Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
Hydrogen Peroxide
Howard Fineman wrote an article for Newsweek that appeared Friday on the MSNBC web site. It is the equivalent of Hydrogen Peroxide. As any parent or outdoorsman knows, the inexpensive disinfectant is useful secondarily as a diagnostic tool. Little-to-no white foam, and you don’t have a problem. A whole lot of frothing, and you do.
Judging by the frothy reception meeting the Fineman column, it’s time for Democrats to amputate something. As a member of the party he’s discussing, you don’t get ants-in-the-pants about something like this if there isn’t a large grain of truth to it.
With George W. Bush�s presidency mired in the muck of hurricanes and doubts about the war, you�d think Democrats would be bursting with energy, eagerly expecting to regain power. But, in a roomful of well-connected Democrats the other night, I was struck by how gloomy they were. They can�t stand Bush, but didn�t have much faith in their own party�s prospects.
Evan Sayet, who used to be a Communications Director for President Bush, has written an open letter to Fineman about this. It’s worth reading because Fineman’s a MSM (mainstream media) guy, and Sayet is what you could call a “partisan hack”; Fineman can say what is so, but he has a position to lose if he says why it is so. Sayet may have an agenda, but that agenda doesn’t entirely discount the weight of his words:
The Democrats are demoralized because they recognize that the American people reject their basic philosophy of confiscation of income and its redistribution by leftists. And the public rejects more and more government regulations such as warning labels on coffee that it might be hot and the ceding of our sovereignty to foreign bodies like the United Nations and France. Americans don�t want to have to pass �global tests� when the proctors are the Sudan, Germany, and Syria.
Most of this letter is nothing more than the recitation of Republican talking points. A lot of it has already been heard, almost verbatim, on Rush Limbaugh’s program.
But that doesn’t make it wrong.
And it means something, that when you show the Fineman piece or the Sayet letter to a die-hard leftist, you get frothing, frothing and more frothing. The harder-left the guy is, the more frothing you get. Grrrrr!!!
The year I cast my first vote, that whole thing about taxing “the wealthy” gave me a pretty bad case of indigestion. I was fortunate to live in a bed-and-breakfast community that was just coming of age as a burgeoning metropolitan area, so at a young and tender age I got to see homeless people up close. It was hard to work downtown for a single day, without being panhandled. I saw a lot of them. Far more than the average spoiled trust-fund liberal. They weren’t “down on their luck” at all; they were practicing a livelihood.
I couldn’t get out early enough to re-elect Ronald Reagan.
I was making half of minimum wage.
It would be eight years before I gave a rat’s rear end about Democrats and Republicans.
This is not iron-clad proof that Sayet is correct, I guess. But it does support what he says. One thing that has stayed constant for the better part of a century, is that elections are decided by people who don’t care which party wins. That’s who we’re talking about when we use words like “mainstream.” In 1984, that was me. Since seeing Bill Clinton for the first time and realizing the awful things that would happen if that man ever became President, I’m not that anymore. But once upon a time, I was.
And I think it’s fair to say that, while “mainstream” people have more misgivings than I do about invading Iraq, they also think George Bush is a decent, trustworthy, intelligent man. I think they tune out when someone impugns the President’s personal character, or when they call him stupid.
And at this point, every argument the Democrats can make has to do with President Bush either wanting to kill black people, or being too much of a dumbass to eat a bag of pretzels, or something roughly equivalent to one of those. If that’s the intro to your thesis, it really doesn’t matter much what comes after — for the most part you’ve lost your audience. If there wasn’t some truth to that, the President’s name wouldn’t be Bush.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.