a liberalism—a political left—that took issue with our exceptionalism. It is a left that has no more fervent mission than to recast our greatness as the product of racism, imperialism and unbridled capitalism.

But this leaves the left mired in an absurdity: It seeks to trade the burdens of greatness for the relief of mediocrity. When greatness fades, when a nation contracts to a middling place in the world, then the world in fact no longer knocks on its door. To civilize America, to redeem the nation from its supposed avarice and hubris, the American left effectively makes a virtue of decline—as if we can redeem America only by making her indistinguishable from lesser nations.

Hat tip to Professor Mondo.

Randall Hoven, writing at American Thinker, comes up with a list of events & issues about history showing the Tea Party to be on the right side — whether people are paying attention or not. It is an impressive list, longer than I think a lot of people would imagine it to be.

I expect they are going to continue to be right, so long as they keep the platform narrow and reasonable, because the point they’re trying to make is one that human events are always going to support: Robbing Peter to pay Paul, as they say, makes for a sore Peter. It makes for a situation in which Paul must be expected to do a lot more of whatever it is Paul was doing, and Peter will do a lot less of whatever it is Peter was doing. This is the way people are built; we respond to incentive; so this isn’t going to change.

The list is endless. If you were thinking of starting a business or making an investment that might not pay off for five or ten years, would you feel like you know the rules and could depend on them? No, you’d hunker down, which is exactly what everyone with any money left is doing right now.

This jobless recovery is not some mystery. It is very clearly the result of decisions — decisions made by Obama and the Democrats. At every opportunity they grew government, shrank the private sector, and viewed budding enterprises as little more than beasts of burden — something to whip while healthy and carve up and eat when not.

As Robert Mugabe viewed white-owned farms, Obama views corporations not yet in Chapter 11.

Nothing Democrats did helped; everything they did hurt. Everything. Min wage. TARP. Stimulus. ObamaCare. The Gulf oil spill. Every budget they ever proposed, written or not. Every little czar they put in place to spend other people’s money and to bully the only productive people still toiling away at the thankless tasks of making stuff and providing jobs.

At every point, the Tea Party and its sympathizers tried to stop these idiocies, only to be called ignorant racists.

But whether or not the Tea Party is right, is only half the issue. The other half, perhaps more important, is how we as a nation are going about conducting the argument.

Everything you can do to botch an experiment, we’re doing. First thing we did was elect minority tokens to represent the way the lefties think our economy should work: Woman as House Speaker and black guy as President. These are improvements, for sure, on some level since it does us no credit to have big long uninterrupted lines of white dudes in these offices going all the way back to the founding of the nation. If that was the only point to it, I’d have no problem — but it isn’t. The tokens were put there to sell things. You can only say nice things about Speaker Pelosi or else you’re a sexist; can’t disagree with President Obama or else you’re a racist. That was the point. President Obama was positioned where He was positioned, and put where He was put, to sell things that otherwise could not be sold. And that’s not just an observation about His skin color, it’s everything about Him. His sex appeal, His speaking style, all the charming superlatives that His admirers will define and a whole lot more that they won’t. Not a single one of these embellishments have anything to do with making anything better, unless you happen to have something to gain by Barack Obama winning an argument. That, as I’ve written many times before, is His only contribution: Selling crap that shouldn’t be sold.

We engage “these idiocies” as Hoven calls them, one after another, each time without waiting to see how any of the previous idiocies have worked out. That thwarts a whole lot more than simply observing that perhaps they’re not a good idea; had any of them worked, but with caveats, there would be opportunities to improve. Can’t do that either. So that’s another thing we did wrong.

The scope is universal. Everything has to be enacted sea to shining sea. Freedom must yield, nobody outside Washington can choose anything. Also, once the idiocy is tried, it has to enjoy the benefit of maximum impact. So everyone has to be affected and nobody can be allowed to get away from it. That’s necessary, of course, because some of the people involved are viewed the same way Robert Mugabe viewed white-owned farms; so who would participate voluntarily in such a role?

So to me, the insults flung at the Tea Party — by people who plainly aren’t looking at the facts, not monitoring how the evidence is shaping up to appear in columns like Hoven’s — are just icing on the cake, a final layer of national wrongdoing. We’re having a discussion that I think is worthy enough, if we were to have it reasonably: Should the government step in after the free market has determined who-gets-what, and rearrange the results to make them more fair? But “reasonably” is the key word. If we were to have that discussion reasonably it would be a short one. So we break — every — single — rule — we possibly can. Choose minorities to present one school of thought, just so anybody who shows any resistance can be called a racist. Put Washington in charge of everything. Never wait to see how anything works before trying the next thing, just slam ’em in. No test beds allowed, completely out of the question, federalize everything, expand the scope all across the fruited plain, make everything compulsory and don’t allow anything to be voluntary.

That way, there’s no control to the experiment. The results can be as dismal as you can possibly imagine, and at the end of it you get to say “Yeah but who knows what could’ve happened if we didn’t do it. Better agree with me about that or else you’re racist.”

But it only works on people who don’t pay attention. Yes that is a super-majority, to be sure…but as the economy continues to sour, the silver lining in the cloud is that people are given incentive to pay closer attention. That popular yard sign in circulation right now, “If you voted for Obama in ’08 to prove you’re not a racist, you need to vote for someone else in ’12 to prove you’re not an idiot,” is becoming sadly persuasive. Sixty-five percent of Americans now disapprove of the President’s economic policies; the “do what I say or else you’re a racist” glue is not holding up the wallpaper.

What this all comes down to, is that there is a reason we’re hearing the Tea Party people are crazy: They’ve spoken out about a public issue, which automatically means they have to have enemies. And those enemies have no place else to go other than slander. That’s the bottom of their barrel now, and they’re scraping it. There’s a referendum taking place here and it’s on something much, much bigger than President Obama or His skin. We’re having a referendum on whether the right to private property is higher than political demagoguery, or whether political demagoguery can trump the God-given right to property. Even though the experiment’s been done all wrong, the verdict that is being delivered, unmarred and unsullied — you certainly can’t argue Obama’s way hasn’t been given a fair shake — is that the right to property must win or else civilization cannot endure. You can’t get the bills paid, with your “sore Peters,” that is, if the people paying the bills are to be treated as evil, attacked for doing what they do, discouraged from continuing to do it.