Archive for the ‘Deranged Leftists’ Category

Rectal-Cranial Inversions…

Monday, May 24th, 2010

With regard to these hard-left barking moonbats…

…as long as we’re overhauling our health care system, is there some plan within that overhaul to get them the help that they need? And in the meantime they’re not being entrusted with any actual responsibilities, are they? Are they being kept away from sharp objects? If they have money, is it being kept in trust somewhere so it can be managed by someone more competent?

I worry about all this adrenaline being channeled into saying foolish things to “prove” personal, inner decency. From where does the necessity arise? What did these people do to create such a giant sinkhole of guilt?

They are incomplete people. They need help.

Hat tip to Boortz.

Out of Touch, Out of Line

Sunday, May 23rd, 2010

“This crap is disgraceful,” thunders blogsister Cas. “There is no other way to put it.”

She may very well be right about that. I thought Michael Corleone might have done a better job when he said “Don’t ever take sides against the family again, Fredo.” But the analogy breaks down because our country has yet to leave a horse head in anyone’s bed…not nearly as much as I’d like us to anyway. And Fredo was born into the Corleone family, he didn’t swear an oath to defend it.

Like these clowns did with our nation and with our Constitution.

Two thirds of us think states like Arizona have a perfect right to do this…

…and one hundred percent of me thinks the old dictum about politics stopping at the water’s edge, was a darn good idea. Agree with that or not, you have to agree something is plenty well hosed here. Can President Obama fly on down to Mexico and give a lecture to their government, whatever remains of it…and lecture them that they’re “acting stupidly” with their laws? He seems to get away with an awful lot, and I know He’s got that phrase in His cliche dictionary somewhere. Trouble is, He won’t stop apologizing to foreign leaders long enough to put that to the test; the finger-waggling is only aimed at His own country. You live somewhere else, you get a bow.

Compare and contrast: The two highest authorities representing our legislative branch, react after President Calderon gets done bashing one of our own United States:

And then they react after he says something positive about the country they purport to represent:

Can you say loyalty issue?

Perhaps this is the kind of thing FrankJ had in mind when he came up with the democrat party slogan of:

We don’t like America and we won’t rest until you don’t like it either.

Although I’m also kind of partial to this other gem that appears further down on the same list: “The Founding Fathers shot British people for less than what we’re doing.”

I Made a New Word XXXVII

Saturday, May 22nd, 2010

Bi•no•pia (intang. n.)

As I’ve pointed out a few times, it’s easy to criticize something and labor toward its demise when it has a name, and it’s much harder to do this when it doesn’t have a name. By and large, when I invent names for things, they are things that have been sticking around for awhile and need to go away.

Folks, here’s something that needs a beat-down.

Binopia is a portmanteau between binary and myopia. I’ve lately become aware of this horrible afflication through the Rand Paul flap; it is a myopia that comes from seeing issues that involve permission and proscription in binary terms. It is an inability to comprehend the simple concept of passively allowing something, and at the same time, withholding your approval.

We’ve got an awful lot of people walking around who can’t comprehend this simple, entirely workable, dichotomy. To them, if you disapprove of something the only way you can show it is to pass a law against it.

It’s like what I’ve been telling my son for a few years now: When a conservative hears something on the radio he doesn’t like, he changes the station. The liberal who hears something he doesn’t like writes to his congressman expressing his support for, and demanding, a ban.

If we are to remain free, the people in that second group cannot have power to prohibit. Because if they do, they’re going to have to outlaw something every single time they want to make a statement about what wonderful people they are…which is all the time. When you have binopia, it is impossible to indicate to the waitress you’d like a stack of pancakes, without passing a law against eggs, sausage, bacon and cold cereal.

I see in that debate between Megyn Kelly and John Stossel, the Blonde One intoned — and this is the one anti-Rand-Paul argument I’ve heard thus far that’s made the most sense — that if we didn’t empower the federal government to lower the boom on these “public accommodations” and left things to the free market to sort out, maybe it would’ve worked eventually but it would have taken, gosh, a hundred years or so. That’s probably true. But I would say if you’re going to noodle on that one and figure out if it’s the right way to go, the first step is to call it what it really is. So let’s call it what it really is: We suspended our Constitution, which our executives, judges and legislators are sworn to uphold, which our public schoolteachers so regularly tell our children is such a wonderful perfect document that must be protected across the centuries. We trashed it to get quick results. We did an end-run around it.

Was that the right way to go? If so, then I want all those signs taken down: “We Reserve The Right To Refuse Service To Anyone.” I want ’em down, coast to coast. Trash ’em. Because they’re not true.

Stossel has the right point-of-view in that match-up, because he is using his full range of vision. He doesn’t have binopia. He’s making a reasonable request, which perhaps isn’t possible anymore, but our enduring freedom absolutely relies on it: Those who want to have some say in what is made into an enforceable crime, could they please find some other way to communicate their likes and dislikes about things.

You aren’t a racist and you would never patronize an establishment that discriminates? Hey, that’s just awesome. If you feel a need to prove it repeatedly and compulsively, first of all, you have a problem. More likely than not, a skeleton in your closet that’s bugging you. Get some help. Yes, I’m dead flat-ass serious about that. Secondly: How about you just not go to those places and leave it at that. You don’t have to pass a law every time you disapprove of something.

Third point: As I pointed out here, and I’m re-emphasizing in bold the part that has to do with this point…

I agree with what Rand said [the author, Ayn, not senate nominee Paul] in that paragraph, but absolutely agree with states’ rights. I imagine the two might seem to be mutually exclusive to anyone who hasn’t thought this out all the way, and that might very well include Ayn Rand.

The individual is to enjoy supremacy above the state AND the fed at least with regard to certain things. That is the original intent of the Constitution. These three entities are to share power — and not agreeably, because power is all about doing what you’re going to do when the other guy isn’t going to like it. Not one among the three enjoys complete power.

Fact remains, there is no authorization in the Constitution for what Rand Paul was criticizing. Nor should there be, since there is no mechanism installed anywhere that makes the federal government inherently wise or benevolent about restaurant service policies compared to restaurants, OR the states.

In fact, can a private business really oppress someone like a government can? It’s really hard to come up with examples. If you lay down the entirely reasonable restriction that discrimination is not oppression, since no choice has been actually taken away besides “you can’t eat at our restaurant” (and who’d want to, anyway?)…then it becomes even harder to come up with an example.

I got a feeling if you could revive Ayn Rand and ask her about this senate nominee who was named after her, she’d end up agreeing with what he said. I’ve also got a feeling that when this whole thing plays out and the dust settles on it, his critics will be missing more ass flesh than he will. Most people loathe discrimination, but have had some misgivings for a long time about government telling businesses what they can’t do. It seems like a swell idea until you have a personal experience that allows you to see up close how compassionate our civil servants are…heh…and then you meet some folks who act like Ayn Rand villains, and the flaws in the plan become really hard to ignore.

All a business can really do, in the final analysis, is offer a product or service…and withdraw it. And then they can be like BP and screw things up, I suppose. But discrimination is not that. It isn’t being poisoned, it isn’t being injured, when you get down to the nuts and bolts of it it’s really just stupid business. We don’t need laws against it, what we really need is to have our freedom back.

It’s embarrassing to have to point it out, but since 1964 we’ve lost a hell of a lot more rights than to throw people out of our businesses if we don’t like their skin color. Kids get suspended from school if they get caught with an Advil, we can’t change the oil in our own cars because we can’t dispose of the oil, we can’t cut our own grass because we can’t dispose of the clippings, we can’t toss out light bulbs or batteries. This is the binopia we need to start fighting. This is how all that nonsense starts. Someone somewhere has a preference…and they express it by means of a new law. We lose yet another freedom and our progressives say “Well what of it? It’s the right choice!”

So we might as well require it? Until everyone is forced to do the right thing all the time?

If you can’t see something falling away when that happens, you have a mighty strange definition of freedom.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News.

He Basically Served in ‘Nam

Wednesday, May 19th, 2010

I work in a highly technical job and it continues to come as a surprise to me when I hear people there using the word “basically.” The B-word means, in my experience, that you’re stating something for the record because you want people to behave as if it’s really true, but you aren’t really willing to put your name up next to it without some insulator. That’s what the word “basically” is for, it is an insulator. It has no other purpose.

In my world, that means it might as well be a negator; it might as well be synonymous with “not.” Maybe that’s Dick Blumenthal’s problem, maybe he should have told people “I basically served in Viet Nam.”

I do hate that word.

I basically think poor Blumenthal is being given a bum rap here, and a raw deal. Basically, I agree with the old dictum that every time a democrat is caught lying, a Republican somewhere must have done the same thing, because there is basically perfect symmetry at work here. Basically, all they’re trying to do is help the “little guy” — who is basically you and me — and when they tell you something you can basically trust ’em.

And it’s such a tragedy this “anti-incumbent mood” is driving so many of them out of office. A real shame. Basically.

The Apex!!

Thursday, April 29th, 2010

It’s like the source of The Nile. I’ve been looking and looking and looking…

Our left-wingers obviously care more about collective rights than individual rights. When there’s a “wealth gap” they get all alarmed…now, what’s cause and what’s effect? Is it necessary for us all to bring home the same amount of money if we’re a collectivist society — or do we become a collectivist society because we’re in a potato sack race, with our legs bound together, no one allowed to become too different from anybody else?

They love abortions. Is that cause, or is that effect?

When they don’t have too many demands made of their time…which is often, since nobody really trusts them with too much of anything…they engage in activities that are non-edifying. They don’t go to Wikipedia, unless they’re “admins” determined to make sure the “other side” doesn’t have the last word about something. They want to watch Jeopardy. Or even better, The Kardashians. Once again — is that cause, or is that effect?

They think global warming is a threat. They think radical Islamic terrorism is not. Now why is that? They don’t believe in God. How come? Is it necessary to doubt the existence of God because they know they’re going to Hell? Or do they become liberals because they always hated being dragged off to church?

There must be a root cause — something that kicks off the chain reaction, that actuates all the other things. I’ve been looking for it and looking for it and looking for it. What is it? Are they just plain cowardly? Do they feel bad when someone is mugged or raped…and they aren’t able to sneak off, because someone else is trying to stop the mugging/raping so they can’t look good while they’re high-tailing it out of there? Is that why they’re so full of hate?

Blogger friend Phil enlightens.

…[Socialism and Communism] are based on the same premise — that liberty in the economic sphere is rigged to the advantage of the wealthy. This is true to a limited extent. No system is perfect.

But Socialism/Communism both rest on the premise human nature being truly altruistic, and that once envy is eliminated via wealth redistribution, people will just enthusiastically produce for each other with no angle toward personal gain, because “everybody’s” gain is their gain and they’ll just all see it that way and everybody will be happy.

This, of course, requires humans to be something other than what we are. Some idealized form of human that does not now nor will ever exist.

Progressives believe that human nature is evolving toward that, and that they can push that evolution along. The worst progressives don’t even mind killing off those who they feel are holding that evolution back. For the good of the future of Mankind, of course. That, in a nutshell, is what Progressivism is all about. The basic premise of Progressivism is the evolution human nature. Cultural Dawrinism.

Our system is the worst one ever, except for all the others. Our system gives me incentive to work hard and make new things because it will give ME a more comfortable existence and opportunities to do things I can’t do today. If I don’t like what I’m doing, I can decide to change jobs. If I want to work less, I must be willing to suffer the cut in compensation or find some legal and ingenious way to make up the difference.

In their system … all must be equalized. If I make too much, money must be taken from me to give to someone else. If I don’t make enough, money must be taken from someone else to give to me.

There is no incentive to produce outside of coersion, and the only people with the power to coerce is the government.

This is why socialism and communism, which are again based on the same false premises — inevitably deteriorate into totalitarian, trickle-up poverty.

Ah…this explains everything, plus a bonus: Why they’re so fascinated with Darwinism/evolution. It also explains that jitterbugging that they do. You know what I mean. During the odd minutes they’re all “I’m for complete rights for EVERYBODY! no matter what!!” Drug dealers, homeless people, terrorists at Guantanamo. They all have to have everything, three square nutritious hot meals every single day.

During the even minutes they define people out of existence. Oh no, you don’t count. You’re an unborn baby. You’re a teabagger. You’re a Boy Scout, or a Boy Scout’s homemaker Mom. You don’t count.

Phil’s explanation is perfect. It explains why I keep thinking of liberals when I see Star Trek episodes…especially the ones with the bald French guy who drinks tea. It’s all about evolution. Some of us are leading the way — like Barack Hussein Obama. Others of us are holding everyone else back, and must be defined out of existence. They/we must be put down, just like a dog at the pound. So that the narrower, “real” definition of “everybody” can be allowed to skip on down the conveyor belt, toward its ultimate destiny…no war, no disease, no starvation, warp speed, inter-galactic travel, making friends with the aliens with rubber masks on their faces who speak perfect English.

This is why they are screwballs, it explains why they cannot carry a coherent thought in a straight line. It has to do with themselves. They are something that, they themselves cannot admit this is what they really are.

They want to represent “everybody” after they get done re-defining what exactly that is. They supposedly think you have a whole bunch of rights, after your mother chooses to carry you to term and you make it past that magical vaginal finish line. In truth, that is metaphorical of something else: You have to make it to your mother’s vagina, you have to get born, have your cord cut, breathe air, and then you have to donate to democrats and vote for them. If you don’t do all these things, you are a non-person. You’re a counterweight that is holding back the entire human condition, and are to be dealt with in kind.

You are to be eradicated. Put in a gas chamber.

This explains why they go through the motions of representing “everyone,” but then, at the same time, seem to be so eager to whittle down that definition of what “everyone” really is. To find people who exist outside of it, so that they can call ’em out, and gain universal recognition for the plain and simple fact that these outliers simply don’t belong. It explains why, through the years, so many of them have figured out people like me should be cast out — but in all of those years, not a single one of them has taken on the task of giving voice to exactly what place it is that I should be sent. Why they want to send so many people to oblivion, and why so many of them seem to have so much passion about doing it, but why not a single one among them has the balls to say the word “oblivion.”

Update 4/30/10: The Joe America thing fits into my late epiphany…as does the thing with Obama’s new nuclear weapons policy.

Let me state this more coherently: We meet good friends and neighbors who voted for Obama, whom we know to be decent, hard-working and honest. And then we meet scumbags who voted for Obama. We meet people like Joe America, who are liked by other people whom we like, but then hurl insults at us every single chance they get. We see people like Hillary Clinton telling obvious fibs, like that she was named after Sir Edmund Hillary. Al Gore reprises the “man behind the curtain” scene from Wizard of Oz, almost word for word, telling us not to think about the East Anglia scientists caught red-handed in their shenanigans — world’s still ending, forget everything else. Except for voting for democrats of course.

From this, we conclude there is a massive scam going on. There are the foolers and the foolees. We then get distracted debating other things…well yes, both sides practice deceptions but the liberal side does more of it…et cetera. Meanwhile, we have made up our minds that there are layers to liberalism, sort of a pudding with skin on it. People on the top know what’s going on, they fool the other 99 percent.

Here is my epiphany. Since the current administration was so obviously taken by surprise with the whole nuclear thing — needed the dimbulb Eskimo whore to go on teevee and explain what’s cockeyed about this, and then they were caught just slipping on their shit trying to make sense of it all. They clearly hadn’t done any advance thinking.

Bearing that in mind, I cogitate on the following question:

What if things like character, decency, honesty, or deficiencies in these things are entirely irrelevant to being a liberal? What if we’ve all been over-thinking it? What if there is no skin on the pudding, no strata. What if the entire thing is a one-celled creature. What if Thing I Know #230 explains everything as opposed to ninety-nine percent:

We’d call them “rationalists” if they thought things through rationally; that’s why they’re called “socialists.”

These are all people who haven’t been thinking things out. They are all the kid who didn’t do his homework and wants to copy the answers off your paper. Some are smart, some are stupid, some are decent, some are creeps, some are actually quite brave and some are craven and cowardly. The only thing they have in common is they just haven’t been doing the thinking.

Consider the ramifications. Obama’s nuclear policy never was supposed to make us more secure, or do anything good for anybody. Just make “us” more liked. The health care bill never was supposed to get people covered.

They don’t give a flying fuck what’s going to happen if we abolish the death penalty, they just want it abolished. And no, nobody thinks convicts have a “right” not to be executed, or that killing is “wrong” when the state does it. They are just wasting your time when they say things like that.

It goes back to what Phil said. They just want to evolve to the next level, and the only way for them to do that is to affect public policy. To pass some laws that will make us better liked. By…somebody. This part of it they simply haven’t thought out. They don’t know who, exactly, is supposed to like us better. They know what they expect the reaction to be, and for them that’s plenty good enough. Again, these are kids that don’t do their homework. They are accustomed to not thinking things out all the way through. This is quite alright in their world, because it’s a world in which things do not happen because of other things. People there just do…whatever. Whatever brings a positive response from others.

Remember the beginning of 2009? The season of “Hope-Is-In-The-Air?” They swore in their hopey-changey President, and with all this stuff broken from the last eight years of “Failed Policies of the Bush Administration” (FaPoBuAd) and the opposition finally gutterballed, having complete control of everything and eager to show everyone what they were all about, they settled in, rolled up their sleeves, and busily set about…talking shit about their opponents and not getting a damn thing done. Yeah, oh yeah! We made them not count before, but we’re gonna really make them not count now! Yay for us!

Us. Them. We. They. They’re going to bring us all together and end our petty bickering, but they never do get there because you can’t have anyone in the club if you don’t leave someone out of the club. Truth is, they don’t want to be in charge. “Winning” an election, or an argument, is about as close as they ever want to get to running anything. If you’ve ever built something, especially something upon which your future fortune is going to depend…perhaps your very life?…you have become accustomed to saying to yourself “Hold it — there’s a little nugget over there that, perhaps, I have not yet thought out all the way.” And when you start doing that, you alienate yourself from them. These are people who think out only the fun stuff, and then stop. All of life is companionship and fellowship.

I’ve been saying this for awhile. My epiphany over the last few weeks is that this goes all the way up to the top. Al Gore doesn’t think things out. There is no sinister plot to fool people into believing in global warming, and wrecking the economy. He was just another pain-in-the-ass tree-hugging environmentalist all anxious to show what a decent good person he was…obviously you’re a better person when you care about “The Planet,” than you would be if you didn’t. He made some money doing it, so it started feeling really good to keep doing it some more. And then there was more money connected to it, and more and more. Simple as that. Al Gore doesn’t care about the East Anglia scandal, because he doesn’t understand it and isn’t too excited about figuring any of it out. It’s just some of that boring science-and-facts stuff as far as he’s concerned. The same goes for our President and the nuclear policy. What’ll the bad guys do about it? Feh. Who cares. That foreign policy stuff is so boring. My new edict makes Me a better person, it’ll make us all better people. That’s all that matters. We’re gonna keep evolving.

What’s this have to do with replacing President Soetoro in 2012, and immobilizing Him in 2010? How do we talk to these people? You have to remember: There is a spectrum of leftism, with extremist zealots and wishy-washy moderates, and then there is a spectrum of devotion to the cause. Generally, an extremist zealot is going to be a hardcore zealot and a wishy-washy-mod is going to be a casual experimenter. Keep in mind this is not always the case, though.

You want to make contact only with the casual experimenters, those who have just dunked their toes in the water. The Persephones who merely nibbled on the pomegranates. These are the folks who haven’t thought out the ramifications to ObamaCare, would like to think it out, but don’t know where to start with it. Don’t know where to start with any of it — but meanwhile, just want to stay out of the arguing part of it and be liked. I’ve found a lot of these people are perfectly capable of thinking things through, if only they get a little bit of help finding the relevant facts.

If they start accusing you of being a bad person, just move on. It means you’re not talking to one of those people, you’re talking to a devoted disciple. He may be ideologically so-called-moderate. But he’s learned to do his thinking by calling other people nasty names. He’s a drowning man who will pull you under. A fight will start and it will be all your fault; he said you’re a Nazi so it must be true.

Our current President is enormously popular personally. Even with His approval ratings hitting bedrock and then boring downward through the bedrock — with most people, if they could just have Him without having to accept His policies, they’d take it. So this is the point that has to get hammered home: He’s a package deal. You have to take His policies if you take Him. And we cannot afford His policies.

Defending Palin? Most of the time, it should not be necessary. She still doesn’t have a “real job”; she doesn’t really count. Palin-friends and Palin-foes, alike, forget routinely about the very real possibility that she won’t ever run for anything from here on out.

Point is, in 2008 you got to vote for a personality, rather than for ideas. Even if you’re not ready to express your regret over that…and it seems roughly half of ’08 Obama supporters are ready (although most have yet to apologize)…nevertheless, this was not a properly executed decision. Obama is just chock full of ideas that should have been evaluated on the campaign trail, in a more scrutinizing, balanced way. Just about everyone with a working brain is ready to concede that much. It’s silly to try to avoid it.

And so, going forward, it has to be all about the ideas. And their consequences. This, I believe, is how you reach the truly thoughtful, not-yet-lost, discontented and despondent Obama voter. It’s not about whether Sarah Palin knows how to pronounce the word “nuclear.” It’s about — welcome to the world where you’re completely fucked if you don’t think everything out. Now that you’ve figured out facts are important, here are some. That’s what reaches people.

Just don’t go “reaching” people who don’t wanna be reached. I’d say about two-thirds of them are just spoiling for a fight — and of those, only one-third started out that way. The balance of ’em just walked into a room one day and said “I voted for Obama!” expecting everyone to be pleased about it, discovered “everyone” wasn’t so happy about it, grasped desperately for some kind of way to react, and ended up being pit bulls. They’d think things out, as opposed to just snarking at people, if they could. They just don’t know how to get started. And so this whole “evolution” path has some appeal for them. It seems to fill in a missing piece.

Geico Actor’s “Private Message”

Thursday, April 22nd, 2010

Civility was sent to intensive care during the infamous “Florida recount” a decade ago, and it hasn’t been discharged from that section yet. Our liberals have been suffering from this deranged notion that they need to get back at “them.” This is a relatively new situation. I remember vividly wondering what was going on that my parents liked Ford and this other neighbor agreed with them, but that neighbor over there liked Carter. They’d discuss this and disagree on things, but we kids were told everyone really desired the same outcome although they had different concerns along the way of getting there. It seemed believable at the time. The election debacle changed all that. Since then there has been a palpable sense, on both sides, of “Us versus Them.” Who’s acting and who’s reacting? Depends on your perspective, I suppose.

During that big ol’ dust-up from two years ago — Hillary or Obama? Hillary or Obama? Hillary or Obama? — it seems Civility slipped into a coma. I notice since about that time, someone has circulated a talking point among The Left that it’s a desirable thing to make a move toward a reasoned and rational exchange of ideas, and then at the last minute scuttle it. I see this over and over again. Yesterday I noticed liberal gadfly comment-poster Arthurstone drifted over here, just like a virus, and opened an account so he could continue his long-established penchant of outwardly pretending to say something substantial, but in substance just making asshole-ish little quips. And coincidentally…or not, depending on your point of view…his fellow lefty asshole Geico voice-actor Lance Baxter, a.k.a. D.C. Douglas, made headlines when PRWeb starting whining on his behalf over his losing his gig. Whining, apparently, at his prompting.

Los Angeles actor, D.C. Douglas, says he was dropped from the upcoming GEICO “Shocking News” campaign after a group of Tea Party members harassed him and the insurance giant over a private voicemail the actor left for FreedomWorks. Matt Kibbe, President and CEO of FreedomWorks, posted Mr. Douglas’ cell phone number in a blog post on biggovernment.com, instructing readers to “Feel free to contact (him)… call his employer too. Let them know that you…are now in the market for car insurance.” The next day, GEICO held auditions to replace Mr. Douglas’ voice on the campaign.

Mr. Douglas’ message hardly warranted the mobilization of the Tea Party Movement. Upset by the recent gay and racial slurs slung by Tea Party members at Congressman Barney Frank and Representative John Lewis during the Health Care Reform Weekend, Mr. Douglas left his opinion of FreedomWorks’ staff and followers on their company voicemail and included his phone number.

“I called as a private citizen to make a complaint,” explains Mr. Douglas. “Racism and homophobia are my Achilles heal, but unfortunately my message included inappropriate words and I am sorry for that. However, telling their members to harass my employer to get me fired is an egregiously disproportionate response to my actions.”

Sounds pretty serious, huh? Yes, let’s all take Mr. Douglas’ word for it, let him define “egregiously disproportionate” and head on home.

Not so fast though. Moonbattery links to the audio left by Mr. Douglas at FreedomWorks…which in turn links to the recording made when FW had the decency to call Douglas back, and discuss whatever bug might have been up his butt much more courteously than I would’ve.

I note, with interest, that “racism and homophobia” don’t make the cut either in the original “private message” or in the follow-up call. That is not to be taken as a refutation of Mr. Douglas’ words as he summarizes his motivation for leaving the original message. But if that is what motivated him, that’s almost worse isn’t it? Kind of like…I’m going to use my liberal rope-a-dope strategy on you, because I’ve figured out you’re a racist and a homophobe and this is what you deserve.

It all goes back to what I’ve been saying for years: When an argument arises, be it a passionate one, a constructive one about figuring out what to do, or both of those — liberals are no friends to the substance in it. They’re much less fond of the what than they are of the who…as in, who is substandard, unworthy of civilized discussion, unfit for breathing the same oxygen as the rest of us, who should be locked out of the great doors of our village. All of their so-called “discussion” seems to lead right back to that.

This is not the way responsible grown-ups behave, especially when they’ve been invested with the authority and power to make all of the important decisions in our country for a block of 24 months. I would expect adults, worthy of that trust, to explain to us what they’re going to do as a follow-up act to ObamaCare. Why they think it will be within my son and grandchildrens’ abilities to pull in a household income sufficient to keep that household humming…and are they all going to have to live in the same one? With, horror of horrors, Granddad? In other words, I would expect them to directly address the concerns so many of us so obviously have. Rather than resort to the time-tested labor-union tactic of marginalizing whoever doesn’t go along.

Of course, Douglas doesn’t represent the people who have been put in charge. But he is displaying — getting fired for — a particularly odious method of avoiding the subject, and the air has been so thick with it for the last couple of years I simply cannot accept that it’s his idea & his idea alone. I think this is coordinated. You see it all over the place now. “All right, let’s compare evidence, anecdotes, life experiences that have caused us to see things differently, and you’ll try to persuade me and then I’ll explain my point of view…PSYCH!!!” And then some innuendo about the “teabaggers” being homophobes or believing dinosaurs walked the earth a century ago.

We’ve slowly become acclimated to this childish behavior from our liberals, and it takes some effort to notice it’s all over the place now, and wasn’t so frequently encountered three years ago. Certainly not ten years ago.

What is it they hope to get out of such a ruse? I think it hasn’t been thought out. I think, in their private cloakrooms, they aren’t discussing anything more rationally in there than they are out here. It’s a reflex action, a hold-over from the Election of 2008.

In 2000, the message was that Republicans would force grandma to choose between her heart medication and her supply of cat food…which of course she was eating herself. In 2004 it was about George W. Bush being a dunce. In 2008 it was about anyone who failed to support {Insert Name Here} being a dunce…and of course they needed all summer long to figure out Barack Obama was {Insert Name Here}. And that was rather silly. Like “Now that we finally got that settled, you’re a stupid idiot if you don’t fall in line behind…uh, that guy, him.”

Yeah, you can be fired if 1) your job is to represent a brand that is a household word, 2) you leave a “private message” clearly designed to waste someone’s time and showcase your uncanny ability to be a jerkwad, 3) you leave your name. When all three of those line up it creates an impression that your company is stuffed full of liberal assholes who have no wish to co-exist with anyone who isn’t exactly like them. And then it becomes your employer’s decision to make, about whether it’s desirable for them to have that rep.

The conservative blog-readers who are calling up to cancel their Geico policies? Hey, don’t blame them, Mr. Douglas. Mr. Kibbe, and they, were just following through on the desire you presented to them. Wouldn’t wanna be taking any money away from those retarded people, would you?

Sorry you’re on the unemployment line. But I got a feeling that in the long run, this is likely to make Civility’s condition in the intensive ward better, not worse. The whole “I wanna have a reasonable discussion with you OH NO I DON’T!!” maneuver is no longer clever, and in fact it’s become somewhat tedious. We’re going to look back on it in a few years and say, you know, that really didn’t help things. We’re going to say, the people who did that, are really to blame for the constant Hatfield/McCoy type of snarking that was the defining signature of the naughty-aughties. Whether they were blamed at the time, really doesn’t matter. By then, if we’ve studied history responsibly in order to determine cause-and-effect, we’ll understand this is a big part of the reason why so much heat was generated with so little light.

“Who Are You Better Than?”

Thursday, April 8th, 2010

Blogsister Daphne, in an offline, sends along a link to a rant by someone leftward of mind and energetic of keyboard, but possessing a lazy non-functional sort of curiosity about the world and the things within it. It is really a sad, pitiful kind of an essay. The author even calls it an “observation” but if you read every word you’ll notice there is not a single observation within it. What is within it, is a conclusion — one based on precisely nothing. You’ve heard the drill before; they should really make one word out of it. Teepartiersizracist. Why do it? They should make one word out of this one as well: Highfivesandpatsonthebackfromhisliberalbuddies.

Does this seem like projection?

“…who are you better than?”
Quote:

“You know when I was a little boy, there was an old negro farmer that lived down the road from us, named Monroe. He was … (subtle laugh), I guess he was just a little more luckier than my daddy was. He bought himself a mule.

It was a big deal in round that town. Now my daddy hated that mule. Cause, his friends were always kidding him about, “They saw Monroe out plowing with his new mule and Monroe is going to rent another field now he had a mule.”

One morning that mule showed up dead. They poisoned the water. After that, there wasn’t any mention about that mule around my daddy. It just never came up. One time we were driving down that road and we passed Monroe’s place and we saw it was empty. He just packed up and left, I guess, he must of went up north or something.

I looked over at my daddy’s face, I knew he done it. He saw that I knew. He was ashamed. I guess he was ashamed. He looked at me and said, “If you ain’t better than a nigger son, who are you better than?”” – Agent Anderson, Mississippi Burning

And welcome to the Tea-hadist mindset. With Barack Obama in charge…who are you going to be better than?

And don’t think some of us recognize the symptom because we are a pack of condescending know-it-all asshats. We are…but that has fuck-all to do with the observation.

It’s just that we have seen this before. Up North…in our so-called “enlightened” neck of the woods.

Want to know the difference between North and South? Well, a man once told me that up North, it is OK to have a Black as your boss, but you will be damned if you will have one for a neighbor. Down South, it is OK to have a Black neighbor…but you will damned if you will have one as a boss.

So we went through all this Tea Party nonsense up North, about 35-45 years ago. And the reaction was just as vehement, inarticulate, and dumb as what is being spewed now. If you want to see hate and spittle, you should have seen how South Boston reacted to school integration.

But you would not have seen it 24/7 as you do today. It happened…but not in a perpetual echo chamber. And thank Christ for that.

And if you think the enlightened liberal North embraced integrated housing with open hearts, think again, It was called “white flight” and it damn near emptied some cities. “Sure, we support integration…now excuse us while we move to the suburbs where those Zulus won’t be able to spear us with their assegais.”

But white flight was a safety valve. It kept the pressure at reasonable levels. It also prolonged it and led to new levels of stupidity, but you could, after all, vote with your feet. Many did. Many still do.

OK, the job front was a bit stickier. Northern Industry has always been (at least since the 1950’s) largely integrated. Steel Mill owners don’t give a fuck what your skin color is. Besides, you could only tell on the way into work, on the way out everybody pretty much looked the same.

But you always knew what hand you were playing, because the cards were mostly dealt face up. Your boss was still white. Your union steward was still white. Your mayor and your chief of police were still white. And, as much as it pains me to tell you this, Michael Steele did not run the GOP. And even if he did, at least up north, you went home at the end of the day to your own private Idaho in the suburbs, and played golf on the weekends at a club where Michael Steele was never going to get in. Well, not the front door

The workforce may have been integrated, but you still knew who you were better than. Nobody dared yell “You Lie!!” at a white boss.

Over time, most of that has changed (but if you take a shot every time you can name a Black mayor of a predominantly white New England city…you are going to bed sober). But it took a very conscious effort to change it. Acceptance of diversity does not come easy when the question is: “who are you better than?”

And now the way the cards were dealt 18 months ago has upset a huge segment of the population. They no longer know who they are better than. They are lashing out. And there is fuck-all for a safety valve and it does run 24/7 in a perpetual echo chamber.

They say it is about “freedoms”…but they can point to no freedoms that have been lost over the last 14 months.

They say the Constitution is being destroyed, but when you ask them what parts of The General Welfare Clause or Congresses’ power to regulate Interstate Commerce are being violated…they stand mute with rage

They say it is about taxes…but they can find no drastic tax increases in the last 14 months.

Come to think of it, I don’t really remember anyone getting speared with an assegai thirty years ago either. But that didn’t stop people screaming about the danger.

And they say they want their Country Back.

Well, Bing-fucking-O.

Now we have it. They want to return to a time and place where they at least knew who they were better than.

And the fact that most of this spittle is flying from the mouths of the poor, the semi-educated, the low information voter, and from By-God Dixie…well, that is only because it is your turn. A lot of the rest of the Country has already gone through this exercise 35-45 years ago. And the same spittle flew from the same confused lips when it was our turn.

So we don’t look on Tea-hadists with scorn because they are alien and unfathomable. We do so because we recognize these very traits as ours and those of our neighbors.“All in the Family” wasn’t the most popular show in the Northeast because Archie Bunker was despised. It was popular because he was comfortably familiar. But at least he was a character. Nobody tried to run him for President.

And it ain’t just President Obama. It is a lot else: If your job can be done on the Indian sub-continent, who are you better than? If China can launch a spaceship, who are you better than? If the world looks at the mighty Dollar as little better than an American Peso, who are you better than? If an immigrant can work your ass into the ground, and do it smiling for a lot less money, who are you better than?

A whole lot of life has been shaken and stirred the last couple of decades.

This whole Tea-Party nonsense will eventually pass. Because there is no “going back”. OK, you can move to Idaho, or Montana, and it will feel like you have found what was missing. And you might even be happy. As long as you never watch the POTUS on the national news while you are trying to answer the question: “Who am I better than?”

But Jesus wept, people are going to keep asking that damned question. Soccer may be watched for it’s beauty…American Football is about who is better. We are more of a class society than people want to admit. There is still a very strong vein of Scotch-Irish pride that runs through this Country’s character. Unfortunately that pride is seldom based, at least lately, on personal or collective achievement…just who you are better than. You can hear it every time a factory closes in this Country and people cheer. No, they really don’t believe that closing the Auto Factories will make America stronger. But it adds a whole bunch of people to the list of those they are better than.

Still…what the fuck. 600 years of violence and oppression was bound to warp the Scotch-Irish a bit. Hell, you can even consider them heroically well adjusted given their, and my, history. And history will eventually change us again once all the dogs adjust to the new Alpha Male reality and find their place again in the pack. Until then we live in the land of flying angry spittle.

PS – I never wanted to be better than anyone else. Just faster. Cheers

So the game is afoot, to mix politics with racial tension. Has been for awhile; but now that Obama is doing some real damage it’s kicking into high gear. Defensive instinct, I guess.

This seems, to me, a treacherous weapon the democrats and liberals are deploying. By which I mean: It is known damage will be done, but to what exactly, and to what extent, no one can say. It is an epoxy of unlimited doom. They are the little boy displaying all sorts of courage his parents lack…as he mixes brake fluid with bleach, flushes car parts down the toilet, uses imitation coffee creamer to fill the living room with flaming vapor…because, and only because, his parents are responsible for outcomes of things, and he is not.

Or perhaps it’s because his parents are responsible and know they’re responsible — and he simply hasn’t put that much thought into it. Whatever the case, his fearlessness is the one that only comes from the purest ignorance.

These two issues cause damage when blended together, because they are not the same. The political differences lead to rancor, to be sure; but if you think one way and I think another, at some point I’m going to write you off, catalog your opinions as a testament to your intellect and drive — a derogatory one — and you’ll damn sure do the same with me. In other words, at some point it becomes a dead issue between us. We won’t meet on a patch of ground the next morning at dawn with swords or pistols. The worst that’ll happen is I’ll go around telling people you’re a left-wing whacko and you’ll tell them all that I’m a right-wing nutjob.

But it seems nobody wants to allow anyone else to make up his own mind, about where racism exists or where it was seen. Everyone wants to tell everybody else that this thing over here is racist and that thing over there is not. It does not become a dead issue. Why is that? Because after thousands of years, we still live in a village, and every man can still be ostracized into oblivion for thinking the wrong thing…or being perceived to be thinking the wrong thing. You can be fired for being a racist; certainly, your authority over others, for obvious reasons, will be constrained no matter how precious your individual contributions to a company’s bottom line. And so the rumors hurt, personally. They contain the power to eradicate people. Think of the little boy starting fires in his parents’ living room again.

I’m speaking of the difference between insulting a man and screwing around with his livelihood. Back in the wild west days, stealing a man’s horse led to a hanging. Seems harsh now, but if you lived back then it made more sense.

Their willingness to bring such harm to strangers, doesn’t frighten me that much. What really causes me unrest is the lack of thought they put into it. People like this fellow seem to have noodled out the situation just barely up to the hash mark labeled “it just might make them all shut up and leave Barack alone” — and not so much as a fraction of an inch behond that.

But I find it educational, to say nothing of surprising, to gain so much insight about myself from reading just a few paragraphs. That everything President Obama is doing, would be a hundred percent cool with me if only He was a white guy. This, I must say, arrives as news.

I’m inclined to keep my silence on the one observation, the big one, the elephant in the room: That, if I really want to find a bunch of people obsessed with figuring out “who am I better than?,” a tea party is not where I’m going to be headed. I’m going to make a bee-line for the closest gaggle of arugula-eatin’ tree-huggin’ liberals. This is where the author’s ignorance peaks out to an impressive zenith, up where the air is thin. Anyone who’s exchanged ideas with anyone else, for any length of time, has surely noticed this: Argue with a conservative for a few minutes, and the argument goes to “if you want more of something, subsidize it and if you want less of something, tax it.” Argue with a tea party person, and the result is pretty much the same.

Argue with a liberal for an equivalent length of time, and the argument goes to “and that makes me better than (somebody).” No matter what the subject, that’s where it all goes. It is as if they have lost something, or were born without it, and are trying to get it back again.

Update: I’m told it is the height of hubris to quote oneself. It is not the first time this scribe has been guilty of such a thing, and it is almost certainly not going to be the last:

Thing I Know #330. A man who doesn’t know the difference between a fact and an opinion, is not to be trusted in delivering either one of those.

Sorry, it just seems to fit Mr. Jinx to a tee.

All you folks who’ve never quoted yourselves before, now you know who you’re better-than. That’d be me.

How Liberals Do Their Lying

Tuesday, April 6th, 2010

One of the things to scroll up Memeorandum while I was off this weekend picking up the kid, was a snarky little hit piece that spread to all kinds of liberal blogs asserting why it is that left-wingers should maintain their iron-fisted control over how our public school systems educate the next generation about history. It purports to be sounding an alarm bell that the conservatives are invading our schools with a bunch of falsehood about history.

The right is rewriting history.

The most ballyhooed effort is under way in Texas, where conservatives have pushed the state school board to rewrite guidelines, downplaying Thomas Jefferson in one high school course, playing up such conservatives as Phyllis Schlafly and the Heritage Foundation and challenging the idea that the Founding Fathers wanted to separate church and state.

The effort reaches far beyond one state, however.

In articles and speeches, on radio and TV, conservatives are working to redefine major turning points and influential figures in American history, often to slam liberals, promote Republicans and reinforce their positions in today’s politics.

The Jamestown settlers? Socialists. Founding Father Alexander Hamilton? Ill-informed professors made up all that bunk about him advocating a strong central government.

Theodore Roosevelt? Another socialist. Franklin D. Roosevelt? Not only did he not end the Great Depression, he also created it.

Joe McCarthy? Liberals lied about him. He was a hero.

The piece attempts to set the record straight. But keen-eyed observers will notice it quickly diminishes into an exercise of cataloguing personal shortcomings of Republicans, some real and some imaginary, and only occasionally pretends to concern itself with historical fact. And the conclusion to be reached was: Keep those other guys from saying anything. Leave our monopoly exactly where it is.

The structure of it is a Snopes-like one of “debunking.” Very slowly, over the last few years, I’ve come to realize liberals like this format. It offers the appearance that you, the debunker, are cranking out durable, well-researched material fit for consumption by an antagonistic audience — when this is not really the case. Your logic doesn’t have to be that strong. You just provide a fair overview of what you’re debunking, you say “not true,” and then jot down a couple paragraphs that carry a cosmetic appearance of being related to the claim. Source your statements — but they don’t really have to be connected. The audience will fill that part in without realizing they’re doing it. It’s sort of like watching the magician’s assistant float in the air, tricking oneself into seeing what one is not really seeing.

I noticed this with the Joseph McCarthy claim. If you read through it carefully you see there’s really no claim, very little basis of disagreement. It comes down to “What McCarthy did was wrong” versus “not necessarily.” If you stick with the facts you see the now-ancient morality play, following the release of the Venona papers, has some real problems with it. Yes, McCarthy was hounded into oblivion and an early grave. But that doesn’t look quite so much like just desserts, when the Senator claimed there were communists working in the government, and the facts later revealed that’s exactly what was going on. It ends up looking like payback. Every good murder movie has a scene in which someone catches on to what the bad guy’s doing, and the bad guy manages to frame the whistleblower and take him down. Gee willikers, with the communists and McCarthy, we saw that happen in real life and it would be four decades before we understood what was really happening.

But on that claim, we end up arguing about righteousness. Always a problematic thing where flawed mortals are involved.

On the Socialism in Jamestown issue, this article ends up lying. There’s just no other word for it, it’s bald-faced flat out lying.

Reaching for an example of how bad socialism can be, former House of Representatives Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, said recently that the people who settled Jamestown, Va., in 1607 were socialists and that their ideology doomed them.

“Jamestown colony, when it was first founded as a socialist venture, dang near failed with everybody dead and dying in the snow,” he said in a speech March 15 at the National Press Club.

It was a good, strong story, helping Armey, a former economics professor, illustrate the dangers of socialism, the same ideology that he and other conservatives say is at the core of Obama’s agenda.

It was not, however, true.

The Jamestown settlement was a capitalist venture financed by the Virginia Company of London — a joint stock corporation — to make a profit. The colony nearly foundered owing to a harsh winter, brackish water and lack of food, but reinforcements enabled it to survive. It was never socialistic. In fact, in 1619, Jamestown planters imported the first African slaves to the 13 colonies that later formed the United States.

Got that? Jamestown had something to do with what was called a “joint stock corporation” and that makes it a capitalist model. “It was never socialist.”

Well. I didn’t read A Patriot’s History of the United States: From Columbus’ Great Discovery to the War on Terror…but this guy did

In the 15th and 16th century, it was common for the King to grant great swaths of land via a charter. The London Company received its charter in 1606 from King James. The initial stock-holders were 600 individuals and 50 commercial firms. The first wave of colonists settled at Fort James, later Jamestown, Virginia. These were mostly gentleman adventurers who disdained hard work. There were few farmers, carpenters husbandman, blacksmiths, masons or fisherman etc. Unfortunately, the colonists reaped what they did not sew and 60% died from disease and starvation the first winter.[4]

Captain John Smith, as council president, assumed control and instituted military style discipline; issuing the famous biblical edict: “He who will not work will not eat.” Less than 15% of the population died the second winter. Smith continued to run the settlement like an army until 1609, when confident of its survival, the colonists tired of his tyrannical methods and deposed him.

At this point, Smith returned to England, whereupon the London Company (by then calling itself the Virginia Company) obtained a new charter from the King. The Virginia Company sought to raise capital in England by selling stock and by offering additional stock to anyone willing to migrate to Virginia. The company provided free passage to Jamestown indentures, or servants willing to work for the Virginia Company for seven years. The would-be colonists were also promised by the King all the same rights afforded to them as they enjoyed in England. Nevertheless, the colonists were considered “employees” of the Virginia Company, were not granted land in the New World and were subject to the absolute rule of the Governor of the Company. More “employees” arrived at Jamestown, more starvation, disease and death.

Like Smith, subsequent governors, such as Lord De La Warr, attempted to run the colony in a socialist model: Settlers worked in forced-labor gangs; shirkers were flogged and some even hanged. Negative incentives only went so far because ultimately – and this is the important point – the communal storehouse would sustain anyone in danger of starving, regardless of individual work effort. Administrators eventually realized that personal incentives would work where force would not, and so they they permitted private ownership of land. The application of private enterprise and land ownership (which came with voting rights and the fruits of ones labor) combined to help Jamestown survive and prosper.

Thus, the settlement at Jamestown failed in large part due to socialism and statism, but recovered only after the Governor reestablished land rights and the right to the fruit of ones own labor. It appears that the force of equal outcome fails to motivate people to do any more than the minimum (even when faced with starvation and death). Thus the old adage: “Men who don’t benefit from their hard work tend not to work very hard.” (Sir Thomas Dale). [emphases in original]

I suppose the blogger linked could be lying his ass off about the book, but it doesn’t seem very likely because unlike me, he isn’t replying directly to the McClatchy piece; he’s just talking about a book he read that he found educational and enlightening. Regardless, it would be good if I had the book myself and didn’t have to rely on someone else. But I suspect the point of my disagreement with the McClatchy writer doesn’t have to do with citing sources, it has to do with defining “socialism.” It’s a devil’s-in-the-details thing. This is, much of the time, how liberals do their lying.

According to what I call socialism, much of early America was a failed socialist experiment. Including Plymouth, birthplace of Thanksgiving, which had learned much the same lesson as Jamestown:

This “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” was an early form of socialism, and it is why the Pilgrims were starving. [Gov. William Taylor] Bradford writes that “young men that are most able and fit for labor and service” complained about being forced to “spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children.” Also, “the strong, or man of parts, had no more in division of victuals and clothes, than he that was weak.” So the young and strong refused to work and the total amount of food produced was never adequate.

It’s all right here if you think that guy might be lying his ass off too.

As Ryan Siefert pointed out last summer as the tea parties were kicking into high gear, “There seems to be a need in American society to have to relearn the same hard lessons over and over again” with regard to socialism. He, too, is saying untrue things about socialism in Jamestown; in fact, if this really isn’t true, the conspiracy must be spread far and wide. Into the archives of historical documents. All the way back to the contemporaries. Someone in the vast, right-wing conspiracy must have gotten hold of a time machine, gone back and bribed them.

Well, it seems it is true; at least two pre-revolutionary era colonies practiced hardcore socialism straight out of the Twentieth Century Motor Company in Atlas Shrugged — from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. I’m really not sure how you go about pretending to offer decent service to the truth and write a sentence like “it was never socialist.” All of the ingredients were there, after all. Relying on senses and intuition, I conclude we are perhaps in the midst of some kind of game involving semantics. They didn’t call themselves socialists, perhaps, because the word had not yet been invented; or maybe, to be a socialist, your economic model has to be interwoven with an energized political movement. I notice this in the here-and-now; I’m told President Obama is not a socialist, and nobody substantiates the dismissal by offering me a criteria for being a socialist that the President fails to meet. That never seems to happen. They just threaten to make fun of me or anyone else who dares to call Him a socialist.

Or, maybe the author, one Steven Thomma, just didn’t do his research. Or he’s got an axe to grind, and is immersed in this activity of deliberately cherry-picking “facts.” Either way, if early Jamestown wasn’t socialist then I don’t see the point of calling anything else socialist…nor do I see the point of blasting more holes in his little hit piece.

Once you know what really happened, even if you have a predilection toward liberalism and you really want to see the children grow up to be good little Obama-voting libtard-drones — nevertheless, allowing both sides to have some input into the educational process, including the curriculum design, seems like just the reasonable thing to do. Certainly more edifying for the children, than just learning how to draw outlines around their hands every November to make paper turkeys so Mom can stick ’em to the fridge.

Mississippi ACLU Returns $20,000 for Alternate Prom

Thursday, April 1st, 2010

NY Times:

To avoid further controversy, the American Civil Liberties Union of Mississippi has rejected a $20,000 gift intended to underwrite an alternate prom replacing one canceled by a local school district after a lesbian student demanded that she be allowed to attend with her girlfriend.

The gift, to sponsor one of several privately sponsored alternate events, came from the American Humanist Association, an advocacy group whose mission is to promote “good without God.”

“Although we support and understand organizations like yours, the majority of Mississippians tremble in terror at the word ‘atheist,’ ” Jennifer Carr, the fund-raiser for the A.C.L.U of Mississippi, wrote in an e-mail message to Roy Speckhardt, executive director of the humanist group.
:
Regarding the A.C.L.U. move, Ms. Carr wrote to Mr. Speckhardt: “Our staff has been talking a lot about your donation offer and have found ourselves in a bit of a conflict. We have fears that your organization sponsoring the prom could stir up even more controversy.”

Duh. Of course it’s supposed to stir up controversy. Everyone involved wants controversy. That’s why the girl wanted to wear a tuxedo.

Trouble with just about everything coming off the rails today — everything non-money-related, anyway — is that the people making the most noise, have it exactly bass-ackward who’s trying to grab headlines and who “just wants to be left alone to live their lives as they see fit.” Just about everywhere you look, someone somewhere is claiming to want to be left alone, to just live out their existence peacefully and quietly…and it’s absolutely bullshit. You can’t swing a dead cat around without slapping someone who’s trying to fundamentally re-order and re-organize the protocols under which the rest of us live. To force perfect strangers he or she will never meet, ever, to live under a certain set of new codes. And then hypocritically claiming to want to be left alone to live life their own way, that they don’t really care what everyone else does.

We’re way too tolerant of this. Once it crosses into out-and-out lying, it’s no longer virtuous to be tolerant of it. And I’m sorry, once you’re protesting for your right to wear a tuxedo to the prom when you’re a girl, that’s not about being left alone to live your own life in a manner of your choosing. That’s about being a walking fucking billboard.

The FARK kids, seldom correct but never in doubt, are outraged. Something about constitutional protections. We-ell…back in the day, I didn’t go. Couldn’t get a date. Not hip, with-it, handsome, rich enough…so no prom for Morgie. The cool kids got to go, and hey, that’s life.

Actually, the atheists ought to just love that arrangement. That’s a microcosm of how evolution is supposed to work, isn’t it? The non-social, anti-social, strange weak specimens fail to breed, die off, and strengthen the gene pool by removing themselves from it…right?

Naturally it comes as a bit of a surprise to me that we have a constitutional right to go to a gay atheist prom.

I can’t wait to find out how, when and where Ms. Carr found time to go door-to-door throughout all of Mississippi, yell the word “atheist” at them, and then watch a majority of them tremble in terror. Wonder what kind of majority it was that trembled, just a bare 51% majority, or a huge two-thirds supermajority.

Something tells me someone’s been ignorantly talking out of their own ass about southerners — AGAIN. Could someone get the word out that Lee surrendered at Appomattox and it’s okay to stop shooting?

“Is the Tax Power Infinite?”

Thursday, April 1st, 2010

Henninger:

Constitutional professors quoted in the press and across the Web explain that much about the federal government’s modern authority is “settled” law. Even so, many of these legal commentators are quite close to arguing that the national government’s economic and political powers are now limitless and unfettered. I wonder if Justice Kennedy believes that.

Or as David Kopel asked on the Volokh Conspiracy blog: “Is the tax power infinite?”

In a country that holds elections, that question is both legal and political. The political issue rumbling toward both the Supreme Court and the electorate is whether Washington’s size and power has finally grown beyond the comfort zone of the American people. That is what lies beneath the chatter about federalism and the 10th Amendment.

Liberals will argue that government today is doing good. But government now is also unprecedentedly large and unprecedentedly expensive. Even if every challenge to ObamaCare loses in court, these anxieties will last and keep coming back to the same question: Does the Democratic left think the national government’s powers are infinite?

Your Volokh link would be here.

Liberals have two problems. First, they have come to rely on dictating to their audience what is to be thought of as an extreme idea and what is thought to be a moderate one. As an example, these references to letting a “wild wild west” of capitalism running unfettered — simply don’t make any sense. Capitalism being self-regulated, a completely unregulated capitalist society cannot exist. What runs off willy-nilly drunk on its own power, is the regulation.

Here, they are simply exercising the third technique for motivating large numbers of people to do a dumb thing without anyone associating the dumb thing with your name later on: switch moderation and extremism with each other. It doesn’t work here because Kopel’s question beats it to the punch, and once the question is asked, the audience sees it is a fair one. How far are we ready to go with this federal taxation power? Like it or not, it is what stands in the roadway, ahead of us, confronting us, head-on.

The second problem the leftists have is that they seem to be the last to realize when they argue for a strongly centralized federal government, it only seems to work in their favor some 30% to 40% of the time. Once those other guys are in charge, our liberals screech louder than anybody about runaway, unchecked federal power. It just so happens to be about matters other than taxation when theirs is the party of dissent.

But it really doesn’t matter that we have these subject changes as the power is handed off from one side to the other — it is certainly not a sign of sensible thinking to be arguing for unlimited, unrestrained, unchecked centralized power during the three-eights-of-the-time the people our leftists appreciate the most, happen to be running most things…or the seventh-of-the-time they’re running everything. It isn’t a model for good government and it may not even be consistent with basic sanity.

They Know They’re Better Than We Are

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

I don’t think Sean Penn is kooky; I just think he likes Communists. When I say that, small-tee tim the godless heathen says I lost him right there. Alright, I’ll explain: “Kooky” is a write-off. Kooky means nuts. It means eating your own feces. It implies randomness. Noticing someone is kooky, is an implied directive that we shouldn’t pay too much attention to what it is they are saying.

In my opinion, Sean Penn’s ability to absorb genuine knowledge about these subjects that fascinate him, has been put to some legitimate question and he is an exceptionally dangerous man. This is not to say he can impose danger all by his lonesome. It is an observation that there is a great multitude of people who think like him, and this multitude can shape and direct events for the worse.

Their predilections are not random. They love thugs. “Thug” meaning — not just some guy who’s in charge of things, but a dictator determined to keep the proles in line. Power-to-the-people…but only a phony, cosmetic power, nothing real. George W. Bush trying to privatize Social Security, that is not their kind of “thug.” They like Hugo Chavez, who unilaterally decides what time zone his country is going to be in.

By sheer coincidence, Neo-Neocon was noticing this about our “intellectuals” the very same day.

The stupidity of supposedly smart men can be simply stunning. And that stupidity is not random; it tends to almost always go in the same direction, that of failing to understand the workings of the totalitarian and tyrannical mindset.

I think I have found a window into the world in which these egotists live. And that window’s name is James Lovelock, who is worried about climate change but convinced the human genome is too stupid to do anything about it.

“I don’t think we’re yet evolved to the point where we’re clever enough to handle a complex a situation as climate change,” said Lovelock in his first in-depth interview since the theft of the UEA emails last November. “The inertia of humans is so huge that you can’t really do anything meaningful.”

One of the main obstructions to meaningful action is “modern democracy”, he added. “Even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while.”

“Evolved” is a peculiar description, in my opinion. If you follow the link you’ll find a picture of a gentleman who is ostensibly the speaker Lovelock. He looks grouchy and ill-tempered enough, but just as human as the rest of us.

But I’m going to go way out on a limb here — since this is the primary focus of what I’m writing about, now — and speculate. Somehow, something in my gut tells me Lovelock is not including himself in his comments. I’m double-checking the picture, he still looks human. A bright fellow like him must understand if there is a limit to how much you and I have evolved, it must apply to him as well. But I think not. I think the bright fellow has been told a few times too many, over his ninety years, what a bright fellow he is. And now there can be limits to my evolution, and to yours, but not to his. He’s not really human, in his own mind.

And this is the key. If we all get what Lovelock wants, and we suspend our democracy so we can fight climate change…something tells me, in Lovelock’s vision, Lovelock will still be allowed to say things. The rest of us will be put under martial law, and while border guards are demanding to see our papers, Lovelock can simply clear his throat and all the soldiers will drop their guns and clipboards, look up from their checkpoints, and find out what the esteemed thinker has to say.

He’ll then drone on about this thing over here was indeed part of his plan, this other thing over there was not. And that third thing, he’s still chewing on it, he’ll letcha know. The jack-booted statists will duly note all this and then go back to breaking into our doors and vanishing us in the middle of the night.

That is why I think Sean Penn is dangerous. That is why I think NN has been noticing what she’s been notcing about the intellectuals. This is not intelligence; it is lack of maturity. These people have tried out freedom, they’ve tried out real power going to the little people, and you know what? They don’t like it.

They’ve figured out it’s harder for them to be special that way.

They want a social stratification to take effect. They want a terracing of the human landscape. They want compartmentalization. They want an aristocracy, so that they can be part of it.

I doubt Mr. Penn is really all that ignorant about how people in Venezuela are treated. I think he knows. But he doesn’t envision himself living “down there” in his buddy Hugo’s country. Sean Penn would get the health care that is every bit as good as Hugo Chavez says it is…and he knows full well that this isn’t true of everyone living there.

I think that’s the point.

That’s why the “stupidity is not random.” It isn’t stupidity. It is weariness. It is the fatigue that comes from living down in the swamp, with the rest of the riff-raff.

When they know well they’re more evolved. It just isn’t right, you know.

Faking the Hate

Monday, March 29th, 2010

Michelle Malkin is sizing up the situation and it isn’t pretty.

At best, the fakers are desperately seeking 15 minutes of infamy. At worst, their aim is the criminalization of political dissent.

Upon decimating the deliberative process to hand President Obama a health-care “reform” victory, unpopular Beltway Democrats and their media water-carriers now claim there’s a tea-party epidemic of racism, harassment, and violence against them.
:
Yet, the claims that tea-party activists shouted “nigger” at black House Democrats remain uncorroborated. The coffin reportedly left outside Missouri Democratic congressman Russ Carnahan’s home was used in a prayer vigil by pro-life activists in St. Louis who were protesting the phony Demcare abortion-funding ban in Obama’s deal-cutting executive order. Videotape of a supposed intentional-spitting incident targeting Missouri Democratic congressman Emanuel Cleaver at the Capitol shows no such thing. Cleaver himself backed off the claim a few days later. He described his heckler to the Washington Post in more passive terms as “the man who allowed his saliva to hit my face.” Slovenliness equals terrorism!

The FBI is now investigating the most serious allegation — that tea-party activists in Virginia are somehow responsible for a cut gas line at the home of Democratic representative Tom Perriello’s brother. But instead of waiting for the outcome of that probe, liberal pundits have enshrined the claim as conclusive evidence of the tea-party reign of terror.

This is one of the few places in which the liberal method for managing some aspect of public policy, matches up with the liberal method for winning an election: This unhealthy addiction to a Deus ex Machina ending to every little drama. Everything has to have a trick…a “magic bullet.” Nothing can ever be sweated out.

So of course it’s out of the question to argue the merits of something they want to do. Nope, you have to vote our way because those other guys are wankers. Don’t worry about what’s in our bill. Pass it, and you’ll find out what’s in it.

Update: This (hat tip to Cassy) might be something that didn’t quite show up on your news radar. In fact, I’m pretty sure it didn’t because when I News-Googled the phrase “Sarah Palin death threats” all I got back was pages and pages about Palin inciting the death threats…not receiving them.

It’s interesting how we’re all expected to pay more-or-less attention to the “death threat” issue, depending on who is the target of it.

They Need a Powell Doctrine

Sunday, March 28th, 2010

Quite a few years ago the word got out that then-Secretary of State Colin Powell wasn’t quite falling into line with the Bush administration’s decision to go to war, and that among the festering issues was the administration’s failure to fulfill the Powell Doctrine. Victory was not being adequately defined. Our country wasn’t following the “Get In To Get Out” rule. It started out as a legitimate, smoldering concern, and of course in no time at all it erupted into a MoveOnDotOrg talking-point.

The past is prologue. Nowadays it is The Left that is in charge, and every week we’re reminded it is not a moderate Left but something brittle, prickly and uncompromising right out of Haight-Ashbury. It is my humble opinion that they could use a Powell Doctrine. They do not seem to know what victory looks like. Or perhaps, like sharks, they have been designed biologically to always swim forward, incapable of stopping until their existence has come to an end. For all the setbacks they’ve had over the last year and a half, they haven’t encountered any actual defeats. And yet look at all the internal strife, the conflict, all the frustration, the exasperation.

I think the problem is they don’t quite know what it is they’re supposed to do with the rest of us. They’re trying to prove something about themselves, and it seems when they win an election the proving has only just begun. That would be just what’s expected of them, if indeed they were in it for public service. But if they were toiling away for the purpose of serving the public, they wouldn’t have passed the sham of a health care bill they just passed.

I see Frank Rich of the New York Times is still fanning the flames: Whoever doesn’t support ObamaCare must be a racist. Obviously, it’s a cherry-picking exercise — neither side of the political spectrum possesses a monopoly on nasty behavior. But toward what end? They got their Congress, they got their President, they got their health care bill. Still, there is a debate to be “won”; some enemies to be “beaten,” into exactly what level of submission I’m not altogether sure. I don’t think they know, either.

Powell Doctrine time. They seem to have been overrun with dogs-chasing-cars who don’t know what to do when the teeth have wrapped around the chrome of the bumper.

“There still is some racism out there,” I’m told. In any society in which 300 million people retain their God-given right to think whatever thoughts they want to think, I’m sure that is true. I’m not sure how that is relevant — and, again, I’m not sure anyone else knows the answer to that question either. Certainly, it’s one thing to say “there are racists out there” and quite another thing entirely to say that anyone who disagrees with President Obama about anything, must be one.

What makes this cherry-picking, propaganda move ultimately self-defeating is that it dilutes the victories already secured, especially since they were secured in a blatant nose-thumbing against the public’s wishes. If dissenting from the President on the subject of health care is to be stigmatized — automatically — on the same level as classic white-supremacist racism, then the question naturally arises: Out of those few who say they support the democrats’ health care initiatives, how many of them are lacking in any will or any arguments to justify the position, and are simply afraid to take a different, possibly more sensible one?

Stigma does have blowback.

But this is the real damage done to my America in the last few months, and I see it on both sides of the argument. People don’t appear to understand what it is they’re trying to do, when they argue against others and try to “win.” It isn’t uniquely an American problem, either; I see it in those half-wits up at Ottawa University who harangued Ann Coulter out of giving a speech. What is the purpose here? Is the opposition to be muzzled? Or gelded politically? Or neutralized from any ability to recruit others? Stigmatized into oblivion? Vanished in the dark of some terrible night? Put into some re-education camp?

Once you recognize people have the right to think for themselves, you can’t make good on that and then at the same time pursue an agenda of hounding some idea you don’t like into nothingness. These are two mutually-exclusive things.

But perhaps they understand, on some subconscious level, that a complete victory here would ruin them. If one idea is universally recognized as being so stupid that nobody will deign to support it; and its polar opposite is universally recognized as being smart, such that nobody wants to miss out on taking the credit for supporting that; then the eggheads who walk among us have lost yet another method by which they can manifest their smart-ness. It’s not possible for anyone to be a smarty-pants when everybody is one; to have any kind of an elite club, any at all, you’ve got to leave someone out of it.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News.

Memo For File CXI

Saturday, March 27th, 2010

Steven Colbert says “reality has a well-known liberal bias.” It must be nice living in a two-dimensional universe in which reality can be regarded, and measured beyond all meaningful dispute, with a simple glance. I guess that’s the payoff for anyone with the courage to catalogue all disagreement as mythical, plug his ears and go “la la la” anytime an inconvenient truth comes along.

Colbert is right. Our history is written by the left. It isn’t supposed to be that way; but when humans gather together in something institutionalized, there’s something about us that drives that institution toward the left. It’s true of colleges, legislatures, their research arms, publishing houses, certification boards, newspapers, broadcasting corporations and Hollywood. Damn straight it’s true of historians. For proof, I would nudge the conversation a notch or two closer to where I’m really going with this: Election years and what our historians have to say about them.

The second sentence in the movie Braveheart is profound: “Historians from England will say I am a liar, but history is written by those who have hanged heroes.” Our history is indeed written by our liberals. Think back: In 2008 and 2006, along with 1992, and 1974, Republicans got their asses reamed. How does history record these years? As Republican ass-reamings. How do we recall the years in which the democrats got their asses reamed? There was 2004, 2002, 2000, 1994, 1980 and 1968. These are…”periods of civil unrest.” Turmoil. Confusion. Despair. Chaos, weeping, wailing and the gnashing of teeth.

Well, it must be quite the shot in the nuts to have two political assassinations within months of each other. But reading back on it, I doubt like the dickens this is why 1968 is recalled as a tumultuous year. Not that I’m saying it wasn’t one. But color me skeptical on the idea we’d be recalling 1968 as tempestuous, if the liberals won another round. Yes, as things are, it is an accurate assessment to say ’68 was a wild one. But it’s also a masking-out, a lightning-rod move…an effort to keep another point from seeing the light of day. Yes a couple of assassinations did take place in 1968 — but another thing happened too. We got tired of the democrats screwing everything up and we voted ’em out.

And we got tired of them, because everything they touched turned to crap. The “race relations,” the war in Vietnam, the failed prosecutions against violent criminals who were determined to do all the raping and killing they could…and, under left-wing stewardship, were allowed to. We got fed up, and that is the real reason 1968 was filled with such “unrest.”

As I write this, it looks pretty certain 2010 and 2012 are going to be tempestuous, tumultuous, chaos-filled years. As history recalls them.

According to our new James Clyburn rule, simple dissent is tantamount to violence — “terrorism, really” — now that his side is in charge.

It strikes me as a circular conversation:

Conservative: This is not a good idea. Let’s just not do it.

Liberal: You’re bad.

Conservative: My ex-wife would agree. But the fact remains, your idea sucks.

Liberal: You’re just an awful person.

Conservative: Maybe, but your idea sucks.

Liberal: You’re terrible. I’m better than you are.

Conservative: You’re just not getting it, your idea really does suck. It’s hurting us. We should stop.

Liberal: Me good. You bad. Me cool. You not.

I got a good taste of this myself this week, when one of my more vocal blogger pals found out to her distress she was in a clear minority, at her own spot as well as at mine — she was offering a virtual high-five to the students of Ottawa who used mob rule to stop Ann Coulter from speaking at their campus. My position on it was, and is, classically American: If you disagree with something, let that thing out, and define your disagreements. Give it a hearing so you can demonstrate it is as ludicrous as you think it is. Who knows, you just might learn something.

I’m not quite so troubled that the university students chose a different path. What I find troubling is that they chose it, and then, to all appearances, still think of themselves as able scholars within an institution of higher learning. Well in my world, you can’t take the finger-in-ears-la-la-la route, and then claim to be “learning.” That’s just me.

Actually, it’s not just me. This was one of those rare occasions on which I happen to be in the majority.

But my dissenting party refused to see the clear logic of that. Instead, she poured vast reserves of energy, time after time, into a regurgitated theme: She disagreed with Ann Coulter, I did not. Coulter and I were like two peas in a pod. This escaped my comment, although not my notice, because it was so irrelevant. Coulter and Freeberg agree. Well, on what? There was no specific point to be inspected or discussed. Coulter, thanks to the “justice” of mob rule, was not allowed to make any! And she never took this thought anywhere. Just kinda…hung it out there. Over and over again. As if showing off for some third-party.

A few more rides around the merry-go-round of “you and Ann Coulter agree,” and I decided this reflex-action had been repeated enough times, to merit a discussion of its very own:

There’s one little bullet here I’ve been dodging that I’d like to address head on. You keep getting back to the subject of “Mark (not actually my name) and Ann Coulter agree on everything.” I would find this merely obsessive, if it had a question mark at the end; when you continue to return to it as a statement of fact, it gets creepy. What is that? Some subconscious tic? It’s off topic. We can’t really discuss any particular thing Ann Coulter actually said (perhaps, if she was allowed to speak, we could).

You know how I read it? I think, throughout mankind’s existence, we have spent thousands of years being lured back into collectivist living units; evolution has not succeeded in showing us what a failed experiment it is. Food gets scarce, the village needs to make a decision about who is to be ostracized. And so an instinct develops, and is refined to a competent art among those lucky enough to survive the famine. The instinct of “In scarcity, ostracize that guy, over there…not me.” I think this is why leftists in general are never quite finished proving how wonderful they are; why their diatribes keep coming back to that point. Why their wonderfulness is always relative to somebody else. Why every time they tackle a problem, their first step is always to identify a villain that made it happen, even if there isn’t one.

And I think this is why you believe it’s relevant that Freeberg and Coulter agree on this, or that, or something, or everything — and nobody else does. You’re saying “shut Freeberg out of the gates, and not me. He won’t join my crusade to shut up Coulter, so he must agree with her…and if you don’t help me shut up Coulter, we’ll shut you out too.” Classic guilt by association stuff. To an American, the irony is rich. In my country, fifty years ago liberalism was supposed to be the answer to something called “McCarthyism.” I don’t think you’re so indecent to practice the guilt-by-association thing on purpose; you are known to me to argue your points honestly, when they are on the winning side. But it’s an interesting and remarkable lesson to take away from this exchange — liberalism is not a solution to McCarthyism. As I pointed out at my place (actually, echoing a point someone else was making) liberalism is rapidly becoming a synonym for classic authoritarianism.

I think this is worth pointing out, not to psychoanalyze the individual in question, but to point to the larger human tendency. It is not a productive one, but it is perhaps the singular human tendency that modern liberalism most capably succeeds in intensifying, magnifying, glorifying: Earning our stature in the community, at the expense of someone else’s. Perhaps George Orwell said it best in that little rhyme toward the end of 1984:

Under the spreading chestnut tree
I sold you and you sold me.
There lie they, and here lie we
Under the spreading chestnut tree.

That is what it’s all about, I think. One of the big failings of liberalism — and by “big,” I mean this isn’t just a turn-off to dedicated conservatives, I think it creeps out most middle-of-the-road people — is that liberals are very quick to abandon any discussion of whether their programs are effective, ineffective, or possibly damaging. They don’t stick with this analysis very long at all. They’re constantly distracted by something else. And the “something else” is almost always some tantalizing inspection of some ideological opponent’s unworthiness.

Some dissertation on why that fellow should be the next one to be shut out of the village gates, to starve in the savage winter. Him, not me!

Blogger friend Rick has a great run-down on all the shenanigans taking place. All the hubbub about what an awful, angry, violent terrorist-type person you must be if you dare disagree with the democrats and all their schemes. Neal Boortz has a pretty good one as well; he embeds the video you see up top. Rick links to Lori at Wizbang who goes further in-depth. And this stuff fairly well summarizes the week that just rolled by: A whole lot of drivel about those horrible tea-party people. And the tumultuous times in which we live.

A parade of gray-haired pols with their martyr complexes about the sixties…droning on…mmm yes, I’ve seen this stuff before. Reminds me of the sixties! Overturned cars, fist fights at midnight, molotov cocktails. Just like now. Vandals, terrorists, angry violent individuals. But as Lori points out, the “angry” mob is not that angry and not that special:

Even with the help of those in the media, the reality of what is happening is getting to the people. The little people. And now instead of beating up on rich Republican politicians, and fat cat CEOs, they are beating up on the little people who don’t give a crap about party or politics. They just want their voices to be heard. They care about their pocketbooks, their childrens’ futures, their freedoms and the future of their country. They don’t care what letter is behind your name. They want representatives in Washington who will listen to them. Vilifying those people, calling them names (such as teabaggers), questioning their motivations, accusing them of being racists and just generally beating up on those people, just because they disagree with the Democrat/Obama agenda, is just downright ugly. So much so that not even the MSM will be able to spin it as anything but that. When I think about it in those terms, I begin to understand why the Democrats are doing what they are doing. It doesn’t make it any less ugly, but at least it helps me to understand.

My own memory made relevant by current events, is much more recent. It is the election, and subsequent inauguration, of Barack Obama. And then the chasing, er, “finding” of votes so that Al Franken could bring the democrats a supermajority in the Senate and make the Republican failure of 2008 complete. Remember that? All the gloating about oh boy, those Republicans were really, really, super-duper-defeated now!

And then the liberal blogs induldged in a whole bunch of research-and-reportage, about what dirty rotten creepy jerks the conservatives really were. To get the word out…you know…to all the voters, who had already made up their minds that conservatives were dirty rotten creepy jerks.

To make darn good and sure the voters would never forget.

To convince those who were already convinced…or to convince themselves…or something.

Perhaps my thinking is out of fashion. But I do not think we are living in a village. Or if we are, I do not think there is a famine going on that necessitates the organizing and cataloguing of we who live within the village walls…queueing up to figure out who should be locked out of the village walls first, to perish in the awful winter, so the foodstuffs can be rationed among those most worthy. Maybe that whole process is what liberalism is all about — and why I’m not going to make a very good liberal.

In my view, when you’re trying to figure out if an idea is good or not, the thing you need to do is: Figure out if it’s good or not. This game of musical-chairs, to figure out who should be pre-emptively muzzled, who should be allowed to drone on at length even when He has nothing better to say than “For Far Too Long We Have,” “Let Me Be Clear” and “Make No Mistake.” Who’s just wonderful and sort-of-God, and who’s just an awful, terrible person.

Because in my world, wonderful people get things wrong pretty often. So do smart people.

Awful, terrible rotten creepy jerks — and idiots, too — manage to nail the right answer too. It happens.

So this ranking-by-worthiness, from my point of view, is pretty much a waste of time. The folks in charge, though…the ones who, you’d think, would have less time for it than anybody else, as they proceed to solve our various problems…they don’t seem to have anything else to say. Every sentence out of their anointed mouths seems to be some variant of “look at those awful terrible people over there; now, don’t you forget how terrible they are, all you little people.”

But the people in charge are liberals. And I did suggest, up above, that perhaps nowadays this is what liberalism is all about. Figuring out who is to be ostracized next. It doesn’t seem to be about too much else. It’s running unopposed, getting what it wants — which our Vice President says is a big fucking deal. It’s going on months & years with all sorts of wonderful opportunities to get out whatever message it wants to get out. And this is just about the only one it’s managed to communicate: Agree with us, or you are substandard, terrible, whacked-in-the-head and generally bad. Kind of like immature high school girls: Oh, they’ll just HATE us for-EV-er!!

Memo For File CX

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010

I finally figured out what’s missing this week.

Late on this past Sunday, the liberals began dragging us kicking-and-screaming into their vision of what life is all about. You know the drill: No independence, no innovation, no capitalism, very little local authority, no real sense of the individual delivering goods and services in order to secure an uncontestable right to property.

Board this, committee that, and every li’l blessed thing in this rough patch of grass we call “real life” that doesn’t have an iron-and-silver clad guarantee with regard to the outcome, must be a piece of unfinished business.

All security. All safety. All sanitization.

No Opportunity. No liberty, no freedom, no ambition, no dreams…unless you’re a liberal activist or a politician.

Conservatives are evenly divided between “cry” and “fight.” (Some say both.) Liberals are all cheery and gloating. I would expect to see all of this. And of all the things I’d expect to see, there isn’t a single thing missing.

Except one thing.

And this post is all wrapped up in that one thing. I’ve learned something this week about the difference between liberals, and decent people like me. This missing thing is inextricably connected to that difference.

See, the liberals are not behaving in a way consistent with the way I’d behave if…well…let’s get down to brass tacks, here. Unless you’ve had your head stuck someplace in deep isolation for a sustained period of time, you know this health care bill is deeply unpopular and it isn’t just unpopular with Republicans. Fact is, even if you’re a left-winger you probably still don’t like it that much…unless you’re liberal clear down to the marrow of your bones. In which case you might be in the Noam Chomsky Michael Moore camp, all pissing and moaning that it doesn’t go far enough.

But this piece of legislation, wonderful as it may be to the stalwart liberal mind, is not quite in perfect harmony with the American mindset. And I’m not talking about 1776, I’m talking about right here and now.

Now then. What comes next takes a little bit of mental effort. But it’s effort expended on my part, not on yours, so hang awhile. It also calls for something of a confession. You see, here and there are some issues — you might find this tough to believe — on which my opinion doesn’t quite fall into line with the majority. It will perhaps not surprise you too much to learn that on this issues, I regard myself as being right and “most” people as being wrong.

Just like our liberals do with regard to this piece of legislation.

The smarties have probably already figured out where I’m going with this.

Let us say it’s my lucky day and our Congress is settling down to do things the Morgan way. The House passes a resolution…lessee…it says that men and women are different, and that’s perfectly alright.

Most people wouldn’t agree with a resolution like that. I would, and furthermore I’ll say this country would be a lot better off if everyone unanimously agreed with me.

Guaranteed immunity for parents caught whacking their kids’ butts in public. Even the girls.

Jail time for the scam artists who tried to sell us on their global warming Kool-Aid. I’m talking double-digits, breaking rocks.

When we execute murderers, we aren’t molesting the Eighth Amendment unless we’re being more cruel to the convict than he was to his victims. Up until that point, it’s all good. Unfortnately, American law does not recognize this as a matter for the legislative branch…but still.

You have to speak English in order to vote.

The punishment for leaving your gum on a sidewalk, parking lot or bus seat, is that when we track you down with the gum you have to put it back in your cakehole and start chewing it again.

You can eat saturated fat.

No minimum wage. If your employer wants to pay your a buck fifty-five an hour and you want to work for that, good for you.

No minimum age either. If you’re thirteen you can work forty hours. Make it fifty or sixty, as long as you don’t miss school. This isn’t a Dickens story for cryin’ out loud.

Teachers are paid according to how many of the students they pass on to the next grade, are capable of showing competence in that grade.

If you’re on unemployment for more than thirty days, you can’t have a teevee.

Oh my goodness, I do believe I could add on to this list all day long.

Now what do these things all have in common. I’ll tell you. If we were to decide to do them, I’d agree with them…most people would not. To put it more plainly, I think they are good ideas. I am in the minority in thinking they are good ideas. I’m fully well aware I’m in the minority on thinking they’re good ideas. And I honestly cannot tell you why. Yeah, I could play Devil’s Advocate on these things, but I wouldn’t do a terribly good job of it.

If by some miracle one or two of them were to pass…I’d be all smiley about it, but there’d be truckloads of anger about it from sea to shining sea. Darn that Morgan! What a stupid law he got going here.

Just like you’re hearing right now. About democrats.

Thing is, if & when the time came for me to comment on the matter — you would be hearing, from Yours Truly, on a regular basis, some genuine bewilderment. Why do most people disagree with me about it being a good thing men can put swimsuit calendars up on their cubicle walls at work? Who are these people who think Hooter’s should be allowed, or required, to hire ugly fat women?

And when you shake your finger in my face and intone — quite rightly — that I might’ve gotten this one thing I want, but I’d better savor the victory as long as I can because it cost me more political capital than I’ve got. I wouldn’t just leave that statement lying there. I would show some real, heartfelt outrage about it. It’s that big of a compromise? That much of an earth-shattering notion that stupid kids should be held back a grade? That they should be allowed to do something in their off hours that doesn’t have to do with texting or gaming?

I’d be more flustered in victory than I would be in defeat.

Now back to reality. I am not the guy who just managed to get his way here, oh heavens no. We all know that.

What we see here, is a rare and precious glimpse into the diseased rotted wrinkles of the progressive mind. They are so naturally aclimated to this whole routine of dragging the rest of us, kicking and screaming, into whatever Utopia they have in mind on any given day.

All I see from them, for three days now, is the same ol’ same ol’. YOU’RE A RACIST IF YOU DISAGREE WITH BARACK OBAMA, yeah, yeah. There are no lamentations about where the trolley of our modern society is coming off the track. I’ve even heard a few jokes from some of them about us rubes out here in the backwoods or the sticks — who somehow must like getting ripped off by the insurance companies and left without any money. Where’s the sense of wonder about that? Where’s the drive to know more? It’s just a drive-by snarky quip, and mission-accomplished. On to the next topic.

As far as the situation involving all these people, this undeniable majority, disagreeing with them — somehow, that’s just to be expected.

That’s just not natural. Among people who are so all-fired sure that their way is the right way, it’s even less natural.

It’s as if, if their worldview on any particular topic isn’t sufficiently strange…if it has a little too much to do with common sense…if it’s too appealing to an intelligent mind that has taken the time and trouble to look at both sides…they’re sure to become bored with it.

Liberals Are More Evolved Than Conservatives

Friday, March 19th, 2010

Liberals and atheists, that is. And their I.Q. is higher as well. Yeah that’s right, we got another one.

People who later admitted to being “not at all religious,” and who classified themselves as “very liberal” politically had higher IQ scores as teenagers than those who were “very religious” and “very conservative.”

The difference isn’t huge. Only 11 points, on average, separate the liberal from the conservative, for instance. But [researcher Satoshi] Kanazawa believes it’s significant.

“Liberalism”—which Kanazawa defines, in part, as caring about the well-being of vast numbers of people you’ll never meet—”is a very new thing for humans,” he said.

“Historically, humans cared about the welfare of immediate family and friends but not complete strangers.”

Well, I think there’s something to this. Changes in environmental pressures have caused a sort of social evolution that was not here previously. Only thing is, a “change” in pressure is not necessarily an increase. It can be a drop. Which means the genome is devolving…weakening. It has to meet fewer challenges. It’s bored.

This is evidenced by the fundamental difference between conservatives and liberals, aptly demonstrated here. A conservative cares about whether he is confronting a particular challenge effectively. A liberal cares about whether he is confronting a particular challenge more fashionably, as interpreted by some third party, than the conservative. Whether the actual problem is solved in the end or not — he’s too distracted by these other considerations to notice.

Before you are effective, be approved-of. And in gauging whether or not your approval is sufficient, just compare it to the other guy’s.

James Lewis at The American Thinker is not being snookered by it, even for a moment.

[It’s] typical of the cultural Left today — and of its hopeless cravings to validate itself as being smarter, better-educated, and of course, more compassionate than those conservative throwbacks to a brute past. Somehow the Left always needs to boast, and like any other compulsive boaster, it is compensating for its own feelings of inferiority. I suspect that that’s the real inner nature of the Left: Most of its followers worry about their personal adequacy in life.

They certainly do seem to expend a whole lot more energy on relativism, and perceptions of others, compared to their conservative counterparts. If Kanazawa agrees with me that this is where our recent societal pressures are pushing us, and it would appear that he does, then IMO his research is valid. Our environment is descending into a pit of lethargy, distraction, despair and indulgence. Our push is to intoxicate our priorities, to become penny-wise and pound-foolish — to pursue our most vexing problems, in a manner that leads to all sorts of consequences other than a successful resolution. Our push is toward classic Bacchanalia. Yes, we are evolving in that direction. Our liberals first.

Hat tip to Dr. Sanity, via Maggie’s Farm.

“Mirror, Mirror”

Saturday, March 6th, 2010

While we are on the subject of bitch slaps (see previous), did you see how James Taranto took care of Professor Krugman. It was a little bit wordier than George Will leaving his own handprint on Krugman’s rodent-like face, but just as elegant.

Former Enron adviser Paul Krugman takes note in his New York Times column of what he calls “the incredible gap that has opened up between the parties”:

Today, Democrats and Republicans live in different universes, both intellectually and morally.

“What Democrats believe,” he says “is what textbook economics says”:

But that’s not how Republicans see it. Here’s what Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, the second-ranking Republican in the Senate, had to say when defending Mr. Bunning’s position (although not joining his blockade): unemployment relief “doesn’t create new jobs. In fact, if anything, continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work.”

Krugman scoffs: “To me, that’s a bizarre point of view–but then, I don’t live in Mr. Kyl’s universe.”

What does textbook economics have to say about this question? Here is a passage from a textbook called “Macroeconomics”:

Public policy designed to help workers who lose their jobs can lead to structural unemployment as an unintended side effect. . . . In other countries, particularly in Europe, benefits are more generous and last longer. The drawback to this generosity is that it reduces a worker’s incentive to quickly find a new job. Generous unemployment benefits in some European countries are widely believed to be one of the main causes of “Eurosclerosis,” the persistent high unemployment that affects a number of European countries.

So it turns out that what Krugman calls Sen. Kyl’s “bizarre point of view” is, in fact, textbook economics. The authors of that textbook are Paul Krugman and Robin Wells. Miss Wells is also known as Mrs. Paul Krugman.

It seems Krugman himself lives in two different universes–the universe of the academic economist and the universe of the bitter partisan columnist. Or maybe this is like that episode of “Star Trek” in which crewmen from the Enterprise switched places with their counterparts from a universe in which everyone was the same, only evil.

Like Spock, the evil Krugman is the one with the beard.

About That “Right-Wing Extremist” Who Shot up the Pentagon…

Saturday, March 6th, 2010

Dennis the Peasant skewers ThinkProgress but good. Goes on to make an ass out of himself afterward, but the skewering is good.

What do you do when you have a degree in journalism but don’t have the brains to think for yourself? Well, if you’re a no-talent dickweed like Alex Seitz-Wald, you end up working for organizations like Think Progress spinning the news for dimwit partisans:

Last night, a California man armed with two semiautomatic weapons and “many magazines” of ammunition opened fire on police officers at the entrance to the Pentagon, wounding two before being killed by police. The shooter, 36-year-old John Patrick Bedell, was “well dressed in a suit” and “very calm,” walking “very directly to the officers” before engaging them, a police spokesman said.

Bedell “appears to have been a right-wing extremist with virulent antigovernment feelings,” the Christian Science Monitor reports, who traveled from California specifically to attack the Pentagon. While police were hesitant to assign a motive, “writings by someone with his same name and birth date, posted on the Internet, express ill will toward the government and the armed forces and question whether Washington itself might have been behind the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.”

In one posting, Bedell ranted against “big government.” In another, he wrote, “I am determined to see that justice is served in the death of Colonel James Sabow” — a Marine whose suicide has been the subject of conspiracy theories — because it would be a “step toward establishing the truth of events such as the September 11 demolitions.

There you have it: (a) The Christian Science Monitor speculates right-wing extremism, (b) You’re paid by Think Progress to propagandize against the right, so (c) Bedell is a right-wing extremist. Never mind that the police are still investigating the facts, what’s important is spinning for your supper.

Of course, it’s worth pointing out that if Bedell had been a commie asshole on the level of Van Jones and raving truther ravings, he’d be a fucking left-wing hero. But as we all know, when it comes to left-wing trutherism, well, that’s different

He goes on to indulge in wild conjecture about Michelle Malkin blaming everything that goes wrong on Muslims, then in an update provides a link to prove his point about her.

Dennis needs to read his links. Malkin made herself crystal clear on this incident:

I’m with Zombie:

Now, just for a moment, let’s set aside the false guilt-by-association game everyone’s always playing. We all know that John Patrick Bedell and Joseph Stack are basically insane, plain and simple — as are any number of similar whackjobs who periodically go loco and erupt into violence. Violent psychopaths often incorporate some seemingly random overarching theme into their mindset, and on occasion that theme involves politics. Whenever someone like Bedell or Stack goes ballistic, every pundit jumps into the fray and tries to spin the outburst as “exemplifying” the political viewpoint of those with whom the pundit disagrees.

But that only rises to the level of a valid argument when a distinct pattern emerges. If, say, 5,000 suicide bombers in a row are invariably Islamic fundamentalists — well, OK, we’ve got a problem with the belief system, not just with the individuals. Yet I don’t see a pattern in these “going postal” violent outbursts which seem to happen perhaps three or four times per year, every year, no matter who’s in power or who’s president: it seems that the “philosophy” (if you can even call it that) of each of the attackers is unique, idiosyncratic and just plain illogical. Even so, if he starts shooting or killing when a Republican is president, he is deemed a left-wing psycho (see: Charles Manson); if he starts shooting or killing when a Democrat is president, he is deemed a right-wing psycho (see: Joseph Stack). But the truth is, paranoid people simply feel threatened by the external power structure in general, so they lash out at any symbol of authority, regardless of its political affiliation.

So, instead of playing the blame game so unapologetically employed by the Left when they feel they can spin things to their political advantage, I’m not going to say that Bedell’s actions at the Pentagon epitomize the leftist worldview. Rather, he was just crazy, as clearly indicated by his belief in the craziest of modern crazy conspiracy theories, 9/11 Truthism.

Are most Truthers leftists? Yes. But that doesn’t mean that all left-leaning Americans are thereby just as crazy as the most extreme among them; it simply indicates that when a leftist goes crazy in the post-9/11 era, he often gloms onto Truthism as his paranoia of choice.

Put it this way: Leftism fails as a coherent philosophy on its own terms. We shouldn’t try to wring significance from the delusional outburst of someone who just happened to be leftist. There are plenty of ways to logically disembowel Marxism and its numerous noxious contemporary offspring without having to resort to an unnecessary round of political “gotcha!”

And Zombie speaks for me as well.

I’m sure somewhere out there, there is a right-wing blogger or hardcore conservative guy out there offering this as evidence that the lefties are dangerous psychopaths getting ready to tweak out and shoot things up. But my prediction is that it isn’t going to be quite as prevalent as what you just saw ThinkProgress do.

That’s because it is pointless. When your philosophy is something like “when you don’t have any money, stop spending” — you don’t need to cherry pick news items about non-believers acting crazy, in order to make your idea seem reasonable. Because it already is.

When you believe in crackpot Keynesian economics, that is when you have to sell this snake oil: “People who disagree with me are bonkers, nuts, crazy, stupid, got picked on in school, have syphillis, are stupid women, are repressed homosexuals, are Uncle Toms, are…are…are…”

If you’re in a position to argue your argument based on the merits of your argument — you’re somewhat likely to do exactly that. It’s not a hard rule but it works most of the time. And so the argumentum ad hominem approach is predominantly a left-wing approach. Not absolutely, not completely. But mostly.

Now if someone could please get the Christian Science Monitor, and the Associated Press, some pointers about how to report actual news?

Ebert’s Folly

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

I was reading this and midway through I had a thought. The one thing that provoked the thought was somewhere in here:

Over the last few weeks, [film critic Roger] Ebert has used his busy Twitter page to give the tea party belittling nicknames, predict it will quickly fade and opine that “a loud movement is not the same as a mass movement.”

“I write about the TeePees because it’s so sad how they’ve been manipulated to oppose their own best interests,” Ebert said in an e-mail, using his latest epithet for the tea party followers. “I am a liberal.”

And Andrew Brietbart came along and gave voice to this thought.

Andrew Breitbart, publisher of several influential conservative blogs including Big Hollywood, defends Ebert the new-media user while attacking Ebert the political thinker. Breitbart says that Ebert’s Twitter posts reveal a patronizing view of tea party adherents that serves as a “caricature of the liberal mind-set” and that the critic brims with “raw contempt for Middle America.”

That’s why when liberals create or take over a political party and give it a name, they choose the name “democrats.” The word comes from the Latin (oops, forgot to read my hand notes) Greek democratia, meaning “rule of the people.” Free and open participation, by everybody.

When they open their mouths, or in Ebert’s case twit their tweets, just about everything they have to do & say is concerned with selecting who is to participate.

“Don’t pay any attention to those people, over there. They are not part of the everyone I have in mind.”

This is the most stark and simple insight you’ll ever gain about what a modern-age democrat really is. (I really don’t know, nor do I care, whether Ebert himself is registered with the party.) They are advocates who labor tirelessly, demanding this-or-that issue is to be placed on the scale of democracy. And then they insist on placing their thumb on it. We have to listen to “everybody,” but then we have to look to them to define “everybody.” They’re constantly picking & choosing who is supposed to be left out.

Update: All those who demand evidence to support the above, feast your eyes.

And this is no anomaly by any means. “Listen to me, don’t listen to those people over there, I’m part of ‘everybody’ and they are not.”

Hat tip to Another Black Conservative.

Religious Leftists

Thursday, February 25th, 2010

As long as I’m quoting myself:

Rick had a link to a nice, logical, beefy, well-thought-out rebuttal to the “New Christianity” being espoused by Brian McLaren and others. I thought so highly of it that I sent it to some relatives whom I thought would be interested.

The response I got back, reminded me of my problems with organized religion. And, not-so-organized religion. And, come to think about it, social affairs outside of religion. In all walks of life, we become enemies of our own intellectual acumen when we spend too much time and energy trying not to argue about things. It causes us to fail to see incompatibilities among the various components we try to snap together. That’s one of the constructive points to arguing about things, you know: Try to determine incompatibilities among things, incompatibilities that would otherwise go undetected.

I won’t quote the other party, but I’ll excerpt from my reply:

The phrase “[McLaren] would have credible answers to many of his critics’ doubts” suggests a lack of experience “debating,” if one can call it that, religious leftists. These folk are not the debating type. Think of Al Gore being confronted by well-informed global warming skeptics…it’s a few steps down from that. A distracting sucker-punch, which neither the opponent or any bystanders can genuinely understand let alone dissect for a response, followed by a hasty change of subject. That’s about the best you can get out of them. See, “leftist,” in religion as well as in politics, has come to indicate a desire and inclination to think things out emotionally. Ideas are evaluated emotionally; new members are recruited to the movement emotionally. In religious leftism, there isn’t an awful lot of thought given to the thinking-concepts of Christianity — The Fall, man’s redemption, Christ Himself. As that McLaren critic pointed out, these things are all missing. Instead, the core elements are, as I’ve noticed:

1. I feel X;
2. (unstated but more important) I wouldn’t feel X if I were not a Good Person;
3. (also unstated but even more important) Others don’t feel X and therefore are not as good as I am.

And it is a constant that, as these other concepts are being discussed, all conversations lead back to #3. It is a relative exercise of self-evaluation. Therefore, it ends up being negative when it was conceived as something that was supposed to be positive…I suppose all cults are stacked into this crude, three-level pyramid — the idols and officials who drive the movement, the followers who are mere mortals but at least are heading in the right direction, and the stupid rubes who haven’t joined, don’t belong, aren’t heading in the right direction, and provide the contrast by which the cultist can feel good about himself.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: This need to feel like a worthy person, appears to drive everything else. There is a sense, on the left, in both religion and politics, that motion is needed for redemption. This makes the entire engine go. Redemption from what? Real Christianity is precise and thought-provoking in answering that question. Also, in real Christianity the emphasis is on coming to terms with one’s Creator, with one’s destiny, so that one can turn one’s attention to other pressing worldly concerns on the other six days of the week. Be functional. Just as God was on His six days. Leftists, on the other hand, seem to be engaged in a Sisyphean struggle to continually earn some redemption which is lost to them a few seconds later, so it has to be earned back again. Audibly.

They’re pretty annoying, and they don’t seem to have a clear understanding, themselves, of what they do & don’t want to discuss. When people ritually dispense the time-honored advice of “let’s not discuss religion or politics,” the older I get the more convinced I am this is a reference to leftists.

The Hard Left’s Reaction to Dick Cheney’s Hospitalization

Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010

Things are looking positive at this point, but it’s still something to worry about and if you were close family it would probably be time to fly home like Liz Cheney had to.

I guess it’s beyond the capacity of a brittle hardcore lefty to be thinking that way, though. Like…you’re shocked?

For a few moments after I first tuned in, I thought he’d already died. Those were some happy moments.

[W]e could have his future grave made into a urinal.

He’s recovering? How disapponting [sic]…

he’s gonna die sometime…might as well be now…

Let’s go back over this one more time. People need to get it…

These are the people who are running just about everything, or whose idols are running everything, because we held a national election and decided there is something about their position on the ideological spectrum that makes people compassionate. Increases their ability to look out for others, take care of strangers, empathize with the problems of others. And do something positive about all of it. That was, as is always the case, the driving message behind why they should gain our confidence. And therefore win.

Winning, it would seem this late in the game, turns out to be the sole rationale behind all of it. Just crushing the opposition beneath their heel, and doing it some more. Up to, and beyond, the point of breathlessly anticipating the terminal heart conditions of their enemies, and I would presume celebrating hard when it’s time to build the coffin and dig the grave. This is the empathy, this is the compassion?

They are precisely what they call others. Precisely.

You know what I think? I think these are people who don’t really know enough about current events to form an informed opinion about ideology. They just know something about themselves, something that makes them terribly unhappy, and they’re scrambling around looking for some way to display Pollyanna manifestations of “decency” they know darn good and well they don’t really have. It’s not the first time I’ve commented on it, and I’m sure it won’t be the last time I’ll notice it.

“Drunken Irishman”

Monday, February 15th, 2010

This absolutely, positively makes the cut and I’ll tell you why.

The two male blowhards did a bang-up job of correctly articulating the prevailing viewpoint.

The skinny blond chick illustrated, with pinpoint accuracy (somewhere just past the two minute mark), why, where and how this deviates from common freakin’ sense.

I also agree with the idea that this speculation of what kind of a President Palin would make, is overblown in the extreme. Palin may have decided not to run; she certainly has not decided she will run. Personally, I think behind closed doors she is absolutely non-committal about it. Just from watching the way she makes decisions, I think she’s settled on a date-for-deciding. Up until that date, anything that happens just goes into a “piggy bank” of events, if you will…things go in, they don’t come out. If there’s any one thing that makes it a go or a no-go, she’ll ponder it when the date arrives and not one minute before.

So yes, this could be much ado about nuthin’.

But not any time soon are you going to hear any one of these “Palin Is Not Qualified” types give voice to what exactly the minimal qualifications are. I say she’s qualified, and I’ll tell you what the qualifications are right now: Constitutional: Born in the USA, on or before January 20, 1978. Practical: Bringing the cash to the party — motivating many, many others to write checks. And most important of all, Beneficial: Ready, willing and able to call the liberals out on their bullshit. America needs to be protected from economic malaise, terrorism and illegal immigration, but before we get to those it has to be protected from George Soros.

Those are the minimal qualifications. Without those, things are sure to get worse during the next administration.

I hope she possesses these qualifications, because thus far, not too many others have demonstrated even a trace of evidence of having ’em. The first one is easy, the second one is almost as easy, the third one…for the most part, it’s just her.

Grateful hat tip to Associated Content.

Memo For File CVII

Monday, February 15th, 2010

I’ve decided the time has come to honor the advice of The Bastidge, and follow it. There is certainly a valid point to be made that the world, and therefore the populace that inhabits it, straddles a chasmatic divide separating two unacknowledged communities, and that each of these communities in perfect isolation would enjoy a harmony that must elude us as we co-exist with each other as a monolith. The divide has something to do with order versus chaos, clarity versus obfuscation, substance versus packaging, individual rights versus community obligations, opportunity versus security, pulling your weight versus fitting-in, logic versus emotion.

We’re seeing it right now with the health care debate. And it substantiates the point all the more when we observe that much of the controversy and dissention swirls around this ramshackle, oxymoronic thing called a “public option.”

I called this “Yin and Yang” out of a desire to get to the bottom of what causes people to pursue, throughout their entire lives, one way of thinking over another. The Yin work within boundaries; the Yang do not. The concept is centuries old, and dates back to periods in different world cultures in which femininity itself was a concept synonymous with the stewardship of quiet, contemplative female chores. In societies like this, it naturally follows that men think of things the way women do in ours, and women must think of things the way men do in ours. Here’s a litmus test: Friend of a friend buys a new car. Or, gets carjacked. It’s a great story to tell for sure, but who is to spend time talking about it?

In an agricultural setting, what happens to one has at least the likelihood of impacting everybody else. And so it makes good sense for people to get together somewhere and swap stories. But these are “Shut Your Girl Mouth Men Are Talking” societies. To whatever extent checking-this-out evolves to become a necessary household chore, it is a manly chore. A railroad’s coming to town, maybe (how does this change things?). Farmer Brown’s crops got wiped out by the cold weather (are ours next?). Who goes down to the saloon to find out about this stuff. It’s not the Mama; there are meals to be cooked, a floor to be swept.

Now, we have the automobile. The printing press. The Internet. Womens’ Lib. And when the time comes to swap tidbits of useful news, who does that? Here is what a lot of people are missing: This is a perfect reversal. We do not have mead halls where the men go to drink beer out of steins and compare prices of bushels of corn. It would be awesome if we did, for sure. But it’s not happening, because the gender roles in our society have flipped around in a perfect one-eighty. Men retreat into their own little worlds, not unlike the kitchens that enveloped their great-grandmothers. Their “kitchens” may be just about anything: A computer with a stubborn virus on it; a classic car that’s being rebuilt; a ham radio or a model train set down in the basement; but there is always a project, it always has a border around it, and that’s what men do.

This awesome Art of Manliness article offers a chronicling of what happened to our mead halls. It began, irony of ironies, with us guys being decent and kind enough to give the ladies the right to vote. Prohibition followed that, and…

For centuries, a man could visit a bar and be in the exclusive presence of other men. Because drinking was seen as a corrupting influence on the “purity and innocence” of women, bars were completely off limits to ladies (exceptions were made for prostitutes, of course). Out of the presence of women and children, men could open up more and revel in their masculinity over a mug of cold ale. However, the bar as a men’s only hangout would quickly see its demise during the dry years of Prohibition.

By banning alcohol, Prohibition forced drinking underground. Speakeasy owners, desperate to make a buck, accepted all drinkers into their establishments, regardless of gender. Moreover, the economic and political empowerment women experienced during the 1920s and 30s made drinking by women more acceptable. By the time Prohibition was repealed, the female presence at the local watering hole had become a common appearance.

World War II only further eroded the male exclusivity of bars and pubs. As more women entered the workforce, it became acceptable to socialize with their male co-workers in taverns and lounges after work.

Today, there aren’t many bars around that cater only to men (gay bars being an obvious exception). Instead, bars have become a place where the sexes come together to mingle and look for a special someone.

Note the article’s title: “The Decline of Male Space.” Men used to own the world. Now, we don’t. We have relinquished the privilege and obligation of socializing, turned it over to the gals, and toddled off to the basement to go play with our train sets. The women do what we used to do — they hold court and they compare their notes with each other, try to see if there’s some hidden meaning of everyday events that might affect the family.

This is precisely what their great-great-grandfathers did. The very same thing.

And so I grow weary of having to explain this. Yes, “Yin” is traditionally female, although I use it to describe a personality attribute that predominantly is to be found in our males. Yang, likewise, is traditionally male, although it describes things our women usually do and that our men, typically, don’t. The concept didn’t flip around, the gender roles did. And so, I have to concede that The Bastidge is accurate in his critique:

Your theory’s alright, if a bit vague and rambling. But Yin and Yang have a specific meaning, and you’re using them more or less backwards.

Yin is a concept roughly aligned with the female, but the concepts covered in your theory- group consciousness, socializing, consensus, softness, weakness, emotion, passivity, are all associated with it.

Yang is roughly male, but also strong, factual, direct, resolute, hard, aggresiive, etc.

In their crudest, most basic form, yin and yang refer to the female and male sexual organs.

My use of these names was arbitrary anyway, and that was on purpose. For the last five years I have seen these as placeholders for something more descriptive that would, and should, come later. After I’d given it another think. Well, with this morass of a health care “debate” that has been taking place, and will surely flare up again later this year, I’ve been forced to give it another think. Besides of which, I’ve met lots and lots of manly-male guys who do their thinking in a much “Yangy-er” way than a lot of the females…so the genders don’t fit well in any case.

And I think the terms are these:

Architects and Medicators.

The word “Architect” is chosen with care. Way back in our history, when written language was a novel idea, architects were “master builders” (which is the etymology of the term). These things they labored to construct, with every little piece of it not put in place properly, could very likely collapse and wipe out an entire family in a heartbeat. And so laws were passed condemning failed architects to a death by stoning (Code of Hammurabi, Law 229). That’s a little gruesome, but it had the effect of galvanizing their chosen profession into a noble discipline.

In their own little community, a “Climategate” e-mail scandal would not, could not, have been tolerated even for an instant. Things were the way they were — period. An angle was ninety degrees, or it wasn’t — period. Up was up and down was down — period. There was no room for bastardizing the peer review process into some mutation of what it was intended to be, to ostracize and excoriate colleagues who spoke measurable truth. The architect, hundreds of years before Christ, lived in an object-oriented world and thought about that world in an object-oriented way.

Okay, now let’s look at what I’ve set up as the polar opposite.

“Medicator,” similarly, is chosen with deliberate thought and intent. “Physician” doesn’t work because physicians are supposed to adhere to the Hypocratic Oath and First Do No Harm. The verb “medicate” is applied to addictions, primary among those being mind-altering substances. It speaks to a process of adjusting one’s emotional response to reality as a first priority, with recognizing that reality as a distinctly second-place priority. Medicators do not heal. Nor do they seek to do harm. The long-term welfare of the body is simply outside of their concern. It isn’t that they don’t care, it’s that there is an emotional well-being that they prize more highly.

To recognize reality as it really is, and to adjust one’s emotional profile in response to the reality so that it is unconditionally cheery, are two mutually-exclusive goals. It may not seem to be the case when reality happens to be pleasant. But when reality is unpleasant you can choose to wrestle with it to whatever extent is required to fix a problem, or you can choose to ignore it in order to keep your emotions on a high and even keel. The sacrifice of long-term satisfaction in order to achieve a short-term high is, of course, a defining hallmark of medicating.

One Revolution AwayNow, these people trying to shove this fustercluck of a health care bill down our throats: It’s no mystery at all where they come down. They are medicators. It is not a primary goal of theirs to actually treat illnesses, heal the sick, bring “healthcare” or “access to healthcare” to “the uninsured.” Nor are they trying — architect-style — to solve any kind of a problem, President Obama’s unceasing speechifying notwithstanding. Think on it: When is the last time you heard anyone in Washington use those phrases above? Been awhile, hasn’t it? No, lately it’s about “getting this done.” Beating the opposition. Winning. Make things the way they/we want them to be. But wait just a second…we’re half way through an election cycle, one that began with their decisive victory. They already beat the opposition. Their victory is forgotten, however, just like a druggie’s high, and they find themselves incomplete, hungry, after-buzzed, struck with a raging case of Delerium Tremens if they don’t score another victory. And after they get that done, of course, they’ll need another and another and another. They live out their lives on a hairpin turn, just like a druggie. Time loses all meaning for them. Bliss is constantly one hit away.

It’s not about health care, of course. It’s about how we think about the world around us. The medicator lives in a gilded cage, waiting passively for someone to come along and fix the latest problem. He does not solve real problems, he does not support anyone who would solve real problems, he does not live in reality. He considers reality itself to be an inimical force. This, ironically, provides a liberating effect. Of course it’s all about the way one does one’s thinking to perceive the world around him, and with someone else assuming the burden of actually fixing the problem, the thinker enjoys the luxury of thinking about things as a non-architect. In a non-object-oriented way. With every little thing on God’s creation, melted together into a sloppy mess. And this overly-medicated “thinker” does not think, in turn, about the resulting mess; instead, he picks up an emotional vibe from it, and shares it with other self-medicated thinkers. That’s the model of reality as perceived by the medicator: A great big ball of warm, gooey wax that’s all melted together, and is now giving off vibes. Hopefully good ones, but if they’re bad ones then someone else needs to fix something — or it’s time for another “hit” of something via one-more-revolution.

Disciplining a child provides a similar contrast. To the architect, everything is cause and effect: The child engaged in undesirable behavior, therefore something needs to be modified about what the child perceives as proper or improper. The solution is to teach the child a new taboo. This can be done through direct communication if the child shares the desire that his behavior should be proper, or through punishment if he does not. First of all the transgression has to be properly categorized — bad attitude, or simple misunderstanding? Then we assess what the child understands about etiquette and go from there. In the Architect’s world, that’s what we do.

In the Medicator’s world, the exercise really is one of medication! Concentrating on something is not a task that was, for one reason or another, failed in this case; it is an ability that has gone missing because the child’s “brain isn’t wired quite right.” Of course the solution is to put the child on a prescription for some goop that will alter his emotional state, and make the process “easier for him.” (It’s nearly always a him.)

Another acid test is when a complex system of any kind starts producing the wrong output, because some unit within it starts to go all wonky — with all the other units in good order. To the Architect and Medicator alike, this is a no-brainer, but they come up with polar-opposite solutions. The Medicator wants to chuck the whole thing and start from scratch, whereas the Architect sees a puzzle to be solved in separating what’s good from what’s busted. Think of Blondie and Dagwood getting in one of their matrimonial melees about whether to call the plumber.

I commented last month that I had finally expunged the malware from my HP Mini notebook. My victory announcement was premature, it turned out. The beastie lived on, downloading other crap onto my platform. It shames me to say it, but if I were to act purely on logic and reasonable cost-benefit analyses, I would have taken the “scorched earth” approach much, much earlier than I did, and lost a lot less time. It became an Ahab/whale thing; I lost sight of fixing the problem, and concentrated instead on figuring out entirely useless trivia about it. Where’d I pick up this thing? What exactly does it contaminate? How come these packages over here can detect it and fool themselves into thinking they’re cleaning it, when they’re not? How come that package over there seems to have “wounded” it (toward the end, it locked up the netbook instead of popping up an ad, which is what it was clearly trying to do)…but can’t quite get all of it?

See, neither Architects or Medicators enjoy a monopoly on always having the right idea. Medicators throw things away in bulk — they are much more inclined to announce “this entire thing is bolluxed!” That is often the right approach, and I have to make a confession…my second one, now…that I’ve often missed out on this advantage when it comes up. Medicators seem to think life has no puzzles in it, none whatsoever. And they probably think this because, in the world they construct around themselves by accepting some responsibilities and simply walking away from some other ones, they’re absolutely right. Choices confront them — choices in which the wrong answer results in some kind of personal suffering — and they become petulant, unpleasant, and then someone else swoops in and solves it for them.

In their world, the question of who gets the “rep” as a problem solver, is completely isolated from the record of who did or didn’t actually solve problems. At no time has this been more evident, than this first year of watching our new President struggle with the demands of His new job. He is a dedicated Medicator. He fixes nothing. The only responsibility He takes is to refine the emotional buzz that comes from this thing or that one…and having failed even at that, He has a ready finger-of-blame to point somewhere else so He can give Himself a good report card. Which He did, actually. That one single act speaks volumes not only to how He thinks about the world and the challenges within it; it is a tip-off to how medicators think as well. You’ll notice this about them if you know some really dedicated ones personally. They enter into conflict with others, because they tend to demand the final word about their own work. It was up to par, the other guy just has a mistaken interpretation of “par.” They followed the instructions they were given, it’s the other guy’s fault for not giving them the right ones.

Running a meeting is yet another good litmus test. Some meeting chairs do it right: Agenda item, question, answer, does anyone have any objections, next agenda item — boom, boom, boom. Others engage in this ludicrous and time-consuming practice of using the forum to adjust the emotional tenor of the participants, as if it’s a high school pep rally. Buying a car: Any salesman will tell you, some people turn their thoughts to the TCO with considerations such as gas mileage, service records, availability of parts. Others worry overly much about how they look when they’re tooling around in the car, what strangers will think of them.

Homeowners’ Association bylaws can be written to accommodate one of these halves of humanity, or the other, or both. This is a rather interesting situation, because the bylaws represent an attempt to “architect” a successful neighborhood, through the “medication” of the emotions of the people who observe it. Here and there, though, we see stories in the news surrounding HOA bylaws that are, to turn a rustic phrase, just plain stupid. They don’t do anything to make people feel good and it seems extravagant and far-fetched to suppose they could have anything to do with preserving the value of the property. Banning the American flag is the one example that springs immediately to mind, since those stories have a way of jumping onto the front page.

The last time we linked one of these, the story in question showcased a persistent trait among the Medicators: proxy offense.

[M]anagement told them the flags could be offensive because they live in a diverse community.

The controlling curmudgeon lays down the curmudgeonly rule, and the curmudgeon is silent on whether he or she personally finds the emblem, the e-mail, the cologne, the pin-up calendar, et al, offensive. It’s much more often proxy: Some third party is offended. Or some third party could be offended. The impossible-to-meet “Could Be Interpreted As” standard of cleanliness. It is conceivably possible, therefore the contraband has to go. The curmudgeon will oversee the removal. But it’s business and not personal, see? Just like something out of The Godfather: “Tell Michael I always liked him, it was business, not personal.” Some nameless faceless anonymous person complained, or could complain.

This dedicated Architect says — Medicators really shouldn’t be running anything. They don’t want to. They don’t want the responsibility. This is why these columns are now coming out, some serious and some satirical, that speculate openly that President Obama is perhaps bored and disenchanted with His own job. I no longer consider it to be commentary outside my sphere of knowledge, to proffer that President Obama had some serious misgivings the first time He made a decision about something that had little-or-nothing to do with winning an election, saw that His decision had a direct bearing upon the outcome, and emotionally recoiled. I have seen this happen too many times, up close. In the months since then, the country has been buried in this “awkward stage” in which He tries to confront each and every single challenge with a vision that, as this-or-that chapter reaches the final page, the emotional buzz of those watching has been fine-tuned and frothed up into a desirable state of bliss. This is, I’m sure, why we’ve seen so many speeches out of Him during His first year, and will doubtless see about that many out of Him during His second.

We live in a society in which our every want and need is met, with resistance or inconvenience that is at best negligible. It may not seem like that to us at the time because we’re spoiled; we tend to mistake a temporary slow-down, or wrong turn, or setback, for a real possibility of failure in acquiring what we’re trying to acquire. Deep down, we all know we’re not really being challenged by much of anything; we will get what we are trying to get, one way or the other, so long as some minimal quantity of our peers are also trying to get the same thing. If all else fails we’ll band together and our populist rage will force someone to give it to us. We’re supposed to be so worried about “the economy” but we have our beer, our coffee, our big teevee screens. The only things that are really in jeopardy are the self-respect and dignity that come from having a job, and the same for our children. All other things are guaranteed, in one way or another. They don’t face any real jeopardy.

This state of hyper-safe hyper-civilization has aggravated the divide between — whate’er you wanna callzem, Yin and Yang, or Architects and Medicators — as I’ve pointed out before. It creates a bigger divide on such fundamental questions as: What is a good speech, anyway? What is a convincing argument? Is it thinky-thinky or feelie-feelie? In other words, do you progress systematically among the first three pillars, basing your opinions/inferences upon available fact and things-to-do upong the opinions/inferences. Or, do you just stir up a whole lot of motivating emotions in your audience, get them all outraged against some straw-man Snidely Whiplash, anti-logical exuberance for your “ideas,” Obama-style?

And the fact is, Architects have a definite idea in mind about the answer to such rudimentary questions.

Another fact is, Medicators have a definite idea about the answer as well. These ideas are not the same. They are opposites.

Another fact is, neither side is willing to budge on such issues. If you have a pulse, and a brain, and you’ve been using your brain to solve problems that confront you here and there…each day you stay alive further enmeshes you in the answer you chose, way back, before you were five years old.

And the least inconvenient fact of all is that if we cannot agree on questions like those, we aren’t going to agree on anything else.

We are engaged in a discourse between people who understand how to make real decisions, and those who do not understand this and do not seek to understand this. They don’t see the need. But since they’ve “won,” for the time being it is their job…even if they continue to find ways to weasel out of it, and blame others when the job goes undone.

We’re Dangerous and Crazy

Saturday, February 13th, 2010

Dolphin Logic:
An argument that works like this:

• All fish live in water.
• Dolphins live in the water.
• Therefore, dolphins must be fish.

— from the House of Eratosthenes official glossary.

TPMuckraker goes after the Palin fans, but in a rather craven and cowardly way. Not by actually concluding anything, but by just sort of throwing stuff out there.

The Massachusetts man charged this week with stockpiling weapons after saying he feared an imminent “Armageddon” appears to have been active in the Tea Party movement, and saw Sarah Palin, who he said is on a “righteous ‘Mission from God,'” as the only figure capable of averting the destruction of society.
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In Girard’s view, only one person can save us: Sarah Palin. Later in the lengthy post, he wrote:

I believe that the ONLY —– ONLY —— potential presidental (sic) candidate I have seen with the sheer force of will and God-insprined (sic) rightous (sic) determination to bringdown (sic) this “War Powers” evil is Sarah Palin.

Girard praised Palin’s “magical combination of charisma, a remarkable reserve of personal strength and committment (sic), and her righteous ‘mission from God’ drive (sic) return this country to its convservative (sic), Constitutional foundation.”

Completely off-topic, but I just thought I’d throw this video out there of an Obama supporter. Just sorta let people draw their own conclusions about who’s supporting who.

Now then, where was I? Ah yes. Back to the subject at hand, Dennis the Peasant gives TPM a beatdown:

This is how bad it is in Obamaland today: It’s to the point where a Ivy League edjamacated professional astroturfer like Marshall must spend his time trying to defame by suggesting linkage between a man with obvious mental health issues and the opposition. This the sort of thing one has to do when you’re paid to use the news to sing the praises of incompetents and amateurs, but cannot. Marshall’s not only a media whore, he’s now he’s responding to tough political times by becoming a media whore on the level of Charles Johnson.

Well, I’m off to oil the claymores. Check the gas masks. Clean the ol’ .50-cal. Those nice young men in their clean white coats, they’re coming to take me away, ha ha.

But at least I’m fairly sure nobody came by to put gas in my car.

Related: Via Gerard: NeoNeocon caught the Angry Left in a lie about Palin and the deployment bracelet she wears as a tribute to her son, Track.

It is hardly surprising, however, that many of Palin’s detractors jumped at the chance to blast her for the bracelet without even bothering to confirm the basic facts. It was a case of assuming the worst, seeing what they expected to see. They considered the incident to be only one more piece of evidence confirming what they believed they already knew, and what they feel should be self-evident to any thinking person: Sarah Palin is a stupid, lying, child-exploiting, shameless, opportunistic right-wing nut. That there might be a more benign explanation for any of her behavior does not even occur to them, and therefore no further fact-checking would be needed.
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Many people read the latter as “uneducated,” and therefore “stupid.” The assumption is that Palin doesn’t change these things — she continues to drop her “g’s” at the end of “ing” words, for example — because she cannot do so, rather than because she chooses not to do so.

So we’re dangerous and crazy, she’s an idiot. None of this ever needs a re-think, because it’s based on evidence, but when the evidence turns out to be wrong, even that doesn’t call for a re-think of anything. Why, the fact we were snookered by it is evidence that it represents an idea that must be true, otherwise how was it so easy to fall for it?

But then Neo really, really nails it:

If one watches this YouTube video of some of the recent typically chortling mockery of Palin for writing notes on her hand, it appears evident that the most important function of all of this may be as a bonding exercise, a fail-safe device for those who exhibit it to recognize each other and congratulate themselves on their own excellent taste and judgment. [emphasis mine]

And that is not dolphin logic. It’s a widespread phenomenon that has been noticed, and validated, for a long time now. Bonding exercise.

If you think the gun-grabbing nut really is a nut, and Josh Marshall clearly thinks he’s a nut…you and Mr. Marshall can disagree on any one of a number of things, which are recognized by the two of you as far more important.

If I think Bob’s a kleptomaniac and you think Bob’s a kleptomaniac, this doesn’t bring us any closer together. If we agreed with each other on an Internet thread somewhere about Bob, and a week later we were introduced personally by a third party in person, then even if we recognized each other’s handles we’d never tell the guy “oh that’s alright, we’ve already met.”

If we want to kill each other, and then we come to an agreement that Susan’s a slut…we still want to kill each other. Am I right or am I right?

But “Jack is stupid” — oh, if we agree on that then we are blood brothers. From that point on, if anyone wants to take a swing at you they have to go through me. If anyone calls me stupid in your presence, then they’re saying the same thing about you and you’ll defend my honor. Because we achieved some reckoning on the intellectual weaknesses of this other guy.

Poll: Republicans Gaining Ground on Obama

Wednesday, February 10th, 2010

Washington Post.

The survey paints a portrait of a restless and dissatisfied electorate at the beginning of a critical election year. More than seven in 10 Americans disapprove of the job Congress is doing, and as many say they’re inclined to look for new congressional representation as said so in 1994 and 2006, the last times that control of Congress shifted.

Somewhere in very-very-young-adulthood, like going back into the upperclassman-high school years, people start to become enamored of the idea of building things. You go back any further than that, and it’s not that way quite yet. If you’re in shop class or computer class you’re a “dweeb.”

The liberalism we have today is just an easy, cosmetic way for grown-ups to go through the motions of doing this building — even though, on the inside, they’re thinking about their minute-to-minute challenges in a purely middle-school way. And you know what I mean by that: What’s the cool thing to wear, where’s the cool place to go, what’s the newest cool dance move, which rock band am I supposed to be listening to.

I’m not talking about the hardcore “Bush planned 9/11” types. I’m talking about those who are simply inclined toward a leftist leaning. They just don’t want to be left out (heh!) of anything. They learned how to wear AC/DC tee shirts to middle school so they could be cool, they learned how to date/be the football jock/cheerleader. And then between 17 and 26 they figured out it was cool to have an actual impact on things, to just sample what becomes an obsession to many of us in old age: Leave something behind that wasn’t here when you arrived.

The current administration typifies this — this mistaken thinking that there is no contradiction here. Well, there is a contradiction. People who think this way, are drinking cups that seek to be more inviting on the outside than they are within. It ultimately doesn’t work. Building things is not for the timid; it means you have to absorb some slings and arrows, because it means for a few minutes…hours…months…you’re not going to be any fun to watch. If you’re fun to watch, every single minute, you can’t get anything done. It’s a trade-off. You get to pick one of the two, but you have to pick because you can’t have both.

It’s a pretty heavy thought. But in the decades ahead, it will be possible to express it all, and expect large numbers of people to immediately comprehend every nuance of it, correctly, in just three syllables: Obama. You know, that failed experiment from oh-eight. Check your bearings because I think you’re getting ready to make an Obama decision here, sport.

Eve Ensler’s Take on It

Wednesday, February 10th, 2010

Need a break from Palin at this point…but it’s important to take a look at this Newsbusters item about Eve Ensler, creator of The Vagina Monologues. She and Joy Behar have agreed that Sarah Palin is one of just a select few idiots sparsely strewn across the landscape who show some skepticism about the global warming thing, and this is strong evidence of insanity.

The post-modern dream continues: Me and my pals are going to draw up some plans that will have a direct impact on everyone, and would all of you who are not part of the “everyone” I happen to like, kindly leave us alone. So we can proceed with not leaving you alone.

ENSLER: Well, I just think the idea that she doesn’t believe in global warming is bizarre.
BEHAR: Every scientist at every note believes in it but Sarah Palin doesn’t believe in it.
ENSLER: And I think we just kind of have to walk around the world at this point and look at what is happening to nature and earthquakes and tsunamis.

How would you like to have some friends like these, huh? Look at the earthquakes and tsunamis and that’s “proof” of global warming…which means we’re spewing carbon, breaking the earth, but the healing will come just as soon as we stop spewing and pay higher taxes so it can be cleaned up somehow. Buy it, buy it all, or else you’re a crazy person.

All these glittering generalities that don’t have a single thing to do with real friendship: Make you laugh, wonderful drinking buddy, fun to be around, warm personality, blah blah blah. Except when you go with them somewhere, the minute you excuse yourself to go take a whiz, you just know they’re going to indulge in a lot of hateful gossip about you, how you’re not one of them because you don’t seem to believe in what they believe. Ever have friends like that?

Two other things really jumped out at me: It was impressive how many times these two told each other, as well as the audience, what “we” all believe. I’ve never figured out why people tolerate this passive-aggressive rulemaking, this “here’s what we all are thinking” thing. It must be something brought forward out of middle school, something that went flying over my head back then. On a times-per-minute basis, the frequency of this was pretty high. The other thing was class. Behar, obviously, thinks she has some and Palin doesn’t have any. Well, now. Palin went through a period just shy of about a year with reporters flying up to Alaska to go through her garbage cans. They didn’t find anything. There wasn’t even a pre-Todd boyfriend stepping forward to talk about “The Sarah I Knew.” The bikini photos had to be ‘shopped.

Behar, on the other hand, took a shot right there & then at Bristol; a low one that drew “oohs” out of the none-too-Palin-friendly audience…

And between the two of them, it’s easy to see they can make a conversation about a vagina, out of a conversation about damn near anything else. This makes them pretty proud.

It reflects poorly on womanhood in general when “ladies” like this are not lonely. On some level, women like this wish to be. You realize that, right? They certainly don’t want to be around just anybody; they really want to identify the “right” people, and restrict their company to just those. You have to be into their jokes about female body parts, you have to believe in global warming, you have to have voted for Obama, always look for the union label I suppose. What else? The list probably goes on at some length.

Every now and then you see immature young girls behaving like this. They’re “there” — wherever “there” happens to be — to be sociable. They can’t be alone even for a second. Always listening, always chattering, doing both at the same time somehow. But only with certain people. Constantly reaching out, often literally, to grab hold of an acquaintance by the elbow and ratchet them in. And then whisper. “Everybody” thinks what we think, sister. But not any ol’ everybody. Just our everybody. Yeah, that’s it!

But those girls are about sixteen. What’s Joy Behar’s excuse?

Update: Welcome, HotAir readers.

D’JEver Notice? LII

Sunday, February 7th, 2010

As I explained to Buck when he was asking over at his place…presuming I am representative of those who have been relatively silent about “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”…my reasoning is that I just don’t have a dog in the hunt. Beyond being a citizen of the country being defended, that is. We have people who make these kinds of decisions, and my position is that they should decide the matter according to what would provide the greatest defense possible for the nation — period. And not decide the issue according to politics.

Yeah, that’s what I think should happen. You can probably guess how much confidence I have in it.

This puts me squarely in the middle on the issue. Now, we’ve got an awful lot of people running around who call themselves “moderates,” even in the same breath as calling me an extremist, who are extreme on this issue. I’ve heard them say the most asinine things. Like that the military doesn’t do anything in which sexual preference would matter. And that homosexual soldiers are every bit as rough-and-ready as straights, if not moreso. Both sweeping generalizations, commenting on matters well outside the perimeter of knowledge the speaker might possibly have about anything.

The other side, to be fair about it, is also extreme. It is unethical, immoral, makes us a less moral people. This treads into that treacherous territory of human social theory that the people living in a country become more sinful, or more pristine, depending on the laws under which they live. And that just doesn’t work with me. I don’t even respect it as true thinking. It is quinine taken by those who, for whatever reason, don’t feel right about themselves.

This issue, more than any other, needs to be decided by eliminating the outliers. If you’re like that jackhole in the Saturday Night Live audience who was cheering and banging his hands together at the mention of repealing DADT, there is something wrong with you and you probably shouldn’t be deciding anything.

Cobb calls these people out with glorious sarcasm:

The Great and Powerful Oz commands that homosexuals report front and center. You have lived in the shadows for too long and now must proudly show off your sexuality in military splendor. Why? Because we are not interested in your service, we are interested in your identity. By we, we mean the royal we. The Great and Powerful Oz has spoken.

Disgusting.

In fact, between the two types of extremists, I think I’d sooner trust the folks on the other end of the spectrum, the “Cure the Gays of their Illness” folks, to watch children over a weekend. At least there might be some among them who are concerned about the ultimate effects of whatever law is being put in place, or repealed. So they might be a little bit obsessed but they might think something out like “real” people. Not zealots.

One Revolution AwayPeople cheering for the repeal of DADT on the other hand…these are people waiting for some revolution to make life fair. Like I said: They shouldn’t be deciding anything. We all saw it for the last year and a half. They want a revolution that will make everything perfect, they get it, next thing we know they’re all grumpy and upset because they need another revolution. You must understand this about them: Laws have an effect on the level of “humanity” within all of us, because laws do not have an effect on anything else. Things do not happen because of other things. All roads lead back to where we are right now, One Revolution Away From Happiness. They live out their entire lives on a turning point.

They shouldn’t even be allowed to own pets or houseplants.

She Adroitly Rewrote History

Sunday, February 7th, 2010

Me, making my predictions for 2010 (#4):

Speaking of Palin, she will stump for five GOP candidates, four of them will win, everyone will talk about the one who didn’t.

Now, there’s this writer-of-editorials who goes by the name of David Wiegel. We recall him as the guy who put together a special column just to announce he would not talk about Palin’s Facebook updates — no matter what! What followed was very little more than a manifesto that demonstrates David Wiegel does not like Sarah Palin.

Naturally, he got the gig of informing us about her speech when she appeared at a commemoration of Ronald Reagan’s 99th birthday.

“I am a supporter of this movement. I believe in this movement,” said Palin. “America is ready for another revolution.”

Palin adroitly rewrote the history of the past three months of elections, giving the Tea Party movement credit for Scott Brown’s election in Massachusetts and calling the White House “0 for 3″ in recent elections — leaving out the New York special election where her candidate, the Conservative Party’s Doug Hoffman, lost in a last-minute upset. [emphasis mine]

Wow, can I call it or can I call it?

I had earlier given Wiegel some props for managing to form some criticism of Palin that made some sense. It’s become a pretty rare thing. Well, maybe I should pull back on that. His hatchet piece ends up being rather incoherent and rambling, suffering from the “mass murder and overtime parking” problem. Every single paragraph drips with resentment and criticism, and it isn’t always clear what exactly the criticism is supposed to be.

I’m wondering how he got the assignment, frankly. Wiegel seems to owe Palin much for whatever definition currently exists with regard to his career: Resident Palin Hater. I don’t think it would be very good policy to assign a Palin fan to cover a speech like this. But it doesn’t make too much more sense than that to assign the guy who comes right out and admits he can’t stand her.

Maybe it’s Wiegel’s move to make. If so, it was a bad one. He comes off looking rather petty and jealous. Like a scorned wife writing an editorial about her husband’s much-younger mistress.

Prepare For Your Defeat!I got a feeling David Wiegel is much, much angrier at Palin than he would be if there was some doubt about what she was saying. But the Obama/Biden “Hope and Change” ploy has been put to a more-than-fair test, and it’s an enormous bust. History in the making. And perhaps this is the kind of thing that is burying print journalism in a tar pit while we watch: Lately they are a perfect reverse barometer of what to take seriously, and what not to. Ideas that deserve serious attention, they treat with derision and ridicule; to the ideas that deserve derision and ridicule, they offer the most solemn and studious worship, and expect the rest of us to do the same.

Update: Althouse (hat tip to Gerard) shares her thoughts on the ordinary citizen “quitting” her job last year…and being “toast”…

What I love about all this is the extreme contrast to the way Palin was mocked when she resigned as Governor of Alaska. I, myself, did not think it was stupid, because I pictured her doing something like what she is actually doing, but I certainly remember the derision. Her political career was over. She was “toast.”

A big difference between what I pictured and what she’s doing is that she’s staying in Alaska. I thought she needed to get out of Alaska (in order to run for President). It’s innovative the way she’s staying in Alaska. As a blogger, operating from my remote outpost in Madison, Wisconsin, I love that she’s working through Facebook and staying rooted in Wasila, Alaska. Fox News is building a TV studio in her house in Wasila. That’s so not toast.

Sweatin’ to the Socialists

Monday, February 1st, 2010

I was somewhat surprised when I saw the date on the video…

“Change” would be rooting for America once in awhile…making it easier to revitalize the economy, rather than harder.

Hat tip to Harvey.

Best Sentence LXXXI

Monday, February 1st, 2010

The eighty-first award for the Best Sentence I’ve Heard Or Read Lately (BSIHORL) is hereby bestowed upon His Majesty Misha I at Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler…

…for this entry:

We’ve spent decades wondering how anybody with an IQ above that of a turnip would ever vote for somebody (a liberal) who actually believes that expanding government and spending tax funds to “stimulate” the economy would ever work better, or even as well as just keeping them out of the equation.

Doesn’t ramble on too long — and yet, it says it all. The essentials are all covered.

But what follows is good too. Go read it all.