Conservatism means if an idea is repeatedly demonstrated to be flawed and/or dangerous, after awhile you put it on the shelf where it belongs.

Liberalism means you keep finding excuses so you can implement it over and over again, without regard to whether there’s any variance in the results.

Had another thought about The Wilding of Sarah Palin that is worth a post all by itself. You know how it needs to fit into the 2010 and 2012 elections…whether she chooses to run or not.

Castes.

From Wikipedia:

A caste is a combined social system of occupation, endogamy, culture, social class, and political power. Caste should not be confused with class, in that members of a caste are deemed to be alike in function or culture, whereas not all members of a defined class may be so alike.

Alphas betas gammas deltas epsilons, from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Those are castes. Each layer has a separate function to fulfill, and this in turn determines the rights and privileges enjoyed as well as the burdens and obligations imposed.

Liberalism has built an entire “Western Sharia Law” around this; a religion inextricably intertwined with a way of governing. If you’re a straight white guy, you get one package of rights & responsibilities; if you’re black, you get another, if you’re gay you get another, if you’re a woman you get another. Expectations are made. If you’re Latino, you m-u-u-u-s-t support illegal immigration even if it offends you deeply — even if the reason for the offense, is that you and your relatives, or your grandparents, meticulously followed the rules when coming here. And we already know from the good Rev. Jesse Jackson that “You can’t vote against healthcare and call yourself a black man.” Of course you can’t. Expectations have been made.

There is the purity test to help define what it means to be a conservative. That’s a good thing; next year, it will certainly be needed. But a more concise definition is always helpful. One bullet is better than ten, although ten bullets are certainly better than the endless tome that is my own conservative platform. One bullet distills things down to an either-or.

Conservatives need to know two things about you in order to figure out what your rights are. One: Are you capable of accepting the associated responsibilities? Or are you mentally indigent? And two: Are you free? Or have you had a conviction imposed upon you, that revokes some of these rights through due process?

It seems to me that this is where the fundamental split takes place this year, and the next one. Liberals need to know so much more about you. It’s like they’re looking you up in an actuarial table. Do you believe in evolution, do you believe in climate change, are you white, are you Christian, are you Jewish, are you Muslim, are you female, are you gay, do you chew tobacco, do you smoke dope, do you drink, do you drive a hybrid, are you an immigrant, do you shoot guns, do you live in the city…

…are you a member of a labor union. That’s the big one right there. That demonstrates the point all by itself. You have an absolute, inviolable right-to-work — if you have that card in your wallet. And if you don’t, you don’t.

I’m a Congressman, so I get this health plan, over here. You’re not, so you get that one over there.

I got a liberal democrat elected, so I get some “stimulus” money. You didn’t, so you don’t. You get to pay in so I can have my money.

You see it in the CRU scandal. Scientists are to contribute studies to the IPCC…if their work has been subject to “peer review.” If not, then whatever they have to say doesn’t mean anything, even if they are real scientists. But gosh darn it, if we have to re-define what peer review is, we’ll go ahead and do that then! And, of course, you can’t participate in the peer review, if your works have not been peer reviewed. So it ends up being a cyclical, nonsensical criteria. Nothing more than a gentleman’s-club. I’m in. You’re out. I count. You don’t. We’re right. You’re wrong. Behold: the new “scientific method,” fit for a post-modern world saturated with, and drowning in, institutionalized thinking.

This has never helped the human race. It never once helped us to figure out the earth is round. To the contrary, this is precisely what kept it flat.

Castes, Republicans. You want to drive those other guys out, you talk about castes. That’s what it’s all about. Liberals love to talk about how we’re “all in the same boat,” and “all in this together.” Their actions are the direct opposite of that. Not on this issue, or those two issues, or these three issues over here. Each and every single one, all the way down the line. Do we have a caste system in place or do we not.

And they have to lose. Castes have no place in a free society. A free society cannot continue to function with their system put into effect. No culture is big enough for the two of them.

Update: Some quality parody of this mindset, making for a welcome lighter fare, from FrankJ at IMAO.

Look at this e-mail I just got:

Frank,

I noticed you have a few thousand in savings. Please don’t spend any of it because I already have plans for it. Also, you’re out of Doritos.

kthxbai,
President Obama

I’m really starting to think Obama doesn’t understand the American ideal of privacy and freedom. Plus, he’s a mooch. Here’s what I wrote back:

Barry,

That’s my money! I’m going to buy a bouncy castle and usurp the king and declare myself “Lord of Bounce.” Why don’t you just admit you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re losing all our money, and you have stupid ears and then go resign. And those were Fiery Habanero Doritos! You have to go to Mexico to get those! You suck!

-Frank J.

The e-mail exchange continues, as His Holiness replies…

Frank,

I know change is scary and confusing, but that doesn’t mean you should direct all your cracker rage at me. I’m sorry you had plans for your money, but we don’t all get what we want. What’s more important is that I get what I want which is what the country needs. We all other than me have to make sacrifices. And I borrowed your golf clubs.

kthxbai,
President Obama

Graaah! What a jerk! Here’s what I wrote back:

Barry,

YOU’RE THE CRACKER!!! You don’t have any plans! You don’t even know what’s in those bills! And you don’t get what you want, which is to not suck so much! What this country needs is for you to announce to everyone, “I’m a stupid dummy dumb.” And then you should resign and get a job more to your skill level like Walmart greeter.

And you should have asked before taking my golf clubs! I need those to control the local squirrel population!

-Frank J.

I told him good. Hopefully he’ll resign now and return my clubs.

Effective parody has truth behind it; really good parody has more truth. This is awesome.

The line that divides us cleanly in half, in 2009, remains; but it has shifted slightly. Might as well take a note of where exactly it is.

Some of us are willing to tolerate any sort of personal ridicule in order to avoid supporting the wrong decisions;

The rest of us are willing to support all kinds of wrong decisions, in order to escape any sort of ridicule. Yeah, it pretty much all comes down to that.

Know what makes me think of that?

This…it’s long been an item of “Everyone Else Is Blogging It, I Might As Well Blog It Too.” People paid to be cool, supporting bad ideas to make themselves cool. They’ll do whatever it takes. Even though the idea is oh so wrong.

Back in the middle ages the “court jester” was a fickle, silly, mentally unbalanced, pitiful individual. I wonder what people from a few hundred years ago would think if you could travel back there in a time machine and tell them, “When our clowns tell us we should think a certain thing, a lot of our ordinary but comfortably-living property owners do exactly what they say.”

Thing I Know #153. Lately I notice sarcasm is used, more and more, to discuss opinions without considering facts. In those situations the opinion that “wins” is almost always wrong.

My household is a dual-income one, now, which means two sets of job responsibilities. So the political loudmouth could not make the trek “home” for the festivities. It would appear, from my e-mail, that the extended family that could so journey, got into a little bit of a polite dust-up around the table.

I continue to marvel at what an incredibly rare event it is for yours truly to actually bring up the subject of politics — compared to the way people recall it later. Thinking back on it, it almost never happens. I’m not saying that to be funny; it’s true. People come to me with questions. I’ve always had this appealing trait that when people ask me what time it is, I tell ’em how to build a watch…so I suppose it’s natural that when you’re talking about one thing when you go to ask Morgan about the particulars, and by the time Morgan dishes out his monologue you’re talking about ten things, you should recall later that Morgan brought up the subject.

That’s quite understandable.

Doesn’t make it true.

Be that as it may. The subject of the elections came up at a dinner table which was separated from me by about eight hundred miles. So I can’t tell you how. I can only say the inquiry that came my way, was about people becoming tragically polarized, and the question that emerged was in what way did the recent election results address this trend, if they did at all. I take it the options were that the election manifested it, the election healed it, the election opened a new chapter of it, or…some smorgasbord of other alternative answers. Had I already “blogged” about this? What, if anything, is out there that has been written about this?

The reply follows, with just a few minor corrections (and one meaningful one — why do we always see these things after we hit the “Send” button?).

There is quite a bit inspecting the underlying causes, without attempting to attack the problem you specify directly, but you have to understand how to look it up. For example: The 527 groups. They can be used to channel large amounts of money into advertising campaigns *provided* the campaigns are not affiliated with, or directly advocate the election of, any specific candidate.

As anyone who’s been placed on their mailing lists knows, a victory for the opposing side brings on an avalanche of form letters from the 527. If these form letter campaigns are effective — and they must be, otherwise they would not take place — the money comes in. So right there is an artificial device put in place to keep your gas gauge at 50% or very close to it…the effect of this is that a massive war chest will be accumulated on the Republican side as the democrat party continues to run everything…with no opposition anywhere. It is quite unavoidable. Two solid years of form letters from Republican fund raisers to loyal Republican supporters to the effect of “Guess what they’re up to NOW?” is bound to have an effect. Mistakes will be made. Real life will bring challenges to everyone…it always does. Can’t blame conservatives for any of it. There aren’t any.

Also — there is a cause-and-effect relationship between all these drives to “get the vote out.” I’m sure you’ve seen these, all these PSAs, some paid-fer, some not…some of it just mindless pablum echoing from blogs — “Get out there and VOTE VOTE VOTE!!!” as if the subject under discussion is bringing a sandbag to an overloaded levee or a bucket of water to a house fire. Left undiscussed, is that there is one surefire way to get people to vote, that works better than any other: Convince them everything’s going to hell. [Lack of] voter participation, contrary to popular belief, is a sign of good times. People stay home because they’re pretty sure everything’s working out more-or-less OK.

Finally, there is the question of John McCain himself. The Republican party picked him out of a desire to decrease polarization across the board, to help unify — choose someone closer to the middle. The Republican party officials…were after exactly what you are after, to somehow compel people to agree. Supposedly, this was a surefire plan to win the election. Act a little bit more like lightweight democrats.

What did the electorate do? Congratulate the Republican party on doing this wonderful voice-impression of democrats, pat ’em on the head, turn around and vote for the other guy. He was cuter. But the lesson is, when people get offended about things, they’re often getting offended on behalf of others — with whom they don’t even agree, and people who in all likelihood aren’t even getting offended. I see it with Sarah Palin; all these democrats running around talking (still?) about what a terrible VP pick she was, with that pregnant unmarried daughter and all. You think the average democrat gives a rip about that? No. They’re trying to agitate fundamentalist Christian Republicans…who they hate. Take a poll of all the people who are sympathetic to conservative principles, and the message comes back pretty resoundingly: Fred Thomspon would have been a much better pick, and probably would’ve won. It sounds fantastic at first, but how many Republicans would have stayed home to watch reruns with a Thompson/Palin ticket out there?

So when one seeks to win converts, it never helps to mute the message. Therefore, the moderate sub-spectrum is a politically unattractive place. We just ran the most-liberal-Republican against the most-liberal-democrat, and the Republican got his own hindquarters handed to him. It wasn’t about Republican-ness…it was about moderation. People say they want it. They don’t. They want a messenger who will stand up for his message. They don’t care that much about the contents of the message. Heath Ledger touched on this a little bit in The Dark Knight, giving a brilliant monologue as The Joker: Something about how calmed-down people are, when they know there is a “plan.” If the plan involves death and destruction, they’re not concerned, compared to the way they would be if they thought there was no plan at all.

So I don’t hold out a lot of hope for unification if the plan is to gather toward the middle. Seems to me that’s been tried already, just now. In fact, I don’t altogether agree with the goal. How many people do we want agreeing? Sixty percent? Eighty? A hundred? On how many issues? Some? All? This fixes what, exactly? Does it manifest that things are OK? If so, how? Quite to the contrary, it would be an enormous red flag that people aren’t thinking for themselves.

And we have that problem with things existing as they are right now. I see it in every Obamaton with whom I discuss these things…every single one, so far. Time comes to discuss what His Holiness the iPresident Man-God is going to do to solve our various problems, and all I hear about is ending the war, which means giving up. Close down Guantanamo, sign Kyoto, and roll back the tax cuts. That’s all. After that, the specifics come to an abrupt stop. There are none. It’s just how wonderful the Man-God is, how smart all His people are. This, to me, is not indicative of people thinking for themselves. They can name four specifics, maybe, on which they think they agree with the Man-God, and each item has to to do with helping our enemies, or dealing injury to ourselves. “I need some ‘Change!’ — two twenties for a ten?” “Uh…yeah, that seems fair, sure!”

And the problem exists on the Right, too, to be fair about it. Lots of quoting from scripture (much of it non-existent), lots of sloganeering. Not nearly as much as the hopenchange liberals this year. But it is there. And there is some negative feeling about it too. Sarah Palin gave her best speeches when she showed evidence of some independent thinking going on upstairs. Once she took the housewifey approach and prattled on about how wonderful McCain was, her support started to erode. People wanted to know if she stood for sincere, heartfelt, resolute support for conservative principles, and she made the mistake of giving them two answers. When she’s at the top of the ticket in 2012, hopefully she’ll be in a position to do a better job of it.

The irony? I think people *do* want to be unified. Support for the liberal ideas dissipates, just as soon as liberals talk about how to split us apart, which never takes long. Rich versus poor, gay versus straight, white versus black, man versus woman, labor versus management. Do I need to substantiate this point? Listen to Hillary Clinton talk about an issue…any issue…for fifteen minutes. See if you can pick out who the bad guy is, the Snidely Whiplash who needs to be taken down a peg or two. There always is one. The subject she discusses, doesn’t matter. There always is one. Even when she talks about a tragedy with no villains in it, like Hurrican Katrina, the Indonesian Tsunami, or the AIDS epidemic. If there’s no villain, she’ll make one. That’s emblematic of what liberalism is in 2008, of [what] people chose to buy with their votes this year. They came together, to drive a wedge amongst themselves. Now there’s one-party rule so no wedge-driving will be possible. It’ll be interesting to see how they pull this off.

PS: A great hue and cry has arisen about how President Bush should resign before January 20, and (as usual) if enough people complain, we can make it happen. As a commentary on that, I designed a new bumper sticker:

[From here.]

This morning I woke up to find my hit counter had spiked, because of this. [Note: This was mostly a result of linkage at Maggie’s Farm, so welcome to The Blog That Nobody Reads, you Yankee farmers.] So there seems to be widespread recognition of this. We seem to have a lot of people living among us, who live their lives, perpetually, on a turning point. Always one revolution away from happiness. No schism, means no revolutionary event, and no revolutionary event, means a stultifying boredom [of such magnitude] that they’d never be able to tolerate it once they had it.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News.

My girlfriend wanted to go shopping for Halloween costumes on Thursday, during her lunch hour. Now, she works in downtown Sacramento and we live in Folsom, which presents a problem because there’s a good twenty or thirty miles between the two, and Al Gore tells me if I drive my car too much I’ll kill the planet, something I don’t want to do. So I packed up my son’s lunch and homework and saw him off to school, then hopped on my bike, with my AM radio piping in some talk radio for the trip.

One of the last things I did before I left the house was a quick update to The Blog That Nobody Reads, which involved an unusual wistful request about upcoming cultural changes, something that is typically outside of our field of interest. Of course, it had to do with the elections — a recurring four-year event in which all our lives are impacted, and practically shaped, by whatever values and sentiments emerge from the ballot box as “prevailing.” And so it is the one time I’m forced to care about what others think. So now I’m worried. I’m particularly worried that the signs indicate, with an undercurrent of certainty, that we’re about to botch it and botch it good.

I asked that a “meme” take over on the innernets with regard to Joe the Plumber; that people rise up, and say loud and proud, “I AM JOE THE PLUMBER.”

That was Thursday morning. On Friday Iowahawk, intentionally or not, obediently complied…

I hope you will join me in expressing a simple bit of solidarity with this guy, Spartacus style. I AM JOE. I am a Wal Mart schlub in flyover country who changes my own oil and unclogs drains without a license. I smoke and drink beer and toss the football in the front yard with my kid, and I figure I can fend my way without handouts from some Magic Messiah’s candy bags. Most everyone in my family and most everyone I grew up with is another Joe, and if you screw with them, you screw with me.

Are you a Joe? Say it proud. Leave it on every goddamn newspaper comment section and online forum. Let these pressroom and online thugs know you won’t stay silent when they try to destroy the life of a private citizen for speaking his mind — because for every one of them, there are a million Joe Wurzelbachers. And for that we should all be thankful.

No, he didn’t “obediently comply” quite so much. It’s a case of great minds thinkin’ alike. Whatever; that was the kindling catching under the big-wood, and now the bonfire is ablaze.

Blogger friend Buck thinks I was ahead of my time. I prefer to think of it more as a natural resonance thing. Real Americans exhibit a common behavior, that is synchronized not through genuine collaboration, but by shared values. Joe the Plumber did not come looking for Obama; Obama came looking for Joe, and when Joe didn’t give Obama the answer Obama wanted, the Obama campaign started looking for ways to destroy Joe. I have an emotional reaction to that. Real Americans have the same reaction to that, that I do. The small-a “americans” who support Barack Obama, don’t react the same way and can’t react the same way, because it would conflict with their rabid, tingly support for their messianic but decidedly lackluster presidential candidate.

But anyway.

I put out my call for solidarity with Joe early enough that it preceded any real knowledge I had about the fellow. It came before what emerged as a swelling of new facts about Joe the Plumber…the whole license thing, tax lien thing, etc. etc. etc. None of which really matters to me at all. But what does matter to me, is something I heard coming out of Rush Limbaugh’s program just as I took my mountain bike off the Jedediah Smith recreational trail and pointed it down J Street, into downtown:

Joe the Plumber does not make 250,000 dollars a year. He doesn’t even make close to that.

He just wants to.

This does not detract from my admiration for the real Joe the Plumber. It doesn’t change my desire for people to pull the “I Am Spartacus” thing with Joe.

Quite to the contrary, I think that’s thirty tons of awesome.

You see, Joe is not speaking out about his objections to Barack Obama’s Robin-Hood tax plan with regard to his current economic status. He is objecting on behalf of his own dreams, which is quite a different thing. Joy Behar revealed herself to be a small-a american when she called those dreams “fantasies.” I’ve been familiar with that mindset for awhile. Years and years ago, the Sacramento area had a left-wing radio talk show host piped in from Los Angeles, and I remember this talk show host had a caller who was discussing tax plans and social programs and what not. The talk show host asked how much money the caller made, and I think the number was 44,000 a year or something. Talk show host said “Okay, then; you, will never, ever make more than sixty thousand a year. In your life. EVER. I guarantee it.” Or words to that effect. I’m paraphrasing. But the point was that we’re stratified, economically, and we’re stratified in perpetuity, womb to tomb.

I am Joe because I do not believe that is the case.

I do not believe we walk around from cradle to grave with “R” or “P” etched into our foreheads, marking us as rich or poor. I believe we ascend and descend; I believe we ascend and descend quickly and strongly. I would even add “violently.” Furthermore, I think that is the point of having an America. At all. I think the country was founded by people who figured out life is not about abundances of security, quite so much as of opportunity. Liberty…to succeed, to fail, to rise, to fall. Real freedom — when it’s sweet, and when it’s sour. I think they figured out when you have too much security, that things don’t move. I think they figured out what life is, and like babies emerged from the womb, were hungry to live it. They figured out life is motion, and therefore, life is danger. At least, that’s what life is if you’re of the mindset that equates responsibility with danger.

I think the country was founded by people who wanted things to move. Joe gets it. He’s got his big ol’ dreams, and being a capital-A American he’s going to work toward them. Maybe his dreams are on a completely different level from anything he’s done before. In fact, maybe when measured on a probability scale, they really do become fanciful. Maybe he will never succeed. Maybe he’s got his on-days when he works like a Tasmanian Devil toward achieving those dreams, and maybe he’s got his off-days when he never lifts a finger to bring himself any closer to those dreams. Maybe his lack of a license is a tell-tale sign that he isn’t really dedicated to what he’s supposed to be doing.

But they are dreams and they are not fantasies. Because here’s the difference: Barack Obama walks up to Joe, and says…if & when you make a quarter million a year, I’m gonna take some from you and spread the wealth around. And Joe, who I presume is not a loyal Republican or democrat and doesn’t really have a historical stake in the right-versus-left thing, says to himself…hey, that’ll work out alright for me in the here-and-now, but he’s screwing around with my dreams.

And so he safeguards the future. If you’re reading, Ms. Behar, that is the difference between a dream and a fantasy.

The small-a americans can’t have dreams like those. They’ve given them up. And they know it. That fills them with fear and rage; when they see someone like Joe, a Genuine American, who has dreams about the future and thinks they’re real enough that they deserve protection, it all bubbles up to the surface. Michelle Malkin calls it JTPDS, for Joe The Plumber Derangement Syndrome. And she’s got examples. Lots of ’em. Go read up.

I have seen this kind of anger before. I have seen it…roughly…a month and a half ago. When Sarah Palin started making the news. Women hate Sarah Palin because — and when they explain it, themselves, they don’t make an awful lot of sense.

 • She is seen as ideal because her son is being deployed to Iraq…..how does that speak to her credibility as a candidate?
 • children with crazy names: Track, Trig, Bristol, Willow, and Piper…. i feel sorry for them!
 • married to high school boyfriend…. come on how about some exploration! [emphasis in original]

This is not the way right-wing “hate” works, I notice. You haven’t long to wait if you’re looking for examples of how people on the right wing are perceived to be puttin’ the hate on people on the left wing. The accusations fly fairly often. And if you look at what inspires or provokes those accusations of right-wing hate, you see the motivation is something similar to what set off Plumber Joe.

It isn’t tax liens, or plumbing without a license, or hunting moose or giving one’s own kids crazy names. It is “HEY…your tax-the-rich plans are screwing up my dreams.” Dreams of starting a large, successful business; dreams of teaching my kid how to use a target rifle; dreams of buying my wife an enormous SUV that she can’t commandeer without a hydraulic stepladder on the side, just because she’s a wonderful woman and I think she deserves it.

The Left, on the other hand, just dredges up ugly tidbits…some of which aren’t even ugly. Sarah Palin’s got a tanning bed. Todd works for BP oil. Joe the Plumber called Social Security a “joke.” He’s divorced. Over and over again, they play up these things as scandals, and in so doing reveal how out-of-touch they are. And, the lengths they’ll go to putting America under the control of the “correct” people.

It’s the kind of snarking you do when you catch someone doing something wonderful, that you could’ve done awhile ago, and in the days since then have made some kind of commitment toward not doing it. And to think — all Joe did, to set off this kind of anger, was dare to dream. To imagine himself as bigger tomorrow than he is today, to to make some substantial choices toward bringing that “fantasy” to reality. And to do some thinking, which leads to Step One: Don’t support Barack Obama, or any other soft-socialist, for any position of power.

He saw the light, along with millions and millions of capital-A Americans. If this guy gets his way, then what is the freakin’ point to what I’m trying to do? That’s the dangerous message. That’s the genie that was let out of the bottle. That’s where the American identity lives. We don’t prove to each other, or to a bunch of foreigners around the world, what wonderful “civilised” people we are by backing the “right” policies…abolishing guns…abolishing capital punishment…signing carbon emission treaties…etc. Americans are not here to be wonderful — we aren’t here to be, period. Americans do. We dream, and then we do.

Joe The Plumber speaks for me. I am Joe The Plumber. His story is my story. So say we all. Or, at least…many of us. We think the way he thinks. We do not see ourselves, tomorrow, bound by what defines us today. To us, this is what being a real American, is all about — we dare to dream big. And when you screw with Joe, you’re screwin’ with the rest of us.

The rest of you who hate him so much…there are lots of other countries out there, who hate Joe for the same reasons you do. They’d love to have ya, I’m sure. Think on it. Hope you get your place overseas all set up and furnished by the end of the month, and no, DON’T take an absentee ballot. It’ll just weigh you down, and that’ll make your jet plane emit more carbon.

Cross-posted at Cassy Fiano and Right Wing News.

Now that voter registration doesn’t work for this purpose, how do you tell our blue-staters and our red-staters apart today? To a child, or someone from a foreign shore, wanting to understand the definitions — how do you explain the split? Here’s one proposal:

A red-stater and a blue-stater break up a fight between a couple of kids on the middle school playground, and start debating what should happen to them.

The red-stater wants detention for whoever threw the first punch.

The blue-stater wants detention for whoever threw the last one.